"Nothing" Doing---Ding Dong

Here is some more mind-bending Nothingness---

"NOTHING BLOWS UP

How did a baby tweak in the vacuum grow up to be the whole universe? For a long time, no one could answer this question. While the big bang seemed to stand as the only possible explanation behind the expansion of the galaxies and fossil radiation, it created as many problems as it solved.

For example: The universe is simply too big to be so smooth and uniform as it appears. In several important respects, the universe is uncannily---unbelievably homogeneous. Everywhere you look, you find more or less the same amount of matter and light, behaving in more or less the same way, assembling into the same formations. It's hard to believe that things fell in line that way by accident. Everything in the universe behaves as if it were part of a 13-billion-year wide marching band---stepping in precision and keeping its lines perfectly straight even though the marchers at the far ends can't see or talk with one another. In fact, the opposite ends of the universe are much too far apart to communicate in any way what they've been doing since the big bang--- even at the speed of light. And according to the signs written into the fossil radiation, they always were.

So how did everything get so straight, so smooth, so synchronized?

In the process of trying to solve a seemingly unrelated problem, Alan Guth found the answer. The universe, it seems, inflated suddenly, unreasonably, in a manner truly beyond imagining. The newborn speck of nothing inflated in a tiny fraction of a second so fast that the numbers don't begin to make sense in our minds. It inflated much faster than the speed of light. (Nothing can travel faster than light---except space itself, which can.) To be precise, it grew so big that its size increased by a number followed by 50 zeros (remember that a million has a puny 6). It did that in a fraction of a second so small that to write it you'd have to put a 1 in the numerator and a number with 33 zeros in the denominator.

At the end of this exponential growth spurt, the baby universe was not really what you'd call big---only about the size of a cantaloupe." Pages 172-173

Wow! One of the hoariest 'flat Earth' myths still believed, and felt, by almost all people, has to do with the expansion of space. It's natural to feel and believe that over time, galaxies became further from one another in existing space. But, uh uh. It's the space, ITSELF, that is expanding. And, I learned something mind-boggling, here---HEAR!

"Space" CAN move faster than light! But, we also know that "Nothing" can move faster than light. Therefore, there does exist this mysterious "space" = "Nothing", and it is what 'moves', that rearranges universal 'furniture', and back in the early days of massive inflation, "nothing" sped faster than light.

"NO BOUNDARIES TO NOTHING

There are ways to avoid a descent into the hell of quantum gravitational chaos. Stephen Hawking and colleagues, for example, have proposed a quite different approach that makes a neat detour around the notion that the whole universe can be condensed into a single point. There is no single point, they say, because the universe is something like a spherical earth. The farthermost north point on the globe is the north pole. We don't need to worry about what is north of the north pole, or what 'created' the north pole. IT is simply there. To get from here to there, we simply start walking.

In Hawking's scenario, the north pole is analogous to the beginning of time. The universe is analogous to a four-dimensional sphere. Increasing latitude represents the passage of time.

There is one catch: The time that Hawking uses is 'imaginary' time.

In any event, using imaginary numbers allows physicists to plot time as if it were just another dimension of space.

'Instead of time being real, it wanders around in the realm of imaginary numbers,' said Caltech physicist John Preskill. 'Now it looks a lot like space. Now it can go both ways.'

Can physicists get away with this trickery? Is it fair? Most would argue that imaginary time---just like real time---is merely a convention that happens to work because it accurately describes reality. So it really doesn't matter which time we use, any more than it matters whether you say that Earth is flat (from your backyard) or round (from space.) It's simply a question of perspective.

Hawking's approach not only avoids the dreaded singularity at the center of the big bang, it also deftly avoids the problem of where space and time came from. If you view the birth of the universe as a fluctuation in some preexisting vacuum, then space and time already had to exist. A fluctuation, by definition, is something that changes in space and time. So space and time have to exist before the fluctuation. And space and time, as we have seen, are not nothing. Even empty space is real, and its presence has to be accounted for just like everything else. 'In this context, a proposal that the universe was created from empty space seems no more fundamental than a proposal that the universe was spawned by a piece of rubber,' writes Guth. 'It might be true, but one would still want to know where the piece of rubber came from.'

