Bottom line up front: Genomes can store information. Conserved noncoding elements can survive hundreds of millions of years. Under optimal conditions, a genetic information channel spanning a billion years could theoretically preserve roughly 2.5 megabytes of data. This channel deserves to be taken seriously.
A Neglected Channel
For decades, we’ve scanned the sky with radio telescopes, looking for narrowband signals. But is it possible that the message already arrived—not in electromagnetic waves, but in the genomes of living cells?
In 2007, Masaru Tomita’s group at Keio University did something considered “crazy” at the time: they encoded Einstein’s E=mc² and 1905 into the DNA of Bacillus subtilis. Tomita said something key: “Bacterial information could persist—potentially for an incredible million years.”
More importantly, the design: he used fourfold redundant storage. Even if DNA mutates, the data can still be recovered. Tomita also anticipated today’s question: “The question a lot of people ask is—who would read the bacteria?” His answer had a rare scientific romanticism: “If aliens discover it in the distant future, they would naturally have higher intelligence to quickly crack the code.”
In 2026, Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences published a hypothesis paper titled “Directed Information Panspermia.” The author, Sh. M. Kocharyan, proposed a concrete framework: a civilization could introduce primitive life forms to a habitable planet while simultaneously encoding information into the genetic code of those life forms. The genetic code, beyond its biological function, could also serve a “hyperbiological” role—as an interstellar information medium. The receiver civilization—the descendants evolved from those life forms—would eventually evolve the ability to read it.
This is a theoretical hypothesis, not an observational discovery. But it provides an operational framework.
So How Much Could Theoretically Be Stored?
In our earlier conversation, we attempted an estimate of this channel’s information capacity. The setup:
Carrier: A large, slow-reproducing organism (crocodile-like), with a per-generation mutation rate of about 10⁻⁹ and a generation time of about 20 years.
Time: 10⁹ years, roughly 5 × 10⁷ generations.
Redundancy: Assume a large number of independent lineages carrying the same information, allowing a decoder to correct individual lineage mutations through consensus.
Selection pressure: The information is embedded in conserved noncoding regions, hitchhiking on the host’s essential regulatory sequences.
Under this setup, the per-site substitution probability is about 4.9%. With an optimal decoder capable of maximum-likelihood consensus across millions of independent copies, the consensus error rate drops to negligible levels. Effective encoding capacity approaches 2 bits per base (the full four-letter alphabet).
If 1% of the genome can be used to carry information (about 10⁷ bases, for a large vertebrate genome), the recoverable information is roughly:
This is where the 2.5 MB figure comes from. It requires a series of ideal conditions to hold simultaneously: independent redundant lineages, active maintenance mechanisms preventing information deletion, and a decoder that knows where to look. But it gives an order of magnitude. The channel is narrowband, but it isn’t zero.
Why This Channel Might Be Real
The Genetic Code Itself Is an Error-Correcting Code
The standard genetic code is not random. It was optimized by natural selection into an error-correcting code. The codon assignment pattern minimizes the impact of point mutations on protein chemical properties. Biochemically similar amino acids are assigned to codons sharing two nucleotides—even if a mutation occurs, the consequence is “mild.”
If the genetic code itself is an error-correcting code, then any “unnatural” sequence in a genome inherits this error-correction capability. This is the underlying architecture that lets information hitchhike.
Conserved Noncoding Elements Prove Deep-Time Possibility
Some conserved noncoding elements are completely identical across humans, rats, mice, chickens, and dogs—species that diverged 300 million years ago. This is empirical proof: if selection pressure maintains it, noncoding sequence can survive hundreds of millions of years.
A designed anchor would be embedded in such a region—hitchhiking on the host’s essential regulatory sequences. It would sit in a place that “should drift but somehow doesn’t.” Its conservation would exceed what natural selection can explain.
Interstellar Material Exchange Is Real
Even if the information exists, it needs to reach Earth. 3I/ATLAS provides observational motivation. JWST/MIRI detected methane directly on an interstellar object for the first time, finding an unexpectedly high CH₄-to-water ratio. SPHEREx detected broad organic C–H features.
These molecules themselves are not biosignatures. But 3I/ATLAS proved one thing: material from the galaxy’s ancient regions can travel across vast interstellar distances to reach our solar system. It provides a concrete diagnostic framework: timing of volatiles, isotope ratios, chirality, spatial distribution of organics.
Honest Caveats
This estimate depends on several heroic assumptions that need to be explicitly flagged:
Independence. You need a large number of reproductively isolated lineages, each carrying the information, for a billion years. This isn’t “a ton of biological material”—it’s an engineered and maintained ecosystem.
Active maintenance. If the information serves no function, it is evolutionarily invisible. Billion-year information persistence requires active maintenance mechanisms: a toxin-antitoxin system, a homing endonuclease, a CRISPR-style “immune” system that kills cells that lose the information.
The recognizability paradox. A “recognizable message” is, by definition, something selection would not preserve. If it looks like a message, selection eliminates it. If it survives, it looks like biology.
The physical bottleneck. Billion-year-old fossil DNA has long since degraded. The information must be continuously replicated—meaning living organisms, not fossils. Maintaining a specific message for a billion years requires continuous selection or maintenance.
Worth Starting to Look
If panspermia was directed, the most likely trace is not the signal itself, but a conserved element that shouldn’t exist—a noncoding sequence whose conservation has no evolutionary explanation.
This claim is testable and falsifiable. It doesn’t require anyone to announce aliens. It requires only that we get better at spotting statistical anomalies in genomes.
The first evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence may not be a radio signal—it may be a stretch of DNA that is too conserved to be natural. We now have the tools to start looking. Whether we find it in two years or two hundred is unknown. But the search is no longer science fiction.
Acknowledgment: The logical framework of this post emerged from a conversation about panspermia, genetic repair mechanisms, and information theory. Any errors in the derivation belong to the conversationalists, not to the cited research.
If you spend any time in the space weather community, you know Ben Davidson’s name. His daily Suspicious Observers updates have become a fixture for thousands of people who want to understand what the Sun is doing and how it might affect Earth. And if you’ve followed his work for long, you’ve also encountered the Thunderbolts Project—the volunteer-run organization behind the Electric Universe movement that has produced documentaries, newsletters, and a massive YouTube archive exploring plasma cosmology and electrical phenomena in space.
These are communities that have done something genuinely valuable: they’ve gotten people excited about space science.
The Genuine Appeal
Davidson has been explicit about his mission. In a 2015 interview, he described his goal as taking “away the overly nerdy stuff and put it in a way that’s easy to understand and engage in.” He partnered with a NASA engineer to host public science events. He worked with researchers at Ohio State University to build models examining relationships between solar magnetism and earthquake occurrence—work that was published in New Concepts in Global Tectonics. Whatever one thinks of the conclusions, the impulse to make science accessible and to look for connections between solar activity and terrestrial phenomena is not inherently unreasonable.
The Thunderbolts Project operates in a similar spirit. Its stated mission is to “explore the Electric Universe paradigm,” and it has produced educational videos, a weekly newsletter, beginner’s guides, and documentaries on topics ranging from comets to Mars surface features. The project has over 216,000 YouTube subscribers and more than 40 million views. People are clearly hungry for alternative frameworks that emphasize the role of electromagnetism in cosmic phenomena, and Thunderbolts has provided a platform for that curiosity.
There’s a real intellectual tradition here. Plasma cosmology, associated with figures like Hannes Alfvén and Eric Lerner, has raised legitimate questions about the over-reliance on gravity in standard cosmological models. The Electric Universe extends these ideas to stars and planets, proposing that electrical discharge plays a dominant role in shaping celestial bodies. Whether or not one accepts these frameworks, they represent a form of scientific speculation that has motivated people to study plasma physics, solar dynamics, and comparative mythology who might otherwise never have engaged with those subjects.
The Crustal Displacement Hypothesis
Now, the hard part.
The crustal displacement hypothesis—the idea that Earth’s entire solid crust could slip rapidly over the interior, shifting the poles to different geographic locations in a matter of hours or days—is a different matter entirely.
