The Cosmic Emporium

**Gio** · 19th February 2019, 13:45

The latest stuff ...

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Blain: "My Recent US Trip Was An Eye-Opener - Poverty Has Never Been So Visible On The Street"

US President's day

"Another fascinating weekend… It’s a holiday in the US, and much of UK is off for mid-term. I’m still trying to digest the importance of last week’s news about Amazon pulling out of its New York HQ2 deal in light of protests by liberal lefties. I’m thinking it’s a very interesting moment, and rather changes the game.

How much do current events, like Amazon, change the game of Macro Strategy decisions? In the past the role of strategist was to carefully scrutinise, analyse and conceptualise Central Bank interest decisions, input the available economic data into our calculations, spice it up with some expectations about global trade prospects, and make rosy assumptions about growth and consumption to determine (ie; guess) if stock and bond prices will rise or fall, and therefore what to buy.

We assumed we lived in a solid-state political and employment universe where its binary that consumption will rise in line with employment, and that any job is a plus job.

Recent events demonstrate that simple equation may need massive revision. Over the past few years we’ve been forced to factor in the irrational and unpredictable politics of populism, and their effect on markets. Now our expectations about employment and consumption are under pressure.

My heightened interest in the topic might be because I’m a Scot (ie Socialism is part of our DNA), and had an uncle who ran away from Glasgow to America as a kid who became wonderously successful yet remained a Wobbly – a member of the IWW; Industrial Workers of the World – his whole life. (I so admired him I named my first born, Jack, after him!)

Nobody comes out well from the Amazon affair. Jeff Bezos and Amazon look out arrogant and out of touch – as one US chum told me New York’s politicians are idiots: “after its walked out on its current home town without paying a dime in alimony, let’s give a company that doesn’t pay any taxes a couple of billion in bungs to come to the last affordable bit of NYC and price all of AOC’s constituents out of their homes… what’s not to like?”

New York’s political leaders look stupid, confused, disjointed and lost. The young congresswoman AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) might be smiling like a winner today, but strikes me as a child who expects congratulated for throwing her new toys out the pram. How will she explain chasing away 25k well-paid jobs as the core of her presidential strategy and her New Green Deal?

Whatever the rights and wrongs, the faction of the Democratic Party crowing about their victory over the unacceptable face of capitalism have set a new bar in the rising and angry debate about tax, wealth and jobs. Forget Trump and walls – that’s irrelevant. (Declaring an Emergency is more an issue – what can of worms has that opened?)

Where Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has clearly scored is painting Jeff Bezos as the villain - arrogant, threatening, and a serial tax-avoider. That chimes with a large part of the US electorate – and sets some dangerous precedents in terms of populism – Remember how close Bernie Sanders came?"

"The US should be the happiest place in the world these days. Employment among minorities has never been so high. More women than ever before are in the total workforce, which now exceeds 63% in terms of the participation rate. Years of economic growth, and more recently Trump’s tax boost last year, means investment has been strong. Corporates are doing well.

Yet, after 10 years of ultra-low interest rates, tax-giveaways, and a massive increase in the wealth of the richest 0.01% of the US population (who now own a staggering 10% of the wealth!), wages for the rest are only now beginning to show any signs of upwards pressure.

While Bezos and his fellow trillionaires wonder which slice of cake to guzzle next, the facts are the poorest workers in the US are in poverty. Over 60% of the lowests’ incomes go to cover their housing and transport costs, the next 25% on food. The 50% percentile income bracket - definitionally the “middle class” - spend 44% on housing and travel. More than half the population aren’t saving for their retirement, but are scrabbling to put food on the table today.

My recent trip to the USA was an eye-opener - poverty has never been so visible on the street, and it feels the income-inequality debate is bursting out. No wonder populists are calling for the rich to be taxed till the eye’s pop. But the US needs to do two things – create a fair tax and equality system, and fix what’s broken in its society and economy.

The classical models of modern states suppose its role is to provide these indivisible services like law and order, defence and care. All citizens share in the benefits of membership, with the basis the strong should protect the weak. We’ve seen the care function morph into the emergence of education, pensions, healthcare and social services - which are as major costs states now bear. There is the inbuilt reluctance of these who don’t need such services to pay for them. Why should a rich man pay to make the poor comfortable? Because, if you don’t… eventually they will eat you. Simple as – it’s the cost of membership.

