Nuland's Nazi Friends Riot in Kiev

1 Dead and 100 Wounded after Grenade Thrown

Oleh Tyahnybok leader of the Svoboda fascist party (left) with US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria (Fuck Europe) Nuland and her Prime Minister designate and soon to be Prime Minister Yatsenuk (right) last year just before the coup.

Tyahnybok rushing the National Guard in today's demonstration by the Svoboda fascists outside Rada building in Kiev shortly before the explosion from the grenade thrown into the National Guard and police there.

Above - Here is the video of it.

Below The lies coming from the State Department followed by an interview with Canadian socialist Roger Annis who gives some background to the February coup last year.

Was it just an angry Svoboda Nazi thug that threw the grenade  or was it another false flag operation who knows?  Daria Mitina former Moscow Press Officer of the Foreign Ministry of the Donetsk Peoples' Republic suspects the the Ukrainian Minister of the interior Arsen Avakov (who is standing behind Nuland in the top photo) in her Skleroznik blog (in Russian, use google translate if like me you don't speak Russian)

Below Tyahnybok (right) with his friend John McCain who is sort of giving a Nazi salute .

While below here is  Tyahnybok giving a Nazi salute during a speech

Alexei Borisovich Mozgovoi Anti-fascist Hero

The world has lost a great man. A hero of immense integrity, a poet, a soldier and thinker. Let us hope that the new leaders of the Ghost brigade carry forward his vision and work with vigour and in the spirit he would have wished.

“Commander Alexei Mozgovoi was a hero, not only for Donbass people, but for people all over the world.” – http://english.pravda.ru/news/world/24-05-2015/130707-mozgovoi_reported_killed-0/#sthash.zLUXGDMj.dpuf

 Mozgovoi's appeal for an anti-oligarchic revolution in Ukraine:

A fine pair of murderous neo-Nazis terrorists

A fine pair of murderous neo-Nazis terrorists.  Frau Merkel if you support Nazis you are a Nazi.  You are also a quisling traitor to Europe, Germany and the German People in placing the interests of the American Empire above that of Europe and its people.  You and Obama are responsible for the deaths and humanitarian disaster in the Donbass. 

Gravitational Waves and Andrei Linde gets a surprise.

Yes the great gravitational wave breakthrough was as expected announced yesterday.  Stanford University Professor Andrei Linde, one of the founders of inflation theory, and his wife fellow Stanford Professor the string theorist Renata Kallosh got a surprise visit:

Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo surprises Professor Andrei Linde with evidence that supports cosmic inflation theory. The discovery, made by Kuo and his colleagues at the BICEP2 experiment, represents the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. These waves have been described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang."

The original paper published yesterday at 10:45 a.m. is here.

Linde's shock at the result... "5σ r=0.2", Linde says "0.2!" in surprise.

It is surprising . The article on arXiv concludes:

Subtracting the various dust models and re-deriving the r
constraint still results in high significance of detection. For
the model which is perhaps the most likely to be close to re-
ality (DDM2 cross) the maximum likelihood value shifts to
r = 0.16 +0.06 −0.05 with r = 0 disfavored at 5.9σ. These high
values of r are in apparent tension with previous indirect limits
based on temperature measurements and we have discussed
some possible resolutions including modifications of the ini-
tial scalar perturbation spectrum such as running. However
we emphasize that we do not claim to know what the resolu-
tion is.

They are saying that their value of r which is the ratio of the tensor polarization from gravitational waves to the scalar polarization from the inflaton field, after correction for the effects of gravitational lensing, is incompatible with with the indirect limits established by satellite temperature measurements. From this r = 0.2 is surprisingly high.

These incompatibilities  need to be ironed out before this result is fully accepted.  This is just a
note of caution.  Lets hope everything is fine and we have witnessed a scientific revolution as big as that introduced by the CMB anisotropy results and the birth of precision cosmology.

