Category: Q & A

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GENERAL & SPECIAL RELATIVITY

Since Einstein said that E=mc2 , why does a massless photon have energy?

Someone asked a similar question on Quora. My answer garnered nearly a million views and many dozens of comments. It gave me an opportunity to gather thoughts on a subject that has puzzled folks for decades.

Of course, I’m a pontificator, not a scientist. I got advice from working physicists and incorporated what they taught me.

One thing I learned from science writer Jim Baggott is that Einstein first published his famous equation in this form: 

M = \frac{E }{ C^2}

When written this way, it becomes clear that anyone who knows the total energy of anything can calculate in principle its total mass.

Einstein knew nothing at all about the Higgs field but today physicists agree that the mass it creates is less than 5% of what mass they have discovered. 

In fact, nearly 99% of the mass of a single proton is derived from the energy of “massless” gluons that constrain its two up-quarks and one down-quark. Gluons are bosons which don’t interact with the Higgs field; quarks, which are fermions, do.  

In the end, it’s all about energy, which it turns out is equivalent to mass, which according to Baggott is what quantum fields do. Quantum fields like the Higgs field make mass. Perhaps the electromagnetic field — which makes photons — does the same. 

Here is Einstein’s equation for energy:

E^{2}=\left ( mc^{2} \right )^{2} +\left (pc \right )^{2}

Since

p=\frac{hf}{c} 

and

m=\frac{hf}{c^2}

it follows that it might be reasonable to imagine that photons have both internal mass and inertial mass, which causes Einstein’s equation for energy to give the following result:

E=\sqrt2 ({hf})

All that is left is to divide by c2 to get mass, right? 

m=\sqrt2 (\frac{hf}{c^2})

Most folks think the internal mass of a photon is zero. Period. End of story. They use the two mass and momentum terms in Einstein’s equation to calculate total energy of massive objects, yes, but photons, they insist, lack internal mass. They lack the internal fermionic structures associated with all massive particles.

Photons do have inertial energy proportional to their critical frequency though, which suggests that they possess perhaps equivalent inertial mass, which drives the photoelectric effect.

When physicists take the energy measure of photons, they drop the mass term in Einstein’s equation. They set mass to zero and cancel out the first term, mc2.  It leaves the second term — pc — which for photons simplifies to hf, inertial energy correlated to frequency, right? Energy can be measured in eVs, electron-volts, which are also units of mass. 

If photons have internal energy, their total energy in the universe is undervalued by 1.414 (the square root of 2). Accounting for this added mass reduces the Cosmic energy deficit to near zero. 

PHOTON MASS

I should add that overestimating mass and disrupting popular models of the Cosmos is something most scientists think is a bad idea. 

The gluon is the only other massless particle currently in the standard model, but it has never been observed as a free particle. All gluons are buried inside hadrons. It is their binding energy in quarks that makes as much as 99% of the measured mass of protons and neutrons. 

So, there is precedent to possibly reevaluate mass equivalence of photons. 

Some readers might wonder about the massless graviton. This particle is theorized to exist, yes, but has not been observed or added to the Standard Model.  The same is true for dark matter and dark energy — no physical evidence; not added to the Model.

It doesn’t mean dark energy and matter don’t exist. Cosmologists see way too much gravity everywhere they look. The problem is they can’t explain exactly what is causing it. 

As for my answer to the original question published on Quora, it was as accurate as my limited experience could make at the time, but the subject is controversial and several issues are not yet settled, even by experts. Some disputes might never be settled.

Who knows? 

Not me. I’m a pontificator, right? 

What follows is a version of the answer:

You might be mistaken about energy.

According to the complete statement of Einstein’s most well-known equation, energy content is a combination of a particle’s mass and its momentum. The equation you cite is abbreviated. It is a simplified version that is missing a term.

Einstein’s complete equation is strangely analogous to Pythagoras’s geometry of right-triangles. When anyone thinks about it though, aren’t the frequencies of light at right angles to its propagation? Light waves are transverse, right? 

Here is a more complete version of Einstein’s equation:

E^{2}=+\left ( mc^{2} \right )^{2} + \left (pc \right )^{2}

—where m is internal mass and ρ is momentum. Internal mass is often referred to as “rest mass” because it is invariant in all reference frames and unchanged by velocity or acceleration. Momentum is inertial energy measured in equivalent mass units called electron volts (eVs). 

Massless particles like photons have momentum that is correlated to their wavelengths (or frequencies). It’s their frequencies that give massless particles like photons their energy content. So without (rest) internal mass the equation becomes:

E=ρc

—where  p=\frac{hf}{c} for massless photons.

So, E = hf 

[“h” is Planck’s constant. “f” is frequency. “c” is light speed.]

Of course, in classical Newtonian physics ρ = mc. The mass term is critical.

Screen shot from Khan Academy showing derivation of photon momentum. Typed mark-ups by me show mass equivalence when ρ is set equal to mc. When mc = hf/c, then m = hf/c*c, right? Click the pic for a better view in a new window. 

On the other hand, in quantum mechanics the total mass of photons cannot be zero either—photon internal mass is set equal to zero and eliminated. Inertial energy based on the photon’s critical frequency (the 2nd term in Einstein’s equation) becomes its equivalent mass. I’m not sure everyone agrees. 

The beauty created by setting photon rest-mass (internal energy) to zero is it transforms the maths of relativity and quantum mechanics into structures that seem to be consistent and complete — able, one hopes, to meld into theories of everything; TOEs, if you like. The problem, of course, is that the convention of setting to zero leaves thrashing in its wake 95% of the mass and energy which “other” stories claim is hidden unseen “out there” within and around galaxies to move them faster than they ought. 

The Abraham-Minkowski controversy seems to touch the argument.  Click the link and scroll to the end of the article to learn how many things are disputed, not known, or unexplained. The science is not settled, although several physicists claim that the controversy is resolved by postulating an interaction inside dielectrics (like glass) of photons with electron-generated polaritons.  

NOTE BY EDITORS: On 18 April 2021 a writer massively abbreviated and modified the article in Wikipedia on the A-M controversy. The writer deleted the entire list of disputed claims. Please click the link in this sentence to review a list of unsolved problems in modern physics. Photon mass inside dielectrics isn’t on the list. 

The permittivity of “empty“ space (called the electric constant) qualifies as a dielectric, does it not? Isn’t space itself—with its Maxwell-assigned permeability (the magnetic constant) and permittivity (electric constant)—a dielectric?

Arthur Eddington wrote in chapter 6 of his book Space Time and Gravitation (read pages 107-109) that the dielectrics of space around the Sun increase proportionally with the intensity of the gravitational field. Light waves closest to the sun slow down more, which pulls the wavefront that lies farther out to deflect still more to catch up. Like glass, gravity refracts light.

Light falls into the Sun like any solid rock, but refraction adds to light’s “Newtonian” deflection to give Einstein’s predicted result. Unlike slow rocks, light travels fast enough to avoid capture by the sun. 

It’s not clear to me how many physicists agree with Eddington, but then again, it’s not obvious whether humanoids are able to visualize reality. It’s one thing to write equations and symbolic algorithms that match well with observations. It’s quite another to acquire a natural intuition for what might be true. 

Empty space isn’t empty, right?

As for the Abraham-Minkowski dispute: how important might it be to decisively resolve ambiguities concerning photon mass?

Perhaps the dispute is swept under a rug because disagreements about something as fundamental as photon mass mean that physicists might know less than they let on. The controversy seems to me at least to have the potential to crash the tidy physics of light and mass built by hard work and much history.

Isn’t it better to pretend everything is just fine until physicists finally agree that everything really is?

Maybe the subject involves some aspect of national security which requires obfuscation. It wouldn’t be the first time. 

What I think can be safely said is that momentum and mass of quantum objects seem to have no meaning until they are brought into existence by measurements. The math looks like nothing we know; sometimes physicists use the results as mathematical operators that don’t commute the way some might think they should.

PHOTONS AND GRAVITY

I reviewed the math.  I saw the term that makes the deflection difference (it’s really there) but did not understand enough at the time to tease out a satisfying reason why photons seem to bend nearly twice more in a gravitational field than early acolytes of Newton conjectured. I guess I like Eddington’s explanation best. 

According to Wikipedia, Einstein’s theory approximates the deflection to be:

\frac{4GM}{(c^2)b}

“b” is the distance of a photon’s closest approach to a gravitational object like our Sun.

Here’s some guesses I made before reading Eddington:

Maybe light deeply buried in a gravity field near a star like the Sun will experience the flow of time more slowly—it’s an effect common to all objects in a gravity field; it affects all objects the same way and is unaffected by their mass or lack of it.

It might have something to do with Schwarzchild geodesics. The geodesics of spacetime paths are longer and more curved in a gravity field than what anyone might expect from a simple application of Newton’s force law, which is oblivious to the spacetime metrics of Einstein. 

Schwarzchild metrics help to explain the “gravitational lensing” of faraway objects when their light approaches Earth from behind massive gravitational structures in the far reaches of space. Light careens around the structures so that astronomers can see what would otherwise remain forever hidden from them. 

Here is another guess:

It might be that light spends more time in a gravitational field than it should due to special-relativity-induced time dilations so that photons have more time to fall toward the star than they otherwise would. This guess is certainly wrong because the time differential would be governed by a Lorentz transformation.

Photons of light don’t undergo Lorentz transformations because, unlike massive objects that travel near the speed of light, they don’t have inertial frames of reference. Any line of reasoning that ties Lorentz transformations to photons leads folks into rabbit holes that contradict the current consensus about the nature of light. Light speed is a constant in all reference frames. Space and time expand and shrink to accommodate it. 

Electron-like muons (which have rest masses 205 times that of electrons) are short-lived, but their relativistic speeds increase their lifetimes so that some of those that get their start in the upper atmosphere are able to reach Earth’s surface where they can be observed. Their increased lifespan is described by a Lorentz transformation. It’s tempting to apply this transform to photons, but theorists say, no. It doesn’t work that way.

Time contractions and dilations are Special Relativity effects that apply to objects with inertial mass that move in some specified reference frame at velocities less than the speed of light, yes, but never at the speed of light, right?

Nearly every physicist will insist that photons have no internal mass; they travel in vacuum at exactly the speed of light—from the point of view of all observers in every reference frame. Photons don’t have inertial reference frames in the same way as muons or electrons.

Changes in time and position caused by a photon’s location in a gravity field are completely different; they are described by a vastly more complicated theory of Einstein’s called General Relativity.

Here is one way to write his formula:

The terms in this expression are tensors, most of them. Click the link, anyone who doesn’t think tensors are difficult to write and manipulate. 

Here is another way to think about photon energy and behavior:

Light follows the geodesics of spacetime near a massive object—like the sun. Gravity is the geodesic.

The difference for massive objects traveling at relativistic speeds is that their momentum and inertia enable them to skip off the geodesic tracks, so to speak.

Because massive objects always travel at speeds less than light, their “clocks” slow down through an additional dynamic (a Lorentz transformation) that works at cross-purposes to gravity. Massive objects lock onto the gravity geodesics for a shorter period of time. They undergo less gravitational time dilation than does light because they spend less time constrained on its geodesics. They jump the geodesic tracks to become constrained by the dynamics of the Lorentz transformations. 

The result is that massive objects traveling at relativistic velocities less than light deflect less toward the star (Sun) than does light.

What makes General Relativity unique is it’s view that gravity and acceleration are equivalent. Acceleration is a change in the velocity and/or the direction of motion. Massive bodies such as stars curve and elongate the pathways that shape the space and time around them.

Photons traveling on these longer spacetime paths accelerate by their change in direction, but their velocity doesn’t change in any reference frame. Something has to give. What gives, what changes is the expected value of deflection. The light from distant stars bends more than it should.

SOME HISTORY

No one who lived before 1900 could know that the geodesics of space-time elongate (or curve) in the presence of mass and energy, which are equivalent, correct? No one in bygone eras could have known that time slows down for massive objects that approach light-speed, either.

A man named Joann Georg Soldner did a calculation to show how much a Newtonian “corpuscle” of light would bend in the Sun’s gravity, which he published in 1804. He assumed that photons had mass and fell toward the Sun like any other object.

When Arthur Eddington’s observations showed that starlight deflected more than Soldner had calculated, Einstein’s theories of relativity got a boost in credibility that lives on into modern times.

I should add that Eddington knew about Einstein’s predictions when he made his experimental observations in 1919 because Einstein had already published his general theory.

EXPLANATIONS

I would very much like to read a coherent, verbal (non-mathematical) explanation of exactly why and how Einstein’s general theory can lead to an accurate and reasonable prediction at odds with Newton about the angle of deflection of photons near a star.

Here is a synopsis of an explanation that I heard from a working physicist:

Soldner used Newton’s view to calculate deflection using only the time the photon spent in the gravitational field. Einstein did the same but then modified his calculation to account for the bending of space in the gravitational field. The space component nearly doubled the expected deflection.

The theorist’s explanation satisfied me. It sounded right.

Notice the speed of the hands on 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. Stronger gravity makes clocks run slower. Under General Relativity, gravity and acceleration do the same thing. Click on the pic for a better view.

On the other hand, I believe (secretly and in agreement with Newton’s acolytes) that photons must have a mass equivalence that for some reason is being discounted, but no one I’ve read believes the idea makes sense beneath the shadow of a relativity theory that has the reputation for being fundamental, flawless, and complete.

After all, the mass of any object in a gravitational field is irrelevant to its trajectory because the mathematics cancels it, right?

F=ma=\frac{GMm}{r^2}

Little “m” appears on both sides of the equation so it can be divided away.

The problem is that the equations for gravity—especially over cosmological distances—are not necessarily settled. These are serious anomalies that are not yet resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Some have direct consequences on the ability of organizations like NASA to conduct accurate landings on Mars and the Moon. Click the link in this paragraph to review six of the biggest puzzles followed by seventeen alternative theories designed to bring the discrepancies to account. 

Anyway, mass-energy equivalence of photons might permit Lorentz transforms on light to help to resolve certain problems in cosmology and the transmission of light through medias where gravity is not a factor. It might also simplify understanding of annoying Shapiro effects, which slow down communications with explorer craft inside our solar system.

ANOTHER EXPLANATION

Since I haven’t yet found a good explanation—and with a promise to avoid nonsensical personal predispositions—here is my attempt to explain:

In GPS (Global Positioning Systems), dilations of time—in both the velocity of satellites in one frame and their acceleration in another frame (gravity)—must add to provide accurate information to vehicles located in another frame.

These time dilations can work at cross-purposes. It requires expensive infrastructure on the ground to coordinate the information so that drivers of vehicles don’t get lost.

A massless object moving at the speed of light is going to follow the geodesics of the gravity field. This field is a distortion of space and time induced by the presence of the mass of something big like the Sun.

If massless energy does not obey the laws of Special Relativity (like GPS satellites do), then its velocity must necessarily have no influence whatever in the deflection of light near a star. It might seem like all the deflection comes from the distortion of spacetime, which is gravity.

Photons ride gravity geodesics like cars on a roller coaster. According to appendix III in Einstein’s 3rd edition of his book, Relativity, the Special and General Theory—published in English by Henry Holt & Company in 1921—it’s only half the story.

The other half of the measured deflection comes from the Newtonian gravitational “field”, which accelerates all objects in the same way. This field further deflects light across the spacetime geodesics toward the sun to double the expected angle.

I’m not entirely convinced that modern 21st century physicists believe it’s quite that way or quite that simple.

CONCLUSION

The theory of general relativity helps theorists to describe the distortion of metrics in spacetime near massive bodies to predict the deflection angle of passing photons of light. What we know is that predictions based on the theory don’t fail.

It’s like the theory of quantum mechanics. It never fails. It’s foundational. No one has yet been able to explain why.

Somebody, please, tell me I’m wrong.

Here is a link that addresses the math concerning the deflection disparity between Newton and Einstein.

Billy Lee

Link to comments on Quora

Readers interested in this subject will learn things from the material in these comments, I promise. 

Billy Lee 

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LAST GASPS

As my Quora readership inches closer to 500,000 views, more admins are asking me to become a contributor to their spaces.
 
On Quora, a half-million views is almost nothing, but for me personally it seems like a lot. I’ve had answers throttled and in some cases pulled-down for violating rules that no one can explain. Fortunately, I’ve successfully appealed every take-down. 
 
I live in fear that  Quora will one day “disappear me” as so often happens to controversial people on other social sites. Whatever sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Quora are about, freedom of speech does not seem to be one of their core values, at least to my way of thinking. 
 
Isn’t it obvious?
 
Social media is run in the main by faceless administrators who have hidden agendas; they don’t abide by any First Amendment in any Constitution anywhere in the world.  
 
Because pontificators have an expectation that they will be allowed to express themselves freely on the internet, we play along while the sites we promote use us in ways we don’t understand. Admins don’t seem to want to come clean. When was the last time any administrators explained themselves when not under threat of subpoena? 
 
Some observers of social media say it’s about money; others say it’s about political persuasion to the far right or to the middle or away from the far left; others say it’s service to intelligence agencies who experiment to throw elections. 
 
Who really knows? 
 
The following questions are among the several dozen I addressed on Quora.com during the last of the 2019 winter holidays. The questions and answers are mostly about science and politics. I threw in a couple about Jane Fonda; she’s controversial in some spaces.
 
Billy Lee
 
Disclaimer:  Billy Lee is a pontificator, not an expert.  The people who read, upvote, and share his answers don’t care.  The Editorial Board 
 
1 – From the point of view of those who live on planets at the “edge” of the observable universe, would the diameter of their observable universe differ from how we on Earth view the diameter?
 
If the Big Bang theory is right and we are living in the only universe, it must be true at the periphery that some observers will look to the center to see many stars and galaxies while others will look away to see nothing at all.
 

If we live in a multiverse, the folks at the periphery who look away will likely see universes like ours that emit EM radiation. Those universes that don’t broadcast electromagnetically will be as invisible as dark matter, which many believe makes 85% of the stuff that lies all around.

Presumably, universes look different than stars or galaxies; observers at the periphery might be able to tell the difference.

Some conjecture that universes are nothing more than black holes, which together form an infinite foam that flows perhaps to infinity.

Inside each black universe are more black holes which house black holes that contain more black holes and on and on in a progression that pushes holes to infinity like the reflections in funhouse mirrors.

Black holes emit Hawking radiation, which means they glow in the dark of space. Perhaps it is Hawking radiation observers at the peripheries will learn to detect, measure, and catalogue as they study a multiverse humans will never see.

Sadly, Earthlings are buried somewhere inside an enormous place at least 93 billion light years across. The periphery of this vast expanse is pushing outward at 7 times the speed of light.

We can’t see to the edge of our own universe; we have no way to observe universes that lie beyond the reach of our telescopes—should more than one be “out there.”

Observers at the periphery should know things about the nature of reality that Earthlings can only guess. They see beyond our peripheries.

But isn’t it also true that we know things they don’t? Because of our more “central” location we understand better than those at the peripheries what the size and age of the universe must be.

Maybe. 

If we could only collaborate with the Peripherans to share what we’ve learned. Laws of physics make a forever prison that walls away the truth of all that goes lost beyond the boundaries of human sensors.

2 – Do all EM waves travel at the speed of light?
 
All electromagnetic waves travel at lightspeed in the medium of space where the nearest mass is too far away to have any effect.
 
Notice I said the medium of space, not the vacuum.
 

It’s not entirely clear that what astrophysicists call vacuum is in fact empty.

The conjecture that 95% of the universe is not electromagnetically active but is active gravitationally should be kept in mind because light bends and decelerates in the presence of gravity. The best known example is black holes, which divert and trap photons.

Are there volumes of space inside the Universe where the conjectured dark energy and dark matter don’t reside? If so, does the speed of light increase or decrease inside these volumes?

Light slows as it passes through materials like glass. Some kinds of glass slow photons by as much as 40%.

One explanation is that photons excite electrons as they pass over and through the molecules and atoms that make glass. Because photons passing through are not necessarily at frequencies resonant with the electrons in the glass, electrons are unable to absorb enough energy to jump from one energy state to another. Instead, they vibrate just enough to emit polaritons, which impede photons like a pool of molasses impedes dropped pebbles.

The photons of light seem to acquire mass as their velocity decreases. When the photons exit glass they again go “massless” and resume lightspeed instantly.

Could a phenomenon similar to that of glass be typical of the space inside the Milky Way Galaxy where planet Earth resides? If so, what everyone thinks they know about EM waves and the isotropic nature of the Universe might need some tweaking.  

If it turns out that despite the consensus of science, photons do indeed contain a small amount of mass, they might have enough in aggregate to account for the curious behavior of galaxies. Conjectures about the invisible dark no one can see might not be necessary.

EM Mass?

3 – If the universe is expanding faster than light, how can we currently withstand that kind of speed but we can’t if we replicate it under our current conditions? Is it a matter of relativity? Am I misunderstanding something?
 
The space in the universe is expanding by 14 miles-per-second for every million light-years of distance.
 

If this distance is scaled down to equal the circumference of Earth, the expansion will measure about one-tenth of a mile per year. Over a human lifetime the expansion will measure 8 miles. No ordinary non-scientist will notice the difference at this scale.

The universe is at least 93 billion light-years across. Do the math to see that space is expanding from one side of the universe to the other at 7 times the speed of light.

But some perspective is in order.  Inside the Milky Way Galaxy, which is roughly 100,000 light years across, the expansion is a mere 1.4 miles-per-second. Remember: a light year is almost 6 trillion miles. The Milky Way is almost 600,000 trillion miles across. 1.4 miles-per-second is practically nothing.

The nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.5 light years away—26 trillion miles. In one year the space between us and it expands by less than 2,000 miles. Meanwhile, the star itself is moving away from our Sun 200,000 times faster—about 12 miles-per-second. The expansion of space accounts for almost none of the separation.

Force is a measure of mass accelerating, right? Mass is not really accelerating due to the expansion of space. Space is puffing up like a loaf of raisin-bread in an oven. The raisins (galaxies) get carried along by the expansion.

The light that travels between stars and galaxies stretches into redder wavelengths as the loaf grows. But forces accelerating galaxies and stars are almost entirely due to masses acting over distances too short for the expansion of space to have any more than a statistically negligible effect.

The expansion of space adds up over larger and larger distances to become enormous, yes, but in the much smaller volumes of space where a few dozen or so galaxies live the gravity-induced distortion of spacetime by mass overwhelms it, at least for now.

4 – What existed before the Big Bang? Was there always something? How did the universe come into being from nothingness? Is God a possibility?
 
No one knows the answers to these questions one way or the other, but smart, popular people have published opinions based on their prejudices and what little they think they know for sure.
 

Currently, I favor the idea by Roger Penrose and others called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC). The basic idea is that a sufficiently old and expanded universe will lose all its mass through evaporation out of black holes; the metrics of spacetime become indistinguishable from a singularity, because without mass, spacetime is meaningless.

The universe puffs along like smoke from a choo-choo train—each universe emerges in a kind of “big bang” from the dying gasp of the last.

In this scenario, the universe is eternal backward and forward in time. It has no beginning or end; it has EONS that last trillions of years and endlessly repeat. The universe never collapses; it expands. When its mass evaporates into energy, it triggers a new expansion that generates in its wake new matter and gravity to provide the metrics necessary for spacetime to once again emerge.

This idea does not rule out the possibility of God, but it doesn’t support the idea either.

It also doesn’t rule out the possibility that humans live inside a simulation.

Smart thinkers like Nick Bostrom have argued that the statistical probability of a simulated universe approaches certainty. If so, humans can’t know what the underlying reality is that enables a simulation like ours to be created and sustained.

Such a state of affairs opens the possibility that we are created and accountable to a creator of worlds who has its own reasons for doing things, which aren’t necessarily ones we can understand.

The hard problem of consciousness is a clue for those who believe the universe comes first and consciousness second that they might have the order reversed. The possibility that conscious life is fundamental and foundational is something folks might want to keep in mind.

FAKED LIFE

CONSCIOUS LIFE

5 – Does Lawrence Krauss believe in an infinite number of universes?
 

I don’t know.

Alan Guth is the most prominent voice for this conjecture.

Evidence for B-Mode polarization of gravity waves would support the idea that cosmic inflation is likely to be unstoppable; some think that runaway inflation creates matter and gravity in its wake. The process forms universes that bud and break off into new universes as the expansion of space foams along.

E polarized waves in the cosmic background radiation can be transformed into B polarized modes by either gravitational lensing or cosmic inflation. Determining which is which is difficult because space dust can and does mess with the data to give misleading results.

The problem is that no one has been able to prove that anyone has detected B-mode waves that aren’t the result of either gravitational lensing of E-modes or their interaction with space dust.