The division of income within society is critical. The argument about taxing the rich typically boils down to: “If you tax us more, we’ll take less risk, create fewer jobs, and no one will get richer.” The trick is to persuade entrepreneurs to keep making money, but ensure that money is distributed and lubricates everyone without demotivating these drivers. (I’m trying to work out why we should accept inherited wealth as being worthy of the same protections... )

Historically, the Americans have always done the right thing after exhausting every other possibility first. Roosevelt’s iconic New Deal followed the government’s disastrous non-intervention in the wake of earlier financial crash. The Americans can do it again – some variation on AOC’s Green New Deal that balances growth, consumption, wealth, health, and entrepreneurship is possible. A programme that addresses a re-jig of society in terms of educational relevance, green environmental industries, and a massive-across-the-board infrastructure rebuild, while also balancing care for those in need at the core of a new approach.

That’s a real challenge, but one I’d expect the Americans to find… eventually. If it doesn’t happen… expect more instability and mad decisions like stopping new well paid jobs and increasing economic strain. In which case... where else to invest?"

Blain's Morning Porridge, submitted by Bill Blain
Source:zerohedge.com

**Gio** · 19th February 2019, 14:02

Well perhaps just a little bite for now ...

Aerosmith - Eat The Rich

4:42 minutes

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-0lAhnoDlU

**Gio** · 19th February 2019, 14:20

And if eating the rich doesn't do it for you America ...
Perhaps this will temporarily satisfy the craving ...

Pops' Root Beer Bread Pudding

"This Route 66 institution goes the extra mile for soda-based indulgence.

Driving through the tiny town of Arcadia, Oklahoma, just a half-hour north of Oklahoma City, no passenger can miss the sign for Pops. Nestled along Route 66, the roadside restaurant and gas station sells around 700 kinds of soda, arranged by color. Out front, a 66-foot-tall soda bottle statue provides a tip-off regarding what’s in store for customers. At night, LEDs illuminate the structure, turning it into a beacon of light that harkens back to the days when this legendary route was dotted with neon.

Travelers who find themselves drawn in by the splendid display will discover more than just pop inside. Waitresses bustle around in its diner, complete with an old-fashioned soda fountain. Though patrons are welcome to order a proper meal, the diner’s claim to fame is their root beer bread pudding. Pops makes a steaming slice of not-too-sweet, yeasty pudding studded with plump raisins, then douses the creation in house-made root beer and white chocolate sauces. Wash it down with any of their hundreds of sodas (several of which they serve on tap, in bottomless cups) for the ultimate sugar high."

Source: atlasobscura.com

**Gio** · 19th February 2019, 14:29

Speaking cheap labor ...

**Gio** · 19th February 2019, 16:45

Interesting wash/suds business ...

A Secret Pinball World in a Brooklyn Laundromat

Atlas Obscura

"Sunshine Laundromat, located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is half laundromat, half pinball bar. In fact, it’s the only laundromat in New York City that’s allowed to serve alcohol. But what actually goes on behind-the-scenes?

In this episode, we ask owner Peter Rose a few questions about this unique laundromat. From the weirdest thing they’ve ever found to the ‘best’ pinball machine in the establishment, Peter patiently answered our many questions and offered an insight into this secret world inside the unassuming laundromat."

Published on Feb 19, 2019

5:39 minutes

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VzEI0n0pcU

**Gio** · 19th February 2019, 19:46

"Physicists used to search for the smallest components of the universe. What if that’s not the point?"

What’s the point, theorists wonder, of the perfection found at every level,
if it’s bound to be superseded?

A Different Kind of Theory of Everything

By Natalie Wolchover

"In 1964, during a lecture at Cornell University, the physicist Richard Feynman articulated a profound mystery about the physical world. He told his listeners to imagine two objects, each gravitationally attracted to the other. How, he asked, should we predict their movements? Feynman identified three approaches, each invoking a different belief about the world. The first approach used Newton’s law of gravity, according to which the objects exert a pull on each other. The second imagined a gravitational field extending through space, which the objects distort. The third applied the principle of least action, which holds that each object moves by following the path that takes the least energy in the least time. All three approaches produced the same, correct prediction. They were three equally useful descriptions of how gravity works.

