Torsdag

 

Wake up to politics

 

I´ve covered this before, but opinion polls supposedly suggest that most Trump/MAGA supporters are in favor of Operation Epic Fury. The number of MAGA Republicans who support the war is much larger than the number of non-MAGA Republicans who do so. This is true both in percentages and in absolute numbers. Only 3% of Republicans identify clearly as both MAGA and anti-war. From this, some gadflies conclude that there isn´t a "split in MAGA" over the Iran war. It´s all sound and (non-epic) fury from the legacy media, signifying nothing. 

However, there seems to be a problem with the relevant polls.  

Those who self-identify as MAGA usually take that to mean "100% support for Trump". The label is ideologically empty and is used to express extreme trust in the person of Donald J Trump. Those who oppose the Iran war will probably not identify as MAGA for that very reason. But this skews the result. If "MAGA" just means "I love Trump", then almost *by definition* MAGAs will be much less likely to oppose Trump´s policies on any issue. 

The writer of the first article linked below believe that the midterm elections *will* cause trouble for Trump since many new Trump voters in 2024 were independents and are likely to switch their allegiance (many of these might be opposed to the war or dissatisifed for other reasons). However, he believes that this isn´t the same thing as a major split in MAGA, since the MAGAs who are "Trumpier than Trump" (Steven Bannon, Tucker Carlson, MTG) command very little support.

I can´t help wondering if political commentators are simply talking pass each other. They have different definitions of what "MAGA" is supposed to be. The ideologically orthodox populists may be a minuscule group and perhaps nobody outside their circles gives a damn about what Bannon is saying, but if a larger group of independents leave the "MAGA coalition" (in the broader sense), Trump is in trouble anyway! And that´s true even if this particular group is smaller than the MAGA cultists for whom Trump simply can do nothing wrong. Elections can be decided by a few swing voters... 

Another interesting finding (second link) is that 26% of Republican voters believe that Trump started the Iran war to distract from the Epstein files, while a whopping 81% of Democrats think so. 

There is no MAGA split on Iran

Majority of Americans think Trump launched Iran war to cover up Epstein scandal

Make it plain on tablets

 

Vision boards are dangerous, apparently. Never even heard of them before, but our sistah in Xrist Doreen Virtue have the receipts. Please note that Virtue actually say that vision boards may work. But since they aren´t Biblical but rather occult, you shouldn´t use them anyway. 

I didn´t think I would have to defend "positive thinking"!

That being said: I´m sure Virtue is right when she said that everything she got from vision boards "felt wrong" in some way. Well, yes, that´s because the material world is imperfect. In that sense, "turning to God" might indeed be a better option if you want "eternal peace". But while humans can´t live by bread alone, most of us do need that darn bread somewhere at the base of Maslow´s pyramid. And if the good lord doesn´t provide it, well...  

Our techno-populist future

 

Vance is a rather notorious Trump sycophant. It seems the Vice President has a sycophant all his own. The guy who wrote "Code Red" (and the article below). Translation: Peter Thiel wants to sell his techno-dystopian future to the American electorate as "populism". Let´s welcome the new techno-populist future! I´m sure it´ll be waaaaay better than the techno-bureaucratic future on offer from The Other Team...

This isn´t going very well, is it? 

Code Red: J D Vance, et cetera

Beaver Patrol

 

Credit: The Fourth Way 

The late Winston Churchill is apparently too divisive and controversial, so the Bank of England (sic) will replace his portrait on the five pound note with a beaver. Not sure who would find Churchill controversial in 2026. Neo-Nazis??? 

The trick (of course) won´t work. You can never be Woke enough, and "beaver" is apparently a rather crude sexual/sexist innuendo. Yes, I checked. So the beaver will have to go, too.

Besides, have anyone checked whether the beaver is a "clean" animal, and if so, in which religious communities? Exactly. And aren´t we excluding non-Eurasians by having a *Eurasian* beaver on the five pound bill? Well, at least the next year or so will be entertaining. Until Nigel Farage becomes Prime Minister and puts his Lord & Master Trump on those darn bills. 

Now, *that* might prove a tad bit controversial, methinx!   

Virtual reality

 

This stuff is a bit over my head, but...our man Anton discusses new developments in quantum physics. Note that the "virtual" particles (really transient particles) don´t *really* appear out of Nothing, since they take their energy from the so-called quantum foam, the idea being that there is no vacuum in the spacetime continuum. And presumably energy is everywhere.

