When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. Leviticus 19: 33-34
Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy. 1 Corinthians 14: 1
Dad could tell the future. He was a Navy pilot who took off and landed on aircraft carriers, sometimes at night. His time to defend America was long ago. Aircraft carriers were then new to war, and pilots crashed their planes and helicopters a lot. Until the kinks got worked out over a period of many years, the Navy lost about one out of four pilots to mishaps at sea.
Dad predicted a number of crashes. Soon the pilots in his squadron wouldn’t fly if he got a “bad feeling.” His commanders respected him. Over time, good fitness reports and promotions led him to command an anti-submarine, jet-helicopter squadron during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Afterward, the Navy rated his squadron (HS-1) the safest combat aviation group on America’s east coast. Not one man was lost during his command.
Dad went with his feelings; when he got that “bad feeling”, he always flew the mission himself, or led it, rather than risk the lives of his men. Dad rose rapidly in the ranks, holding many important positions, not only in the Navy but also at the NSA (National Security Agency). Near the end of his career, a president appointed him to lead another intelligence agency not known to the public.
Navy fliers I talked with who knew dad said he was the best pilot in the United States Navy. He could fly anything under any conditions. Navy officers don’t lie. It’s against their Code of Conduct. Of course, I believed every word.
My dad was fearless to the very end of his ninety-one years of life. He once ate a half pound of spoiled cheese, because it was a gift, and he refused to embarrass the giver. The cheese smelled the way cheese smells when it has been ripened at the bottom of an army latrine; I almost threw up from the stench, but dad gulped it down like porterhouse steak. He grabbed the cheese with both hands, tore it in half, and inhaled a deep breath to savor the aroma. I was amazed that the rancid mess didn’t instantly kill him.
Today, many people seem to be having apocalyptic fears. People I don’t know well, who seem normal, have told me about vivid dreams they have had about good and bad things. Sometimes their visions trouble them. The thought has crossed my mind that a lot of folks are teetering on the edge of insanity. It’s sad and troubling.
The election added a lot of stress to people’s lives, did it not? Election tampering by foreign intelligence agencies ran rampant and was obvious to anyone who was paying attention. The United States has an unfortunate reputation for election tampering in other countries, which goes back many decades; our recent election seemed to give other countries a golden opportunity for pay-back, which some inflicted brazenly — perhaps as a warning for us to back-off; to stand-down. Who knows?
Anyway, the election is done; Trump won; Hillary won the popular vote but lost the electoral college. In the countryside of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan (among other states) Trump won by huge margins never before seen in the free world, ever. His biggest leads came in districts with electronic voting machines. These margins overwhelmed the leads racked up by Democrats in urban areas.
It was a strange election that lasted a very long time. Many “unprecedented” things happened during the contest that no one in America has ever experienced before. Is it any wonder that some people feel unhinged by an outcome that makes no statistical sense; by an outcome no one saw coming?
Republicans now control the entire federal government; they control enough state governments to enable easy passage of amendments to the Constitution, should the GOP decide to change America in that way.
Some people want to know: what’s coming next; what sudden shocks might rock their world?
How would I know?
Yes, I took the time to compile a list of bad things that could happen. Yes, it may have been a waste of time; maybe my effort might have been better spent helping the poor.
With GOP leaders like these, what things could possibly go bad?
It’s possible that none of the bad things in the list below will happen. Maybe some will. My contribution to understanding the future is simply to point out things that have a chance of happening, which people may not have considered, or yet read about, or even shared (if they have thought about them).
My blog is read by not very many people; stilI, I felt compelled to write these “heads-up” warnings to help any curious humans (or bots) who might accidentally stumble onto my essay; to open the eyes of the few and the lucky, so that they might better understand what’s coming next; to inoculate some of them — especially the people I love — against the despair that can overwhelm any one of us when we find ourselves ambushed by the bad things in our future.
So here is my list of BAD THINGS. I might add to it from time to time if my imagination runs amok, or freaked-out people tell me scary stuff.
Here it is:
— The First Family refuses to live in the White House.
— Blacks and women start disappearing from news shows, replaced by white men.
— Athletes and entertainers step forward to confess: yes, they voted for Trump.
— Evidence emerges: The birth certificate was faked. Congress starts an investigation.
— The military draft of young people is resurrected.
— The USA drops a neutron bomb on a city for the very first time.
— The United Nations disbands.
— Russia reestablishes its control over Eastern Europe.
— The Philippines makes a military alliance with China.
— Donald Trump resigns.
— Mike Pence becomes president.
— A hot year kills hundreds of millions.
— Many popular foods become unavailable.
— The president’s wife reveals that he is gay.
— The Mueller investigators reveal that the new president is an agent of the Russian government — hand-picked by Paul Manafort.
— A major volcanic eruption inside the USA kills hundreds of thousands.
— The Post Office is privatized.
— The Veterans Administration is privatized.
— Social Security is privatized.
— Medicare is privatized.
— Prisons are privatized.
— Public education is privatized.
— Tax deductions are eliminated, raising taxes on the poor and middle-class.
— Inheritance taxes are eliminated, locking-in a permanent aristocracy.
— Unlawful assembly is redefined: three or more unrelated people who gather in a public space for any purpose other than private discourse shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, unless they have in their possession a permit signed by the president of the United States.
— A 1954 law denying tax exemptions to churches who endorse politicians is repealed.
— The WALL is retooled to restrain fleeing Americans.
— The Constitution is amended to eliminate all forms of naturalizationto block any pathway to citizenship for children bred by foreigners.
— An insect species is destroyed by a gene-driver released from an unregulated lab.
— Chipmunks are rendered extinct by a second gene-driver accident.
— Internet access is placed under federal regulation.
— SCOTUS hands over abortion policy to the states.
— SCOTUS rules that businesses have a constitutional right to choose who can buy their products and services, and who cannot.
— State governments add lithium to city water supplies to raise the spirits of unhappy citizens.
— Congress mandates that electronic nano-chips be injected into the buttocks of every person to help ICE track, identify, and differentiate people’s movements and immigration status.
— Congress declares that felony unlawful assemblyis ”from this time forward” a capital offense.
— The 2020 election is postponed until ”we can figure out just what the hell is going on.”
— GOP controlled state legislators amend the constitution to fight terrorism; they rescind the Bill of Rights.
Many smart physicists wonder about it; some obsess over it; a few have gone mad. Physicists like the late Richard Feynman said that it’s not something any human can or will ever understand; it’s a rabbit-hole that quantum physicists must stand beside and peer into to do their work; but for heaven’s sake don’t rappel into its depths. No one who does has ever returned and talked sense about it.
I’m a Pontificator, not a scientist. I hope I don’t start to regret writing this essay. I hope I don’t make an ass of myself as I dare to go where angels fear to tread.
My plan is to explain a mystery of existence that can’t be explained — even to people who have math skills, which I am certain most of my readers don’t. Lack of skills should not trouble anyone, because if anyone has them, they won’t understand my explanation anyway.
My destiny is failure. I don’t care. My promise, as always, is accuracy. If people point out errors, I fix them. I write to understand; to discover and learn.
My recommendation to readers is to take a dose of whatever medicine calms their nerves; to swallow whatever stimulant might ignite electrical fires in their brains; to inhale, if necessary, doctor-prescribed drugs to amplify conscious experience and broaden their view of the cosmos. Take a trip with me; let me guide you. When we’re done, you will know nothing about the fine-structure constant except its value and a few ways curious people think about it.
Oh yes, we’re going to rappel into the depths of the rabbit-hole, I most certainly assure you, but we’ll descend into the abyss together. When we get lost (and we most certainly will) — should we fall into despair and abandon our will to fight our way back — we’ll have a good laugh; we’ll cry; we’ll fall to our knees; we’ll become hysterics; we’ll roll on the soft grass we can feel but not see; we will weep the loud belly-laugh sobs of the hopelessly confused and completely insane — always together, whenever necessary.
We will get lost together. This rabbit-hole is the Krubera Cave of Abkhazia land. It is the deepest cave in the world. Notice the tiny humans, for scale.
Isn’t getting lost with a friend what makes life worth living? Everyone gets lost eventually; it’s better when we get lost together. Getting lost with someone who doesn’t give a care; who won’t even pretend to understand the simplest things about the deep, dark places that lie miles beyond our grasp; that lie beneath our feet; that lie, in some cases, just behind our eyeballs; it’s what living large is all about.
Isn’t it?
Well, for those who fear getting lost, what follows is a map to important rooms in the rather elaborate labyrinth of this essay. Click on subheadings to wander about in the caverns of knowledge wherever you will. Don’t blame me if you miss amazing stuff. Amazing is what hides within and between the rooms for anyone to discover who has the serenity to take their time, follow the spelunking Sherpa (me), and trust that he (me) will extricate them eventually — sane and unharmed.
Anyway, relax. Don’t be nervous. The fine-structure constant is simply a number — a pure number. It has no meaning. It stands for nothing — not inches or feet or speed or weight; not anything. What can be more harmless than a number that has no meaning?
Well, most physicists think it reveals, somehow, something fundamental and complicated going on in the inner workings of atoms — dynamics that will never be observed or confirmed, because they can’t be. The world inside an atom is impossibly small; no advance in technology will ever open that world to direct observation by humans.
What physicists can observe is the frequencies of light that enormous collections of atoms emit. They use prisms and spectrographs. What they see is structure in the light where none should be. They see gaps — very small gaps inside a single band of color, for example. They call it fine structure.
The Greek letter alpha (α) is the shortcut folks use for the fine-structure constant, so they don’t have to say a lot of words. The number is the square of another number that can have (and almost always does have) two or more parts — a complex number. Complex numbers have real and imaginary parts; math people say that complex numbers are usually two dimensional; they must be drawn on a sheet of two dimensional graph paper — not on a number line, like counting numbers always are.
Don’t let me turn this essay into a math lesson; please, …no. We can’t have readers projectile vomiting or rocking to the catatonic rhythms of a panic attack. We took our medicines, didn’t we? We’re going to be fine.
I beg readers to trust; to bear with me for a few sentences more. It will do no harm. It might do good. Besides, we can get through this, together.
