Wave functions: 1D Hydrogen atom (Part 3 and Conclusion)

Part 2 and Part 1 of this essay can be found by following the former links.

Conclusions:

1. Like its real counterpart hydrogen the gedanken experiment of one dimensional hydrogen atom (1D H) shows bound states. A scattered electron state only occurs for zero energy, at infinite distance from the proton.

2. the 1D H atom has non-zero ground state energy.

3. The wavefunctions of the 1D H atom are governed by a single quantum number (n)

4. The wave functions of quantum number n show n+1 nodes (zero points).

David Cross: Why America Sucks at Everything

David Cross is of course best known as 'Tobias Fünke' in the insanely funny 'Arrested Development'. His rant is not, despite the clickbaity title, merely gratuitous "Murrica bashing" and actually concentrates mainly on the US health care system.

A minor beef of mine is the (brief) mention of the UK as a "socialist country" but that might have been intended as irony.

Watch and learn!

The Shadow - Carl Jung's Warning to The World

This is very worth watching because of the controversial content, mecriful shortness but also the beautiful artwork chosen.

To Preheat or not to Preheat, That's the Question... (Part I)

So you've got your non-microwavable TV dinner (Tembi's Finest Beef Lasagne?) ready for the oven. The cooking instructions say 'Place in the centre of an oven preheated to 180 celsius for 30 to 35 minutes'.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you put your favourite TV dinner sin in a cold oven, then started heating the oven plus food? Would you save time? Would you save energy, potentially planet saving (think millions of TV dinners every year!)? Or would the outcome be the opposite of that?

I have and do it regularly: depending on size of the food I'll routinely put it in a cold oven and the add an eyeballed 10 minutes to the 'cold cooking time'.

Here we'll determine with physics and mathematics which is the best way of cooking: preheated oven or cold oven?

Firstly, some definitions of the main quantities, in order of apperance:

Now some differential equations and integrations:

Armed with the material constants scattered throughout this post the time evolution of an empty oven, food placed in a preheated oven, food placed in a non-preheated oven and the set temperatures of 180 C (oven) and 75 C (food) were plotted:

This shows the preheat time for the oven to reach 180 C is about 30 mins, a reasonable expectation.

However the value to reach 75 C for the food in a preheated oven of about 5 mins and the value to reach 75 C for the food in a non-preheated oven of 75 mins do not correspond to my personal experiences.

This is probably due to estimation errors on α and γ. Since as these appear as the exponents in exponential functions small errors can be exponentially propagated.

To resolve this, some measurements will now be carried out, to be reported in Part II.

Please find Part II and conclusion here.

Open Letter to the Guardian's Editor Kath Viner & its Zionist Gatekeeper, Jonathan Freedland by Tony Greenstein

(Read it below or read it at Tony Greenstein's blog)

Do You Not Have a Shred of Decency? Why did the Guardian remove from its coverage of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s death any reference to the Palestinians?

Dear Kath and Jonathan,

Yesterday’s Guardian has 4 pages dedicated to the life of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. 60% of the front page was also devoted to his death. As someone whose first political activity, as a 16 year old schoolboy, was demonstrating against the 1970 Springbok Rugby tour, I am the last person to quarrel with the extent of your coverage.

What I find amazing though is that there wasn’t even a passing mention of Tutu’s support for the Palestinians or his description of Israel as worse than its South African counterpart:

your struggle will be harder than ours, as Israel’s apartheid is even worse than South Africa’s. We never had F-16s bomb our bantustans killing hundreds of our children. Remember that.”

Tutu never lost an opportunity to criticise what he termed an apartheid state. This was well before B’Tselem’s Report describing Israel as ‘A regime of Jewish supremacy’ and Human Rights Watch’s Report ‘A Threshold Crossed - Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution’.

Perhaps I can make a more general observation? When people pay a tribute to someone and deliberately, for unspoken political reasons, excise a part of their life, they end up saying more about themselves than their subject. Your coverage of Desmond Tutu’s death says more about the Guardian than it does about him.

To do all these things and distort someone’s life, because it’s politically inconvenient to tell the truth, and is at variance with the Guardian’s editorial line, is not merely dishonest but politically odious. It suggests that the tribute you paid to Archbishop Tutu’s struggle against Apartheid is just hot air. Pious and empty words aimed at convincing your readers that you retain some integrity.

We all know the reasons for the Guardian’s dilemmas. You spent five years demonising Jeremy Corbyn and the Left as ‘anti-Semites’. You lost no opportunity to portray people who were opposed to apartheid as racists. Even worse you did it in the company of genuine racists and anti-Semites.

People like Boris Johnson, who in his 2004 novel ‘72 Virgins’ depicted Jews as controlling the media and being able to “fiddle” elections. Not forgetting Jacob Rees-Mogg who, apart from tweeting in support of the neo-Nazi AfD in Germany, described fellow Jewish MPs John Bercow and Oliver Letwin as “Illuminati who are taking the powers to themselves.” A comment described as ‘expressly anti-Semitic’ by Professor Michael Berkowitz of UCL.

Let me remind you both of one of Desmond Tutu’s most famous speeches when he said:

“I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government.”

What is there in this that you or your fellow scribes at the Guardian don’t understand? Either your opposition to what happened in South Africa, the subjugation of people according to the doctrines of racial supremacy, is a principle or it is a narrow political calculus dependent on the circumstances of the time.

The omission of any mention of Desmond Tutu’s longstanding support for the Palestinians was not accidental, an unfortunate oversight but a deliberate editorial decision. We know this because a critical comment from Professor David Mond, who pointed this out, was deleted by the Guardian. It did not accord with your ‘community standards.’ Likewise two comments from Mark Seddon, the former Editor of Tribune, were also deleted.

Desmond Tutu was a strong supporter of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, just as he supported sanctions against South Africa. That was the real reason for your selective editing.