This idea traces back to Charles Hapgood’s 1958 book Earth’s Shifting Crust. Hapgood proposed that unbalanced polar ice caps could generate centrifugal forces sufficient to slide the crust over the mantle. Albert Einstein wrote a foreword to the book, which is often cited as an endorsement. But Einstein’s actual words were carefully hedged. He called Hapgood’s idea “original” and “of great simplicity” and said it would be “extremely important” if it continued to be supported by evidence. More importantly, Einstein pointed out in his correspondence that the ice caps simply lacked sufficient mass to cause such a shift, and he noted that Hapgood would need to explain why other crustal imbalances didn’t trigger similar events. Hapgood later conceded this point and speculated that the force must originate from within the Earth.
The modern version, as promoted by Davidson and others, typically involves a solar micronova or some external trigger that “unlocks” the crust from the mantle, allowing it to shift catastrophically.
Where the Physics Breaks Down
This is where the problems become insurmountable.
Angular momentum. If the crust were to accelerate and rotate relative to the core, the core would have to experience an equal and opposite change in momentum. The proposed theories treat the core’s rotation as fixed while the crust moves freely, which violates one of the most basic conservation laws in physics. A review of four major crustal shift theories—Hapgood’s, Chan Thomas’s, and two others—found that all of them call for the crust to be accelerated to the speed of the fastest Learjet (500+ MPH) during the pole-to-equator shift and then decelerated back to zero, all within 24 hours. No plausible mechanism exists to accomplish this.
The paleomagnetic record. If the crust had shifted catastrophically, the magnetic alignment of rocks formed during the shift would be random. Instead, the ocean floor shows a clear, orderly pattern of magnetic reversals over millions of years, which is only consistent with plate tectonics and slow true polar wander. True polar wander—the rotation of the entire solid Earth relative to the spin axis—is a real phenomenon, but it operates at rates of less than 1° per million years. The catastrophic version requires speeds roughly 1,000 times faster.
Friction. The asthenosphere is not a frictionless layer of liquid; it is a highly viscous solid rock that flows extremely slowly over geologic time. The gravitational force and friction between the crust and mantle would make any rapid slide physically impossible.
What’s Really Going On
None of this means the people asking these questions are foolish. The geological record does contain genuine anomalies—tropical fossils in polar regions, mass death assemblages, evidence of abrupt climate shifts—that mainstream geology has sometimes struggled to explain fully. Hapgood was motivated by real puzzles. The problem is that crustal displacement doesn’t actually solve them, and it introduces a cascade of new problems that violate known physics.
The Better Path
The charitable framing here is this: Suspicious Observers and Thunderbolts have created spaces where people feel empowered to ask big questions about Earth’s history and humanity’s place in the cosmos. That’s valuable. The crustal displacement model, however, is not a viable scientific hypothesis. It’s a compelling narrative that has outrun its evidentiary basis and collided with fundamental physical laws.
You can appreciate the community, the curiosity, and the educational mission while being clear-eyed about the physics.
The best version of this community is the one that encourages people to study space weather, learn about plasma physics, and engage with real scientific data. The worst version is the one that convinces people to reorganize their lives around a catastrophe that cannot happen.
The sky is speaking. Let’s listen carefully—and let’s be honest about what we’re hearing.
The air in the market tasted of rust and regret. It was a dry, metallic tang that clung to the back of your throat, a constant reminder of what this place used to be. Now, it was just a backdrop for a slow-motion suicide.
I was leaning against a pillar of what might have once been a fountain, watching the parade. The Americans moved through the stalls with a quiet, shuffling dignity that made me want to break something. They were human, same as me, same as anyone. I saw tall people, people with skin the color of old bronze, people with eyes that held a deep, ancient sadness. They’d been a proud nation once. Artists, engineers, poets. Now they were just marks.
And the marks were lining up to get fleeced.
The Epstein Class—that’s what the Americans called them, though they were just as human as anyone else—were in theory a delegation from some wealthy core world whose name I’d already forgotten. They’d arrived generations ago, offering “partnership.” Now they ran everything. They called their currency dollars. Little chits of blue plastic, printed on demand, backed by nothing but the ruling class promise not to ruin you today.
A merchant sat behind a stall, flanked by two enforcers. They were fat. Not glandular, not sick—just wealthy in that way that turns men soft and cruel. Their skin had the pale, doughy look of people who hadn’t worked in generations. Their clothes were off-world silks, their fingers heavy with rings. One of them was eating something expensive while an American artisan, a woman whose hands were calloused from shaping beautiful glasswork, handed over a sculpture that must have taken her a month to make.
In return, the merchant dropped a handful of dollars into her palm without even looking up. The woman didn’t count them. She just clutched the worthless plastic to her chest and walked away, her head held high, as if she’d just completed a fair and honorable transaction.
She’d just traded a piece of her soul for a handful of tokens that the issuance class could print infinite numbers of. Tokens that were backed by nothing but the purely theoretical promise not to eat her alive.
Fuck. It was like watching a man thank a mugger for not cutting his throat after he’d already taken his wallet.
I’d been stateside for three standard months. That was two months and twenty-nine days too long. My mission parameters were simple: assess the situation, make contact, offer a solution. But the situation wasn’t a puzzle to be solved. It was a disease. And the Americans weren’t just infected; they were in love with the pathogen.
They called it Stockholm syndrome back on Earth. A nice, clean, clinical term for a filthy, visceral reality. But this was worse. This was a planetary-scale kink. They’d been beaten, robbed, and humiliated for so long they’d forgotten what it felt like to stand up straight.
The issuance class didn’t just take their resources. Anyone can do that. The Epstein class took their dignity. They’d started wars between American factions, just for the entertainment, then sold them the weapons to fight them. They’d publicly violated American leaders—men and women—on live broadcast feeds, a “demonstration of power,” they’d called it. And the Americans, what did they do? They rebuilt, they bowed their heads, and they went back to work to earn more dollars.
I saw an enforcer, a brute with a shock-stick and a bored expression, stop a young American male in the street. The kid couldn’t have been more than twenty. The enforcer didn’t say a word. He just pointed a finger at the kid’s boots. Fine leather, hand-tooled. A family heirloom, probably, passed down through generations. The kid’s face went pale, but he didn’t argue. He didn’t fight. He just knelt down, unlaced them, and handed them over. The enforcer took them, grunted, and walked on. The kid walked home in his socks, his eyes fixed on the dusty ground.
I pushed off the pillar and fell into step beside him.
“You could have run,” I said. My voice was low, but it cut through the market’s quiet hum.
The kid flinched, looking at me with wide, terrified eyes. He saw my foreigner clothes, my hard face. He saw a predator of a different kind.
“It is not permitted,” he whispered. “They would… they would punish my family.”
“They’re already punishing you,” I said, my voice flat. “They’re punishing you every day. They’re punishing you right now. What do you think they’re going to do if you stop? Take away your birthday?”
He just stared at me, uncomprehending. The concept of resistance was so alien to him it was like I was speaking a dead language.
I stopped and turned to face the market square. I spread my arms, a gesture of utter disbelief. “Look at this! Look at all of you!”
A few heads turned. They saw a crazed foreigner, yelling at nothing.
“You call yourselves Americans! You tell stories of your ancestors who carved cities out of mountains! You sing songs of warriors who sailed the stars in ships of light! And now look at you! You trade your art, your labor, your children’s future for… for what? For dollars?”
I pointed at the merchant, who was now using a dollar to pick something out of his teeth.
“You take the plastic shit of people who have made a national sport of raping your minds and bodies, and you say ‘thank you, may I have another?’ You are not a nation. You are not a people. You are a flock of sheep who have learned to love the wolf. You are cucks! You get off on being robbed, on being humiliated! You’ve convinced yourselves that this is the natural order, that they are strong and you are weak!”
I was shouting now. The market had gone quiet. The merchant had stopped what he was doing. His enforcers were watching me, their hands resting on their shock-sticks. Good. Let them look.
“You are a nation of victims suffering from the worst case of Stockholm syndrome in the history of the goddamn galaxy! They have taken everything you have, and you still queue up every morning to give them more!”
One of the enforcers started walking my way, his shock-stick crackling. I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes on the Americans. On the glass artist. On the shoeless kid. On all the other hollow faces in the crowd.