Like me, you, dear reader, are going to experience power and euphoria, because when people summon courage; when they trust; when they lean on one another; when — like countless others — you put your full weight on me; I will carry you. You are about to experience truth, maybe for the first time in your life. Truth, the Ancient-of-Days once said, is that golden key that unlocks our prison of fears and sets us free.
Reality is going to change; minds will change; up is going to become down; first will become last and last first. Fear will turn into exhilaration; exhilaration into joy; joy into serenity; and serenity into power. But first, we must inner-tube our way down the foamy rapids of the next ten paragraphs. Thankfully, they are short paragraphs, yes….the journey is do-able, peeps. I will guide you.
The number (3 + 4i) is a complex number. It’s two dimensional. Pick a point in the middle of a piece of graph paper and call it zero (0 + 0i). Find a pencil — hopefully one with a sharp point. Move the point 3 spaces to the right of zero; then move it up 4 spaces. Make a mark. That mark is the number (3 + 4i). Mathematicians say that the “i” next to the “4” means “imaginary.” Don’t believe it.
They didn’t know what they were talking about, when first they worked out the protocols of two-dimensional numbers. The little “i” means “up and down.” That’s all. When the little “i” isn’t there, it means side to side. What could be more simple?
Draw a line from zero (0 + 0i) to the point (3 + 4i). The point is three squares to the right and 4 squares up. Put an arrow head on the point. The line is now an arrow, which is called a vector. This particular vector measures 5 squares long (get out a ruler and measure, anyone who doesn’t believe).
The vector (arrow) makes an angle of 53° from the horizontal. Find a protractor in your child’s pencil-box and measure it, anyone who doubts. So the number can be written as (5∠53), which simply means it is a vector that is five squares long and 53° counter-clockwise from horizontal. It is the same number as (3 + 4i), which is 3 squares over and 4 squares up.
The vectors used in quantum mechanics are smaller; they are less than one unit long, because physicists draw them to compute probabilities. A probability of one is 100%; it is certainty. Nothing is certain in quantum physics; the chances of anything at all are always less than certainty; always less than one; always less than 100%.
To multiply the vectors Z and W, add their angles and multiply their lengths. The vector ZW is the result; its overall length is called its amplitude. When both vectors Z and W are shorter than the side of one square in length, the vector ZW will become the shortest vector, not the longest (as it is in this example), because multiplying fractions together always results in a fraction that is less than the fractions that were multiplied. Right? To calculate what is called the probability density, simply multiply the length of the amplitude vector by itself, which will shrink it further, because its length (called its magnitude) is always a fraction that is less than one in quantum probability problems. This operation is called ‘’the Born Rule” where the magnitude of an amplitude is squared; it reduces a two-dimensional complex number to a one-dimensional unit-less number, which is — as said before — a probability. Experiments with electrons and photons must be performed to reveal interaction amplitude values; when these numbers are squared, the fine structure constant is the result. The probability density is a constant. That by itself is amazing.
Using simple rules, a vector that is less than one unit long can be used in the mathematics of quantum probabilities to shrink and rotate a second vector, which can shrink and rotate a third, and a fourth, and so on until the process of steps that make up a quantum event are completed. Lengths are multiplied; angles are added. The rules are that simple. The overall length of the resulting vector is called its amplitude.
Yes, other operations can be performed with complex numbers; with vectors. They have interesting properties. Multiplying and dividing by the “imaginary” i rotates vectors by 90°, for example. Click on links to learn more. Or visit the Khan Academy web-site to watch short videos. It’s not necessary to know how everything works to stumble through this article.
The likelihood that an electron will emit or absorb a photon cannot be derived from the mathematics of quantum mechanics. Neither can the force of the interaction. Both must be determined by experiment, which has revealed that the magnitude of these amplitudes is close to ten percent (.085424543… to be more exact), which is about eight-and-a-half percent.
What is surprising about this result is that when physicists multiply the amplitudes with themselves (that is, when they “square the amplitudes“) they get a one-dimensional number (called a probability density), which, in the case of photons and electrons, is equal to alpha (α), the fine-structure constant, which is .007297352… or 1 divided by 137.036… .
Get out the calculator and multiply .08524542 by itself, anyone who doesn’t believe. Divide the number “1” by 137.036 to confirm.
From the knowledge of the value of alpha (α) and other constants, the probabilities of the quantum world can be calculated; when combined with the knowledge of the vector angles, the position and momentum of electrons and photons, for example, can be described with magical accuracy — consistent with the well-known principle of uncertainty, of course, which readers can look up on Wikipedia, should they choose to get sidetracked, distracted, and hopelessly lost.
“Magical” is a good word, because these vectors aren’t real. They are made up — invented, really — designed to mimic mathematically the behavior of elementary particles studied by physicists in quantum experiments. No one knows why complex vector-math matches the experimental results so well, or even what the physical relationship of the vector-math might be (if any), which enables scientists to track and measure tiny bits of energy.
To be brutally honest, no one knows what the “tiny bits of energy” are, either. Tiny things like photons and electrons interact with measuring devices in the same ways the vector-math says they should. No one knows much more than that.
What is known is that the strong force of QCD is 137 times stronger than the electromagnetic force of QED — inside the center of atoms. Multiply the strong force by (α) to get the EM force. No one knows why.
There used to be hundreds of tiny little things that behaved inexplicably during experiments. It wasn’t only tiny pieces of electricity and light. Physicists started running out of names to call them all. They decided that the mess was too complicated; they discovered that they could simplify the chaos by inventing some new rules; by imagining new particles that, according to the new rules, might never be observed; they named them quarks.
By assigning crazy attributes (like color-coded strong forces) to these quarks, they found a way to reduce the number of elementary particles to seventeen; these are the stuff that makes up the so-called Standard Model. The model contains a collection of neutrons and muons; and quarks and gluons; and thirteen other things — researchers made the list of subatomic particles shorter and a lot easier to organize and think about.
Some particles are heavy, some are not; some are force carriers; one — the Higgs — imparts mass to the rest. The irony is this: none are particles; they only seem to be because of the way we look at and measure whatever they really are. And the math is simpler when we treat the ethereal mist like a collection of particles instead of tiny bundles of vibrating momentum within an infinite continuum of no one knows what.
Feynman diagrams help physicists think about what’s going on without getting bogged down in the mathematical details of subatomic particle interactions. View video below for more details. Diagram protocols start at 12:36 into the video.
Physicists have developed protocols to describe them all; to predict their behavior. One thing they want to know is how forcefully and in which direction these fundamental particles move when they interact, because collisions between subatomic particles can reveal clues about their nature; about their personalities, if anyone wants to think about them that way.
The force and direction of these collisions can be quantified by using complex (often three-dimensional) numbers to work out between particles a measure during experiments of their interaction probabilities and forces, which help theorists to derive numbers to balance their equations. These balancing numbers are called coupling constants.
The fine-structure constant is one of a few such coupling constants. It is used to make predictions about what will happen when electrons and photons interact, among other things. Other coupling constants are associated with other unique particles, which have their own array of energies and interaction peculiarities; their own amplitudes and probability densities; their own values. One other example I will mention is the gravitational coupling constant.
To remove anthropological bias, physicists often set certain constants such as the speed of light (c), the reduced Planck constant (ℏ) , the fundamental force constant (e), and the Coulomb force constant (4πε)equal to “one”. Sometimes the removal of human bias in the values of the constants can help to reveal relationships that might otherwise go unnoticed.
The coupling constants for gravity and fine-structure are two examples.
for gravity;
for fine-structure.
These relationships pop-out of the math when extraneous constants are simplified to unity.
Despite their differences, one thing turns out to be true for all coupling constants — and it’s kind of surprising. None can be derived or worked out using either the theory or the mathematics of quantum mechanics. All of them, including the fine-structure constant, must be discovered by painstaking experiments. Experiments are the only way to discover their values.
Here’s the mind-blowing part: once a coupling constant — like the fine-structure alpha (α) — is determined, everything else starts falling into place like the pieces of a puzzle.
The fine-structure constant, like most other coupling constants, is a number that makes no sense. It can’t be derived — not from theory, at least. It appears to be the magnitude of the square of an amplitude (which is a complex, multi-dimensional number), but the fine-structure constant is itself one-dimensional; it’s a unit-less number that seems to be irrational, like the number π.
For readers who don’t quite understand, let’s just say that irrational numbers are untidy; they are unwieldy; they don’t round-off; they seem to lack the precision we’ve come to expect from numbers like the gravity constant — which astronomers round off to four or five decimal places and apply to massive objects like planets with no discernible loss in accuracy. It’s amazing to grasp that no constant in nature, not even the gravity constant, seems to be a whole number or a fraction.
Based on what scientists think they know right now, every constant in nature is irrational. It has to be this way.
Musicians know that it is impossible to accurately tune a piano using whole numbers and fractions to set the frequencies of their strings. Setting minor thirds, major thirds, fourths, fifths, and octaves based on idealized, whole-number ratios like 3:2 (musicians call this interval a fifth) makes scales sound terrible the farther one goes from middle C up or down the keyboard.
Jimi Hendrix, a veteran of the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division, rose to mega-stardom in Europe several years before 1968 when it became the American public’s turn to embrace him after he released his landmark album, Electric Ladyland. Some critics today say that Jimi remains the best instrumentalist who has ever lived. Mr. Hendrix achieved his unique sound by using non-intuitive techniques to tune and manipulate string frequencies. Some of these methods are described in the previous link. It is well worth the read.
No, in a properly tuned instrument the frequencies between adjacent notes differ by the twelfth root of 2, which is 1.059463094…. . It’s an irrational number like “π” — it never ends; it can’t be written like a fraction; it isn’t a ratio of two whole numbers.
In an interval of a major fifth, for example, the G note vibrates 1.5 times faster than the C note that lies 7 half-steps (called semitones) below it. To calculate its value, take the 12th root of two and raise it to the seventh power. It’s not exactly 1.5. It just isn’t.
Get out the calculator and try it, anyone who doesn’t believe.
[Note from the Editorial Board: a musical fifthis often written as 3:2, which implies the fraction 3/2, which equals 1.5. Twelve half-notes make an octave; the starting note plus 7 half-steps make 8. Dividing these numbers by four makes 12:8 the same proportion as 3:2, right? The fraction 3/2 is a comparison of the vibrational frequencies (also of the nodes) of the strings themselves, not the number of half-tones in the interval.
