Best Introductory Lectures on Category Theory - The Catsters

There are 79 (!!) lectures on category theory here: http://www.scss.tcd.ie/Edsko.de.Vries/ct/catsters/linear.php

If you've done a bit of Lawvere & Schanuel on Conceptual Mathematics or Tom Leinster's lecture notes on Category Theory, then The Catsters is a very relaxing listen, except that Eugenia Cheng whispering secrets and emphasizing concepts with the lilt of her voice wake and whip your mind up a bit.

A Collector's Item

83rd Session of Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance

1. Is social evil organised with malicious intent by a group of people in power (eg, the Exchange Stabilization Fund of the US Treasury sitting inside the New York Fed since 1934) or is social evil simply disorganised incompetence (as St Augustine famously argued in his City of God)?

2. For the 83rd session of the Philosophcal Foundations of Law and Finance we will examine both theses. The ESF has recently been unearthed as the biggie committee behind the dark ops. And for a contemporary view of how to solve the whole host of disorganised structural problems, see http://www.zerohedge.com/article/what-both-sides-are-missing-debt-ceiling-debate.

3. Afterwards, we'll probably pop into the very chi-chi Artisan Bar at the Langham's on Regent Street...hang out for media personalities and very rich Africans, Arabs and Chinese.

Middle Class Anarchy

1. What is the result of Euro risk contagion and US debt politicisation? The failure of institutions which the middle class believes in. The immediacy of anxiety and doubt is compounded with normalcy bias followed closely by angry rejection and then self-piteous cries for help. As Dostoevsky showed in the Grand Inquisitor, the death of the spirit of anthropos corresponded to the Church expanding its pity for the masses which in turn enslaved them by unnatural codes of moral dependency. Since Constantine attempted to bring the secular and the divine together from 800 AD, the spirit of free thought and courage were submerged into the grand euro-ritualisation of symbolic power. These ritualisations reinforced the hierarchy of power through the discourse of discretionary mysticism. What were before humble limited abilities of the human became supernatural constructs of control (eg cults of virginity were simply a form of sacrifice and repression of the intergenerational impulse, racism another grouping which destroyed the individual by resurrecting caricaturisation in place of intelligence, and then of course, money controlled by the theodocy of the elite was perverted into instruments for the prosecution of terror, war, systematic rape and infant-genocide).

2. From the Declaration of Independence, we have known very precisely and can without any appreciable academic effort understand immediately that bad banking is the morphism from business education to war and is the main construct of control in the imagination which binds the middle class throughout the world. Money is the substratum of the stream of middle class consciousness. It feeds on the false and tragic-comic of formal desires of civilisation.

3. Talk to an anthropologist about money, about global phosphorescence on the screens, and she will tell you that such will always be (1) used to short circuit the normal physical trading pathways ("hedge arbitrage is normal amongst traders") and (2) those outside the magic chrematistic circles will treat the insiders as suspect and immoral. And how about government officials in this game? Always "weak, despotic, captured and blamed."

4. So what is THE solution to middle class anarchy? Put differently, how much would you pay to alleviate the pain?

The Big Kahuna - When Ponzi's Unravel

1. I heard the folks in DC have agreed on a $1.5 Trillion debt reduction and the US CDS spread widened to 56 basis points. Oh oh, the jig's up. The market says such measures aren't good enough. If the spread widens further tomorrow after an official announcement that the Republucans and Democrats have kissed and made up, then we are in a PERFECT STORM.

2. Once the bond market no longer believes in debt reduction legislation then we have the beginnings of the great unwind, where promised relief is simply met with violent disbelief.

3. The following are some wavelets in front of the Big Kahuna.

Thanks to zerohedge at: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/us-cds-jumps-highest-february-2010-debt-ceiling-worries

n-Financial Theology: Quantum Clouds and Financial Trading

1. Spooky action at a distance happened with the Fed buying US treasuries. Although Ben Barnanke and Blinder (1988) wrote an academic article that argued the money multiplier effect does not exist where there are external sources of funding, the same Bernanke 21 years later shreds his academic reasoning by doing exactly that which he had argued would not work. To get the economy started, just reduce the fed fund rate (ie overnight deposit rate of the primary banks) and inflate the Fed balance sheet by having the Fed buy US treasuries in open market--the so-called POMO. After $1.6 trillion ($600 billion of QE2 from November 3, 2010 to late May 2011), the open market laboratory Rats and lemmings tests show that interest rates are creeping up and banks and major corporations are simply hoarding about the same trillion plus dollar amount--which amount is probably composed of retained earnings and insanely cheap borrowed capital. See chart below:

2. Why is this a quantum mechanical event? Because in theory (besides Bernanke and Blinder 1988, see Carpenter and Demiralp 2010 at http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2010/201041/201041pap.pdf) and any common understanding of how trading works ("Gee, Bud, how does blowing up the elephant make those flowers blue on the other side of the street?" "Beats me, must be some kind of set up or magic or something.") There is simply no way the buying (and later someday selling) by the Feds of treasuries should instantaneously support the Russell 2000, S&P 500, ES, and all the other major equity indexes around the world. This has happened without any conceivable PHYSICAL explanation except that it is some kind of ENTANGLEMENT. Traders will call it positive correlation. But correlation DOES NOT explain the events which are across markets where no financial instruments exist which would allow some kind of physical coupling of markets! Is there an invisible financial instrument which links all these instruments in various markets together? Plain answer: No.

3. Because of the lack of traditional physical explanation (neither mechanics nor dynamics is sufficient here), we as mirror-neuronal n-categorical carbon based self-replicators need to find at least the lowest level isomorphism of these events, or we will throw the whole series of events into the wheely bin called "an act of God." What we assert with a positive name for that which defies our sense of unique material extension covers up our ignorance of that which must be an intensionality. Intensionality as the lineage of great philosophers have provoked through the centuries is that from which creativity comes. Modernly with a pinch of fractal inspiration, what the common conventional thinking attribute as a given unique thing is an ignorant illusion-- for those things which appear to have primary being are merely transitory vessels of various degrees of emptiness. Look at the clouds and not these words to understand! The pure potentiality of Aristotle, the Demiurge of Timean Plato, the Intelligent Oneness of Plotinus, the dependent co-origination and nirvana of Buddha, these and more are morphisms, adjunctions and natural transformations of n-.

n-Gold as Global Reserve Currency

1. Check the time of my previous blog.

2. Now check this out: