Justice

Never underestimate the power of science to help understand even the most abstract and/or emotional themes.

E.g justice.

You think justice is something you only can learn in church, which no one else than a priest can truly explain you by a divine morality? Far from it.

Just look at a simple little method to create good programs: the ML-method (not the maximum likely method, but the “measuring line”-method - because it measures “lines of work” in a software). It depends on information and the simple fact, that information is action: therefore information processing is work. And if you have to do much work, you don’t do it alone. You look for help. That’s true both for people and for software objects. And when you create a group to do the job, you have to portion your work onto the helpers. And if you don’t do it equally (according to both the task and the abilities), you create traffic jams of work, because some of your objects/people have to do too much, while others are allowed to be lazy instead of contributing their parts. You call that attempt to distribute work equally “load balancing” in networking.

On the other hand – if you want to maintain your group doing a great job, it’s not enough to distribute the work equally, you also have to care for your servers/objects/group members, because they need resources to work (just the physical fact of conservation of energy). If you don’t care for them they simply stop being able to help you after a while. Because your own resources are limited, you have to spend it equally, shouldn’t forget anybody, because each part of your group is needed as strong as possible - to let the stream of work flow as powerful as possible. To make your group “efficient”, efficient for more than a day or a week, producing not just "enough" effect, but the highest possible effect. Ongoing.

Distributing work and resources equally – how do you define “justice”?

Why are there no slave rebellions?

Actually, the full title above should be “Why are there no slave ant rebellions?” But it works for humans the same way. Slavery is a “functioning social system” in both species.

Both are social species. What does that mean?

It means that some individuals form a group – that they no longer act only in their own interest, but caring for the other group members as well. Surely not because they love all the others, but simply because the group makes them stronger, increases the own chance to survive.

And how are groups build? Like any other information processing system: by communication = information processing.

Btw: Do you know how to detect systems or subsystems? By measuring the “density” of communication. Where the density decreases (or increases) you have found a boundary of a (sub)system. Remember SOA? To have more flexible, easy-to-modify systems, you have to make the members/objects more autarchic, to loosen coupling – means to lower the density of communication.

The more dense the communication, the less individual the members – look at your body: Build of billions of cells working together, highly specialized to their tasks.

And now what?

Suicide is the keyword here, because as long as cells live as individuals, they are something like immortal. In a human body only the ovum is allowed to survive in its successors (it’s the only cell which undergoes two births: “all of them are present at birth”) – each and every other cell has to die after their lifetimes and many, many even earlier: they have to die by real suicide. It’s a simple tool of Mother Nature to create interfaces, which are necessary for the information processing – she creates much too many cells on both sides of the connection to increase the chance of their coupling, sending unfocused communication signals. When the contact is created (and communication starts), then the flood of communications is controlled, centered towards the interface – the other cells, now definitely dispensable, are cut off the communication stream...

and in just one hour they are not only dead but dissolved without a trace.

So suicide is nothing “unusual” in a social group, when the communication is dense enough to create something like a “body” out of the different members, since the “will to survive” moves from the members to the body. (Darwin: if it wouldn’t do that, the body would simply dissolve again and not be able to reproduce itself.)

Humans are near to that state, i guess, because i don’t know from any other apes which made suicide to a rite like we did.

That’s one precondition for slavery: the willingness to sacrifice for the own group.

The next is – look a the ants – lacking intelligence. Because the amazon ants, the slaveholders, use mimikry to stir the willingness of the slaves. The amazon queen “smells” like the own queen – and the kings and popes of the human societies “smell” like fathers, pretend to protect and educate “their children” (s. Rousseau). And if the slaves are not stupid enough, a slowly changing system is able to get them used to obedience and harm against their truest interests – and more important, even the truest interests of their children.

“The slaves build homes for and feed the slave-makers, who cannot do anything but fight. They depend completely on their slaves for survival.” Sounds familiar.

