AfterMath

Remember the Trump-worshiping January 6, 2021 "Shaman"? He's going to get millions of our tax dollars for being a criminal.

President Trump is establishing a $1.8 billion "compensation fund" for the 1,600 rioters and fake electors who were either charged, convicted, imprisoned or accused of criminal activity as a result of the January 6, 2021 Capitol Building attack. This means that thousands to millions of dollars will be paid to these miscreants by the American taxpayer (me included) for their treasonous acts. Trump has already pardoned all those responsible for the attack, despite the fact that it directly resulted in several deaths and numerous injuries, millions in property damage and a death blow to what we all thought was impossible in America.

Taking the next logical step, it means that individuals and groups (including former President Biden, MS Now and CNN) who worked to bring justice against the January 6 cabal could now be legally liable for their actions and political views regarding the attack.

Trump has also declared himself immune from tax audits, following decades of refusing to make public his tax filings and charitable donations as all presidents before him had done. Taking the next logical step, Trump will declare himself free not only from paying all taxes, but will try to find a way to make himself immortal.

I recall an old Simpsons episode in which the antisocial billionaire J. Montgomery Burns underwent annual infusions of drugs to immunize himself against death. I also recall a 1960s television series in which a man, whose rare blood type made him immortal, was chased every week by a wealthy pursuer intent on imprisoning him and making him his personal blood donor.

Trump will turn 80 next month, and while he may immunize himself against taxes he will certainly die, and stand before a very stern Judge.

Today, noted Harvard physicist "Lisa Randall" reports on why some physicists seem to be abandoning quantum mechanics. I put her name in quotes, because I believe that in the following video she is an AI-generated avatar. But I generally believe what the video has to say.

Another noted physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, has also turned away from conventional quantum mechanics (QM), saying that we need to focus instead on its foundations. She implies that "It's mathematically sound, but does it reflect reality?" That's pretty much what this video is getting into.

To summarize, "Randall" says that some physicists believe "QM is an unnecessary complication." This is paraphrasing what a group of MIT physicists are reporting in a recent paper, in which they claim that classical physics can solve the Schrödinger equation using the classical notion of least action. But it does not explain why in the conventional view of QM (the Copenhagen interpretation) the wave function of a quantum state collapses instantaneously upon observation. If true, then wave function collapse is a dynamical process, yet no one knows what that process is or how it can be described mathematically.

Perhaps, as "Randall" implies in the video, the role of human observers and consciousness itself is a quantum phenomenon, and reality as we believe it to be is meaningness without observers. As Einstein himself once asked, "Does the moon exist if it is not observed?" and "Can a mouse or a microorganism collapse a wave function?"

While I hate to think that all the years I've spent trying to comprehend QM may have been a colossal waste of time, it's fascinating to think that there may be a better and simpler explanation of reality.

Let's take a walk ... but avoid the sand trap!

It seems that every old movie I've ever loved is coming out in Blu-Ray and 4K, but having spent much of my capital on DVDs 25 years ago I can't afford to upgrade. Now there's a 4K version of 1953's Invaders from Mars, a long-time favorite of mine, which I saw on TV maybe around 1957. The film was directed by noted production designer William Cameron Menzies, a giant in the movie industry.

As a kid, the movie impressed me about the possibilities of atomic-powered rockets (which I now know are impossible) and the likelihood of intelligent life on Mars. But that creepy Martian in the glass bubble (played by Mexican actress Luce Potter) and the idea of being remotely controlled by bioelectronic brain implants scared the crap out of me. What still impresses me today is the film's surreal, eerie music composed by Raoul Kraushaar, still buried deep in my brain now for some 70 years.

True, the movie's scientific aspects are way out of date (some even silly), and the special effects crude by today's standards, but watching it again this morning brought back a flood of memories.

Today we know that Mars had rivers and lakes of water and a thicker atmosphere than it has today, and life of some kind most likely did exist. But Mars lost its magnetic field millions of years ago, allowing the solar wind to strip it all away while bathing the planet in deadly radiation. The film's idea of its inhabitants moving underground is very plausible, which—if we humans are stupid enough to think we could ever live there—is the only safe place to be.

In classical and quantum electrodynamics the effect of a change in an electric charge (its position, momentum, acceleration, etc.) on a nearby observer cannot be measured instantaneously because the effect's speed is limited by the velocity of light. This is also related to the well-known principle of causality, which states that events cannot occur before their causes. It might be nice if your bedroom light would come on before you turn on the light switch, but it just doesn't work that way.