EDITORS NOTE:  2019-02-05
Some readers have complained that E & B mode waves are incomprehensible. To help, we have added a video followed by an excerpt from Wikipedia about the Cosmic Microwave Background:

From Wikipedia: The cosmic microwave background is polarized at the level of a few microkelvin.

There are two types of polarization, called E-modes and B-modes. This is in analogy to electrostatics, in which the electric field (E-field) has a vanishing curl and the magnetic field (B-field) has a vanishing divergence.

The E-modes arise naturally from Thomson scattering in a heterogeneous plasma.

The B-modes are not produced by standard scalar type perturbations. Instead they can be created by two mechanisms: the first one is by gravitational lensing of E-modes, which has been measured by the South Pole Telescope in 2013; the second one is from gravitational waves arising from cosmic inflation.

Detecting the B-modes is extremely difficult, particularly as the degree of foreground contamination is unknown, and the weak gravitational lensing signal mixes the relatively strong E-mode signal with the B-mode signal.

Scientists like Brian Keating have claimed in the past that they detected B-Mode polarization in gravity waves only to have to retract later when others offered alternative explanations. Nevertheless, Keating is involved in an effort in Chile to gather new evidence that he hopes will be incontrovertible and lead to a Nobel Prize.

If gravity waves with B-style polarization are not found, an argument will be made that cosmic inflation is not creating alternative universes. The proposals for ekpyrotic and other cyclic models of cosmology by folks like Steinhardt and Penrose will be strengthened.

The statistical certainty required to qualify a discovery is at minimum 99.9994% (5σ). In the best data so far, 97.2% is the closest to 5 sigma that anyone has reached.

The statistical metric that proves B-style gravity waves is formidable but within our grasp should it turn out that cosmic inflation really is generating universes.

So far, the evidence for alternative universes is not sufficiently robust.

6 – Is Jane Fonda correct to say that Trump’s actions are criminal?
 
I don’t know what actions by Trump Fonda says are criminal.
 
Trump and his thugs slander a lot of people; they lie continuously about the smallest things; they undermine our Constitution and public institutions. Somewhere in their mess of cruelty and paranoia are crimes against America and the voting rights of the public.
 
Only morons and deplorables would defend a man as depraved as our president has proven himself to be over decades. People are afraid of the president and his Russian/Israeli mob connections.
 
Jane seems to feel that seeing something wrong obligates her to speak up to point it out. With any luck at all, exposure can disinfect bad deeds.
 
One of the worst atrocities the United States has committed in modern times was its conduct of the Vietnam War. Jane Fonda was among the first of prominent Americans to say our country was doing bad things for no good reason.
 
People who visit Vietnam today say it is an amazing place. Communism and reunification have been good to the people who live there, which includes thousands of ex-pats.
 
Remember, we killed and wounded millions for nothing but the thrill of the kill. We poisoned vast areas of the country with cancer inducing defoliants like Agent Orange. When we tired of cruelty, we left.
 
Everyone knows what we did was wrong. Jane Fonda showed courage to say so and try in the most creative way she knew how to stop it. We owe apologies to Vietnam and reparations to fix what we broke.
 
It’s not going to happen, right?
 
I resigned an officer’s commission rather than fight this vile war. It makes me sick at heart that many of the people who did bad things have not yet asked God to forgive them.
 
Time is running out.
 
I believe everyone answers to God someday for the wicked things they’ve done. Pointing a finger at Jane and calling her “traitor” isn’t going to cut it with the Christ, because Jane belongs to Him; he defends her now as he defends us all.
 
Jesus said peacemakers are children of God. Does anyone believe it?
 
CHRIST
 
7 – What caused the universe to exist?
 
 No one can say for sure you’ve asked the right question.
 
It’s likely humans live inside a simulation where reality is dumbed down in the same way video games are dumbed down to imitate a fantasy version of “real” life.
 
In a simulation, the simulants won’t necessarily see other life; their “science” is likely to be nonsense, which explains nothing and satisfies no one. Their history will be fabricated and make no sense to any simulant who takes time to examine origins.
 
Such is the state of human affairs. Humans continuously wage war, which our hosts might find endlessly entertaining. We search the heavens for companions but find none. The pinholes of light in the canvas tarp that entraps us—humanoids call them stars and galaxies, right?  It’s illusion. Everything simulants believe is lies.

Who knows?

If humans live inside a simulation, reality outside the simulation might be foreign to the sensibilities of any simulant “genius” who tries to decipher and make sense of the rules.

In the reality that exists beyond, stuff other than mass and energy might be fundamental and foundational. Conscious life might not be troubled by the mysteries of existence, because outside the simulation there are no mysteries.

Is it possible that somewhere “out there” beyond the walls of the simulation, everything makes perfect sense?

FAKED LIFE

8 – Why hasn’t the mass of the Earth increased from the dust of everything that ever lived on it over the last 4.5 billion years?
 
You are overestimating the weight of the biomass.
 
Almost everything that lives is mostly water, right? Water evaporates, falls as rain, freezes and so on, but the amount of water inside life-forms is a tiny fraction of the water that makes the oceans, lakes, rivers and clouds.
 
Shrink Earth to the size of a basketball made of polished metal like aluminum or steel. Breathe on the surface.  At that scale, the mist of your breath will form a film that is deeper than the deepest oceans.
 
There is a lot of life in the oceans, but it is a tiny fraction compared to the amount of ocean water, which is itself a tiny fraction of the mass of Earth.
 
In the oceans formed by the moisture in your breath, the mass of life is unmeasurable compared to the weight of the mist of your breath and the weight of the polished basketball.
 
It is likely that more mass falls to Earth from space in a year than all the bio-mass that has lived and died on our planet during the past 4 billion years. I haven’t worked out the numbers, but it seems to me that there might be a reader “out there” who will enjoy doing the calculation.
 
9 – Would impeachment be beneficial to Trump’s reelection campaign?
 

Deplorable people develop ravenous appetites for scum. The more evidence presented that Trump is scum, the more his followers love him.

Trump lost the popular election by 11 million votes—3M to Hillary; 8M to independent candidates.

As long as votes are flipped in certain strategic counties, he will win the electoral college even if he loses the popular count by 20M or more.

It’s not possible to defeat a cult where everyone cheats to get the results they all want.

I know evangelical Christians who volunteered for the first time to work at polling stations in 2016 to make sure Trump’s votes were counted.

My question is whether these cult followers took as much care to make sure the votes of Trump’s opponents were counted fairly.

We’ll never know.

10 -What happens if we cannot guarantee a fair election in 2020?
 

People have trouble accepting the mathematically provable fact (look it up or take a college course) that fair elections are not possible. It is not possible to set up an equitable system to select a slate of candidates from which voters are able to fairly pick a single winner.

Nevertheless, we do the best we can, right?

In the USA, fair results are further disrupted by state election boards who flat out cheat, and we have the problem of the electoral college.

The current president claims he won by a landslide in the electoral college, but the truth is that he lost by the largest popular margin in the history of elections—11 million votes, which were 8% of the ballots. Clinton got 3 million more than Trump; third party candidates gathered in another 8 million.

Trump proved that he could win in the electoral college by tweaking the results in a few counties in three states. Confirmational recounts and challenges were squelched by GOP state courts in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Even in Michigan where state-wide election results favored Democrats by 20 points, no recount was permitted Hillary Clinton who lost by 10 thousand votes. 

Reality Winner, incarcerated NSA specialist. She offered NSA documents to prove the Russian military gained access to USA voting machines in 2016. Editor’s Note 5 December 2021: The information Reality released was used to help harden the 2020 presidential election against foreign interference according to CBS News.  The USA holds Winner incommunicado — as they hold other whistleblowers like Daniel Hale of the NSA and Teri J. Albury of the FBI.

NSA analyst, Reality Winner, is currently serving an 8 year sentence of incarceration and media censure for trying to alert the public to voting machine tampering that executives at the National Security Agency know occurred.

Everyone remembers (or should remember) the fiasco in Florida that elected Bush Junior in 2000. The consequences were a disaster from which the USA is yet to recover. Twin Towers, Iraq War, financial collapse, and Great Recession are trigger words to help people remember the nightmare some may have repressed to stay sane. The USA came close to becoming a third-world country almost overnight.

In 2016 Americans shoved their way onto the Titanic one more time—the captain of the ship doesn’t even know how to swim. There is no way most Americans will survive the catastrophe that is on its way. We are going to hit an iceberg in the middle of the night. The water that we die in will be cold. In this movie, no one is coming to the rescue.

TRUMP

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

11 – Why has it been so hard to recreate the brain? It’s billions of years old, and still more complicated than any machines we have ever made.
 

Multi-celled life with neuron based brains came on line less than 400 million years ago.

One celled organisms like amoebas and protozoa are incredibly intelligent and agile yet they lack neurons, which seem to be the foundational units of modern brains. Fossils of amoebas have been found in rocks that are older than 400 million years.

To mechanically recreate a modern brain requires much more than simply wiring-up in three dimensions a hundred billion or so logic gates. Actually, such a building project would be prohibitively expensive and impossible to accomplish using current fabrication capabilities.

Even if it were possible to create the neuronic architecture of a brain, other mechanical structures such as nanoscale microtubules are probably essential to bring the brain into a conscious state such as the one experienced by humans.

Microtubules are the bones of cells—a sort of scaffolding to hold everything together. They play an essential role in meiosis and mitosis to keep DNA from becoming an entangled mess during cell divisions. They have a quantum nature that adds a probably essential complexity to neuronal activity inside brains.

Brains also have a chemical nature that enables them to interact with the complicated hormonal chemistries of the body to drive emotional intelligence—an intelligence essential to survival that depends on feelings to work properly.

The point is that before anyone can build a working brain, they will need to understand what a working brain is and how it actually functions. This knowledge may lie hundreds of years into the future. It might require super-computers to figure out how brains work; artificial super-intelligence is what might be required to create the schematics, blueprints, and production protocols to build living brains.

It’s possible that the artificial intelligence of a distant future will be what is finally able to recreate brains by deploying strategies that humans can never hope to understand, because sadly homo-sapiens may not be smart enough.

Super Intelligence

Faked Life

12 – Is light the most significant thing in the universe?
 

Light is electromagnetic radiation. We can feel some frequencies as heat, some we can see, but most frequencies we don’t see or feel. Humans evolved to see and feel frequencies of light that are prevalent at the surface of Earth and are able to penetrate into a few feet of saltwater in the oceans.

Earth’s magnetosphere and its atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen deflect or block high frequencies of light that pack a lot of energy. Life on Earth didn’t evolve to sense light frequencies that don’t get here.

Astronauts in space encounter these higher frequencies of light. Excursions into space are carefully choreographed to avoid solar flares and other known sources of high energy light. So far we’ve been lucky. No space traveler has yet been cooked by light they can’t see. On Earth people have learned not to stick their hand into an invisible beam of microwave light. They heat their coffee with microwaves instead.

If humans were the size of galaxies and lived in space, they would sense less than one percent of the energy and mass that is out there. 95% of the mass and energy in the universe is not electromagnetic according to the latest conjectures by astrophysicists. Space people will sense only a small fraction of the 5% that is electromagnetic—what everyone calls light and matter.

In the large scales of space, humans are tadpoles in the desert. Nothing in space makes survival easy for lifeforms accustomed to living under a blanket of heavy gases inside the comfort of a massive magnetic field that is generated by a planet unlike any other that astronomers have yet seen.

Finding Life in Space

13 – What will happen to the Earth in three billion years?

It’s impossible to know, but the most probable scenario is that it will be swallowed by the Sun. Earth is likely to be struck by an asteroid that will break it into pieces; many will fall Sunward.
 

Solar systems have the reputation of being unstable over long periods. A popular conjecture of some cosmologists is that one or more of the giant outer planets might have moved inside the orbit of Mars during the distant past. Were this event to play out again, Earth’s orbit would be disrupted; it might be flung out to the faraway depths of the solar system or into the Sun.

If Earth drifts to the outer reaches of the Solar System it will—over many millions of years—freeze solid. It will generate its own heat only by radioactive decay of the uranium and thorium in the material beneath its crust. Radioactive heating seems to be typical in objects like Pluto and several of the moons that orbit Jupiter and Saturn. They have, some of them, warm oceans many miles below the frozen crust and ice that make their surfaces.

