Well, there is the competition already going on, because it is prepared for the residents and members of the Empire crazies and warmogers, because it will be NO place to hide when the truth will come out in a full scale and we can wish them only good luck
Hi Saker, well, what I would like to say is this…a very wonderful photo of an eagle. I’m just ignoring the posters and just looking at the eagle…what a fantastic photo eh ? Scary birds. I have photos all over my kitchen of eagles…Golden and Garibaldi (like the one in the photo)…the Golden are used by Mongolian nomads to hunt small prey…and they land right on the arms of their trainers…the trainers have on a jacket that has feathers on it and the Golden Eagle lands gently and oh so gracefully on his arm. The Golden ones seem to be much more gentle that these Bald Eagles like the one in the photo…these ones are more ‘wild’…
Sorry to be OT…Saker, tell me…do you ‘believe’ all the hype about ‘aliens’ ?
Quantum entities exist in a realm of potentiality, in what is called a state of “superposition,” which is to say they hover in a ghostly state between existence and nonexistence, existing in all possible states up until the moment they are observed. Not existing in space-time, their appearance in space-time at the moment of observation is a quantum event in which an atemporal process manifests in time. Wheeler expresses the central point of quantum theory in a single, simple sentence when he says, “No elementary phenomenon is a (real) phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” The necessity for this demarcation is the most mysterious feature of the quantum, for it holds the clue to the central principle of the construction of everything out of nothing. This tenet changes our traditional view that something has happened before we observe it; as Heisenberg writes, “The term ‘happens’ is restricted to the observation.” At the moment of being observed, the wavefunction collapses in no time at all into a particular manifestation, while all of the other potentialities vaporize as if they had never existed. From the quantum point of view, everything that might have happened influences what actually does happen. In a quantum universe such as ours, everything ultimately exists in a state of open-ended potential, what Heisenberg calls “transcendent potentia.” Quantum theory implies that the whole universe─including ourselves─is recreated and recreating itself anew every nano-second based on how we are dreaming it up. Wheeler comments in his own inimitable style, “We may someday have to enlarge the scope of what we mean by a ‘who.’”
Observation is the very act through which the quantum realm “discloses” itself. In quantum theory the moment of observation is where the rubber meets the road, which is to say, where abstract theory and empirical data meet and a specific actuality is realized and manifested out of a vast array of possibilities. It is important to note that we are always “at” the moment of observation, which is to say that we’re there right now! There is no other moment but the one eternal moment of observation. The tendency to think that the moment of observation is just one single discrete moment in a linear sequence of other moments is due to the long ingrained habit of thinking in terms of linear sequential time, i.e., a “linear time hangover.” In our role as observer-participants, it is as if we are on the cutting edge of the big bang itself, on the forefront of the moment of creation that is always taking place in this very moment, in the here and now.
Quantum theory is revealing to us the creative nature of our moment-to-moment experience. It should get our highest attention that observing these quantum objects is the very act that brings them into existence. When we observe an atom to be someplace, quantum physics tells us that it is our looking that caused it to be there. Just like a rainbow can’t be said to exist until the moment that it is observed (as it is made up of light, moisture, and an eye), quantum entities can’t be said to exist until the moment of observation; the act of observation is truly creative. Quantum theory reveals that there is nothing inherently real about the properties of an object that we measure; it is as if we ourselves are intimately involved in producing the results of our own measurements. Our discovery of a quantum entity in a very real sense “causes” it to be there, which implies that there is no physically real world independent of our observation of it. Before these entities are observed they don’t really exist, there is nothing we can say about them; they are “unspeakable.”
Wheeler sometimes used a baseball analogy to illustrate this situation. Talking about how they call balls and strikes, some umpires say “I call them the way I see ’em,” which is an expression of the subjective, projective nature of our perception. A second umpire might say “I call them the way they are,” which is an expression of there being an objectively existing reality not dependent on observation, which was Einstein’s point of view. Wheeler then quotes a quantum umpire who would say “They ain’t nothing till I call ’em,” which is an expression of a quantum baseball game in which nothing exists until it is observed. The properties of quantum objects aren’t inherent to the object, but instead emerge from and are created by interactions with their environment as well as their relationship to observers and their inescapably creative acts of observation.
We can use light as an example: it is well known that light displays either wave-like or particle-like qualities depending upon the experimental set-up and how it is observed. To be more accurate, the wave-like or particle-like behavior that we observe in light is not a property of light per se, it is a property of our interaction with light. If, as quantum physics attests, there is no independent, external objective reality, then light, be it in its wave-like or particle-like aspect, cannot be said to exist separate from our interaction with it. In other words, light has no properties independent of us. What we are saying about light is true of everything; what we experience is not external reality, but our interaction with what our minds construe to be an external reality.
Wheeler likens how we create “reality” out of nothing but our interactions to a slightly skewed, surprise version of the party game “twenty questions.” In the regular version of the game, someone leaves the room, and everyone decides on a word. The person is allowed to ask a series of yes or no questions until they feel that they have enough information to guess the word. Wheeler tells the story that he was the one sent out of the room, and when he came back and began asking his yes or no questions, his friends were taking longer and longer to answer. The tension was building in the room, until he finally guessed the word to be “cloud,” at which point the whole room bursts out into hysterical laughter. His friends explained to him that they had decided to not decide on a predetermined word, and were play-acting “as if” they had decided on a particular word based on nothing but the answers they were giving, the only rule being that every answer had to be consistent with all previous answers. There was no word that existed until the very moment of Wheeler’s guess. Wheeler’s questions and interactions with his friends helped create, or to say it differently─“magically conjured”─the word in the same way that physicists’ and their measuring apparatuses’ interactions with the subatomic realm actually create the elementary particles they are measuring. To talk about the word “cloud” existing “in the room”─i.e., in the “minds” of Wheeler’s friends─before Wheeler’s guess is not accurate, in the same way that the elementary particle wasn’t “in the universe” before the experiment, having no existence prior to being measured. Similarly, in our inquiries into the nature of the universe it is easy to imagine that the final answer already exists, which we will one day uncover, without realizing that the very questions we ask and the actions we take condition and help to create the answers we get back. If Wheeler had asked different questions or the same questions in a different order, he would have ended up with a different word. The idea that the word “cloud” was sitting there, waiting to be discovered, is in Wheeler’s words “pure delusion and fantasy.”
In discussing the surprise version of the game of twenty questions as illustrative of how physicists participate in producing the results of their experiments, Wheeler painstakingly makes the point that the power he had to bring about the word “cloud” was only partial. Similarly, the experimenter has some substantial influence on what will happen to the electron by the choice of experiments he will perform, i.e., “the questions he will put to nature;” but there is always a certain unpredictability about what any given one of his measurements will disclose, i.e., “what answers nature will give.” This unpredictability is because the rest of the universe is always inescapably involved in any observation that we make. Quantum reality is not subjective─a mere figment of the imagination─just as it is not objective. The quantum dimension is the bridge, the intermediate realm between the subjective mental realm “in here” and the seemingly objective world “out there,” somehow coupling the two.
Quantum entities don’t “have” or “possess” intrinsic properties. The fact that the properties of these quantum objects is a function of our observation and that there is no substance, no separately existing intrinsic quantum object separate from its properties, is an expression of these quantum objects having no independently existing objective reality. They are not real in the way we commonly think of something being real. And yet, we ourselves, as well as the experimental instruments physicists are using to measure these not-real quantum objects, are made of the same quantum stuff that itself isn’t real in the ordinary sense. This brings up a related question: how does the mass-less, intangible photon, which has zero weight, give rise to even a single particle that has mass, not to mention the massive weight of the whole universe?Simply put, there aren’t any nuts and bolts at the quantum level. We can’t visualize the quantum world, not because we know too little, but because we know too much. Though beyond our imagination, nature has no trouble, however, producing such quantum entities; indeed, such entities are what this whole wide world is made of.
The universe appears in one way, but exists in another. Behind the apparent solidity of everyday objects lies a world of open-ended potentiality. Physics has penetrated to the very core of material, seemingly objective reality and has found nothing that can be said to ultimately exist beyond or outside of our observation of it. It is as if objective reality has slipped beyond our grasp, beyond concepts, beyond even the concept of existence and nonexistence. To quote one of the most important astrophysicists of the first part of the twentieth century, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, “We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.” Exploring the farthest reaches of the outside micro-world brings us right back to our inner selves. We can never speak about nature without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves. Poetically expressing the same realization, Wheeler asks, “What is Out There? ‘Tis Ourselves?”
but if I want to know about quantum theory I’ll read an open university course from good physicist who understands it, and the math that’s needed, such as Leonard Susskind, or one from MIT — not a ‘spiritual healer’.