In electrodynamics causality is preserved in what is called the retarded potential, which ensures that an electric effect occurs after the cause. But there's also its evil twin, the advanced potential, which violates causality but is mathematically and even physically perfectly allowed. The noted Caltech Nobel physicist Richard Feynman and his university advisor John Wheeler studied this possibility, coming up with Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, which in brief implies that an observer or "absorber" of an electromagnetic effect can send a message of the effect backward in time via advanced potentials. (I studied this many years ago, but all I can remember is how amazing it sounded.)

Now there's a new report saying that physicists can send messages into the past without violating Einstein's general relativity theory. It has nothing to do with electrodynamics, but with something called closed time-like loops in spacetime. I don't understand it, so I won't pretend that I can explain it. Still, it too is amazing (if true).

I could swear that many years ago I read an article somewhere reporting that the U.S. Department of Defense (now sadly called the Department of War), had commissioned scientists to see if an atomic bomb could be exploded in the past. I've never be able to verify seeing the article, but given the state of America's lust for war today I wouldn't be surprised if they're researching it now. (Please watch this related video.)

I spent some time today wondering if there isn't a more accurate way to determine Newton's gravitational constant \(G\) than the almost standard Cavendish torsion balance approach. I thought of masses suspended by springs, suspended masses brought close together horizonally, etc., only to discover that just about everything has been thought of way before my time and by much smarter people.

So, for the purpose of bringing this subject to a close, here's a link to a comprehensive recent paper describing the various ways in which the determination of \(G\) has been tried, going all the way back to Cavendish in 1798 (whose measurement was actually pretty darned accurate).

That's the title of the very first Twilight Zone episode from the original 1960s version, in which a man finds himself in a vacant town totally devoid of other people or living creatures. Unable to make contact either by shouting or using functionless telephone booths, he eventually learns to his horror exactly where he is.

Here is a new video presentation by the noted Harvard physicist Lisa Randall on what is known as the "Fermi Paradox," which questions why modern humans have not detected any verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations, be it radio waves or actual, verifiable visitations by alien probes or advanced entities here on Earth. [I strongly suspect that it is Randall's voice in the video, but that her appearance is AI generated. You decide.]

My one and only contact with Randall was when she came to Caltech to talk about "heirarchical black holes," but she had also just published her new book "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs." I had read and admired her earlier book "Warped Passages," but I'm afraid I offended her when I told her I didn't like her new book, which seemed preposterous to me. "Well," she said, "I can't please everyone."

Anyway, this new video talks about several reasons why intelligent extraterrestrial beings have not contacted us. One reason is that that they are aware of our violent nature and have chosen to remain incognito. Another has to do with the "Great Filter," a hypothetical circumstance or point in time in which intelligent civilizations routinely self-destruct for whatever reason. Randall reasons that humans may not have reached that point yet, so we still exist, but that we—as countless extragalactic civilizations have experienced before us—are yet to encounter it and will be destroyed. Conversely, Randall adds, perhaps we've already survived the Great Filter, allowing us to move on.

But Randall posits one other viable possibility that she calls the "Dark Force," which has to do with the extreme will of any technologically advanced species to survive at all costs. If it encounters another species, whether friendly or foe, the species' best alternative is to destroy it (if it can), or to avoid it by hiding from it and moving on to other galactic or extragalactic regions in the universe.

[I also strongly suspect that the recent release of UFO files by the Department of Defense (or the Department of War, as Trump calls it) is nothing more than a distraction designed to make us forget the Epstein Scandal. People, there are no aliens, so stop wasting your time ruminating on them.]

Meanwhile, I've been binge-watching the 2015 HBO series Westworld again, which I find prescient and prophetic given the modern AI world we find outselves in today and where it's likely headed. The extreme disconnect between human haves and have-nots, coupled with the preposterous greed, ego, power and money of multibillionaire tech and political leaders, calls to my mind Westworld's corporate dreams of making unaccountable violence, murder, rape and mass killing available in a digital paradise where rich vacationers can go to indulge their sick and immoral fantasies without consequence. This is already being done on a relatively tiny scale in which morally sick men can download, watch and even create AI videos of women and children being sexually abused, tortured and murdered.