However, when the first note is counted as one and flats and sharps are ignored, the five notes that remain starting with C and ending with G, for example, become the interval known as a perfectfifth. It kind of makes sense, until musicians go deeper; it gets a lot more complicated. It’s best to never let musicians do math or mathematicians do music. Anyone who does will create a mess of confusion, eight times out of twelve, if not more.]
An octave of 12 notes exactly doubles the vibrational frequency of a note like middle C, but every note in between middle C and the next higher octave is either a little flat or a little sharp. It doesn’t seem to bother anyone, and it makes playing in large groups with different instruments possible; it makes changing keys without everybody having to re-tune their instruments seem natural — it wasn’t as easy centuries ago when Mozart got his start.
The point is this:
Music sounds better when everyone plays every note a little out of tune. It’s how the universe seems to work too.
As for gravity, it works in part because space-time seems to curve and weave in the presence of super-heavy objects. No particle has ever been found that doesn’t follow the curved space-time paths that surround massive objects like our Sun.
Notice the speed of the hands of the clocks and how they vary in space-time. Clocks slow down when they are accelerated or when they are immersed in the gravity of a massive object, like the star at the center of this GIF. Click on it for a better view.
Even particles like photons of light, which in the vacuum of space have no mass (or electric charge, for that matter) follow these curves; they bend their trajectories as they pass by heavy objects, even though they lack the mass and charge that some folks might assume they should to conduct an interaction.
Massless, charge-less photons do two things: first, they stay in their lanes — that is they follow the curved currents of space-time that exist near massive objects like a star; they fall across the gravity gradient toward these massive objects at exactly the same rate as every other particle or object in the universe would if they found themselves in the same gravitational field.
Second, light refracts in the dielectric of a field of gravity in the same way it refracts in any dialectric—like glass, for example. The deeper light falls into a gravity field, the stronger is the field’s refractive index, and the more light bends.
Measurements of star-position shifts near the edge of our own sun helped prove that space and time are curved like Einstein said and that Isaac Newton‘s gravity equation gives accurate results only for slow moving, massive objects.
Massless photons traveling from distant stars at the speed of light deflect near our sun at twice the angle of slow-moving massive objects. The deflection of light can be accounted for by calculating the curvature of space-time near our sun and adding to it the deflection forced by the refractive index of the gravity field where the passing starlight is observed.
In the exhilaration of observations by Eddington during the eclipse of 1919 which confirmed Einstein’s general theory, Einstein told a science reporter that space and time cannot exist in a universe devoid of matter and its flip-side equivalent, energy. People were stunned, some of them, into disbelief. Today, all physicists agree.
The coupling constants of subatomic particles don’t work the same way as gravity. No one knows why they work or where the constants come from. One thing scientists like Freeman Dyson have said: these constants don’t seem to be changing over time.
Evidence shows that these unusual constants are solid and foundational bedrocks that undergird our reality. The numbers don’t evolve. They don’t change.
Confidence comes not only from data carefully collected from ancient rocks and meteorites and analyzed by folks like Denys Wilkinson, but also from evidence uncovered by French scientists who examined the fossil-fission-reactors located at the Oklo uranium mine in Gabon in equatorial Africa. The by-products of these natural nuclear reactors of yesteryear have provided incontrovertible evidence that the value of the fine-structure constant has not changed in the last two-billion years. Click on the links to learn more.
Since this essay is supposed to describe the fine-structure constant named alpha (α), now might be a good time to ask: What is it, exactly? Does it have other unusual properties beside the coupling forces it helps define during interactions between electrons and photons? Why do smart people obsess over it?
I am going to answer these questions, and after I’ve answered them we will wrap our arms around each other and tip forward, until we lose our balance and fall into the rabbit hole. Is it possible that someone might not make it back? I suppose it is. Who is ready?
Alpha (α) (the fine-structure constant) is simply a number that is derived from a rotating vector (arrow) called an amplitude that can be thought of as having begun its rotation pointing in a negative (minus or leftward direction) from zero and having a length of .08524542…. . When the length of this vector is squared, the fine-structure constant emerges.
It’s a simple number — .007297352… or 1 / 137.036…. It has no physical significance. The number has no units (like mass, velocity, or charge) associated with it. It’s a unit-less number of one dimension derived from an experimentally discovered, multi-dimensional (complex) number called an amplitude.
We could imagine the amplitude having a third dimension that drops through the surface of the graph paper. No matter how the amplitude is oriented in space; regardless of how space itself is constructed mathematically, only the absolute length of the amplitude squared determines the value of alpha (α).
Amplitudes — and probability densities calculated from them, like alpha (α) — are abstract. The fine-structure constant alpha (α) has no physical or spatial reality whatsoever. It’s a number that makes interaction equations balance no matter what systems of units are used.
Imagine that the amplitude of an electron or photon rotates like the hand of a clock at the frequency of the photon or electron associated with it. Amplitude is a rotating, multi-dimensional number. It can’t be derived. To derive the fine structure constant alpha (α), amplitudes are measured during experiments that involve interactions between subatomic particles; always between light and electricity; that is, between photons and electrons.
I said earlier that alpha (α) can be written as the fraction “1 / 137.036…”. Once upon a time, when measurements were less precise, some thought the number was exactly 1 / 137.
The number 137 is the 33rd prime number after zero; the ancients believed that both numbers, 33 and 137, played important roles in magic and in deciphering secret messages in the Bible. The number 33 was Christ’s age at his crucifixion. It was proof, to ancient numerologists, of his divinity.
The number 137 is the value of the Hebrew word, קַבָּלָה (Kabbala), which means to receive wisdom.
In the centuries before quantum physics — during the Middle Ages — non-scientists published a lot of speculative nonsense about these numbers. When the numbers showed up in quantum mechanics during the twentieth century, mystics raised their eyebrows. Some convinced themselves that they saw a scientific signature, a kind of proof of authenticity, written by the hand of God.
That 137 is the 33rd prime number may seem mysterious by itself. But it doesn’t begin to explain the mysterious properties of the number 33 to the mathematicians who study the theory of numbers. The following video is included for those readers who want to travel a little deeper into the abyss.
Numerology is a rabbit-hole in and of itself, at least for me. It’s a good thing that no one seems to be looking at the numbers on the right side of the decimal point of alpha (α) — .036 might unglue the too curious by half.
Read right to left (as Hebrew is), the number becomes 63 — the number of the abyss.
I’m going to leave it there. Far be it for me to reveal more, which might drive innocents and the uninitiated into forests filled with feral lunatics.
Folks are always trying to find relationships between α and other constants like π and e. One that I find interesting is the following:
=
Do the math. It’s mysterious, no?
Well, it might be until someone subtracts
which brings the result even closer to the experimentally determined value of α. Somehow, mystery diminishes with added complexity, correct? Numerology can lead to peculiar thinking e times out of π. Right?
People’s fascination with the fine-structure constant has led to many unusual insights, such as this one, found during an image search on the web. The hypotenuse is 137.036015… .
The view today is that, yes, alpha (α) is annoyingly irrational; yet many other quantum numbers and equations depend upon it. The best known is:
These constants (and others) show up everywhere in quantum physics. They can’t be derived from first principles or pure thought. They must be measured.
As technology improves, scientists make better measurements; the values of the constants become more precise. These constants appear in equations that are so beautiful and mysterious that they sometimes raise the hair on the back of a physicist’s head.
The equations of quantum physics tell the story about how small things that can’t be seen relate to one another; how they interact to make the world we live in possible. The values of these constants are not arbitrary. Change their values even a little, and the universe itself will pop like a bubble; it will vanish in a cosmic blip.
How can a chaotic, quantum house-of-cards depend on numbers that can’t be derived; numbers that appear to be arbitrary and divorced from any clever mathematical precision or derivation?
The inability to solve the riddles of these constants while thinking deeply about them has driven some of the most clever people on Earth to near madness — the fine-structure constant (α) is the most famous nut-cracker, because its reciprocal (137.036…) is so very close to the numerology of ancient alchemy and the kabbalistic mysteries of the Bible.
What is the number alpha (α) for? Why is it necessary? What is the big deal that has garnered the attention of the world’s smartest thinkers? Why is the number 1 / 137 so dang important during the modern age, when the mysticism of the ancient bards has been largely put aside?
Well, two reasons come immediately to mind. Physicists are adamant; if α was less than 1 / 143 or more than 1 / 131, the production of carbon inside stars would be impossible. All life we know is carbon-based. The life we know could not arise.
The second reason? If alpha (α) was less than 1 / 151 or more than 1 / 124, stars could not form. With no stars, the universe becomes a dark empty place.
These are the values of some of the fundamental constants mentioned in this essay. Plug them into formulas to confirm they work, any reader who enjoys playing with their calculator. It’s clear that these numbers make no precisional sense; their values don’t correspond to anything one might find on any list of rational numbers. It’s possible that they make no geometric sense, either. If so, then God is not a mathematician.
Without mathematics, humans have no hope of understanding the universe.
Yet, here we are wrestling against all the evidence; against all the odds that the mysteries of existence will forever elude us. We cling to hope like a drowning sailor at sea, praying that the hour of rescue will soon come; we will blow our last breath in triumph; humans can understand. Everything is going to fall into place just as we always knew it would.
It might surprise some readers to learn that the number alpha (α) has a dozen explanations; a dozen interpretations; a dozen main-stream applications in quantum mechanics.
The simplest hand-wave of an explanation I’ve seen in print is that depending on ones point of view, “α” quantifies either the coupling strength of electromagnetism or the magnitude of the electron charge. I can say that it’s more than these, much more.
One explanation that seems reasonable on its face is that the magnetic-dipole spin of an electron must be interacting with the magnetic field that it generates as it rushes about its atom’s nucleus. This interaction produces energies which — when added to the photon energies emitted by the electrons as they hop between energy states — disrupt the electron-emitted photon frequencies slightly.
This jiggling (or hopping) of frequencies causes the fine structure in the colors seen on the screens and readouts of spectrographs — and in the bands of light which flow through the prisms that make some species of spectrographs work.
OK… it might be true. It’s possible. Nearly all physicists accept some version of this explanation.
Beyond this idea and others, there are many unexplained oddities — peculiar equations that can be written, which seem to have no relation to physics, but are mathematically beautiful.
