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Published: Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2005
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Volume 4, Issue Number 51
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This Week You Need To Know:
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Vice President Dick Cheney lost a decisive White House policy battle Dec. 15, when President George W. Bush staged a photo opportunity with Republican Senators John McCain (Ariz) and John Warner (Va)—two of Cheney's biggest Republican Party critics—to announce Administration capitulation to bipartisan, bicameral Congressional demands that the U.S. repudiate torture. The White House session, where it was announced that the President supported the McCain amendment banning any American violation of anti-torture conventions, came just hours after the U.S. House of Representatives, by a veto-proof 308-112 vote, passed a resolution, instructing House conferees, hammering out a final defense budget, to support the McCain language.
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Cheney ally and House Armed Services Committee chair Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif) denounced the Bush-McCain deal and said he would block it, but the message coming from the White House was clear.
Adding insult to Cheney's injury, the House resolution was sponsored by Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa), whose Nov. 17 call for a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq on a six-month timetable, triggered a national debate on a viable exit strategy. Murtha became the target of a Cheney-orchestrated smear campaign, which totally backfired on the Bush White House, and in effect, broke the Administration's nearly five-year vice-grip on the lower house. A core group of moderate Senate Republicans have already broken with the Cheney-led White House, after the failed "nuclear option" showdown in May.
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This Week in History
Every year during his Presidency, Franklin Roosevelt sent a Christmas Eve greeting to the American people. In his first year as President, the message was delivered from around the national Christmas tree, as the nation began to defeat the pessimism and suffering that had stemmed from the Great Depression. That year of 1933 had seen a whirlwind of legislation designed to get people working, and to set the wheels of industry and agriculture turning again. For the first time in many years, Americans could see that they had a President who would fight for them.
Roosevelt's message that year was buoyant, for the grey, drawn faces he had seen during his 1932 campaign were now beginning to smile a little and there was hope in the air. The President began by saying, "We in the nation's capital are gathered around this symbolic tree celebrating the coming of Christmas; in spirit we join with millions of others, men and women and children, throughout our own land and in other countries and continents, in happy and reverent observance of the spirit of Christmas.
"For me and for my family it is the happiest of Christmases.
"To the many thousands of you who have thought of me and have sent me greetings, and I hope all of you are hearing my voice, I want to tell you how profoundly grateful I am. If it were within my power so to do, I would personally thank each and every one of you for your remembrance of me, but there are so many thousands of you that that happy task is impossible.
"Even more greatly, my happiness springs from the deep conviction that this year marks a greater national understanding of the significance in our modern lives of the teachings of Him whose birth we celebrate. To more and more of us the words 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself' have taken on a meaning that is showing itself and proving itself in our purposes and daily lives.
"May the practice of that high ideal grow in us all in the year to come.
"I give you and send you one and all, old and young, a Merry Christmas and a truly Happy New Year.
"And so, for now and for always, "God bless us, every one."
Eleven years later, America had come out of the Great Depression and had transformed herself into an industrial marvel. But the nation was also fighting a massive world war against fascism in every part of the globe, and President Roosevelt's tone during his last Christmas Eve broadcast was more thoughtful, yet perfectly consistent in outlook with his 1933 address. During 1944, he had set into motion many of the plans and projects which would create modern America. The Bretton Woods monetary system, the United Nations Organization, the G.I. Bill of Rights, and the framework for expanded scientific and technological research, were all in various stages of preparation by the time of Roosevelt's Christmas Eve broadcast from his home at Hyde Park.
This time, Roosevelt began by saying, "It is not easy to say 'Merry Christmas' to you, my fellow Americans, in this time of destructive war. Nor can I say 'Merry Christmas' lightly tonight to our armed forces at their battle stations all over the world—or to our allies who fight by their side.
"Here, at home, we will celebrate this Christmas Day in our traditional American way—because of its deep spiritual meaning to us; because the teachings of Christ are fundamental in our lives; and because we want our youngest generation to grow up knowing the significance of this tradition and the story of the coming of the immortal Prince of Peace and Good Will. But, in perhaps every home in the United States, sad and anxious thoughts will be continually with the millions of our loved ones who are suffering hardships and misery, and who are risking their very lives to preserve for us and for all mankind the fruits of His teachings and the foundations of civilization itself.