Is this the destiny of AI, whose only purpose will be to gratify our basest desires? God help us.

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President Trump has erected a 22-foot-high golden statue of himself at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, replete with raised fist reminiscent of his stance during his possibly-staged assassination attempt last year. This has prompted accusations of Trump promoting himself as God and recalling Christ's admonitions of the "abomination of desolation" He mentions in Matthew 24:15 and Mark 13:14. But during the unveiling ceremony, invited "Christian" pastors didn't bat an eye while profusely praising and adoring Trump.

Who'd a thunk that American "Christians" would not only fail to recognize the Antichrist when he finally arrived, but would actually worship him instead?

America, you disgust me.

"Once is happenstance, and twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action." — Auric Goldfinger

The motility of many bacteria is provided by whip-like, flaggellar strands powered by rotating "motors" constructed of highly-organized bundles of peptides and proteins. The precise organization of these bundles has been used for decades as evidence of an intelligent designer God. But given billions of years of evolution, these motors might have come about via natural selection.

The fact that the universe as we know it and that all life seems to be dependent on narrowly-constrained, finely-tuned physical constants has been argued about for many years. If constants such as the gravitational and fine-structure constants were a bit different, or if the fundamental electric charge varied by only a bit, the universe might never have come into existence, along with life as we know it. Indeed, fine tuning has been used by creationists as proof of the existence of God.

But there are two hitches in this argument that many physicists rountinely use to discount an intelligently-designed universe. One is the argument that it's just the way things came about, as improbable as that may seem, while the other focuses on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which posits that there is a superposition of distinct but disconnected universes that spin-off every time a measurement or observation is made in which two or more outcomes are possible. In the latter argument, the universe we live in just happens to be one of possibly infinite worlds in which the physical constants are just right. This is sometimes called the "jackpot" or "Goldilocks" theory, although I can't really see it as being much different than the first argument.

But now scientists at the University of Queen Mary in London have discovered a purely biological aspect of the fine tuning argument. It has to do with the viscosity of liquids, particularly blood, which affects not only its flow characteristics but the ability of cells to regulate the admittance and exploitation of water and nutrients. The original paper can be found here.

I tend to discount all these as evidence of God, and rely instead solely on the mathematical principle of least action. While it's possible (even if extremely improbable) that Nature as it is might have come about by chance, there is no such thing as chance when its comes to mathematics. Even in a universe with no life or organization whatsoever, mathematical principles would still apply, as would least action.

If you ever go to Kentucky, you might be tempted to visit creationist and Answers in Genesis founder Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Petersburg or his Ark Encounter in Williamstown. There you'll discover that Adam and Eve and their kids rode around on dinosaurs, a practice that was quite safe before the Fall of Man occurred. The Garden of Eden (said to be located near the ancient city of Ur in southeastern Iraq or, if you're a Mormon, in Jackson County, Missouri) had a full complement of both herbivorous (vegetarian) dinosaurs like the gigantic Diplodocus and even the enormous, seemingly-ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex, whose serrated 6-inch fangs came in handy for munching on dense tree foliage and cracking delicious coconuts. It was only after the Fall that theropod ("beast-foot") dinos like T. rex turned to killing and eating other dinosaurs.

And don't forget that Noah's Ark, made of a never-discovered type of wood called gopherwood in the Bible, housed all of God's creatures (including dinosaurs) while consisting of a box measuring 510 feet long, 85 feet wide and 51 feet high, complemented by a single square opening measuring 18 inches by 18 inches to allow for ventilation.

But for the animals in Eden and traveling on the Ark it's far more likely that God had slightly different plans:

It buggers the imagination to think how Noah kept the theropods and other meat-eaters away from all those fat, juicy herbivores during the Ark's long journey on the high seas. Perhaps God put them all in a state of miniaturized hibernation during the voyage so that oxygen, space and hunger weren't a problem.

It's no wonder that Kentucky is a deep-Red, Trump-supporting state, whose residents fully welcomed funneling their tax dollars into a creationist museum featuring kids riding on dinosaurs, or a full-size, $100 million replica of Noah's Ark. Seeing it in person must surely be calming their fears about impending poverty while struggling to stay afloat (no pun intended) in Trump's billionaire-take-all economy.