“One of the amazing characteristics of nature is this variety of interpretational schemes,” Feynman said. What’s more, this multifariousness applies only to the true laws of nature—it doesn’t work if the laws are misstated. “If you modify the laws much, you find you can only write them in fewer ways,” Feynman said. “I always found that mysterious, and I do not know the reason why it is that the correct laws of physics are expressible in such a tremendous variety of ways. They seem to be able to get through several wickets at the same time.”

Even as physicists work to understand the material content of the universe—the properties of particles, the nature of the big bang, the origins of dark matter and dark energy—their work is shadowed by this Rashomon effect, which raises metaphysical questions about the meaning of physics and the nature of reality. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, is one of today’s leading theoreticians. “The miraculous shape-shifting property of the laws is the single most amazing thing I know about them,” he told me, this past fall. It “must be a huge clue to the nature of the ultimate truth.”

Traditionally, physicists have been reductionists. They’ve searched for a “theory of everything” that describes reality in terms of its most fundamental components. In this way of thinking, the known laws of physics are provisional, approximating an as-yet-unknown, more detailed description. A table is really a collection of atoms; atoms, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be clusters of protons and neutrons; each of these is, more microscopically, a trio of quarks; and quarks, in turn, are presumed to consist of something yet more fundamental. Reductionists think that they are playing a game of telephone: as the message of reality travels upward, from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale, it becomes garbled, and they must work their way downward to recover the truth. Physicists now know that gravity wrecks this naïve scheme, by shaping the universe on both large and small scales. And the Rashomon effect also suggests that reality isn’t structured in such a reductive, bottom-up way.

If anything, Feynman’s example understated the mystery of the Rashomon effect, which is actually twofold. It’s strange that, as Feynman says, there are multiple valid ways of describing so many physical phenomena. But an even stranger fact is that, when there are competing descriptions, one often turns out to be more true than the others, because it extends to a deeper or more general description of reality. Of the three ways of describing objects’ motion, for instance, the approach that turns out to be more true is the underdog: the principle of least action. In everyday reality, it’s strange to imagine that objects move by “choosing” the easiest path. (How does a falling rock know which trajectory to take before it gets going?) But, a century ago, when physicists began to make experimental observations about the strange behavior of elementary particles, only the least-action interpretation of motion proved conceptually compatible. A whole new mathematical language—quantum mechanics—had to be developed to describe particles’ probabilistic ability to play out all possibilities and take the easiest path most frequently. Of the various classical laws of motion—all workable, all useful—only the principle of least action also extends to the quantum world.

It happens again and again that, when there are many possible descriptions of a physical situation—all making equivalent predictions, yet all wildly different in premise—one will turn out to be preferable, because it extends to an underlying reality, seeming to account for more of the universe at once. And yet this new description might, in turn, have multiple formulations—and one of those alternatives may apply even more broadly. It’s as though physicists are playing a modified telephone game in which, with each whisper, the message is translated into a different language. The languages describe different scales or domains of the same reality but aren’t always related etymologically. In this modified game, the objective isn’t—or isn’t only—to seek a bedrock equation governing reality’s smallest bits. The existence of this branching, interconnected web of mathematical languages, each with its own associated picture of the world, is what needs to be understood.

This web of laws creates traps for physicists. Suppose you’re a researcher seeking to understand the universe more deeply. You may get stuck using a dead-end description—clinging to a principle that seems correct but is merely one of nature’s disguises. It’s for this reason that Paul Dirac, a British pioneer of quantum theory, stressed the importance of reformulating existing theories: it’s by finding new ways of describing known phenomena that you can escape the trap of provisional or limited belief. This was the trick that led Dirac to predict antimatter, in 1928. “It is not always so that theories which are equivalent are equally good,” he said, five decades later, “because one of them may be more suitable than the other for future developments.”