"The Christmas spirit lives tonight in the bitter cold of the front lines in Europe and in the heat of the jungles and swamps of Burma and the Pacific islands. Even the roar of our bombers and fighters in the air and the guns of our ships at sea will not drown out the messages of Christmas which come to the hearts of our fighting men. The thoughts of these men tonight will turn to us here at home around our Christmas trees, surrounded by our children and grandchildren and their Christmas stockings and gifts—just as our own thoughts go out to them, tonight and every night, in their distant places.
"We all know how anxious they are to be home with us, and they know how anxious we are to have them—and how determined every one of us is to make their day of home-coming as early as possible. And—above all—they know the determination of all right-thinking people and nations, that Christmases such as those that we have known in these years of world tragedy shall not come again to beset the souls of the children of God.
"This generation has passed through many recent years of deep darkness, watching the spread of the poison of Hitlerism and Fascism in Europe—the growth of imperialism and militarism in Japan—and the final clash of war all over the world. Then came the dark days of the fall of France, and the ruthless bombing of England, and the desperate battle of the Atlantic, and of Pearl Harbor and Corregidor and Singapore.
"Since then, the prayers of good men and women and children the world over have been answered. The tide of battle has turned, slowly but inexorably, against those who sought to destroy civilization.
"On this Christmas day, we cannot yet say when our victory will come. Our enemies still fight fanatically. They still have reserves of men and military power. But, they themselves know that they and their evil works are doomed. We may hasten the day of their doom if we here at home continue to do our full share.
"And we pray that that day may come soon. We pray that until then, God will protect our gallant men and women in the uniforms of the United Nations—that He will receive into His infinite grace those who make their supreme sacrifice in the cause of righteousness, in the cause of love of Him and His teachings.
"We pray that with victory will come a new day of peace on earth in which all the nations of the Earth will join together for all time. That is the spirit of Christmas, the holy day. May that spirit live and grow throughout the world in all the years to come."
Full article on separate page...
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Special From LaRouche
Lyndon LaRouche released the following open letter on Dec. 13, 2005 in response to an op-ed in the Washington Post by Felix Rohatyn and Warren Rudman.
The tale was told more or less as follows.
During one of those occasional silly seasons which the French call revolutions, a revolting pair of academics were sipping beverages in a favorite café, while successive clusters of revolutionaries raced past the café on the street outside. Suddenly, one of the pair in the café stood upright, grabbing his hat, scarf, and coat, exclaiming: "That is my revolution which just passed; I must go and lead it!"
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Latest From LaRouche
The LaRouche Show host Harley Schlanger welcomed Lyndon LaRouche as his guest on Dec. 17, along with LaRouche Youth Movement panelists Riana St. Classis, Cody Jones, and Jason Ross.
This has been an especially bad week for Vice President Dick Cheney. And that's good news for our nation and the world. The Vice President in charge of torture, and now apparently, domestic spying, suffered a one-two punch this week, as his effort to make torture part of U.S. policy was defeated decisively by a bipartisan alliance in the Congress. Then, the very next day, yesterday, his drive to extend the Patriot Act, under which domestic spying has been revived, was defeated—and, again, by a bipartisan coalition...
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The Principle of Power
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
November 25, 2005
The special circumstances presented to us by the presently onrushing, global breakdowncrisis of this world monetary-financial system, require that we quickly replace what are now clearly the hopelessly failed practices which had been lately taught as 'economics' in our universities, governments, and comparable places. Instead of those currently failed ideas, we must adopt a notion of economy whose standard is functionally consistent with the crucial difference, the principle of creative reason, which is the only quality of action which actually sets man apart from Wolfgang Köhler's ape.
The pedagogical boxes in this article were written by members of the LaRouche Youth Movement (and honorary LYM member Bruce Director). In commissioning the work, LaRouche advised that 'the pedagogical presentation represented by that combination of efforts will have the net outcome of presenting the subject-material in the mode of a Socratic dialogue. 'The general rule is: 'Be ecstatic, provided you do not sail without sextant, compass, and, above all else, a well-aimed rudder.' Albatrosses will not be supplied for this journey.'
