Christian Nationalists?

 

Onward Christian Soldiers

Onward Christian soldiers!
Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus
Going on before.
Christ, the royal Master,
Leads against the foe;
Forward into battle,
See, His banners go!

Isn’t “Christian Soldiers” an oxymoron?

The Christian Nationalists are at it again. Fact challenged Sarah Huckabee, the current Governor of Arkansas, gave the rebuttal to the State of the Union address. Her father, the former Governor, is an unapologetic Christian Nationalist.  Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Bobert have claimed that the US is a Christian Nation. Governor Ron DeSantis is taking over the New College in Florida and trying to turn it into what has been characterized as a right-wing Christian school.

Notable in all of their rantings is quoting from the Old Testament, and the Epistles from the New Testament, but noticeably absent are the words of Jesus Christ himself. IMHO, this is not an accident. Christian Nationalists feel that the end times are imminent, and they will all be received into Heaven in the Rapture. I think that Jesus said something about “Knowing not the hour.”

The Christian Nationalist are also intolerant, and worthy successors to the Pharisees. Jesus spoke often against the Pharisees in the Gospels (Matthew 23:1-36; Mark 12:36-40; Luke 11:37-52; Luke  20:45‑47). Jesus spoke against domination.  Soldiers and War are all about domination. Boy are Christian Nationalists going to be disappointed when Jesus finds that they have been taking his name in vain. Maybe they should start calling themselves “Biblicists” or something other than Christians.

Immigrants

 

How Have You Been 

How have you been my darling children,
While I have been away in the west?
Though you are strangers,
I feel that I know you.
By the way that you treat me
 and offer to feed me
 and eagerly ask if I'll stay for a rest. 

How should you treat strangers? 

The United States has citizens and wards.   (Monarchies and other forms of government may have subjects and wards). Before the 14^th Amendment, slaves were wards of the United States and the property of a slave owner.  The apportionment value of a slave was only 3/5 of a person (citizens plus wards).  Before the 19^th Amendment, women did not have the right to vote ( it took 42 years to certify this Amendment). Even after this Amendment, married women were considered to be property of their husbands, a situation agreed to by the state, so arguably women were still wards of the state.  The Equal Rights Amendment, ERA, would have changed this status (but opponents of the ERA had learned from the 19^th Amendment, so while the ERA was  originally passed by Congress in 1972, it had a deadline for ratification by March 1979.)  Children are wards of the state and while there is no formal age in which they are granted full rights as citizens, various rights are granted at various ages 16, 18, 21, etc.  There is considerable disagreement from parents who consider children to be their property whose  interest overrides any authority by the state.  The state considers children to be wards of the parents and the state has a secondary claim which is not excised unless the rights of the parent are terminated.   In no cases are children ever considered to be property of the state, nor does the state acknowledge that they are property of their parents. 

I would be remiss if I did not mention that non viable fetuses  are NOT considered to be wards of the state by the Constitution.  They might be viewed by many as persons, but that is an ethical opinion, not a legal opinion. In the same fashion, Corporations are neither citizens nor wards of the state. 

Prisoners who are incarcerated, and those with mental or physical disabilities can be wards of the state, even after they have passed the normal age of full citizenship.  People who are not born in the United States can be granted citizenship if they have lived in the United States a certain number of years, but  meanwhile they are wards of the state ( e.g. Resident Aliens). 

If individuals are citizens, subjects, or wards of other states, they can be visitors to the United States.  Only in rare cases, such as diplomatic immunity, would a visitor not be treated as a ward, subject of, the United States.  If they have evil intentions, visitors are considered to be intruders to the United States.  Those who are strangers may be treated as visitors or intruders.  Most major religions and cultures have an admonition to treat strangers as visitors.  Those who cross the border into the United States are strangers, but are they visitors or intruders? Gov. DeSantis flying asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard was treating them as intruders, but the residents of Martha’s Vineyard treated them as visitors. If we treat strangers only as intruders, then not only are we failing to act as major religions and cultures want us to act, but we are exercising a poor strategy. 

The opening move in any game with three or more players should to first be nice, e.g. assume that the stranger is a visitor not an intruder .  Only in a two-player game would always treating the stranger as an intruder be a winning strategy. The last I looked, there were a lot more than two of us.

Board of Directors II

 

Take The “A” Train

Hurry, get on board, it's comin'
Listen to those rails a-thrumming
All aboard, get on the "A" train
Soon you will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem

Who is getting on a Corporation’s Board?

The Board of Directors of a Corporation should represent ALL of the Corporation, not merely the shareholders of the Corporation. The shareholders own the ASSETS of the Corporation, but they are NOT the Corporation. The Board of Directors should therefore include the representatives of the shareholders, but it should also include others.