In Hawking's scenario, the universe doesn't have to be created from nothing. It's just there. It is a geometry of space and time. When the geometry changes---that is, when imaginary time becomes real---the universe begins. The change from nothing to something is literally a change in geometry.

'I wouldn't describe it as a universe being created from nothing,' Hawking elaborated at a recent press briefing at Caltech. 'Instead, the universe just exists as closed Euclidean geometry. It doesn't have time, so it doesn't have a beginning or end. The time we experience is something we construct.'

The big bang happens, he said, when you start moving in the imaginary direction from any point on this sphere. Or in the words of Hawking's collaborator, Neil Turok of Cambridge, 'Where space turns into time, you could say time began.'" Pages 181-184

Now, that's some GROSS way of morphing---Space turns into time! How timely a notion is that? For many years, NOW, I've been known to point out that time is an illusion, coming from the spiritual point of view. Finally consider this---

"THE RETURN OF FOREVER

'I believe that soon any cosmological theory that does not lead to the eternal reproduction of universes will be considered as unimaginable as a species of bacteria that cannot reproduce.' Alan Guth, 'The Inflationary Universe'

These days, the big bang is a given. So is inflation. So is the idea that the universe amounts to nothing, and could have originated from nothing. But cosmologists continue to debate the mechanism that created inflation in the first place. Quantum fluctuation in an unstable vacuum is but one idea among many. Yet pervading nearly all the scenarios for the birth of the universe is a sense that our universe is not alone. We are not one of a kind; more likely, we are one of a litter. Universes, it turns out, may well produce like rabbits." Page 184 All from "The Hole in the Universe" by K.C. Cole

It-All just IS! It-All IS---Just! Just SO!

posted by James at 3:54 PM
Contact me at jfcrystal@hotmail.com

Understand, Rubber Band!

When I reread parts of "The Hole in the Universe" having to do with string theory, yesterday, it seems like "nothing" struck gold in my realization quest.

One of my required healthy habits is to randomly lie down for ten minutes on each side as I allow earwax remover to loosen up accumulated waste, so I can then squirt water to take an ear dump. What's the signal that causes this activity? The ears itch, or else you could say they are tickled bling bling.

Just NOW, as I took the boring time to accomplish the job, all I could do was be there and literally look at the wall, allowing the mind to wander. "Nothing" came up, rising with surprising insights.

One of the cuter and cleverer quips that eternally applies to any arising morphed. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" simplified into "Absence of absence", pure and empty. And it wouldn't stay still, as spacetime used other prepositions in place of "of", and what do you know? Amazing faces and bulks filled me with ploys.

Hey, there can't even BE an absence of X, because 'absence' = not being here-now!

Anyway, let's play the preposition 'record'. "Absence of absence" is quite the tautology, and what has it taught? Well, it's so tight, it can't vibrate, and in another meaning of "tight", it's too drunk to avoid falling down.

"Of" can mean 'belongs to', so "absence of absence" indicates that "nothing," as "absence", belongs to itself. Aha! Here-now we can see another way Zorn's Lemma and all those other equivalent math beginning assumptions shows up. The first meaning of "of", though, is 'derived from', so of course absence comes from---absence. Thusly is it born. To boot, don't ignore the "presence of presence". You play that one.

How about "under", "over", "inside", "outside", "within", "without", "around", "beside", "behind", "through", "on", "off of", "into", "out of", "from", and how can we forget the most simple "to"? Can we morally reject, instead of reflect on, "towards", "away from", and all the myriad other prepositions? NO WAY.

Absence IS under absence, in full support mode. It is over itself, shining as its own lord. As long as we split the cosmic egg, too, how can absence fail to be both inside and outside itself? Shot through---that's more like it! Likewise for within and without. And, we may tweak the superior surround sound Bose noise-maker as we at once be all around our "nothing" absence, as we keep on singing, "I don't get around much, anymore."

Humorously, absence is all beside itself, with reflected oomph. But, how can absence be behind itself? Who's behind this scandal? Well, absence is through and threw, all through with itself at the same spacetime it is appearing through itself. Talk about a weird mirror! The strange land of on and off of shimmers with moving bliss, such as sitting on a chair that is rising off of the earth---what a bunch of absence!