- BOX 1: Three Species of Number
Let's play a game! One player will geometrically construct two lengths by whatever means he chooses. Can the other player always determine how the lengths were created? In fact, can he ever? Maybe this is not a game worth playing!
- BOX 2: Constructing Volumes
The difference between a real economy and the fantasy of a financial analyst is construction. Construction tests the viability of those ideas the mind thinks best conceived: Are they really of legitimate parentage, or did an adulterer slip in when your guard was down, and adulterate the whole affair?
- BOX 3: The Torus and the Sphere
The sequence that represents the volumes of those cubes that a person can build with unit cubes is 1, 8, 27, 64, etc. In the 4th Century B.C., Plato challenged his collaborators to solve an old problem: Build a cube of volume 2. In other words, construct two cubes, one of which can contain exactly twice the amount of material as the other. This means we must find an intermediate cube, not in the sequence of cubes which are generated by unit cubes.
- BOX 4: Cardan and Complex Roots
Archytus performed a Promethean act, when he discovered a Sphaerics-guided solution to the life-and-death paradox of doubling the cube. For Archytus, that solution lies not in the visible domain of the cube itself, but belongs to a higher domain, where human creativity dances with universal principles, what Gauss has since called the complex domain. From that time to the present, repeated acts of contempt have been perpetrated against Archytus, by those heirs of the legacy of Aristotle and Euclid, who, on behalf of their oligarchical masters, wish to rob man of his fire, and replace it with soulless analytic formulas.
- BOX 5: Fermat's Principle
What the reason was for the change in light's direction when passing from one medium to another was a major fight in the 17th Century, and it must become so, again, today. Fermat's principle that light's action is determined by the principle of quickest time, was a political statement, a clear attack on the prevalent empiricist thinking, and a call back to the method of Greek knowledge.
- BOX 6: Kästner's Argument for Anti-Euclidean Geometry
'If two straight lines, in the same plane, are perpendicular to a third line, then they never intersect. This conclusion flows from the clear concept of straight line: for, on one side of the third line everything is identical to the other side, and so the two lines would have to intersect on the other side also, if they intersect on this side. But they cannot intersect twice. . . . 'However, when only one of the two lines is perpendicular to the third, and the other does not form a right angle, then do they intersect? And on which side of the third line? . . . 'Why should something necessarily occur with an oblique straight line, which does not have to occur, when one replaces it with a curved line? . . . Thus, the difficulty concerns the distinction between curved and straight lines...
- BOX 7: Gauss, Bolyai, and Anti-Euclidean Geometry
'I would also note that I have in the last days received a small paper from Hungary on Non-Euclidean geometry, wherein I find reflected all of my own ideas and results, developed with great elegance—although for someone to whom the subject is unknown, in a form somewhat hard to follow, because of the density. The author is a very young Austrian officer, the son of a friend of my youth, with whom I discussed this theme very much in 1798, although then my ideas were much further from the development and maturity, that they have attained through this young man's own reflection. I hold this young geometer v. Bolyai for a genius of the first order.' —Gauss to Gerling, Göttingen, Feb. 14, 1832
- BOX 8: Hypergeometry
Gauss and his student Riemann insisted that the physical universe must be characterized by an anti-Euclidean hypergeometry. Such notions of hypergeometry cannot be directly visualized; nevertheless, when the higher functions associated with physical action, such as elliptical and Abelian functions, are represented in the complex domain, the essential physical-geometrical characteristics of these hypergeometries become clear....
- BOX 9: What Galileo Avoided
In 1609, Kepler published the New Astronomy, a revolutionary work that for the first time used celestial physics as the basis for the ordering of the Solar System. Up to this point, since the hoax of Ptolemy's geocentric model, all astronomy was based on the Aristotelian idea that cause (i.e., Truth) was unknowable. The only thing that could be attained, according to Aristotle, at best was 'mathematical' approximations of what you see. This is what later became known as empiricism.