The Landscapes of Science

 I have always been interested in the concept of a "landscape" in scientific theories.  A "landscape" is a representation of a higher dimensioned potential energy surface in a simplified three dimensional plot.  A couple of years ago I posted this comment in a thread about Conrad Hal Waddington's ideas on epigenetics (his term for developmental processes in biology not to be confused with the current misuse and abuse of the terminology):

"I can still remember the shock of insight from seeing a diagram of the epigenetic landscape in one of C.H. Waddington’s books when reading it over 40 years ago now.

I am impressed to this day by the usefulness of the “landscape” concept in diverse fields of science. In chemistry the potential energy surfaces of molecules and reactions are a landscape representation. In evolutionary theory there are of course fitness landscapes and finally on the grandest scale the cosmological landscape of string theory.

They are all of course higher dimensioned potential energy surfaces simplified to a 3-D representation in a 2-D projection. I wish the current evolutionary biologists would draw them the right way though, like physicists, chemists and the late great C. H. Waddingtion did. The vertical axis is potential energy and stable states are the lowest levels on this axis. So there are fitness valleys not fitness hills. A test “marble”, “ping-pong ball” atom or organism will tend to roll down to the lowest level in the metaphor of terrestrial gravity operating in a landscape."

 Comment in Why Evolution Is True

I have continued to think about the landscape metaphor in science.  The landscape is a simplified representation of a mathematical object in a potentially highly dimensioned hyperspace.  The usefulness of the concept in such diverse scientific fields  must represent some underlying similarities of the mathematics involved.

An example of a chemical potential energy surface from the article When is a Minimum not a Minimum

Here is Waddington's epigentic landscape from 1957 showing the potential developmental pathways for the ball (embryonic cell) as it rolls down the landscape.

What is the fundamental difference between difference between the two landscape representations ?  More to come.

Jerry Coyne Attacks Jim Al-Khalili and Gets Free Will Wrong Again

Jerry Coyne continues his naive nineteenth century mechanistic materialist denial of modern compatibilist views on free will.  He has launched a determinist attack on Jim Al-Khalili's ideas on free will, whose views I personally agree with.  Jim Al-Khalili is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Surrey and he has hosted several BBC productions about science.  He is currently President of the British Humanist Association.

It is late in the evening and I am tired and about to go to bed.  So I won't write a critique of Jerry's position, but instead I will post a link to one post on this thread on his blog where I think the poster got it just right as a substitute here

He quotes Jim Al-Khalili:

“our actions still determine which of the infinite number of possible futures is the one that gets played out.”

What Jerry fails to understand in his Jihad for determinism is that for modern quantum cosmology only the ensemble is deterministic so we face an "infinite number of possible futures".  That is the wonder of the world we live in.




When I get it together I intend to discuss Jim Al-Khalili's ideas on quantum biology.

Reading a Champagne Label

BEAUMONT DES CRAYÈRES GRAND PRESTIGE BRUT CHAMPAGNE

This weekend we opened a bottle of this champagne. The  Beaumont des Crayères Champagne was born in 1955 when a group of winegrowers from the village of Mardeuil near Epernay, formed a cooperative.  The Grand Prestige Brut is made from; 40% Chardonnay, 40% Pinot Noir and 20% Pinot Meunier grapes.

This Champagne is crisp with powerful apple and citrus fruit notes, pale straw yellow with a lively and persistent mousse.  Overall an excellent Champagne.   We have found that often the best value for money, on a quality to price ratio is to be had from the Champagne cooperatives, beating the big better known Champagne houses hands down.   Not that the Beaumont des Crayères Cooperative is small, with 240 members it produces half a million bottles a year.