The motion machine runs absence into and out of itself---that IS very moving stuff. Similarly, absence swings from and to absence, in its "nothingness" forth and backing off and on. Most mysteriously, then, enveloping infinite spacetime in all its glory, while absence can seem to just not be here-now, it paradoxically IS always also inclined towards itself AND away from itself.

Where and when can absence go, and possibly not be there and then? Just so, how about its flipside, its flipped out "presence"? We can really get so spun by these considerations, that we might lose our conventional mind. Such as, can there be, or not be, a presence of absence, and an absence of presence?

Can there be too much presence, or too little absence, or too much absence inserted into too little presence? Watch it James; don't get pornographic here-now. Understanding is always presence, even when standing down as absence.

One of my most enduring epiphanies presented itself as an absence of the need to ever seek; nevermore, quoth the maven. When working twelve-hour days as a cook at a retirement facility on Saturdays and Sundays, around 1991, let me tell you what happened. On this one Sunday, after working hard, I always took a short nap before doing the dinner. My back was in danger of going out, so when getting out of bed, I always consciously moved very carefully and slowly.

On this magic day, after swinging the legs down on the floor and sitting up straight, I completely understood "understanding", bodily as well as mentally, but altogether in Enlightening Spiritual terms. We are always already "understanding"! What a perfect word! Despite the 'fact' that we are continually in motion, when alive that is, our center, as well as all the rest of us, continually 'stands' 'under' It-All; indeed IS It-All.

"One nation, under God" expresses this understanding for our country--- do you under stand, do you stand under this understanding? YES! Whether you consciously understand or not, you are always understanding. How is it possible that you are NOT understanding? Hey, even physics proclaims this bodily claim to justice, since we always appear as our little nicked bud of the mysterious "nothing" of all spacetime, AS spacetime---the Big Bang.

Are you awake? Then you are appearing in the light of the sun, even at night, which can be understood as 'standing' 'under' the lucky old sun, herself. She is beaming, she is shining, and this allows, in fact requires, understanding, physically. This reminds me of one of my old favorite jokes.

Whenever I was hanging out with any friend's kids, quite often one of them would tell me, "Come here." My immediate response would be, "I'm already HERE." There you go again, "understanding", you old time friend.

Understanding is the same as "being here-now". In our particular sprouting reality as spacetime, the four dimensional universe, any entity or even thing is always where it is, at any present time.

Thus, the presence of presence combines with the absence of absence like the following-- every question contains at its core the existential "Where-when are you?" And there is only one possible answer, to wit, "I am here-now". That is Understanding, pinpointed as spacetime unbound, queerly inside an assumed boundary. Let's translate that sentence, let 'er rip!

Yahweh said the God words--"I am that I am". Well, "I am here-now" is the mundane, the very secular base, which is irrefutable. To be present, as is shown by the words, "I am", is pure in Yahweh's case, but for us gross humans, the only way to be present, as this "I am", is to inhabit particular portions of spacetime. So, conventionally, we can easily agree that, obviously, in a null fashion, at THIS instant we are some three-dimensional PLACE.

However, check out this 'book'---there's a more ecstatic way to understand "I am here-now". The "I am" indicates the priority of Being. Indeed, in spite of our enchantment with the heavy duty gross existence, our weight and so forth, Being is all there IS! Therefore, to acknowledge that "I am" is to truly be One with this. "Being" is what I am.

What about the "here-now"? The four-dimensional physical play is the "here-now", and since to be is to be in some garb, some form, well---"here-now" is what I am, at the same spacetime as I am Being. Therefore, I, as my apparent chip off the old and new arising, have proven that Being = "here-now", and we can all understand THIS.

Don't get wise, bubble eye, or I'll cut you down to peanut size. Understand, rubber band?

Ah, that old high school ditty desires extended comments. This band of brothers and sisters called the present "here-now" of Being as humanity resembles rubber, when you stretch out all I've written today. As the "here-now" of Being, understood in terms of modern physics, you could say that all the way from the Big Bang to any here-now is a huge stretch, a living sketch, of God's Mind, and thus it's just like rubber. What a band of rubbers! You rubber my back, and I rubber yours.

Rubber on, Mac Beth!

posted by James at 4:42 PM
Contact me at jfcrystal@hotmail.com

Connecting Relationships

Here's some "nothing" to really stretch your mind, and it's oh so correlated to my previous blog of today---CONNECTIONS and RELATIONSHIP.