“They aren’t gods! They aren’t even smart! They’re just men—fat, lazy, stupid men from a world so rich they’ve forgotten how to do anything but take! The only power they have is the power you give them! Every dollar you accept is a link in your own chains! Every time you bow your head, you give them permission to do it again! There is no shame in being beaten. The shame is in staying on your knees!”
The enforcer was close now. I could smell his cologne, expensive and cloying, the scent of a man who’d never known a day of hardship in his life.
“You want to use that thing?” I asked, my voice dropping to a low, dangerous growl. “Go ahead. But you should know, I’m not one of them. I don’t hand over my boots.”
I looked back at the crowd one last time. Their faces were a mix of fear, confusion… and something else. Something I hadn’t seen before. A flicker. A tiny, almost imperceptible crack in the mask of passive acceptance.
“They can only take what you are willing to give,” I said, my voice softer now, but no less hard. “Think about that. Think about what you’re giving them. And then ask yourselves what you have left.”
I turned and walked away, leaving the enforcer standing there, his shock-stick held uselessly in the air. I didn’t look back. The seed was planted. Whether it would grow in this poisoned soil, I had no idea.
But it was the best I could do. I’m not a savior. I’m just a man who hates to see a good people get fucked. And America was full of good people. They’d just forgotten how to be anything else.
At one point I was considering writing a review paper on “absolute directions in space”. Since the Michelson-Morley experiment, a lot of absolute directions have been discovered and refined. However, I didn’t get much further than creating the map you see below. While each of the measurements on their own deserves a review article, there isn’t as much tying them all together in the end as I thought, and so here we are — a blog post.
The map is galactic coordinates projected using the Mollweide projection. Most of us are comfortable with projections of spherical geometries onto flat surfaces, because most of us are living on an oblate spheroid and we use flat maps, but I digress.
One thing that might stand out if you haven’t seen these things plotted together at first is that the ecliptic (the path of the sun through the heavens) seems to sort of match up with the CMB dipole, with maximum excursions about 5 degrees or so different. This coincidence is generally regarded as not indicative of much, kind of like the interesting fact that the angular size of the sun is roughly equal to the angular size of the moon (when viewed from Earth).
One might also be tempted to point out that the motion of the local interstellar medium through the solar system is “roughly” as if it were kind of coming from the galactic center, but that angular difference is actually not all that small.
Anyway, there’s the map, there’s the direcoins, and here’s some python code to generate the figure, with the coordinates explicitly marked, for those who want to see the numbers. Happy stargazing!
Two decades ago, in a windowless room in the ground floor of Morse Hall at the University of New Hampshire, I spent a few days poking around at trying to see the tessabrot.
What is the tessabrot? Thanks for asking.
The tessabrot is a four dimensional object which is the set of all ordered quadruplets of real numbers w, x, y, z such that when we form the tessarine (aka bicomplex number, aka Davenport numbers, aka hypercomplex numbers) Z_0 = w + xi + yj + zk this sequence does not diverge:
Basically, it’s the 4d version of the Mandelbrot set. I had the pleasure of seeing Benoit Mandelbrot in person so it just might be that he influenced the images you are about to see. He was remarkably easy to see, not at all like the rumors, though he may indeed have had infinite surface area.
Some of you might be familiar with Quaternions which are much more commonly used than Tessarines. I first learned of the Tessarine ring from the 1991 book by Clyde Davenport “A commutative hypercomplex calculus for special relativity” which I found at the DeMerrit Library. At the time, I wasn’t really sure if the Tessarines would be all that helpful with relativity calculations and pedagogy; an opinion I still hold. Very interesting book none the less.
There’s something kind of exciting about the Tessarines. Like Quaternions, there are three imaginary numbers i, j, and k. However in Quaternion algebra, all three square to minus one. In the hypercomplex Tessarine algebra, k^2 = 1 !!! You have an imaginary number which when squared gives you 1, but it isn’t quite 1.. it’s 1 along an imaginary k axis. Multiplication is commutative, but there’s no unique inverse.
Anyway lets get to the eye candy. At that time, I approached the tessarine by making 2D slices of the the thing, painting the thing black, but using color to indicate the distance to the brot (in terms of how quickly the series diverges) and threw in some color cycling for effect. This gives two degrees of freedom behind the scenes because every point (w,x) defines a plane (y,z) which we then render as a 2d image. To make the videos, we cycle through these two free parameters a bit and of course zoom and color cycle into this strange creature.
The bits with square edges are actually Quaternabrot slices, they snuck in there along with all the shifty ghosting which is de rigeur when you dive deep into these kinds of structures.
Merged video of 2d slice tessabrot exploration
20 years later we are back for more. Another approach is to build Tessabulb 3d images using the “distance to” algorithm along with ray tracing to render the thing in 3d sorta kinda.
Tessabulb
Mandelbulb flythroughs burst onto the rave and hardcore complex discrete math and hardcore fractal geometry scenes and captured the imagination of many, but due to complexity I didn’t dive in until relatively recently when I asked my pal large-matrix-of-numbers-chatbot for a little help.
In this case there is only one free parameter, as every real point z defines a i,j,k volume of the tessabulb. Lets take a look at a flythrough of the tessabrot using this visualization technique on an expedition of spring 2026:
Return of the Tessabrot
I can’t wait to see more of this thing! Maybe in another 20 years I will be able to finally fly around this thing with a real spaceship, perhaps go into 1e-25 on negative real axis and find a new homeland.
This post attempts to convey whine and complain about a common paranoia which affects full stack developers and other technical folk like auto mechanics or circuit designers or really anyone alive today in so-called high tech society.
New layers of the tech stack are built with protocols, languages if you will. When we learn javascript, we can talk using this language to the browser to enable it to display components on our screens. We are quite high on the tower with this “high level language”. Behind the scenes in the browser, that javascript code might be interpreted by a javascript interpreter written in java, passing the commands on to the browser. That java code runs on a virtual machine written in C. The C compiler enables us to translate C code into assembly code which commands the CPU. Drivers and interfaces allow communication from the CPU to various peripherals each with their own tech stack language all the way down to the materials. And do you know how that silicon was prepared? How about those capacitors? More tech stacks await us as we approach the base of the tower. Is the base of the tower the raw materials? Or is it perhaps the ancient history of human knowledge, the natural language substrate?
At any rate, the paranoia arises from the fear that this stack is too high and could crash down startling the children. With too many languages, too many floors on our tower, there aren’t enough people to teach and learn them and layers begin to disintegrate. A software library disappears from some cloud platform and apps don’t function. Nobody knows how to speak to the guy who knows how to make galvanized rubber or what language he speaks, and now we have a tire shortage. As the amount of technical requirements required to built your product goes up, so does the amount of time you must spend dealing with updates and changes to each of these dependencies, until eventually you can’t keep up and that’s all she wrote.
It’s kind of a pernicious paranoia so I’ve come with some good news.
The tech stack is larger in China, and they are still holding it up. Really, it can get a lot higher.
Humans have always been hugely tempted by apocalyptic fantasy. Don’t fall for that trap.
Hackers. Hackers constantly provide tests and break various layers when they are weak so we don’t build more on top of them.
Experience. As tech stack failures become more common, engineers have become wary of building on new layers unless absolutely necessary. Nobody calls all those cloud APIs like getting fonts from google like people used to do back in the 2010s. Mechanics know they want machines that can be fixed and worked on.
Redundancy.
Redundancy.
Just because we can’t fit the stack in our heads doesn’t mean the stack won’t work.
Lets start with more familiar territory. Perhaps we are all more familiar with the honor of dying for one’s country.
Die for your country!
After all, we all have a date with our maker. Why not make it worthwhile? Valhalla awaits! Certainly all of us could imagine a situation in which we would gladly give our lives to protect our loved ones, our traditions, our way of life, in the sense of those parts of our way of life that we want to defend. Our country! Of course we would die for our country. Heck, we’d probably even die for other countries too, why not.
But yes, i hear you complaining already. Those motivators for martyrdom, those incentives to “die for the country”, some might be a bit outdated. The Purple Heart is perhaps the oldest military award still given to U.S. military members, but our military exploits are no longer about directly saving the lives of our immediate family and friends, and more about being an “economic hitman” protecting a “racket” while saving the lives of our fellow soldiers. The glamour of sending your child to die in the military is now perhaps more about “protecting our freedoms” in a political and economic sense. Because:
War is good for the economy!