For example: Euler’s number, “e” (not the electron charge we referred to earlier), when multiplied by the cosine of (1/α), equals 1 — or very nearly. (Make sure your calculator is set to radians, not degrees.) Why? What does it mean? No one knows.
What we do know is that Euler’s number shows up everywhere in statistics, physics, finance, and pure mathematics. For those who know math, no explanation is necessary; for those who don’t, consider clicking this link to Khan Academy, which will take you to videos that explain Euler’s number.
What about other strange appearances of alpha (α) in physics? Take a look at the following list of truths that physicists have noticed and written about; they don’t explain why, of course; indeed, they can’t; many folks wonder and yearn for deeper understanding:
1 — One amazing property about alpha (α) is this: every electron generates a magnetic field that seems to suggest that it is rotating about its own axis like a little star. If its rotational speed is limited to the speed of light (which Einstein said was the cosmic speed limit), then the electron, if it is to generate the charge we know it has, must spin with a diameter that is 137 times larger than what we know is the diameter of a stationary electron — an electron that is at rest and not spinning like a top. Digest that. It should give pause to anyone who has ever wondered about the uncertainty principle. Physicists don’t believe that electrons spin. They don’t know where their electric charge comes from.
2 — The energy of an electron that moves through one radian of its wave process is equivalent to its mass. Multiplying this number (called the reduced Compton wavelength of the electron) by alpha (α) gives the classical (non-quantum) electron radius, which, by the way, is about 3.2 times that of a proton. The current consensus among quantum physicists is that electrons are point particles — they have no spatial dimensions that can be measured. Click on the links to learn more.
3 — The physics that lies behind the value of alpha (α) requires that the maximum number of protons that can coexist inside an atom’s nucleus must be less than 137.
Think about why.
Protons have the same (but opposite) charge as electrons. Protons attract electrons, but repel each other. The quarks, from which protons are made, hold themselves together in protons by means of the strong force, which seems to leak out of the protons over tiny distances to pull the protons together to make the atom’s nucleus.
The strong force is more powerful than the electromagnetic force of protons; the strong force enables protons to stick together to make an atom’s nucleus despite their electromagnetic repulsive force, which tries to push them apart.
An EM force from 137 protons inside a nucleus is enough to overwhelm the strong forces that bind the protons to blow them apart.
Another reason for the instability of large nuclei in atoms might be — in the Bohr model of the atom, anyway — the speed that an electron hops about is approximately equal to the atomic number of the element times the fine-structure constant (alpha) times the speed of light.
When an electron approaches velocities near the speed of light, the Lorentz transformations of Special Relativity kick in. The atom becomes less stable while the electrons take on more mass; more momentum. It makes the largest numbered elements in the periodic table unstable; they are all radioactive.
The velocity equation is V = n * α * c . Element 118 — oganesson — presumably has some electrons that move along at 86% of the speed of light. [ 118 * (1/137) * (3E8) ] 86% of light-speed means that relativistic properties of electrons transform to twice their rest states.
Uranium is the largest naturally occurring element; it has 92 protons. Physicists have created another 26 elements in the lab, which takes them to 118, which is oganesson.
When 137 is reached (most likely before), it will be impossible to create larger atoms. My gut says that physicists will never get to element 124 — let alone to 137 — because the Lorentz transform of the faster moving electrons grows by then to a factor of 2.3. Intuition says, it is too large. Intuition, of course, is not always the best guide to knowledge in quantum mechanics.
Plutonium, by the way — the most poisonous element known — has 94 protons; it is man-made; one isotope (the one used in bombs) has a half-life of 24,000 years. Percolating plutonium from rotting nuclear missiles will destroy all life on Earth someday; it is only a matter of time. It is impossible to stop the process, which has already started with bombs lost at sea and damage to power plants like the ones at Chernobyl and at Fukushima, Japan. (Just thought I’d mention it since we’re on the subject of electron emissions, i.e beta-radiation.)
4 — When sodium light (from certain kinds of streetlamps, for example) passes through a prism, its pure yellow-light seems to split. The dark band is difficult to see with the unaided eye; it is best observed under magnification.
The split can be measured to confirm the value of the fine-structure constant. The measurement is exact. It is this “fine-structure” that Arnold Sommerfeld noticed in 1916, which led to his nomination for the Nobel Prize; in fact Sommerfeld received eighty-four nominations for various discoveries. For some reason, he never won.
5 — The optical properties of graphene — a form of carbon used in solid-state electrical engineering — can be explained in terms of the fine-structure constant alone. No other variables or constants are needed.
6 — The gravitational force (the force of attraction) that exists between two electrons that are imagined to have masses equal to the Planck-mass is 137.036 times greater than the electrical force that tries to push the electrons apart at every distance. I thought the relationship should be the opposite until I did the math.
It turns out that the Planck-mass is huge — 2.176646 E-8 kilograms (the mass of the egg of a flea, according to a source on Wikipedia). Compared to neutrons, atoms, and molecules, flea eggs are heavy. The ratio of 137 to 1 (G force vs. e force) is hard to explain, but it seems to suggest a way to form micro-sized black holes at subatomic scales. Once black holes get started their appetites can become voracious.
The good thing is that no machine so far has the muscle to make Planck-mass morsels. Alpha (α) has slipped into the mathematics in a non-intuitive way, perhaps to warn folks that, should anyone develop and build an accelerator with the power to produce Planck-mass particles, they will have — perhaps inadvertently — designed a doomsday seed that could very well grow-up to devour Earth, if not the solar system and beyond.
8 — The Standard Model of particle physics contains 20 or so parameters that cannot be derived; they must be experimentally discovered. One is the fine-structure constant (α), which is one of four constants that help to quantify interactions between electrons and photons.
9 — The speed of light is 137 times greater than the speed of “orbiting” electrons in hydrogen atoms. The electrons don’t actually “orbit.” They do move around in the sense of a probability distribution, though, and alpha (α) describes the ratio of their velocities to the cosmic speed limit of light. (See number 3 in this list for a description of element 118 — oganesson — and the velocity of some of its electrons.)
10 — The energy of a single photon is precisely related to the energy of repulsion between two electrons by the fine-structure constant alpha (α). Yes, it’s weird. How weird? Set the distance between two electrons equal to the wavelength of any photon. The energy of the photon will measure 137.036 times more than the repulsive force between the electrons. Here’s the problem. Everyone thinks they know that electron repulsion falls off exponentially with distance, while photon energy falls off linearly with wavelength. In these experimental snapshots, photon energy and electron repulsive energy are locked. Photons misbehave depending on how they are measured, right? The anomaly seems to have everything to do with the geometric shape of the two energy fields and how they are measured. Regardless, why “α”?
11 — The charge of an electron divided by the Planck charge — the electron charge defined by natural units, where constants like the speed of light and the gravitational constant are set equal to one — is equal to . This strange relationship is another indicator that something fundamental is going on at a very deep level, which no one has yet grasped.
12 — Some readers who haven’t toked too hard on their hash-pipes might remember from earlier paragraphs that the “strong force” is what holds quarks together to make protons and neutrons. It is also the force that drives protons to compactify into a solid atomic nucleus.
The strong force acts over short distances not much greater than the diameter of the atom’s nucleus itself, which is measured in femtometers. At this scale the strong force is 137 times stronger than the electromagnetic force, which is why protons are unable to push themselves apart; it is one reason why quarks are almost impossible to isolate. Why 137? No one has a clue.
Now, dear reader, I’m thinking that right now might be a good time to share some special knowledge — a reward for your courage and curiosity. We’ve spelunked together for quite a while, it seems. Some might think we are lost, but no one has yet complained.
Here is a warning and a promise. We are about to descend into the deepest, darkest part of the quantum cave. Will you stay with me for the final leg of the journey? I know the way. Do you believe it? Do you trust me to bring you back alive and sane?
In the Wikipedia article about α, the author writes, In natural units, commonly used in high energy physics, where ε0 = c = h/2π = 1, the value of the fine-structure constant is:
Every quantum physicist knows the formula. In natural units e = .302822….
Remember that the units collapse to make “α” a dimensionless number. Dimensional units don’t go away just because the values used to calculate the final result are set equal to “1”, right? Note that the value above is calculated a little differently than that of the Planck system — where 4πε is set equal to “1”.
As I mentioned, the value for “α” doesn’t change. It remains equal to .0073…, which is 1 / 137.036…. What puzzles physicists is, why?
What is the number 4π about? Why, when 4π is stripped away, does there remain only “α” — the mysterious number that seems to quantify a relationship of some kind between two electrons?
Well… electrons are fermions. Like protons and neutrons they have increments of 1/2 spin. What does 1/2 spin even mean?
It means that under certain experimental conditions when electrons are fired through a polarized disc they project a visible interference pattern on a viewing screen. When the polarizing disc is rotated, the interference pattern on the screen changes. The pattern doesn’t return to its original configuration until the disc is rotated twice — that is, through an angle of 720°, which is 4π radians.
Since the polarizer must be spun twice, physicists reason that the electron must have 1/2 spin (intrinsically) to spin once for every two spins of the polarizer. Yes, it makes no sense. It’s crazy — until it isn’t.
What is more insane is that an irrational, dimensionless number that cannot be derived by logic or math is all that is left. We enter the abyss when we realize that this number describes the interaction of one electron and one photon of light, which is an oscillating bundle of no one knows what (electricity and magnetism, ostensibly) that has no mass and no charge.
All photons have a spin of one, which reassures folks (because it seems to make sense) until they realize that all of a photon’s energy comes from its so-called frequency, not its mass, because light has no mass in the vacuum of space. Of course, photons on Earth don’t live in the vacuum of space. When photons pass through materials like glass or the atmosphere, they disturb electrons in their wake. The electrons emit polaritons, which physicists believe add mass to photons and slow them down.
The number of electrons in materials and their oscillatory behavior in the presence of photons of many different frequencies determine the production intensity of polaritons. It seems to me that the relationship cannot be linear, which simply means that intuition cannot guide predictions about photon behavior and their accumulation of mass in materials like glass and the earth’s atmosphere. Everything must be determined by experiment.
Theories that enable verifiable predictions about photon mass and behavior might exist or be on the horizon, but I am not connected enough to know. So check it out.
