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By Nat Wilson Turner
I would like to propose that the United States and associated English language information sphere remain in what I call The Interregnum of Unreality, which I posit kicked off in 2008.
It’s tempting to declare us in a new regime, given Trump’s re-election and seeming consolidation of power, which has seen him bring the Silicon Valley companies and much of the MSM onside.
But I think it’s more useful to think of Trump’s second term as merely a change in management for the pre-existing apparatus of control, which seeks total information dominance via traditional and social media.
Until the pillars of American power (the dollar as reserve currency and the perception of American military primacy) fall, the Interegnum continues.
Symptoms include this and this.
And monsters flourish in interregnums. It was the interregnum between the Russian defeats of 1904 and the final fall of Nicolas II in 1917 that produced Rasputin after all.
Until or unless the United States openly goes through the financial crash, market crash, and admits we are back in recession (or Depression), The Interregnum of Unreality will continue.
The Interregnum of Unreality kicked off when Obama’s administration and Bernanke’s Fed elected to keep the markets and economy going via massive Quantitative Easing rather than structural reform of the markets that failed under Bush and Obama.
It was paired with a change in geostrategic tactics. No new boots on the ground invasions, although the Iraq and Afghanistan occupancies were maintained as long as possible.
Instead, Obama preferred no-fingerprints regime changes (Egypt, Tunisia, Ukraine, etc) or proxy wars (Syria, Ukraine). He also happily accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for essentially not being GW Bush, even while continuing and expanding on many of Bush’s worst policies (surveillance, drones, etc).
A new era will also require the undeniable end of the United States’ pretense to be the global military hyperpower, capable of facing China, Russia, and Iran simultaneously while brutally dominating the Western Hemisphere.
Obama inaugurated a style of total information dominance completely removed from actual policies or outcomes. He built on the media strategies pioneered for John F. Kennedy: slick TV and print media packages with Obama as the inspiring figurehead.
They initially ran wild with social media, unleashing it on the Arab world in 2011 and rapidly realizing more control was required.
After Trump’s election win in 2016, Obama and the Democrats moved to set up a Silicon Valley censorship regime, sending RussiaGate ringleader Mark Warner to Twitter and other companies to let them know that if Adam Schiff wanted an account removed it would be removed.
The “Resistance” to Trump in his first term included much genuine grassroots opposition but was headed by resistance from the Deep State, the MSM, and the online monopolies.
Biden attempted to expand on the total information control, but since he was as charisma-challenged as Obama was blessed and the wheels came off of so many of his policies mid-term, the Democrats lost control of the machine along with their credibility.
Biden was Benedict to Obama’s John Paul 2.
The MSM and Silicon Valley have moved into Trump’s camp (or been bought and destroyed by Trump’s backers like CBS News).
I suspect one of the reasons for our Interregnum of Unreality is caution on the part of America’s major ops who don’t want to provoke a suicidal attack from the dying eagle.
The Interregnum of Unreality (2008-?) is one in which The Empire can suffer enormous, humiliating defeats in what is basically the WW3 preseason, but it cannot be openly, undeniably revealed to the populace of the US that we are no longer the world’s dominant military power.
It’s why pausing the 12 Day War was so critical. It was essential for everyone to temporarily de-escalate things before someone got nuked.
Now Bibi’s Qatar attack is another instance of possibly self-destructive overreach. Poor Ukraine is losing out on the narrative control as it’s slowly strangled by the Russian python, which has little interest in conquering territory and every interest in drawing the UAF into bloody battles that are slowly but surely demilitarizing Ukraine, their #1 stated goal in the SMO.
In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, we’re seeing the Trump administration moving to expand its power ala the post 9/11 frenzy which produced the Patriot Act, mass surveillance, the Afghan and Iraq wars.
But because someone like Kash Patel has nothing like the control of the apparatus of state power that say, John Ashcroft enjoyed in 2002, we’re seeing a kind of keystone cops clampdown so far.
ICE is similarly limited to self-defeating debacles despite the much more capable Stephen Miller essentially having the funding to rebuild it from the ground up.
I argued at NakedCapitalism that this clampdown might not go according to plan, but I expect things to blunder along until one or both bubbles (economic or military) pop.
In the aftermath of several errant Russia drones crashing into Poland, said nation’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, invoked Article 4 of NATO, and whilst giving an interview to a German paper, called for “a limited, NATO/EU-run no-fly buffer for drones nearing alliance airspace.”