Maybe you’ve heard that one before? What do you think, could war, being good for “absolutely nothing”, and also famously being “hell”, still be good for the economy? Some of us have had this “War is good for the economy™” meme imprinted on us already, and accept it, while others might be thinking something along the lines of: Well not really, that’s the broken window fallacy (that breaking windows improves the economy because of the new income generated by people hiring glass repairmen). Paying larger and larger amounts just because “it’s fun to kill some folks” can’t really be good for the economy can it?
The argument against this broken-window-helps-the-economy theory is that while the window repairmen do indeed make more money, this money would have gone to other people and so this doesn’t represent a net total increase of economic activity after all. However, if we weight the window repairmen as more important the the other businesses that people would have been supporting with their coin had not they had the expense of the broken window, then indeed we see that broken windows do improve the (weighted) economy!! Maths, people, you can’t argue with them.
To accept that war is good for the economy of a nation means to accept that certain people and businesses are more intrinsic and important to the nation than others, and deserve a higher weight in our accounting. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, the companies are simply more important to the USA than any mom and pop store selling fruit or vitamins. Wars indirectly gave jobs to Cheney’s grandchildren’s Mexican gardeners, and these folks are weighted more heavily as part of our nations economy than for example the veterans who asked you for change today, who didn’t get as much of the new money printed for the wars as the Cheney family did. Wars help money to flow to Washington DC’s real estate, not just the five sided homes, and DC is more intrinsically “the USA” than other areas of the country which lost that purchasing power. Hence: “War is good for the economy”. The question of whose economy we are talking about has an implied answer here.
Examine for example the investment iShares U.s. Aerospace & Defense ETF (NYSEMKT: ITA). Clearly this exchange traded fund will make more money for its investors when there is war. In some sense, this is what we mean when we say that war is good for the economy: investors in these companies are going to do better.
Anyone not supporting these companies, including draft dodgers, deserters, short sellers, peaceniks, the far-left (ok ok sorry, I got the memo, we have to call them far-right now), war protesters, whistle blowers, are clearly unpatriotic traitors. With me so far? Great. Lets support the economy.
Healthcare Funding is Good for the Economy!
So lets go then to look at another incredibly important sector of our economy, which we must support if we are good patriotic citizens: the health sector. The medical industrial complex is arguably number two behind the military industrial complex. The AMA, the CDC, and the companies which fund and provide their officials, need us to be sick to enable a very significant fraction of our nation’s GDP. And sick we are! Spending associated with getting sick corresponded to about 20% of GDP in USA even before recent events. Just like defense spending, this is vastly higher than any other country. Big money! Big prizes! And we should be proud patriots and support this Rockefeller funded endeavor, as we do for the war machine. Get sick for your country!
I mean for real, my grandma’s 401k likely has as component dedicated to the pharmaceutical industry as well as some defense exposure. If somebody isn’t doing their patriotic duty and getting sick they are basically taking bread out my grandma’s mouth.
On to the latest coronavirus scare
We all remember learning in elementary school that coronaviruses are what cause the common cold. Of course anyone with kids in school knows that these coronaviruses change quickly and novel ones arrive approximately every 7.2 seconds (7.2 milliseconds in kindergardens), and are often passed on to family. Thus when a particularly virulent strain arrives (naturally or not), there is a great opportunity for many people to get sick and boost the share prices of the health sector and the economy. The patriotic question which should come to mind is: how can we maximize the impact of this pandemic?
One of the first things noticed about this latest coronavirus, which it has in common with all the others, is that those getting sick very often have a deficiency of vitamin D , which one could get from old fashioned activities such as outdoor exposure to sunlight, as has been known for centuries in medical circles. In addition, we know that these things transfer from person to person almost exclusively in indoor environments. Knowing these two rather obvious major factors relating to getting sick from the latest coronaviruses, can you think of a good policy to make sure as many people get sick from them as possible?
Stay Inside!
Right! The most common government initiative taken by those who wish to boost the economy with increased patriotic contraction of coronavirus illnesses was to make citizens stay inside. This was undertaken with great fervor, with parks and other places of potential health such as gyms being closed by mandate.
An unpatriotic draft dodging citizen engaged in potentially healthful activity being apprehended by officials who demand this citizen work on getting himself and his neighbors sick.
It has been heartwarming to see how people from different walks have life have united in patriotism and the desire to help the economy by maximizing coronavirus related illnesses. Mass efforts were undertaken to not only keep people inside, but to force them into crowded areas in hopes for increased transmission. Checkpoints at borders increased, and at these places people who would normally go on about their business were brought into closer quarters to exchange viruses. Small businesses that people might pass through in smaller numbers were closed so that people would be forced to go to larger box stores and share communal interior air. Outdoor markets of course were shuttered, these things were definitely not contributing to our important group effort to get as sick as possible. One skateboard park operator in California even figured he could make at least a few more people sick by filling his park with sand, so they would be more likely to have vitamin D deficiency and spend time inside where transmission could occur. Everyone doing what they can, it reminds me of some famous speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do to get sick for your country”.
What about Masks?
OK, so not every aspect of our national effort to get sick worked well. We had high hopes for these masks in their ability to with even a slight blockage of our respiration increase numbers of covid customers, but after a lot of work, the scientific consensus is still unclear. Even the most optimistic of peer reviewed studies only shows a marginal increase in covid customers for places which mandated wearing masks. It’s a pity because we had a lot of hope that this would especially bring in a lot of child customers (the best kind as children almost always have someone willing to pay their medical bills), and so we all put a lot of effort into making kids wear them. However not all was lost, as surely the economic boost from payments to truckers and middlemen bringing the masks in from China was a huge win, while the illness from the plastics and bacteria wafting from metric shittons of used masks nationwide will also count as economic ROI, “mission accomplished”.
Fighting Foreign Agents
Unfortunately, many doctors worldwide pursued an alternative right-wing (did I get it right this time?) agenda, looking to make covid customers healthy again quickly with early treatments. Clearly this is was a foreign conspiracy to sabotage our medical economy. Luckily loyal agents acted quickly and suppressed information about early treatment, spreading rumors about the medications involved and bringing down the fear of delicensure for health professionals who even so much as mentioned vitamin C.
More Heroes
While the struggles of everyday Americans to make sure covid revenues went higher might be heartwarming, some heroics went above and beyond. Of course I am speaking of the injections, that dominant symbol and continual provider of so much income for our glorious fatherland medical authorities. These injections have been such a prolific cash cow for our nation that we name them after the latin root for cow, “vaca”.
Patriotic athletes expressing their patriotism and taking one for their country.
It’s important to note here that thanks to the patriotic legislation introduced in 1986, if any parties inject people with injections named for the cash cow, and those people get sick or die, then the parties doing the injection have no liabilities whatsoever. In other words, it is 100% legal to “mess up” and include any combination of adjuvants in the injections, provided they are done in the name of the holy cash cow.
While this operation of wealthy patriotic interests outside the law is unlikely to surprise anyone, it does fit in very neatly with another piece of the legal landscape, namely that corporations are legally obligated to maximize profits. Thus we can immediately see that if certain doses of adjuvants increase the risk of certain diseases, diseases which will put more money into the hands of the corporations producing the injections, then these corporations are legally obligated to include those extra doses of adjuvants in their injections.
Indeed, the true heroes of the day came and pointed out that not getting the injections was effectively a move akin to desertion from the military, rightly treating anyone who refused the injection as a turncoat and a traitor to their nation.
So, lets get back to work comrades, drink our GMO corn syrup and do what must be done for our (weighted) nation. Stay inside!
Some people asked me for music recommendations, so here’s some Shazams we looked up for whatever reason over the last half a decade. Enjoy!