Of course you did not want to mention Tutu’s position on Palestine. Tutu’s opposition to Israeli apartheid routinely attracted cries of ‘anti-Semitism’ from those who refuse to understand that opposing the Israeli state for what it does is not the same as hostility to Jew.

I fully understand your dilemma. The Guardian has spent so much of its time making false accusations of anti-Semitism that you don’t know how to handle the legacy of someone who, according to your definition, was anti-Semitic. Desmond Tutu was an opponent of apartheid in all its forms, including its Jewish equivalent, Zionism.

Just one final thing. The Guardian seems to have gone quiet on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’. I presume that you are satisfied with the fact that in order to eradicate ‘anti-Semitism’, Starmer is expelling dozens of Jewish members? If you are Jewish in the Labour Party today you are 5 times more likely to be expelled as non-Jews. It seems a strange way to oppose anti-Semitism which is presumably why the Guardian says nothing?

Is it too much for you now to come clean and admit that the campaign against Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ was never about Jews and always about Israel and its apartheid practices?

Yours truly,

Tony Greenstein

Merry Christmas! (Fairytale of New York - The Pogues)

Revisiting the Meidner Plan

BY MIO TASTAS VIKTORSSON and SAOIRSE GOWAN for Jacobin

In the 1970s, the Swedish labor movement developed a plan to gradually socialize ownership. What can we learn from it today?

Confronting the power of capital in the United States will require a plan.

We may be confident that the concentration of capital in the hands of a tiny minority represents both the primary obstacle to economic equality and one of the most fundamental threats to democracy in America, but without a concrete agenda capable of securing control over capital for the people, we will never succeed in overcoming these problems.

The potential benefits of public control over the 30 percent of the national income which flows to capital are immense: a society which can provide a level of comfort, security, and freedom currently unknown by most, a massive reduction in racial and gender wealth gaps, and a healthier democracy.

As such, the question of how to secure control of capital for the people must be engaged seriously, honestly, and by drawing upon the lessons of others who have tried to do so before.

A New Hope

In the 1970s, the Swedish Landsorganisationen (LO) blue-collar trade union confederation took it upon themselves to ask the same questions — albeit, under different national circumstances.

Sweden’s postwar welfare state had been built around a model designed by LO economists Rudolf Meidner and Gösta Rehn. The model stressed Keynesian fiscal policies, centralized collective bargaining between unions and employers, low inflation, and a push for wage equalization through a “solidarity in wages” policy. Meidner summed up the principles behind this policy in 1993:

First, equal work should be equally paid, regardless of the profitability of the firm, the size or location of the workplace. What matters is the kind and nature of work, and the skills which are needed to perform it. The second aim of the policy is the equalizing of wage differentials, but not their total elimination. Different wages should be paid for different kinds of work.

The solidarity in wages policy had a number of beneficial impacts. First, by making wage demands the subject of central bargaining, it enabled unions to secure rising living standards without creating an inflationary spiral.

Secondly, it ensured that unproductive firms would not be able to stay afloat by underpaying their workers. This would lead to workers being made redundant, but this was considered a feature of the model — low productivity enterprises would be replaced by new jobs in more productive firms and industries through massive investments, active labor market policies, and an extensive welfare state to ensure nobody suffered significant hardship in the intervening period.

It became clear that there was a side effect which threatened the solidarity upon which this economic model was built. Wage restraint in profitable firms kept inflationary pressures down, but it did so by creating huge excess profits for business owners. Exposés by C. H. Hermansson in the 1960s showed that a vast proportion of capital in the Swedish economy was controlled by a mere fifteen families.

A government-commissioned inquiry confirmed Hermansson’s findings, and Meidner summed up the public mood: “Solidarity in the politics of wages had led to a lack of solidarity in the politics of profits.” Profits created by wage restraint and state investment were being concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority. Under these circumstances, workers found themselves asking why they weren’t sharing the benefits. And so it was determined by the LO that a way to redistribute such excess profits had to be found.

The “Meidner Group,” an expert commission whose members also included Gunnar Fond and Anna Hedborg, was appointed in 1973 to create a proposal to achieve three aims: to shore up the solidarity wage policy by ensuring wage restraint didn’t enrich the owners of profitable firms; to counteract the concentration of private capital; and to give employees more control over the workplace.

The result, published two years later and adopted by the LO congress in 1976, was one of the most ambitious democratic socialist policy proposals ever seriously considered in a developed economy. It would confront not only the question of who reaps the benefits of excess profits, but also the question of who owns, controls, and manages the workplace.

If fully implemented, a number of “wage-earner funds” would have been set up, financed through profit-related payments from firms in the form of voting shares, and administered through union-dominated boards. In this way, as firms produced profits for their shareholders, the wage-earner funds would gain larger and larger stakes in the company until they became the majority owners.

Excess profits would no longer benefit only the rich and powerful, and the benefits of holding capital would be shared across society. The funds would be controlled by workers within entire branches of industry, thereby ensuring that they would not provide an unequal benefit to workers in the most profitable companies and not contribute to increased differences in wages between workers — unlike other profit-sharing schemes bound to specific companies as have periodically been seen in the US and other countries in the past.

It was estimated by the Meidner group that wage-earner funds would have majority control over the stock market within a few decades. In order to prepare for this transition, dividends paid to the wage-earner funds would initially be divided between reinvesting in companies, further increasing the share owned by workers, and financing research, expertise, education, and training for workers to assist them in the running of their companies.

Of considerable relevance to current debates over concentration of capital is the Meidner group’s finding that

the modern economies of the west are filled to the brim with measures against monopolies, cartels or trusts. But nonetheless, nobody denies that the direction of economic development is essentially controlled by and for owners of capital, and their interests.

It was not sufficient to have — as Sweden did — decades of social-democratic government, an interventionist state, and powerful labor unions. Without changing who owns capital, economic development would continue to favor the rich and powerful.