Anyway… frequency is the part of Einstein’s energy equation that is always left out because, presumably, teachers feel that if they unveil the whole equation they won’t be believed — if they are believed, their students’ heads might explode. Click the link and read down a few paragraphs to explore the equation.
In the meantime, here’s the equation:
When mass is zero, energy equals the Planck constant times the frequency. It’s the energy of photons. It’s the energy of light.
Photons can and do have any frequency at all. A narrow band of their frequencies is capable of lighting up our brains, which have a strange ability to make sense of the hallucinations that flow through them.
Click on the links to get a more detailed description of these mysteries.
What do physicists think they know for sure?
When an electron hops between its quantum energy states it can emit and absorb photons of light. When a photon is detected, the measured probability amplitude associated with its emission, its direction of travel, its energy, and its position are related to the magnitude of the square of a multi-dimensional number. The scalar (α) is the probability density of a measured vector quantity called an amplitude.
When multi-dimensional amplitudes are manipulated by mathematics, terms emerge from these complex numbers, which can’t be ignored. They can be used to calculate the interference patterns in double-slit experiments, for one thing, performed by every student in freshman physics.
The square root of the fine-structure constant matches the experimentally measured magnitude of the amplitude of electron/photon interactions — a number close to .085. It means that the vector that represents the dynamic of the interaction between an electron and a photon gets “shrunk” during an interaction by almost ten percent, as Feynman liked to describe it.
Because amplitude is a complex (multi-dimensional) number with an associated phase angle or direction, it can be used to help describe the bounce of particles in directions that can be predicted within the limitations of the theory of quantum probabilities.
Square the amplitude, and a number (α) emerges — the one-dimensional, unit-less number that appears in so many important quantum equations: the fine-structure constant.
Why? It’s a mystery. It seems that few physical models that go beyond a seemingly nonsensical vision of rotating hands on a traveling clock can be conjured forth by the brightest imaginations in science to explain the why or how.
The fine-structure constant, alpha (α) — like so many other phenomenon on quantum scales — describes interactions between subatomic particles — interactions that seem to make no intuitive sense. It’s a number that is required to make the equations balance. It just does what it does. The way it is — for now, at least — is the way it is. All else is imagination and guesswork backed by some very odd math and unusual constants.
By the way (I almost forgot to mention it): α is very close to 30 times the ratio of the square of the charge of an at-rest electron divided by Planck’s reduced constant.
Anyone is welcome to confirm the calculation of what seems to be a fairly precise ratio of electron charge to Planck’s constant if they want. But what does it mean?
What does it mean?
Looking for an answer will bury the unwary forever in the rabbit hole.
I’m thinking that right now might be a good time to leave the abyss and get on with our lives. Anyone bring a flashlight?
Statement: The Billy Lee Pontificator Editorial Board
This essay is a collection of Facebook rants that Billy Lee wrote and later deleted, because he is a coward and feared readers might turn on him; even stone him to death. Billy Lee deleted his tantrums from Facebook, yes, but he copied and pasted them into what he thought was a secret file on his blog site.
Billy Lee has no secret files; not any he can hide from us, anyway — his EditorialBoard. Nuh uh…No way…. We got to reading his ”secret” files the other day, and guess what? His Trump file was pretty good.
We decided to tell Billy Lee to stand up; to act like a lion, not the mouse he so often seems to be. Publish this stuff, we told him. Even Billy Lee Junior and Fannie Jeane agreed. They talked him into it. They really did. It was them two, not us.
So here goes: Billy Lee said we could publish his warnings about the orange-man — who he fears will destroy the country we love if he doesn’t make some changes to his deplorable personality. Billy Lee insisted that we encrypt the name of ”orange-man” to protect our site from harassment by Trump trolls and bots. No problem.
The Editorial Board
Note: On September 18, 2016 Billy Lee removed the encryption we used to hide his essay from web search-engine spiders. He told us that he wants to stand (or maybe crash and burn) on the words he wrote. NO FEAR! he choked between bouts of episodic projectile vomiting. NO FEAR!
Note:On November 9 (11-9) news outlets declared Trump the winner of the 2016 presidential election. We wish our new president the very best. We pray that he will reassure all Americans that he loves them and will serve with the humility and respect for human rights and freedoms that his high calling demands. One way to start is to apologize to the civilians (non-politicians) he insulted and falsely accused of crimes and human failings during his campaign. The Editorial Board
Trump
Ted Cruz of Texas took many evangelicals away from Trump. For this, we must thank him for his courage. His sacrificial act at the Republican National Convention brought wrath from the Trump goons, but he was trying to save America from making the worst mistake in our history. God is good.
Editors Note:(November 19, 2016)Exit polls now show thatTrump received the largest percentage of evangelical votes, ever. 81% voted for him; Hillary Clinton received 16%.
Senator Ted Cruz says he is a follower of Jesus. A Trump surrogate called Cruz a ”Zika virus.” Cruz refused to endorse the GOP presidential candidate because the orange-man slimed his wife, among other insults.
A top Trump super Pac leader called Senator Ted Cruz a Zika virus. The GOP doesn’t want him. Good riddance to the Zika virus. The rhetoric reminds me of Hitler: the way he painted his detractors.
Editors Note:On Friday September 23, Cruz tweeted that he would vote for Trump to honor a promise he made before the GOP convention to support the nominee; Hillary Clinton was too liberal. His ”non-endorsement” lasted two months; it ended two days before the first presidential debate. The Pontificator endorsed Hillary Clinton on February 10, 2016.
I’m feeling good vibes about America tonight. Our neighborhood sounds like the happiest war zone anyone could ever imagine. [from a July 4th Facebook entry.The Editors]
God is healing our country, apparently, even when we can’t see it, some of us.
All we have to do is love and forgive. The rest is easy. Be confident and do what’s right. That’s the goal for summer and fall and into the elections. All else is up to God, whose angels protect us twenty-four seven.
Ted Cruz, you are a beautiful man. Thank you for what you said and did at the GOP cross-burning. They called it a convention, but you knew better. 2,500 delegates showed up; 18 were black — less than one percent.
Nobody in leadership attended; not the Bush family; not the McCain’s; nor the Romney’s — not anyone of integrity, good will, and national stature. It took bravery, Mr. Cruz, and you showed it. May God bless and protect you.
My take away is this: these are very sad days for Trump and his family. He loves America, he says, but he’s lived inside a bubble of privilege his entire life. He doesn’t understand which way the wind blows, and he seems dangerously close to a heart attack every time he speaks. (He’s 70 years old.)
Despite his words, which some take to be patriotic, he and his friends plan to wreck America (much like Bush W. almost did) by making the country a hostile, unfriendly place for people who want to use the freedom granted by its Constitution to warn us of our follies.
The people who support Trump, many of them, behave on the internet like vicious animals (apologies to my furry friends in the animal kingdom). Team Trump seems to carry a lot of race-hate in their hearts as well as hatred for my gal, Hillary, who I love. Log onto the Internet and go to their Twitter feeds, anyone who doesn’t believe it. Hillary Clinton is Mother Teresa compared to many of them.
Editor’s note:On January 6, 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report (click this link), which concluded that agents of Russian intelligence created bots on social media to intimidate and suppress Hillary Clinton supporters. Billy Lee received threats on Twitter from a few of them.
Despite all this hate, many Christian pastors and opinion leaders have jumped on board the Trump train — if you ask them privately, which I have. It disturbs me to hear pastors defend Trump; they say he ”accepted Christ” a few months (or years) ago; yes, he behaves badly; we must give him the benefit of every doubt — he’s a ”baby Christian” after all; he needs time to grow.
It reminds me of the excuses religious leaders gave Hitler, who not only claimed to be a Christian tasked to carry out God’s Holy Will but encouraged his minions to stamp the words, “Gott mit uns” on their military-issued belt-buckles.
God is with us, Team Hitler chanted as pastors and congregants alike took the world to war and caused the deaths of nearly 100 million people in a futile and absurd quest to exterminate the progeny of ”those people” they blamed for the Crucifixion of Christ. To add context, the crucifixion was a state-execution by the Roman Empire of a rogue rabbi carried out over two-thousand years ago.
Today the Jesus-haters are Muslims, they tell us. We are supposed to elect a candidate who says he will exterminate them — the really bad ones anyway plus their families — at least for right now. Later … well … we’ll see about that — after we figure out just what the hell is going on.
What is going on — what’s wrong with America — Is this: our elites aren’t carrying their weight; they aren’t supporting the people in the countries that protect them. They are — many of them — decadent, immoral, insensitive, and entitled.
Trump is a billionaire. No matter how well-intentioned, he is the last person we should pick to lead our country.
On the RNC twitter feed, a trumper challenged me for posting the following:
“A few minutes ago on Fox News Congressman Darrell Issa said Hillary was 72 years old. She is 68; Trump is 70. Turn FOX NEWS off.”
The emotions of the haters are high right now. It’s probably a good time to get off the Internet and let these lunatics implode on their own. I’m a coward anyway. Until today, I didn’t have the guts to challenge them. I was too scared.
I must have blocked at least 100 tweeters so I could follow the Democratic convention on Twitter without seeing grotesque images and reading threats in the feeds.
[As of the day of this posting, Billy Lee has blocked over 3,000 Trump lunatics. The Editorial Board]
The amazing part for me was to learn that Twitter was also blocking crazies. What I blocked were trumper-nazis who were somehow getting by the censors.
What I learned is that it doesn’t matter if Trump is good or bad. Who knows? — he might be a Christ follower — some Christian leaders say he is. What matters is that he and his movement are unleashing the dogs of war on the American people. These dogs stalk the Internet; they worship guns; some have tens-of-thousands of followers.
They say vicious things; they make veiled threats and not so veiled threats. They post disgusting images. They rally around Trump with confederate and American flags; they carry guns; they ride hogs and choppers. They’ve got it all figured out.
The cure for what’s wrong is violence, they believe. They embrace the cure. They worship cruelty. They behave like bullies. They take no prisoners. They show no mercy — at least on Twitter.
In the real world outside Twitter they might be little-old-ladies in combat boots texting away on iPads inside nursing homes for all I know, but I block them anyway and pray that their hero never makes it to the White House.
Trump supporters worked themselves into a frenzy at the GOP convention. They chanted, ”Lock her up! Lock her up!” They never explained why.