Dmitri Medvedev, the former president of the Russiann Federation while speaking at a Russian Security Council meeting on Moday said that “Russia would consider NATO forces protecting Ukrainian airspace as a declaration of war. . . .”
Russia, it should be added, asserted that “that “no targets on the territory of Poland were planned for destruction,” and that the drones it used in Ukraine have a flight range of no more than 700 kilometers (435 miles).” I would add the Russian first deputy Permanent Representative to the UN made a very good point in an interview this morning. He asked simply, “cui bono?”
Cui bono notwithstanding, a lot remains open for interpreation, especially without the evidence being reported on seriously and assiduously. (Which won’t happen in the West.) That said, the number of drones that landed or were shot down in Poland is troubling. Look at this map for a better idea of what worries me. I’ve heard several explanations, from Ukrainian spoofing and EW warfare, to a false flag operation. Spoofing, EW warfare, cui bono or false flag–any others?–really doesn’t matter. It is simply bad ju-ju for all parties concerned.
Regardless of what really happened, are we absolutely insane?
Have our diplomats and leaders lost all touch with reality? If we declare and attempt to enforce a No-Fly Zone over the Ukraine we are declaring war on the Russian Federation. Declaring war on a nuclear power that could absorb a full force first strike by the USA much better than we could absorb their very robust response is as stupid as someone with brains for dynamite who cannot blow the wax out of their ears if their brains exploded.
Thank heavens for the brothers Lieven, one, Dominic, is an historian of empire, the other, whom I will quote below, is foreign policy analyst that writes frequently for the site Responsible Statecraft. Anatol is an adult in a childish firmament of foreign policy know-nothings, like Kaja Kallas. As one Russian observer said about her: she is critically undereducated. But back to Anatol, as he writes on the drones falling in Poland: “We should remember that during the Cold War, there were a number of far more serious violations of air space by both sides, some of them leading to NATO planes being shot down and American and British airmen killed. These incidents led not to threats of war, but careful attempts to de-escalate tensions and develop ways to avoid such clashes.” What a mature idea. I wish we had more adults in the room, so to speak.
The whole Ukraine debacle has only unravelled our power faster than if adults were running our foreign policy. And a No Fly Zone over the Ukraine is the height of childish, bat-shit crazy ideas. But then, we have not had an adult running our foreign policy since George Schultz left foggy bottom on January 20, 1989. I take that back, the last adult to manage our foreign policy was James A. Baker, who left foggy bottom on August 23, 1992. It has been unipolar willy nilly serially destroying nation after nation ever since.
It has got to stop. I just fear how it ultimately will stop.
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First economic: The US dollar is down 5% over the last six months against a basket of currencies. And over the past year, it’s lost 9.6%. The biggest winner against a dollar has been the euro which has gone up 13% however, which truly is a win for Europe because it makes their natural gas imports from the US less expensive. But their natural gas imports are still a poison chalice. Expect the dollar to continue its slide, perhaps precipitously at some point in the New Year.
There were large moves out of US equities in the spring confirming the adage “sell in May and go away.” What September will look like is anyone’s guess, especially as Israel is more than likely to start the second phase of its war against Iran? Or October—that worst of months for Wall Street? What happens if Iran closes the Straits of Hormuz and oil goes above 100 dollars a barrel? That would be great for oil producers, but it would be terrible for markets across the globe, even China, possibly leading to a worldwide recession, especially with Chinese growth being somewhere between 4% and 5% at present.
Regardless of what happens in September or October—both always being bad month’s economically for the US economy, America’s bond market and the value of the dollar will continue its downward trajectory because America’s lenders are now demanding gold for loans instead of treasuries. This smells to me like the beginning of the end of dollar hegemony.
It makes me wonder what kind of “store of value” the BRICS will adopt to support their currency? Will it be a basket of their currencies? Will it be backed by gold and petroleum? That would be truly hard-core, because it would mean we were in for a long era of tight money. Our entire lives, actually, the entire history has been based on easy money. And as you know money creation is only possible when using a fiat currency.
There are many ways to imagine what they’ll do. Maybe blockchain? Who really knows? But there are other commodities that do have a store value, silver among them, maybe even rare earths and others they could use. It certainly is an interesting time to live.