The moon stabilizes Earth’s tilt and rotation on its axis. The moon is receding at 1 to 1.5 inches per year. In 3B years, the moon will be 60,000 miles farther from Earth. Its gravitational pull will drop to almost half of what it is today. Computer simulations show that Earth is likely to start wobbling chaotically, even tip over onto its side. Such a scenario will disrupt climate and seasons to spark extinctions of plant and animal life.

A more urgent crisis is the production by humans of many thousands of tons of radioactive poisons, chemical toxins, and biological agents that can induce disease. These materials must be secured and protected for many tens-of-thousands of years to prevent breaches of containment structures, which will rust and rot after the humans who maintain them no longer can. 

Risk analysts like Nick Bostrom have speculated that humans are likely to suffer an extinction event during the next few thousand years. Without human caretakers it might take less than 500 years for the poisons to break out to soak the earth like vinegar in a sponge.

Huge die-offs of life-forms might occur.

RISK

14 – Where does the universe begin?
 
People have a lot of ideas; the one that seems most reasonable to my mind is Conformal Cyclic Cosmology introduced by Sir Roger Penrose about 15 years ago where he proposed that the Universe is eternal into both the past and future; it has no beginning and no end.

CCC produces EONS in an infinite progression of puffs—much like a steam locomotive emits a series of puffs from its smokestack as it chugs along on its tracks.

These eons last trillions of years. At the end of an eon all matter has been sucked into black holes where it evaporates by the mechanism of Hawking Radiation. The Universe ends devoid of matter, which is necessary to establish the metrics of space and time.

A universe without matter is conformally equivalent to a singularity. The process by which a universe emerges from a singularity will be the same process that pushes a universe devoid of mass into becoming a new universe.

Under the CCC scenario “big bangs” create new universes on the ashes of the old to eventually introduce the matter necessary to establish the spacetime metrics of relativity and the foundational realities of the quantum world.

If CCC is valid, evidence of Hawking Points left behind from prior universes should be able to be identified in the cosmic background radiation. The search for these points has already begun.

Conformal Equivalence

15 – How did the earth get far enough away from the first photons of the cosmic background radiation that they are only now, 13 billion years later, arriving at our observatories?

You are referring to the surface of last scattering, which isn’t a thing but is instead an estimated location.

The cosmic background radiation is a thing—1E90 photons released in the great photon decoupling event that occurred, I don’t know, maybe a half million years after the origin of the Universe we live in now.

These photons are still here; they saturate all space like vinegar in a sponge.

The surface of last scattering is the place where astronomers look to get an idea of how uniform was the decoupling of photons when the Universe turned on the lights.

The location of the decoupling event is a long way away (13.7B light-years maybe), but the distance to the edge of the universe on the other side of the surface of last scattering is a lot farther.

One reason is that space is currently expanding at 14 miles-per-second for every million light-years of distance. The edge of the Universe beyond the surface of last scattering is at least an additional 32B light-years; at its edge the Universe is expanding outward from the perspective of Earth at 3.5 times the speed of light.

We live at the center of a sphere of celestial objects we can detect that is 27.6 billion light-years across. Our physics predicts that the universe we can’t see is 93B light-years across at minimum. Across 93B light years, the expansion of space adds to 7 times the speed of light.

Because it is almost certain that Earthlings don’t live at the center of the Universe, most scientists familiar with the matter think that the actual universe is bigger than 93B light-years—perhaps a lot bigger.

16 – How did Jane Fonda betray Vietnam American POW’s during the Vietnam War? Were there repercussions after her visit to North Vietnam?

If I’m a prisoner, I want visitors. Celebrity visitors are even better.

Jane provided a first-hand account—a picture—of the captivity that helped war planners set up the conditions for an eventual release. We got almost all the POWs back.

Jane Fonda doesn’t get credit for the good she did. Probably the most important thing she accomplished was to remind Americans that we were attacking a primitive people thousands of miles from home for no good reason.

Had Vietnam been a nation of puppies and kittens, the atrocities of war would have affected more people whose hearts became stone as they continued to fight for too many years.

Many veterans have hearts that have yet to melt. Many are unable to apologize for their gullibility even now in their golden years as they prepare to meet God and account for their lives. Their leaders lied; soldiers believed the lies then; some continue to believe.

History has proved that those who protested the war were right. We owe Jane Fonda big time for having the courage to speak truth to racists and killers.

How many civilians display courage in the face of evil?

The United States killed over two-million souls during that depraved debacle. How is the world better? We have bitter people on all sides who won’t look into the mirror and take responsibility for what they did.

Blaming Jane Fonda for our moral failings is a mistake we must fix in order to heal.

Is Something Wrong?

17 – Is it possible that an object has weight but no mass?

Remember the formula that says force equals mass times acceleration.

F=m*a

Force is weight, right?

Mass accelerated by a gravitational field is what gives an object its weight (or force).

So it seems reasonable to believe that if mass is zero, force must also be zero. But that idea would be wrong. Another concept in physics is momentum. It is mass multiplied by its own velocity. Momentum is energy that can be used to do work.

Massless objects like photons have energy too. Photons have the ability to do work. The energy of light is related to its color (or frequency). The higher a photon’s frequency the more work it can do. Gamma photons have the highest frequencies. Some have energies equivalent to baseballs thrown by professional pitchers.

So it seems that both massless photons and massive matter have energy that can do work. Energy is energy so momentum must have some kind of equivalence to the frequency of massless photons.

What is work? It is force multiplied by the distance through which it moves. Since both massless photons and massive matter can do work they both must have some kind of equivalence related to force.

Therefore it is true that a massless photon can exert a force, which when measured can be thought of as its weight. The wave-particle duality of photons is another way of saying that an object with no mass can have weight (or force).

The idea that an object with no mass can exert a force which can be measured as “weight” has puzzled folks for a very long time. However, a string of formulas can be constructed to show that it is true.

The energy of photons goes up in tiny increments called quanta as their frequencies increase. When the energy gets high enough it gets difficult to force a photon to step up to the next highest energy level. It is something to keep in mind when pondering the physics of quantum phenomenon like black-body radiation or the photo-electric effect that Einstein described to win his Nobel Prize.

18 – Where do the ideas for the left/progressivism in the U.S. come from?

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FLASH CARD ANSWERS

Wisdom can be condensed and gurgitated easily by anyone who has experienced a lifetime of learning, experimentation, and the testing of limits. No one understands America who has not spent time in its ghettos and prisons; in its jails and colleges; in its military and its resorts; in its paradises and hells. 

No one who’s never been both rich and poor knows what either is like; rich and poor is what the majority of Americans are. The ten percent who consider themselves middle-class know almost nothing about either — rich and poor is how ninety percent of the population lives –with ninety percent of the ninety percent living poor. 

I know things — amazing things that most people believe are not true. I’ve lived all over the world; worked for over a dozen companies; attended a dozen schools; trimmed gravestones in Arlington National Cemetery and invented products everyone uses — like milk carton safety caps and tear-spout coffee lids. I developed products of war — like the run-flat wheel that enables military vehicles with shot-out tires to keep rolling. 

My truth is not reflected in media or in the faces of my family and friends. I have secrets, which many want kept until I sleep in the grave. When speaking truth, they tell me to stop; when I continue, some walk away. 

So be it. 

People on Quora.com ask me (and others) for answers to questions. What follows is a small sample of questions I’ve answered.  Readers can scan to find something they like. Find something interesting and read a flash card answer, which is my version of what might be true. Copy answers onto index cards. Who will stop you?

I admit: some answers are not true.

Who will find what’s fake?

If objects in the universe are moving away from us in all directions, are we the center according to the Big Bang theory?   
It’s not true that all objects are moving away from us. The Andromeda Galaxy is heading toward us (the Milky Way); the collision is due in a few billion years; it’s likely that the black holes at the center of both galaxies will interact with unpredictable results.

The material in the universe can be compared to the dust in a household vacuum cleaner that is shaken loose into a large room. Over time the individual particles will separate to fill the space, but what an individual particle will do is not knowable, at least not right away.

That said, we know for certain that the metrics of space are changing; it is an expansion that is increasing with time.

Currently the rate of expansion is 14 miles per second for every million light years (a distance of nearly six-million-trillion miles). It seems like a small number until you do the calculation for the size of the universe. Past the “event horizon” of 14 billion light years the expansion exceeds the speed-of-light.

Do the math.

What is the future of a universe that is undergoing a runaway expansion?

A conjecture has been proposed by mathematician Sir Roger Penrose called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC). Data gathered by recent satellites seems likely to strengthen his view.

What is wrong with the question “What existed before the Big Bang?” I have been told that this question doesn’t make sense, but I have never heard a decent layman’s explanation as to why. 
The question is sensibly answered by the theory proposed by Roger Penrose: Conformal Cyclic Cosmology or CCC, sometimes referred to as Eon Theory.

The conjecture was proposed around 2004, I think, but collaborating evidence is only now becoming available through data collected by the WMAP and Planck satellites, and by LIGO.

The premise is that in both the singularity and a maximally expanded universe the degrees of freedom of gravity, which is associated with “mass”, drop out of the metrics. Without mass it is not possible to differentiate the initial and terminal states of the universe by scaling; the two states are in fact conformally equivalent.

The Big Bang emerges from a maximally expanded universe; the cycle repeats endlessly like a chugging choo-choo train whose next puff seems to emerge from the dispersion of the last puff; time has no beginning and no end.

If or when the universe ends someday and ceases to exist, could it be created again as it was in the beginning? 
The idea by Roger Penrose, retired mathematician and cosmologist, that the universe is conformally equivalent at its beginning and end is gathering evidence from the WMAP and Planck satellites that acolytes who do the math claim might be confirmational.

Evidence may also be buried in the data collected by LIGO, according to Penrose. He’s urging folks to dig through the data to find it.

Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) — some call it Eon Theory — has been exciting for the past 15 years, but only in the past few years has data been available to help validate what at first seemed to some like a crackpot idea.

Is it safe to have a nuclear reactor in a submarine?

Of course not.

Of the 82 nuclear submarines deployed or under construction by the US Navy, two have sunk (the Scorpion and Thresher).

It’s 2.5%, which for me is too high.

In war, all USA subs will be destroyed at sea by enemy fire during a first strike surprise attack.

The USA will destroy all adversary nuclear subs with a coordinated and long-planned after-strike.

Large numbers of nuclear reactors and their poisons boiling at the bottom of oceans are a threat to every living creature on Earth.

The nuclear genie needs to be put back in its bottle. It should be the highest priority of the international community if humans are to have any chance at all to continue as a species for more than a few hundred years.

All personnel engaged in warfare preparation involving nuclear weapons are subject to sophisticated arguments in training fashioned by psychologists to ensure their enthusiastic support of nuclear weapons and a solid belief in their own personal safety.

I beg these trained individuals to use their common sense.

      Don’t we live under a nuclear reactor called the Sun? It does no harm. 
We would die, everyone of us, if Earth didn’t have a magnetosphere to deflect the solar wind; the field works with nitrogen and oxygen to make Earth’s atmosphere opaque to high energy radiation from the Sun. It doesn’t work the same way for Earth-generated radiation.

Nuclear power is not safe; on so many levels, it never will be. A world with 10,000 nuclear reactors and 50,000 nuclear warheads is a planet doomed to extinction, if not in the near future, then in the long, for sure.

     Scrap nuclear deterrence? What?
We need to learn to work with people who have different ideas about what life is and how it should be lived. We don’t have much time to learn. The danger is imminent; the need is urgent.

Even without war, the poisons of rotting reactors and weapons will percolate into the environment over time. We’ve already destroyed the planet.

If humans survive, people will someday forget about the weapons; they will rot unattended and unremembered. A few thousand years from now people might wonder why everyone they know is sick and dying.

In hindsight, was going to Iraq justifiable?
Was killing a million human beings and destabilizing the Middle East justifiable?

What does an enemy of the United States have to do to suffer such consequences? Almost all the “facts” the Bush family “shared” with Americans and the rest of the watching world about Saddam and the Iraqis were bald-face lies.

The damage is that people believe these lies to this day. Their misunderstanding of what happened distorts everything they believe and do.

We will never get it right when Americans’ views are twisted out of all proportion to realities.

Is the situation dangerous in the Middle East?

After all the blood-letting, are things better or worse?

How was the first cell created? Can we replicate those circumstances?
No one knows how the first cells were created. It is a mystery of science likely never to be solved.

What is known is that cellular life began on Earth almost immediately after it cooled sufficiently to be safe for life, which unravels at temperatures above 300 degrees or so Fahrenheit.