The Employers Strike Back

It goes without saying that employers’ resistance to such a plan was intense, sustained, and effective. In addition, the SAP (the Swedish Social-Democratic Party) defeat in the 1976 elections by a right-wing coalition ensured that capital had time to fully mobilize against the proposal. By the time the SAP returned to power in 1983, the proposal had been watered down as a result of retreats and compromises by the labor movement and lukewarm support — even outright opposition — from the SAP leadership.

A form of wage-earner funds were introduced in 1984, but with extremely limited worker involvement, funded only for seven years by a small excess-profits tax instead of through share issues, and they never controlled more than 7 percent of the Swedish stock market. Meidner described the final product as “a pathetic rat,” with most of the key principles of economic democracy, wholesale redistribution of capital ownership, and solidarity wage policy having been abandoned or substantially undermined. The funds were privatized after 1992 by a right-wing government.

The Meidner Plan failed. But it is crucial for us to remember that it was a political failure rather than an economic failure. The LO took on the employers and lost, but their plan for a transition to a democratic-socialist economy lives on, and it can help to guide our own attempts to give people control over their workplaces, to reduce inequality through public ownership of capital, and to build a sustainable economic model that can end mass unemployment while keeping inflation under control.

Return of the Socialists

There are lessons to be learned from the proposals, debates, and reality of wage-earner funds in Sweden, but that does not mean that the situation translates to other societies and time periods on a wholesale basis. Sweden in 1976, or even 1991, is a very different country to the US today. In order to sketch out how wage-earner funds in the US could be implemented, and how they would have to be modified compared to the Meidner proposals, it is worth looking over the key differences in summary.

A primary concern is the absence of the Rehn-Meidner economic model, of full employment, low inflation, an expansive welfare state, and active labor market interventions. Our belief is that any social-democratic or socialist government elected in the US should immediately set about pursuing similar policies — both because they are independently beneficial, and because they create conditions which will allow wage-earner funds to thrive.

A second glaring difference between the two contexts is that Sweden had an immensely higher union density (over 70 percent, and rising to over 80 percent in the mid-1980s) than the US had at any point during its history. The context in which wage-earner funds are plausibly attainable would likely be accompanied by a considerable growth in the strength of organized labor, but it would be unreasonable to assume this automatically translates to near-universal unionization as existed in 1970s Sweden.

As such, it will likely be necessary for the state to own the wage-earner funds on behalf of the people, in order to avoid a justified critique that we are handing control over the economy to unrepresentative bodies (private sector union density was 6.6 percent in 2014). However, as giving people control over their workplace is a core principle, we have to go further than this.

The French comité d’entreprise model may offer a way forward. For a country renowned for its relatively powerful labor movement, one would be surprised to hear that only 5 percent of France’s private sector employees are union members. However, in any company with over fifty employees, elections must be held for a representative council with extensive influence over the management of the company. Most workers choose to support representatives from one of France’s union confederations, and the introduction of industrial elections offers a promising way to jump-start the connection between workers and trade unions in the US.

Crucially, representative councils would also provide an avenue for employee control over how the shares owned by wage-earner funds are used. The workers in a firm should be enabled to use the people’s shares to secure improvements in their lives and livelihoods. There are important questions about how to balance out the public interest with the interests of workers in each particular firm — questions which will require further study and discussion.

What is not in question is that elected worker representatives in each company should have immensely more control over their businesses than they do at present — through French-style councils as well as worker representation on boards, employee ombudsmen, strengthened collective bargaining, and representation in the structures of wage-earner funds and having legal rights over how the shares are used.

The Funds Awaken

The below diagram is an overview of how ownership of companies could be restructured over time.

The existing owners of capital (primarily the rich, whether directly, through diversified private index funds, or any other instrument) would retain their shares, but those shares would be diluted through new issuances every year (Meidner proposed that these should be 20 percent of profits, we think that this is a good starting point). The voting shares of the funds would thereby gradually increase in value until capital income and control over the economy lies in the hands of the public.

The state would ensure that each fund holds a diverse portfolio of stock to ensure they, on the whole, track the performance of the economy at large but would grant their boards, which should be comprised of government appointees and worker representatives, substantial operational autonomy. The boards would set overall policy, but committees tailored to each industry should also be established, including individuals appointed by the board, worker representatives, and other stakeholders (such as consumer groups, local authorities, and environmental or minority group representatives).

A share of profits would be sent to a central clearing fund, for the same purpose as in the original Meidner proposal — to provide expertise, research, education and information to workers in the running of their companies.

It may be prudent to exempt genuinely small businesses from having to issue shares to wage-earner funds. Fear of mom-and-pop stores and self-employed tradespeople being expropriated contributed to the scare tactics used by employers, and the political risk incurred by including them would likely outweigh any benefits accrued. If an exemption is included it should be extremely carefully designed to avoid companies using loopholes to avoid issuing shares to wage-earner funds.

It should be obvious to observers that removing the most powerful opponents of better wages and conditions will strengthen traditional labor strategies — union organization, collective bargaining, and — where necessary — industrial action. Those employed in small firms not covered by wage-earner funds will benefit immensely from this more favorable climate.

Finally, it is of the highest importance that we exercise caution in how the capital income that funds acquire is distributed. Meidner repeatedly stresses that the money should not be seen as a direct tool of fiscal policy, and releasing vast quantities of money into the economy at once can create the inflationary spirals that the Rehn-Meidner model was designed to avoid.

The use of capital income in the wider economy should be subject to carefully drafted fiscal rules — analogous to those imposed on the Norwegian government pension funds — designed to ensure long-term economic stability, growth and equalization.

A Future Worth Fighting For

There will undoubtedly be tradeoffs made between different interests as a result of this proposal. It will be difficult, and people and groups with perfectly legitimate interests will feel aggrieved or frustrated that the balance has not gone the way they desire. But what is crucial is that everyone involved will have a sympathetic interest.

The current situation absolves us of having to balance between the economic interests of workers at a polluting factory and the environmental impact of that pollution, because capital makes the decision for us. But with the control that wage-earner funds could give us over the capital stock, we can, over time, ensure that life is far better for the vast majority. An economy controlled by the people will require a lot of patient negotiation, innumerable hours of study and training, and a social movement willing to be patient and understanding when mistakes are made.