A Corporation is a special legal entity chartered by a state (including our federal government which is a group of United States). That Corporation protects the assets of the shareholders from being commingled with the assets of the Corporation, i.e. Limited Liability. If the state provides this protection, then it has an interest in the governance of the Corporation and should arguably have seats on its Board of Directors.

A Corporation is a producer. The factors of production are land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship but this is an antiquated definition based on agricultural production. I am proposing treating Capital as a single factor (combining land and capital), and am proposing calling entrepreneurship, Intellectual Property, for example trademarks, goodwill, brand names, trade secrets, etc. Intellectual Property is an asset of the Corporation whose asset owners should be, and are already, represented on the Board.

Not represented on the Board, but arguably it should be, is Labor, the employees of the corporation. If a Corporation has gone public (i.e. shares of the assets of the corporation are liquid and can be sold to others of the public) then the employees of the corporation probably do not have a seat on the Board governing the corporation, but arguably Labor should be involved in governing the Corporation. A special class of corporation, Employee Stock Ownership Plan, ESOP, often has employees on its Board, or at least employees always elect members of the Board because those employees are shareholders.

The economic transactions of the Corporation should produce profits. The profits of a Corporation are taxed. Thus the government already should be receiving a share of those profits. The remaining profits are either retained to increase the assets of the corporation (shareholder equity), are distributed to the shareholders in the form of dividends, or distributed to employees in the form of bonuses, at the direction of the Board. When a Corporation is private, then it is more likely to award bonuses, share the profits with all of the employees of the Corporation. When a Corporation is public, then it is less likely to do so.

Having seats on the Board does not compel those directors in those seats to always be in attendance and vote on the actions of the Corporation. The Labor seats and the Government seats can vote present or be absent and, in that case, can give their vote as proxies to other Board members. However having a seat means that those members can, and should, participate in debates on Corporate actions.

Outcomes II

 

Paint it Black

I see a red door
And I want it painted black
No colors anymore
I want them to turn black.

If you only see things in Black and White, you can be missing quite a lot.

Black and White might seem like two  dimensions.  It is not. It is only one dimension,  choice, and black is not making that choice and white is making that choice.  But Black is only the choice of one outcome.  If you look at multiple choices, then the most probable choice is 50% Black and 50% White, in other words gray.  If various shades of gray were allowed, for example 50 as in the popular book series, then only one of those 50 is 100% black and one of those 50 is 100% white.

Microsoft Word allows for three colors, dimensions: Red, Green, and Blue. It allows for 256 graduations within these colors.  This allows for 256³ gradations within these three dimensions, or 16,777,216 colors.  And the most common color is still grey. It does not take many dimensions and many gradations within those dimensions to give rise to many, many possible outcomes.

Outcomes

 

Impossible

But the world is full of zanies and fools
Who don't believe in sensible rules
And won't believe what sensible people say
And because these daft and dewy eyed dopes keep building up impossible hopes
Impossible things are happening every day\

There is a difference between impossible and improbable.

Improbable means that there is only one outcome, or a few outcomes, out of the myriad of outcomes that could happen.  Impossible means that there is NO  outcome.  The problem is when the number of outcomes gets very large, or the popular wisdom rules out certain outcomes as impossible, people confuse impossible with improbable.

Automatic sliding doors that detect the approach of a person who wishes to use that door, did not exist at the time of the production of the original Star Trek TV series.  To appear futuristic, the doors on the StarShip Enterprise appeared to open automatically.  In reality, this was a practical visual special effect where an off-screen stagehand pulled the door open when an actor approached.  Automatic door opening was an improbable outcome in 1966, not an impossible outcome.  Now most retail stores have automatic doors, sliding or folding, and what seemed improbable in 1966, has become so possible that it is common place.  Before 1969, a man walking on the moon might have seemed an impossible outcome, but now we know that it was merely an improbable outcome.

Impossible things can never happen.  But many improbable things are often incorrectly characterized as impossible.

Reality

 

Compared to What

Slaughterhouse is killin' hogs
Twisted children killin' frogs
Poor dumb rednecks rollin' logs
Tired old lady kissin' dogs
I hate the human love of that stinking mutt (I can't use it!)
Try to make it real, compared to what? C'mon baby now!

Making it real might be accepting that reality is hyperbolic.

If the shape is always flat, then Euclidean geometry would apply in all places. It does appear to apply locally but fails to produce reasonable results when traversing the globe, when the distance between two points is significant compared to the radius of the spherical Earth. When the distance is large, spherical non-Euclidean geometry, not Euclidean geometry, applies and its Great Circle distance is used, rather than the shortest distance between two points in flat space.