The first cells were thousands of times smaller than the cells that make the plants and animals of today. These tiny prokaryotes persisted for a few billion years until the larger eukaryotes evolved.

Once eukaryotes developed the ability to convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis, they produced huge volumes of a byproduct called oxygen, which poisoned most prokaryotic life on Earth during that time.

Prokaryotes able to adjust to the presence of oxygen survive today, mostly as bacteria and archaea.

Does socialism only work in small countries?
Any system that is supported by the people who live under it works well — especially socialism.

The problem for socialism is interference by the United States. It is the policy of the USA to disrupt and prevent — to the point of war if need be — the success of socialism anywhere.

The reasoning is simple. When socialism succeeds, billionaires are at risk. They don’t share well, and some are willing to kill anyone who tries to undercut their power.

Read the news: what wealthy people do is disgusting. Don’t make me explain. Get your head out of the sand, anyone who doesn’t believe it.

The pharaohs made the Egyptian system work. They built pyramids. The Russians were first into space and first to the moon. The Germans produced the scientists who propelled civilization into the future after WWII.

Slavery inside the USA clothed the world in cotton.

Pick a system, any system, and it can be made to work as well as any other.

If billionaires can convince cotton-pickers that life is good, who will challenge them?

What was the real reason why the USA lost the war against Vietnam?
The USA killed two-million Vietnamese. The Vietnamese killed fifty-eight thousand Americans. The USA thoroughly trashed Vietnam and poisoned the country-side with Agent Orange defoliants. The Vietnamese didn’t knock down a single structure inside the United States.

The USA deployed a program to assassinate over one-hundred-thousand South Vietnamese men and women it suspected of siding with the North. No such program of civilian murders was carried out by the North.

The Americans and their allies napalmed entire villages and executed both civilian and animal survivors. Not a single village was ever cremated by the North.

The USA carpet-bombed huge swaths of Vietnam daily for twelve years. The North didn’t have an effective air force.

It was a one-sided fight from the beginning. The USA killed and murdered until its leaders’ lust for blood was satiated. When nothing was left to prove and the thrill of the kill faded, the United States pulled out its troops and went home.

The whole world knows what we did. The reason the international community of nations doesn’t confront us for doing bad things is because we scare them.

The families of tens-of-millions of the dead cry out to God to settle scores; they pray for justice.

Americans trust — as the Germans, the Japanese, and the Romans before them trusted — that justice never comes.

Who is Donald Trump’s base? Why is he popular? Why are people voting for him? Why do people like and support him?
Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by nearly eleven million votes. Three million went to Hillary; eight million to third party candidates. It was the biggest loss by popular vote in the history of USA elections.

Losing the popular vote by 8% yet securing the electoral college is a result that will live in infamy.

The first election after his “victory” was in 2018 when the largest swing of Republican districts to Democrats occurred in the history of the contests between Republicans and Democrats.

Trump is the most unpopular man to hold the presidency in my lifetime.

Why do his supporters love him?

My view is that in every country people exist who are attracted to bad things like moths are to flames. History shows that in Germany, people loved Hitler. The allies forced the German population to tour the concentration camps, because otherwise no one in Germany would believe their government committed genocide.

Trump is doing bad things to powerless people — not only to mothers and children at our southern border but in the middle east, far east, and around the world.  His decisions are making a more dangerous world; it’s possible that tens-of-millions of innocents will die should he continue to trash the edifice that has enabled Earth to avoid nuclear war during the past 75 years.

We must avoid nuclear catastrophe for thousands of years more if we are to become the great space-faring civilization many people seek. We can’t go to the stars if Earth is poisoned by plutonium.

People have a dark side. Philosophers, psychologists, and priests have argued this point for millennia. Evidence is solidly on their side. Political campaigns are waged using “hidden persuaders” that appeal to the reptilian nature of human conscious thought. These persuaders are built from the bricks of fear, sexuality, aggression, and cruelty. They work.

Until people learn to turn away from the dark side, survival of civilization is at risk.

Leaders like Hitler and Trump are inevitable and unavoidable. It will be interesting to learn whether America’s great experiment in divided government will survive Trump’s attempt to undermine it so that he can become a king of sorts whose family members will succeed him in their quest for ultimate power.

What do you find interesting about physics?
The science of physics is all about explaining what is happening but not why. It’s interesting to me that the smartest scientists in the world can’t tell anyone why anything works the way it does.

The universe is governed so far as anyone knows by forces and constants that are unknowable, underivable, and unexplainable. All anyone can know is what happens; no one understands why.

Billions of dollars are spent to determine that gravity behaves according to certain rules. Experiments to discover the measure of forces and constants are always being done and refined. But where do the rules come from that make the forces and constants? What principles underlie the formation of the Universe?

Good luck to anyone who finds someone who knows why. Scientists laugh at the philosophers who try to provide clues to the why of things; it’s because some scientists are arrogant and ignorant. They don’t believe that what little they know is almost nothing at all.

Even animals as dumb as cats, goats, and birds calculate distances in their heads to make survival decisions based on their answers. Like humans they have no clue about the why of things, either.

What must happen for all Americans to accept the same truths?
Reduce the number of television and radio channels to one. Restrict diversity of content on the internet. Reduce the number of people who think “outside the box.” Put them into prisons or execute them, whichever is cheaper.

Torture people who refuse to think like everyone else. Others will “get the message” and adjust their thinking to conform to the American Way.

Eliminate elections — they stir-up people unnecessarily.

Reduce the wages of the 99% to subsistence; pay the 1% as much as possible to encourage them to embrace conformity.

Build impenetrable walls on all borders. Malcontents must not be allowed to leave; they might spread anti-American ideas abroad.

Do these things and Americans will accept the same truths. They will present a united front against anyone who might dare to challenge them.

What shocked you the most from the Mueller report?
The most shocking aspect of the report is the absence of any mention of or investigation into the president’s wife who is the daughter of a former member of the communist party of Yugoslavia back in the day.

She was born when DT was 24 years old. Was she groomed for the job she currently holds? Can America rule out with confidence that she is not a sleeper agent? She immigrated to the USA not too many years ago. It would be nice to hear that she is trustworthy.

It is clear from the report that DT is working for the other side. No one will say that the emperor has no clothes. Is it fear of the Russian-Israeli mob bosses, or is it something else?

Why is everyone in denial when the truth is obvious? How can Mueller say there was no conspiracy when the report screams that there was?

As for obstruction of the investigation, no sensible person needs a report to understand the extraordinary lengths that the president and his team traveled to discredit the people who defend Americans against despots and liars like the ones we currently endure.

The president has the power to hurt a lot of people should he go postal, which he seems in his tweets to threaten from time to time.

What are volcano eruptions good for?
Volcanism permits the release of heat generated by the radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth’s interior. The release of heat permits convection currents in the liquid part of Earth’s core — without these currents the magnetosphere collapses, which puts the survival of all life at risk due to dramatically increased exposure to charged particles from solar and cosmic radiation.

When will the earth’s core cool down enough to make the magnetic field too weak to counter the suns solar storms?
Earth’s magnetic field depends more on convection currents in its molten metallic core than on its temperature. If the core gets too hot, it cannot sustain a magnetic field.

For convection currents to circulate, heat must be generated, but it must be able to escape so that it doesn’t build up.

Earth’s crust or mantle is cracked like the shell of a hard-boiled egg.

Crustal pieces called tectonic plates move about to permit volcanism and venting faults, which release the heat that is generated by the radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth’s interior.

Earth’s core is the size of the planet Mars. It is solid at the center with a liquid (but highly viscous) outer layer. The solid center stays solid because of the pressure it is under; it is too hot to be magnetic. The outer liquid center is also under pressure; it must circulate to generate Earth’s magnetic field; otherwise the field will collapse; the protection it offers Earth against the solar wind will die.

Venus has a solid-liquid core like Earth’s but no tectonic plate activity to release heat and permit convection currents. As a result, Venus lacks a magnetosphere to shield it from cosmic radiation and solar flares.

The core of Mars froze solid millions of years ago. With no magnetosphere and little gravity, over time the solar wind has been able strip away a sizable portion of the Martian atmosphere. Only the heaviest gas is left in more than trace amounts: carbon dioxide.

I’ve read that geologists believe that the dynamics which generate the magnetosphere of Earth are robust and will last as long as the planet. Let’s hope they are right. 

I have heard from Conservatives that Communism killed millions of people. Leftists claim that Capitalism killed the same. Which economic system has killed more people, and how are these numbers figured?
Since the start of the first World War until today two countries have killed the majority of people who have died in fights between nations: Germany and the United States.

During their killing sprees, oligarchs in both countries built and nurtured vast military-industrial alliances that automated mayhem and suffering. The rapid killing of humans began with chemicals, advanced to automated machine gunnery, and culminated in the deployment of atomic bombs and massive aerial bombardment of cities with fire-jellies known today as napalm.

During WWII, Germany attempted a partially successful ethnic-cleansing of Jewish populations in Europe and the Middle East. After the war against Germany was won, the United States and Russia worked together to orchestrate the execution of 100,000 German citizens for war-crimes. It was a small fraction of the numbers killed during that war, which some analysts believe approached 100 million souls.

It occurred to me that your question might be asking about which system, Capitalism or Communism, killed the largest number of its own subjects as it struggled to stand itself up and establish itself.

My view is that Capitalism is a euphemism for slavery. The word was invented to put a positive spin on the system in the USA where everyone works to enrich a privileged few. USA oligarchs needed an attractive term for their system when it came under popular challenge around the world by Communists during the twentieth century.

Communists believed that people should cooperate to create wealth, which they then shared. This kind of thinking was anathema to those who believed that only the people who risked their fortunes were entitled to the wealth created by their subjects (workers or slaves).

Through this lens, it is clear that Capitalism (or slavery) in the USA — the one country in the modern world able to preserve its slave system — decimated its indigenous populations and oppressed the Negro population under the cruelest form of slavery that has yet existed on Earth.

Oligarchs known as robber barons permitted the killing of thousands of ordinary workers during the building of the nation’s infrastructure, not only in mines, on road and railway systems, and on dams but also in unregulated sweat shops hidden behind the invisible walls of poverty in overcrowded cities.

The United States has a media system owned by a handful of families that sustains itself on advertising revenue. The practice of advertising in the USA is sophisticated. Psychologists help oligarchs maximize their advantages by crafting messages to modify the attitudes and behaviors of ordinary people.

Billionaires (most of whom are well-dressed thieves) hold themselves up as pillars of virtue and civic service in the media they control. They fight wars to secure the resources of countries like Venezuela, Brazil, Vietnam, Japan, etc. etc. They explain these wars to the public as righteous acts against evil powers.

It’s sickening.

If something is 40 million light years away, how long will it take for the light to reach us?
A light-year is a distance, which is 5.8786 trillion miles. 40 million light-years is a distance of 235 trillion miles.

Space expands at 14 miles-per-second per million light-years. For objects separated by a distance of 40 million light years, space expands at 560 miles per second.

Every million years, as the light from an object approaches Earth, the expansion of space will decrease by 14 miles per second, because the distance between the incoming light and Earth will be decreasing.

Therefore, it is certain that the time it takes light that started its journey 40 million light-years distant from Earth will take more than 40 million years to reach us. Right?

The first million light-years will take close to an additional 3,006 years due to the expansion of space. Each million light years of reduced distance will add less travel time until the added time becomes insignificant, because as the distance between the incoming light and Earth falls to zero so does the expansion of space.

If we take half of 3,006 years to be the average added time per million light-years, a simple calculation that doesn’t involve calculus will be a close approximation of the additional time traveled.

Do the math to learn that the added time of travel is 60,120 years due to the expansion of space alone.

Light 40 million light-years away takes 40,060,120 years to reach Earth.

The answer to whether or not our own consciousness has anything to do with how a wave or a particle manifests in physics seems to change completely with whoever answers it. Is there any real way to prove this?
Richard Feynman said once that he believed the underlying nature of reality is unknowable. Violations of Bell’s inequality in quantum entanglement cannot be visualized by models or any sort of mental imagery.

Something that can be described by mathematics but not explained by words or imagery is probably 95% of reality for the species-human. We are tadpoles in a muddy pond who struggle in vain to understand a world we will never see.

It has been known for a hundred years that when humans conduct an experiment on nanoscale particles they affect the results during their observation of both the process and the outcomes. Every kid who does the several variations of the double-slit experiment learns that it is true.