But all of this is a tiny price to pay when we reconsider the benefits. A society where we end destitution. One in which we work for the good of everyone, not to give some nameless billionaire a thirteenth yacht full of cocaine. One where racial, gender and disability wealth gaps are sharply reduced or eliminated. An America where no child goes to sleep hungry while the average person in the top 0.01 percent has an income of $21 million just from capital, every single year.

Such obscene inequalities require the most immense efforts to overcome. And we are not unclear about this — implementing this proposal would be intensely difficult, and would face fierce opposition. But while those inequalities exist, it is our job to think the unthinkable.

It is worth recalling that when Prime Minister Olof Palme saw the first draft of the Meidner Group report, he thought it was an interesting academic discussion rather than a serious proposal. We do not believe that this will be our last word on the matter — indeed, we primarily offer it as a starting point for such academic discussions, in the hope that with the right plan, we can move from discussions, to full proposals, to concrete changes in our society that ensure capital works for the many, not the few.

Crimbo Drinks in the No 10s of the Commonwealth

H/T: Harry.

Post-Human Capitalism And Revolution: Detroit And Blade Runner 2049

The cyberpunk of the late 20th century was not just fiction nor just a response to late capitalism, but hidden within cyberpunk lies dormant political theory for the present and the future — leading the late Mark Fisher to call cyberpunk ‘cybernetic theory-fiction’. The 2017 film Blade Runner 2049 and the 2018 videogame Detroit: Become Human are perfect examples of how fiction and politics morph with the shifting dominant ideology, both showing the beginnings of a robot revolution from the antagonistic perspectives of robot laborers, robot/human police and post-human capitalism. Both give us a glimpse of how a 21st century revolution could unfold in the United States.

In Blade Runner 2049 and Detroit, the future is a world in transition to post-human capitalism. But the automated laborers aren’t formless factory machines, they’ve essentially become human while the humans have become disposed machines. The question then arises: where do the robot laborers stand in relation to the Marxist tradition? In his essay on Blade Runner 2049, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek asks, ‘if fabricated androids work, is exploitation still operative here?’ Is their work ‘appropriated by their owners as surplus-value?’1

Post-human capitalism is a contradictory dystopia. If production is fully automated then who can afford to consume what is produced? If production increases while employment decreases then, as Marx put it (although in a different context), “the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.” He adds, “without consumption there would be no production.” 2 The post-human capitalist solution is to make robots consumers.

Become Human: A Subject for the Object

The foundational problem in robot/replicant/android fiction is always the question of when do robots become conscious subjects? When is this threshold crossed? When it comes to posing this question in the late capitalist dystopias of cyberpunk, the answer might be found in Marx. In Samo Tomsic’s book The Capitalist Unconscious, the philosopher argues that Marx’s theory of the subject can be found in Grundrisse when Marx claimed that ‘[p]roduction not only supplies a material to the need, but it also supplies a need for the material…’ Therefore, ‘[p]roduction thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.’3 To read this in terms of post-human capitalism and cybernetic theory-fiction is to uncover a theoretical framework in which an android subject can emerge, potentially breaking the constraints of dead labor by becoming part of it — a replicant or android being first produced as an object in a factory then becoming a subject who produces and consumes.

In Blade Runner 2049, the main character K is a perfect example of a producing/consuming subject. In a crowded, climate change-ravaged Los Angeles, K goes home to his small apartment, is paid bonuses, owns a hologram whom he develops a relationship with, buys an upgrade for her to travel with him, he turns down sexual advances from his boss, etc. K, as a replicant, is first an object produced in a factory. For Marx, K becomes a subject under capitalism as a laborer (whose surplus value is appropriated, in K’s case by the LAPD) and then as a consumer of goods that transcend the basic need of survival — becoming a desiring, enjoying subject. Production, for Marx, is therefore not only a process that produces commodities (objects), but also one that creates subjects (humans/potentially posthumans, although alienated) to consume and enjoy those objects.

This is echoed later by theorists like Delueze/Guattari, Judith Butler and Mark Fisher with Fisher claiming that ‘the fact that human beings are involved in the reproduction – or replication – of machines does not mean that they lack a reproductive system: on the contrary, human beings form part of such a system.’4 This reproductive system is production, both in a literal sense (humans are involved in the production process of replicants) and in a theoretical/economic sense (producing objects also implies and creates a subject to consume them).

Blade Runner 2049 displays the human forces involved with the production of replicants under the Wallace Corporation, but when self-reproduction is introduced (‘to be born is to have a soul’), a split takes place between police (the LAPD) and capital (the Wallace Corporation). This, paired with replicants and androids becoming subjects/deviants, is the antagonism that leads to revolution.

The Revolution of Doubt

DO READ more @Neondystopia.

The CIA Plot to Eliminate Julian Assange

Dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot. Cosmic Secret. For All Eyes. DISPERSE FAR AND WIDE:

H/T: Farmer's Letters.

More Dispatches from a Dystopian Ingelish Xmas

The taxman sent me a letter for "Amount due of £xxx". Subsequent investigation by us showed they were actually right because apparently we hadn't payed a tax contribution for an employee for Aug 2021. I hold my hand up, all this crap is done from a small smart phone and it was probably a case of not having tapped the last button, so no biggie.

The letter mentioned the possibility of spread-out payments, a form of Covid relief I guess...

So in these uncertain times and not knowing where the next pound is gonna come from I decided to try and use this 'opportunity'. The number 0564 456 76567, printed on the letter, was called.

Several menus and bad mood music (this would have bee better suited)^* later I got to the inevitable AI interrogation:

t'Computer: 'Blah blah'

Me: 'F*ck off, you Capitalist pigs!'

t'Computer: 'Failure to comply can result in a fine or imprisonment'.

Glad to hear HMRC haven't completely lost their touch then!