"My only regret in life is that I didn’t drink enough Champagne“
John Maynard Keynes

Reading The Label

The main parts of the label are relatively obvious; The name of the brand, Champagne the wine's Appelation d'origine contrôlée (AOC) and an alcohol content of 12%  etc are all shown.  At the bottom of the label a line containing lot of specific content in small print is present:

"Elaboré par Beaumont des Crayères à Mardeuil, 51530, France, CM-826-001 Produce of France"

First is the name and address of the producer, here showing that the origin of the grapes is the village of Mardeuil.  CM-826-001 is the producers Professional Registration Code.  The letters CM denote that the producer is Coopérative-manipulant that is a cooperative of growers who also make and sell Champagne under their own labels.  The first two letter of the code shows the type of champagne producer.  Most of the champagne you will see on the shelves is NM (Négociant-manipulant) meaning it is from a Champagne house.  Here is a list of the two letter codes:

ND (Négociants-Distributeur) – A  company selling Champagne it did not make
RM (Récoltant-Manipulant) – grower producer – A grower who sells grapes to the houses as well as buying grapes from other growers and making his own Champagne
CM (Coopérative-manipulant) – cooperative producer – A coop of growers who also make and sell Champagne under their own labels
NM (Négociant-manipulant) – a Champagne house – Producer who buys grapes in volume from growers to make Champagne
MA (Marque d’Acheteur) – a buyers own brand – A brand name owned by the purchaser such as restaurant, supermarket, wine merchant


If you live in Ontario Beaumont des Crayères is available from the LCBO

The Wicked Witch is Dead

As Berthold Brecht wrote of his character Arturo Ui,  "the bitch that bore him is in heat again "  For Thatcher the bitch that bore her is in heat again with so called austerity policies designed to transfer wealth from the 99% of the population to the richest 1% being rampant throughout the world with heirs like Cameron in Britain and Harper here in Canada implementing them.

As I said to an Argentinian fellow graduate student over twenty years ago now.

"it is a pity we couldn't both have lost the Falkland's war, you would have still got rid of the generals and we would have got rid of Thatcher."

It is a pity that Britain's first woman prime minister will be remembered for the destruction of all civilized norms in her country rather than helping to save it like Argentina's first woman President Cristina Fernandez.

Here is Billy Bragg's Comment on her death:

"This is not a time for celebration. The death of Margaret Thatcher is nothing more than a salient reminder of how Britain got into the mess that we are in today. Of why ordinary working people are no longer able to earn enough from one job to support a family; of why there is a shortage of decent affordable housing; of why domestic growth is driven by credit, not by real incomes; of why tax-payers are forced to top up wages; of why a spiteful government seeks to penalise the poor for having an extra bedroom; of why Rupert Murdoch became so powerful; of why cynicism and greed became the hallmarks of our society.

Raising a glass to the death of an infirm old lady changes none of this. The only real antidote to cynicism is activism. Don't celebrate - organise!"

It is ironic that the mad cow who through her agricultural policies gave the world mad cow disease should die in the throws of dementia.  I will never forgive her for destroying the country I grew up in.

The Most Embarrassing Graph in Modern Physics

Over at cosmologist Sean Carroll's blog he is discussing The Most Embarrassing Graph in Modern Physics and the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

For what it is worth, I threw in my two penn'orth:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most-embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/#comment-81859

Hives the Great Swedish Garage Rockers

My wife recently saw the Hives on the Carson Daily Show.  She was really impressed which really surprised me as normally she is not so much into the punk and related stuff I like but I guess garage may be more accessible.  They are really a great live band I have enjoyed their work for about ten years now (thanks Thierry for recommending them).

I have embedded this video of them performing the same "Go Right Ahead" together with "Insane" from their new album "Les Hives" live at the Camden Roundhouse London last month. 

One reason for posting it is the Roundhouse brings back many memories for me.   A long time ago I saw Pink Floyd there before they became famous and Boring Old Farts. This was when Syd Barrett was still with them and before the mother-fuckers had driven him mad while they were still an interesting experimental band.  I also attended the first secret unannounced London performance of Cream there. It was supposed to be their first public performance but a friend who played base in Geno Washington's Ram-Jam Band saw their real first performance at a Club in High Wycombe a couple of days earlier.  He had played a festival with Pink Floyd and talked to some of the members off stage.  They tried to convince him that their type of music was the "future of music" (shades of Wagner) unfortunately they were partially right.