- BOX 10: Kepler's Approach
'Anyone who shows me my error and points the way will be for me the great Apollonius.' —Johannes Kepler, Astronomia Nova Kepler's anti-Euclidean approach to astrophysics dealt not with the motions of the heavenly bodies, but with the power that caused their motion. Shapes, figures, forms, and curves—none of these were adequate to express a principle that caused motion. Kepler dispenses with the empiricist approach of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe in the first section of his Astronomia Nova, demonstrating that while their three systems appear to differ, they are all geometrically equivalent, and therefore, all wrong. For how can figure cause itself?
- BOX 11: Leibniz vs. Descartes
Following in the footsteps of the heroic accomplishments of Kepler, who poetically described the motion of the planets as 'at once so well hidden and so admirable,' the ongoing scientific debate of the 17th Century became centered around the elusive concept of motion, and the true science necessary to comprehend such physical change.
- BOX 12: Zorzi's Venetian Attack On Renaissance Science
Were Francesco Zorzi (a.k.a. Giorgi) alive today, he might be described (as some Republicans have recently described their party's Vice President) as 'a nefarious bastard.' Zorzi, unfortunately, did have parents. He came from a very old family that was among the top ten ruling families in Venice. Zorzi's political role and his method of thinking should be seen from the standpoint of the historic significance of the institutions he represented.
- BOX 13: How Cubic Roots Are Defined Algebraically
From the Greek studies of the line, square, and cube came an understanding of simply, doubly, and triply extended self-similar action. For example, the triply extended action of a cube necessitates two means between the extremes. This gives an idea of cubic roots.
- BOX 14: Gauss's Geometrical Approach to Algebra
As Gauss devastatingly exposes in his 1799 doctoral dissertation, the approach to algebra as being ontologically arithmetic fails to explain itself: Algebra fails, internally, to prove what became known as the fundamental theorem of algebra.
- BOX 15: Doubling the Square, The Cube, and Cubic Roots
In these investigations of doubling the square, doubling the cube, and other challenges LaRouche has laid out, we find we must make a lot of constructions. If the faithful reader has not chickened out, and has begun the process of fighting with these problems, he has run into two things. First, a certain amount of frustration, a 'fire in the butt,' that provokes those industrious souls to do more work. Second, a sense that the investigation isn't really about doubling the square or doubling the cube, after all.
- BOX 16: Eratosthenes' Sieve
'First of all, though they had eyes to see, they saw to no avail; they had ears, but they did not understand; but, just as shapes in dreams, throughout their length of days, without purpose they wrought all things in confusion. They had neither knowledge of houses built of bricks and turned to face the sun nor yet of work in wood; but dwelt beneath the ground like swarming ants, in sunless caves. They had no sign either of winter or of flowery spring or of fruitful summer, on which they could depend but managed everything without judgment, until I taught them to discern the risings of the stars and their settings, which are difficult to distinguish. Yes, and numbers, too, chiefest of sciences, I invented for them, and the combining of letters, creative mother of the Muses' arts with which to hold all things in memory. . . .'
—Prometheus, speaking in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound
- BOX 17: Euler Misses the Point
'The monad . . . is nothing else than a simple substance, which goes to make up composites; by simple, we mean without parts. Now, where there are no constituent parts, there is possible neither extension, nor form, nor divisibility. These monads are the true atoms of nature, and, in fact, the elements of things.'
—Gottfried Leibniz, The Monadology
- BOX 18: Einstein-Born Dispute
The 2,500-year-old fight between the method of the science of Sphaerics and the Aristotelean fraud represented by Euclidean geometry, is reflected during the 20th Century in the fight between Albert Einstein, Max Planck et al., and the culturally pessimistic irrationalism typified by Niels Bohr's so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum phenomena.
- BOX 19: The Catenary
'The resourcefulness of this curve is only equal to the simplicity of its construction, which makes it the primary one among all the transcendental curves.'
—G.W. Leibniz, On the Catenary Curve, 1691
Leibniz, knowing the order of the universe to be developing in accordance with perfection, by which the simplicity of its means carries out the richest accomplishments, sought to bring the state of mankind into coherence with the discoverable reality of such a universe.
- THE ANIMATIONS in this section can be viewed at www.larouchepac.com
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LaRouche: `The Immortality of Martin Luther King'
Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
speaks to the Martin Luther King Day Prayer Breakfast in Talladega County, Alabama on Jan. 19, 2004
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