Today, various puzzles and paradoxes point to the need to reformulate the theories of modern physics in a new mathematical language. Many physicists feel trapped. They have a hunch that they need to transcend the notion that objects move and interact in space and time. Einstein’s general theory of relativity beautifully weaves space and time together into a four-dimensional fabric, known as space-time, and equates gravity with warps in that fabric. But Einstein’s theory and the space-time concept break down inside black holes and at the moment of the big bang. Space-time, in other words, may be a translation of some other description of reality that, though more abstract or unfamiliar, can have greater explanatory power.

Some researchers are attempting to wean physics off of space-time in order to pave the way toward this deeper theory. Currently, to predict how particles morph and scatter when they collide in space-time, physicists use a complicated diagrammatic scheme invented by Richard Feynman. The so-called Feynman diagrams indicate the probabilities, or “scattering amplitudes,” of different particle-collision outcomes. In 2013, Nima Arkani-Hamed and Jaroslav Trnka discovered a reformulation of scattering amplitudes that makes reference to neither space nor time. They found that the amplitudes of certain particle collisions are encoded in the volume of a jewel-like geometric object, which they dubbed the amplituhedron. Ever since, they and dozens of other researchers have been exploring this new geometric formulation of particle-scattering amplitudes, hoping that it will lead away from our everyday, space-time-bound conception to some grander explanatory structure.

Whether these researchers are on the right track or not, the web of explanations of reality exists. Perhaps the most striking thing about those explanations is that, even as each draws only a partial picture of reality, they are mathematically perfect. Take general relativity. Physicists know that Einstein’s theory is incomplete. Yet it is a spectacular artifice, with a spare, taut mathematical structure. Fiddle with the equations even a little and you lose all of its beauty and simplicity. It turns out that, if you want to discover a deeper way of explaining the universe, you can’t take the equations of the existing description and subtly deform them. Instead, you must make a jump to a totally different, equally perfect mathematical structure. What’s the point, theorists wonder, of the perfection found at every level, if it’s bound to be superseded?

It seems inconceivable that this intricate web of perfect mathematical descriptions is random or happenstance. This mystery must have an explanation. But what might such an explanation look like? One common conception of physics is that its laws are like a machine that humans are building in order to predict what will happen in the future. The “theory of everything” is like the ultimate prediction machine—a single equation from which everything follows. But this outlook ignores the existence of the many different machines, built in all manner of ingenious ways, that give us equivalent predictions.

To Arkani-Hamed, the multifariousness of the laws suggests a different conception of what physics is all about. We’re not building a machine that calculates answers, he says; instead, we’re discovering questions. Nature’s shape-shifting laws seem to be the answer to an unknown mathematical question. This is why Arkani-Hamed and his colleagues find their studies of the amplituhedron so promising. Calculating the volume of the amplituhedron is a question in geometry—one that mathematicians might have pondered, had they discovered the object first. Somehow, the answer to the question of the amplituhedron’s volume describes the behavior of particles—and that answer, in turn, can be rewritten in terms of space and time.

Arkani-Hamed now sees the ultimate goal of physics as figuring out the mathematical question from which all the answers flow. “The ascension to the tenth level of intellectual heaven,” he told me, “would be if we find the question to which the universe is the answer, and the nature of that question in and of itself explains why it was possible to describe it in so many different ways.” It’s as though physics has been turned inside out. It now appears that the answers already surround us. It’s the question we don’t know."

Source: newyorker.com

**Gio** · 19th February 2019, 19:54

Question

Moody Blues

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBsdHoTdOmc

**Gio** · 20th February 2019, 07:06

Brexit Britain: Europe's view

Sky News
Published on Feb 19, 2019

The UK has long enjoyed a reputation for its global influence, military power and financial strength.

But the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, recently described Britain as a "waning country", too small to stand alone on the world stage.

So, is Brexit changing the way the rest of Europe views the UK?

Our foreign affairs editor Deborah Haynes has travelled across the continent to find out what impact leaving the European Union is having on Britain's reputation.

12:08 minutes

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZdAlqiLCbY

**Gio** · 20th February 2019, 16:00

Meanwhile at the Justice Department ...

“It has come to our attention that too many of you are paying attention.”

**Gio** · 20th February 2019, 20:23

Will share this here ...
A surprisingly fun YouTube share ...