Of course the above exchange is entirely fictitional. Instead, something more surreal but also irrelevant took place and it wasn't worth remembering.

t'Computer then decided it couldn't compute my immensely complex problem and advised to call... 0564 456 76567! No kiddin'!

So I'll call t'number, AGAIN. Thanks HMRC, much obliged!

Of course if The Machine is no longer able to extract monies from The Little people it may soon come to a grinding halt.

---

^*One Hundred Years (The Cure)

It doesn't matter if we all die

Ambition in the back of a black car

In a high building there is so much to do

Going home time

A story on the radio

Something small falls out of your mouth

And we laugh

A prayer for something better

A prayer

For something better

---

Due to Sausage Fingers Syndrome, I use Google's AI voice recognition (AIVR) for searches on my 'smart' phone. Yesterday I dictated 'facebook duchess scarborough' (I run a pub in Scarborough) and Google transcribed it into:

facebook scarborough bastards

Thanks, google!

The Execution of Julian Assange

Let us name Julian Assange’s executioners. Joe Biden. Boris Johnson. Scott Morrison. Teresa May. Lenin Moreno. Donald Trump. Barack Obama. Mike Pompeo. Hillary Clinton. Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett and Justice Timothy Victor Holroyde. Crown Prosecutors James Lewis, Clair Dobbin and Joel Smith. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia Gordon Kromberg. William Burns, the director of the CIA. Ken McCallum, the Director General of the UK Security Service or MI5.

Let us acknowledge that the goal of these executioners, who discussed kidnapping and assassinating Assange, has always been his annihilation. That Assange, who is in precarious physical and psychological health and who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings on October 27, has been condemned to death should not come as a surprise. The ten years he has been detained, seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly three in the high security Belmarsh prison, were accompanied with a lack of sunlight and exercise and unrelenting threats, pressure, anxiety and stress. “His eyes were out of sync, his right eyelid would not close, his memory was blurry,” his fiancé Stella Morris said of the stroke.

His steady physical and psychological deterioration has led to hallucinations and depression. He takes antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine. He has been observed pacing his cell until he collapses, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall. He has spent weeks in the medical wing of Belmarsh. Prison authorities found “half of a razor blade” hidden under his socks. He has repeatedly called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day.” The executioners have not yet completed their grim work. Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Haitian independence movement, the only successful slave revolt in human history, was physically destroyed in the same manner, locked by the French in an unheated and cramped prison cell and left to die of exhaustion, malnutrition, apoplexy, pneumonia and probably tuberculosis.

Assange committed empire’s greatest sin. He exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, callous disregard for human life, rampant corruption and innumerable war crimes. Republican or Democrat. Conservative or Labour. Trump or Biden. It does not matter. The goons who oversee the empire sing from the same Satanic songbook. Empires always kill those who inflict deep and serious wounds. Rome’s long persecution of the Carthaginian general Hannibal, forcing him in the end to commit suicide, and the razing of Carthage repeats itself in epic after epic. Crazy Horse. Patrice Lumumba. Malcolm X. Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Sukarno. Ngo Dinh Diem. Fred Hampton. Salvador Allende. If you cannot be bought off, if you will not be intimidated into silence, you will be killed. The obsessive CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, which because none succeeded have a Keystone Cop incompetence to them, included contracting Momo Salvatore Giancana, Al Capone’s successor in Chicago, along with Miami mobster Santo Trafficante to kill the Cuban leader, attempting to poison Castro’s cigars with a botulinum toxin, providing Castro with a tubercle bacilli-infected scuba-diving suit, booby-trapping a conch shell on the sea floor where he often dived, slipping botulism-toxin pills in one of Castro’s drinks and using a pen outfitted with a hypodermic needle to poison him.

The current cabal of assassins hide behind a judicial burlesque overseen in London by portly judges in gowns and white horse-hair wigs mouthing legal Alice-in-Wonderland absurdities. It is a dark reprise of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado with the Lord High Executioner drawing up lists of people “who would not be missed.”

I watched the latest installment of the Assange show trial via video link on Friday. I listened to the reading of the ruling granting the appeal by the United States to extradite Assange. Assange’s lawyers have two weeks to appeal to the Supreme Court, which they are expected to do. I am not optimistic.

Friday’s ruling was devoid of legal analysis. It fully accepted the conclusions of the lower court judge about increased risk of suicide and inhumane prison conditions in the United States. But the ruling argued that US Diplomatic Note no. 74, given to the court on February 5, 2021, which offered “assurances” that Assange would be well treated, overrode the lower court’s conclusions. It was a remarkable legal non sequitur. The ruling would not have gotten a passing grade in a first-semester law school course. But legal erudition is not the point. The judicial railroading of Assange, which has eviscerated one legal norm after another, has turned, as Franz Kafka wrote, “lying into a universal principle.”

The decision to grant the extradition was based on four “assurances” given to the court by the US government. The two-judge appellate panel ruled that the “assurances” “entirely answer the concerns which caused the judge [in the lower court] to discharge Mr. Assange.” The “assurances” promise that Assange will not be subject to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) which keep prisoners in extreme isolation and allow the government to monitor conversations with lawyers, eviscerating attorney-client privilege; can, if the Australian his government agrees, serve out his sentence there; will receive adequate clinical and psychological care; and, pre-trial and post trial, will not be held in the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado.

“There is no reason why this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say,” the judges wrote. “There is no basis for assuming that the USA has not given the assurances in good faith.”

And with these rhetorical feints the judges signed Assange’s death warrant.