Fun Fact: The number of Mormons (Latter Day Saints) in the world (about 17.5-18 million) exceeds the number of Jews (about 15-16 million), despite the fact that Judaism is 4,000 years old while Mormonism is less that 200 years old. Great going, Mormons! Your fanciful lies about the Garden of Eden, the Book of Abraham, the Kinderhook Plates, the White Salamander, the inferiority of black people, the conquest of ancient immigrant Lamanites over the Nephites in early America and the great cities they built somewhere around here seem to have really caught on!

[I didn't mean this to be a rant. I just liked seeing Gary Larson's comic again, but I needed some context.]

Here's the senior high school graduation photo of a very pretty girl. I had a chance to meet her, and I'm so glad I didn't.

I was reminiscing today while writing in my personal journal about school friends I had many years ago who are now all long gone. One was Daniel M., who I battled with in elementary school for the highest grades. We hung out for several years, building electronic devices and dangerous chemical compounds together after school, even after he transferred to nearby Monrovia High School. I recall him telling me about a girl in his senior class that he had a crush on, whom he described as a "really wild babe." He was invited to a party she was attending, and Dan asked if I wanted to come along. I can't recall now why I didn't go.

That girl was Leslie Van Houten, one of the infamous Charles Manson cult members who brutally murdered actress Sharon Tate and others in 1969. Manson is now dead, while Van Houten and several fellow cult members served long life sentences in prison (Van Houten was paroled in 2023).

I've personally met and talked with numerous notable people, but I'll always wonder what I might have thought of this one. May God save her soul.

My erstwhile favorite physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, reports on a new theory of gravity that presumably explains the origin of the universe. Called Ultraviolet Completion of the Big Bang in Quadratic Gravity, in reality the theory is just a form of Weyl's 1918 conformal gravity theory combined with a massive spin-2 ghost field that arises from yet another Weyl idea, the square of the Weyl tensor \(C_{\,\,\mu\nu\alpha}^\lambda\).

Hossenfelder has taken to critiqueing her reports on new theories with a "BS Meter," which ranges from 0 (great theory) to 10 (pure BS). On this theory she gives it a rating of 2, which means she's pretty impressed with it.

She also notes that the trouble with Einstein's 1915 gravity theory, as far as its ability to be dragged kicking and screaming into quantum theory, is that the Newtonian gravitational constant \(G\) is dimensioned, not dimensionless (as are most of the coupling constants of quantum theory). Weyl's idea was to assume the square of the Ricci scalar \(R\) in his gravitational Lagrangian, so his theory did not require \(G\) at all, as the Lagrangian is dimensionless to begin with.

My only complaint is that the new theory (and others like it) is called "quadratic gravity," not Weyl gravity. It's becoming a popular idea because its non-dimensionality also makes it renormalizable to higher energy domains as demanded by quantum field theory.

Caveat: the paper cited by Hossenfelder is (with the exception of Equation 1) quite mathematical and difficult to follow.

It's nice to know that nearly all the fundamental constants of physics have been determined to a high degree of accuracy. They're routinely known to levels of parts per billion and, in the case of the electron magnetic moment, parts per trillion. But the most fundamental constant of physics, the gravitational constant \(G\), is far less precisely known. It's generally known with certainty to only several parts per ten thousand.

This is a consequence of the fact that the technology of measuring \(G\) dates back hundreds of years, to the relatively primitive torsion balance of Henry Cavendish, who in 1798 measured it to be about \( 6.74 \times 10^{-11}\) in standard units, very close to the modern estimate of about \(6.6743 \times 10^{-11}\). The precision of this estimate is still quite poor compared to the high precision of other fundamental constants. Pathetically, the torsion balance method is still the only one directly applicable to the \(G\) measurement.

Recently, the measurement was made with the best torsion balance developed to date. It provides a value of about \(6.67387 \times 10^{-11}\), but with significant uncertainty regarding the last two decimals. See this article for a detailed discussion of the problem.

It is interesting that Einstein's 1915 gravitational field equations depend heavily on the \(G\) factor, which is needed to balance the units associated with the energy- momentum tensor. Many theorists, including the great British mathematical physicist Paul Dirac, considered the possibility that \(G\) is not strictly a constant, but varies slowly with time. If true, then a precise knowledge of \(G\) isn't really necessary.

However, Einstein's equations are not conformally invariant, and in recent years theorists have turned to a variant of Einstein's gravity called pure \(R^2\) gravity, a concept that was first featured in Herman Weyl's 1918 modified gravity theory. Weyl's theory is automatically conformally invariant, and being dimensionless it does not require \(G\), nor even an associated energy-momentum tensor (presumably, the theory includes mass-energy as a purely geometrical quantity).