Second domestic political: Niall Ferguson in his interview by Charlie Rose posted a week ago on the Internet was asked about Trump‘s challenges of outright ignoring the constitution with the following question: are we the Roman Republic, is this or are we witnessing the collapse of the constitutional order like the Roman republic. Rose asks if Trump is Augustus. He clearly is not. I would say that Trump is more like Marius and the Kennedys were more like the brothers Gracchi. In fact, I made this argument on a graduate school paper that I got a very good grade on, but in which my professor seriously disagreed with my analogies. Regardless I would say that we are at the beginning of the end of our constitutional order, and that we are looking down the barrel of Caesarism. It’s on the way. Maybe two years, maybe four years but it’s coming. Will it be a general? Will it be a politician? Those are questions we simply can’t answer. But as Ian Welsh has consistently predicted America is heading for a collapse, be it constitutional or economic or both it’s gonna happen and there isn’t anything anyone of us can do about it. Besides, Ferguson, while whip-smart, is kind of a tool.
Third is about some weaknessess the SCO currently must contend with if they are to become the anti-NATO military block. Here they are in no particular order of importance: One, the nations that make up the SCO are too diverse and often times their interests do not align with everyone in the SCO. For example, China and India have serious border issues. Pakistan and India have serious issues in Kashmir. Those are just two examples of several potential conflicts between members of a block, supposedly to oppose NATO. The issues between Pakistan and India make the intra-NATO issues between Greece and Turkey look like a family arguement on Thanksgiving.
Second, as the former director general of Russian international affairs Council said in a recent interview, “ the mandate of the SCO is too general.” The SCO can focus on security, development, or terrorism. Not all three.
Third, China is by far the most powerful member of the SCO and that creates a dangerous asymmetry in the organization. Much like the United States dominated NATO for so long and skewed it’s purpose after the Cold War for its own unfathomable means.
Fourth: This essay on the relative merits of “Superradiance,”. Is well worth the three minutes it will take to read, plus it is comprehensible to the layman. The essay describes Superradiance as “a collective quantum optical effect in which a group of emitters, such as atoms or molecules, emit light in a highly coherent and amplified manner. In the context of mammalian neural systems, superradiance occurs when a group of neurons collectively emit photons, resulting in a stronger and more coherent signal compared to individual neuron emissions. This coordinated emission of photons across vast networks of microtubules within neurons could potentially achieve the long-range coherence necessary for the emergence of consciousness.”
The essay stands as a correction of sorts to Sir Roger Penrose’s “Orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR)” theory of human consciousness, which Wikipedia describes thusly: Orch Or “is a controversial theory postulating that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons (rather than being a product of neural connections).” In short, says Penrose, “Consciousness does not collapse the wave function; instead it is the collapse of the wave function that produces consciousness.”
One thing we do know is that consciouness is decidely not computational and most likely occurs in the quantum realm.
As you can tell, I dig this kind of stuff.
If you’ve read this far, and you’ve read some of my articles and most if not all of Ian’s, then you might wish to Subscribe or donate. Ian has written over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, need the money to keep the shop running. So please, consider it.
I just watched the first half of иди и смотри, in English, “Come and See.” I had to stop. It was just too much. It’s not like the first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, it is random, crazy, evil violence committed on peasants who are not really supporting the partisans.
This rarely happens to me, but on minute I smiled, the next I wanted to wretch, and the next I got misty eyed. I’m attemping to watch it in the original Russian but it is hard because it is in essence peasant Russian and their accents are pretty damned hard to unpack at times so sometimes I have to rewind and turn the subtitles back on.
I was told by a dear Russian friend–who lives in Russia–that Come and See captures the wanton brutality of war in its essentially random nature.
I can not say yet as I reccoment this film from 1987–that was damn near shitcanned by Soviet censors and I can understand why. It is harsh, beautiful, tender, cruel and arbitrary in equal measures. If you have the stomach, go ahead but be warned.
More when I finish.
If you have seen it, please share.
If you’ve read this far, and you’ve read some of my articles and most if not all of Ian’s, then you might wish to Subscribe or donate. Ian has written over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, need the money to keep the shop running. So please, consider it.