Technical science is technical science, and not the stuff that non-scientists talk about.
“but if I want to know about quantum theory I’ll read an open university course from good physicist who understands it, and the math that’s needed, such as Leonard Susskind, or one from MIT — not a ‘spiritual healer’.”
The real reason for learning about quantum physics, or most any other science, is not to ‘understand’ it, as such, but to make use of it, because we don’t still don’t really understand what motion is, even.
I remember when relativity hit the popular imagination and people were saying all kinds of strange things, but never talking inertial frames, hyperbolic tangent as velocities factor, and the other actual stuff, and the math, of relativity. You see the same thing with any technical and scientific knowledge, such as electricity or computers: people talking about it and tossing around metaphors while having no ability to do any actual work with it. People — even some teachers and scientists, talk about energy as if it was a ‘thing’ and not an expression of relationship of elements within a reference frame, like saying an object ‘has’ some amount of kinetic energy, all by itself. (I was in my late forties until I understood what ‘energy’ really means.) People try to see these things in terms of naive reality, which leads to wrong understanding, wrong models, and wrong questions, in wrong modes of thinking.
When Einstein said ‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe’ it was about the most unscientific thing thing he ever said. Even the best scientists tend to fall into that trap.
When Levy says “To be more accurate, the wave-like or particle-like behavior that we observe in light is not a property of light per se, it is a property of our interaction with light.” that’s good.
When he says “Wheeler expresses the central point of quantum theory in a single, simple sentence when he says, “No elementary phenomenon is a (real) phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” that’s really pushing it and falls back on rather shaky ontology.
When he says “Quantum theory is revealing to us the creative nature of our moment-to-moment experience. It should get our highest attention that observing these quantum objects is the very act that brings them into existence.” that’s over the edge and falls into anthropomorphic artifact and religious dogma. The universe, presumably in some quantum context, existed and did it’s thing long before humans were around to make observations.
Humans take their perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, and philosophies way too seriously, trying to fit extrapolate from tiny little wet computers into the whole cosmos and all possible reality systems while forgetting that that’s what they are actually doing. That’s why people used to think the Earth was the center of the universe, and we still make the kind of errors: ‘system slip’ — not staying in the valid contexts. You can call it ‘bubbles’ or ‘Washington (for example) Consensus’ too, or ideology.
Levy tries to break through these walls, but his concept of ‘spirit’ indicates his conditioning: after a ‘spiritual awakening’ one needs to come down again, recuperate from it, toss out all the new trash collected, and get back to work.
“When he says “Quantum theory is revealing to us the creative nature of our moment-to-moment experience. It should get our highest attention that observing these quantum objects is the very act that brings them into existence.” that’s over the edge and falls into anthropomorphic artifact and religious dogma. The universe, presumably in some quantum context, existed and did it’s thing long before humans were around to make observations.”
Not at all.
Even the doubters (Linde) believe in the likelihood of the “participatory” Universe:
“Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde believes this quantum paradox gets to the heart of Wheeler’s idea about the nature of the universe: The principles of quantum mechanics dictate severe limits on the certainty of our knowledge.
“You may ask whether the universe really existed before you start looking at it,” he says. “That’s the same Schrödinger cat question. And my answer would be that the universe looks as if it existed before I started looking at it. When you open the cat’s box after a week, you’re going to find either a live cat or a smelly piece of meat. You can say that the cat looks as if it were dead or as if it were alive during the whole week. Likewise, when we look at the universe, the best we can say is that it looks as if it were there 10 billion years ago.”
Linde believes that Wheeler’s intuition of the participatory nature of reality is probably right. But he differs with Wheeler on one crucial point. Linde believes that conscious observers are an essential component of the universe and cannot be replaced by inanimate objects. “
““One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.” “
“Why does the universe exist? Wheeler believes the quest for an answer to that question inevitably entails wrestling with the implications of one of the strangest aspects of modern physics: According to the rules of quantum mechanics, our observations influence the universe at the most fundamental levels. The boundary between an objective “world out there” and our own subjective consciousness that seemed so clearly defined in physics before the eerie discoveries of the 20th century blurs in quantum mechanics.”
Why? Interesting stuff — but it isn’t quantum mechanics or science — or all that good philosophy either.
“Even the doubters (Linde) believe in the likelihood of the “participatory” Universe:”
And if you believe in tooth fairies that is not science either. Science is not about belief. This is what I was talking about.
Time is a useful perception and concept which is beyond our ability to ‘understand’. It may not be continuous, linear, or discreet, or simply a perception of our nervous systems — we don’t know; but it’s handy.
What “existed and did it’s thing long before humans were around” means is also that the universe can not be limited to our particular set of perceptions, theorization, and linguisitc limitations — whatever time is or isn’t. We can speculate that space doesn’t exist either, but the point is that whatever we think or say or do is within a limited system or context, and we have to keep that in mind.
Anonymous on August 02, 2015 · at 8:20 pm UTC said:
“Even the doubters (Linde) believe in the likelihood of the “participatory” Universe:”
And if you believe in tooth fairies that is not science either. Science is not about belief. This is what I was talking about.
Time is a useful perception and concept which is beyond our ability to ‘understand’. It may not be continuous, linear, or discreet, or simply a perception of our nervous systems — we don’t know; but it’s handy.”
If you believe in tooth fairies you may even still believe in a “handy” concept that the earth is at the centre of the Universe.
The point is that Science and belief systems are intertwined and concepts like time may seem to be handy but are, ultimately, misleading and unhelpful http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time:
“Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.””
Wheeler offers an interesting interpretation to quantum effects I was not aware of. Nevertheless, I think he overstretches his interpretation in stating that there is no real thing unless we observe it. This is most likely right for a single quantum object, such as a photon, but I am sure he is wrong on macroscopic objects, because these are made of many quantum objects (usually trillions of atoms) that can’t help interacting all way long. This leads to a near-certain objective reality with a vanishingly small probability that by chance all the quantum interactions will change the macroscopic object notably.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45KGS1Ro-sc is a very brief intro to quantum mechanics exposing what it is really about: particle physics, abstract theories — not about consciousness, spirit or that stuff. It’s just an updated model of what we observe happening. Other implications are speculation and imagination.
blue on August 02, 2015 · at 7:06 pm UTC said: “is a very brief intro to quantum mechanics exposing what it is really about: particle physics, abstract theories — not about consciousness, spirit or that stuff.”
“It would be tempting to dismiss Wheeler’sthought experiment as a curious idea, except for one thing: It has been demonstrated in a laboratory. In 1984 physicists at the University of Maryland set up a tabletop version of the delayed-choice scenario. Using a light source and an arrangement of mirrors to provide a number of possible photon routes, the physicists were able to show that the paths the photons took were not fixed until the physicists made their measurements, even though those measurements were made after the photons had already left the light source and begun their circuit through the course of mirrors.
Wheeler conjectures we are part of a universe that is a work in progress; we are tiny patches of the universe looking at itself — and building itself. It’s not only the future that is still undetermined but the past as well. And by peering back into time, even all the way back to the Big Bang, our present observations select one out of many possible quantum histories for the universe.”
Richard Feynman once famously quipped that no one understands quantum mechanics, and popular accounts continue to promulgate the view that QM is an intractable mystery (probably because that helps to sell books). QM is certainly unintuitive, but the idea that no one understands it is far from the truth. In fact, QM is no more difficult to understand than relativity. The problem is that the vast majority of popular accounts of QM are simply flat-out wrong. They are based on the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of QM, which has been thoroughly discredited for decades. It turns out that if Copenhagen were true then it would be possible to communicate faster than light, and hence send signals backwards in time. This talk describes an alternative interpretation based on quantum information theory (QIT) which is consistent with current scientific knowledge. It turns out that there is a simple intuition that makes almost all quantum mysteries simply evaporate, and replaces them with an easily understood (albeit strange) insight: measurement and entanglement are the same physical phenomenon, and you don’t really exist.
blue on August 02, 2015 · at 7:59 pm UTC said: This talk describes an alternative interpretation based on quantum information theory (QIT) which is consistent with current scientific knowledge. It turns out that there is a simple intuition that makes almost all quantum mysteries simply evaporate, and replaces them with an easily understood (albeit strange) insight: measurement and entanglement are the same physical phenomenon, and you don’t really exist.
“Information-based interpretations]
Further information: Quantum logic and Digital physics
Quantum informational approaches have attracted growing support during the 2000s. Hagar and Hemmo (2008) even refer to it (critically) as “a new orthodoxy in the foundations of quantum mechanics.”