The original quote? Replace “slaves” with “slave ants” and “slave-makers” with Amazon ants.

The great difference? “One ant species in the American southwest makes other ants their slaves by raiding their nests and making off with the pupae”.

Only the humans treat their own species so badly.

Remember Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler)? He is “credited” to have killed up to 100,000 persons by staking them. His people allowed him to do so in the name of “national security”, because he was the king and he promised to defend them against enemies. But he didn’t only stake foreigners, he also let his own people “die an agony”, just because he could and he was in the mood for – exactly like Mr. Schwarzenegger today. So question: Who needs foreign enemies with leaders like that?

Seems as if that species deserves to lose Mother Natures goodwill.

Cassandra and Bertrands Paradox

No one likes naysayers and pessimists, so i’ll restrain myself today despite the fact, that it seems, as if the leader of the mightest nation on Earth, the top of the executive, is no longer controlled by a working separation of powers. It seems as if the maybe not elected president now can laugh about any bill in the country using “bill-signing statements”, bypassing Senate, when it is not obedient, insidiously authorizing the Secret Services to spy on their own neighbors, selling common people to Big Biz, bullying justice into submission, while always lying or letting lie and intriguing.

(Btw: thank you for the checklist for dictators, PowerOfGold)

Remember Bertrands Paradox?

Remember the importance of getting and knitting dots together?

The more you know about a system, the better you know, how that system will behave...
To be able to better foresee the future.

We know so much about the new version of a “rigorously enforced" democracy in America, where you only have to take the president and his underlings into account, with no other complicating factors like justice or decency beyond the ruling elite - as the French just couldn't get past the Roi de Soleil and had to care for nobody else. That's why such a democracy is called "simplified", clear chains of commands, no confusion, whom to serve. But we don’t want to know it. It’s too harmful, too annoying, too difficult and we all have our own problems, so be quiet, Cassandra, and let us dance around the Trojan Horse of TV, cheap holidays and Walmart.

Alas, looking for the links above i stumbled across an article by Ray McGovern: “Too Late” and so i can’t be silent without quoting him:

“The SS prison guards were required to extract a confession from prisoners before they were hanged or shot, but Haushofer refused. When they removed his body, though, a paper fell out of his pocket. It was his admission of guilt written in the form of a sonnet:

Schuld

...schuldig bin ich
Anders als Ihr denkt.
Ich musste früher meine Pflicht erkennen;
Ich musste schärfer Unheil Unheil nennen;
Mein Urteil habe ich zu lang gelenkt...
Ich habe gewarnt,
Aber nicht genug, und klar;
Und heute weiß ich, was ich schuldig war.

Guilt

I am guilty,
But not in the way you think.
I should have earlier recognized my duty;
I should have more sharply called evil evil;
I reined in my judgment too long.
I did warn,
But not enough, and clear;
And today I know what I was guilty of.”

The Frog and the Boiling Pot

Today i wondered what to talk about. Information is so easy, so basic with it its consequences “strategy and structure of information processing systems”, that sometimes it is hard to discuss again and again the same simple things. On the other hand – our whole universe with all the different details and interactions is build on that base...

which seems so hard to understand for people that even the highest paid experts don’t know what information is until now, just because of the infinity of details created by an informational universe.

Thanks to Robert from Greenseptember, i know now what to write about, because he told us that his wife starts to worry about the state of the States and that he wouldn’t blame her for waiting so long to see what’s going on in a nation, where a government gets too powerful and has too much information on its citizens (“sleepwalking into a surveillance society”). I agreed, despite the fact, that the destruction of separation of powers simply proves, that democracy can’t exist in that country.

Because democracy needs a “Rechtsstaat” (Constitutional State) to survive. Oh yes, many dictatorships and facist regimes kept strictly formal provisions of their law (with the emphasis on “their”), so a Constitutional State isn’t enough to create a democracy, but can’t be ignored. Btw, in mathematics you call a constraint like that “necessary”, while the “democracy” is just a “sufficient” condition, because if a democracy exists, it has to be a Constitutional State, but that doesn’t work vice versa: If a Constitutional State exists, it may be a democracy, but it can be a dictatorship either.