"LOOPY?

If string theory can't yet create spacetime from strings, there is another theory in the wings that begins with loops (if not strings) and winds up creating something very much like spacetime.

Loop space begins with pure geometry: spacetime is a weave made of quantum-scale knots or links, rather like a woven carpet. These are not knots of anything. They are, as Strominger might have put it, 'just the thing.' The knots are reminiscent of Kelvin's nineteenth-century notion that knots in the ether gave rise to all the particles in nature. Except that these knots give rise to spacetime as well. Spacetime is what you get when you weave together all the quantum-scale loops.

The difference between strings and loops is primarily the starting point of the two theories. String theory emerged from particle physics; it takes place on a background of normal spacetime. It has yet to figure out how to create spacetime from string theory. Loop space, on the other hand, begins with loops of pure geometry; the loops are spacetime; the challenge is to create the rest of the universe from that backdrop.

One of the appeals of loop space is that it is, in the end, only about relationships. The universe is nothing but relationships, nothing but geometry. There is no there there. There is only the relationship between one thing and another.

As Smolin puts the question" 'Does the world consist of a large number of independently autonomous atoms, the properties of each owing nothing to the others? Or, instead, is the world a vast, interconnected system of relations, in which even the properties of a single elementary particle or the identity of a point in space requires and reflects the whole rest of the universe?'

His answer is that space, time, and matter are all part of a larger web: 'There are relationships, and nothing else.'

Connections, in other words, may well be all there is to something. The only difference between something and nothing may be that something has connections. Something IS connections.

As E.M. Forster put it: 'Only connect.'

Connecting may well be what the universe does best---even exclusively." Pages 162-164 from "The Hole in the Universe", by K.C. Cole

Wow---that's right out of India, and Eastern religion. We have Indira's Net, which is reality, and then there's the Diamond Sutra, I think it is, that claims there exists only a single 'diamond' that is all of reality, as it exhibits parts that reflect all other parts. Sort of an infinite hall of mirrors.

Well, in American national politics, the disconnect sure seems to be beyond easy repair. But then, the very insulated top yelping DOGS in D.C. keep on pretending they're only there 'to help you.' Uh huh.

I can relate.

On the "Nothing" other hand, some choose to play small ball when it comes to people connections and even family relations. There are many ways to get to zero.

posted by James at 6:01 PM
Contact me at jfcrystal@hotmail.com

Government Is THE Industry

About a week ago, when Bush's approval rating was reported to be at a low 33%, you could really feel the pain of extreme lefties, who expressed their anguish in fantastic ways. America must come to fully realize that the donkeys on the far left are in control of the Democratic Party, and the word that best describes them is ---FANTASY.

They are the ultimate reality show, today's version of that old TV program, "Fantasy Island". How did they display their dark colors, wrt the 33%? Some of them thought, wishfully, yearning a different form of government, to wit the parliamentary one. Thus, with Bush so obviously unwanted, they could immediately have a vote and oust the bugger. What fantasists!

So, last week Olympia Snowe and Joe Lieberman joined together in urging the demolishment of the useless FEMA. Hmm?

As noted recently by yours truly, via "Jorge" Will, we can't ignore the 22% rating of Congress.

Put it all together, and what do you get? Right NOW, and for quite a while, the elephant---and donkey---in the political 'room' is that the majority of the citizens of the good old US of A are fed up with the federal government. And, if they could, they'd sweep the field absolutely clean, and get back to representative government.

Call it like it is. Now is the time and place to understand that we are totally disconnected from a legitimate republican form of government; that is, it's "taxation without representation" time, AGAIN!

Benjamin Franklin, if he were alive today, would have to acknowledge that his worry, about the brilliantly formed republican government, "if you can keep it", had been spotted 'owl' on, and we long ago lost it. What's a "powerless" citizen to DO?

There's always, already, "nothing" to do. There's nothing to It-All.

We always observe, and understand, to the best of our ability, limited as that may be---and, there are always limits. Not only are we always living on the edge, but also we choose to exist in edgy terms, terminally manning our precarious perch on the ledge of days and nights. Man or woman, this is how we exist.