J. A. Wheeler (1990) with his “It from Bit” (“It”: physical entity, “Bit”: unit of information) has been described as “the cheerleader of this sort of view”. These approaches have been described as a revival of immaterialism”
I liked how Arthur Clarke had his aliens put the Earthlings in their place while terraforming Titan and igniting Jupiter. There’re serious plans for fixing up Mars but little beyond. But I’m willing to bet the first human to set foot there will be Chinese. Funny, indeed, the new Space Race that isn’t since the SCO has no credible competition. I know why! The Outlaw Empire doesn’t have anymore former Nazi German rocket scientists to run NASA.
Hypocrisy as a way of life. Other people, religion, colour, philosophy are inferior and should be treated with abject rejection not to mention put them into slavery.
A super earth might be able to hold on to methane and, if big enough, to some helium and hydrogen. If life could tolerate this reducing atmosphere, it might survive almost up to a Jupiter orbit in our solar system measures, due to the incredible greenhouse effect!.
This is an interesting article–he does slam in a dismissive way a rather cherished belief on this site that ISIS is a creature of the CIA calling it a “conspiracy theory”. sigh but here goes
Institute of Peace’s Hawkish Chairman Wants Ukraine to Send Russians Back in Body Bags
“The United States Institute of Peace is a publicly funded national institution chartered by the U.S. government to promote international peace through nonviolent conflict resolution.
But its chairman, Stephen Hadley, is a relentless hawk whose advocacy for greater military intervention often dovetails closely with the interests of Raytheon, a major defense contractor that pays him handsomely as a member of its board of directors.”
…
“In a speech at Poland’s Wroclaw Global Forum in June, Hadley argued in favor of arming the Ukrainian government in part because that would “raise the cost for what Russia is doing in Ukraine.” Specifically, he said, “even President Putin is sensitive to body bags — it sounds coarse to say, but it’s true — but body bags of Russian soldiers who have been killed.””
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxS5CGuczVg
JUL 31
It’s David & Goliath story’: German journos face treason charges over revealing intel plans
H/T to Willyloman dug it out now on his site.
China-bashing has been off the charts the past 2 weeks or so, even by ZH’s low “standards” of tabloid mudslinging.
That BRICSpost article earlier about the Chinese not too happy about all the USN presence in their ocean offshore.
Maybe a historical reenactment of the 1999 incident where the evil Clingon alien put a cruise missile into the Chinese embassy in Belgrade?
Or, the other way, the 2001 APRIL FOOL episode of the USN spyplane forced down over Hainan Island?
Or, even further back in history, maybe the “Great Powers” are going to go ashore & partition Shanghai with thousands of troops in each sector so they can conduct business as it should be—in an uninterrupted corporofascist oligopoly, as was done in the 1920’s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Shanghai
That is a classic American propaganda tactic that the United Snakes has used throughout its 200-year bloodthirsty history: Justify American aggression as a “defensive” response to another country’s alleged actions (which are often nothing more than American lies).
Examples of this America tactic include:
-The Remember the Maine incident to justify the USA’s Spanish-American War.
-The Gulf of Tonkin “attack” to justify American aggression in the Vietnam War
-The Racak “Massacre” to justify America’s attack on Yugoslavia in 1999.
-The lies about Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction to justify American aggression against Iraq.
-The American Reichstag Fire called 9/11 to justify America’s phony global War on Terrorism.
9-11 is the template that America increasingly resorts to in order to demonize the USA’s latest target of aggression.
Stage an attack on yourself and blame it on your targeted “enemy” nation.
False Flag terrorism is as American as apple pie.
This includes virtual cyber false flag “attacks” which are even more susceptible to America manipulating as a psyops campaign against nations like China, North Korea, etc.
Most pro-Americans (like many on ZeroHedge) cannot bring themselves to admit that the the self-styled Land of the Free would stage an attack on itself, but September 11th proves otherwise.
–
It is important, I believe, to understand the next large and impactful hegemonic battlefield that surely will be used, and used against everyone tangentially as the US takes complete control of the Internet. It is a choke point as surely as the Straits of Malacca or Hormuz, or the great canals and other narrow passages of the oceans and seas.
Larchmonter445 on August 02, 2015 · at 12:47 am UTC
Today the NYT ran a David Sanger (CIA mouthpiece, DOD bullhorn) piece on Obama determining (maybe signing an authorization?) that China must be attacked for its cyberhacking (unproven). Especially, the OPM hack which stole the identities and deep background files of tens of millions of employees and applicants for secret and top secret and key government jobs.
Should the NSA want to, it could easily cripple most of the networks of China. It has been embedded in all the router hardware (US manufacturers) and network switches and much of the software from Microsoft and other providers used by Chinese institutions and industries.
China’s vulnerability is huge and only in recent years have they realized (post Snowden) how deep and wide the NSA has penetrated the fiber optic system within the nation and connecting the nation to the Internet.
Should a large attack hit China, I suspect it will be considered a military attack. The US has declared it will use cyber as a one of their weapons of military “defense and offense”.
You can be certain US businesses will be profoundly impacted if such a cyber war is launched by Obama and the pinheads in NSA-CIA-DOD-State.
This last “power” of the US is like the nuclear advantage they possessed at the ending of WWII. They could not resist using it. Cyber advantage is a closing window. However, with the goal to contain China and destabilize the economic advantage China has over the US (wealth versus debt), I suspect the pinheads will go ahead or contract some black hat action to cripple large sectors of China.
With that act, I suspect also, the US electrical grid, most of the networks and many crucial nodes that support America’s infrastructure will be attacked by Chinese assets.
The reason this article floated today from Sanger is to test the “thinkers” on both sides to see if the US should go ahead and to sound out what response they believe will be returned.
The world, if rational, will soon develop a MAD doctrine for cyber.
If you recall, recently, China and Russia signed a mutual pact about cyber in which they pledged not to hack or make war on one another. They probably also have secret protocols to assist one another in defense and offense if they are attacked by a “third party”.
This is more than causing computers to go blue screen. This is about shutting down all medical, financial, banking, traffic on land, sea and in the air, probably skewing GPS satellite info, and crippling most forms of digital communication around the globe.
It will isolate nations from one another because smart nations will swiftly shut the switch to the Internet so they will not be attacked. It will alter the globe as we know it the last 30 years.
All of the results are good for the Hegemon. Bad for everyone else.
Recall that Obama is very vindictive and without proof ordered an attack on North Korea for the so called Sony hack. It was a cyberwar attack.
Now, he will attack China if the US thinks it can block a counter-move. The very fact of the OPM hack indicates a very deep penetration by whoever did it (let’s assume China). And therefore, whoever did it is inside the US networks and embedded also. They may be able to cripple the US if China is attacked.
Where are the grownups? Well, President Xi is coming to Washington this year. Maybe he’ll bring a solution for the man-child in the Oval Office.
Also, this is from the same America is that is massively guilty of hacking most of the world including Brazil, Iran, India, and its nominal allies like Germany and France.
So the idea that America is merely retaliating “defensively” against cyber attacks is a propaganda meme that the Americans are pushing to justify yet another one of their aggressive assaults similar in nature to their bogus War on Terrorism and self-inflicted 9-11 attack or their serial drone bombings of other nations.
If anything, China and other nations should be retaliating against America’s ongoing cyber terrorism. For example, America created the Stuxnet virus and used it to attack Iran (and even North Korea)–yet the American “free press” rationalizes this act of American cyber terrorism in typically Orwellian terms.
Also, the New York Slimes is a leading mouthpiece for the American Empire and was infamous for peddling the Iraqi Yellowcake uranium from Niger lies–a deception, which the Newspaper of Record (Lies) has yet to be punished for.
More recently, the NY Slimes, like most of the America-controlled media, dutifully spouted allegations accusing North Korea of the Sony hack, despite the fact that IT security analysts were questioning the validity of this American accusation.
And of course the American “Newspaper of Record” has been spewing the “Russian aggression against Ukraine” propaganda for the past couple of years.
America is the world’s leader in hacking and cyber terrorism–even as it claims to oppose these practices.
This is similar to how America is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism (such as Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front against Syria or LIFG against LIbya), yet hilariously claims to be leading a War against Terrorism.
Welcome to the Goebbelsian world of America and its unipolar order.
Yet most people don’t have the honesty to state the unvarnished truth that American Empire has no clothes on cyber terrorism or any other issue.