1,2024-12-24,”O Tannenbaum (O Christmas Tree)”,”Dave Koz, David Benoit, Rick Braun & Peter White”,https://www.shazam.com/track/375879665/o-tannenbaum-o-christmas-tree,375879665
8,2024-11-29,”Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 26: 1. Vorspiel (Allegro moderato)”,”Ray Chen, London Philharmonic Orchestra & Robert Trevino”,https://www.shazam.com/track/414704699/violin-concerto-no-1-in-g-minor-op-26-1-vorspiel-allegro,414704699
11,2024-11-23,”Symphony No. 9: I. Andante comodo”,”Philharmonia Orchestra & Benjamin Zander”,https://www.shazam.com/track/548405975/symphony-no-9-i-andante-comodo,548405975
12,2024-11-21,”Ula Ula”,”Illya Kuryaki & The Valderramas”,https://www.shazam.com/track/66412206/ula-ula,66412206
13,2024-11-21,”Essa É pra Tocar no Baile”,”BNegão & Seletores de Frequência”,https://www.shazam.com/track/62336817/essa-%C3%A9-pra-tocar-no-baile,62336817
14,2024-11-20,”Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 26: II. Adagio”,”David Zinman, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich & Julia Fischer”,https://www.shazam.com/track/86383798/violin-concerto-no-1-in-g-minor-op-26-ii-adagio,86383798
17,2024-11-15,”Heaven Is A Place On Earth”,”Belinda Carlisle”,https://www.shazam.com/track/263253/heaven-is-a-place-on-earth,263253
18,2024-11-14,”La Gioconda, Act III: Dance of the Hours”,”Herbert von Karajan & Philharmonia Orchestra”,https://www.shazam.com/track/53088179/la-gioconda-act-iii-dance-of-the-hours,53088179
20,2024-11-12,”You Make Me Feel Like Dancing”,”Leo Sayer”,https://www.shazam.com/track/411117/you-make-me-feel-like-dancing,411117
21,2024-11-12,”The Will to Fail”,”Katie Lee”,https://www.shazam.com/track/61451083/the-will-to-fail,61451083
22,2024-11-08,”I Want the White Boy Deal!! Dance Mix”,”Jay Double You!”,https://www.shazam.com/track/151645920/i-want-the-white-boy-deal-dance-mix,151645920
23,2024-11-03,”Boléro, M. 81 (Excerpt)”,”Boston Symphony Orchestra & Seiji Ozawa”,https://www.shazam.com/track/98542220/bol%C3%A9ro-m-81-excerpt,98542220
24,2024-11-03,”Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, I. Allegro molto appassionato, II. Andante, III. Allegretto non troppo”,”Isaac Stern, The Philadelphia Orchestra & Eugene Ormandy”,https://www.shazam.com/track/64726141/violin-concerto-in-e-minor-op-64-i-allegro-molto-appassionato,64726141
26,2024-10-30,”Gravee (feat. Fred Wesley)”,”The Greyboy Allstars”,https://www.shazam.com/track/121135030/gravee-feat-fred-wesley,121135030
29,2024-10-30,”Got to Be a Love (Paul Nice Remix) [feat. Quantic & Sharon Jones]”,”Greyboy”,https://www.shazam.com/track/40249099/got-to-be-a-love-paul-nice-remix-feat-quantic-sharon-jones,40249099
31,2024-10-24,”Concerto for Violin & Orchestra, Op. 14: II. Andante”,”New York Philharmonic, Frank Huang & Juraj Valcuha”,https://www.shazam.com/track/465785742/concerto-for-violin-orchestra-op-14-ii-andante,465785742
32,2024-10-13,”My Heart Is for You”,”Peter Sandberg”,https://www.shazam.com/track/412118296/my-heart-is-for-you,412118296
33,2024-10-12,”Couldn’t It Be You?”,”Art Blakey”,https://www.shazam.com/track/11077716/couldnt-it-be-you,11077716
35,2024-09-28,”The Game of Love”,”Daft Punk”,https://www.shazam.com/track/89205232/the-game-of-love,89205232
36,2024-09-23,”One Hand Killing”,”Twelve Foot Ninja”,https://www.shazam.com/track/296990101/one-hand-killing,296990101
37,2024-09-18,”Violin Concerto No. 2 in E, BWV 1042: I. Allegro”,”Salvatore Accardo & Chamber Orchestra of Europe”,https://www.shazam.com/track/63122572/violin-concerto-no-2-in-e-bwv-1042-i-allegro,63122572
38,2024-09-16,”The Planets, Op. 32: IV. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity”,”Sir Simon Rattle & Berlin Philharmonic”,https://www.shazam.com/track/47656508/the-planets-op-32-iv-jupiter-the-bringer-of-jollity,47656508
39,2024-09-06,”Remember the Time”,”Michael Jackson”,https://www.shazam.com/track/20145232/remember-the-time,20145232
42,2024-08-29,”(Everytime I Turn Around) Back In Love Again (Single Version)”,”L.T.D.”,https://www.shazam.com/track/10548632/everytime-i-turn-around-back-in-love-again-single-version,10548632
43,2024-08-29,”Freckles”,”The New Mastersounds”,https://www.shazam.com/track/53743638/freckles,53743638
44,2024-08-29,”Kools Back Again”,”Kool & The Gang”,https://www.shazam.com/track/10287590/kools-back-again,10287590
45,2024-08-29,”Sudden Flight (feat. Jesse Royal & Sevana)”,”Protoje”,https://www.shazam.com/track/227526628/sudden-flight-feat-jesse-royal-sevana,227526628
49,2024-08-19,”Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 38: I. Allegro non troppo”,”Hélène Grimaud & Truls Mørk”,https://www.shazam.com/track/63035218/sonata-for-cello-and-piano-no-1-in-e-minor-op-38-i,63035218
55,2024-08-02,”Sing a Song of Song”,”Kenny Garrett”,https://www.shazam.com/track/11089724/sing-a-song-of-song,11089724
56,2024-08-02,”Seven Steps To Heaven (feat. Jon Hendricks, Al Jarreau & Till Brönner)”,”Take 6″,https://www.shazam.com/track/47374962/seven-steps-to-heaven-feat-jon-hendricks-al-jarreau,47374962
57,2024-08-02,”Seven Years of Good Luck”,”Joe Sample”,https://www.shazam.com/track/10844616/seven-years-of-good-luck,10844616
58,2024-07-21,”Clarinet Sonata in E-Flat Major, Op. 167: II. Allegro animato”,”Martin Fröst & Roland Pöntinen”,https://www.shazam.com/track/115975272/clarinet-sonata-in-e-flat-major-op-167-ii-allegro-animato,115975272
60,2024-07-16,”Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 77: I. Allegro non troppo”,”Hilary Hahn, Academy of St Martin in the Fields & Sir Neville Marriner”,https://www.shazam.com/track/48418702/concerto-in-d-major-for-violin-and-orchestra-op-77,48418702
61,2024-07-04,”Ave Maria, “Ellens Gesang III”, D839″,”Göran Söllscher & Gil Shaham”,https://www.shazam.com/track/63901744/ave-maria-ellens-gesang-iii-d839,63901744
62,2024-07-04,”Keyboard Concerto No. 7 in G Minor, BWV 1058 (After BWV 1041): II. Andante”,”Angela Hewitt, Richard Tognetti & Australian Chamber Orchestra”,https://www.shazam.com/track/83158748/keyboard-concerto-no-7-in-g-minor-bwv-1058-after-bwv,83158748
63,2024-07-03,”Can’t Say Nothin'”,”Curtis Mayfield”,https://www.shazam.com/track/10071709/cant-say-nothin,10071709
69,2024-06-15,”Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35: II. Canzonetta (Andante)”,”Viktoria Mullova, Boston Pops Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra & Seiji Ozawa”,https://www.shazam.com/track/70566024/violin-concerto-in-d-major-op-35-ii-canzonetta-andante,70566024
73,2024-05-31,”Partita for Violin Solo No. 3 in E, BWV 1006: 1. Preludio”,”Vladimir Ashkenazy”,https://www.shazam.com/track/210220242/partita-for-violin-solo-no-3-in-e-bwv-1006-1-preludio,210220242
77,2024-05-22,”Violin Concerto in D, Op. 35: I. Allegro moderato”,”Leila Josefowicz, Sir Neville Marriner & Academy of St Martin in the Fields”,https://www.shazam.com/track/88892635/violin-concerto-in-d-op-35-i-allegro-moderato,88892635