The other day, while seated alone next to Bear Creek, being "nothing" like Siddharta in Hesse's novel of that name, when he crossed a river, the return of the bird tribes got me good. Trees show the motion of wind, so eventually in my "nothing" simply being there, empty minded, my gaze went skyward, and since it was fairly windy, I enjoyed watching the swaying trees above, as well as rekindling some old Carlos Castaneda, by following leaves when they were blown down, and then swam on down the stream.

One of the three trees above me was dead. Hence, I wondered at the chosen perilous spot I was in---the wind might have been strong enough to break off a limb, which could fall on my head and extinguish my edgy existence. After playfully watching, with existential interest, the three amigos, it became obvious that I was okay. I chose to stay there, figuring that if a limb did escape, the noise of it's falling would be heard by ME, and I'd have time to get out of the way.

Thus, I returned my head to the horizontal, and enjoyed the sweeping scene, focused on the moving water, while its surrounding solidity, in motion also, filled my brain's plucked vision. Before too long, I heard a sound above me, which I thought was tree limbs rubbing together. So, I looked with detachment and couldn't see any place where they were doing that. Then, my ears went into puckering action, and the noise made rhythmic sense, and the eyes managed to swivel onto that interesting dead tree.

What do you know---it was a red headed woodpecker, working away! It was a little fellow, and the hole was already big enough to hide its head, when it went deep. I enjoyed observing the hard wood working "immigrant", and even had a hoary laugh, when I recalled the days in 1973, when I lived in this commune on a health ranch. You hear, one of the places I slept, there, was near a tree that was owned by a woodpecker, and that pecker regularly disturbed my beauty sleep. I was so pissed, so often!

I guess the distribution of my silence peace was the noisy karma I chose to be born into. My parents told me that right after I was born, and brought home, there was some dude who daily ruined my baby sleep option by running his loud motorcycle. To this day I intensely dislike any rumbling motorcycle motor, as much as I am repelled by cigarette smoke. Somehow, barking dogs became the star bane of my existence, along the way.

Do you remember back in the day when dogs ran free? Ah, the law and order forces sure changed that old American scenario, sometime in the 70's, I believe. The Isla Vista next to UCSB, where I lived in 1970-1972, used to have packs of dogs practically on every block. NOW, they didn't bother people by barking or menacing, so it must have been their shitty remains that brought about the leash laws.

Back to my bird brain theme. Besides the particular life style of woodpeckers, consider the 24/7 right-on-the-edge-of-spacetime existence of creatures of flight. Do birds sleep? I think so. At least they live some spacetime at rest, eh? However, even during those periods, as members of the predator-prey game, they must maintain a minimal level of alertness, I suppose. But, probably, for most species, the night is a safe spacetime.

However, just embrace their waking life. Humans must breathe constantly, but taking in solid and liquid food is best done during specific short spacetimes, so most of their waking spacetime is not involved in hands and mouth at work shoving in food. Ah, but birds---they are almost only searching for, and eating food. Except for time out for sex, which doesn't take much time. They're like frogs. This reminds me of an old sex joke.

What animal has the shortest sex life? The frog. It hops on, hops off, and croaks.

NOW, despite the apparent differences between birds and humans, I believe we can say that their essential existence is of a piece, at peace with the running and flying chance to always live on the edge. Being alive, in whatever form, and in whatever process, is to be here-now, an edgy spacetime of always looking for 'food' to 'eat'. In this fashion do birds, humans, and indeed, all entities, exist.

Look out! Always, already on THE lookout!

But, butting our heads back on the future of America's disconnected political reality, maybe we can fork John Kenneth Galbraith's freshly dead body of work, and turn "The New Industrial State" baloney inside out, and pithily recognize Washington D.C., et al, for what it is---"The (not so) New Governmental State". Thus, we can give up politics, in the non-denial of the rise of the State, in that the actual dog that's calling the barks, is Government, which is the Industry in control, not the wagging tail of economic activity done by non-governmental "workers".

Hence, the good rude news is a splash, a smashing dash of awakening "water". We can return as the bird tribes, who are consciousness in flight, not flights of fantasy such as government kooks. Some genius praised Bernard Lewis in yesterday's WSJ. One beautiful bright line real world truth stands out, in my view, as I fly by to shoot It-All down, and out.