I've long admired Weyl's ideas, and while his 1918 theory failed it subsequently became a cornerstone in modern quantum field theory. Einstein himself professed the notion that his theory was only an approximation of the truth, and to me theories like \(R^2\) represent a step in that direction. I am hopeful that a variant of \(R^2\) will be able to answer the problem of dark matter and perhaps dark energy as well.

Trump posted this on his social media site, then reluctantly took it down following much criticism. He now believes he's God. Even his MAGA worshipers were upset, as polls show his approval rating with them slipped from 100% to just 99.999%.

While MAGA fully supports the Second Amendment, they have broken the Second Commandment — "You shall not bow down and worship false idols."

"Though the Heavens fall, let the truth be known." — William Murray, Lord Mansfield

I haven't subscribed to Large Man Abroad on YouTube, but I tend to agree with his views. Recently, Trump-appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi asserted that if all the elite sexual predators named in the Epstein files were to be prosecuted, the entire American societal, economic and governmental system would collapse. This video says "Then let it all collapse." With this, I fully agree.

Imagine that it did all collapse. Banks would fail, tens of millions of jobs would be lost, we'd likely lose electrical power and access to food and gasoline and other critical services. Elite zillionaires know this, and they rely on our subservience to their unjust power hold. But the system would eventually reestablish itself, hopefully without criminal elites and government officials again in charge.

Would Americans be willing to accept all this? They haven't so far, and look where things are today. As for me, I say burn it all down now and start over.

Update: Wow, I posted this just this morning and got five emails disagreeing with me, saying basically that America is a great country and whatever problems we have can be worked out in the polls and by holding those responsible for our problems accountable. My response: This is BULLS**T! Americans are too naive, undereducated and stupid to think that things can be turned around by voting. Trump and his criminal cabal will NEVER be held accountable because they have total power. This is not England where a Royal can be kicked out because of illegal sexual proclivities. This is AMERIKA, which has to be destroyed as it stands now and rebuilt by people possessing fundamental morals and strict adherence to the U.S. Constitution.

Kidnapping is a horrific crime, and we all abhor it, but all such cases are not the same. Which one of the following is involving many thousands of hours of police time, tens of millions of dollars for recovery of the victim, along with non-stop public attention, thoughts and prayers? Duh.

In high school I took a year of geometry. You know, the kind of geometry that presumes trigonometry doesn't exist. I got a D grade in both semesters. In my senior year I took Algebra II, only managing C grades. (SHE was in the latter classes as well, probably getting A's or B's, but perhaps I was distracted from Mr. Nickerson's otherwise excellent teaching abilities as a result.) But to tell the truth, I hated all four years of high school, having gone from a straight-A student in grade school and junior high to a mediocre C+ student. High school will do that to a person.

I never hated math, I just never cared about it when I was in high school. I had girls on my mind, although my near-pathological shyness prevented me from doing anything about it. But now I love math.

Recent surveys indicate that American students either hate math or just don't care about it. That's a pity, but it doesn't have to be that way. This new article from Big Think shows that you can love math, assuming you care about how the universe works. It also forever improves one's analytical thinking skills, helping to avoid stupid mistakes in life. Mathematics, like God, is eternal, true and unchangeable, and it is out always there, waiting to be discovered and utilized. (There are American evangelicals who think that God can make 1 + 1 = 5. That's nonsense, because it's not a matter of ability, just a matter of stupid thinking. It's like saying that President Trump is a good, moral and honest man. That's also nonsense, but unlike math ignorance it's dangerous as hell.)

Classic 2018 strip from Ruben Bolling, predicting the AI takeover via everything we own:

Tell me again about the rabbits, George. — Lenny, in Of Mice and Men

The hardest graduate physics classes I ever took were in electrodynamics. The textbook was Jackson's still-impenetrable Classical Electrodynamics (one of the earlier editions), and my grade was a "B" in both (not impressive, since in graduate school a B is considered a mediocre grade). I was motivated only because in 1918 Germany's Hermann Weyl tried to unify gravity and electromagnetism, and at the time I was intrigued with Weyl's ideas.