According to Zach Epstein of BGR News, all of Windows 10’s features that could be considered invasions of privacy are enabled by default. Signing in with your Microsoft email account means Windows is reading your emails, contacts and calendar data. The new Edge browser serves you personalized ads. Solitaire now comes with ads. Using Cortana – the voice-driven assistant that represents Redmond’s answer to Apple’s Siri – reportedly “plays fast and loose with your data.”
“I am pretty surprised by the far-reaching data collection that Microsoft seems to want,” web developer Jonathan Porta wrote on his blog. “I am even more surprised by the fact that the settings all default to incredibly intrusive. I am certain that most individuals will just accept the defaults and have no idea how much information they are giving away.”
As examples, Porta cited Microsoft having access to contacts, calendar details, and “other associated input data” such as “typing and inking” by default. The operating system also wants access to user locations and location history, both of which could be provided not just to Microsoft, but to its “trusted partners.”
“Who are the trusted partners? By whom are they trusted? I am certainly not the one doing any trusting right now,” Porta wrote, describing the default privacy options as “vague and bordering on scary.”
Alec Meer of the ‘Rock, Paper, Shotgun’ blog pointed out this passage in Microsoft’s 12,000-word, 45-page terms of use agreement:
“We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to.”
While most people are used to ads as the price of accessing free content, writes Meer, Microsoft is not making it clear enough that they are “gathering and storing vast amounts of data on your computing habits,” not just browser data.
Opting out of all these default settings requires navigating 13 different screens and a separate website, the bloggers have found.
Meer was underwhelmed with Microsoft executives’ claims of transparency and easily understandable terms of use. “There is no world in which 45 pages of policy documents and opt-out settings split across 13 different Settings screens and an external website constitutes ‘real transparency,’” he wrote.
Tracking and harvesting user data has been a business model for many tech giants. Privacy advocates have raised concerns over Google’s combing of emails, Apple’s Siri, and Facebook’s tracking cookies that keep monitoring people’s browser activity in order to personalize advertising and content.
Question for any Chinese visitors of this web site.
I read this line; ‘”I was happily preparing to go to Australia to start my studies,” he said. “For something like this to happen, it’s like falling to hell from heaven.”, right here – link to Sydney Morning Herald.
‘Heaven and hell’ are purely christian concepts. How likely is it for a indigenous Chinese individual to use these terms?
Back from trekking round northern rural China.
On just about every hill / mountain there was some kind of marker / monument /
shrine / pagoda paying respect to the world of spirit.
Even the kerb strips were imprinted with Feng Shui symbols.
I came to the view that underneath the concerns for worldly betterment
there was an underlying awareness of a non material reality
FWIW
It’s no joke. If the world was to survive the unfolding ecological catastrophe, if the ‘Chosen People’ of the Atlanticist Reich were to subdue every country on Earth, and if technology were to advance rapidly, some time in the next few centuries, the ‘Exceptionals’ would escape into the cosmos to spread their psychopathic Wetiko disease far and wide. Imagine all the alien ‘gooks’, ‘rag-heads’, ‘unpersons’, ‘unterbeings’ etc waiting to be ‘Shocked and Awed’ to extinction, and their planets looted to enrich quadrillionaire Donald Trump XXVIII’s Empire. I bet they have a unit planning just such an eventuality, deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, filled with slavering geeks and nerds.
If we are talking about intelligent life elsewhere, then we have to also talk about flying saucer people who, if half the stories are true, a few of whom could take out the lot of the neocons and other assorted wackos like Uncle Fred takes out a wasps nest from under his eave with a can of Hornet Spray. Uncle Fred doesn’t mind wasps in the woods but doesn’t let them invade his house.
Of course, we still have a few centuries to go before we would even know how to get there — and it isn’t at all clear we can survive nearly that long.
It’s also a long shot thinking that such aliens would be at all susceptible to such scams and schemes — even many humans don’t buy it any more. If, perchance, we were to be talking about more human level aliens we should not expect that they are part of a ‘nature preserve’ of more advanced forms of life, or that that they couldn’t just do ‘an Afghanistan’ on invaders (with a 21 light year supply line).
It’s sort of like the ancient Easter Islanders planning to invade Europe.
Another unfunny comment. In the USA, one of the cherished “freedoms” is the freedom to be brutalized or murdered by cops. This article has some interesting comparisons of the use of lethal force by cops, between the USA and other counties.
A video of a man trying to stab two police officers with an eight-inch knife in the UK has sparked a massive debate on social media. Many contrasted the way British cops subdued the attacker without incident with the way police in the US would have done.
The total number of bullets German police used in all of 2011 was 85. Of the 85 bullets used in 2011, 49 were warnings shots, 36 were aimed at criminal suspects, 15 people were injured, and 6 were killed, Der Spiegel reported in May.
Norwegian police could be a role model for all. Scandinavian cops fired just two shots in the entire of 2014, neither of which killed or injured anyone, official figures show. Officers used an opportunity to pull out their firearms only on 42 occasions in 2014, the lowest number in the last decade. They have killed two people in shootouts over the twelve year period, the statistics reveal, with fatal police shootings taking place in 2005 and 2006.
how many more police brutality related deaths, videos, and cases of injustice does America have to go through before we get some change…
The head of the US Marine Corps confirmed that 10 of its often-problematic F-35B fighter jets are ready for combat.
Against what? Airliners? :D
The program has cost nearly $400 billion and was first kicked off 15 years ago.
The 10 stealth fighters have experienced numerous cost overruns and delays over the years.
The announcement comes just days after Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said the F-35 jet has “taken us too long [and] has cost us way more money than we ever imagined possible.”
James also said there were still challenges left to overcome. “I would sum it up in a word – software,” she said.
Earlier this year, for example, the software system intended to identify maintenance issues was found to give false-positive readings 80 percent of the time. The Marine Corps will be using its ready F-35B jets with an early-version of software called Block 2B. Software is still being tested that will allow the warplanes to carry more weapons and integrate full night-vision capability.
The jet’s developer, Lockheed Martin, has designed three models. Each F-35B costs around $134 million. The A- and C- models cost $108 million and $129 million, respectively.
$400 billion & 15 years and they got 10 aircraft to show for it. And those aircraft are most certainly defective, very buggy, partially operational, pre-production aircraft for test and debug work. Not for actual combat, despite the gay PR.
“Looks like those aliens need some freedom”
:D
But it’s actually how the freakshow thinks. Just saw a headline at yahoo news which read:
Russia’s ‘tin pot despot’ Putin ordered spy’s London murder, UK inquiry told
From the zionazi reuters propaganda house. The lower “life forms” of the zio-freakshow are literally going full on gay now.
Send John McCain and Sarah Palin to this new planet along with Lindsey Graham. They make such a nice triple.
Well, there is the competition already going on, because it is prepared for the residents and members of the Empire crazies and warmogers, because it will be NO place to hide when the truth will come out in a full scale and we can wish them only good luck
Hi Saker, well, what I would like to say is this…a very wonderful photo of an eagle. I’m just ignoring the posters and just looking at the eagle…what a fantastic photo eh ? Scary birds. I have photos all over my kitchen of eagles…Golden and Garibaldi (like the one in the photo)…the Golden are used by Mongolian nomads to hunt small prey…and they land right on the arms of their trainers…the trainers have on a jacket that has feathers on it and the Golden Eagle lands gently and oh so gracefully on his arm. The Golden ones seem to be much more gentle that these Bald Eagles like the one in the photo…these ones are more ‘wild’…
Sorry to be OT…Saker, tell me…do you ‘believe’ all the hype about ‘aliens’ ?
Well Ann,
hmm…you’re just starting to ask the correct questions like Heisenberg, Wheeler and others of Einsteins chums who had bothered to dwell on such:
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/wordpress/quantum-physics-the-physics-of-dreaming/
“10. A PHYSICS OF POSSIBILITIES
Quantum entities exist in a realm of potentiality, in what is called a state of “superposition,” which is to say they hover in a ghostly state between existence and nonexistence, existing in all possible states up until the moment they are observed. Not existing in space-time, their appearance in space-time at the moment of observation is a quantum event in which an atemporal process manifests in time. Wheeler expresses the central point of quantum theory in a single, simple sentence when he says, “No elementary phenomenon is a (real) phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” The necessity for this demarcation is the most mysterious feature of the quantum, for it holds the clue to the central principle of the construction of everything out of nothing. This tenet changes our traditional view that something has happened before we observe it; as Heisenberg writes, “The term ‘happens’ is restricted to the observation.” At the moment of being observed, the wavefunction collapses in no time at all into a particular manifestation, while all of the other potentialities vaporize as if they had never existed. From the quantum point of view, everything that might have happened influences what actually does happen. In a quantum universe such as ours, everything ultimately exists in a state of open-ended potential, what Heisenberg calls “transcendent potentia.” Quantum theory implies that the whole universe─including ourselves─is recreated and recreating itself anew every nano-second based on how we are dreaming it up. Wheeler comments in his own inimitable style, “We may someday have to enlarge the scope of what we mean by a ‘who.’”