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Process knowledge is crucial to economic development
Henry Farrell, Sep 02, 2025 [Programmable Mutter, via The Big Picture, September 12, 2025]
… I’m fascinated by process knowledge and manufacturing because I spent a chunk of the late 1990s talking to manufacturers in Bologna and Baden-Wurttemberg for my Ph.D. dissertation.
I was carrying out research in the twilight of a long period of interest in so-called “industrial districts,” small localized regions with lots of small firms engaged in a particular sector of the economy. Paul Krugman’s Geography and Trade (maybe my favorite of his books) talks about some of the economic theory behind this form of concentrated production: economic sociologists and economic geographers had their own arguments. Economists, sociologists and geographers all emphasized the crucial importance of local diffuse knowledge about how to do things in making these economies successful. Such knowledge was in part the product of market interactions, but it wasn’t itself a commodity that could be bought and sold. It was more often tacit: a sense of how to do things, and who best to talk to, which could not easily be articulated. The sociologists were particularly interested in the informal institutions, norms and social practices that held this together. They identified different patterns of local institutional development, which the Communist party in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, and the Christian Democrats in the Veneto and Marche, had built on to foster vibrant local economies….
I spent a lot of time on workshop floors, listening to small-scale founders talking about their lives. I’ll never forget a particular conversation with a manufacturer of teabag-packing machines** about the technical ingenuity required to figure out how to reliably staple on the threads attached to some fancy tea bags, which allow you to pull the teabag out without either scalding your fingers or rummaging around for a spoon. The machinery for accomplishing this apparently simple task was quite complex and fantastical: it was a surprisingly difficult engineering problem….
A lack of appreciation for physical process knowledge helps explain why America is in trouble. Breakneck criticizes the first Trump and Biden administration’s belief that they could strangle China through export controls, riling up Chinese companies to “break free of American restrictions.” However, Dan’s criticisms go way further. It isn’t just that America focuses so much of its “entrepreneurial dynamism” on stuff that doesn’t necessarily do much good, and may plausibly do significant harm to American society: crypto, the metaverse and perhaps AI. It’s that for decades, American policy makers sat back as manufacturing moved overseas, not understanding what the long term consequences for process knowledge might be….
[TW: Regular readers will recall the number of times that Ian has written about the folly of free trade and that technological advances will more likely occur where the manufacturing is physically located. Or, As I wrote in The Obama administration as “managed democracy” (May, 2010):
…as an industrial enterprise grows and matures, its trained and skilled employees make the surrounding community a pool of technical talent that is highly conducive to the creation of other industrial enterprises that use the same or similar skills. That’s why certain towns and cities become known as centers for specific industrial products. Sheffield in England was known for its highly specialized alloy irons and steels. Delft in Holland is known world-wide for its blue pottery. The Hocking River valley in southern Ohio became known in the 1800s as a center of brick manufacture. The Connecticut River valley was known for almost a century as “Precision Valley” because it was a center of designing and making high-precision metal-working machine tools. Detroit became known for making automobiles. Today, almost every high-speed, high-volume printing press in the world comes from Heidelberg, Germany. The southern part of the San Francisco Bay area became known as Silicon Valley.
How much is it worth to have a locale or city renowned for the technical excellence of its local enterprises and workers? What value can be assigned to having a few hundred wizened old men around who can train entire generations of new, highly-skilled workers? Or who have a few different ideas than their boss, and decide to start up their own company?
Exactly these kind of links are traced out by David R. Meyer, a professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Brown University, in his 2006 book, Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America. This is important because it details how the USA machine tool industry developed – and the USA machine tool industry is the foundation of the modern industrial mass production economy.
The Silicon Valley Consensus & the “AI Economy”
Edward Ongweso Jr. [via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
The “AI economy” is less a story of productivity or innovation, then an attempt to graft a new political-economic order—let’s call it the Silicon Valley Consensus—that is ostensibly concerned with building our stillborn God. A coalition of hyperscalers, venture capitalists, fossil fuel firms, conservatives, and reactionaries are engaged in a frenzy of overbuilding, overvaluing, and overinvesting in compute infrastructure. Their goal is not to realize AGI or radically improve life for humanity, but to reallocate capital such that it enriches themselves, transmutes their wealth into even more political power that imposes constraints on countervailing political forces, and liberates capitalism from its recent defects (e.g. democracy), consolidating benefits to its architectures regardless of the actual social utility of the technologies they pursue….
