Meeting Report - Civilization: The West and the Rest

[johnkarls]

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Usually no meeting report is prepared unless we are bombarded by inquiries about what happened.

[Indeed, our most-recent meeting report had been for our Feb 2019 meeting on “Hunger in America” 11 months ago – implying that meeting reports are less frequent than 10%.]

HOWEVER, a tidal-wave of inquiries has been received about our Jan 13 meeting.

Accordingly, following past practice Yours Truly has prepared the following report from his notes.

And each participant of the Jan 13 meeting is invited to post any additions/corrections s/he deems appropriate.


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Significant Background Matters – The 2020 Election and the 1/13/2021 Impeachment

It would appear that the overwhelming proportion of inquiries was prompted by curiosity about the role, if any, played in our meeting by the 2020 Election and the 1/13/2021 Impeachment.

After all, “How To Secure American Elections in the Wake of the 2020 Election” was posted in Sec. 3 of www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org entitled “Possible Topics for Future Meetings” and it had attracted 4 so-called “replies” and 476 “views” before our 1/13/2021 meeting. The proposal and “replies” are available at viewtopic.php?f=150&t=2006&sid=b6ae3e0a ... 287ae1fdcd.

In addition, we currently have TWO “Working Groups” underway, as described in Sec. 8 of www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org – one on the “Iran Nuclear Deal (aka JCPOA)” and the other on “Speaker Pelosi’s Proposed Parliamentary (vs. Presidential) Form of Government.”

The second on Speaker Pelosi’s Parliamentary Form of Government currently comprises 3 postings in Sec. 8 of www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org –

(1) The first entitled “Pelosi’s Parliamentary Form of Government” and comprising 7 so-called “replies” documents how this subject began life as a “Possible Topic for Future Meetings” on 10/10/2020 and graduated to a “Call To Action Invitation To Join Our Working Group” sent to all of our then-189 members on 11/28/2020. This posting including “replies” is available at viewtopic.php?f=619&t=2010&sid=b6ae3e0a ... 287ae1fdcd.

(2) The second entitled “Pelosi’s Parliamentary Form of Government – 117th Congress” is a 1/9/2021 e-mail to our Working Group Members concerning Speaker Pelosi’s 1/8/2021 virtual meeting with her Democrat Caucus during which she reported that she had instructed the House Rules Committee to be prepared to move forward immediately with either (A) Rep. Jamie Raskin’s 25th Amendment Bill, and/or (B) another impeachment. This posting is available at viewtopic.php?f=619&t=2013&sid=b6ae3e0a ... 287ae1fdcd.

(3) The third entitled “Pelosi’s Aim To Prevent Trump From Being Elected in 2024 is a 1/12/2021 exchange of e-mails with one of our Working Group Members concerning misleading press reports regarding whether another Impeachment, this time resulting in Conviction, would prevent President Trump from being elected President again in 2024. This posting is available at viewtopic.php?f=619&t=2014&sid=b6ae3e0a ... 287ae1fdcd.


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Summary of Our Jan 13 Meeting

The first order of business is always to vote on the topic for the next meeting.

By way of background, there is no discussion of proposed topics because many years ago, such discussions often consumed almost an hour. So proposed topics are required to be posted in Sec. 3 of www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org at least 24 hours in advance and each participant is expected to vote immediately at the opening gavel.

Also by way of background, we have a run-off between the two top vote getters if neither has achieved a majority on the first round. And Yours Truly never votes except to break ties.

Although not disclosed at the meeting (since no discussion of topics is permitted), Yours Truly would have voted, if there had been a tie, for “How To Secure American Elections in the Wake of the 2020 Election” described above.

However, “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress” by Harvard Prof. Steven Pinker won the vote.


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Our Jan 13 Focus Book and The 2020 Election/Impeachment

There was still scope for the 2020 Election/Impeachment to creep into the discussion of Prof. Niall Feguson’s “Civilization: The West and the Rest.”

And the 2020 Election/Impeachment did in several tangential ways.

As usual, our discussion for the first 35 minutes comprised comments on specific portions of “Civilization” chapter-by-chapter for reasons explained in the Suggested Discussion Outline available at viewtopic.php?f=620&t=2012&sid=b6ae3e0a ... 287ae1fdcd.