Observation is the very act through which the quantum realm “discloses” itself. In quantum theory the moment of observation is where the rubber meets the road, which is to say, where abstract theory and empirical data meet and a specific actuality is realized and manifested out of a vast array of possibilities. It is important to note that we are always “at” the moment of observation, which is to say that we’re there right now! There is no other moment but the one eternal moment of observation. The tendency to think that the moment of observation is just one single discrete moment in a linear sequence of other moments is due to the long ingrained habit of thinking in terms of linear sequential time, i.e., a “linear time hangover.” In our role as observer-participants, it is as if we are on the cutting edge of the big bang itself, on the forefront of the moment of creation that is always taking place in this very moment, in the here and now.
Quantum theory is revealing to us the creative nature of our moment-to-moment experience. It should get our highest attention that observing these quantum objects is the very act that brings them into existence. When we observe an atom to be someplace, quantum physics tells us that it is our looking that caused it to be there. Just like a rainbow can’t be said to exist until the moment that it is observed (as it is made up of light, moisture, and an eye), quantum entities can’t be said to exist until the moment of observation; the act of observation is truly creative. Quantum theory reveals that there is nothing inherently real about the properties of an object that we measure; it is as if we ourselves are intimately involved in producing the results of our own measurements. Our discovery of a quantum entity in a very real sense “causes” it to be there, which implies that there is no physically real world independent of our observation of it. Before these entities are observed they don’t really exist, there is nothing we can say about them; they are “unspeakable.”
Wheeler sometimes used a baseball analogy to illustrate this situation. Talking about how they call balls and strikes, some umpires say “I call them the way I see ’em,” which is an expression of the subjective, projective nature of our perception. A second umpire might say “I call them the way they are,” which is an expression of there being an objectively existing reality not dependent on observation, which was Einstein’s point of view. Wheeler then quotes a quantum umpire who would say “They ain’t nothing till I call ’em,” which is an expression of a quantum baseball game in which nothing exists until it is observed. The properties of quantum objects aren’t inherent to the object, but instead emerge from and are created by interactions with their environment as well as their relationship to observers and their inescapably creative acts of observation.
We can use light as an example: it is well known that light displays either wave-like or particle-like qualities depending upon the experimental set-up and how it is observed. To be more accurate, the wave-like or particle-like behavior that we observe in light is not a property of light per se, it is a property of our interaction with light. If, as quantum physics attests, there is no independent, external objective reality, then light, be it in its wave-like or particle-like aspect, cannot be said to exist separate from our interaction with it. In other words, light has no properties independent of us. What we are saying about light is true of everything; what we experience is not external reality, but our interaction with what our minds construe to be an external reality.
Wheeler likens how we create “reality” out of nothing but our interactions to a slightly skewed, surprise version of the party game “twenty questions.” In the regular version of the game, someone leaves the room, and everyone decides on a word. The person is allowed to ask a series of yes or no questions until they feel that they have enough information to guess the word. Wheeler tells the story that he was the one sent out of the room, and when he came back and began asking his yes or no questions, his friends were taking longer and longer to answer. The tension was building in the room, until he finally guessed the word to be “cloud,” at which point the whole room bursts out into hysterical laughter. His friends explained to him that they had decided to not decide on a predetermined word, and were play-acting “as if” they had decided on a particular word based on nothing but the answers they were giving, the only rule being that every answer had to be consistent with all previous answers. There was no word that existed until the very moment of Wheeler’s guess. Wheeler’s questions and interactions with his friends helped create, or to say it differently─“magically conjured”─the word in the same way that physicists’ and their measuring apparatuses’ interactions with the subatomic realm actually create the elementary particles they are measuring. To talk about the word “cloud” existing “in the room”─i.e., in the “minds” of Wheeler’s friends─before Wheeler’s guess is not accurate, in the same way that the elementary particle wasn’t “in the universe” before the experiment, having no existence prior to being measured. Similarly, in our inquiries into the nature of the universe it is easy to imagine that the final answer already exists, which we will one day uncover, without realizing that the very questions we ask and the actions we take condition and help to create the answers we get back. If Wheeler had asked different questions or the same questions in a different order, he would have ended up with a different word. The idea that the word “cloud” was sitting there, waiting to be discovered, is in Wheeler’s words “pure delusion and fantasy.”
In discussing the surprise version of the game of twenty questions as illustrative of how physicists participate in producing the results of their experiments, Wheeler painstakingly makes the point that the power he had to bring about the word “cloud” was only partial. Similarly, the experimenter has some substantial influence on what will happen to the electron by the choice of experiments he will perform, i.e., “the questions he will put to nature;” but there is always a certain unpredictability about what any given one of his measurements will disclose, i.e., “what answers nature will give.” This unpredictability is because the rest of the universe is always inescapably involved in any observation that we make. Quantum reality is not subjective─a mere figment of the imagination─just as it is not objective. The quantum dimension is the bridge, the intermediate realm between the subjective mental realm “in here” and the seemingly objective world “out there,” somehow coupling the two.
Quantum entities don’t “have” or “possess” intrinsic properties. The fact that the properties of these quantum objects is a function of our observation and that there is no substance, no separately existing intrinsic quantum object separate from its properties, is an expression of these quantum objects having no independently existing objective reality. They are not real in the way we commonly think of something being real. And yet, we ourselves, as well as the experimental instruments physicists are using to measure these not-real quantum objects, are made of the same quantum stuff that itself isn’t real in the ordinary sense. This brings up a related question: how does the mass-less, intangible photon, which has zero weight, give rise to even a single particle that has mass, not to mention the massive weight of the whole universe?Simply put, there aren’t any nuts and bolts at the quantum level. We can’t visualize the quantum world, not because we know too little, but because we know too much. Though beyond our imagination, nature has no trouble, however, producing such quantum entities; indeed, such entities are what this whole wide world is made of.
The universe appears in one way, but exists in another. Behind the apparent solidity of everyday objects lies a world of open-ended potentiality. Physics has penetrated to the very core of material, seemingly objective reality and has found nothing that can be said to ultimately exist beyond or outside of our observation of it. It is as if objective reality has slipped beyond our grasp, beyond concepts, beyond even the concept of existence and nonexistence. To quote one of the most important astrophysicists of the first part of the twentieth century, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, “We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.” Exploring the farthest reaches of the outside micro-world brings us right back to our inner selves. We can never speak about nature without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves. Poetically expressing the same realization, Wheeler asks, “What is Out There? ‘Tis Ourselves?”
anon. if you think I’m going to read that amount of printed mass you’re an alien.
by the way..links are better.
Ann on August 02, 2015 · at 6:13 am UTC said:
“anon. if you think I’m going to read that amount of printed mass you’re an alien.”
Your choice.
Rather a childish response since you seemed inquisitive.
PS: the link was provided.
Paul Levy has some nice things to say — I liked his article about malignant egophrenia at http://baltimorechronicle.com/011305PaulLevy.shtml
but if I want to know about quantum theory I’ll read an open university course from good physicist who understands it, and the math that’s needed, such as Leonard Susskind, or one from MIT — not a ‘spiritual healer’.
Technical science is technical science, and not the stuff that non-scientists talk about.
blue on August 02, 2015 · at 6:54 am UTC said:
“but if I want to know about quantum theory I’ll read an open university course from good physicist who understands it, and the math that’s needed, such as Leonard Susskind, or one from MIT — not a ‘spiritual healer’.”
That may not get you too far – here’s what Wheeler had to say on the subject http://www.bigear.org/vol1no4/wheeler.htm:
“The real reason universities have students is to educate the professors.“
The real reason for learning about quantum physics, or most any other science, is not to ‘understand’ it, as such, but to make use of it, because we don’t still don’t really understand what motion is, even.
I remember when relativity hit the popular imagination and people were saying all kinds of strange things, but never talking inertial frames, hyperbolic tangent as velocities factor, and the other actual stuff, and the math, of relativity. You see the same thing with any technical and scientific knowledge, such as electricity or computers: people talking about it and tossing around metaphors while having no ability to do any actual work with it. People — even some teachers and scientists, talk about energy as if it was a ‘thing’ and not an expression of relationship of elements within a reference frame, like saying an object ‘has’ some amount of kinetic energy, all by itself. (I was in my late forties until I understood what ‘energy’ really means.) People try to see these things in terms of naive reality, which leads to wrong understanding, wrong models, and wrong questions, in wrong modes of thinking.