Building out generative AI’s compute infrastructure and energy supply is an incredibly capital-intensive enterprise (McKinsey expects $7 trillion will be spent by 2030)….
2. The primary capital source for this infrastructure buildout isn’t external debt, but internal cash flows—primarily at hyperscalers—that dominate our stock market. Their profitability is so extreme that they can put “oodles of oodles of money” towards such an ambitious project without touching risky financing options, even if revenues and profits have yet to materialize….
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
AI-Capex is the everything cycle, now Just under 50% of GDP growth is attributable to AI Capex
Alex Krainer, Sep 07, 2025
… But the true nature of the Western empire has been carefully concealed from us behind the glossy façade of the Western “civilization.” Today’s empire is a reincarnation of the undead British Empire, whose DNA it still carries. The more we learn about this empire, the uglier it looks. As an example, it seems that many, if not most of the famines recorded in history weren’t natural disasters nor consequences of wars but results of deliberate policy aimed at subjugating populations and forcing them to accept colonial control and slavery.
This may seem like an exaggeration, but British statesman and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli explicitly said as much himself. He explained that the objective of the British Empire was to
“Gain and hold territories that possess the largest supplies of the basic raw materials. Establish naval bases around the world to control the sea and commerce lanes. Blockade and starve into submission any nation or group of nations that opposes this empire control program.” (Knuth, E.C. “Empire of the City,” 1946, p. 57)
There’s much evidence that the Empire really did use starvation as a weapon of war against disobedient groups and nations and that they did so relatively frequently. Take the example of India: during the 120 years between 1757 and 1878 when she was under direct British rule, India experienced 31 serious famines (Mike Davis, “Late Victorian Holocausts, El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World” – London: Verso, 2002).
Even in absence of outright famines, much of India’s population lived in chronic food insecurity. While this was concealed from the British public, Britain’s ruling establishment was well aware of it.
Economic historian Robert C Allen found that, during the 19th century, famines became more frequent and more deadly as extreme poverty increased from 23% in 1810 to more than 50% in the mid-20th century. The period from 1880 to 1920, the height of Britain’s imperial power, was particularly devastating for India. By the 1910s, life expectancy collapsed to 21.9 years….
In April 1974, Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s Secretary of State and National Security Adviser sent out a classified memo to select cabinet officials. The title of the memo was, “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests,” and it was commissioned on the recommendation of John D. Rockefeller III and came to be called, more famously, NSSM 200, for National Security Study Memorandum 200.
In it, Kissinger addressed the difficulty of controlling resource rich areas of the world against the social pressures borne of growing world populations and went on to suggest the kinds of coercive measures the US should consider. He bluntly stated that food aid should be considered as “an instrument of national power,” and that the US should ration food aid to “help people who can’t or won’t control their population growth.”
The NSSM 200 made depopulation in foreign developing countries an explicit, if secret, national security priority of the United States for the first time. In that, the policy of the British Empire was simply grafted onto the US foreign policy. If anything changed between Disraeli and Kissinger, it’s the slick framing of policy goals: “rationing food” to “help people” is the sanitized version of “starving them into submission.” But the language amounted to recommending genocide, at least as defined under the UN Convention of 1948.
Peter Turchin, Sep 13, 2025 [Cliodynamica]
According to my US Political Violence Database (USPVDB), the five years from 2020 to 2024 saw seven assassinations. This is higher than the previous peak during the 1960s, although only half as large as that of the late 1860s:
….It’s important to note, that by themselves political assassination and terrorism don’t overthrow the established elites (at least, I can’t think of any examples). An assassination of the state ruler may serve as a triggering event for a revolution or an onset of civil war, but it still requires a well-organized and committed counter-elite party. The failure of Alexander Ulyanov and ultimate success of his younger brother illustrate this principle perfectly.
The significance in the rising frequency of such instability “micro-events” is that they signal that something is deeply broken within the social system in which they happen. I tried to draw attention to the rising frequency of shooting rampages back in 2008 (you can read about it in my 2012 blog post, Canaries in a Coal Mine). A canary dropping dead in a miner’s cage is not the cause of the explosion to come, but rather an advance warning.
Similarly, the increasing incidence of assassinations and terrorism tells us that we aren’t out of the woods yet, by a long stretch.