After the GOP convention, I felt more confident he won’t win.
Lock her up! Lock her up! hisdelegates chanted. It sounded to me like, Crucify her! Crucify her!
Only haters scream words like these. Sometimes they get their way. Haters locked up Christ Jesus and killed him, right? Some people said, he did nothing wrong. Some said, he loved others. He healed people. He lived a perfect life.
To paraphrase Hillary Clinton: What difference did it make? Right now, I’m not sure about the results of the approaching election. Some polls show that Trump will be president.
The Russian mafia is working with the GOP to take down Hillary, some people in the intelligence community report. It’s a nightmare scenario.
During a debate last year, Trump explicitly said that he’d met Putin while the two of them sat backstage waiting to appear on 60 Minutes.
”I got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes; we were stablemates,” Trump said at the time.
Trump insisted this summer that he doesn’t know Putin. He’s never met him.
Trump married two women from communist countries — his first wife, Ivana and his current wife, Melania. The one non-communist he married, Marla Maples, bore him a child out of wed-lock. He later married her.
Marla and Donald divorced before a sunset-clause in their prenuptial agreement expired. Marla got nothing — a reported 2 million dollars out of the many thousands-of-millions Trump had accumulated.
Has anyone visited Trump Twitter feeds to see who his acolytes are? I did. I saw thousands of bots with 5 followers and 25 tweets flooding feeds with pro-Trump, anti-Hillary nonsense. It was annoying and scary.
I also found Trump worshippers, some with tens-of-thousands of followers. I blocked the worst of them — the ones with pornographic images of Hillary, or assault weapons, or threatening messages in their bios.
People are afraid of Trump and his rabid cult of followers; he promises to enable cops to become even more aggressive than some already are.
Is it any wonder that the Donald has zero-percent support among black citizens who must endure a militarized police-state that the USA has engineered to suppress righteous rage?
People are afraid to advocate for what they know in their hearts is right, because GOP thugs scare them. Most white Americans are not accustomed to being scared; to experiencing fear; they aren’t in the habit of self-censorship to protect the people they love (except at work, where disagreements with owners can cost folks their jobs).
We can’t let fear stop us from speaking out. We can’t let Trump thugs terrorize us into silence — not while we still have a chance, no matter how slim, to stop them.
Here’ something to remember:
After the Russians captured Hitler (to be historically accurate, no one ever claimed responsibility for finding him), German citizens said they knew nothing about concentration camps; they were shocked when the allies forced them to walk through the slave-labor camps where six million people toiled and died, many by poison gas and immolation.
After Trump is elected, we won’t hear about the bad things that are happening in our country. It isn’t going to be on television. People are going to disappear, and we won’t know why or how.
Trump will muzzle the press (some are saying that his surrogates already have), but we won’t know. A nation that can’t figure out FOX NEWS is not going to understand sophisticated attacks against democracy by people who are truly evil.
It’s why we have to speak up and vote. We have a chance to stop the rise of fascism in America. We have to take the chance we still have.
Tony Schwartz wrote Trump’s Art of the Deal. He spent 18 months at Trump’s side following him around to listen to conversations, phone calls, and observe relationships. He wrote the book; Trump signed it. Trump and Schwartz split the money 50/50.
Like Trump, Schwartz is a ”tweeter” who I started following recently.
Tony Schwartz made millions from the sale of the book he wrote for Trump: The Art of the Deal. He is warning voters that Donald is a sociopath.
Schwartz now says: I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.
Schwartz says he wishes he titled his book, The Sociopath.
What bothers me is that people who have read Art of the Deal believe they know Trump. The writer says no — they read a book designed to sell a lot of copies and make money, which a ghost writer penned. (The writer was Schwartz himself.)
Tony Schwartz didn’t seem to believe that Trump would run for president someday. He now regrets the bad thing he did for money.
I spent four weeks in 1974 living within the limits of this Wisconsin city. Being a Navy kid, I had spent time in many places both inside the USA and outside — in Europe and Asia. I remember thinking at the time that Milwaukee was the most racist place I’d ever seen. I couldn’t understand why people didn’t object.
Here are some reasons:
In 1974 socialist Germans who hated minorities ran the city. They would have loved their fellow German, Donald Trump, if they knew him, which is possible because he was the son of Fred Trump, the German billionaire developer who built 27,000 segregated rental units in Queens NYC and was rumored to be the richest American. His son — in his late twenties at the time — was already wealthy and making a name for himself in Manhattan.
The people I worked for in Milwaukee told me that the police were able to prevent blacks from coming into the white areas by using traffic stops. I never saw a black person while I was there. But I heard a lot of racist talk from whites.
Blacks made nearly half the city’s population. I heard white people talk about how bad they (the blacks) were, but I never saw any in the month I lived and worked in Milwaukee. Remember: 1974 was six years after an assassin murdered Martin Luther King and ten years after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. Segregation was illegal.
Today — 43 years after — only one city in America has more poor or more homeless than Milwaukee.It doesn’t shock me that the city experienced race-war this summer. It doesn’t surprise me that the city crushed the insurrection and that we no longer remember it, most of us.
America’s beer supply remains safe and sound.
I am afraid for the black people in Milwaukee, because as bad as the national-socialists mistreated minorities when I visited, the current leadership demonstrated this summer that they are capable of worse.
The election of Donald Trump to the presidency will reduce risk to racist supporters who hope to suppress minorities.
Like I said earlier, I’ve been on Twitter. I’ve read the feeds. Under the right leadership, a genocide is possible. Some would say we have a slow-burning genocide unfolding right now.
Trump is unleashing the dogs of war; dogs who destroy civilizations. With almost three months to go, how will anyone patch the breach in the dam that holds back barbarians armed to the teeth with weapons of war? Go to any gun range and watch Americans practice.
Wake up. Everyone. Take a stand now. It will be impossible to make a difference once we are standing behind razor wire waiting for our turn in microwave ovens. These monsters are not going to stop with blacks.
They will move on to the journalists and people they think are radicals. Eventually, they’ll burn the unfit, the retarded, the disadvantaged and of course, the Muslims.
Then they’ll show their true colors: they’ll go after the Jews; people with birth defects; autism; bad breath; body odor; torn jeans; the list of defects and moral failings that bother them will get longer, not shorter.
Somewhere along the line, the attacks on Christians will begin. Some say the attacks have already started. The take-downs of Ted Cruz and John Kasich were the first of many to come; operatives will sprinkle the suppression of Christians into the mix like salt; no one will notice — not until it’s too late to do anything about it.
We’ve seen this movie before. It is the natural course of empires like Germany, Japan, Russia, ancient Egypt, Persia; and of course, ancient Rome — the list is long. We in America will be living in it soon if we don’t vote to stop it.
A billionaire candidate staffed by paranoids to advise him doesn’t need GOP money; he doesn’t need anyone’s approval; he doesn’t need to buy television time.
He has access to communication networks involving AM radio stations, private mailers, internet ads, and e-mailers to spread whatever conspiratorial excrement he chooses to dispel; he can easily discredit and defame reasonable people who might dare to defend our country and the shared values enshrined by our constitution.
Evan McMullin, ex-CIA official and presidential candidate.
Fox News, OAN, and Rush Limbaugh among others in this network have driven their stupid listeners into a psychosis of evil. It’s disturbing; I would say it’s terrifying. Even our CIA worries.
Evan McMullin, former CIA officer who is running for president, told Thomas Roberts of MSNBC that providing security briefings to Trump …is a threat to [national security], because he has been co-opted by Vladimir Putin, he is aligned with Vladimir Putin; he would not be able to secure a security clearance at even the lowest levels…he doesn’t know the first thing about fighting terrorism…
David Preiss, former longtime CIA briefer to the presidential candidates, told Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC that after the 2000 election the CIA continued briefings to Al Gore who they believed won, and suspended briefings to George W. Bush until a few weeks later when the Supreme Court stopped the election-law mandated recount of votes in Florida to give the presidency to Bush who CIA analysts believed was the loser.
If the CIA was correct about the election, it must have irritated its directors when Bush falsely claimed that the CIA told his staffers that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction — a lie that some believe began the unraveling of our country. The Great Recession that followed the stolen election and illegal war wiped out one-third of the accumulated wealth of the middle-class; you know, folks like me and my life-partner Bevy Mae.
I hope our readers will have the common sense to vote against Republicans at every level of government so we can set things right.
This summer in Dimondale, Michigan Trump told white confederate militia members from nearby Charlotte about black people. Speaking directly to blacks, none in the audience, he said: You live in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs. What the hell do you have to lose?
The answer is: everything. The New York Times reported a few weeks later that Trump might be 650 million dollars in debt. No one really knows. Could they be right? If true, it means that every black person in the USA has a higher net worth than the Donald.
Aren’t folks tired of predators running everything, ruining everything, wrecking everything, taking everything, and playing everyone?
As our Editorial staff has advocated for two years now, the United States must establish an internationally enforced limit to personal incomes and estate sizes — for the simple reason that unlimited wealth destroys self-governance, democracy, and the benefits of civilization which ordinary citizens want and deserve.
Billy Lee believes incomes and estates should be limited to some reasonable ratio of the minimum wage. The reason: to prevent legalized looting of our institutions. People could easily buy expensive homes and remain well within the limits proposed by the Pontificator. The Editorial Board
The limits can be very high and do no harm. My suggestion has been to link the minimum wage to a maximum income and estate size; my recommendation is 1,000 to one for income and 20,000 to one for estate size; we’re talking about an estimated $20 million per year income limit; $400 million maximum estate sizes; inheritances might be limited to $5 million per inheritor.
Limits like these will encourage entrepreneurs but discourage looting like the kind we see going on in our financial sector. During the Bush administration a director of one of the stock exchanges drew an annual salary of $150 million. That’s crazy wicked.
Limits prevent isolated individuals who lack supporters from unduly influencing elections. Wealthy men like Trump won’t be able to get off the ground their drive-for-ultimate-power unless many other (hopefully reasonable) people get behind them at the start. Healthy democracies don’t need a Lone Ranger to rescue them.
The process we are witnessing now — where fawners and sycophants leap on board the choo-choo train after it has already left the station — shouldn’t happen in a democracy like ours. The stakes are too high.