But one thing that stuck with me was the fact that the electric and magnetic fields \(E,\,B\) are not fundamental—only the scalar \(\Phi\) and the vector potential \(A_i\) are fundamental, from which \(E\) and \(B\) are derived. The trouble is, these fields are essentially undetectable, as if Nature were intent on hiding the real truth from us.

But in 1959 Aharonov and Bohm (A-B) believed these fields might be verified. They suggested a laboratory experiment which, in 1986, was conducted successfully by Akira Tonomura. It has been verified many times since then, although the underlying reality of the \(\Phi,\,A_i\) fields are still not well understood.

In 2014 I wrote a simple paper on the A-B effect while sitting in a public laundromat waiting for my washer and dryer to be delivered. It was based on Feynman's path integral idea, in which a particle going from A to B takes every possible path (even including going around the Andromeda Galaxy and back). Today, I can barely comprehend what I wrote, not doubt due to the effects of ageing.

Nature remains a mysterious bitch, and I can only hope that God will explain things to me should I survive judgment in the afterlife. But until then curious readers of my obscure site can watch this recent video by Veritasium, which tries to explain why electromagnetism has remained a great mystery for hundreds of years:

I liken God the Father to electric charge, eternal with no beginning and no end. I liken Christ the Son as the Light which is begotten from the Father. I liken the Holy Spirit with Magnetism, also begotten from the Father. All three are somehow connected with Maxwell's equations, which every physics student studies but little appreciates or comprehends. No wonder EM is so mysterious.

I've used the computer algebra/calculus program Mathematica since its DOS version came out in 1992. The programming is simple for basic stuff, but for advanced applications the necessary code can be intimidating. So I struggled with it off and on over the years, although since retirement it's been little more than a calculator for quick inquiries. I've long since forgotten how to program the more difficult stuff, but then I discovered ChatGPT, the free online artificial intelligence (AI) program that requires little more than a simple typed-in inquiry. Amazingly, ChatGPT responds with Mathematica code that I could never master. Best of all, it works perfectly, although sometimes it misunderstands exactly what it is that you want. (I recently revised a paper I wrote using Mathematica's curve-fitting capabilities.)

I now realize that AI will likely not become Skynet, the destroyer of the world from 1991's great Terminator 2: Judgment Day film. But I'm beginning to also realize that AI doesn't have to take over the world's nuclear launch codes to bring about the end of humanity—it only has to destroy our jobs, which it is already doing. With over 8.2 billion people on the planet today, employment is a basic human need. AI is now threatening to take over just about everything we do except gardening and janitorial work.

The online version of The Atlantic magazine has a lengthy new article that discusses the potential destruction of a large swath of the American workforce. You should read it—it quite accurately predicts the likely disastrous downside of a technology that has the potential to undo all of civilization.

The only detour I could make out of the article is "universal basic income" for people who cannot find work because of AI. But basic universal income means both living in a cardboard box on the sidewalk and bread and circuses to keep the masses of unemployed compliant and appeased by a government and the uber-wealthy who will undoubtedly control and profit handsomely from AI.

My civil service pension relies on contributions from workers. But if there are no workers, you can find me living in a cardboard box in the near future, if I'm still around. Yes, I know: "Poor Little Snowflake."

Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as Caligula.

In 66-73 AD, Jewish rebels fought an all-out war against the armies of ancient Rome's generals Vespasian and Titus (one of his sons). The Jews lost everything—Jerusalem was burned to the ground, the Second Temple was looted and destroyed, and according to the ancient historian Flavius Josephus hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women and children were slaughtered, along with thousands crucified. Titus finished the war after his father became emperor and returned to Rome carrying a fortune of Jewish gold, silver and jewels. Many Jewish prisoners were brought to Rome as well, to serve as slaves or gladiatorial victims.

After Ttitus' death, his brother Domitian constructed the Arch of Titus in 81 AD to commemorate the conquest of Judea. The loot from the war was used to construct the Colosseum a year before, which was nothing but an open-air torture chamber for the sick amusement of Rome's corrupt and sadistic citizens.

Now Emperor Donaldus Johannus Trump wants to build a 250-foot high arch on the Potomac River across from the Lincoln Memorial. Infamously named the Arch of Trump, it would be five times as high as that of Titus, dwarfing everything around it, and would be built in similar architectural style.

Like Trump's lavish new ballroom, which is currently being constructed on the grounds of the demolished East Wing of the White House, the Arc de Tromp would be paid for by billionaire worshipers with money they've made from the destruction of Amerika's environment, economy, healthcare and middle class.

