Programmed Reality

Yesterday I got a 1964 dime in change.  The rarity of this occurrence is incalculable.  But how strange to think that it might also have something to do with the most profound event in our country's history.

Executive Order 11110.  Some say that it is what got President John F. Kennedy assassinated.  Others say it is a minor executive order of little significance.  I decided to take a break from investigating the nature of reality and research this little gem.

The transcript of the order appears below as well as a link to the more lengthy Executive Order 10289 which it amends.  Essentially, 10289 is a list of things that the Secretary of the Treasury is empowered to do without approval of the president.  In 1963, Kennedy added one thing to that list via EO 11110, namely the ability to issue Silver Certificates, which are U.S. Treasury Notes that can be redeemed for the equivalent in silver coins.

There is a great deal of confusion about many aspects of this story, such as what kind of notes could have been redeemed for silver, what 11110 actually said, what Kennedy's intentions were, etc.  Wikipedia entries on EO 11110, the Silver Certificate, United States Note, and Federal Reserve Note, are very inconsistent.  For example, the United States Note page says that "all ... types of circulating currency, silver certificates, Federal Reserve Notes, and United States Notes, were redeemable by individuals only for silver," whereas the Silver Certificate page implies that only those notes could have been redeemable in silver.  This is not a moot point because it is the difference between metal-backed currency and fiat currency, the evils of which has been prolifically documented (see for example G. Edward Griffin's excellent book, "The Creature from Jekyll Island").  It is really the core of the argument about Kennedy, 11110, and the conspiracy to assassinate him.  It is also, to me, fascinating that all of these currency types were floating around in circulation in 1963, the nuances of which were completely unknown to the general public in whose wallets they sat.  

Here is the fact, straight from the US Treasury: "Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything.  This has been the case since 1933. The notes have no value for themselves, but for what they will buy."  It appears that since the US abandoned the gold standard in 1933, the same is true of United States Notes.  Therefore, 11110 only has to do with Silver Certificates, despite some sites claims to the contrary.

As a coin collector as a kid, I was very aware that something major happened in 1964 with respect to silver and the US Mint.  As I was told at the time, the value of silver exceeded the face value of the corresponding coins (dimes, quarters, half dollars) for the first time in 1964.  Hence, beginning in 1965, coins would be minted using copper and zinc instead of silver.  Suddenly, all 1964 and earlier coins were being hoarded by coin collectors and non-collectors alike.  Of course, it wasn't that silver was suddenly more valuable - it was that inflation had finally taken its toll and reduced the value of the dollar enough to drop the value of coins below their meltdown values.  Big deal, right?  It was bound to happen?

What is the number one suspect for the root cause of the inflation that created this situation?  Fiat currency, or currency NOT backed by something of real value, like heavy metals such as gold or silver.  Popular conspiracy theory says that the private banks that represent the Federal Reserve are the ones who have profited every year from the inflation that reduces the savings of the rest of us, and are the biggest proponents of fiat currency, which Federal Reserve Notes are.  Popular conspiracy theory also says that JFK was assassinated by a cabal that represents the very establishment that includes those same big financial interests.  Is it a coincidence that he was killed in 1963, just a few weeks after signing Executive Order 11110 that gave the US Treasury the right to decide on their own to print non-fiat money in the form of silver certificates?  Is it a coincidence that 4 months later, redemption of silver certificates for silver was halted forever and that that was the end of coins and paper money of real value?  Jim Marrs put all of this together in his best seller "Crossfire."  According to him, "Kennedy apparently reasoned that by returning to the constitution, which states that only Congress shall coin and regulate money, the soaring national debt could be reduced by not paying interest to the bankers of the Federal Reserve System, who print paper money then loan it to the government at interest. He moved in this area on June 4, 1963, by signing Executive Order 11110 which called for the issuance of $4,292,893,815 in United States Notes through the U.S. Treasury rather than the traditional Federal Reserve System."