Trumpillnomics / Felonomics
Data shows energy bills soaring as state and federal Republicans cut price-savings programs
Richard Eberwein, 9/04/25 [WCPT 820 Radio, via Clean Power Roundup]
Energy bills have been steadily increasing since President Donald Trump took office in January, partially thanks to state and national Republicans ousting Biden-era clean energy policies and prioritizing nonrenewable energy sources.
According to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), residential electricity bills have increased by nearly 10% nationally since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, despite his campaign pledge to slash electric bill prices….
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law on July 4, is also expected to increase energy costs for consumers even more. A report from Climate Power published last month found that 64,000 jobs have already been lost or stalled since Trump took office, with 56% of them located in congressional districts represented by Republicans. The report also says the cuts to clean energy have reduced the total energy supply, which have contributed to the higher bills experienced by consumers….
US Interior Secretary: ‘No Future for Offshore Wind Under This Administration’
Adrijana Buljan, September 12, 2025 [offshorewind.biz, via Clean Power Roundup]
Trump administration axes $679M in offshore wind infrastructure funding
[esgdive.com, via Clean Power Roundup]
The U.S. Department of Transportation is withdrawing or terminating $679 million in funding for 12 port and infrastructure upgrades that would support offshore wind projects, it announced Friday.
2025 farm income projections paint grim picture for farmers trying to break even
[WHO13, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
Coffee Prices Post Largest Annual Jump Since 1997
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2025]
Treasury bonds aren’t the safe haven they’ve been in the past — and taxpayers will pay a price
[Market Watch, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]
Homeless organizations note uptick in homeless families living in cars
[Spectrum News 13, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]
More Trump Administration Circular Firing Squad with Investor-Spooking ICE Raid on Hyundai-LG Plant
Yves Smith, September 9, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]
…And keep in mind that despite the concern, which may be justified, about mistreatment of Koreans doing construction work at the plant, some (we don’t know how many) were skilled workers necessary to get the equipment installed and shake the operations down. Although it is an entirely different type of production, my father was one of the most seasoned managers/executives in the paper mill industry in running startups and major expansions. They were not easy. A successful startup would take two years and burn 20% of the capital cost. An unsuccessful one would hemorrhage cash pretty much forever. And all of these startups required bringing in experts from the vendors to help with design, installation, and training….
South Korea in Deadlock Over $350 Billion Investment Fund
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-09-2025]
Richard Murphy, September 13 2025 [Funding the Future]
In this video, I explain why Trump’s economic policies are a disaster — and why the UK should take note as the far-right tries to copy them….
This man is an outright disaster.
Far-right politics is an outright disaster.
We’ve always known that, but now we can see the evidence. And it’s critical that we do see a note and talk about that evidence, because the threat from the far-right is real elsewhere, including here in the UK.
The far-right has no known answer to any known problem.
Its hatred of migrants solves nothing. We are living in an interdependent world, and to pretend otherwise is just absurd.
To pretend that we can live in glorious economic isolation is just absurd.
To pretend that we can run an economy on the basis of giving tax cuts to the rich, and increasing, in effect, taxes on everybody else by imposing tariffs is absurd because the net result is a lack of spending power….
Trump steals $400b from American workers
Cory Doctorow, September 09, 2025 [Pluralistic]
Trump’s stolen a lot of workers’ wages over the years, but this week, he has become history’s greatest thief of wages, having directed his FTC to stop enforcing its ban on noncompete “agreements,” a move that will cost American workers $400 billion over the next ten years:
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
I’m a trained historian. At least I consider myself one, with a Master’s in History and in International Relations, I think I qualify. But, today I must confess to a dilettantish interest in the history of mathematics. Now, please understand that I am no mathematician. I struggled through college algebra. I will, however, add that when I completed college algebra my analytical faculties grew so profoundly—at least to me in hindsight—that I made the Dean’s List every semester thereafter. So, I believe there is something quite important to be said about learning how to solve for ’n’ that we should impart to our children. In the beginning the abstract nature of algebra confounded me, but once I was able to conceptualize it, I began mastering the equations and, as aforementioned, my intellectually faculties grew rapidly and intensely. Soon, my intolerance for fucktose in an history text—or any text for that matter— become keen, acute and annoying as hell to many of my fellow junior and senior history seminar classmates. But I digress. This is about math. Let me add before the next paragraph begins that I also never took calculus. But we’ll get to calculus soon.