When Einstein said ‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe’ it was about the most unscientific thing thing he ever said. Even the best scientists tend to fall into that trap.
When Levy says “To be more accurate, the wave-like or particle-like behavior that we observe in light is not a property of light per se, it is a property of our interaction with light.” that’s good.
When he says “Wheeler expresses the central point of quantum theory in a single, simple sentence when he says, “No elementary phenomenon is a (real) phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” that’s really pushing it and falls back on rather shaky ontology.
When he says “Quantum theory is revealing to us the creative nature of our moment-to-moment experience. It should get our highest attention that observing these quantum objects is the very act that brings them into existence.” that’s over the edge and falls into anthropomorphic artifact and religious dogma. The universe, presumably in some quantum context, existed and did it’s thing long before humans were around to make observations.
Humans take their perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, and philosophies way too seriously, trying to fit extrapolate from tiny little wet computers into the whole cosmos and all possible reality systems while forgetting that that’s what they are actually doing. That’s why people used to think the Earth was the center of the universe, and we still make the kind of errors: ‘system slip’ — not staying in the valid contexts. You can call it ‘bubbles’ or ‘Washington (for example) Consensus’ too, or ideology.
Levy tries to break through these walls, but his concept of ‘spirit’ indicates his conditioning: after a ‘spiritual awakening’ one needs to come down again, recuperate from it, toss out all the new trash collected, and get back to work.
*Tried samadhi — didn’t like it — came back*
blue on August 02, 2015 · at 5:37 pm UTC said:
“When he says “Quantum theory is revealing to us the creative nature of our moment-to-moment experience. It should get our highest attention that observing these quantum objects is the very act that brings them into existence.” that’s over the edge and falls into anthropomorphic artifact and religious dogma. The universe, presumably in some quantum context, existed and did it’s thing long before humans were around to make observations.”
Not at all.
Even the doubters (Linde) believe in the likelihood of the “participatory” Universe:
http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featuniverse
“Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde believes this quantum paradox gets to the heart of Wheeler’s idea about the nature of the universe: The principles of quantum mechanics dictate severe limits on the certainty of our knowledge.
“You may ask whether the universe really existed before you start looking at it,” he says. “That’s the same Schrödinger cat question. And my answer would be that the universe looks as if it existed before I started looking at it. When you open the cat’s box after a week, you’re going to find either a live cat or a smelly piece of meat. You can say that the cat looks as if it were dead or as if it were alive during the whole week. Likewise, when we look at the universe, the best we can say is that it looks as if it were there 10 billion years ago.”
Linde believes that Wheeler’s intuition of the participatory nature of reality is probably right. But he differs with Wheeler on one crucial point. Linde believes that conscious observers are an essential component of the universe and cannot be replaced by inanimate objects. “
You certainly seem more sure of time (e.g “long before humans were around to make observations.”) than some others http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time
““One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.” “
“Why does the universe exist? Wheeler believes the quest for an answer to that question inevitably entails wrestling with the implications of one of the strangest aspects of modern physics: According to the rules of quantum mechanics, our observations influence the universe at the most fundamental levels. The boundary between an objective “world out there” and our own subjective consciousness that seemed so clearly defined in physics before the eerie discoveries of the 20th century blurs in quantum mechanics.”
Why? Interesting stuff — but it isn’t quantum mechanics or science — or all that good philosophy either.
“Even the doubters (Linde) believe in the likelihood of the “participatory” Universe:”
And if you believe in tooth fairies that is not science either. Science is not about belief. This is what I was talking about.
Time is a useful perception and concept which is beyond our ability to ‘understand’. It may not be continuous, linear, or discreet, or simply a perception of our nervous systems — we don’t know; but it’s handy.
What “existed and did it’s thing long before humans were around” means is also that the universe can not be limited to our particular set of perceptions, theorization, and linguisitc limitations — whatever time is or isn’t. We can speculate that space doesn’t exist either, but the point is that whatever we think or say or do is within a limited system or context, and we have to keep that in mind.
Anonymous on August 02, 2015 · at 8:20 pm UTC said:
“Even the doubters (Linde) believe in the likelihood of the “participatory” Universe:”
And if you believe in tooth fairies that is not science either. Science is not about belief. This is what I was talking about.
Time is a useful perception and concept which is beyond our ability to ‘understand’. It may not be continuous, linear, or discreet, or simply a perception of our nervous systems — we don’t know; but it’s handy.”
If you believe in tooth fairies you may even still believe in a “handy” concept that the earth is at the centre of the Universe.
The point is that Science and belief systems are intertwined and concepts like time may seem to be handy but are, ultimately, misleading and unhelpful http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time:
“Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.””
Yes blue,
that Paul Levy article link is very good – thanks for posting.
Wheeler offers an interesting interpretation to quantum effects I was not aware of. Nevertheless, I think he overstretches his interpretation in stating that there is no real thing unless we observe it. This is most likely right for a single quantum object, such as a photon, but I am sure he is wrong on macroscopic objects, because these are made of many quantum objects (usually trillions of atoms) that can’t help interacting all way long. This leads to a near-certain objective reality with a vanishingly small probability that by chance all the quantum interactions will change the macroscopic object notably.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45KGS1Ro-sc is a very brief intro to quantum mechanics exposing what it is really about: particle physics, abstract theories — not about consciousness, spirit or that stuff. It’s just an updated model of what we observe happening. Other implications are speculation and imagination.
blue on August 02, 2015 · at 7:06 pm UTC said:
“is a very brief intro to quantum mechanics exposing what it is really about: particle physics, abstract theories — not about consciousness, spirit or that stuff.”
Am…http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featuniverse:
“It would be tempting to dismiss Wheeler’sthought experiment as a curious idea, except for one thing: It has been demonstrated in a laboratory. In 1984 physicists at the University of Maryland set up a tabletop version of the delayed-choice scenario. Using a light source and an arrangement of mirrors to provide a number of possible photon routes, the physicists were able to show that the paths the photons took were not fixed until the physicists made their measurements, even though those measurements were made after the photons had already left the light source and begun their circuit through the course of mirrors.
Wheeler conjectures we are part of a universe that is a work in progress; we are tiny patches of the universe looking at itself — and building itself. It’s not only the future that is still undetermined but the past as well. And by peering back into time, even all the way back to the Big Bang, our present observations select one out of many possible quantum histories for the universe.”
Here’s a longer but better video, which help demystify the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc
The Quantum Conspiracy: What Popularizers of QM Don’t Want You to Know
Uploaded on Jan 12, 2011
Google Tech Talk
January 6, 2011
Presented by Ron Garret.
ABSTRACT
Richard Feynman once famously quipped that no one understands quantum mechanics, and popular accounts continue to promulgate the view that QM is an intractable mystery (probably because that helps to sell books). QM is certainly unintuitive, but the idea that no one understands it is far from the truth. In fact, QM is no more difficult to understand than relativity. The problem is that the vast majority of popular accounts of QM are simply flat-out wrong. They are based on the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of QM, which has been thoroughly discredited for decades. It turns out that if Copenhagen were true then it would be possible to communicate faster than light, and hence send signals backwards in time. This talk describes an alternative interpretation based on quantum information theory (QIT) which is consistent with current scientific knowledge. It turns out that there is a simple intuition that makes almost all quantum mysteries simply evaporate, and replaces them with an easily understood (albeit strange) insight: measurement and entanglement are the same physical phenomenon, and you don’t really exist.
Slides are available here:
https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/…
Link to the paper:
http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf
blue on August 02, 2015 · at 7:59 pm UTC said:
This talk describes an alternative interpretation based on quantum information theory (QIT) which is consistent with current scientific knowledge. It turns out that there is a simple intuition that makes almost all quantum mysteries simply evaporate, and replaces them with an easily understood (albeit strange) insight: measurement and entanglement are the same physical phenomenon, and you don’t really exist.
As you can see from this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics, Wheeler was the “cheerleader of the QIT approach:
“Information-based interpretations]
Further information: Quantum logic and Digital physics
Quantum informational approaches have attracted growing support during the 2000s. Hagar and Hemmo (2008) even refer to it (critically) as “a new orthodoxy in the foundations of quantum mechanics.”