PublicEye.org says it is all a lot of nonsense, in an article by Edward Flaherty.  According to Flaherty, 11110 was only Kennedy delegating the right to the US Treasury to approve the issuance of silver certificates without the need for his approval as well.  He claims that "The purpose of the order was to facilitate the reduction of certificates in circulation, not to increase them."  Really?  How exactly does facilitating the issuance of silver certificates help reduce those in circulation?  You're suspect, Ed!  So, I was curious about Ed and found out that he appears to be a pro-Fed lackey and spends most of his time debunking non-economists.  What does he really know of Kennedy's intentions?  Then again, what do the conspiracy theorists know of Kennedy's intentions in issuing EO 11110?  Sadly, there isn't much available on Kennedy's real opinions of the Fed or his motives behind 11110.  There may be some hints, however.  In a news conference in June 7, 1962, Kennedy said "if I were anxious to get control of the Federal Reserve, the matter comes up in 1963.".  His Comptroller of the Currency for the United States Department of the Treasury, James Saxon, chartered a large number (369) of new national banks (competitors of the Federal Reserve System) and was known to be frequently at odds with the Fed.  Other than that, there is precious little of fact.  So, we are left somewhere in between the pro-conspiracy camp and the debunkers.  

Executive Order 11110 did indeed facilitate the issuance of silver certificates that were probably at odds with the policies of the Fed.  However, it was hardly an attempt to abolish the Fed, as some claim.  So, the shroud of mystery surrounding the JFK murder and the financial elite will not be broken by this late night blogger.  But, I did get a dime with a melt value of $1.38 out of the deal.

Transcript of Executive Order 11110:

------------------------
AMENDMENT OF EXECUTIVE ORDER NO. 10289 AS AMENDED, RELATING TO THE PERFORMANCE OF CERTAIN FUNCTIONS AFFECTING THE DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY.

By virtue of the authority vested in me by section 301 of title 3 of the United States Code, it is ordered as follows:

SECTION 1. Executive Order No. 10289 of September 19, 1951, as amended, is hereby further amended

- (a) By adding at the end of paragraph 1 thereof the following subparagraph (j):

(j) The authority vested in the President by paragraph (b) of section 43 of the Act of May 12, 1933, as amended (31 U.S.C. 821 (b)), to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury not then held for redemption of any outstanding silver certificates, to prescribe the denominations of such silver certificates, and to coin standard silver dollars and subsidiary silver currency for their redemption,

and (b) By revoking subparagraphs (b) and (c) of paragraph 2 thereof.

SECTION 2. The amendment made by this Order shall not affect any act done, or any right accruing or accrued or any suit or proceeding had or commenced in any civil or criminal cause prior to the date of this Order but all such liabilities shall continue and may be enforced as if said amendments had not been made.

JOHN F. KENNEDY THE WHITE HOUSE, June 4, 1963
---------------------------

As Executive Order 11110 is an amendment to Executive Order 10289, interested readers may view that one here

Tags: jfk, john f. kennedy, executive order 11110, federal reserve, silver certificate
Categories: General

Last month, Lord Martin Rees, the president of Britain's Royal Society and "astronomer to the Queen of England", hosted the National Science Academy's first conference on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, which was attended by such scientific illuminaries as physicist Paul Davies, SETI founder and astrophysicist extraordinaire Frank Drake.  And the resulting sound bite of the week is "World-Leading Physicist Says 'They Could Exist in Forms We Can't Conceive'"?  

Really?  That's it?  That's news?  That's what we get from the world's leading thinkers on cosmology?

Sorry for my tone, but it's about time these guys got caught up with science fiction writers from 50 years ago.  Check out a 1959 movie called "Invisible Invaders."  Or at a minimum, take Carl Sagan's brainchild from the late 70's, "Contact" (film treatment in 1979, book in 1985, and movie in 1997) featuring a highly advanced extraterrestrial race who can appear to us in any form they want.  I'm sure there were many other writers who considered that a civilization advanced enough to cross millions of light years of space, might be advanced enough to learn how to cloak.  I certainly pondered that idea as a kid.  

No doubt, these guys are a bright bunch.  But not necessarily seeing the forest for the trees.  Take SETI, for example.

We tend to assign attributes of our own civilization and our own values to other potential civilizations.  But there is really no reason to assume that once life forms on a particular planet that it will evolve into a life form that is eager to communicate.  One could argue that the intelligence of dolphins, elephants, and humans are roughly equivalent (turn the clock back 50,000 years and look at what we assume about the behavior of each species; is there much difference?)  We don’t see dolphins building SETI dishes.  Using Drake's own equation for counting the number of ET civilizations that we might be able to communicate with, we need to consider the duration of a civilization communicating with electromagnetic radiation in the radio spectrum.  One can make the assumption that it might be similar to ours and in the range of 50-100 years.  But this is a big assumption.  Maybe ET modulates magnetic fields, or seismic waves, maybe they got fully wired for broadband internet before discovering radio wave propagation, maybe they communicate via telepathy, or entanglement, or some form of communication that is completely unknown to us.  Expecting them to have a period of radio wave technology that just happens to overlap ours is probably quite unlikely.  When I made reasonable assumptions for the factors in the Drake Equation in my book "The Universe - Solved!", I got the result of .08 overlapping radio wave civilizations per galaxy, making it unlikely that SETI will find anything before funding dries up.