I remember attending an excellent production of Brecht's stage adaptation of Gorky's Mother at the Roundhouse while I was a student.  The most impressive production I saw at the Roundhouse was the original production of Ballet Rambert's "Cruel Garden" inspired by the life of Garcia Lorca.  I will never forget this performance, my wife and I found it deeply moving.

Anyway for some fun dynamic Swedish garage rock keep on playing The Hives.

A New Year Begins

Well it is New Years Day and the Holiday Season is almost over.   I haven't made any New Years resolutions but I suppose I should have made one to post in this blog more often.

Well what did I do over the Holiday?  We didn't have the normal Christmas dinner of Turkey and all the trimmings.  We had sushi instead and repeated it again for New Years eve.  The holidays provide a good excuse for drinking Champagne.  Over Christmas we had a bottle of Piper-Heidseck Brut.  Then on New Years Eve we opened a bottle of Lanson Black Label Brut.

The Piper-Heidseck was very strongly brut, light coloured with lemony citrus aromas.  The Lanson on the other hand was a darker straw colour, a richer and slightly less brut champagne.  Which do I prefer?  I like them both.



We will be continuing drinking the Lanson tonight with more sushi.

A Happy New Year to every one who makes it to this blog!

Rent Seeking - The Price of Inequality III

I promised to look at Stiglitz's analysis of rent seeking in America and it's implications.  A little belatedly I will try to do that.  Stiglitz defines rent-seeking as “using political and economic power to get a larger share of the national pie, rather than to grow the national pie”.  In Wikipedia  we find this definition "In economics, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth."

Rent originally referred primarily to rent on land but in modern economics the term has become expanded to newer an wider forms of activity. In another quote from Stiglitz he argues.

"Much of the top-most wealth instead comes because of successful “rent seeking.” Economists use the term “rents” for income derived from owning an asset, rather than from effort. “Rent seeking” refers to attempts to garner a larger share of the economic pie, rather than making the pie larger.
Monopolists, for example, gain their wealth through restricting production — which makes the size of the pie smaller. When we look at divided societies abroad, like so many of the dysfunctional oil-rich countries, we diagnose their problem as an infliction of excessive rent seeking — too much of society’s resources go to attempts to grab a larger share of the oil wealth, too little to expanding the economy. What we don’t realize is the extent to which the United States, too, has become a rent-seeking society."

Stiglitz demonstrates that  have a system that actively redistributes income and wealth from huge numbers of people at the bottom of the pyramid to a tiny number at the very top.  He shows how the financial system is permeated to the core with rent seeking such as the predatory lending in the sub-prime mortgage disaster about which he says:

"the form of rent seeking that is most egregious - and that has been most perfected in recent years - has been the ability of those in the financial sector to take advantage of the poor and uninformed (p. 32). This is because financial companies almost always know more about their product (mortgage, derivative, stock, etc.) then do their customers, and the industry has been able to minimize any regulation or action by the government to even the playing field."

He also deals with a range of rent seeking including in the so-called high-tech areas.  For example in something that should be dear to the hearts of us Canadians he covers the case of the patent troll rip off of RIM.  One aspect of rent seeking he doesn't discuss is organized crime and the Mafia which is typical rent seeking in search of "a piece of the action".


Another big M rent seeker is Microsoft whose rent seeking he briefly touches on.  He doesn't discuss MS's latest rent seeking scam, the extension of it's attempts to extort money over it's alleged and secret  patents that  Linux supposedly infringes, to an apparently successful shakedown of smartphone manufacturers producing Android phones. "Nice little earner you've got there, you could be protected from a very expensive lawsuit if you pay us a percentage".  Come to to think of it Ballmer looks a little like Tony Soprano.