None of the “assurances” offered by Biden’s Department of Justice are worth the paper they are written on. All come with escape clauses. None are legally binding. Should Assange do “something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX” he will be subject to these coercive measures. And you can be assured that any incident, no matter how trivial, will be used, if Assange is extradited, as an excuse to toss him into the mouth of the dragon. Should Australia, which has marched in lockstep with the US in the persecution of their citizen not agree to his transfer, he will remain for the rest of his life in a US prison. But so what. If Australia does not request a transfer it “cannot be a cause for criticism of the USA, or a reason for regarding the assurances as inadequate to meet the judge’s concerns,” the ruling read. And even if that were not the case, it would take Assange ten to fifteen years to appeal his sentence up to the Supreme Court, more than enough time for the state assassins to finish him off. I am not sure how to respond to assurance number four, stating that Assange will not be held pre-trial in the ADX in Florence. No one is held pre-trail in ADX Florence. But it sounds reassuring, so I guess those in the Biden DOJ who crafted the diplomatic note added it. ADX Florence, of course, is not the only supermax prison in the United States that might house Assange. Assange can be shipped out to one of our other Guantanamo-like facilities. Daniel Hale, the former US Air Force intelligence analyst currently imprisoned for releasing top-secret documents that exposed widespread civilian casualties caused by US drone strikes, has been held at USP Marion, a federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, in a Communications Management Unit (CMU) since October. CMUs are highly restrictive units that replicate the near total isolation imposed by SAMs.

The High Court ruling ironically came as Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced at the virtual Summit for Democracy that the Biden administration will provide new funding to protect reporters targeted because of their work and support independent international journalism. Blinken’s “assurances” that the Biden administration will defend a free press, at the very moment the administration was demanding Assange’s extradition, is a glaring example of the rank hypocrisy and mendacity that makes the Democrats, as Glen Ford used to say, “not the lesser evil, but the more effective evil.”

Assange is charged in the US under 17 counts of the Espionage Act and one count of hacking into a government computer. The charges could see him sentenced to 175 years in prison, even though he is not a US citizen and WikiLeaks is not a US-based publication. If found guilty it will effectively criminalize the investigative work of all journalists and publishers, anywhere in the world and of any nationality, who possess classified documents to shine a light on the inner workings of power. This mortal assault on the press will have been orchestrated, we must not forget, by a Democratic administration. It will set a legal precedent that will delight other totalitarian regimes and autocrats who, emboldened by the United States, will gleefully seize journalists and publishers, no matter where they are located, who publish inconvenient truths.

There is no legal basis to hold Julian in prison. There is no legal basis to try him, a foreign national, under the Espionage Act. The CIA spied on Assange in the Ecuador Embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Assange and his lawyers. This fact alone invalidates any future trial. Assange, who after seven years in a cramped room without sunlight in the embassy, has been held for nearly three years in a high-security prison in London so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, has testified, continue the unrelenting abuse and torture it knows will lead to his psychological and physical disintegration. The persecution of Assange is designed to send a message to anyone who might consider exposing the corruption, dishonesty and depravity that defines the black heart of our global elites.

Dean Yates can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. He was the Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad on the morning of July 12, 2007 when his Iraqi colleagues Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed, along with nine other men, by US Army Apache gunships. Two children were seriously wounded. The US government spent three years lying to Yates, Reuters and the rest of the world about the killings, although the army had video evidence of the massacre taken by the Apaches during the attack. The video, known as the Collateral Murder video, was leaked in 2010 by Chelsea Manning to Assange. It, for the first time, proved that those killed were not engaged, as the army had repeatedly insisted, in a firefight. It exposed the lies spun by the US that it could not locate the video footage and had never attempted to cover up the killings.

The Spanish courts can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. Spain was given an assurance that David Mendoza Herrarte, if extradited to the US to face trial for drug trafficking charges, could serve his prison sentence in Spain. But for six years the Department of Justice repeatedly refused Spanish transfer requests, only relenting when the Spanish Supreme Court intervened.

The people in Afghanistan can tell you what U.S “assurances” are worth. US military, intelligence and diplomatic officials knew for 18 years that the war in Afghanistan was a quagmire yet publicly stated, over and over, that the military intervention was making steady progress.

The people in Iraq can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. They were invaded and subject to a brutal war based on fabricated evidence about weapons of mass destruction.

The people of Iran can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. The United States, in the 1981 Algiers Accords, promised not to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs and then funded and backed The People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), a terrorist group, based in Iraq and dedicated to overthrowing the Iranian regime.

The thousands of people tortured in US global black sites can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. CIA officers, when questioned about the widespread use of torture by the Senate Intelligence Committee, secretly destroyed videotapes of torture interrogations while insisting there was no “destruction of evidence.”

The numbers of treaties, agreements, deals, promises and “assurances” made by the US around the globe and violated are too numerous to list. Hundreds of treaties signed with Native American tribes, alone, were ignored by the US government.

Assange, at tremendous personal cost, warned us. He gave us the truth. The ruling class is crucifying him for this truth. With his crucifixion, the dim lights of our democracy go dark.

The fabulous Chris Hedges.

Dispatches from a Dystopian Ingelish Xmas

It's beginning to look a lot like a Victorian dystopian Christmas!

Googling for the phone number of Sycamore House (my local NHS health facility) it turned out the number on their website is wrong (as it was three weeks ago!), so their answer thingy told me to call 01578 5838 13428. A MEDICAL FACILITY, fer Chrissake!

I needed to check the hour of my appointment with Quay Gardens (a mental health facility near me, yeah, you've guessed: all this is driving me bonkers!), so I looked it up on that Google. Strange: no phone number on their contact page?!?

So I called Sycamore House and 5 menus and half a symphony later a nice lady gave me the number 0954 35757 475.

So I called 0954 35757 475:

Tuuut... tuuut... tuuut... [normal ringtone, then:] tut.tut.tut...Krsssshh.... (dead)

Try again:

Tuuut... tuuut... tuuut... [normal ringtone, then:] tut.tut.tut...Krsssshh.... (dead)

So Quay Gardens (a NHS mental health facility) are self-sabotaging their own telephone system, presumably because of Covid/Omicron/G-d only knows...

---

And the rot may not be limited to the public sector.

I've banked with NATWEST for over 20 years, had a mortgage, 2 business accounts and a hefty business loan with them.

Now I wanted to apply for another business account, primarily to take advantage of their advertised business account overdraft.

So email address and created PW at hand, I applied.