Even more intriguing is the recent experiment which showed that an object 7,000 atoms large (OK, it´s still smaller than a virus, but you get the point) can exist in a "quantum state". Not sure what that even means, but our "classical" macro-world clearly obeys different laws than the quantum world. But where exactly is the boundary? Roger Penrose has proposed that maybe consciousness can be explained by quantum effects in the brain affecting its microtubules. They are of course very small, but still larger than the "sodium nanocluster" made to exhibit quantum properties in the previously mentioned test.

Maybe we shouldn´t cut the funding of quantum physicists just yet, LOL.     

Collapsing Schrödinger

 

Richard Carrier on Schrödinger´s Cat and the collapse of the wave function. Interesting. It´s from the commentary section to his essay about God and information, which I linked to previously (and now link to again). 

>>>Sort of? There are a lot of assumptions in there. My answer could only apply to some specific examples of things some people say about that, not all. And you were a bit vague about exactly what you are talking about.

>>>But I think what you mean to ask is regarding the popular lore that, like Bumblebees Can’t Fly, quantum events require a mind “to observe them” to collapse them, therefore God must exist to collapse the wave function before humans did. That’s two confusions in one.

>>>First, humans can collapse a wave function into the past. People who think this popcorn nonsense don’t realize physics at that scale is time invariant, and that block theory is the standard physics of time now. So even if you needed a “mental” observer to collapse all wave functions, we could be that observer. It doesn’t matter that the function collapses in both time directions at once. Which means, yes, QM entails we could have caused the Big Bang in this obscure sense.

>>>But more relevant to your question, the idea that minds are needed at all is popcorn physics. In actual physics anything that disturbs a quantum state is an observer—a stick, a star, an atom. “Observer” is just figurative for “anything that produces an observation,” which need never be a mind.

>>>Consider the example of Schrödinger’s Cat. That was an example Schrödinger invented to make fun of people adopting this popcorn view, yet ironically—turning him in his grave—it now keeps getting used to sell the popcorn view he was making fun of, and even attributes it to him, when he was it’s most infamous opponent.

>>>In that experiment, a cat is in a box, with a detector that breaks a vial of cyanide when the atomic nucleus of a nearby unstable atom decays. The “joke” is that if you need an “observer” then the whole cat is somehow both alive and dead until you open the box. Schrödinger’s point was that this is stupid and therefore obviously false.

>>>He was right.

>>>First, the cat is an observer. It has a mind. It knows whether it’s dead or alive. So we don’t have to open the box for “its” wave function to collapse.

>>>But more importantly, per Schrödinger’s point: the detector of the atomic decay is also an observer. By sticking that object in the box, you have poked a stick into the quantum system that itself will collapse it. So the cat doesn’t even have to be in the box. There is no state of the box being simultaneously full of cyanide or not. Because the detector is collapsing the wave function all the time just by being there.

>>>In fact, the walls of the box, the air in the box. It’s all a bunch of sticks poking the radioisotope in the eye. They are all observers.

>>>To get an actual state of some volume being “both” cyanide and not cyanide, you would need to create something like a Bose-Einstein state of the transition phase of Nitrogen, Hydrogen, and Carbon into molecular cyanide, where it’s somewhere between free nitrogen and carbon and hydrogen and molecularly bound HCN (cyanide). That is so exceedingly difficult to do it may even be impossible. But there are simpler systems we can do it with. It’s just that you have to keep the BE glob perfectly balanced so nothing, absolutely nothing, shakes or comes into contact with it, because almost any interaction with it collapses the state.

>>>This is what it means to say that anything is an observer. “Observer” here does not mean “mind.” It means any physical interaction with the balanced state large enough to knock the state off balance and thus into some more definite state. It’s just that in experimental physics, it’s usually humans poking the sticks in, hence “observer” stuck as the rubric, even though it doesn’t mean what ordinary people mean by that word.

>>>But when no minds existed, plenty of sticks did. So quantum collapse routinely happened all over the place. Indeed, the Big Bang may itself be the first example of that happening, a balanced quantum state too unstable to stick around collapsed under its own weight and exploded. It was its own stick.

Is God needed for "laws" and "information"?

Spacetime quasicrystals

 

Is time and space made of quasicrystals? But surely space is just...you know, space...and time is...you know, time. Or as Zabine puts it when she wants to scare away guys in night clubs: It´s a differentiable Riemannian manifold. But I´m sure that´s some strange shit, too.

Therefore God? 

Scarabs in Switzerland

 

A meme from the spiritual-occult X account The Fourth Way. This seems to be a self-ironic take on "meaningful co-incidences" á la Jung! 

Indirect realism

 

From the X account The Fourth Way. A funny meme about indirect realism?! A propos a previous discussion here on the blog.