79,2024-05-22,”Suite in E Major, BWV 1006a: I. Prelude”,”Sharon Isbin”,https://www.shazam.com/track/48209007/suite-in-e-major-bwv-1006a-i-prelude,48209007
80,2024-05-22,”Concerto In G MInor BWV 1058, Andante”,”Vladimir Feltsman & Orchestra of St.Luke’s”,https://www.shazam.com/track/82509143/concerto-in-g-minor-bwv-1058-andante,82509143
88,2024-05-20,”Untitled Original 11386 (Take 5)”,”John Coltrane”,https://www.shazam.com/track/426818079/untitled-original-11386-take-5,426818079
89,2024-05-20,”When Lights Are Low”,”Herbie Mann”,https://www.shazam.com/track/69566087/when-lights-are-low,69566087
90,2024-05-17,”Concerto for 3 Violins in F Major, RV 551: II. Andante”,”Il Giardino Armonico”,https://www.shazam.com/track/66375878/concerto-for-3-violins-in-f-major-rv-551-ii-andante,66375878
94,2024-05-15,”Keyboard Concerto No. 4 in A Major, BWV 1055: III. Allegro ma non tanto”,”Murray Perahia & Academy of St Martin in the Fields”,https://www.shazam.com/track/67947823/keyboard-concerto-no-4-in-a-major-bwv-1055-iii-allegro,67947823
100,2024-05-12,”Symphony No. 3 in E-Flat Major, Op. 10, B. 34: I. Allegro moderato”,”Neeme Järvi & Royal Scottish National Orchestra”,https://www.shazam.com/track/128990099/symphony-no-3-in-e-flat-major-op-10-b-34-i-allegro-moderato,128990099
101,2024-05-12,”Bite the Bullet”,”The Dirty Beggars”,https://www.shazam.com/track/110584334/bite-the-bullet,110584334
102,2024-05-12,”Give the People”,”Al Campbell”,https://www.shazam.com/track/5646269/give-the-people,5646269
104,2024-05-12,”Over and Over”,”Dennis Alcapone”,https://www.shazam.com/track/699299839/over-and-over,699299839
106,2024-05-11,”Rag Mama Rag”,”Blind Boy Fuller”,https://www.shazam.com/track/5592504/rag-mama-rag,5592504
107,2024-05-11,”Standard of Rhyme (feat. John Robinson & Fatin)”,”Illvibe Collective”,https://www.shazam.com/track/55553429/standard-of-rhyme-feat-john-robinson-fatin,55553429
117,2024-05-02,”Letter To The Editor (feat. Racquel Jones)”,”Thievery Corporation”,https://www.shazam.com/track/335982048/letter-to-the-editor-feat-racquel-jones,335982048
119,2024-04-26,”Willow Weep For Me (feat. Bud Powell, Pierre Michelot & Kenny Clarke)”,”Dexter Gordon”,https://www.shazam.com/track/326420129/willow-weep-for-me-feat-bud-powell-pierre-michelot,326420129
120,2024-04-26,”In My Head (The Knocks Block Party Mix)”,”Blu DeTiger”,https://www.shazam.com/track/458431993/in-my-head-the-knocks-block-party-mix,458431993
121,2024-04-26,”Take It Slow (feat. Joe Dukie & U-Brown)”,”Boozoo Bajou”,https://www.shazam.com/track/40958002/take-it-slow-feat-joe-dukie-u-brown,40958002
122,2024-04-25,”Fermento Pra Massa”,”Criolo”,https://www.shazam.com/track/158023076/fermento-pra-massa,158023076
123,2024-04-25,”A La Casa de La Trova”,”Compay Segundo”,https://www.shazam.com/track/40033849/en-la-casa-de-la-trova,40033849
124,2024-04-22,”Night Fall (Extended Mix)”,”Johnny Osbourne”,https://www.shazam.com/track/40404933/night-fall-extended-mix,40404933
126,2024-04-20,”THINKIN OF A DRIVE BY”,”DVRST & Kingpin Skinny Pimp”,https://www.shazam.com/track/587202090/thinkin-of-a-drive-by,587202090
127,2024-04-19,”Babylon Tymes (Featuring DJ Collage)”,”Sofa Surfers featuring DJ Collage”,https://www.shazam.com/track/11159827/babylon-tymes-featuring-dj-collage,11159827
128,2024-04-19,”Candle Chant (A Tribute)”,”DJ Krush Feat. Boss The MC”,https://www.shazam.com/track/494816/candle-chant-a-tribute,494816
137,2024-03-30,”Lulu’s Back In Town”,”Jason Moran”,https://www.shazam.com/track/136725315/lulus-back-in-town,136725315
138,2024-03-26,”Rhapsody On Paganini Theme for Piano and Orchestra, Op 43″,”Moscow RTV Symphony Orchestra, Alexander Dmitriev & Alexei Cherkasov”,https://www.shazam.com/track/55200039/rhapsody-on-paganini-theme-for-piano-and-orchestra-op-43,55200039
150,2024-03-03,”(Funky) Four [feat. Jason Marsalis & Matt King]”,”Christian Fabian”,https://www.shazam.com/track/675272989/funky-four-feat-jason-marsalis-matt-king,675272989
190,2024-01-16,”Sonata in C Major, BWV 1005: IV. Allegro Assai”,”Yuri Liberzon”,https://www.shazam.com/track/539734349/sonata-in-c-major-bwv-1005-iv-allegro-assai,539734349
191,2024-01-12,”Platonov (feat. Skeg)”,”Sena & Sena Dagadu”,https://www.shazam.com/track/663144730/platonov-feat-skeg,663144730
192,2024-01-12,”I Do Coke”,”Kill the Noise & Feed Me”,https://www.shazam.com/track/285483750/i-do-coke,285483750
196,2024-01-11,”Keep on Hustlin’ (feat. Young Jeezy, Bun B, Nate Dogg)”,”Warren G”,https://www.shazam.com/track/277102858/keep-on-hustlin-feat-young-jeezy-bun-b-nate-dogg,277102858
197,2024-01-11,”In America”,”The Charlie Daniels Band”,https://www.shazam.com/track/272689786/in-america,272689786
200,2023-12-22,”Party with the Devil”,”Attila”,https://www.shazam.com/track/73195239/party-with-the-devil,73195239
201,2023-12-22,”About That Life”,”Attila”,https://www.shazam.com/track/89423940/about-that-life,89423940
202,2023-12-21,”The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”,”Gil Scott-Heron”,https://www.shazam.com/track/322558/the-revolution-will-not-be-televised,322558
206,2023-12-16,”Me or the Papes”,”Jeru the Damaja”,https://www.shazam.com/track/55410550/me-or-the-papes,55410550
207,2023-12-16,”Women Around the World at Work”,”Martha And The Muffins”,https://www.shazam.com/track/348651/women-around-the-world-at-work,348651
208,2023-12-12,”Consolations, S. 172: No. 3 in D-Flat Major. Lento placido”,”Jean-Yves Thibaudet”,https://www.shazam.com/track/579224228/consolations-s-172-no-3-in-d-flat-major-lento-placido,579224228
209,2023-12-12,”Violin Concerto in A Minor, Op. 53: I. Allegro ma non troppo – II. Adagio ma non troppo”,”St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Walter Susskind & Ruggiero Ricci”,https://www.shazam.com/track/203026423/violin-concerto-in-a-minor-op-53-i-allegro-ma-non-troppo,203026423
210,2023-12-04,”Black Barbie Remixed By Modeselektor”,”Jahcoozi”,https://www.shazam.com/track/43781989/black-barbie-remixed-by-modeselektor,43781989
218,2023-11-30,”Ethiopino”,”Jungle by Night”,https://www.shazam.com/track/58134575/ethiopino,58134575
219,2023-11-29,”The In Samba (Kyoto Jazz Massive Remix)”,”Nicola Conte”,https://www.shazam.com/track/10611764/the-in-samba-kyoto-jazz-massive-remix,10611764
239,2023-09-21,”Rise and Fall of a Short Fugue”,”Stan Kenton”,https://www.shazam.com/track/201117972/rise-and-fall-of-a-short-fugue,201117972
240,2023-09-20,”Mass for the Endangered: Sanctus – Benedictus”,”Gabriel Crouch & Gallicantus”,https://www.shazam.com/track/524728055/mass-for-the-endangered-sanctus-benedictus,524728055
249,2023-09-10,”Saturation”,”Ocean of Emotion”,https://www.shazam.com/track/494863105/saturation,494863105
250,2023-09-09,”For Once In My Life”,”Tony Bennett”,https://www.shazam.com/track/67373678/for-once-in-my-life,67373678