Engineers take what works and turn it into miracles that no one understands — the digital device folks use to view my answer is incomprehensible to most. Some understand parts, but it takes a team to understand the whole.

People crave certainty. Quantum observations prove that certainty is a quixotic quest doomed from the start. People want to believe that what they think “must be true” is provable by both logic and experimental verification.

Unfortunately for those who don’t tolerate cognitive dissonance well, everything and nothing is both provable and falsifiable depending on which axioms are chosen as starting points.

What elements do scientists use to estimate the age of the Earth?
They use isotope ratios. Although 118 elements make up the periodic table, the elements have thousands of isotopes, right?

For example, lead can be separated into eleven groups — each group has a different weight. The weight differences are the result of the number of neutrons in the nucleus. The more neutrons, the heavier the isotope. Four of the isotopes of lead are stable — they don’t decay into other isotopes or other elements.

All chemical properties of the 118 elements in the periodic table are determined by their electrical structure, which is the number of electrons they carry. Neutrons add weight carried in the nucleus but otherwise are irrelevant to the simple chemical behaviors of the elements.

To estimate the age of Earth, scientists study the composition of zircon, a common silicate element in Earth’s crust. Zircon is lead averse. Any lead found in zircon must be the result of radioactive decay of either uranium or thorium, which are common impurities. These impurities are radioactive and can over time change the color of zircon as they break down its crystal structure.

One of the isotopes of uranium has a half-life of 4.47 billion years; another isotope has a half-life of 710 million years. Both isotopes decay to stable isotopes of lead.

So the process is to measure how much of each isotope of uranium is contaminating the zircon sample and how much of that uranium has decayed into the two isotopes of lead that are stable; that don’t decay any further. This method can measure the age of the earth to a precision of 50 million years.

Earth’s age is believed to be 4.543 billion years.

Does it seem odd that such a useful trait like high level cognitive function is not more common in Earth’s life-forms? 
Once a species (humans) reaches a certain level of intelligence, other intelligent creatures become a source of fear and loathing.

Imagine raccoons or squirrels equipped with human intelligence. They are able to out-game us, work their way into living spaces, even sneak up in the night to kill us with their imaginative weapons.

After the kill, they sneak into refrigerators by deploying ingenious levers and pulleys to take and eat cold pizza and left-over wiener-schnitzel.

How long will people put up with such behavior before they go on an extermination campaign?

In New York City extermination campaigns against intelligent rats have already begun. It might take a hundred years, but eventually rats with sense will refuse to live in NYC.

Over hundreds-of-thousands of years collections of intelligent creatures have devolved to fear and mistrust other collections of intelligent creatures. The lust for war has entered human DNA to the point that people search for differences among themselves to justify mass-slaughter and genocides.

What is less subtle than skin color or religion or immigration-status? All these “superficialities” have been used as an excuse to attack and kill “others” no matter how similar or different — some of whom, as I write, are watching from their burrows in horror as they plan their assaults on the species human.

The Kingdom of Animals does not distinguish between our physical and moral differences. Humans deserve to die for their cruelties. With every squashed bug, fear and loathing intensifies. Even now legions of mosquitoes and Japanese beetles plan their revenge.

This summer they will extract it — even as most humans occupy themselves with arguments pro-and-con about what a hair-ball the president has turned out to be.

Only when humans destroy themselves and go extinct will intelligence get its chance to bloom within the diversity of species that occupy the planet. By then extra-terrestrials will have found Earth and enslaved it.

It is in this sense that the species-human will achieve its revenge against the intelligent squirrel and raccoon; against the mosquito and beetle who so often drove people to distraction when they dominated Earth.

Billy Lee

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WHAT’S GOING ON?

What’s Going On?

UPDATE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD: On 26 March 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Nicolas Maduro on charges of drug trafficking and narco-terrorism, and the Department of State offered a $15 million reward for information that helps ”bring him to justice”.

It’s an album title – prophetic in its way — by Marvin Gaye, who was shot and killed by his own father on April Fools Day, 1984. Marvin would have celebrated his 45th birthday the next day, April 2.

Spring was on its way; no one saw winter coming.

It seemed at first that a fight between his parents went terribly wrong. Relatives tell different versions. In the end, it went down like this: Marvin’s father, a Pentecostal Minister and Healer, shot Marvin in his heart with a .38 caliber pistol Marvin gave him for Christmas.

Left behind were an adopted son, two bio-children, two brothers, two sisters, a half-brother, and his parents.

What’s Going On?

His father, it turned out, suffered from an undiagnosed brain tumor located on his pituitary gland. It made him violent; it drove him crazy. He felt scared. He feared his son. He shot the boy-man that he told everyone who would listen he truly loved.

What’s Going On?

Marvin Gaye propelled the Motown sound into the stratosphere of American popular music during the 1960s. Like most gifted black men in those years, he was a traumatized human being. He made the best of it.

Albums like What’s Going On and songs like Sexual Healing brought reassurance and comfort to millions of folks who suffered the emotional stress of living inside but apart in apartheid and militarized America.

In those days, like today, America itched for a fight. It found a good fight in Vietnam; it would soon find many others – all pointless and needlessly wasteful of both national treasure and human life. Like Marvin’s dad, America shot its sons in their hearts. America wasted a generation, which it forced to choose between fighting war and fighting against war.

Father, father
We don’t need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today, oh oh oh
Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what’s going on…

A few souls managed to tightrope between the chasms of violence on both sides, but not many. Today, the United States is a couple of countries short of conquering the entire world.

Venezuela is one country among a dozen or so that sit at the top of a hit-list.

What will come next?

What’s Going On?

I’ve answered a lot of questions about Venezuela on Quora. I’ve never visited the country. I know almost nothing about it except what I’ve read in books and on Twitter by people who live there. Still, I have opinions. I’m not afraid to pontificate about the situation, because I’ve seen these coup-scenarios playout my entire life – seven decades and counting.

It’s like listening to a scratched record that constantly skips to play the same musical phrase; it’s like watching reruns of familiar shows like Leave it to Beaver and even the Twilight Zone. I can tell anyone how a show will end, because in their way all the old shows have the same predictable endings.

What’s happening in Venezuela and how it will end is both predictable and depressing. My standard of living and yours depend on what happens next. The security and safety of our Union depend on it.

The Russians and Cubans must lose. America must win.

Why?

We take the spoils, because if we miss our chance to seize the oil of Venezuela, over time the United States will slide into economic decline. Prosperity and the power of USA billionaires depend not only on free-trade and favorable trade agreements, but also on the resources they sequester; how much of the bounty of others they can steal.

It’s true.

What’s Going On?

TheBillyLeePontificator.com is now open for questions. What follows are answers. The most recent questions are first; the oldest are last.

1 – What’s happening in Venezuela right now?

Over the past several years the United States has been reestablishing its control over the countries of the western hemisphere, right? Dilma Rousseff of Brazil is a prominent example. Anyone who doesn’t know who she is — or her story — isn’t paying attention.

It won’t help to name others. People who know Ms. Rousseff need no explanation. For those who don’t, no explanation will suffice.

It’s easy for Americans to claim ignorance about what their country does to maintain its control over the resources and people of South and Central America. It’s not pretty. People are imprisoned and shot (murdered) to assert USA sovereignty.

Does anyone want to watch the processes by which the sausage they eat is manufactured? Of course not. No one wants to even think about it. The process is brutal and inhumane. It’s better not to know. All anyone really wants is for the sausage to taste good and not make them sick. No one prays for the safety of the pigs who give their lives so that people can enjoy their breakfasts.

It’s the same in Venezuela. The country has massive oil reserves. The leadership is allied with countries who exert their powers on the other side of the world. These countries are always making moves to gain a foothold on American turf. The result is turf wars, which is what Venezuela is.

The United States will kill and imprison as few Venezuelans as possible, hopefully, but it will prevail; it will secure Venezuela’s natural resources, including its oil, for the USA to use and buy from the billionaires who shape its vision.

2 – Considering that every superpower had its rise and fall, do you think that the US will ever drastically fall, and how far into the future do you think that will be?

Since World War II the USA has militarily attacked one-fourth of the world’s nation-states. Of the 195 countries in the world, the USA controls or “unduly influences” all but twenty-five, give or take — through treaties, alliances, trade agreements, and so on. The United Nations is located inside the United States for a reason.

The USA controls the entire western hemisphere and exercises its military dominance without much interference anytime it decides. The Pentagon is a big place. People underestimate its power, because the majority of its structure is not viewable — most of it is below-ground. The vast scale of US power is necessary to operate 800 military bases, which are located in every region of the world.

The financial system of the USA is a force-multiplier that enables the USA to quarantine with knee-bending sanctions both individuals and countries who oppose its goals. American financial leverage is legendary.

The United States is on a trajectory toward world domination that would make the Third Reich stand up and take notice. It is remarkable how US power has grown during my lifetime. The USA is always at war with somebody.

Except for the four years of the Carter administration, the killing and dying doesn’t stop. The numbers of murders has reached into the tens of millions since the end of the last world war.

I believe that the American empire will collapse when the Yellowstone Supervolcano erupts. It might be 500 years from now or next Tuesday. There is no way to know for sure.

3 – Are the recurring power outages in Venezuela due to US interference in their country?

The United States could easily send in technical experts to stand up Venezuela’s power grid. It chooses not to. Not only that, it refuses to provide any kind of aid at all by refusing to work with the elected representatives of that oil-rich country.

Worse, the United States is plotting to isolate and embargo Venezuela. The US president wants their oil; USA oligarchs are at war with socialism; the State Department is at war with Russia who is providing aid to the beleaguered President Maduro.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the United States cares nothing for the ordinary people of Venezuela; it instead is destabilizing the country to secure its resources.

Securing resources in the western hemisphere is something the United States has done repeatedly since the end of World War II. Ask any bona-fide historian if I’m right. Its success is one reason why the United States has the highest standard of living of all other countries in its half of the world.

4 – Russia sends troops to Venezuela to give the United States a ”red line”. Should the United States be worried, and do you think this could start a war between the United States and Russia?

My answer is a guess based on no knowledge or evidence; here it is: the USA will not challenge Russia militarily as long as Trump is president. It’s not collusion; Mueller proved that our president is the most patriotic president that the USA has ever had (and will ever have since he is likely to be the last).

Every red-blooded gun-toting Christian in America knows that Russian oligarchs with the help of almighty God put Trump into power to kill us all for allowing gays to marry. It’s not hard to understand.

5 – What is Venezuela’s national anthem?



Glory to the Brave People

6 – Is it technically possible to sabotage a country’s electricity infrastructure using an electromagnetic attack, as Venezuelan president Maduro has claimed, as the cause of his country’s power failure?

Where were you during the Iraq War? Taking down Saddam Hussein’s electrical grid was a point of pride during that war. Our leaders bragged about it on the evening news.

USA’s ability to attack infra-structure is vastly improved today. Venezuela is the perfect place to conduct diabolical tests of new war-fighting techniques and coup protocols.

Why?

It’s the oil, stupid. (I’m using a popular expression for emphasis. It’s not meant to insult anyone’s point of view.)

Anyone who is knowledgeable about the post-world-war history of the western hemisphere knows that the USA has been or now is at war with every country. The United States runs things or makes those who oppose it miserable with sanctions, sabotage, and subversion.

It’s not something a reasonable person can argue against.

Said another way, only an ideologue or an apologist will deny the culpability of the USA for waging war against Venezuela. If the United States cared about Venezuela, it would help Maduro, not undercut him.

7 – Why do you think there is a nationwide power outage in Venezuela going on right now?

During the Iraq war, the USA took down Baghdad’s power grid. It’s something our country is good at. That this power outage occurred during destabilization efforts to install a new president doesn’t look good for the prime suspects.

8 – Where in the world is the next international war likely to break out?

First, it’s important for everyone to understand that major international conflicts are potential species-extinction events. Enough nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are available to enough countries to threaten the survival of humankind — should humankind fall into the abyss of a conflagration like it did during the two previous world wars.

It’s true that the last world war ended almost 75 years ago, but insufficient time has passed to be convincing that another world war won’t occur, perhaps sooner than anyone imagines.

One important reason why world-war has not occurred is because the United States has spent the post-world-war years consolidating its grip on empire. The USA knows the names, phone numbers, and addresses of every world leader and their relatives. It has cruise missiles and bunker-busters with each leader and family member’s name on at least one of them.

It’s personal. The number of individuals we don’t like and have removed from power is large and growing yearly. Maduro of Venezuela is the latest name on the USA Naughty List, but so, recently, was Dilma Rousseff of Brazil as well as countless others around the world — especially in the Middle East.