Similarly if the universe is flat, then Euclidean geometry would apply in all places. As above, it does appear to apply locally but, given the above, it is reasonable to question if  it applies globally. If the universe is hyperbolic, rather than flat, then non-Euclidean geometry, i.e. hyperbolic trigonometric functions, should apply and not the shortest distance between two points in Euclidean geometry.

If only the shortest distance were involved, this would not be as significant. However this is really the relationship between numbers, where any number, c, can be defined by two other numbers, a and b.

c = a * b

c = a + b

While these relationships are true in any geometry, the relationship between the sum of squares depends on the geometric system being used.

c² = a² + b²

has different solutions depending on the geometric system.

·        In a flat Euclidean space, the solution is 

        c=√(a²+b²), 

      but this only has answers for c in the real plane if a²+b² is greater than zero. If it is less than zero, i.e. negative, then the solution for c is a complex number which requires the use of imaginary numbers.

·        In a spherical non-Euclidean space, the solution is 

      c=1/R*cos^-1(cos(a/R) *cos (b/R)) 

      but this also assumes that this solution is on a sphere which is a closed space which has a Radius, R.

·        In hyperbolic non-Euclidean space, the solution is

      c=cosh^-1(½*cosh(a+b)+½*cosh(a-b)),   

      which is on an open hyperbolic plane with no fixed Radius, R.

This relationship does not merely impact the shortest distance between two points. It impacts every solution that involves the square of two numbers. For example, the Lorentz transform, used in time and length dilation, and mass expansion, which varies based on the ratio of the velocity to the speed of light, in flat Euclidean space is √ (1-(v/c)²), which requires the use of imaginary number if v/c is greater than zero. However if globally space is  non-Euclidean and hyperbolic, then the Lorentz transform is 1+ln(cosh(v/c)±sinh(v/c)), and does not imply the use of imaginary numbers when v/c is greater than zero. It simply becomes undefined ( the natural logarithm of a negative number is undefined). It is suggested that all physical equations, for example those in electrical engineering involving alternating current,  which involve the square of two values should not use the Euclidean solution, but should use the hyperbolic solution. This will prevent the creation of imaginary or complex number solutions which are only a result of assuming that space is flat.

Further, if the universe, space, is hyperbolic, as proposed by Mabkhout [1], the implication is that dark energy and dark matter, are not needed to deal with  cosmic inflation and expansion, the size of the observable universe is consistent with its age, and the Planck length is consistent with the Planck energy, etc..

Additionally if the universe is random and hyperbolic, it must be tolerant and there is no rationale for superstition, scapegoating, or intolerance which are only an attempt to find deterministic reasons for random events.

[1]        Mabkhout, S.A., 2012. The infinite distance horizon and the hyperbolic inflation in the hyperbolic universe. Phys. Essays, 25(1), p.112. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Salah-Mabkhout/publication/302521692_The_Infinite_Distance_Horizon_and_the_Hyperbolic_Inflation_in_the_Hyperbolic_Universe/links/5730e0cf08ae6cca19a1f675/The-Infinite-Distance-Horizon-and-the-Hyperbolic-Inflation-in-the-Hyperbolic-Universe.pdf

Storytelling

 

As Time Goes By

It's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by

What makes a good story?

My forecasting career has been about finding the most likely outcome/maximum entropy, that is the mesostate, outcome, that has the greatest number of microstates, possibilities.  Storytelling is about finding an improbable but desirable outcome and ensuring that that is believable, possible.  My career has been about finding the stories of Dog Bites Man, Goliath Beats David, etc.  But those stories do not fascinate us.  The improbable stories with an  outcome that we believe fascinates us, e.g. Man Bites Dog, David Beats Goliath.  I.e. a mesostate that is not the most probable but is fascinating. 

A billionaire winning a billion dollar lottery, improbable, but not very fascinating.  A pauper losing a million dollar lottery, probable, but not very fascinating.  A pauper winning a billion dollar lottery, improbable AND fascinating.

Goliath beating everyone, including David, probable, but not very interesting.  David beating Goliath, improbable AND interesting.

A good story is about getting from the beginning: David versus Goliath, a pauper and a billion dollar lottery, etc. believably through a middle, to that improbable but desirable, fascinating, interesting outcome or ending.

Forecasting is using believability to get to the most probable outcome

Storytelling is using believability to get to an IMprobable, desirable, and fascinating, outcome.

A problem is that the skills for convincing us about the believability can be misused to produce an outcome that we don’t desire, but is desired by the forecaster or storyteller.  The Boy Can Cry Wolf when there is No Wolf just to get attention for the Boy. Then we don’t believe or trust him when The Boy Cries Wolf and there really is a Wolf.

Just like you can appreciate a good forecast, you can appreciate a good story, but make sure it is believable and that its outcome is one that you desire. Not every good story is true.