The apparent nepotism of the Trump campaign demeans and insults the brave and free people of the most exciting country on Earth — the one country where ordinary people govern themselves; where the wealthy and the powerful don’t rule over us until we are able to thoroughly vet them; until they earn our consent by becoming transparent under scrutiny.
Otherwise, it’s not right. We all know it.
Possession of wealth beyond certain agreed-upon, international norms should be a felony enforced by national and international courts. People who exceed limits could be given one (or possibly two) grace-years to turn over the excessive portion of their wealth to charities or the government — otherwise they spend a year in prison while the courts trim their assets to the lawful limits.
No one runs for public office after a lifetime of plundering and taking until they divest themselves to the lawful limits.
How can anyone trust someone to hold high office who says they have accumulated 14,000 piles of a million dollars each? The person is either a liar or they aren’t. If they are telling the truth, someone should be asking, how does a person accumulate that much money without cheating people; without hoarding; without recognizing the needs of the poor and miserable who are all around; who refuses to help by sharing what they plundered?
The truth is — for anyone who has the courage to face it — behind every great fortune is a dark secret; sometimes many dark secrets. It’s true. Folks can believe it, or not.
How can anyone who understands the difference between right and wrong even consider casting a vote for the current GOP candidate? How heartless are some Americans? Very, according to some polls. Yes, more than a few people are uninformed. So what? Ignorance is not an excuse. For those who don’t have time to investigate the candidates, I do. Take my word for it.
We are on the precipice of bad things. Unimaginable things. Men like Trump get worse after victory, not better. People are going to die. Seriously. Many of the people who support this sicko are gun nuts who are still fighting the Civil War. Consider the movement behind the Donald when making the decision to participate, to vote, and who to vote for.
Who leads America is a serious issue. Election is no joke. People who don’t vote share the blame if we get a bad result. We can’t elect men who cheat on their wives; who hate minorities; trash the environment; hunt endangered animals; lie compulsively; build casinos; fleece contractors; steal, cheat, and take revenge on anyone who dares to refuse to worship them and the ground they walk on.
We can’t elect men who are unable to tell truth from fiction; who won’t apologize to people they’ve hurt; who spread preposterous conspiracy theories; who destroy people they think are disloyal to their self-centered vision. We just can’t.
The candidate’s children stand to inherit windfalls — if they stay on message; if they hang on to their seats on his train. We are not going to hear dire warnings from them — though they know better than anyone what a hairball he is.
For those puzzled about why so many evangelical leaders were willing to endorse Donald J. Trump, the most openly irreligious major-party presidential candidate in our history, Jerry Falwell Jr. provided the answer in his singularly graceless speech at the Republican National Convention:
”Mr. Trump has added a plank to this party’s platform to repeal I.R.S. rules sponsored by Lyndon Johnson in 1954 barring churches and nonprofits from expressing political free speech.”
Mr. Falwell assured his audience, ”Trust me, the repeal of the Johnson Amendment will create a huge revolution for conservative Christians and for free speech.”
Before anyone starts to read this essay, which was inspired by Kevin Baker’s editorial, let me offer a controversial truth, which could dissuade some people from reading further. Why waste time with truths that are disagreeable? some might be thinking.
Here it is: The United States is the one country on Earth where the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is forbidden by law to conduct operations against civilians inside its borders. It’s the reason controversial people come here. The USA is a safe place for dissidents. The concept of freedom (whatever that is) has nothing to do with it.
In other countries, men and women who have run afoul of USA strategic objectives have sometimes disappeared. Enough said.
It’s a violation of US law to discuss the CIA and its associations with American institutions. I can’t be more specific other than to say that the CIA, like other super-sized organizations, must train and equip, house and deploy hundreds-of-thousands of people (the actual number is classified) to work for, with, or under its guidance. It’s a huge undertaking.
The CIA is TEAM USA. It’s big, and it’s complicated. It’s on our side. Some good people work there. Some of them would like to have more say about what happens here in America where we live. Enough said.
If you are still reading, let me get on with it.
Of the 195 countries on Earth, only 75 do not have intelligence agencies. Of the 120 or so countries that do, 15 to 20 conduct operations extensive enough to influence the policies of their adversaries and, yes, their allies. Influencing public opinion is a big part of what these two dozen intelligence services do — especially when conducting operations in competing democracies.
With most foreign intelligence agencies the United States keeps certain agreements that delineate the boundaries of acceptable conduct. Russian intelligence agents don’t assassinate our civilians, nor we theirs — things like that. The details of the agreements differ depending on the country.
The “Temple” or “Church” or “Mosque” — call it whatever — was always the primary institution used by intelligence services in the past to influence public opinion and monitor people’s behavior. Hundreds of books and histories have been written about it. Those who don’t believe, read a book; learn something.
I don’t want my essay to go off the rails, but let me remind readers about the Divine Right of Kings doctrine, the institution of confessionals, the Inquisition, and secret monastic orders imbedded in populations, and on and so on. These intelligence structures and systems existed in the past and persist in most major religions and denominations to this day.
This is what the real Divine Right of Kings looks like. Martin Luther King Jr., Baptist Pastor, won the Nobel Peace Prize almost one year after Birmingham police took this mugshot in 1963 and jailed him. The kings who receive divine missions from God don’t always look like some Christians think they should. King called on the USA to repent of its sins involving segregation and racism. Like all prophets of God, haters killed him; his call remains unanswered to this day.
In the past, each country had its own state-sponsored religion. In many parts of the world state religions are still encouraged and supported.
In the United States, people fought a revolution to get religion out of government; it was an institution that the founders thought would rot our new republic from within by gutting the values of freedom-of-thought and speech for non-enlightened extremists whose purpose was earthly power, not the salvation of souls.
In the 1950s, a form of right-wing extremism got a grip on the American public that was truly frightening. (Remember McCarthyism?) It cloaked itself in the Constitution and the Bible. Its stated purpose was to defeat Communism, which it portrayed as godless and authoritarian.
What the leaders of the John Birch Society and other like-minded extremists wanted most was the political power to turn back trends that they believed would unravel the social order — trends like pop music (rock and roll), integration of the races, the rise of unions, voting rights for minorities, and things like that.
It’s why Lyndon Johnson, a powerful liberal Senator from Texas, tacked an amendment on a bill in 1954, when Republican Eisenhower was president and the GOP controlled Congress. Representative government would be ill-advised to permit charitable groups like churches to lobby for political candidates by spending their flock’s flood of tax-deductible money on elections.
If folks want to hear a reason why this separation of church and state is important, look to media to see what has happened there. Many of our news-outlets are owned and operated by foreign nationals, for example.
In those few media outlets where foreign nationals (some dual-citizens) are not owners, the rest are billionaires; you know, the kind of people who own football teams.
Diversity of political thought among billionaires is notoriously limited; they have the reputation of Neanderthals; it’s why Congress set up public broadcasting stations like NPR — diversity of opinion might be a good thing, they thought.
In the year 2000, Fox News helped throw the election of Al Gore to the defeated George W. Bush. An Australian businessman and his Chinese wife owned Fox News. They each had an ideological stake in the outcome of the election. Their assault against the election of Al Gore became an exercise in bullying on a grand scale.
I watched Fox News in real time spew their venom and lies with an intensity that shocked me. After thirty-six days of lies and propaganda, on December 12, the Supreme Court stepped in where they had no legal jurisdiction and put an end to it — they stopped an ongoing vote recount in the state of Florida to avoid the long court fights and violence the folks at Fox News promised and delivered, in some cases, through their surrogates in the GOP.
The election result doomed America to suffer terrorism, endless war, and a financial collapse that sucked dry one-third of the money in people’s retirement accounts. The financial meltdown led to world-wide destabilization, especially in Europe and the Middle-East.
Imagine Pastor Jerry Falwell Jr.’s church buying Fox News and pushing candidates and right-wing causes consistent with his twisted vision for America. It’s a lot of tax-free political power for a preacher.
With the repeal of the 1954 LBJ rules, these predator-preachers will multiply to become tens of thousands. The repeal will provide temptations to actors who might not necessarily be Christian or even religious to use the power of the church to corrupt our politics, establish a caliphatic vision, and seize power.
If these religious politicians get their way, they will create an American caliphate; a nation under a Christian version of Sharia law. They will make war between the world’s great religions more likely.
What bothers me is that leaders of religions or cartels (or foreign governments, for that matter) influence our discourse and choose our leaders. It doesn’t seem democratic, at least to me. It doesn’t seem to be a dynamic of governance that our founding-fathers would approve.
The hacking of secure computers and other information technology during the current election by hostile states is demoralizing; especially when Russian intelligence is directing it, as the Department of Homeland Security has said.
Let’s face facts. Some in our country have gone over the edge. We have a billionaire, self-funded, running for president. He took control of the Republican Party by pandering for the votes of white supremacists (some call them the alt-right) who fly the Confederate flag in their front yards and on the back of their trucks.
Go to Charlotte, Michigan and drive through white, working-class neighborhoods, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
After WWII, Michigan was the northern state with the largest population of Ku Klux Klan members. White supremacists are obsessed by fire; especially burning crosses. People haven’t changed much in some places. Many supremacists plan to vote for the GOP nominee.
Worse, these haters adore the orange-man with floppy hair who married two women born and raised in communist countries allied with Russia. His current wife grew up in a province of communist Yugoslavia — renamed Slovenia in 1991.
Give me a break.
The biggest intelligence coup a foreign government can achieve is to place a sympathizer in the bed of a powerful man — one who has publicly aspired to be president for twenty-five years. She only has to spill one secret at the right time to be worth her weight in gold; to change the course of history — and not in a good way; not for our side, anyway.
Melania Knauss; born April 1970. Melania is 46. Her husband is 70.
Is Melanija Knavs (she Germanized her name to Melania Knauss) a Russian sleeper agent? Of course not. The idea is preposterous. Her father was a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which had ties to the Soviet Union. He administered a state-run business enterprise. No problems there.
But wouldn’t everyone sleep better at night if Donald turned over his tax filings, balance sheets, and income statements? Wouldn’t the country be reassured if he disclosed the details of Melania’s immigration to the United States and her personal history; especially the history of her life before he dumped his second wife (with whom he bore a child out-of-wedlock) and brought Melanija Knavs to America to become his third wife? The two married in 2005. Melania became a US citizen in 2006.