First, my fascination began with Euclid and how he systematized and synthesized Egyptian and Babylonian ideas into a coherent structure of elements that led to modern plane geometry. The dude took the wisdom of the pyramid builders and the ziggurat builders and discovered a way of looking at the world to build in new ways. That takes a hell of a mind, one I can appreciate, even at his far of a distance in time. As I studied Euclid I learned that Babylonia used a base-sixty numerical system. While the Egyptians used a base-ten system. The Egyptians were the first to utilize fractions around 1000 BC. Then, in the 5th century BC the Indians in an attempt to square the circle calculated the square root of two correctly to five decimal places. Then around 300 BC the Indians used Brahmi numerals to further refine the true ancestor to our base-ten system. At the same time the Babylonians invented the abacus.
The poor Romans didn’t do diddly for mathematics. Imagine complex calculations with Roman numerals? Screw that. But they sure used them to build roads and survey, among other things. So, kudos to them for applied mathematics. At lot of stuff happened between the Romans and the next development. Stuff which I am skipping because I’m trying to get to a simple point without using two thousand words to do so.
Something truly remarkable happened in India in 628 AD. Brahmagupta wrote a book that clearly explains and delineates the role of zero in a proton-hind Arabic script. This was positively revolutionary. He is the clear discoverer of the modern place value system of numbers, as well. Well, natural numbers, that is.
And now stuff really begins to accelerate.
In 810 the House of Wisdom is built in Baghdad for express purpose of translating Greek and Sanskrit mathematical and philosophical texts. Ten years later, in 820 a Persian from Khwarazm—the delta of the Oxus River into the former Aral Sea discovered a way to solve linear and quadratic equations. His name was al-Khwarizmi and his book was called Al Jabr—which was Europeanized into algebra. His book, once it reached Europe three and a half centuries later introduces the Hindu-Arabic numeral system that is adopted wholesale by the nascent scientific community emerging in the earliest European universities. Universities also have a Muslim Golden Age pedigree, coming from the great Persian vizier to the Seljuk Sultan of Central Asia Malik Shah, Nizam al-Mulk. His Nizamiyyas, now known as madrassas, were built all over the Seljuk realm and were the earliest versions of universities, where men came from all over to learn many different topics. Sadly, the madrassas fell into stagnation when al-Ghazali closed the gates of ijtihad (open questioning) in 1091 with his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers. The Muslim Golden Age ended that year.
Now, between the foundation of the earliest European universities and Isaac Newton, a lot of essential groundwork was laid for Ike’s work. I seek not to diminish any of that. But Newton begat not one, not two, not three but four revolutions in science: optics, mathematics, mechanics and gravity. His discovery of infinitesimal calculus is literally the base for modern rocket science as he used it to calculate and predict with stunning accuracy movements of heavenly bodies, hitherto impossible. Newton is simply the single greatest mind in the history of human science. He stands on the shoulders of some mighty men, but his accomplishments are of the ages.
Now, I come to the point. In this essay I have used a very specific word with each mathematical advance I have discussed. That word is “discovered.” I have purposefully eschewed the use of “invented.” And I have done so for a damn good reason. I am what you call a ‘mathematical Platonist.’ Said theory is defined by Wikipedia as “the form of realism that suggests mathematical entities are abstract, have no spatiotemporal or causal properties, and are eternal and unchanging.” Thus, as the Brits would say, ‘maths’ are discovered. However, the opposite of said theory is mathematical nominalism, which has its merits and is defined as, “the philosophical view that abstract mathematical objects like numbers, sets, and functions do not exist in reality, or at least do not exist as abstract entities independent of concrete things or the mind.” Thus as we Yanks say, they be invented.
So why did I write this essay? Because this discussion on the merits of the two theories is utterly fascinating to me. And if you have ten minutes and a solid high school foundation in mathematics you will most certainly understand and appreciate it. The interview engrossed me from the first question.
One final note: Ms. Jonas, the philosopher of math being interviewed says that she is 87% certain mathematical Platonism is correct, I’ll add my confidence level as about 59%. Why? Because there is some set theory ideas I simply cannot wrap my danged head around–I reckon my grey matter isn’t as big or maybe as sophisticated as Ian’s. I licked logic in college with an A+ but this set theory stuff. Good grief. The paradoxes drive me wonko! (If you get the reference add ten bonus points to your final grade.)
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