On the other hand, modifying the Drake Equation to estimate the likelihood of ET visitation, I came to the following conclusion: If 50% of intelligent life forms can make it to Type III status, there should be thousands of migrating/colonizing/traveling species in our neighborhood.  On the other hand, would they even care about us?  When we take a walk through a field, do we attempt to communicate with the ants in an anthill?  If the field is ready to be leveled in order to make room for a housing development, do we attempt to save the ants?  No.  Why not?  Because they are so far beneath our intellect level or our perceived level of net worth, that such endeavors are simply not worth our time.  Now imagine what a Type II or III civilization might be like.  Consider how far we have progressed (some might say, regressed) as a society since the hunter/gatherer stage of human evolution 10,000 years ago.  Further, consider that we are accelerating in this progression exponentially.  So, for all practical purposes, it is impossible to even imagine where we might be in 10,000 years.  Telepathic communication, control of time and space, simultaneous access to parallel universes, full merge with AI?  Some futurists predict these things in hundreds of years, not 10,000.  Furthermore, since 100 million years represents less than 1% of the lifetime of our galaxy, it is not unrealistic to assume that Type III civilizations may be 100’s of millions of years advanced compared to our own society.  Given the foregoing discussion, it is easy to make an argument that it is highly unlikely that ETs are zipping about in our atmosphere in vehicles that appear to be no more than 50 years ahead of our technology (they supposedly crash, after all).  The only possible “True ET” explanation is that extremely advanced species either intentionally appear in a form that makes us realize that they are here (not unlike the father figure in the Carl Sagan movie “Contact”) or they don't appear to us at all.  The above section was taken from my book and written in 2007.

Lord Martin Rees, you should have saved yourself the expense of a conference and picked up a copy of "Contact" and "The Universe - Solved!"

Tags: astronomy, cosmology, extraterrestrial, et, alien, kardashev, ufo, disclosure, frank drake, drake equation, carl sagan, contact
Categories: Cosmology | General | Philosophy | Science

This one felt really important during the height of the cold war.

All H-Bombs have an A-Bomb at their core.  The A-Bomb is needed to generated the million of degree temperature to begin the fusion reaction in the H-Bomb fuel.  So, all nukes, therefore, have at their core, a hunk of fissionable material, generally Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239.  U-235, for example, works well as a nuclear fission fuel because when the nucleus absorbs a neutron, it becomes unstable and splits into two smaller nuclei (e.g. Barium and Krypton), releasing more neutrons which then generate more reactions.  A critical mass of fissionable material will explode because the number of neutrons needed to maintain the reaction is exceeded by the number generated.  But, U-235 can also safely absorb a neutron and not undergo fission, transmuting in non-fissionable U-236 before further decay.  But if some process (for example, creating the perfect neutron energy) were to be discovered that caused absorption rather than fission, the core of the nuke could be neutralized.

So, my thought was to blanket the earth with a "rain" of the right particles to neutralize all nuke cores, regardless of where they are buried or hidden, thereby ending all fear of nuclear strikes.

My naivete may have been to think that we could generate enough particles at high enough density to neutralize a nuke core at any given point on the earth without having that particle beam have an adverse effect on plant and animal life.

So where are we today?  Actually, there are a number of nuclear remediation technologies (for example see Gary Vesperman's "Comparison of My List of 27 Methods of Neutralizing or Disposing of Radioactive Waste with PACE’s 9 Methods") that can clean up cores of nukes or fissionable material in general.  None can be accomplished on the "earth blanketing" scale that I envisioned.  However, maybe nanotech can come to the rescue.  Imagine a healthy swarm of nanobots, all carrying the materials needed for a nuclear remediation technique, such as RIPPLE Fission, and instructed to seek out all U-235 and P-239 and unleash the neutralization technique.  

Time frame?  I'm thinking...