And still no one does anything about Trump, not even a single brave, disgusted Secret Service member with a 15-round Glock 19 Gen 5 MOS. I hopefully await an incident similar to that which befell another sick emperor, Caligula, in 41 AD. (However, it is very probable that, like the Praetorian Guard that carried out Caligula's execution, Trump's betrayers and their families would be killed. It is also very likely that every Secret Service member has been warned of this certainty.)

With something like \(1.8 \times 10^6\) YouTube subscribers (many of whom pay a subscription fee to her site), my erstwhile favorite German physicist Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder has abandoned the academic life (as have many popular physicists unhappy with a professor's salary) and is well on her way to multi-millionaire-hood. I can't help but be disappointed. It ain't envy, just the way things are today.

I sent a comment to a liberal site last week regarding gun ownership. I said that if I were a billionaire, I'd gift an AR-15 assault rifle and 10,000 rounds of ammo to every black man and woman in America, citing the legitimacy of the 2nd Amendment. My sentiment was well received by others.

But perhaps it was also noticed by the Trump Administation who, responding to the murder by ICE of a legally gun-carrying American citizen, quickly denounced the 2nd Amendment, no doubt thinking that all hell would break loose with their control of Amerika if minorities were armed and able to respond to Trump's evil regime.

Didja know that in pre-Civil War America (and even later) it was illegal for a slave or any black person to possess a gun? The law presumed the same thing then that Trump fears today: that blacks and minorities must be controlled far more than whites. But with the recent murder of Alex Pretti by ICE, Trump now wants to restrict firearm ownership to "his" people, meaning white, evangelical GOP-worshiping Republicans.

Maybe even all Democrats, Independents and Greens will be banned from gun ownership. As a firearm-owning Green, I await the outcome of this latest outrage by Trump. Meanwhile, ICE, do not come to my door if you know what's good for you.

More Outrage: Trump posted an anti-Obama video showing Obama and his wife Michelle as monkeys. Trump took the video down, while still insisting that he's "the least racist person in the world." Dear God in Heaven, remove this man from us.

I was not, I was, I am not, I care not. — Common ancient Greek epitaph

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. — Macbeth

I'm 77, and today I cannot help but wonder where all the years went. Who is this strange old person in my mirror? Nowadays I take walks, go to church, go to the gym, read, watch video lectures, peruse YouTube, shop for food and do little else. What a pathetic life! But thank God, it will not go on forever.

Take a gander at this graph depicting U.S. science agency staffing levels. Trump 2016 had a go at reducing them (particularly the EPA), but it wasn't until he got reelected and brought on board rabid science-haters like himself that things really went downhill, literally and precipitously. And of course the EPA is taking the biggest hit of all, mainly because Trump detests any kind of regulation, but also because environmental well-being stands in the way of wealth and profit.

Future generations of Americans will hate us for allowing this to happen, assuming they're intelligent enough to read graphs, unlike all Republicans today. That's why I'm often tempted to say "Just let it all burn down."

Amazon's multi-zillionaire CEO Jeff Bezos spent $75 million producing and promoting the new film Melania, no doubt hoping to impress hubby Donald Trump and giving the nearly always-publicly-absent First Lady a bump in her own approval ratings. As the Salon article points out, the film is bombing, but not so much with Republicans.

Every day I identify Donald Trump more and more with the Antichrist, and with his third trophy wife Melania as either the new Eva Braun or the Whore of Babylon. You can understand why I detest Trump, but why should I pick on dear little Melania?

It's because she posed naked for money in several American and British tabloids like The New York Post in the 1990s, and the photos no doubt caught the eye of serial womanizer Trump, who has a known fetish for young, beautiful, blonde stiletto-heeled women, not to mention underage girls.

But the worst thing is that Melania, who has publicly claimed the photos were only classy, artsy-fartsy modeling gigs, cannot esape the fact that the photos were nothing but girl-on-girl porn with S&M overtones (there are other links to much worse photos, but I will not provide them here).

Try to imagine Jaqueline Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush or Michelle Obama posing for filth such as this for money and fame. And yet conservative Republicans are lining up at the theaters to watch the historical rewriting of one of the worse First Ladies in America's often sordid political past.

Last month, physicists made a fascinating but heart-breaking null discovery: the suspected and long hoped-for sterile neutrino doesn't exist.

Such a particle would have been a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle), far heavier than the three other known neutrinos, and its existence would have broken the long-standing Standard Model of particle physics and cosmology. [By the way, why does Nature love the number three? We live in three spacial dimensions, there are three neutrinos, three types of electrons, three families of elementary particles, along with the Christian Trinity of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit].

But the sterile neutrino represented the best and most likely candidate for dark matter, the elusive pixie particle that is presumed by most scientists to make up about 85% of all ordinary matter in the universe.

I still believe that the existence of dark matter will ultimately be disproved, possibly by a modification of Einstein's 1915 gravity theory. But it's disheartening to find that scientists can disprove one hypothetical particle relatively quickly and cheaply (the sterile neutrino) but can't disprove the hypothetical dark matter pest despite four fruitless decades of searching along with billions of dollars.

In this video Australian astrophysicist Matt O'Dowd explains the situtation in detail:

"Whose face will you take with you into the darkness?" — Anonymous

I woke up this morning thinking of a short story I read long ago in college. It was The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, written by the noted author Katherine Anne Porter in 1930. It tells the story of an 80-year-old grandmother on her deathbed who was abandoned at the altar by her fiancé, and she recalls the painful experience as she is dying. As death approaches, she asks God to give her a sign of assurance that she is loved and accepted by Him, but she receives no sign. As her life blinks out, she imagines herself as a small blue light. Resigned, and thinking that God has also jilted her, she blows out the light.

I recently turned 77, but it seems like yesterday when I was young with a wife and children. The wife is dead now, and the children and their families are more distant than they are near. But I know whose face I will take with me when I go, and I know that God will never abandon me.

President Trump is threatening to enact the Insurrection Act. Next up: Martial law.

It's 1933 all over again:

In a recent comic, political cartoonist Ted Rall posted this:

In the image Rall apologizes to Walt Kelly, the late and great popular newspaper cartoonist who once had his character Pogo famously utter "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Kelly left us long ago, and I lament his absence today, when speaking the truth about an insane, slobbering and tyrannical President Donald Trump is likely to see all political cartoonists declared enemies, subject to arrest by ICE and summarily executed.

That day is coming soon, my fellow Americans. And it was YOU who elected this monster.

I think it was about 25 years ago, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was being developed. There were concerns about it creating a miniature black hole, which would quickly devour the collider facility and then the entire Earth itself:

But there were also concerns that it would create a massive particle called a strangelet, composed of up and down quarks along with a strange quark, whose composition would be stable and capable of converting the entire Earth into a huge strangelet mass, destroying all life. The particle itself is known to be unstable, but in large enough amounts it would be stable—and even more powerful than Donald Trump to destroy everything in its path.

Such a mass (called a "quark nugget") would also be electrically neutral, and would therefore be a candidate for dark matter, which physicists to date have spent billions of dollars looking for. The LHC is nowhere near powerful enough to create such a mass, but the Big Bang would have had more than enough energy to create enormous amounts of these things. And being stable and electrically uncharged , they'd just be floating around now in the observable universe, behaving exactly like dark matter.

In her latest video, noted German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder references the Einstein-like American mathematical physicist Edward Witten, who has proved mathematically that quark nuggets can exist (Hossenfelder rightly comments "And who can disagree with Ed Witten?") I won't disagree either, but if quark nuggets cannot ever be produced in the laboratory, then to me it's just another kind of hypothetical pixie dust.

A vassal state is a country ruled by another, but propped up by a local ruler who kowtows to the true power. Thanks to President Trump, Venezuela is now a vassal state of America.

Venezuela's erstwhile president Nicolás Maduro was a liberal authoritarian ruler who oppressed dissent and was indifferent to his country's covert policy of allowing illegal drugs to transit from Colombia (along with precursor chemicals from China and India) and into America and other nations. The drugs of choice are fentanyl and cocaine, each highly addictive and often fatal (especially fentanyl, which is lethal in mere milligram doses).

Trump is now claiming ownership of Venezuela, presumably until a "suitable" client ruler is either elected or appointed. Venezuela's vast oil reserves are the true underlying reason for Trump's illegal military actions, since he doesn't really give a damn about the drug problem.

My prediction: The year 2026 will be unlike and far worse than anything we've ever experienced under Trump. He's just getting started. May God help the world.

Another year. God grant that it will be much better than the last.