At that point, Yours Truly made an executive decision to depart from the Suggested Discussion Outline, since “Civilization” is an analysis of why historical civilizations have failed, to ask each participant for her/his opinion on the most important reason why our civilization (whether American or international) might fail.

By way of background, the two Short Quizzes which were reflected in the Suggested Discussion Outline featured Yours Truly’s opinion that the greatest threat to our civilization is the development/invention of weapons by a modern-day Stalin, Hitler or Chairman Mao that would make all existing weapons obsolete.

And sure enough, none of the other participants thought this was the most important reason why our civilization might fail.

One might wonder why I didn’t ask each participant for a “ranked vote” for their first several reasons why our civilization might fail.

After all, the number of meeting participants exceeded our minimum for adopting one of our so-called “Six Degrees of Separation” E-mail Campaigns if there had been no more than one dissent for a particular proposal.

HOWEVER, requesting each participant’s most-important reason why civilization might fail did winnow the list of zillions of possible reasons to, at least arguably, the most important – and the remaining 85 minutes of our meeting were consumed by discussing the 4 reasons that were put on the table. Though trying to handle 4 in 85 minutes did not, by a long shot, permit enough discussion of any of the four to garner a sufficient consensus to authorize an E-mail campaign.

[The 4 reasons are numbered in the following discussion ONLY FOR EASE OF IDENTIFICATION AND DO NOT NECESSARILY CONNOTE THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE PLACED ON ANY OF THEM BY THE GROUP AS A WHOLE.]

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Reason No. 1 – Prof. Niall Ferguson’s Thesis That “The West Just Doesn’t Have It Anymore”

There was considerable support for the idea that “The West Just Doesn’t Have It Anymore” even if it is only arguable that this was Prof. Ferguson’s thesis.

In addition, the supporters of this idea argued that consideration of any other reason why civilization might fail should be outside the scope of our discussion which was supposed to focus on Prof. Ferguson’s book.

However, the majority of participants were persuaded by Yours Truly’s argument that Prof. Ferguson actually had a much broader focus, viz. why civilizations fail.

And it should NOT be “heresy” for us to evaluate whether Prof. Ferguson, despite his impressive recital of zillions of historical facts, had reached the wrong conclusion.


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Reason No. 2 – Global Warming (aka Climate Change)

This reason why a civilization might fail enjoyed considerable heart-felt support from at least some of the participants.

We have focused on Global Warming per se many times, perhaps most intensively during a two-month period when we focused on Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” for our 1/13/2016 meeting and Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate” for our 2/17/2016 meeting.

It was noted once more that Naomi Klein “turned a blind eye” to nuclear power with a short confession that she had not focused on it at all and was leaving it to nuclear proponents to make their case.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s book was much more impressive because it presented 13 chapters of examples illustrating how the earth is in the middle of its Sixth Extinction in the last 500 million years in which as many as 50% of the world’s species have become extinct and this extinction is caused almost wholly by human activity.

When we were focusing on Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Sixth Extinction,” Yours Truly probed for whether there is a highly-persuasive argument for combating Global Warming.

Specifically, whether it isn’t true that the only reason why certain species do not overrun the earth is that each species has a natural enemy that keeps it in check.

With the result that if the world were ever again (as of 2016) faced with a pandemic, the quickest way to develop a vaccine would be to ascertain what species had been keeping in check the species causing the new pandemic, to ascertain what it is about the “protective” species that controlled the “offending” species, and then to develop a vaccine based on whatever the “protective” species possessed that controlled the “offending” species.

I was immediately told that my idea was idiotic!!!

Two of the participants at that meeting were the University of Utah’s Radiology Research Professor and the retired Chief Medical Officer of the U.S. Army’s Medical Center at Landstuhl Germany where all serious U.S. military casualties in the Middle East are taken. [Like so many of our local members, the doctor had retired to ski Utah.]

Both participants ganged up on me with the information that my supposition of how vaccines are developed is hopelessly ignorant!!!

That the way pharmaceutical companies develop vaccines is to go down the list of existing treatments to ascertain how effective they might be in combating the species causing the new emergency!!!

But back to Naomi Klein.

Her refusal to spend any time examining nuclear as a solution to global warming is criminal!!!