J. A. Wheeler (1990) with his “It from Bit” (“It”: physical entity, “Bit”: unit of information) has been described as “the cheerleader of this sort of view”. These approaches have been described as a revival of immaterialism”
I liked how Arthur Clarke had his aliens put the Earthlings in their place while terraforming Titan and igniting Jupiter. There’re serious plans for fixing up Mars but little beyond. But I’m willing to bet the first human to set foot there will be Chinese. Funny, indeed, the new Space Race that isn’t since the SCO has no credible competition. I know why! The Outlaw Empire doesn’t have anymore former Nazi German rocket scientists to run NASA.
Hypocrisy as a way of life. Other people, religion, colour, philosophy are inferior and should be treated with abject rejection not to mention put them into slavery.
A super earth might be able to hold on to methane and, if big enough, to some helium and hydrogen. If life could tolerate this reducing atmosphere, it might survive almost up to a Jupiter orbit in our solar system measures, due to the incredible greenhouse effect!.
re: Kurds and the Great Game:
This is an interesting article–he does slam in a dismissive way a rather cherished belief on this site that ISIS is a creature of the CIA calling it a “conspiracy theory”. sigh but here goes
http://original.antiwar.com/john-feffer/2015/07/31/the-kurdish-elephant/
Kurds: Again for what it is worth ( BBC?). “Iraqi Kurds issue warning to PKK ( i.e. the main faction of the Syrian Kurds)
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-33747980
Institute of Peace’s Hawkish Chairman Wants Ukraine to Send Russians Back in Body Bags
“The United States Institute of Peace is a publicly funded national institution chartered by the U.S. government to promote international peace through nonviolent conflict resolution.
But its chairman, Stephen Hadley, is a relentless hawk whose advocacy for greater military intervention often dovetails closely with the interests of Raytheon, a major defense contractor that pays him handsomely as a member of its board of directors.”
…
“In a speech at Poland’s Wroclaw Global Forum in June, Hadley argued in favor of arming the Ukrainian government in part because that would “raise the cost for what Russia is doing in Ukraine.” Specifically, he said, “even President Putin is sensitive to body bags — it sounds coarse to say, but it’s true — but body bags of Russian soldiers who have been killed.””
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxS5CGuczVg
JUL 31
It’s David & Goliath story’: German journos face treason charges over revealing intel plans
H/T to Willyloman dug it out now on his site.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7ZvxpwzBHI
JUL 31/2015
Palestinian toddler burns to death in suspected Jewish ‘price tag’ attack
China-bashing has been off the charts the past 2 weeks or so, even by ZH’s low “standards” of tabloid mudslinging.
That BRICSpost article earlier about the Chinese not too happy about all the USN presence in their ocean offshore.
Maybe a historical reenactment of the 1999 incident where the evil Clingon alien put a cruise missile into the Chinese embassy in Belgrade?
Or, the other way, the 2001 APRIL FOOL episode of the USN spyplane forced down over Hainan Island?
Or, even further back in history, maybe the “Great Powers” are going to go ashore & partition Shanghai with thousands of troops in each sector so they can conduct business as it should be—in an uninterrupted corporofascist oligopoly, as was done in the 1920’s?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Shanghai
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-01/cyber-wars-begin-obama-says-us-must-retaliate-against-china-historic-data-breach
That is a classic American propaganda tactic that the United Snakes has used throughout its 200-year bloodthirsty history: Justify American aggression as a “defensive” response to another country’s alleged actions (which are often nothing more than American lies).
Examples of this America tactic include:
-The Remember the Maine incident to justify the USA’s Spanish-American War.
-The Gulf of Tonkin “attack” to justify American aggression in the Vietnam War
-The Racak “Massacre” to justify America’s attack on Yugoslavia in 1999.
-The lies about Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction to justify American aggression against Iraq.
-The American Reichstag Fire called 9/11 to justify America’s phony global War on Terrorism.
9-11 is the template that America increasingly resorts to in order to demonize the USA’s latest target of aggression.
Stage an attack on yourself and blame it on your targeted “enemy” nation.
False Flag terrorism is as American as apple pie.
This includes virtual cyber false flag “attacks” which are even more susceptible to America manipulating as a psyops campaign against nations like China, North Korea, etc.
Most pro-Americans (like many on ZeroHedge) cannot bring themselves to admit that the the self-styled Land of the Free would stage an attack on itself, but September 11th proves otherwise.
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I’m reposting this which I posted yesterday on this article:
/foreign-policy-diary-the-us-china-standoff-in-the-indo-asia-pacific-region/#comments
It is important, I believe, to understand the next large and impactful hegemonic battlefield that surely will be used, and used against everyone tangentially as the US takes complete control of the Internet. It is a choke point as surely as the Straits of Malacca or Hormuz, or the great canals and other narrow passages of the oceans and seas.
Larchmonter445 on August 02, 2015 · at 12:47 am UTC
Today the NYT ran a David Sanger (CIA mouthpiece, DOD bullhorn) piece on Obama determining (maybe signing an authorization?) that China must be attacked for its cyberhacking (unproven). Especially, the OPM hack which stole the identities and deep background files of tens of millions of employees and applicants for secret and top secret and key government jobs.
Should the NSA want to, it could easily cripple most of the networks of China. It has been embedded in all the router hardware (US manufacturers) and network switches and much of the software from Microsoft and other providers used by Chinese institutions and industries.
China’s vulnerability is huge and only in recent years have they realized (post Snowden) how deep and wide the NSA has penetrated the fiber optic system within the nation and connecting the nation to the Internet.
Should a large attack hit China, I suspect it will be considered a military attack. The US has declared it will use cyber as a one of their weapons of military “defense and offense”.
You can be certain US businesses will be profoundly impacted if such a cyber war is launched by Obama and the pinheads in NSA-CIA-DOD-State.
This last “power” of the US is like the nuclear advantage they possessed at the ending of WWII. They could not resist using it. Cyber advantage is a closing window. However, with the goal to contain China and destabilize the economic advantage China has over the US (wealth versus debt), I suspect the pinheads will go ahead or contract some black hat action to cripple large sectors of China.
With that act, I suspect also, the US electrical grid, most of the networks and many crucial nodes that support America’s infrastructure will be attacked by Chinese assets.
The reason this article floated today from Sanger is to test the “thinkers” on both sides to see if the US should go ahead and to sound out what response they believe will be returned.
The world, if rational, will soon develop a MAD doctrine for cyber.
If you recall, recently, China and Russia signed a mutual pact about cyber in which they pledged not to hack or make war on one another. They probably also have secret protocols to assist one another in defense and offense if they are attacked by a “third party”.
This is more than causing computers to go blue screen. This is about shutting down all medical, financial, banking, traffic on land, sea and in the air, probably skewing GPS satellite info, and crippling most forms of digital communication around the globe.
It will isolate nations from one another because smart nations will swiftly shut the switch to the Internet so they will not be attacked. It will alter the globe as we know it the last 30 years.
All of the results are good for the Hegemon. Bad for everyone else.
Recall that Obama is very vindictive and without proof ordered an attack on North Korea for the so called Sony hack. It was a cyberwar attack.
Now, he will attack China if the US thinks it can block a counter-move. The very fact of the OPM hack indicates a very deep penetration by whoever did it (let’s assume China). And therefore, whoever did it is inside the US networks and embedded also. They may be able to cripple the US if China is attacked.
Where are the grownups? Well, President Xi is coming to Washington this year. Maybe he’ll bring a solution for the man-child in the Oval Office.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/01/world/asia/us-decides-to-retaliate-against-chinas-hacking.html?_r=1
The Americans are hypocritically squealing about being hacked by China and pathetically playing the victim!!
As revealed by Edward Snowden, however, America has been launching attacks against China for years such as through the NSA’s TAO cyber-attack outfit.
Edward Snowden reveals US computer hacking aimed at China
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/06/14/hong-j14.html
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/24/huaw-m24.html
Snowden reveals massive National Security Agency hacking unit
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/12/31/snow-d31.html
Also, this is from the same America is that is massively guilty of hacking most of the world including Brazil, Iran, India, and its nominal allies like Germany and France.
Angela Merkel’s phone ‘hacked by American spies’
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/angela-merkels-phone-hacked-american-2485433
New evidence of NSA spying on France, Mexico
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/10/22/surv-o22.html
So the idea that America is merely retaliating “defensively” against cyber attacks is a propaganda meme that the Americans are pushing to justify yet another one of their aggressive assaults similar in nature to their bogus War on Terrorism and self-inflicted 9-11 attack or their serial drone bombings of other nations.
If anything, China and other nations should be retaliating against America’s ongoing cyber terrorism. For example, America created the Stuxnet virus and used it to attack Iran (and even North Korea)–yet the American “free press” rationalizes this act of American cyber terrorism in typically Orwellian terms.