A democracy needs a more developed Constitutional State, a “Rechtsstaat” – it has to have a working system of separation of powers to assure that justice is able to prevail in a society, because justice is the immune system of a human group to protect equilibrium of interests of its members. Why? Because justice makes the group stronger, more effective and more efficient, simply because when interests are hurt humans start to defend themselves and stop to work together.

It’s that easy.

But back to Roberts wife, a woman we know very much about because we know Robert, so we like her even when we never met her. How can a reasonable and intelligent woman like her not be shocked and awed by the fact, that her nation can’t be a democracy any longer since the first time, when her president added statements to a bill, that he would follow the law, when he wants and ignore it, when he don’t?

Because it didn’t happen suddenly.

Since the 1930’s, the long forgotten time when America was interested in her masses, the powerful people intrigued against losing their power. They installed the Pavlov Reflex against communism to prevent common people from working together to defend their interests and rights and nearly managed to get the absolute power with McCarthy’s help. But the grassroots of America were strong and stopped that guy.

The next head of the Hydra to be cut off was Nixon.

And it took longer every time and the heads didn’t stop to grow. Slowly, but surely the Old America, defending the rights of everybody, transformed into the New America, where rights have to be paid. Not many fought against that development. Why? Because the powerful managed to install another Pavlov-Reflex: the will to be a winner by hook or by crook. Therefore it can’t matter when “justice” demands to be paid, since you can pay as long as you aren’t a loser, so to be treated unjustly is just your own fault.

That’s the way people got used to struggle alone to make ends meet – on their own, for if they ask for help, they would be called communists or losers.

America forgot the words of her Founding Father Ben Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776): We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

America forgot the true meaning of the words “United We Stand”, reduced it to a simple hooray for war.

So slowly, but surely the common people of America starve – today they need chinese money to purchase chinese goods on credit. Btw: 2005 seems to be a year, when they spent more than they had. Last time America spent more than she earnt, was 1933, the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who “helped American people regain faith in themselves” while being a “true communist” in the modern interpretation of the word: he installed Social Security, heavier taxes on the wealthy, new controls over banks and public utilities, and an enormous work relief program for the unemployed.

It took more than seventy years to destroy the separation of powers in America, that’s a long long time of boiling peoples interests.

Look at New Orleans! The houses of the poor are nothing more than an “event” for tourists, no need to help, because if they can’t help themselves...

they are losers.

And if they gather together to help each other...

they are communists.

The water is really hot now – but does the frog jump?

No.

Because the frog jumps if he is thrown into the boiling pot – and survives.

But if you put the frog into lukewarm water and boil it slowly...

slowly...

he get’s used to...

and dies.

Why?

Slowly changing environments support passive information processing because of the speedy reactions of that kind of processing, slowly changing environments lull the brain, the hero of active processing systems on Earth because of the apparent ease of comprehension...

therefore even with smart brains and eyes wide open sleepwalking into disaster, if it comes slowly enough to get used to.

January, 01

A new year.

Just a new number in a particular format type, called “date”, but we greet it with cheers and fireworks – why? Because we need hope, we need to believe that we will survive.

Intelligence is the conquest of the future – however, the price is high: it is fear, since intelligence makes you aware of what may come.

The shrinking gulf stream, the shrinking democracy, the shrinking value of human dignity – future looks dark in our days, but future looked dark in the Middle Age, too – and then came the Renaissance.

So let us fire more firework rockets and let us make more noise to oust the unholy spirits of greed and destruction, creating poverty and harm. Let us believe in a bright future for each and every human being, either poor or rich, white or black or yellor or red or green or whatever, either woman or man, either child or aged, either big or small, either family or foreigner – let us believe and fight for.

Happy new year!