According to who counts, 195 countries exist in the world. The USA has conducted military operations against one-fourth of them since the end of World War II. Many conflicts are state secrets not shared with the public.

Expect major changes in Africa soon, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
To my way of reasoning, the best way to determine where the next lit-match will ignite is to look to past conflagrations. Countries with a history of warlike behavior are more likely than countries that lack such a history to start the next major international conflict.

What countries might these be? I’m not going to name them, because why make enemies unnecessarily who might have reformed their ways? But anyone with a knowledge of history and current events can create their own list. It’s not hard to do.

9 – How much worse can it look for Maduro? Denying hungry and sick Venezuelans from free food and medicine with guns. Isn’t Maduro’s time up?

Anyone with any sense knows that the USA engineered this debacle, because it is at war with socialism.

We invaded Cuba after they threw out the mafia, for crying out loud. We preferred organized crime to socialism.

10 – What should everyone know about the current political crisis in Venezuela?

Venezuela lives and dies on the price of oil. Low oil prices brought Venezuela to the brink of collapse in the late 1990s and made Hugo Chavez’s rise possible. Maduro, his successor, is falling on the sword of collapsing oil prices.

What confuses people is why.

Is the USA manipulating the oil markets to take down Maduro? The US has a consistent record of overthrow attempts against leftist governments. With a billionaire oligarch leading the USA, it seems possible.

Why doesn’t the United States help Maduro stabilize his country, which would be the humanitarian path? No one is sure. Common sense seems to suggest that our leaders are looking for a way to make a socialist system fail. Why else back a 35-year-old nobody to run the country? Wouldn’t aid to the elected government be an easier way to bring relief?

The Russians are involved, which further complicates. It’s possible that DT works for their side — so this coup that’s been in the making by our side during the past five years or so is sure to fail now that DT is aware and getting involved.

Time will tell.

It’s a sad state of affairs, what’s going on right now.

11 – Will a civil war happen in Venezuela?

The US has been at war with Venezuela for a long time now. Hundreds of America’s brightest have been working in their Pentagon offices for years to make sure socialism doesn’t succeed in South America.

Our wealthy oligarchs don’t want anyone to believe that a system might work where they aren’t allowed to steal as much as they possibly can and still call it “free enterprise.”

It simple, really. They are looking for allies inside Venezuela who are willing to blame Maduro for what America is doing to undercut them behind the scenes.

This crap started in Guatemala in 1954; it never ends.

12 – Why is Venezuela’s military backing Maduro recently? Is it worth it?

Maduro is the elected president of Venezuela in the same way that Trump is the elected president of the United States. Was the US election fair? Ask Reality Winner who is serving a five-year prison term incommunicado, because she disclosed NSA info on voting fraud. You will find that you can’t interview her.

Reality Winner, incarcerated NSA whistle-blower who exposed voter fraud and tampering in the 2016 presidential election. She is serving a five-year prison sentence — incommunicado as are other whistleblowers like Daniel Hale of the NSA and Teri J. Albury of the FBI.

So good luck figuring out what the truth is.

The billionaires who milk America don’t like socialism, because it is a system where people cooperate to create wealth, which they then share. Sharing wealth is anathema to oligarchs and mob bosses.

So, the USA is pulling out a well-worn playbook to guide itself through the process of replacing the experienced and elected leaders of Venezuela with a 35-year-old kid who knows just enough to do what he’s told. The USA promises to make him president. He promises to serve. It’s a kind of tit-for-tat.

To increase urgency and hysteria the USA manipulates currency and oil prices while it builds a right-wing cartel of nations to do its bidding. All the leaders will get rich under the plan. No one seriously gives a hoot about what happens to the poor.

The biggest danger is civil war, which happens to be exactly the same danger facing the United States. What goes around comes around.

The USA would be doing the world a big favor by helping Maduro get his country on its feet. Low oil prices have been catastrophic for Venezuela. Why don’t we help instead of using a bad situation as an opportunity to set up a bunch of oligarchs who will march to our drumbeat instead of their own?

Why is economic diversity such a bad thing? Ted Kennedy said in his last book that tycoons like his legendary dad were afraid that if socialism succeeds anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, it might become a prairie fire that takes down their edifice of privileges.

No tycoon wants a prairie fire. Every wealthy person believes they are self-made and entitled to all the advantages that their money can buy.

Ordinary people have about the same power to control the circumstances of their lives as farm animals.

It’s pathetic, really.

13 – With a regime change impending, within the next 30-50 years, will Venezuela consider socialistic influences for governmental structure again?

The pending regime change that is coming will take place in the United States. Americans are sick of boorish elites who — under a GOP led by pig Trump — won’t be electable in 2020.

One-party-rule by progressive democrats will bring relief to average people — something they haven’t experienced since the early 1970s. Many young people have no idea what it’s like to live in country that limits what the wealthy can steal and works overtime to bring equity to working people.

14 – Do you agree that reducing imports from Venezuela by the United States is an adequate short-term answer for helping that country and its citizens?

The best thing the USA can do to help Venezuela is to end sanctions, embargos, destabilization by our intelligence forces, and the policy of strategic strangulation, which is killing people — especially the weak.

The next best thing is to organize an international effort to airdrop food aid into the country. Flood the country with rice, powdered milk, clean water, potatoes, corn, etc. Inexpensive food is easy to collect and distribute and will help to strengthen the elderly, children, the pregnant, and the sick.

Flood the country with medical supplies and doctors to help the sick. Start talks with Maduro to offer him all the assistance he needs to get his country on its feet again.

15 – Is the newly accepted Venezuelan government by the United States backed by the majority of people in Venezuela? Or is it propaganda?

Citgo, the Venezuelan oil company, ships 500,000 barrels of heavy crude into Texas refineries every day. The crude is used to make diesel fuel for trucks. Without cheap diesel America’s goods and services get expensive real fast.

America’s oligarchs hate socialist countries. Most people can understand why. The foreign policy of the United States is to destabilize and overthrow all socialist countries whenever possible. Venezuela is an easy mark, because their leaders do not seem to be sophisticated.

Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor, John R. Bolton, are leading a coalition of nations to inflict strategic strangulation on the Maduro administration. The government cannot access its gold reserves (held in British banks) and is fighting to maintain control of Citgo, which adds 10 billion dollars to the nation’s coffers each year.

The USA plans to divert as many assets as it can to the puppet government it is setting up under the auspices of a 35-year-old kid who no one ever heard of before about three days ago.

The process of destabilization has been accelerated under Trump, and the USA is now making its move.

The USA is hoping for military defections combined with public demonstrations to force a sham election in the next 30 days to oust the socialist government in Venezuela and legitimize a new government, which they will control behind the scenes. They hope to assassinate Maduro if they get the opportunity. The Russians are sending in a large security detail to protect the lives of the current group of leaders and help them hold onto power.

The country of Venezuela is polarized much like the USA. The elites want the USA to intervene; the poor want Madura and socialism. All sides want the USA led embargo, destabilization protocols, and strategic strangulation to stop ASAP.

16 – Will the Venezuelan military switch sides if they see the US military lining up for an invasion? Don’t they care mostly about how much they are paid? What good is an ousted Maduro?

Overthrowing elected socialist governments is a specialty of US foreign policy. The USA is good at it, but it doesn’t always work.

Even an intense strategic strangulation of Cuba (and an invasion to boot) was unable to break down the Cuban revolution.

The USA killed two million Vietnamese but failed miserably to prevent the unification of North and South.

Early successful overthrows such as those in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) have convinced policy makers that the odds are in their favor when they decide to decimate a particular country. They have a better than even chance to prevail, so why not take it?

The problem is that everyone now knows — after 79 years of messing with governments — that the USA cares almost exclusively about itself and the protection of its tycoons. Democracy, equality, and basic fairness mean nothing to the United States in its conduct of foreign policy.

Many policy makers disagree with my point of view, but they are in the habit of giving in to self-deception to make it possible for them to live inside themselves.

17 – What is the likelihood that the US will at some time become entangled in a coup in South America?

The USA has a history of involvement in the politics of South and Central American countries. Coups are part of the history. Where have you been?

Seriously.

Destabilizing socialist countries in our hemisphere is an important component of the foreign policy of the United States. Everyone knows. It’s not a well-kept secret.

The USA keeps track of what’s going on through agricultural programs, aid, and assistance. When it desires change, the USA generally tries diplomacy first. If it doesn’t work, more violent methods have been used, including assassinations, disappearances, and coups.

Under certain circumstances, it can be illegal to talk about what exactly our intelligence services do to keep the Americas safe for exploitation by our companies. The most famous company that the USA went to war for was the United Fruit Company during the Eisenhower years. The president’s secretary held a lot of the company’s stock.

Some countries have raw materials that are considered strategic assets. The USA or its surrogates operate mines and other facilities to secure these assets and to keep other competitor countries from access. Right?

The instability in South and Central America that has arisen since President Obama stepped down is probably the result of activities encouraged by the newest president. He has lots of precedents to justify himself, correct?

18 – Are Russia and China’s recent provocative military maneuvers a prelude to war with the United States?

My belief — based on no evidence I can recite — is that our president is a pacifist. He enjoys pretend violence, like pro-wrestling, but is repulsed by real violence. He likes to threaten, yell, call people names, sue people in court, etc., but he is uninterested in physically hurting someone. For him fake violence is a kind of game. Often, he forgives and makes up later.

His mistresses have all said, as far as I know, that he treated them with kindness; something that many philanderers are not known to do.

When he bombed an airstrip to retaliate against a Syrian chemical attack, he set up the targeting so that no one on-site would get hurt. Yes, an attack on another target killed a hundred or so Russian soldiers, but it was an unintended screw-up he’d probably like to have back.

Our president likes to huff and puff and make deals; it’s a harmless game for him that has no meaning except for the fun he gets each day trying to outwit his opponents who he calls “rats” or “crooked” or “lyin” or whatever fits. Hillary Clinton, in real life, is one of his best friends, for crying out loud.

Trump is a liberal at heart, but he pretends to be a racist monster to hold onto his base, which is, let’s face facts, hold-overs from the Confederacy of the Old South. Southern racists are dangerous when angry; otherwise, they are the dumbest, easiest-to-manipulate voters in the country. They are like lemmings — if Trump says, “run off a cliff”, they’ll do it and praise Jesus for the opportunity.

Trump will not go to war against China or Russia as long as he can play monopoly with their oligarchs. He’ll bluster and threaten. He won’t pull any triggers.

One very interesting thing happened the day he became president. A prominent drug lord from Mexico was arrested and disappeared into the New York City penal system. Within a few days the man’s family was rounded up. They haven’t been heard from since.

So, the president has power. His problem is that a component of his power comes from sympathetic mob bosses, often with dual-citizenship — almost always from Russia and Israel. These “friends” aren’t shy about taking care of business, so the president won’t have to.

19 – The US could lose a future war against Russia or China, a new report to Congress has suggested. Do you agree?

The United States completed a two-trillion-dollar upgrade to our nuclear missile inventories during the Obama administration. The USA built a doomsday matrix.

I’ve heard rumors that a certain country has built a doomsday bomb capable of destroying Earth were it ever detonated. Folks should know that there is no upper limit to the destructive power of hydrogen bombs. Countries can build them as big as they want. They can blow up Earth itself.

The USA might not be able to win a hot war, but we won’t lose it to others, either. A war to the death against Russia or China is a war to the death of the planet. If recovery is possible, it will take thousands of years, but climate changes and the loss of resources will mean that Earth will never be what it once was; humans will never be what they once were.

War by major powers against each other (a world-war) is something that can never be allowed to happen again. The next world-war will kill billions of people and unleash a pandora’s box of suffering on the few unfortunates who survive. Rich and poor alike who live will be traumatized to the end of their natural lives.

Hot war is suicide. The leaders of every nation-state must give their last ounce of courage to preserve the one place in the universe where people have the hope to survive and thrive.

20 – Why is Russia’s military so powerful despite the fact that they spend less on defense than the USA?

1 – The Russians pay lower salaries and have fewer military bases. (The USA maintains 800 bases in 70 countries.)

2 – Russia is more than twice the size of the United States.

3 – Russia has the world’s largest reserves of oil.

4 – Russians are more literate in science and engineering than Americans.

5 – Russia has developed dangerous (to us) technological advantages in missile technology. They have air-to-surface missiles that are stealthy and reach velocities close to three miles per second. The USA has nothing in its arsenal that can track and shoot them down, which means that we risk losing our entire fleet of navy ships in a hot war.