251,2023-09-09,”The Good Ways (feat. Dan Pugach & Maya Kronfeld)”,”Nicole Zuraitis”,https://www.shazam.com/track/670693256/the-good-ways-feat-dan-pugach-maya-kronfeld,670693256
252,2023-09-09,”Clare’s Ostinado (Live)”,”Greg Abate & Paul Del Nero Quartet”,https://www.shazam.com/track/667518451/clares-ostinado-live,667518451
258,2023-09-02,”Take Me Back (feat. April) [Sandy Rivera’s Mix]”,”Kings of Tomorrow”,https://www.shazam.com/track/53597719/take-me-back-feat-april-sandy-riveras-mix,53597719
259,2023-08-28,”Death by Chocolate”,”De-Phazz”,https://www.shazam.com/track/10830891/death-by-chocolate,10830891
260,2023-08-28,”Blues for Celia (Cee Cee’s Blues)”,”The Greyboy Allstars”,https://www.shazam.com/track/121158838/blues-for-celia-cee-cees-blues,121158838
264,2023-08-28,”I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)”,”Stevie Wonder”,https://www.shazam.com/track/280529/i-believe-when-i-fall-in-love-it-will-be-forever,280529
270,2023-08-23,”Cross The Tracks (We Better Go Back)”,”Maceo & The Macks”,https://www.shazam.com/track/5975907/cross-the-tracks-we-better-go-back,5975907
271,2023-08-21,”Tha Block Is Hot”,”Lil Wayne”,https://www.shazam.com/track/20033666/tha-block-is-hot,20033666
276,2023-07-22,”St. Thomas (feat. Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins & Max Roach)”,”Sonny Rollins”,https://www.shazam.com/track/53862027/st-thomas-feat-tommy-flanagan-doug-watkins-max-roach,53862027
277,2023-07-21,”A Message from the Meters (feat. Kelly Finnigan)”,”The Sure Fire Soul Ensemble”,https://www.shazam.com/track/320489839/a-message-from-the-meters-feat-kelly-finnigan,320489839
278,2023-07-19,”The Heathen”,”Bob Marley & The Wailers”,https://www.shazam.com/track/6051243/the-heathen,6051243
279,2023-07-16,”Gyal Magnet [Remix] (feat. Chris Martin)”,”Kaream Kharizma”,https://www.shazam.com/track/517497989/gyal-magnet-remix-feat-chris-martin,517497989
280,2023-07-14,”Careless Whisper”,”Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio”,https://www.shazam.com/track/542382490/careless-whisper,542382490
281,2023-07-12,”We a Run E Grung (Remix)”,”Nadg & Seanizzle”,https://www.shazam.com/track/648146840/we-a-run-e-grung-remix,648146840
293,2023-06-04,”Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 No. 2: II. Andante”,”Chad Hoopes, Kristjan Järvi & MDR Sinfonie Orchester”,https://www.shazam.com/track/114967351/violin-concerto-in-e-minor-op-64-no-2-ii-andante,114967351
295,2023-05-29,”Shut ‘um Down”,”Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson”,https://www.shazam.com/track/41253076/shut-um-down,41253076
296,2023-05-26,”Jamaica a Little Miami”,”Yellowman”,https://www.shazam.com/track/584091/jamaica-a-little-miami,584091
297,2023-05-23,”Pinball Number Count”,”The Pointer Sisters”,https://www.shazam.com/track/53685292/pinball-number-count,53685292
298,2023-05-21,”Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat Major, Op. 73 “Emperor”: II. Adagio un poco mosso”,”Stewart Goodyear, The BBC National Orchestra of Wales & Andrew Constantine”,https://www.shazam.com/track/508504788/piano-concerto-no-5-in-e-flat-major-op-73-emperor-ii,508504788
299,2023-05-19,”Timba Mabo (Descarga) [feat. Jose Luis Quintana “Changuito” & Tata Güines]”,”Hilario Duran”,https://www.shazam.com/track/11060444/timba-mabo-descarga-feat-jose-luis-quintana-changuito,11060444
300,2023-05-19,”Stolen Moments”,”The Caribbean Jazz Project”,https://www.shazam.com/track/60904631/stolen-moments,60904631
301,2023-05-18,”Sanu Ek Pal Chain Na Aawe”,”Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan”,https://www.shazam.com/track/45559451/sanu-ek-pal-chain-na-aawe,45559451
302,2023-05-18,”A Headnaddas Journey to the Planet Adidi-Skizm”,”Brooklyn Funk Essentials”,https://www.shazam.com/track/5353836/a-headnaddas-journey-to-the-planet-adidi-skizm,5353836
303,2023-05-17,”Quitate La Mascara”,”Adalberto Santiago Adalberto”,https://www.shazam.com/track/10592626/quitate-la-mascara,10592626
304,2023-05-11,”Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35: I. Allegro moderato”,”Gil Shaham, Singapore Symphony Orchestra & Lan Shui”,https://www.shazam.com/track/64345462/violin-concerto-in-d-major-op-35-i-allegro-moderato,64345462
309,2023-04-28,”Bonita Applebum (includes ‘Can I Kick It’ Intro)”,”A Tribe Called Quest”,https://www.shazam.com/track/5223085/bonita-applebum-includes-can-i-kick-it-intro,5223085
310,2023-04-27,”Lettre à P”,”Paris Combo”,https://www.shazam.com/track/44155462/lettre-%C3%A0-p,44155462
311,2023-04-27,”Camisa 10 Da Gavea”,”Jorge Ben Jor”,https://www.shazam.com/track/10936501/camisa-10-da-g%C3%A1vea,10936501
312,2023-04-21,”Stormy Weather (Keeps Rainin’ All the Time)”,”Guy Lombardo”,https://www.shazam.com/track/10785903/stormy-weather-keeps-rainin-all-the-time,10785903
318,2023-04-12,”O Dia Em Que Faremos Contato”,”Lenine”,https://www.shazam.com/track/10959560/o-dia-em-que-faremos-contato,10959560
319,2023-04-06,”Reality Check (feat. Onemanarmy, One Be Lo & Senim)”,”Binary Star”,https://www.shazam.com/track/5706116/reality-check-feat-onemanarmy-one-be-lo-senim,5706116
320,2023-04-05,”I Am the Black Gold of the Sun (feat. Jocelyn Brown)”,”Nuyorican Soul”,https://www.shazam.com/track/257688/i-am-the-black-gold-of-the-sun-feat-jocelyn-brown,257688
349,2022-01-14,”Concerto in B-Flat Major for Trumpet and Orchestra: 3. Allegro”,”Hannes Läubin, Simon Preston & English Chamber Orchestra”,https://www.shazam.com/track/63878038/concerto-in-b-flat-major-for-trumpet-and-orchestra-3-allegro,63878038
357,2021-11-18,”World Peace”,”Lee Perry Meets The Mad Professor In Dub Chapter One”,https://www.shazam.com/track/10119818/world-peace,10119818
358,2021-11-18,”Snowblind (The Amalgamation Of Soundz Out Of Mind Remix)”,”Billie & Minus 8″,https://www.shazam.com/track/10611760/snowblind-the-amalgamation-of-soundz-out-of-mind-remix,10611760
377,2021-09-20,”Ula Ula”,”Illya Kuryaki & The Valderramas”,https://www.shazam.com/track/66412206/ula-ula,66412206
378,2021-08-29,”Concerto No. 1 in A Minor for Violin and Strings, BWV 1041: I. Allegro”,”Camerata Antonio Lucio, Emmy Verhey & Alun Francis”,https://www.shazam.com/track/56193170/concerto-no-1-in-a-minor-for-violin-and-strings-bwv,56193170
379,2021-08-29,”Concerto No. 1 in A Minor for Violin and Strings, BWV 1041: I. Allegro”,”Camerata Antonio Lucio, Emmy Verhey & Alun Francis”,https://www.shazam.com/track/56193170/concerto-no-1-in-a-minor-for-violin-and-strings-bwv,56193170
381,2021-08-29,”Concerto for Violin and Strings in G minor, Op. 8, No. 2 R. 315 ‘ “L’Estate”: III. Presto (Tempo impetuoso d’estate)”,”Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Alan Loveday & Sir Neville Marriner”,https://www.shazam.com/track/207036674/concerto-for-violin-and-strings-in-g-minor-op-8-no,207036674
Just what we needed: a somewhat forced tail [sic] of metaparadox designed to clarify wavefunction collapse.