Clout craving Christians, like the Reverend Jerry Falwell Jr., seem to believe that they can make a Faustian bargain and come away with the power and influence they covet. They can make a deal with a man who seems to lack a track record in any church to turn their right-wing political agenda into an army for God.
NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure.
It’s the offer Satan made to Christ during the forty days and nights Jesus lived in the desert without food or water. He got physically weak. His defenses crumbled. He lay in the dust weak and vulnerable. All he had to defend him were the words of Almighty God.
Who knows the story?
… Satan took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. All this I will give to you, he said, if you will bow down and worship me. Jesus said to him, Get away from me Satan. For it is written: Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only. Then Satan left Jesus, and angels came to care for him.
Whatever this election is about, it should not be about power. Why not make it about doing what is right?
Why not make it about helping people and preserving peace? Make it about about forgiving and being forgiven. Make it about loving others — even enemies; especially our enemies.
Love wins.
Is anyone left who believes it?
Billy Lee
4 July 2018: The 2016 election is nearly two years past. Billy Lee asked us, The Editorial Board, to add an addendum to his essay. It’s a kind of warning lifted from the ancient scrolls of the Bible, of all places.
The more priests there were, the more they sinned against me; they exchanged their glorious God for something disgraceful. They feed on the sins of my people and relish their wickedness. And it will be: Like people, like priests. I will punish both… A whirlwind will sweep them away…
Note:Those who have followed the events of the past month will be relieved to learn that Billy Lee and his illegitimate son, Billy Lee Junior, have reconciled. (Can we all just accept it and move on?)
Billy Lee encouraged Junior to write this newest essay, Segregation Tax, to reassure the little b*****d of his unconditional love and trust. The matter of Junior defacing our offices and almost destroying our web-site is behind us.
No hard feelings, says Billy Lee, no matter what the haters say.
The Editorial Board
We Need a Segregation Tax.
Thank you, Daddy, for letting me publish my essay. And thanks to Fanny Jean who fixed grammar and punctuation.
From now on schools, businesses and homeowners in America will be taxed every year they continue to operate in all-white, non-black settings.
The segregation tax doubles each year until these schools, universities, businesses, corporations, and neighborhoods either integrate or go into default. The revenues from the segregation tax will be ear-marked to reduce national debt and fund programs for the poor.
The number of black people needed by businesses, schools, and neighborhoods to trigger avoidance of the segregation tax will be tied to some agreed-upon fraction of the population of black people in the states where they live.
For practical reasons related to difficulties of implementation, my recommendation is to set the fraction to one-quarter. If black folks are 12% of the population in the particular state where they live, then at least one-fourth of 12% (that is, 3%) of their neighbors, school-mates, and co-workers must be black to permit any who are not African American to dodge tax penalties.
2,500 delegates attended; 18 delegates were African American. Under the formula, the RNC would pay the segregation tax because at minimum 83 of the delegates should have been black. If the number represented their full proportion of the population, 330 black delegates would have participated.
Everyone knows the GOP is racist; especially its new standard bearer, right? Under my proposal, the GOP could remain racist, foolish, and cruel as long as its members fork over the money.
If my proposal (described below) was in effect this year, the GOP would have paid $50 dollars for pigheadedness. But consider this: had the segregation tax been enacted the day President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the GOP would owe—due to the tax law’s yearly doubling—$22,500 TRILLION dollars. The tax would pay the national debt one-thousand times over.
The sooner the United States passes a Segregation Tax, the better.
If we get it right with the folks we abused the most, maybe other minority groups can follow and everyone will be treated fairly—once everyone understands they don’t have a choice.
We have to start with black people because they were brought to America in chains; they’ve been abused by slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, state-terrorism, and a system of regulations both written and unwritten known collectively as systemic-racism. They are the one minority least able to conceal their ethnicity by dress, hairstyle, or make-up. They cannot hide like other minorities sometimes do.
Freedom to discriminate against others based on the circumstances of their birth is not freedom; it is a vile attack on freedom and not only freedom but also the dignity of every human being who, according to the sages of old, is created in the image of God—a cosmic force of truth and love who is alleged by some to have ignited the Big Bang.
Shunning and abusing an entire race or group of people is national suicide. No country that does it survives, right? History is proof. Racism has to end sometime. Why not now? Why not right now while we still have time left to save ourselves?
Maybe start with a tax of $50 dollars the first year. It won’t stop discrimination but it will get people’s attention because everyone will be put on notice that the tax exists and is certain to double to $100 the following year and keep doubling year after year. By year 10, the tax will rise to $25,000 per year per household, business, and school. By year 15, the tax will affect the wealthy; it will by then be nearly one-million dollars.
At year 20, the tax on businesses that operate with the help of less than, say, 3% black people; or the tax on a family who chooses to live in gated-community with less than 3% black people; or the tax on private and public schools with less than 3% in their faculty and student bodies will rise to 30 million dollars.
If America continues to remain as segregated in year twenty as it is now, our national debt can be paid-off by the collection of the segregation tax; our government will at last be profitable; it will accumulate surpluses to enable the funding of social-programs-on-steroids.
A segregation tax spent reducing debt and funding programs for the poor is a win-win for everyone. After integrating and diversifying neighborhoods, businesses, and schools we become a more righteous nation worthy of less derision than we now receive from a world watching everything we say and do.
The benefit of righteous living is that we avoid revolution; we avoid chaos in our streets from humiliated people who have nothing left to lose. Of course, some haters may choose to live with this risk.
Some haters might continue to choose segregation. They might choose to pay the segregation tax, which by year 26 will be 1.7 billion dollars per year per family, per school, per corporation, per business, per university, per club, per political party, per whatever institution or organization haters choose to join.
If some refuse to integrate and diversify, the segregated poor will have showered on them by the tax code all the wealth of the nation’s haters. They will no longer need them. The world will witness the biggest transfer of wealth in the history of humankind.
One more thing: a segregation tax has to benefit African Americans only; otherwise other discriminated-against minorities will muscle their way in; blacks will find themselves standing at the end of the line one more time as they have under other programs such as the infamous “affirmative action” programs of old.
Some may remember how unfairly applied these ancient programs were. Everyone but blacks benefitted. People substituted white foreign-nationals to gain advantages. They pushed black folks to the back of the bus like they always do.
When I grow up, I’m going to need a safe place to live with people who love and respect me. I’m going to need a good job, and police to protect me. How about it, America?
The process of discrimination against blacks under affirmative action became so institutionalized and ingrained that the Supreme Court of Michigan banned affirmative action programs in their state colleges and universities last year.
Statistics proved them right. Blacks were being admitted to colleges at the lowest rate of any minority group based on their population. (Read daddy’s article on the Speedos page, anyone who doesn’t believe it.)
Every other minority group benefitted from affirmative action except black people, who the legislators intended to be the primary beneficiaries.
Uh oh…. Am I imagining readers jumping off sofas, throwing laptops, and wagging fingers in what they think is my gutless-liberal face?
I think I am.
Are you out of your mind? they scream; foam spewing. Black people won’t live in our neighborhoods. They can’t afford it!
Well, maybe some neighborhoods will have to chip-in to set aside a few houses where black families can live for free. What could be the harm in that?
Some neighborhoods might have to take up collections to actually pay families to live in their disagreeable hollows; maybe large sums if the neighborhood is overrun with hillbillies carrying pitchforks and oversized stun-guns.
When people stop to really think about it, I believe they will find that it’s going to be cheaper to hire black people to be their neighbors than to pay the segregation tax.
I think folks can see where I’m going with this. No imagined obstacle is going to be as difficult as paying the segregation tax. People who can’t or won’t pay will go bankrupt; even have their houses and businesses seized.
And that is how it should be. People who malign and exclude African Americans—after all the hell they’ve suffered—are no better than farm animals. Put racists in a pen and let them rot in their own manure. They are fit for nothing. They certainly aren’t fit to live in a modern, civilized country, which the United States of America aspires to be.
Under my proposal, nice homes in integrated neighborhoods everywhere in America (not just in a few hundred or so enlightened districts) could become available to black citizens within a few years. Good jobs and quality education might become available to a people long denied in every state—severely denied in some places, like southern Florida.
Some people might have noticed that I haven’t said a thing about churches. A writer on Wikipedia claims that 37% of Americans attend church every week. No one needs to be reminded that churches are among the most segregated places in America.
I don’t go to church, so I wouldn’t know, but I asked my daddy, Billy Lee, about it, because he goes to church almost every week. It’s mostly because his wife makes him, but still…
Daddy said my proposal won’t work with churches that ostracize minorities because we don’t tax churches in the United States. Churches belong to God. People who persist in sin and resist God’s Will go to Hell, where they are nailed to two-by-fours and hung to bleed until the end of time.
Churches are safe places for raging sinners to hang out until they discover how really evil they are and change more or less voluntarily. My plan, daddy said, is coercive. It forces people to be good.
God doesn’t work that way. He gives people plenty of time to set things right—an entire lifetime for most. Eventually, they or Jesus ends up paying for the bad things they’ve done. It’s a choice, and most folks get a lifetime to make it. That’s daddy’s explanation. It sounds crazy.
Anyway, maybe we could write-in a clause that gives preferential treatment to black veterans and their families—you know, the people who risk their lives so we can live like plantation owners compared to billions of impoverished people in other parts of the world—not to mention tens-of-millions of anonymous poor who rot inside inner-cities and ghettos.
Another idea, which daddy said I should not write about, at least right now: why not charge police unions 100 million dollars for each black citizen they kill? During the past few years we could have raised billions for the poor.
Another forbidden idea: any cop who kills someone, even when justified, loses the right to carry outside their house for 5 years—on duty or not. It might cut down on non-judicial executions.
Another idea: anyone who has contact with a prisoner who dies in custody for any reason loses their right to carry for one year. Think about it. It might encourage law enforcement to take better care of humans, who in the USA are presumed innocent until found guilty by a court of law.
B L Junior
P.S. Thank you, Daddy, for letting me publish my essay. Sorry I fired your editors and messed-up your office during your vacation. It won’t happen again. Promise.
for gravity;
for fine-structure.
= 
.
. This strange relationship is another indicator that something fundamental is going on at a very deep level, which no one has yet grasped.