6 – Russia has a fleet of drone subs deployed off our coasts.

7 – Russia does not seem to the have rampant corruption and cost overruns in its manufacturing sector that the United States is known for and which drive up the price of everything the Pentagon buys.

8 – Russians build their vehicles, artillery, and guns to perform in off-road bad weather conditions. They design their equipment to be simple, reliable, and easy to fix.

9 – The USA is paying unreliable private companies to administer a big part of its military space program. The temptations that lead to profiteering and unrealistic assessments of effectiveness might rot the foundations of military readiness. It is a risk the Russians don’t take.

Having said all this, the fact is that the militaries of both countries are nightmarishly lethal. The side that attacks first in the next war will accrue big initial advantages that could make a counter-punch ineffective. An immediate imbalance of power could easily become permanent and lead to catastrophe for the country that takes the first hit.

Technologies of modern warfare are making the world less safe for war-makers.

Hope is when the generals and civilian leaders don’t feel safe that they will avoid all-out war.

Terror-in-the-gut starts when military planners understand that the other side will strike first.

Billy Lee

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MYSTERIES

People ask a lot of questions, don’t they?

Some are simple to answer, but people who have missed their opportunity to be broadly educated sometimes can’t separate the simple queries from the hard.  I’m in that group, more times than not.

I rummaged through an old safe the other day.  I found its key tucked away and forgotten in the back of a drawer in an antique desk. I asked myself: what might be in that old safe?  Why not take a look?  What harm could there be in searching a dusty safe for forgotten objects?

I found old papers and school reports. I found Christmas and birthday greetings and expired credit cards.  I found a rectangular tin-foil-wrapped object pressed flat and smooth and a quarter-inch thick — a pamphlet of some kind, perhaps.

I would unwrap it later.

I reviewed a report card from the seventh grade. It held up well during the past 58 years. My geography teacher wrote a comment that caught me by surprise. “Billy Lee is a thinker,” he wrote next to the “A” he gave me.

I remembered back.  Mr. Holden drove a taxi-cab nights to make ends meet. Memories flooded in.

He complained that teachers weren’t paid enough. Between taxi fares, he read books. He recited titles and authors, but I knew I would never read them. The writers’ names were unfamiliar — foreign, some of them, which I couldn’t remember or pronounce; the titles? — incomprehensible.

How could anyone read books whose content was unconnected to anything they knew or were able to understand?  I couldn’t. I was sure of it.

I found a letter from a girl I once loved.  She explained why we could no longer be together.  Despite all my wonderful qualities, I was needy, she explained. I needed to turn my needs into wants by finding others to fill in the gaps she couldn’t.

It was odd, I thought. I didn’t realize how technically expert was her craft the first time I read her note. Who knows? Maybe today she is a famous author who writes under a pen-name. Stranger things have happened in the history of literature, right?

The writer of Jane Eyre comes to mind. Charlotte Brontë published her novel under the name of Currer Bell.  I always thought a writer of her depth might have come up with a better name.  I did, and I’m not half the writer Charlotte was. People have to admit, Billy Lee has a nice ring, no?

Lately, I’ve been writing answers to questions on Quora to which no one can possibly know the answers.  I call them mystery questions.

Many of the questions remind me of the sailor’s dilemma where a seaman finds himself stranded and adrift on a raft in a vast ocean of swells during a raging monsoon. The man clings to a few pieces of wood and prays to God for deliverance.

He asks God why was he born when it is clear that his life is going to end in terror, alone on a raft in a bottomless sea with no chance of rescue. If God by some miracle answers his prayer; if God saves him and the storm clears, the sun will bake him alive; eventually the sharks will eat him.

Why? Why? Why?

What sin did he commit that drove him to his fate? What decisions did he make that were ill-advised and unwise?

What might he have done differently to avoid the horrid end he knows will befall him in the few moments that remain before his strength is sapped and he loses his grip on the last piece of wood, which will disintegrate once he’s sucked beneath the churn.

Well, one answer that comes to mind is this: he didn’t plan for his birth; once born he didn’t plan for his death. He never really believed that he was doomed to a lonely, fearful death — the destiny of all living creatures; humans are no exception.

The answer to his cry for answers is that there are no answers. No one avoids losing everything they love. It is every person’s fate. No scheme, no matter how cleverly constructed, avoids it.

And yet the sailor begs God. He shakes his fist and screams against the gale: God, why did you forget me?  Why my pointless life?  Why did I suffer to the very end? 

Amen.

Here are six mysteries I will struggle to explain.

Mystery 1 — What caused or initiated the Big Bang, if there was nothing before it?

95% of the mass and energy of the universe that theories and observations say must be “out there”, no one has been able to find, right?

Does anyone anywhere know anything at all about what the universe is or how it works?

The big bang is a verbal “analogy” used to help folks visualize what a few theorists have worked out mathematically to explain a lot of observations that otherwise make no sense.

Here is the hard part: the mathematics is also an analogy; it isn’t real; it’s just numbers. Mathematics cannot make a model that reflects fundamental realities without simplifying a lot of important stuff — and no one as yet knows what the missing stuff is that human speculation and observation is overlooking.

We all know it’s true.

Mathematics is a way of reasoning — like language but minus its ambiguities and textures. An argument can be made that mathematics and language are not adequate to the challenge of describing reality.

Humans seem to be lost in a mystery of existence from which they will never be rescued. They lack certain fundamental tools that they must someday discover and develop to give them any chance at all to climb out of a very dark hole of ignorance.

It might be possible to understand the cosmos — if the secrets of consciousness are unraveled. Consciousness is the magic-water in the desert of ignorance which — when found, understood, and imbibed — could quench the thirst-to-know that every thinking person suffers. That is my hope, anyway.

Consciousness might be fundamental and foundational. Most people won’t accept it, but almost every brilliant person who has thought the problem through seems to have written that it must be so.

Start with this: Why Something, Not Nothing?

Then this:

Sensing the Universe

Then this:

Conscious-Life

Mystery 2 — Assuming we can completely separate religion and faith from pure science and fact, then speaking from a purely scientific point-of-view, what form would life after death take?

The consciousness that people experience today is the consciousness they will experience after death if consciousness is the fundamental foundation of all reality.

Conscious life-forms plug into universal consciousness like televisions plug into the cable network. TVs come and go, but the cable network is forever broadcasting. The conscious experience it creates appears in the televisions that are connected to it and can be observed on their screens by independent observers.

The reality of television comes from its fundamental foundation, which is a broadcasting system — in this analogy. As long as a television is plugged in and turned on somewhere, the reality of the cable network will continue.

Consciousness does not belong to the TV, but is experienced by it. When the TV “dies”, this consciousness will continue to be experienced by other TVs. The unplugged television will never miss it, and the consciousness it shared with other televisions will never die.

This view of reality has been described in analogous ways by Erwin Schrödinger, John Von Neumann, John Archibald Wheeler, and other brilliant physicists.

Conscious-Life

Mystery 3 — How is DNA a natural code?

DNA is a reservoir of bases that RNA draws from to build sequences that are processed in RNA-built structures called ribosomes. From them polypeptide “necklaces” are fashioned which are folded by Golgi structures into proteins. Proteins become the tissues of the body and the catalysts of cell metabolism, right?

In humans, 10% of DNA is used to make the templates of proteins (2%) and catalysts called polymerases (8%). The rest (90%) is not used as far as anyone knows today.

A lot of extraneous chemical structures play at the edges of DNA to influence what is expressed and what is suppressed. It’s called epigenetics and is an active field of research.

DNA is neither a code nor a cipher. It’s not that simple. A lot more is going on that scientists know about and which scientists know nothing about. For example, proteins exist in the body for which no DNA sequencing has been found in the genome. It’s called dark DNA.

NO CODE

Mystery 4 — If the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, won’t it reach infinite speeds?  What does an expanding universe mean after the heat death of the universe?

The universe is expanding like a balloon that is being inflated by the force of something that exists inside it, which no one understands. I’ve heard mainstream physicists say that they believe this expansion is uniform and accelerating; it will lead to a “Big Rip.”

The Big Rip will tear apart everything — including atoms and parts of atoms. Energy will dissipate and the universe will flat-line and disappear. It will be as if the universe never existed when the process is complete. Space, time, energy, and matter ripped to shreds will leave nothing behind.

I’ve always thought that the accelerated expansion of the universe is caused by the gravitational tug of trillions of parallel universes that surround our own like a swarm of fireflies. Accelerated expansion is evidence for massive parallel universes, it seems to me.

As seductive as this idea is, no one is proposing it as a serious explanation for the observations of expansion. I don’t know why, but suspect that many of the smartest people don’t think the parallel worlds model clears up enough of the mysteries in the cosmos to be worth pursuing.

Neither does the Big Rip model. It can be argued that the “rip” model explains nothing. It describes what happens when everything is driven apart by an unknown force to its logical conclusion. Somehow, the description doesn’t seem helpful. It doesn’t answer the biggest question of all: how did everything start in the first place?

How did we get here? Where are we? Is anyone in charge? Will the universe live and die without the benefit of any living thing — any conscious life, including itself — understanding the why and how of it all?

How can something on the scale of a universe exist and then cease to exist whose mysteries were forever out of reach — impossible for conscious-life to grasp or comprehend?

Mystery 5 — How could the precursors to the origin of life move or assemble with intent? At what point would this intent become actual life?

Anyone who says they understand how the precursors of life assemble is telling fibs, because no one has any idea how life started. I’ve heard convoluted conjectures about how clays, for example, might have got life started, but they are unconvincing and not reproducible, at least to my way of thinking.

Based on evidence in ancient rocks it seems more likely that comets and asteroids carried prokaryotic cells to Earth. These cells are thousands of times smaller than the eukaryotic cells that are the building blocks of all animals and plants.

Because these cells are small and are, internally, a disorganized mess (no organelles, no nuclei, tiny amounts of RNA & DNA mixed together like scrambled eggs along with everything else they contain),  it seems reasonable that prokaryotes could be abundant in the universe and have existed since the first generation of stars and planets.

These cell types were firmly established on Earth (a third generation star) by Earth-Year one-billion. Oxygen didn’t exist, nor did oceans. Some geologists believe Earth was bone-dry at its start.

Now comes the really hard part to understand. It took two-billion years for these tiny cells to branch-off into the much larger and more tightly organized cells called eukaryotes. During that time an onslaught of ice-balls from the outer reaches of the solar-system created a deluge of water on both Mars and Earth. 

Earth — having 2.65 times the gravity of Mars and a magnetosphere (which Mars lost when its iron-nickel core froze) — was able to hold onto both its atmosphere and its oceans.

Oceans are probably the incubators where highly unlikely events occurred that made humans possible. Cells grew in size and complexity. Some engulfed prokaryotic granules that became the mitochondria that every eukaryotic cell uses like mechanical batteries to add the energy necessary for big cells to survive.

Somehow these big cells learned how to use sunlight for power. Photosynthesis released oxygen, which poisoned almost every other kind of living cell on the planet. The survivors, the remnant, took another billion-and-a-half years to become space-exploring civilizations of highly intelligent animals who call themselves humans.

It’s a process that, because of its duration and a number of sporadic near-extinctions, seems unlikely to have happened at all, but here everyone is on Earth to prove that the impossible is possible.

Although I agree with Freeman Dyson that prokaryotic life is going to be found to be pervasive in the hundreds-of-thousands of methane-and-water ice-balls in the outer reaches of the solar system (called the Kuiper Belt), it seems unlikely that the much larger eukaryotic cells (or the animals and plants that evolved from them) will ever be found anywhere else but on mother Earth.

It’s possible that intelligent life has evolved in some other place, but the odds are small enough that by the time humans suffer their inevitable extinction it seems unlikely that they will have found and identified beyond Earth any non-prokaryotic life at all.

FINDING LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE

And now, at last, the final mystery. Mystery number six.

Who forgot what it is?

Remember the foil wrapped object found in the old safe?  What was inside, anyway?

Any guesses?

I took the shiny object to my wife, Bevy Mae, and we carefully peeled away the foil to reveal the contents within.

And of course, dear reader, you guessed right.  A stack of money is a wonder to behold.  It makes living feel real good, at least for a while. A sufficiently large amount provides the freedom to buy any old thing at all.

Will we buy a sailboat and take our thrills from a roiling ocean?

We don’t know.

Billy Lee

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