#928 Hollywood Tour of Rare Homes, Graves & Scandals

Daze with Jordan the Lion

Published on Feb 20, 2019

26:46 minutes

Best viewed in full screen

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-bmyNR05JE

**Gio** · 21st February 2019, 08:44

Let's Face It: The U.S. Constitution Has Failed

"Elections provide the bread-and-circuses staged-drama that is passed off as democracy."

"Despite the anything-goes quality of American culture, one thing remains verboten to say publicly: the U.S. Constitution has failed. The reason why this painfully obvious fact cannot be discussed publicly is that it gives the lie to the legitimacy of the entire status quo.

The Constitution was intended to limit 1) the power of government over the citizenry 2) the power of each branch of government and 3) the power of political/financial elites over the government and the citizenry, as the Founders recognized the intrinsic risks of an all-powerful state, an all-powerful state dominated by one branch of government and the risks of a financial elite corrupting the state to serve their interests above those of the citizenry.

The Constitution has failed to place limits on the power of government, on the emergence of unaccountable states-within-a-state agencies and on the political power of financial elites.

How has the Constitution failed? It has failed in three ways:

1. Corporations and the super-wealthy elite control the machinery of governance. The public interest is not represented except as interpreted / filtered through corporate/elite interests.

2. The nation's central bank, the Federal Reserve, has the power to debauch the nation's currency and reward the wealthy via issuing new currency and buying Treasury bonds in whatever sums it deems necessary at the moment. The Fed is only nominally under the control of the elected government. It is in effect an independent state-within-a-state that dominates the financial well-being of the entire nation.

3. The National Security State--the alphabet agencies of the FBI, CIA, NSA et al.--are an independent state-within-a-state, answerable only to themselves, not to the public or their representatives. Congressional oversight is little more than feeble rubber-stamping of the Imperial Project and whatever the unelected National Security leadership deems worthy of pursuit.

The Constitution's core regulatory element--the balancing of executive, legislative and judicial power--has broken down. The judiciary's independence is as nominal as the legislative branch's control of the central bank and National Security state: the gradual encroachment of corporate and state power is rubber-stamped and declared constitutional.

The secret power of the National Security agencies was declared constitutional early in the Cold war, when unleashing unaccountable and secret agencies was deemed necessary.

The bizarre public-private Federal Reserve was deemed constitutional at its founding in 1913, and the Supreme Court famously declared that corporations have the same rights to free speech (including loudspeakers that cost millions of dollars) as living citizens.

The powers of the Imperial Presidency also continue expanding, regardless of which party is in office or the supposed ideological tropisms of Supreme Court justices.

Every step of this erosion of public representation and the elected government's power is declared fully constitutional, in classic boiled-frog fashion. The frog detects the rising temperature of the water but isn't alarmed as the heat is increased so gradually.

Since the rise of unaccountable states-within-a-state are constitutional, as is the dominance of corporate / private-wealth elites, on what grounds can citizens protest their loss of representation?

Elections provide the bread-and-circuses staged drama that is passed off as democracy. The key goal of the corporate/state media coverage, of course, is to foster the illusion that elections really, really, really matter, when the reality is they don't. The National Security State grinds on, the Federal Reserve grinds on and the dominance of corporate-wealth elites grinds on regardless of who's in office.

Every emergency is met by the ceding of more power to unelected elites in positions to serve their own interests. The Cold War, financial panics, Cold War Redux--every crisis is an excuse to expand the powers of the unaccountable, opaque states-within-a-state.

The media is already gearing up with 24/7 coverage of the 2020 elections. The constant churn of drama-trauma serves to mask the impotence and powerlessness of the citizenry and the unaccountability of the states-within-a-state that rule the nation."

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Source:zerohedge.com

**Dreamtimer** · 21st February 2019, 10:51

Or maybe we have failed the Constitution. We have abused it and we continue to. Imo.

**Gio** · 21st February 2019, 11:14

The latest ...

FDA to Rich Old Men: Stop Infusing Children's Blood! - #NewWorldNextWeek

corbettreport

"Welcome back to New World Next Week – the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy
that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news."

Published on Feb 21, 2019

All news items link listed below YouTube show notes

14:41 minutes