Global warming activists generally support solar and wind as the clean energy sources to solve the problem.

First, solar and wind do NOT solve the problem, but merely slow the rate of growth of the problem.

Second, neither has ever been economic and both require governmental subsidies.

That is why every time we have had a meeting that focuses on Global Warming and/or a particular solution to Global Warming, I have always asked for a show of hands by anyone who favors invading other countries to force them to adopt uneconomic energy sources thereby reducing the standard-of-living of their citizens – for example, invading China to prevent it from bringing on stream a new monster-size coal-fired electric-generation plant every week.

In all of our meetings over our 15 years of existence, there has NOT been even one participant who raised her/his hand!!!

This problem was “solved” in the Paris Climate Accord by requiring the U.S. to restrict its economy immediately while permitting the world’s two largest carbon polluters, China and India, to do nothing until 2030.

BTW, the only clean energy source other than nuclear that is price-competitive with coal and oil/gas is hydro, but the potential supply of hydro is extremely limited compared to the need.

So is it any wonder that even Bill Gates has been championing nuclear energy as the only clean-energy source that can solve Global Warming???

Though Bill Gates is a “Johnny Come Lately” to the issue. We have been championing nuclear energy as the solution to Global Warming since our 10/10/2012 meeting 8.5 years ago.

Moreover, Bill Gates is championing uranium fission and we have been championing thorium fission.

In addition to thorium reactors being much cleaner than uranium (99 times the “burn up” rate of uranium meaning little radioactive waste and the ability to simultaneously burn up spent uranium fuel rods from conventional nuclear plants) and thorium being much more plentiful than uranium (virtually all of India’s “sand” beaches comprise thorium -- one child’s pail full of such “sand” contains more than enough energy for one human being’s entire lifetime, including both air and surface transportation among all other energy needs) –

among thorium’s many other advantages is that it is INCAPABLE OF EXPLODING and thorium’s uselessness in creating bombs is what prompted President Nixon, in the wake of the successful 18-month continuous demonstration project of a thorium-fueled nuclear reactor at the U.S. National Nuclear-Research Laboratory at Oak Ridge TN in the 1960’s, to cause the U.S. to turn away from thorium and toward uranium and plutonium.

More information is available in the letters that our Thorium Fission Working Group sent to each of the Moderators of the first five 2019 Democrat Candidate Debates which can be downloaded at viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1781&sid=b6ae3e0a7 ... 287ae1fdcd.

For the super-curious, the moderators for all of the Democrat debates (not just the first five) STEADFASTLY REFUSED to raise the issue of Global Warming (much less thorium or nuclear as a possible solution).

And we stopped importuning the Debate Moderators after the 11/20/2019 debate because Presidential Candidate Elizabeth Warren had just issued a DEFAMATORY STATEMENT (defamatory toward Medicare-For-All that it would cost the U.S. Government $52 TRillion over 10 years RATHER THAN SAVING IT MONEY).

By way of background, we had mounted one of our so-called “Six Degrees of Separation” E-mail Campaigns on 7/12/2017 to Sen. John McCain a mere 16 days before his iconic “Thumb Down” vote on repealing Obamacare (causing repeal to fail by one vote), proving that Medicare-For-All would save the U.S. Government $300 billion/YEAR – not just $300 billion over 10 years.

[Details of that campaign are available at viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1631&sid=9139ec959 ... 8558230694.]

Accordingly, we up-dated our study which showed that the annual savings had been reduced to $86 billion/YEAR – primarily because the “tax expenditure” for the 55.1% of the U.S. population who are covered by employer-provided healthcare had declined from a 35% corporate tax rate to 21% as a result of President Trump’s tax reductions.

[Details of the up-dated campaign are available at viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1869&sid=9139ec959 ... 8558230694.]

The results were immediate!!!

Elizabeth Warren went silent on the cost of Medicare-For-All.

And Bernie Sanders began trumpeting all of the details of our updated campaign.

Except that he couldn’t quite bring himself to say the annual savings would be $86 billion/YEAR. Perhaps because he didn’t want to alienate the healthcare industry.


*****
Reason No. 3 For Civilization to Fail – Censorship by the Big Tech Companies

This was the principal way that the 2020 Election and Impeachment crept back tangentially into our meeting discussion.