Stiglitz's academic area is the distortion of free markets by information asymmetry and he shows that rent seeking is a consequence of this.

More on The Price of Inequality to come.

The Price of Inequality II

I finally finished The Price of Inequality yesterday so I guess it is now time to sum up my views. As I said in my previous post  it is a very angry book.  Stiglitz is justly outraged at the way the "1%" has increased it's wealth at the the expense of everyone else (both the middle and the poor) while at the same time as it has destabilized the economy, inhibited growth and brought about the Great Financial Recession.

The book examines how this happened, it's effect on American society as a whole and it's effect on American politics and legal system.  The way corporate political donations corrupt American "democracy".  Indeed as I put it some time back on a Guardian CIF post "... in America politicians are bought and sold like pork belly futures". He describes a legal system that  where inequality is eroding the rule of law.  A legal system where not only can wealth buy favourable outcomes in the courts but also where corporations can buy laws that represent their interests against those of the majority of citizens.

Finally he finishes  with a chapter entitled The way Forward: Another World is Possible, recalling the slogan of the anti-globalization protesters of over a decade ago. In this chapter he presents his proposals for reversing the trend towards increasing inequality as a way of stabilizing the American economy and achieving a return to growth.

Tomorrow I will look at Stiglitz's analysis of rent seeking in America and it's implications.

The Price of Inequality - Stiglitz

As I mentioned in This Blog is Reanimated  I am currently reading "The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future" by Joseph Stiglitz. Well I have finally just reached the last chapter "The Way Forward: Another World is Possible" so it seems time to post my initial impressions.

For those that don't know Stiglitz's work he is a Nobel prizewinning (2001) economist.  He was a member of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers (1993-97) from 1995 he became Chairman of the Council and consequently a member of the Clinton cabinet.  In 1997 he moved on to become  senior vice-president and chief economist of the World Bank later being effectively fired in 2000 because of pressure from the US treasury after his critique of the policies of the IMF and the damage they had caused.

Stiglitz returned to academia with a professorship at Columbia,  and he has  been active over the past decade in international organizations including chairing  the Socialist International Commission on Global Financial Issues and the UN Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System.  He has also published a number of popular books on economic topics and I have read a most of those published since  "Making Globalization Work,".  

Stiglitz's most important contribution to economic theory relates to information asymmetry and the the effect of this on markets. His work with mathematical rigour completely demolishes neo-classical economic theory and also the monetarist theory of the freshwater school of economics of Milton Friedman and the "Chicago Boys" which he derides as mere "ideology"

"The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future" is his most recent popular book.  It may be the most important book published so far this century, it is also justly a very angry book. We will look at the book and its arguments in more detail in following posts.

Einstein's God Part I

Over at Pharyngula PZ reports that a letter from Einstein containing this quote :

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text." - 1947

is going up for auction.

Other quotations in which Einstein expresses his absence of belief in a personal God include this:

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it" - 1954

So Einstein did not believe in a personal God and therefore was not a theist, he was therefore an atheist.   However Einstein in a number of places claims not to be an atheist but rather an agnostic.   

"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being". - 1949

This is a position similar to Darwin's which I intend to more fully explore in a later post and like Darwin he tries to escape the only meaningful definition of an atheist  as a person who does not believe in a personal God.  The consequence of which is that agnosticism or even deism are both subsets of atheism.  And talking about sets Einstein puts up a vigorous defence of the outspoken and campaigning atheist Bertrand Russell.

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly." - 1940

At times he has no alternative but to admit his atheism, for example in refuting the claim of a Jesuit priest that he had converted to Christianity:

"I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist." - 1945

Enough for now, I am sure I will post more on it later.