Recall how the WSJ, in an editorial, back in the past critical Cold War edge, when they smote the commies thusly---in America, the state exists for the individual, in the USSR, the citizen exists for the state. Oh, how out of fashion that one is, today!

Well, Lewis crudely rebuked the "nothing" West, asleep at the existential switch, by starkly contrasting Islam and Christianity. For the later, the rule was Jesus' "Render up to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to the Lord what is the Lord's". Hence, no state religion allowed. But, Islam evolved into the condition where the state and the religion are one and the same.

Islam is the ultimate totalitarian political system. Truly, it's no real religion. We must stay as vigilant and aware as possible, never forgetting to keep this incredibly bright line difference to hand. This "nothing" is the Islamic nub. Either it becomes like Christianity, or it does not. Now, there's a great existential either-or!

As One who not just 'believes' in Zen, but tries to live it, in my wildest dreams I envision the day far off in the future, when my pitiful realization of God Consciousness will be the lowest, so that the whole world will be living, essentially, an Enlightened One World Religion. So, let's take the desire of ugly Islam, and up the ante, so that MY Religion does the Enlightened and Enlightenment trick!

Live that edgy spacetime, folks.

posted by James at 3:28 PM
Contact me at jfcrystal@hotmail.com

Surprise, surprise---60 Minutes did a segment on Stephan Colbert last night. I wonder what his bomb job portends for him. What I got from the interview is that he's a comedian, whose political leanings are not important. He's no right wing counterpart to left wing Jon Daley, but at least he's funny when he acts out zingers meant to prick the self-important left-wingers. Maybe he's a South Carolina reincarnation of Will Rogers.

Speaking of Will, the George one pointed out something so obvious as to require ongoing attentiveness---while Bush suffers approval ratings in the low 30%'s, for Congress it's an astounding 22%. So, when what Novak reported today about the rising influence of the Mike Pence and Tom Coburn combines with that, why sugar, we just might be undergoing a very significant turning point. Facing political suicide, it could be that Republicans will at last get a spine and not act like the stupid party.

There's government in action, and government inaction. NOW, the former is the essence of Democrats and the latter of Republicans. So, in order to preserve what's left of American freedom for individuals, and even begin to get back some of the lost freedoms, what should the GOP do? Mimic the donkeys!

That is, be as active as possible as government-in-action by dismantling as many retarded Democrat Party 'animals' as possible. Use whatever governmental powers you've got to plant many government-inaction flowers.

Take that excuse for a human, Ted Kennedy. Today, with illegal immigrants and their fans marching all over America---remember that old flag, with the "Don't tread on me!" admonition?---may I point out (again?) that the young boy, Teddy, is a long-living bad apple example of an illegal alien. Hey, illegal immigrants are correctly called out as 'illegal', because they are here illegally. Just so, for Ted, ever since his Mary Jo crime, by dint of the fact that he never was convicted and spent time in prison to pay for it, in effect he's been 'illegal', because he's absolutely out in America living freely, illegally!

How alien can you get?

Too, we can clearly see how easy it is to equate him with alien immigrants. The latter are defined by their failure to assimilate as Americans. They don't learn English, and the most radical of them want to eventually take back the 'stolen' American Southwest, and expand Mexico to the north. And Kennedy? Why, he's a leading member of the traitorous sedition party, the Democrats! Their entire guiding agenda is to essentially destroy the Constitution, to tear it to bits, so that America as founded will be no more. TK and all his supporters, whether wittingly or not, are working like the devils they are to annihilate, from within, our individual freedoms. Thus, we can understand Democrats as ripe suspects to be either jailed, deported or 'hanged'---at best in public shaming opinion---under the Alien and Sedition Act. Their whole being reeks of alien SHIT, which is poisoning America, under the goal of sedition.

And you thought the Civil War made America one union, for all time. Noooh! Liberals are the remnants of the secessionists.

Nothing can also be useful. The non-reaction of those 2,700 mostly donkey-party animals to Colbert's jokes is a perfect example of that. The dog that didn't bark tells us everything! Thus does nothing yield everything.

"Measuring nothing is hard, but it's also necessary for the accurate measurement of many things. You need to know where zero sits in order to place quantities above or below it. Even when nothing's invisible to our senses---to our best theoretical and experimental tests---it has tangible effect.