If we had had “rank voting” this subject would have enjoyed considerable support, as was evident from the discussion.

There has been enough information and analysis about this issue available elsewhere that it does not have to be repeated here (though it was repeated in the meeting discussion).

HOWEVER, several things are worth noting.

FIRST, everyone agreed that democracy was vital to a civilization not failing, and everyone agreed that CENSORSHIP makes democracy impossible.

INDEED, my sense was that if we had had more time, we could have agreed (with perhaps one dissent) on one of our “Six Degrees Of Separation” E-mail Campaigns against censorship by Big Tech.

SECOND, this topic had only been raised by one participant as his most-important reason why society might fail.

IN THIS REGARD, there is another kind of CENSORSHIP that our own group has faced on more than one occasion.

The first-time was 9/1/2018 when major e-mail providers refused to deliver our weekly e-mails to our members.

The “canary in the coal mine” was a former girl friend from my law school days whom I hadn’t seen or directly communicated with in 52 years but who had gone on to graduate from Georgetown Law School and to spend her career as the chief “in house” Washington DC lobbyist for General Motors. Like many of our members, she liked receiving our weekly e-mails and reading many of our focus books herself, even though she still has never participated in one of our meetings. On 9/1/2018 she sent an e-mail inquiring why she was no longer receiving our weekly e-mails.

Our 192 members use 32 different e-mail providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and Verizon. [The “canary in the coal mine” used/uses Verizon for her e-mail.]

Although the e-mail providers would NOT explain the reason for their refusal, it was obvious that they did NOT like our discussing “Authoritarian Rule By Our Intelligence Services” and FISA abuse – we have had four meetings that focused on various aspects of this issue.

We confronted many of them, most memorably Comcast because it was refusing to deliver our e-mails to more than a dozen of our members including George Kunath who is a former NYC partner with whom I have been having a weekly multi-hour gabfest about “everything under the sun” for 33 years and counting.

Both Comcast and Dreamhost, my e-mail provider and website host, refused to explain why Comcast was refusing to deliver to George Kunath the weekly e-mails from Reading Liberally’s e-mail hosted by Dreamhost!!!

But we “raised a stink” with all 32 e-mail providers based on the argument that they had effectively replaced the US Postal Service and it is a MAJOR LEAGUE FELONY for any letter sent via the US Postal Service to be steamed open and its contents read before the miscreant USPS worker decides whether to deliver the letter!!!

HOWEVER, the solution which was NOT offered by the 32 e-mail providers but was stumbled across by TRIAL-AND-ERROR, was to send out each e-mail individually pre-dawn on Saturdays.

NO GREAT HARDSHIP for Yours Truly, because I look forward to listening in the middle of the night once/week to one of 700-plus historic Metropolitan Opera live-broadcast recordings from their streaming service.

[Though nonetheless a small hardship because the Met’s streaming service, like its 12/year theatercasts around the world of live Sat matinee performances since 2006, is billed as “Hi Def” – when, in fact, the “Hi Definition” refers to video and the audio is the LOW FIDELITY with which the world has been plagued ever since the advent of digital audio!!! But I can’t complain too much because I have virtually every one of those Sat matinee performances from the 1960’s thru 2000 recorded on an open-reel Revox, the kind you see in movies about the CIA, which featured analog rather than digital!!! Because I am obviously too lazy in the middle of the night to dig out and play an open-reel analog recording of a Met radio broadcast rather than simply calling up the same performance from the Met’s digital library where, unlike my recordings, each is catalogued and cross-referenced in zillions of different ways including performers.]

BTW, another skirmish with the e-mail providers occurred 6/18/2019 but we “raised a stink” again and the effectiveness of our modus vivendi of sending out our weekly e-mails individually to our 192 members was restored.

Censorship by Big Tech was another topic on which we probably could have secured agreement (with at most one dissent) for one of our “Six Degrees of Separation” E-mail Campaigns if there had been sufficient time on Jan 13.

However, quite a few of the participants at our Jan 13 meeting had become Reading Liberally members during the last year or so.

As a result of which they were SHOCKED AND APPALLED over our jousts with Big Tech censorship!!!

At least they know how to bring into sharper focus this issue by voting for “EMERGENCY – Political Censorship by Major E-mail Providers” which has been listed in Section 3 of www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org and is available at viewtopic.php?f=150&t=1782&sid=b6ae3e0a ... 287ae1fdcd.

Additional information about this issue is contained in the four postings in Section 2 of www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org including the analysis of why “Authoritarian Rule by Our Intelligence Services” and FISA abuse was what precipitated their attack on us – that analysis is available in the fourth Sec. 2 posting available at viewtopic.php?f=547&t=1793&sid=b6ae3e0a ... 287ae1fdcd.


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Reason No. 4 For Civilization to Fail – the development/invention of weapons by a modern-day Stalin, Hitler or Chairman Mao that would make all existing weapons obsolete


It is a testament to my occasional lack of persuasive ability that none of our participants Jan 13 thought this was a problem!!!

Despite all the time and effort I had put into this danger in both the Short Quizzes and the Suggested Discussion Outline.

After all, Stalin killed 25 million farmers in his attempt to collectivize Soviet farms in the 1930’s, Hitler launched WW-II which killed 75-80 million human beings, and Chairman Mao killed at least 33 million people in his “Great Leap Forward” and as many as 20 million more people in his “Cultural Revolution.”

And it should be obvious that if Hitler had gotten nukes and gotten them before the U.S., the world would be a much different place today.

But I can’t be too critical of our participants Jan 13.

After all, I participated in a NYC Harvard Club webinar earlier on Jan 13 on the topic of “A New Chapter for American Foreign Policy” with Rebecca Lissner who is an Assistant Professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department of the U.S. Naval War College.

I presented the following question –

“Do you think there is any danger that a new weapon might be developed/invented that makes obsolete all current weapons, and that it would fall into the hands if a modern-day Stalin, Hitler or Chairman Mao?”

Prof. Lissner thought such a new weapon was unlikely and she then listed, though not relevant, several new types of weapons that have been described in the media.

To buttress her argument, she opined that there had only been one such weapon (at least in the last century) – nuclear.

I was frustrated with being unable to follow-up with such points as –

(1) Historically there have been several such weapons in addition to nuclear – for example, the simple bow-and-arrow that made obsolete armored knights, gun powder which made obsolete fortified towns and castles, etc., etc.

(2) Ms. Lissner’s confessed inability to conceive that such a new weapon could be developed/invented is similar to the myopia of Charles H. Duell in 1889 when, as Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, he recommended closing it on the grounds that “everything that can be invented has been invented”!!!

Meanwhile, a better opportunity has presented itself.

Former U.S. National Security Adviser to the President and Three-Star General H.R. McMaster will be speaking in a Jan 27 webinar sponsored by a different organization on the topic of “The Next Four Years: Strategic Challenges & Opportunities Facing the United States.”

That sponsoring organization requested questions to be submitted beforehand at the time of registration.

Accordingly, I have already submitted for Gen. McMaster’s consideration the same question though slightly edited to comply with that organization’s 120-character limit --

“Any danger a new weapon will be developed by a modern-day Stalin, Hitler or Mao that makes obsolete all current weapons?”

I am anticipating that Gen. McMaster will provide only a general answer, probably affirmative, but sufficiently muted to avoid creating popular anxiety by “making news.”

After all, when I was a U.S. Navy Unrestricted Line Officer 1967-1970 [Ensign > Lieutenant (j.g.) > Lieutenant], I had a top-secret security clearance with cryptographic access.

Which was necessary to stand OOD watches for any command with nuclear weapons.

Because if the launch order is received with little time to fire before being destroyed because the Washington decision makers have used so many of the minutes between enemy launch and our destruction to try to confirm the enemy attack is real and intended, you don’t have time to wake up your Commanding Officer!!!

Under U.S. Navy procedures, when you stand OOD watches, you are the Commanding Officer!!!

And talking about new-technology weapons, one of our officers was on the U.S. Navy Board of Inquiry into the loss of a nuclear sub, the USS Scorpion, on 5/22/1968 with all of its crew of 99. It followed the loss of another nuclear sub, the USS Thresher, on 4/10/1963 with all of its crew of 129. I received from a friend a news report in a local Newport RI paper that quoted a Russian defector that he had been responsible for the development of a weapon for “killing” US nuclear subs by shutting down all electrical systems (including communications) within a radius of several miles and it had been this weapon that killed Thresher and Scorpion. I showed the article to our officer and he looked shocked, but then quickly regained his composure and denied there was anything to the article. However, he requested me to give him the article. BTW, such a weapon was featured several years ago in an episode of "MI-5" (a popular TV series) in which such a weapon was being smuggled up the Thames River in a one-man submarine to the heart of London to destroy London’s economy. [BTW the episode claimed there would even be thousands of deaths immediately because of disabled heart pace makers.]

But back to Gen. McMaster, I want to see the expression on his face when he addresses the issue, if indeed he chooses to do so.

If he does, I expect a “knowing look” plus a “look of appreciation” that someone else shares some of his burdens.

Enough said!!!


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As mentioned at the outset of these notes, every participant of our Jan 13 meeting is invited to post any additions/corrections s/he deems appropriate.

Respectfully submitted,

John Karls

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PS on a different topic -

As the reader can probably tell, the reason for providing more than 10 microsoft-word pages of meeting notes is that they are intended to be so thorough that the tidal wave of inquiries can be stemmed.

However, there is an unrelated topic mentioned in these meeting notes that often produces a mini-tidal wave of its own.

In the discussion of “Reason No. 3 For Civilization to Fail – Censorship by the Big Tech Companies” and the experience of our own organization, I mentioned that we have been effectively forced by Big Tech to send out our weekly e-mails to our 192 members one-by-one.

But that doing so is not a great hardship for Yours Truly because I look forward to the opportunity once/week to listen in the dead of night to a historical Metropolitan Opera recording from their archives.

Though being a bit rueful that such recordings are LOW-FIDELITY-DIGITAL audio rather than the 30 year’s worth of my own personal reel-to-reel HIGH-FIDELITY-ANALOG recordings of the same Sat matinee performances that were originally broadcast live around the world with ANALOG!!!

The problem???

When Sony developed the world's first commercial digital recordings, they instructed their engineers to put Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on a single CD!!!

By way of background, one of Beethoven’s greatest fans was Samuel Morse who was developing his Morse Code a few years after Beethoven had composed his Fifth Symphony.

And in honor of the signature notes (dot-dot-dot-dash) that permeate the Fifth Symphony, Samuel Morse decided to make it Morse Code for the letter “V” which is the Roman Numeral for five.

Now fast forward to WW-II.

“V” also stands for victory!!!

So there was no concert performance in Nazi-Occupied Europe at any time during WW-II that did not feature Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as a passive show of defiance.

And the Nazis chose not to object because, after all, Beethoven was German.

No big mystery why Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most-popular piece of classical music in the world and why Sony chose Beethoven’s Fifth for their first digital CD.

But the Sony engineers informed management that they could not fit Beethoven’s Fifth on a single CD, at least not with the technology that existed at that time.

But Sony management was adamant!!!

The “solution” of the Sony engineers???

Again, we need a bit of background.

The reason why different instruments playing, say, High C all sound different (e.g., you would immediately recognize the difference between a trumpet, a violin, a human soprano, etc., hitting High C), IS THAT EACH IS SOUNDING A NEARLY-INFINITE NUMBER OF HARMONICS BOTH ABOVE AND BELOW THE PRIMARY PITCH.

And it is the combination of all those harmonics that make each instrument distinctive. Even an opera fan being able to recognize instantly the voice of a particular human soprano as distinguished from all of other sopranos.

The “gold standard” for analog recordings was 20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz WHICH IS THE HUMAN HEARING RANGE.

An 88-key piano, for example, features Middle C at 262 Hertz and spans 27.5 Hertz to 4,186 Hertz for its primary pitches.

Though, of course, each of its keys is sounding a nearly-infinite number of harmonics starting at 1 Hertz and ranging up to infinity.

So what did the Sony engineers do???

They lopped off all of the harmonics outside roughly one octave off the left side and one octave off the right side of a standard piano.

They claimed that human beings can’t hear anyway such low and such high pitches!!!

But that is false, ESPECIALLY FOR CLASSICAL-MUSIC LOVERS!!!

And the elimination of the high and low frequencies is why most classical music lovers will swear that digital recordings SOUND NOTHING LIKE a real performance in a concert hall!!!

They don’t know why!!! But they know it’s true!!!

Recording companies have never gone back to correct the problem!!!

And performing-arts organizations ARE CO-CONSPIRATORS!!!

After all, why would anyone pay to hear a live performance if their digital recordings are just as good???

If anyone still has questions about digital vs. analog, I think this exhausts my knowledge about that subject.

So please don’t send me any queries about either that or the meeting.

[solutions]

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---------------------------- Original Message -----------------------------
Subject: Meeting Report Confirmation
From: Solutions
Date: Fri, January 15, 2021 12:51 pm PST
To: ReadingLiberally-SaltLake@johnkarls.com
Attachment:
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Dear John,

I have just read the Jan 13 meeting report that you posted on www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org.

I can attest that it is accurate and complete.

However, I have a question.

In the section of your meeting report dealing with “Reason No. 4 For Civilization to Fail – the development/invention of weapons by a modern-day Stalin, Hitler or Chairman Mao that would make all existing weapons obsolete,” you have a massive paragraph near the end of that section dealing with the Russian weapon that killed two U.S. nuclear submarines – USS Thresher in 1963 and USS Scorpion in 1968.

A bit earlier in that section, you had mentioned that as a U.S. Naval Officer 1967-1970, you had a Top Secret Security Clearance.

Don’t you have a life-long legal obligation to keep classified information secret?

Your friend,

Solutions

PS – Why did you really provide such a long PS of your own about the difference between digital and analog audio recordings? Your PS was 21.7% the length of your meeting report.


---------------------------- Original Message -----------------------------
Subject: Re: Meeting Report Confirmation
From: ReadingLiberally-SaltLake@johnkarls.com
Date: Fri, January 15, 2021 3:12 pm MST
To: Solutions
Attachment:
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Dear Solutions,

Thank you very much for your e-mail attesting that my Jan 13 Meeting Report was accurate and complete.

Reur Q about a life-long legal obligation to maintain the secrecy of classified information, the short answer is that yes, there is a life-long legal obligation to maintain the secrecy of classified information – even after others have exposed it!!!

This is true even if you have stumbled upon classified information which you did not encounter in the line of duty because you did NOT have “A NEED TO KNOW”!!!

Most people assume that if you have a Top Secret Security Clearance, you are eligible to receive any and all Top Secret information.

NOT SO!!!

You are still required to have “A NEED TO KNOW” to obtain access to specific classified information at or below your security-clearance level.

HOWEVER, I do NOT possess any classified information about a Russian “sub killer” weapon!!!

After all, I was told by an officer on the U.S. Navy Official Board of Inquiry into the USS Scorpion tragedy that the story about a Russian “sub killer” weapon in a Newport RI newspaper WAS FALSE!!!

The “fact” that the story about a Russian “sub killer” weapon in the Newport RI newspaper was “false” relieves me of any obligation to treat the “false” story as classified information.

The additional fact that such a weapon was featured in an episode of the popular “MI-5” television series is a potential classified-information problem for the BBC if the weapon portrayed in that episode is real.

But I have no obligation to refrain from reporting that the BBC featured such a weapon in an “MI-5” episode because (A) I was officially told by the U.S. Navy that there was no such weapon, and (B) there was nothing in the “MI-5” episode to indicate the weapon was real rather than “the figment of someone’s imagination.”

Your friend,

John K.

PS – Reur Q about why my Jan 13 Meeting Report contained a PS on the difference between digital and analog audio recordings that you claimed was 21.7% of the length of the Meeting Report itself –

FIRST, the brief discussion in the Meeting Report itself about the lengths to which our organization was driven by Big Tech CENSORSHIP in order to SURVIVE was extremely worthwhile.

After all, most organizations would have been killed by such CENSORSHIP!!!

SECOND, I did NOT want anyone to think that I was especially heroic for enabling our organization to survive such Big Tech CENSORSHIP!!!

But how many organizations have a person who likes opera enough that he has tossed more than 3,000 bouquets to opera stars over more decades than I would care to admit???

Because that is the kind of fortuitous luck that an organization needs to survive Big Tech CENSORSHIP!!!