Jacob Bekenstein

This great physicist was born in Mexico City two years before I was born there. He moved to the US and studied in New York. Now he is a professor in Israel.
I admire his work and believe that information is receiving a new broader interpreation with his work. I plan to follow his work.

Bush New Economic Plan

As Paul Krugman writes in the note below, the Bush administration cannot solve the problem they created. A new stage of more regulation is coming. A Democratic administration will be more able to produce this new state of the American Economic Government policy.

The Dilbert Strategy By PAUL KRUGMAN

Anyone who has worked in a large organization — or, for that matter, reads the comic strip “Dilbert” — is familiar with the “org chart” strategy. To hide their lack of any actual ideas about what to do, managers sometimes make a big show of rearranging the boxes and lines that say who reports to whom.

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Anthony Stafford Beer

Beer was an englishman that started an Internet in Chile to support the socialist government of Salvador Allende, he called it Cybersyn. He did not use the internet protocol TCP/IP, but the main concept was there, computers connected to different locations to organize human activities.
Unfortunately for all of us, criminals stopped the constructive work started by Allende. Here I want to draw attention to what can save us from catastrophe, rationality, and what can destroy our civilization, war.

Chile tried Software to Manage Socialist Economy in '71

When military forces loyal to Gen. Pinochet staged a coup in September 1973, they made a surprising discovery. Salvador Allende’s Socialist government had quietly embarked on a novel experiment to manage Chile’s economy using a clunky mainframe computer and a network of telex machine. The project was called 'Cybersyn'

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Brazil Lula says backs Petrobras-Pemex tie-up

RECIFE, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Thursday backed a tie-up between state-run oil company Petrobras (PETR4.SA: Quote, Profile, Research)(PBR.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Mexico's Pemex, whose crude output is in decline, for new oil field exploration.

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Iraqi Prime Minister Says No Retreat

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Iraq's prime minister vowed Thursday to fight ''until the end'' against Shiite militias in Basra despite protests by tens of thousands of followers of a radical cleric in Baghdad and deadly clashes in the capital and the oil-rich south.

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Iraq and the American Election

You can read below two articles on the war in Iraq. The US is getting ready to elect a president in November. As I have noted here the last few days, the American economy is in disrepair. Here I write as simple as possible as to the development of events in the US from now to November regarding the election.

If the Bush administration lied about the extent of the economic collapse, the US response to Sadr's challenge can only be limited. According to Joseph E. Stiglitz the US is committed to three trillion dollars already in this effort. The US is fighting the war practically alone, Mexico during the Fox administration, did not support this adventure, and very few did. Anthony Blair from England and José María Aznar from Spain did, and as a consequence they lost their power. Fox's party, Partido de Acción Nacional, is still in power.

After reading Patrick Cockburn's piece in The Independent from London, appears to me that General Petraeus, even with his Ph.D. degree, does not understand poor Third World people. According to Cockburn, the Americans have been unable to control Moktada al-Sadr, because they did not expect a poor cleric to be much of an enemy. Saddam Hussein made the same mistake.

If there is not much money for that war, as seems to be the case, events in Iraq will affect the American election.

Who is more likely to be elected?

Counting on past experience, fear is likely to be a factor. If the American people want to be protected from al-Sadr, McCain will win. If the electorate is wise and wants to save money, Obama will be the next President of the United States. If they do not know what to do, four more years of Clinton are in the offing.

Whoever reads my blog, should know by now, that I have very little regard for predictions, even less about the future. In any case, there you have it.

Who is Muqtada al-Sadr?

As Iraq dissolves into civil war, few men wield more power on its bloodstained streets than Muqtada al-Sadr. In just four years, his potent blend of Shia nationalism, enforced by the 70,000-strong Mehdi Army, has made him a hero to millions - and put him top of America's hit list. But does the future rest in his hands? Patrick Cockburn reports

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Thousands in Baghdad Protest Basra Assault

BAGHDAD — Thousands of supporters of the powerful Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia took to the streets of Baghdad on Thursday to protest the Iraqi Army’s assault on the southern port city of Basra, as intense fighting continued there for a third day.

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López Obrador returns to Mexican spotligh

Flags are waving in the warm evening light in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square, and thousands of people have gathered to hear Andrés Manuel López Obrador, leader of the country’s left, speak out against the government’s imminent energy reform proposals.

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God Damn America Especially Pennsylvania By Greg Palast

The kids were snoozing so I drove along the back roads skirting the Lackawanna River on a dawn hunt for black coffee and a newspaper.

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‘Minister of Ideas’ Tries to Put Brazil’

BrasíliaWHEN Roberto Mangabeira Unger looks at Brazil, the country of his birth, he sees a “big, seething caldron of life, whose most salient characteristic is its vitality.”

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Plebanski Action

When we again do the compactification trick we find the Plebanski action
S = ∫_T⁴d⁴xϵ^abcd[B_cdKF^K_ab + Φ_IJB^I_abB^J_cd]
You can read this new derivation of the Plebanski action in the recent article by Lee Smolin Matrix universality of gauge and gravitational dynamics.

Smolin ends his article with the following:

"Conjecture: There is a universality class of cutoff background independent theories of connections, which are all equivalent to each other in the sense that there are transformations that map the degrees of freedom of any one into the degrees of freedom of the other, preserving the equations of motion. Representatives of this equivalence class include general relativity in d = 4 coupled to Yang-Mills theory for any U (N ) (plus certain degrees of freedom required to complete the unification) as well as Chern-Simons theory, matrix Chern-simons theory, as well as the matrix model (2)."

Where (2) is:

S = TrM³

His final conclusion is:

"If true, this hypothesis imply that the question of why particular laws and degrees of freedom are observed in our universe is just part of the question of what chooses the initial conditions in cosmology. A universality of dynamics such as conjectured here would mean that the question of what is the ”ultimate theory” may play as minor a role in physics as the choice of physical computer plays in computer science."

The ideas in this article have been discussed with Roberto Mangabeira Unger, one of the leading thinkers of our time.

Rickard Falkvinge

Rick Falkvinge is a swedish businessman. Very young and original. Below you can read his analysis of our economic situation. He is no Stilgitz, nor Krugman, but at least he has money in the economics game, unlike me. Maybe you can learn from his insights.
Mr. Falkvinge has jewels like:

"One prominent US economics professor recommends immediate investments in precious metals: "gold, silver, and copper-jacketed lead"."

I myself do not know what to do, even less what advice can I give you.

Why the US is collapsing.

Swedish Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge predicts impending doom for US economy and status as a super-power in an analysis from a historical perspective. Also ties to IP framework.

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The Republican Resurrection By FRANK RICH

THE day before Barack Obama gave The Speech, Hillary Clinton gave a big speech of her own, billed by her campaign as a “major policy address on the war in Iraq.” What, you didn’t hear about it?

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I leave Economics to the Pros

Yesterday I posted Stiglitz, now Krugman. They do a better job than I do. Krugman tells us today that we had it coming. More regulation is needed, and I feel it coming. Of course John McCain can still win, and then I guess 2012 will be our end.

Partying Like It’s 1929 By PAUL KRUGMAN

If Ben Bernanke manages to save the financial system from collapse, he will — rightly — be praised for his heroic efforts.

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State of the Economy

I leave it to the pros. Read Stiglitz's views in the note below. I like his clear and precise language. Obviously he is in our side, not in the side of the rich people that got bail out in Bear Stearns.