That's why chemists, for example, must pay such careful attention to the solvents (the background) in which reactions occur. And why physicists respect nothing quite so much as an honest, clean null result. It takes a special kind of courage, Canadian physicist Erich Vogt told his fellow experimentalists in an after-dinner talk, 'to continue to push limits down and find nothing. Each one of you has normally to go home to a family after a long day's work and report courageously, 'Nothing again today.''

And yet, he told them, nothing is more important than experiments that turn up nothing at all. 'A nobody is bound to find something. It takes a somebody to find nothing.'

There are, as always, social and political aspects to seeing nothing as well. Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C. found it perfectly natural to count slaves as 'nothing'. Slaves, like machines today, were simply taken for granted. These days, we take for granted everything from homeless people sleeping in the street to telephones and computers. We have learned to renormalize these things as part of 'nothing'. Whatever is standard becomes effectively invisible. For a long time, the absence of women and minority groups from science was considered so normal that no one---except a few ornery women--even noticed.

Only when something happens to nothing do we finally take note. The rustling of the leaves reminds us of the unseen wind; the orbits of planets remind us of the warped geometry of spacetime; gravity feels the weight of the vacuum even when we cannot."
Page 228, "The Hole in the Universe" by K.C. Cole

Ah, this is so relevant today, as the 'nothing' illegal immigrants march into our face! See, the unseen reality is ever plopping into view, in varying forms. Forms must vary, in order to be distinct from the 'nothing' background. So, for example, take the first march by criminal aliens who were offended and scared enough by the American congress, when it seriously considered making them felons. Brilliant! That was 'nothing' in crystal ball clarifying action.

As this whole national security problem rolls along through time, there's a whole lot of truth imprinting itself in people. There are the big three---amnesty, employer enforcement, and a border. Today, after factoring in the to-date actions by the vital players, I'm beginning to see the 'nothing' light.

Put yourself in the shoes of an illegal. After being called out as felons, which a large portion of Americans are inclined to believe, and given the already very precarious and insecure position they are in, I'll bet it wouldn't take too much real effort, over time, by law enforcement, to find illegals in their work places, and ship them back---so that, in retrospect, we'll realize how easy it would have been to control illegal immigration a long time ago. If Homeland Security does its job, with more and more efficiency, it'll be like curing a drug addict by cutting off the supply of whatever deleterious substance they take. When the jobs dry up, expect a surge in illegal crime, and that a lot of them will be forced to go back home.

Geez. We haven't even tried employer sanctions! The pain of recognizing that 'nothing', if and when the public does so, will have us all slapping ourselves upside our heads, angrily saying, "Why didn't we DO that a long time ago?!"

Then, it might not be too hard to solve the 'amnesty' problem, except with hard conditions to gain it. And, given our extreme wealth, we should be able to control the border at less cost than we believe. Ah, utopia---what a 'nothing' idea!

posted by James at 5:44 PM
Contact me at jfcrystal@hotmail.com

My Colbert 'Report'

How about that Stephan Colbert? The universe, A GAIN, arranges itself to prove that it's always conspiring to make ME happy. It's only been a few weeks since I found The Colbert Report, when surfing TV channels, and I was open enough---or was it that I was bored---to give it a chance. I gave the piece a chance, and what do you know---at least he's a PRETEND right-winger, so it has been intriguing to try to follow his sketches and 'interviews'.

The old Dennis Miller comedy show was politics played for laughs, but the star was very serious in his proclamations of his solidly right views. But, now I'm not sure about the Colbert character. I did happen to catch some of the ending credits, and his show is produced, I think it is, by the infamous Jon Stewart, so maybe it's a send up of the right. That may well be true, now we've been 'entertained' by Colbert at last night's White House correspondents dinner, wherein he was apparently heavily critical of Bush and the Republican's so-called problems.

You might say my sobriquet is "Again". Because, once AGAIN I'm going to use that famous ending to "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf". Remember? The stars, George and Martha, a middle-aged couple, with the husband a professor and the wife the daughter of the college president, spend a day and late night fighting away. It all degenerates into a drunken 'brawl', full of lies.