US-Israeli Stuxnet Cyber-attacks against Iran: “Act of War”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-israeli-stuxnet-cyber-attacks-against-iran-act-of-war/5328514
Barack Obama ‘ordered Stuxnet cyber attack on Iran’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9305704/Barack-Obama-ordered-Stuxnet-cyber-attack-on-Iran.html
Stuxnet 2.0: US launches cyber attack on Iran’s oil ministry
http://www.hangthebankers.com/stuxnet-us-launches-cyber-attack-on-irans-oil-ministry/
US Unsuccessfully Attacked North Korea With Stuxnet
http://news.antiwar.com/2015/05/29/us-unsuccessfully-attacked-north-korea-with-stuxnet/
Also, the New York Slimes is a leading mouthpiece for the American Empire and was infamous for peddling the Iraqi Yellowcake uranium from Niger lies–a deception, which the Newspaper of Record (Lies) has yet to be punished for.
More recently, the NY Slimes, like most of the America-controlled media, dutifully spouted allegations accusing North Korea of the Sony hack, despite the fact that IT security analysts were questioning the validity of this American accusation.
Cybersecurity investigators raise doubts about North Korean responsibility for Sony hack
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/12/31/sony-d31.html
And of course the American “Newspaper of Record” has been spewing the “Russian aggression against Ukraine” propaganda for the past couple of years.
America is the world’s leader in hacking and cyber terrorism–even as it claims to oppose these practices.
This is similar to how America is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism (such as Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front against Syria or LIFG against LIbya), yet hilariously claims to be leading a War against Terrorism.
Welcome to the Goebbelsian world of America and its unipolar order.
Yet most people don’t have the honesty to state the unvarnished truth that American Empire has no clothes on cyber terrorism or any other issue.
Not funny and somewhat OT, though it describes what “freedom” means for people in the zionised fascist west.
‘Incredibly intrusive’: Windows 10 spies on you by default
According to Zach Epstein of BGR News, all of Windows 10’s features that could be considered invasions of privacy are enabled by default. Signing in with your Microsoft email account means Windows is reading your emails, contacts and calendar data. The new Edge browser serves you personalized ads. Solitaire now comes with ads. Using Cortana – the voice-driven assistant that represents Redmond’s answer to Apple’s Siri – reportedly “plays fast and loose with your data.”
“I am pretty surprised by the far-reaching data collection that Microsoft seems to want,” web developer Jonathan Porta wrote on his blog. “I am even more surprised by the fact that the settings all default to incredibly intrusive. I am certain that most individuals will just accept the defaults and have no idea how much information they are giving away.”
As examples, Porta cited Microsoft having access to contacts, calendar details, and “other associated input data” such as “typing and inking” by default. The operating system also wants access to user locations and location history, both of which could be provided not just to Microsoft, but to its “trusted partners.”
“Who are the trusted partners? By whom are they trusted? I am certainly not the one doing any trusting right now,” Porta wrote, describing the default privacy options as “vague and bordering on scary.”
Alec Meer of the ‘Rock, Paper, Shotgun’ blog pointed out this passage in Microsoft’s 12,000-word, 45-page terms of use agreement:
“We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to.”
While most people are used to ads as the price of accessing free content, writes Meer, Microsoft is not making it clear enough that they are “gathering and storing vast amounts of data on your computing habits,” not just browser data.
Opting out of all these default settings requires navigating 13 different screens and a separate website, the bloggers have found.
Meer was underwhelmed with Microsoft executives’ claims of transparency and easily understandable terms of use. “There is no world in which 45 pages of policy documents and opt-out settings split across 13 different Settings screens and an external website constitutes ‘real transparency,’” he wrote.
Tracking and harvesting user data has been a business model for many tech giants. Privacy advocates have raised concerns over Google’s combing of emails, Apple’s Siri, and Facebook’s tracking cookies that keep monitoring people’s browser activity in order to personalize advertising and content.
OT
Question for any Chinese visitors of this web site.
I read this line; ‘”I was happily preparing to go to Australia to start my studies,” he said. “For something like this to happen, it’s like falling to hell from heaven.”, right here – link to Sydney Morning Herald.
‘Heaven and hell’ are purely christian concepts. How likely is it for a indigenous Chinese individual to use these terms?
Chinese culture has both heaven “Tian”, and hell “diyu”, and they exist outside Christian context.
Back from trekking round northern rural China.
On just about every hill / mountain there was some kind of marker / monument /
shrine / pagoda paying respect to the world of spirit.
Even the kerb strips were imprinted with Feng Shui symbols.
I came to the view that underneath the concerns for worldly betterment
there was an underlying awareness of a non material reality
FWIW
It’s no joke. If the world was to survive the unfolding ecological catastrophe, if the ‘Chosen People’ of the Atlanticist Reich were to subdue every country on Earth, and if technology were to advance rapidly, some time in the next few centuries, the ‘Exceptionals’ would escape into the cosmos to spread their psychopathic Wetiko disease far and wide. Imagine all the alien ‘gooks’, ‘rag-heads’, ‘unpersons’, ‘unterbeings’ etc waiting to be ‘Shocked and Awed’ to extinction, and their planets looted to enrich quadrillionaire Donald Trump XXVIII’s Empire. I bet they have a unit planning just such an eventuality, deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, filled with slavering geeks and nerds.
If we are talking about intelligent life elsewhere, then we have to also talk about flying saucer people who, if half the stories are true, a few of whom could take out the lot of the neocons and other assorted wackos like Uncle Fred takes out a wasps nest from under his eave with a can of Hornet Spray. Uncle Fred doesn’t mind wasps in the woods but doesn’t let them invade his house.
Of course, we still have a few centuries to go before we would even know how to get there — and it isn’t at all clear we can survive nearly that long.
It’s also a long shot thinking that such aliens would be at all susceptible to such scams and schemes — even many humans don’t buy it any more. If, perchance, we were to be talking about more human level aliens we should not expect that they are part of a ‘nature preserve’ of more advanced forms of life, or that that they couldn’t just do ‘an Afghanistan’ on invaders (with a 21 light year supply line).
It’s sort of like the ancient Easter Islanders planning to invade Europe.
Another unfunny comment. In the USA, one of the cherished “freedoms” is the freedom to be brutalized or murdered by cops. This article has some interesting comparisons of the use of lethal force by cops, between the USA and other counties.
Police brutality: How UK cops disarmed knife attacker and why it stirred debate over US practices
A video of a man trying to stab two police officers with an eight-inch knife in the UK has sparked a massive debate on social media. Many contrasted the way British cops subdued the attacker without incident with the way police in the US would have done.
The total number of bullets German police used in all of 2011 was 85. Of the 85 bullets used in 2011, 49 were warnings shots, 36 were aimed at criminal suspects, 15 people were injured, and 6 were killed, Der Spiegel reported in May.
Norwegian police could be a role model for all. Scandinavian cops fired just two shots in the entire of 2014, neither of which killed or injured anyone, official figures show. Officers used an opportunity to pull out their firearms only on 42 occasions in 2014, the lowest number in the last decade. They have killed two people in shootouts over the twelve year period, the statistics reveal, with fatal police shootings taking place in 2005 and 2006.
how many more police brutality related deaths, videos, and cases of injustice does America have to go through before we get some change…
This one is funny:
US Marines declare F-35 fighter jet ‘ready for combat’
The head of the US Marine Corps confirmed that 10 of its often-problematic F-35B fighter jets are ready for combat.
Against what? Airliners? :D
The program has cost nearly $400 billion and was first kicked off 15 years ago.
The 10 stealth fighters have experienced numerous cost overruns and delays over the years.
The announcement comes just days after Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said the F-35 jet has “taken us too long [and] has cost us way more money than we ever imagined possible.”
James also said there were still challenges left to overcome. “I would sum it up in a word – software,” she said.
Earlier this year, for example, the software system intended to identify maintenance issues was found to give false-positive readings 80 percent of the time. The Marine Corps will be using its ready F-35B jets with an early-version of software called Block 2B. Software is still being tested that will allow the warplanes to carry more weapons and integrate full night-vision capability.
The jet’s developer, Lockheed Martin, has designed three models. Each F-35B costs around $134 million. The A- and C- models cost $108 million and $129 million, respectively.
$400 billion & 15 years and they got 10 aircraft to show for it. And those aircraft are most certainly defective, very buggy, partially operational, pre-production aircraft for test and debug work. Not for actual combat, despite the gay PR.
yeah BT…Lockheed Martin made all that money for their lousy work…they’re the biggest military contracter on the planet.