Funnily enough, apart from one 'verify your email address' style response I got nothing.

Now every time I visit that site it tells me I'm logged out and 'please login'. Doing so then leads to nowhere.

A Natwest Business Account application 'in progress' [COUGH...]

NATWEST doesn't accept applications anymore and fails to tell (potential and actual, like me) customers about that. Strange for a Company that informs their entire G-ddamn customer base when their CEO has parted with a small fart!

They have of course form in that department. At the time of the 1st Lockdown(TM) a businessman appeared on the Beeb. He had opened a Business Account with cards and everthang, only to find two days later they'd cancelled his account and card and not a nairy peep from NW, like a text message or somfink! That business crashed into the floor before it had learned to even glide...

And the reason for all of this? NW fearing to be inundated with bounce-back-loan requests! So much for the 'Bank of small business!'...

And oh and wait. While I went inbranch asking (vaingloriously of course) about a NW business account and as the Droid said the magic words 'apply online', she gave me a card of the 'BUSINESS TEAM AND CLUBS AND SOCIETIES' (huh?) with a number, which I'll call. If the word 'online' is muttered by anyone but me I'll SCREAM!

Note: for privacy reasons names and phone numbers have been changed (except for NW because it's in the public sphere)

G-d is a Psychopath...

My childhood friend Bert, whom I haven't seen now in more than 35 years, started developing mental health problems some 30 years ago. He struggled with depression, anxiety and psychotic episodes to boot, to date.

About 10 years ago, he also contracted Parkinson's Disease, which became progressively worse and worse, up to the point where he basically couldn't do anything anymore.

Recently things took another turn for the worse (is that really possible?) and he's now in hospital, since 8 weeks ago. Nothing works anymore except for his beating heart. We all 'pray' for a Merciful and speedy demise.

Bert's wife Elaina and his mother Sammy deserve more than a mere mention here, two very strong women who are doggedly and lovingly looking after Bert. Elaina also has to contend with two parents that are developing dementia...

I can only wish a speedy 'RIP, Bert' for him and his amazing family.

When I knew him for some 12 years a nicer, more soft-spoken person than Bert would have been to find but it appears they always 'get to the nice ones first'.

---

A few days ago, Bert finally passed away. Thanks whoever.

Picture above: courtesy Wiki.

Note that the names of the people in this real life story have been changed for privacy reasons.

Bragg Diffraction by synthetic Opal of a pen-style 650 nm red Laser (Part II)

In Part I of this investigation into laser-based Bragg diffraction the synthetic Opal cube showed strong Bragg diffraction, using a 650 nm laser.

In Part II I'll attempt to measure the characteristic d value.

Immediately a problem becomes apparent:

In the schematic, θ is the angle of incidence and α' ('alpha prime') the angle between the purple line and the 'pseudo-crystal's' centre line (green). That blue line represents the orientation of the molecular planes (against which diffraction takes place). Without a value for α' it is impossible to determine α and β and thus d (recall the Bragg condition here.

One solution (among others) is to orient the cube so that:

and:

α = β = π/2

In that case there's no diffraction ('zero order diffraction'), only non-interactive reflection and the angle α' is bound by:

α' + θ = π/2

This however is easier said than done: at high angles of incidence the diffracted ray becomes weak (because travelling distance and thus absorption become high?) Furthermore, suspected higher order diffraction (n > 1) and/or unwanted internal refections make it hard to discern signal from noise.

To avoid this it was decided to determine the critical angle θ_c by means of correlation and subsequent extrapolation. 4 data points, each with a duplicate, were generated as below. The angles were determined with a small protractor (goniometer) and by simple Pythagorean trigonometry. The raw data were:

Correlation of the data:

I'm no longer a student or an 'institutionalised' scientist so don't have access to near-automated ANOVA but the data as well as intuition prompted me to believe the (slightly) quadratic model is the preferred one here, which yields:

γ = 0.04916 + 1.658 θ + 0.8458 θ²

Solved for γ = π/2 we then obtain θ_c:

θ_c = 0.681

and with:

α' = π/2 - θ_c = 0.8898 (51.0 deg)

This value of 51.0 deg 'feels' right and seems in accordance with some preliminary estimates (not reported here). But caution needs to be sounded, as the value is an extrapolated one, not a directly measured value.

(The meaning of γ should be clear from the diagram below:)

Determination of d:

Using the diagram for γ (above) another additional 5 data points, using the schematic below, were generated:

Measurable angles were determined by Pythagorean trigonometry and the angles α and β with some angle algebra. A total of 13 data points where thus obtained and processed (including the 8 previously obtained points):

Which gives me an average μ = 404 nm +/- 40.2 (95 % confidence)

While there's considerable spread on the results, one has to bear in mind the experiment was executed on a dining room table, with a mini protactor, some blue tack, a tape measure and two pen-type lasers.

Testing the model's predictive power:

Next week I'll test the model with 2 other lasers because:

sin β = n λ / d - sin α

Here's the result for 3 data points with the 532 nm green laser:

So the predictions for d = 404 nm aren't perfect but they're not bad either.

Here's the set up again:

The experiment specifically with the green laser also solved another mystery: where are these other diffractions that can be expected from a number of almost random micro-globule planes? Well, with the green laser, which is much more powerful (a range of a couple of kilometer) than the red and purple pen-lasers, they reveal themselves (more about that later) clearly (potentially, it the completest darkness, the red laser would also work to show the additional diffractions)

Here's the result for 3 data points with the 432 nm purple laser:

Although the predictions with the 432 nm laser are slightly less good, the trend prediction is still there.

Overall conclusions so far:

1. This synthetic Opal cube shows clear and strong Bragg diffraction for an inter-molecular plane with d = 404 nm, oriented at 51.0 deg w.r.t. the central line of symmetry of the cube.

2. Experiments with the powerful green laser (532 nm) shows multiple Bragg diffractions, corresponding to multiple intermolecular planes at various angles w.r.t. the central line of symmetry of the cube. This requires further investigation.