Imagine if you will, a world with an infinite number of scientist clones named Schrödinger. Two of them, lets call them Schrödinger A and Schrödinger B, watch a box in a room in a laboratory. The box has a cat and a Zyklon B gas canister rigged to an avalanche photodiode sensitive to cosmic rays. If a cosmic ray comes with enough energy and the right trajectory, hey presto, the cat is dead. If not, the cat is still alive. For the moment, the curtains are drawn on the box and both scientists are looking rather contemplative as they observe the system.
Schrödinger A believes that his cat is both alive and dead, as he has not collapsed the wavefunction by observing the system directly.
Schrödinger B believes that his cat is either alive or dead, but not in reality both at once despite his not having observed the cat to be either alive or dead with his own eyes. His idea is that the wavefunction is already collapsed, one way or the other, trough interaction with the material in the box though of course he has no proof of that or knowledge of whether the cat is alive or dead.
Schrödinger A holds in his head the uncollapsed wavefunction, while Schrödinger B holds in his head the concept of a collapsed wavefunction, just not yet observably clear as to which way it has collapsed.
—
A third and fourth Schrödinger clone observe the room from a neighboring room via closed circult cameras. Schrödinger C believes that both Schrödinger A and Schrödinger B are correct at once. C’s wavefunction includes a superposition of A and B’s world, namely that the cat is both alive and dead, but also that the cat is either dead or alive but not both, at the same time. Schrödinger D is of the opposite opinion, that either Schrödinger A or Schrödinger B is correct, but not both at once, as at some level the wavefunction representing the (original first) two Schrödingers has collapsed due to natural evolution of the system even though it is unclear which scientist is correct.
—
A third room holds another pair of Schrödingers. Schrödinger E is of the opinion that Schrödinger C and D are both right simultaneously in their description of A and B. Schrödinger E’s wavefunction is a superposition of the two possibilities represented by the wavefunctions of C and D.
Schrödinger F is of the opposite opinion, that either Schrödinger C or Schrödinger D is correct but not both at once, though he isn’t sure yet which one of the two is correct.
—
At this point, you are probably expecting that we are going to describe a Hilbert Laboratory, with an infinite number of rooms, and Schrödingers going on forever with each ones wavefunctions describing a superposition or non-superposition of the previous Schrödingers.
This infinite sequence of superposed and non superposed wavefunctions exists at this point as a possibility, a potential observable which might emerge from collapse of the wavefunction representing this post.
Sure that would be cool, but…. well if you were expecting this post to go that direction, forgive me for collapsing your wavefunctions abruptly, but we aren’t going there.
Instead that we are privy to some insider information, and have in fact we are looking at nothing more than a single pair of Schrödingers watching themselves on the closed circult television with a delay so they don’t know it is themselves!!
At this point in the reading of the story, an infinite amount of wavefunctions have just collapsed, and yet the two Schrödingers we watch still hold that infinite heirarchy of wavefunctions in the uncollapsed state in their heads.
Carl Sagan collapsing some wavefunctions
So what can we conclude from this gedankenexperiment? Wavefunctions are on the one hand a sophisticated tool to describe quantum mechanics, and on the other hand a very feeble human concept prone to collapse. We look around and learn something about our environment and they collapse like Hilbert’s dominoes with a great big whooshing sound.
An image of an arrangement where gimbal lock removes some control of orientation. The gimbals here are colored blue, green, and purple.
I may have first learned about gimbal lock from Andrew Chaikin’s excellent book “A Man on the Moon” (pdf) (epub). In orienting the Apollo lander, gimbals were used to control the orientation of the rocket engine, and so gimbal lock was a potential problem. A gimbal is a part of an apparatus that lets you orient something (for example to rotate a globe, to rotate a rocket engine, to rotate a 3D image on your screen). A rotation of the object on one gimbal is a rotation on a particular axis set by that gimbal. Rotation on an exterior gimbal changes the axis of interior gimbals and so if one is not careful, gimbals can become aligned in such a way that temporarily limits the ability to quickly change orientation through some range of possible orientations.
The phenomenon can be described as “parking yourself in” in orientation space. After a set of adjustments, putting your car in a tight space, the only way out is to do something akin to reversing your earlier adjustments – performing a lengthy multipoint turn. Typically this occurs just when one would like the ability to simply reorient quickly, thus ruining your quick getaway. With gimbal lock, it is not exterior cars that force us into a tight space which limits us, but the mechanics of the control mechanism itself: the gimbals.
Political Gimbal Lock
In political science, we like to describe the actions of governments and people using the analogy of orientation:
Examples of using orientation to describe a political landscape
In the sense of orienting a lunar lander, we wish to orient our political ambitions and orient our governance. We wish to point our political apparatus in a certain direction (for example to fight a specific crime, to end a social ailment, to create a pyramid, or to improve some aspect of education) and to step on the gas, firing our political lunar lander rocket. Or, simply to refer to such a plan of orientation for the sake of a theoretical argument. To do so correctly requires communication of this orientation to our political actors, precise readjustment and focus along an infinity of axes presented by every detailed decision.
The left and the right, the red and the blue, socialism and capitalism, all examples of directionality on a gimbal which we rely on in our indication of political orientation. The meanings of these words, like meanings of all words, are contextual, and can change with time. Sure, we could remind ourselves that left and right referred to something specific when they emerged after the French revolution, the left referring to those on the left of the hall who wished the government had less power, and the right referring to those on the right side of the hall who desired more power for those currently in government. However this might not be as clear after exterior gimbals have swung and now perhaps these words have different meanings in new contexts.
We have seen these exterior political gimbals swing often. Lets avoid specific examples in this post, sticking with the abstract metascience, but one example is that those who publicly questioned the federal 9/11 commission report 20 years ago were labeled as left wing while those who publicly question the same report today might be labeled right wing.
If the only accelerator buttons in the voting booth are labeled red and blue, but both red and blue are directions which share the same orientation on some issue, then we might say we face a political gimbal lock on that issue. Well to be fair, with only a binary choice gimbal lock is guaranteed, but even with multiple binary indicators gimbal lock is a reality. Our mechanisms of describing the state, or affecting change, cannot be moved easily into certain directions, as the very symbols of our language can have meanings which prevent it. Spooky innit.
How to Avoid Political Gimbal Lock
So how can we avoid it? Well the first point is that we might not always want to avoid it. The class of people in power, which keep in mind could still mean anything you like it to, doesn’t usually want to enable political change. Therefore an alignment of political gimbals in such a way that locks the system is therefore desirable – until it isn’t. Eventually there will be need for some change and so we don’t want to be too stuck at that point.
A second point would be that we shouldn’t rely on gimbals at all, if they can bite us like this. However, gimbals are useful. Red and blue are concepts people can quickly voice, republican and democrat are teams with history and people know them already. Therefore it can be easier to use this existing linguistic infrastructure rather than to create an entire formalism to describe the direction we really wish to indicate. The mind is drawn to simple one dimensional or binary structures, black and white, up and down, us vs. them, and so we are always tempted to use such simplifications when they at least somewhat apply. The problem is that they can lead us into extremely tight parking spaces, which are impossible to evacuate in a timely manner. We will be forced pushing hard to e.g. ensure that e.g. blue points one way on an issue, then pushing for blue, and going back to realign for a further push and so forth in a multipoint turn.
There are then two strategies for escaping political gimbal lock: to perform the multi point turn and navigate to desired orientation using the existing gimbals, or to escape the existing gimbals temporarily and reorient using new external gimbals (possibly quaternionic in nature). In some sense these choices are analagous to Balaji’s binary political choice of “exit” and “voice”, taken from “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States“.
As Michael Penn would say, that’s a good place to stop.
it is possible to work ourselves into a corner of political orientation space in which
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