2040

Tags: nuclear remediation, nukes, nanotech, fission
Categories: Future Tech | General | Nanotech

When I was a geeky teenager, I remember dreaming up these wild inventions that I though could revolutionize the world in some way.  Since that was 30 years ago, I thought it might be kind of fun to take stock of the likelihood of these ideas it today's time.  Please try not to laugh.  Here was idea #1 - The Invisible Cloaking Device...

My thought was this - how cool would it be to be somewhere and put on a jacket and just become invisible.  Of course, the back pages of Popular Mechanics always had see-through glasses but of course, they were a gaff.  But I wondered if the cloaking concept could really work.  I didn't see why not.  The way I figured it, if they could make transistors that were pretty much microscopic, and LED's that were based on transistors, why not little cameras that were just as small?  All you had to do is put zillions of these cameras all over your cloak as well as zillions of LEDs.  But the LEDs had to be able to generate any color of light.  And each point of the cloak would have many cameras pointing in each direction, the signals of which were collected at a central computer.  The computer would figure out what part of the cloak was at the exact opposite position for each camera and each direction of view.  And so, that signal would get routed to the LED so as to generate the image that was the same as if you were looking through the cloak.  An engineering nightmare to be sure, especially in determining the position of every point of the coat. 

 

So imagine how excited I was in 2006 when I first heard of experiments being done with cloaking devices.  Unfortunately, however, the technology is still woefully weak.  As shown in the figure below, you have to put a camera directly behind the subject and a combiner device between the viewer and the subject and it only works in one direction.  So, nobody is going to get fooled any time soon.

But still, the resulting effect is kind of cool.  See below...

So when will we have true invisibility?  I have seen projections of 10-20 years for single color with a cloak of a well-defined shape.  "Sometime this century" for a Harry Potter type invisible cloak.  I think that nanotech will facilitate the process by enabling microscopic devices that can image in all directions and are self aware of their position.  So, I say...

2030

Tags: invisible, cloaking, invisibility
Categories: Future Tech | General

I was reading an article the other day about a new theory on the reason that we sleep.  A UCLA researcher suggests that rather than provide some vital biological function, it appears that sleep evolved to conserve energy and "keep us out of trouble."  So it got me thinking about all of the other theories that I have read over the years - it helps restore energy levels, it strengthens the immune system, it repairs tissues and cells, it was an evolutionary development to avoid noctural predators.  And the list goes on, with no end of confusion and no apparent scientific consensus.

I wondered, what would be the purpose of sleep in a programmed reality?

And I thought of a possibility.  In multiplayer online games, a great deal of the logic behind the game resides in the client that sits on your PC.  The storage of the overall architecture of the game, each players attributes (to avoid hacking), etc., are on the server.  So what if our brain is analgous to such a client?  Doesn't the client need to be upgraded periodically?  Ever notice how most PCs and Macs do automatic upgrades to various client programs upon reset, or when you attempt to open the program after it has been closed?  Notice that these upgrades aren't done while you are playing or running the program?  The reason for that is to avoid any kind of software conflict.  It is far safer, and in most cases, essential, to do upgrades while the program is not running.  And then the next time you fire it up - presto, there are the changes.

Maybe the purpose of sleep is to allow the programmers the opportunity to upgrade our memories, processing capabilities, or whatever, during a down time.  It might explain why sleep deprivation causes us to act a little strangely.  It's kind of like trying to run an ancient version of Word on your new Vista laptop.  

(thanks to my nutty cat, Simba, for the sleeping pose) 

Tags: sleep, programmed reality
Categories: General | Programmed Reality

This is a nod to the 30th anniversary of the release of the arcade video game Space Invaders, which came out in 1978.

Running on an Intel 8080 microprocessor at 2 MHz, it featured 64-bit characters on a 224 x 240 pixel 2-color screen.  There was, of course, was no mistaking anything in that game for reality.  One would never have nightmares about being abducted by a 64-bit Space Invader alien.  Fast forward 30 years and take a stroll through your local electronic superstore and what do you see on the screen?  Is that a football game or is it Madden NFL ’08?  Is that an Extreme Games telecast or are we looking at a PS3 or Wii version of the latest skateboarding or snowboarding game.  Is that movie featuring real actors or are they CG?  (After watching “Beowulf”, I confess that I had to ask my son, who is much more knowledgeable about such things, which parts were CG.)

Where will gaming be in the next 30 years?  For more on where that is going, feel free to check out my article "Is Our Reality just a Big Video Game". 

   
Tags: video games
Categories: Gaming | General | Programmed Reality