Champagne Cava Comparison

As I mentioned in my last post:

"We have just finished a bottle of Cattier champagne (Champagne Cattier Brut Premier Cru) for our anniversary and are opening a bottle of Cava Reyes de Aragon Brut Reserva."

This seems like a good moment to have a Champagne to Cava  comparison.  The Cattier was released by the the LCBO last year here in Ontario and it has been sitting for about a year in our cellar (well cupboard with a wine rack in it).  We had been hoping to find a champagne with the distinct toasty note we remembered from twenty years ago and haven't really noticed in the cheaper champagne we have been buying here.  We didn't really get the toast note we hoped for, but it was a fine champagne full of depth and complexity with a noticeable  straw colour.  It was one of the best champagnes we have had here and excellent value at $39.95 but then again we are not trying Dom Perignon at >$200, we are not even running to Bolly.

The Cava Reyes de Aragon Brut we had only bought a couple of weeks ago, but it is a 2009 vintage which is anyway the about of maturing time a "champagne method" sparkler (I guess according to the champagne producers I am not allowed to use that term) needs before release.  This is an outstandingly  good cava, like the Cattier it had a (not so strong) straw colour with a depth and complexity that matched the champagne.  In fact it was difficult to tell it from the champagne.  It was almost as good as the champagne only on  a few notes did it not quite equal the Cattier.  Incredible value for $13.95

This Blog is Reanimated

It is Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada and I think I should use the time to start regular posts on this neglected blog.  So I think I should outline the main areas and topics I plan to cover and why.  One obvious area is politics and political economy both Canadian and global.  Also I intend to comment on the books I am currently reading or recently read.  Currently I am reading "The Price of Inequality" by  Joseph Stiglitz (the Nobel prizewinning economist), in many ways it is central to my current political concerns, the growth of oligarchic hegemonism  and its use of neo-liberalism to redistribute wealth upward from ordinary working people to the ultra-rich (nowadays often referred to as the 1%).

The other main area I intend to comment on is science.  Having spent all my working life in research laboratories both in industry and universities, science should be an obvious area of interest. My area of expertise is instrumental analytical chemistry, not the most interesting topic to blog on, though I intend to touch on it at times if something interesting turns up.  However having been educated at the tri-junction of  chemistry, biology and physics it is not surprising that I have developed a passing interest evolutionary theory, quantum chemistry and ever since my teens, cosmology. So I definitely intend to cover these topics.

With regard to evolution I am also currently reading  Rebecca Stott's "Darwin's Ghosts, The Secret History of Evolution" this has an unfortunate subtitle given to the North American edition its' more accurate subtitle in the original British edition was "In Search of the First Evolutionists" which is one of the things I will discuss here when I finish the volume.  One important topic in current biology is the ENCODE debacle and its supposed obituary of Junk DNA.  I have to get a post together on this to try and analyse the controversy.

In the area of cosmology I plan that in addition to discussing recent popular books on cosmology, to post links to interesting recent articles on arXiv to draw them to the attention of non specialists like myself.

Finally my wife has suggested I comment on our wine choices.  We have just finished a bottle of Cattier champagne (Champagne Cattier Brut Premier Cru) for our anniversary and are opening a bottle of Cava Reyes de Aragon Brut Reserva.  So you see our tastes tend towards sparkling wine.

Chance and Necessity

What drives Evolution? -  Quantum Mechanics:

"on the microscopic level there exists a further source of still more radical uncertainty, embedded in the quantum structure of matter. A mutation is in itself a microscopic event, a quantum event, to which the principle of uncertainty consequently applies. An event which is hence and by its very nature essentially unpredictable."

Jacques Monod - Chance and Necessity (1970)

RSS Feed Resurrected

Looks like they repaired the Linux Today feed yesterday. 

Linux Today RSS feed is broken

Linux Today RSS feed is broken.  The feed is empty

http://www.linuxtoday.com/biglt.rss fails on Feed Validator:
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http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.linuxtoday.com%2Fbiglt.rss

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