The basic lie has to do with a fake child that they supposedly had, which George goes along with. Until, that is, the climax, when he snaps and informs their party guests that it is a lie. Now, George is the typical brow-beaten hubby, and Martha has all the family balls. When he blows her cover story, though, she is devastated, and melts into a critical wondering mood, "Why did you have to tell the truth, and destroy our beautiful fantasy?"

Because you went over the line, you went too far, it's time to face reality!

Well, after reading a fair sampling of the varied responses to Colbert's actual performance last night, and thinking about it, the George and Martha movie drama ending came to mind. It seems to be the consensus that Colbert bombed. Now, as I carefully observed his act, in the moments I couldn't help noticing that he wasn't getting many laughs, that, indeed, he was bombing. Also, expecting him to be pro-Bush, as he went on, I did feel off-center as he kept skewering all things Bushian.

So, when it was repeated on C-Span right away, I had nothing better to do than to give it a second look. Yes, the whole comedic shebang did go over like a cold shower. However, consider this---the audience did not laugh at his material.

Who was the audience? Almost all of them were left-wingers! Yes, almost all of his zingers were clearly aimed at the putative right-wing George W. Bush, even right in his face. However, it could be that Colbert was like the movie George, and 'Martha' was meant to be the whole state of politics in 2006, with piquant focus on Washington D.C.

Besides, GWB, himself, DESERVES a public spanking! However, ask yourself, why didn't the left-wing audience laugh more, especially since all the jokes were so 'right-up-their-alley'? Call it tough love. It was doubly ironic, and Colbert was simply playing the left-wingers, with naked exposure of them---THEM!

He was a straight mirror, who reflected with bright painful parody, the lefties, themselves, and each distinct joke was not really meant to be at the expense of the president, but instead was a dagger aimed at the black hearts of the dastardly fantasy-island leftists. So, take the Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame joke. (Firstly, what a sad commentary that those two fantasy characters were even allowed to go to this dinner!) In my own case, then, when the camera shot the image of them into my room, and they laughed their bad asses off, they were either too drunk or too dense, or both, to get that the purpose of this serious joke was to skewer them! The joke was on THEM.

Just so, wrt all the bash-Bush jokes. As in the aforementioned movie, Colbert was about telling the truth about the suicidally fantasy-driven state of politics, these dark days, and it's the rudderless lefties who are totally to blame. That's why the 2,700 people had a hard time laughing. The string of jokes was on them, and at the heart, as the comedian kept pecking away, what was going on began to dawn on them.

It's funny, but the thought of P.J. O'Rourke as the featured comedian came up. He's a firm and well-known rightie, so how would he have fared, in comparison to what Colbert did? Then it hit me. P.J., about six months ago, or so, already played 'George' to our 'Martha', when he wrote a column with the unshakable theme that politics is evil. Thus, Colbert can be understood to have been trying to humorously wake up the top fools in D.C., who are members of that evil class.

Perchance the key joke was that Colbert was 'speaking truthiness to power'. Don't ever forget, politicians are best defined as exceptionally good liars. Also, keep Lord Acton's absolute power bromide in mind. Then, attend to the left-wing MSM audience, who should really be understood to be our absolute 'monarchy' ruler. In the eternal struggle between the doers who make news, and those who are supposed to simply reflect, to report the news, it's lawfully come to be that everything is upside down.

You see, all the elected officials are merely temporary employees, and who is their employer, their boss? The audience of 2,700 and their related minions.

Hey, maybe Colbert tuned in to one of my recent rants, or more. It could be that he used "A pox on all their houses!" and my other advice about how to deal with the jokers in too much undeserved power, such as lackey-boy Teddy Kennedy---MOCK THE HELL OUT OF THEM! Hence, as Colbert 'bombed' away, and exploded his bright-line rockets, over time our MSM betters could only squirm, not laugh, because they were being blasted to their well-deserved jail of---not only don't take them seriously, but with a stream of unremittingly TRUTH, make great fun of them.

What else does seeing the ruling class of 2,700 seated together in a large hall bring to mind? How many times have we bemoaned the one-party Communist rule in China, with scenes of many commies when they get together to "vote"? That's a good rough and always ready way to understand our MSM rulers---they, like the Reds, are endeavoring, mightily, to hold on to their OWN one-party rule.

And, don't think that they don't know it!

posted by James at 3:18 PM
Contact me at jfcrystal@hotmail.com