Henry Kissinger is a war criminal

Watch on youtube!

This Christmas, don’t try to fix your racist uncle who doesn’t believe in vaccines or climate change

Source: Grauniad, H/T Harry Feldman.

How religion turned american politics against science (Big Think)

Bragg Diffraction by synthetic Opal of a pen-style 650 nm red Laser (Part I)

Probing nature with pen-style VIS lasers

Introduction

Diffraction is one of the most frequently encountered physical phenomena in the human world. It is responsible, among other things, for us being able to shout (and hear) ‘around’ a corner and explains why radio and television signals reach every hook, nook and cranny of a city. Diffraction is also the underlying mechanism of the iridescent colours of soap bubbles and petrol on a puddle, as well as the rainbow effect of so-called 'Newton's rings'.

Teachers the world over, together with backyard scientists, have demonstrated the occurrence of diffraction using one-slit and two-slit diffraction, diffraction about a thin wire or through a pin-point hole, using cheap lasers in the VIS (visible) part of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum.

Here’s one of my one-slit experiments using a green pen-style laser (forgive the crappy wall paper used as background):

The laser's green light's wavelength here was 532 nm and the slit width about 30 micron (in the order of magnitude of a human hair)

The lighter areas show up where positive interference occurs, the darker ones where negative interference is found.

X-ray diffraction (XRD) – Bragg diffraction

Scientifically XRD has been used to probe the internal, atomic structure of materials like NaCl (table salt), crystalline DNA and minerals to name but a very, very few. The X-ray part of the EM stretches from wavelengths of 10 pm (‘hard’ X-rays) to 10 nm (‘soft’) X-rays). This is highly relevant because as an order of magnitude this corresponds approximately with significant length scales inside of said crystalline materials.

XRD basically works like this:

The horizontal black lines represent crystal planes (linear planar alignments of actual atoms inside the crystal under investigation). The inclined blue lines represent incident and diffracted X-rays, and α and β the angles of incidence and diffraction, respectively. It can then be shown that the formula at the bottom of the figure correctly predicts the values of α and β for which positive interference occurs. This manifests itself in a lighter area in the ‘detector’, e.g. a camera.

In the formula, aka the Bragg Condition, λ is the wavelength of the monochromatic) X-rays, d is the distance between the atomic planes in the crystal and n is an integer (1,2,3…, aka the 'order' of diffraction)

Clearly, with a suitable experimental set up, this opens up the exciting possibility of determining d (QED the case of DNA, Watson and Crick) and thus the crystalline structure of a material.

Note that in a real crystal, there are many possible sets of atomic planes where diffraction can occur, leading to complex diffraction patterns that can only be 'disentangled' by means of advanced math. Again, QED the case of DNA. Below a representation of a few planes (thick blue lines) in a 2 D cubic lattice (thin black lines, the nodes are atoms):

This type of so-called X-ray diffraction crystallography was discovered by a father and son team by the name of Bragg (in 1913)

Bragg diffraction using VIS light?

Would it be possible to apply the Bragg principle using VIS EM, using cheap pen-type lasers? In principle ‘yes’ but the Bragg condition shows such a material would have to possess “d-values” in the order of magnitude of the wavelength of the visible light which is approximately 400 to 800 nm (much larger than X-rays’ 10 pm to 10 nm range)

a. Construction of a 'pseudo-crystal' lattice using thin and transparent films:

Using various film substrates like cellophane, polypropylene/polyethylene, kitchen cling film and microscope slides, various ‘stacks’ were constructed and tested for diffraction using the red laser. While weak diffraction was obtained, it was not measurable. The thinnest film was about 50000 nm thick and most films weren’t transparent enough when stacked to about 0.5 mm thicknesses.

b. Iridescent ‘Merry Christmas’ banner:

Next up, a suggestion by ‘farcher’ at the physics.stackexchange.com/ website (of which I am a proud member): ‘Merry Christmas’ style banner film. Below a photo of a piece of film I cut off:

The material shows strong surface (reflective) VIS diffraction, which produces that very attractive shimmering colours effect. This material looks very different depending of the angle of visible light incidence.

The film is very, very thin and somewhat see through.

This led to the first successful VIS Bragg diffraction experiment of mine, using a purple laser of 432 nm wavelength, by shining it through the film and projecting the result onto a white paper 'detector':

The diffraction pattern, the dozen or so points arranged on a circle (approximately), are positive interference points, resulting from diffraction by internal atomic/molecular planes.

But the material is highly anisotropic and moving the incident laser a little, changes or destroys the observed pattern. This makes it unsuitable for any quantitative analysis. But we can be sure the “d values” are in the order of magnitude of 400 to 800 nm.

The diffraction here is caused by superthin 'confetti', dispersed throughout the resin matrix of the film. Varying orientations of the confetti then explains the unusual iridescence.

c. Synthetic Opal as a ’pseudo-crystal':

Here is a stock photo of a synthetic Opal cube, which I then purchased:

The iridescent colours of white (non-monochromatic) light is caused by Bragg-style diffraction (it is a truly beautiful - and cheap - object) I believe my purchase is a so-called Gilson-type synthetic Opal.

A simple experiment using the red (obviously monochromatic) laser showed very strong, consistent and clear diffraction. It’s so evident that the cube could be used as a beam splitter: much of the laser beam travels unimpeded through the 'crystal' but another part is strongly diffracted (about 45 degs) to the left:

Here is a (clearer) schematic:

It is well-documented that Opal is made up of semi-hydrated silica micro-globules, organised into planes. The structure thus mimicks real crystalline materials like NaCl but with much larger values of d, making it susceptible to diffraction with VIS EM radiation (light)

Below a micrograph of natural Opal (unfortunately no scale or reference was provided) Globules of semi-hydrated silica form sheets (planes) which provide diffraction:

In Part II I will set out to quantitatively determine the d-value.

And here's a beautiful video on the history of X-ray crystallography (H/T Farmer John: