Paul is charming, kind, a devoted father, a faithful husband, a very successful businessman, and a Brit who honors his queen. He has always loved his Liverpool past.

“Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes, there beneath the blue suburban skies”

He has lived 50 years of magic – wealth, and fame, exhilarating creativity, and bittersweet pain and loss.

He still can’t read music.

What ever is the gift for songwriting and singing, Paul has it.  He does it as naturally as anyone does anything. Like a gifted athlete, he gives commanding concert performances. He sings his solo career songs, yes, but with Beatle songs – which he is careful to do as they were originally done, . . . he brings down the house. . . . still.  It is the Beatles music that carries gloriously on, ever ecstatically received.

Paul McCartney is reticent with personal feelings, and superficial in person.  He barely seems to know Paul McCartney.  ”Maybe I’m amazed” . . . . maybe?  He just never wants to get deep.

“the fool on the hill sees the sun going down, and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round.”

“Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say”.  ’Was I harking back to my mum?’ he asks himself.  Who would know?  Who would  know that his song ‘Blackbird’ was written to console african-americans after the death of Martin Luther King?

“Take these broken wings and learn to fly“.

He can’t explain his creativity – or doesn’t want to. “I’m very lucky with my voice, I have no idea how it happens“.  Songs just come to him.  He dreamed the melody for his greatest song, ‘Yesterday’, the most recorded song in history. He spent months sure that he had heard it somewhere before, trying to find out where.

Paul has this mastery of melody, how it forms and carries a song. His best songs feel already known, like they could be no other way. And the words, when read by themselves, there is just almost nothing there.

“there is an unmistakeable sadness in McCartney’s gaze and muted manner“.  John Colapinto,  The New Yorker,  June 2007

He was not able to reconcile with the  bruising John Lennon, before his death.  And there is the losses of mother and wife.  Paul has dearly loved the women in his life.

“For well you know that its a fool who plays it cool, by making the world a little colder”  - It was John Lennon who wanted this line kept in the song.

Above all the acrimony and nihilism of his times, he holds out, decent, and up beat, ever that 19 year old Beatle.

“I’m never going to believe I’m 70.  I don’t care what you say.  There’s a little cell in my brain that’s never going to believe that“, Rolling Stone, March 2012

Behind the wheel, his eyes centered on the road, he is ever wary, a taut spring. His smile is soft, his eyes rarely blink.  He says pretty much only what is necessary to say. He seems satisfied staying in the background. Somehow he has ended up half way between good people and bad.

He meets a girl from down the hall, an innocent, vulnerable mother to a young son.  He helps her out. Watching television, the boy says you can always tell who the bad guys are. Driver asks: ‘How do you know?’

The girl’s husband has been away, in prison, for what we don’t know.  He eventually comes home, and has problems he can’t handle.  He is roughed up to pay escalating demands for protection payments he may or may not have ‘purchased’ while in prison. This threatens the mother and boy. Driver decides to help get the money, in a robbery he has been asked to drive for, but things go awry.

Bad guys show up for the same money.  They kill the husband. In a sinister luxury SUV, they give chase. Driver races away. He manages to get bumper to bumper – in front of them – going very fast, backward, in control.  They think they have him, but just near the end of the road, an end they don’t see because they are looking at him, he spins around to the side, and they go on to crash.

But he gets found, and almost killed.  He acts fast, and survives.

Somehow, he knows how to deal with creeps, how you have to speak to them, how you cannot trust them, how they only respond to threat and force, how you sometimes have to kill them.

But they keep coming, like insects.  He has to stomp one to death, in front of her, in an elevator, to protect her.  He has no choice.  She watches. Maybe she thinks he is one of them. She leaves. What can he say?

They kill his friend.

He must have thought he was one of them, at one time, but with her he seems to realize he isn’t.  He is not going to go back.

He phones her:  ”I just want you to know that you and the boy are the best thing that has ever happened to me”.

Then he goes to settle things, to ensure her safety. He gives the ring leader a chance to honor an honest deal. The guy doesn’t, of course, and Driver, nearly killed,  has to do what he has to do.

He leaves the money with the body.

Acceleration seems to be a fundamental.  Acceleration of matter in vacuum space creates photons. Acceleration of spin creates magnetism. Photons and magnetism are electromagnetic radiation. Electromagnetic radiation is energy. Matter and energy are interchangeable.

Light, having the same velocity for all observers, must be something like infinite acceleration, each point of light infinitesimally brief but infinitely accelerated from the previous point, infinitely almost instantaneously reaching an asymptotic limit that is constant, and, paradoxically, . . . finite. The infinite variation, the infinite acceleration, that is light, with its  constant and finite velocity, then, becomes the essential invariant, to which all else, in relation, is variant.

As Einstein realized, acceleration is the essence of inertia, of gravity, of matter. Energy can travel at the speed of light.  Matter is that which cannot. Matter and energy are interchangeable.

Acceleration is change of change, change squared, - true change.

The Roman poet, Lucretius, in his famous poem:  On the Nature of Things, presented to the Roman world the philosophy of the pre-Socratic Greeks of 300 B. C.  These thinkers had deduced that the building blocks of reality - atoms – were infinitely small, infinite-in-number entities that repell and attract each other such as to create all things and events. And these ancient Greeks saw, long before Darwin and Einstein, that these fundamental units must have . . . swerve  - an irreducible, varying indeterminancy in their behavior so as to make for the change with variation that is necessary for the evolutionary processes that manifest all things and events, inorganic and organic. The most basic units must be, themselves, units of variation, units of change.

“If all the individual particles, in their infinite numbers, fell through the void in straight lines, pulled down by their own weight like raindrops, nothing would ever exist.  But the particles do not move lockstep in a preordained single direction.  Instead, “at absolutely unpredictable times and places they deflect slightly from their straight course, to a degree thqt could be described as no more than a shift of movement” (2.218-20 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things), Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt, pg.188.

This has been confirmed in the quantum physics of 1900 A. D.

“Even if cooled to a temperature of absolute zero, all objects will retain a fundamental jitter in their physical positions due to quantum ‘zero-point’ fluctuations.”  Painter, et. al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 033602, 2012

For Boethius, the 400 AD Roman philosopher, evil is US – we all have capacity for evil, and therefore to combat evil we must look to ourselves and cultivate our goodness. Evil is the absence of good. “We must break the ‘cycle of violence‘. This is the modern view, the enlightenment view, the christian view.

That evil is OTHER, that there is a distinct dualism of good and evil, this is the premodern view, the Manichaean view,  the view of Mani, the early 250 A.D. Persian mystic whose ideas rivaled and threatened Roman paganism, and then christianity.  Evil is a force to be opposed, to be conquered.

In Science of Evil, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen finds that evil is a disorder of empathy. We all vary in our ‘empathy quotient’. There are those with the ‘continuous, unstoppable drive to empathize‘, those with lesser empathy.  There are components of empathy – recognition and response, feeling and understanding, action and inaction. Failure to act is as significant as not feeling.  There is transient empathy erosion, from fatigue, or drugs and alcohol, or depression. There is Groupthink evil, empathy that is over-powered by enthusiasm and solidarity. Nazi gatherings were organized pageants of celebration.

Lack of empathy can be a failure to be good, but it also can be something else. There are those with. . . no empathy at all.  For them, lack of empathy can be sheer . . . .enjoyment. Serial killers relish their deceit and the knowing terror in their victim’s eyes. Stalin’s greatest joy was to go to sleep knowing that his plans for revenge were unfolding. Nazi evil was beyond efficiency. The Nazi’s precisely engineered emotional as well as physical suffering, over and above the murdering.  They practiced this with a sickening aesthetic, an almost artistic intensity.

Empathy by definition is seeing one’s self in others. Those with high empathy just aren’t likely to perceive – to “empathize” – with the lack of empathy others may have. This asymmetry of awareness empowers low empathy to have charm, and to thrive.

In Explaining Hitler, 1998, Ron Rosenbaum, in his survey of theories of Hitler, found every reason developed but that Hitler wanted to be evil and to do evil things.

The experience of consciousness is outside of normal mental categorization.

“No currently available concept of induction is applicable to it.” Thomas Nagel, philosopher.

“We are the singular of which the plural is unknown.” Erwin Schroedinger, physicist.

“I AM THAT I AM”.  God, to Moses at the burning bush.

“Most experiences are made sense of in relation to other types of experience. . . Any experience immune to all this will be a mystery to its subject. There is only one experience for which that is completely true:  phenomenal consciousness.” Natika Newton, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2001.

“What we can’t say, we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either“.  A. S. Ramsey, philosopher.

In Soul Dust, psychologist Nicolas Humphrey gives an explanation. He does a very good job. Consciousness is a sensation. Whatever sensation is, consciousness is. A reaction to stimuli is always an action. No sentience, no brain phenomenon is passive.  All mentation is behavior. Responses to the outer world get internally registered, and they become representations. These representations then also become aspects of our further experience. Conscious beings become dual processors, they process outer world experience simultaneously with inner world representations of current and past outer world experience. An ever expanding loop of internal and external responses, and responses to responses, reverberates into a self-sustaining loop of memory, thinking, and feeling. . . what we call CONSCIOUSNESS.

“Because our present experience includes at least two distinct times, it is experienced not as an instantaneous slice of time, but as a extended time, containing elements of both ‘now’ and ‘not now’, in a unified, immediate representation.”

This thickened time of consciousness, this cinema of consciousness, creates an artificially robust illusion of willful power and sense of the future. It enables us to imagine possible futures, design behavioral strategies, plan and seek goals.  This inner theatre gives us a sense of creative agency that drives us to endure.  But it is illusory.

We are all drinking the koolaid.

And there is a cost, for we can sense that we aren’t significant, we can know that we are going to die. We can try to find meaning, we can embrace spirituality, we can try to escape.  We are drawn to intoxication, to altered states. These can be enlightening, as they can highlight our normal conscious distortions, but they can also deepen our confusion, and worsen our dread. Many of us can’t manage consciousness, despair is not uncommon, suicide is not rare.

With our consciousness we transform the earth, with ever-increasing risk and reward. We are the genie out of the bottle.

In records released in 1989 by the Dallas police department, Mary Le Fontaine, a local reporter, discovered that a man had been jailed next to Oswald on November 22, 1963.  He was picked up in a sweep following the shootings, was released after Oswald was murdered, and then disappeared. In 1964, he surfaced at an FBI office in Tennesee to give “information about the murder of JFK”.  He told that while jailed near Oswald, he witnessed the police bring before Oswald a badly injured man and ask Oswald if this was the man he had seen at a recent motel meeting. At this meeting, money had changed hands, and one Jack Ruby also present. Oswald said ‘yes’.

After arrest, a note was found in Oswald’s personal notebook:

Oct Nov 1,1963

FBI agent (R1-11211)

James P. Hosty

MU 8605

1114 commerce St

Note the license number. Oswald was meeting Dallas FBI agent Hosty in his car, in the months preceding the assassination. Hosty was in charge of militant extremist groups, gun running, and domestic counterintelligence.

Following meetings with Hosty, Oswald took significant actions. After one such meeting, in March 1963, he opened a post office box, and promptly bought, via mail order, the famous Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from Klein’s Sporting Goods.  At that very time, the mail order gun business – and specifically Klein’s Sporting Goods – was under investigation by Congress. Hearings were about to begin.

Oswald spent the 1963 summer in New Orleans, working with anti-Castro groups, but also publicly posing as pro-Castro. He was exposed – on TV – as a visitor to the Soviet Union who had renounced his US Citizenship, and this served to help discredit the Castro cause. Oswald seemed willing to help this happen. Around this time, the FBI successfully raided and confiscated an anti-Castro weapons cache at Pontchartrain. There seems to have been a tip-off.

Early in November, Oswald visited the Dallas FBI office, but Hosty was not there.  Oswald left a note. After the assassination, FBI headquarters in Washington ordered this note destroyed. A few days later, in Dallas, a gun deal was foiled, again there seems to have been a tip-off.  A man was badly injured in a getaway car.

A sincere Marxist, but an FBI informant?  With his tenuous status, trying to find and keep a job, Oswald may have been willing to help the FBI, and infiltrate anti-Castro groups. He did by all accounts believe in Castro. He may have discovered an assassination plot. He may have warned the FBI.

After the motorcade passed, he left the Texas School Book Depository calmly. When he learned that the assassination went forward, he may have realized his peril.

He may have known that decoy policemen would be involved.  He killed the first policeman that tried to stop him, unconcerned about eye witnesses. He may have thought he would be safe in custody.

“I’m a patsy.“

An overwhelming intuition for Einstein was that there is an all-encompassing, intelligible, something, ‘out there’, some unified and unchanging reality behind the ever-changing particulars of everyday experience. This is what he was after, what he called the secrets of the “Old One“.

For Einstein the clues were to be found in the phenomena that are invariant, phenomena that are the same, regardless of manner of measurement, or relative position, or dynamic operation, or observer point of view.  He saw this in the speed of light, which was found to be the same to all observers, regardless of their own motion.  With this, space and time are relative, but space-time is not.  Einstein’s own great insight was that acceleration, inertia, and gravity are equivalent, and therefore, rather than a ‘force’ between two masses, gravity is inherent in all of mass and motion.  It is invariant, and so must be related to space-time, and so he derives his theory of general relativity:

Ruv- 1/2 guvR = 8πTuv

“Matter tells space-time how to curve, and curved space-time tells matter how to move.” – John Wheeler.   “an entwined dance of space, time, matter, and energy” –  Brian Greene.    Einstein, Walter Isaacson, 2008

It is really a theory of what isn’t relative. Einstein preferred that it be called the theory of invariants.

It turns out there is a brilliant mathematics of invariants.  It is called group theory. It was invented by Evariste Galois, in France, in 1730. He was refused admission to the elite Ecole Polytechnique institute of mathematics, too advanced for their examiners to understand.   He died in a duel, at age . . . . 20 .

Galois wrote his theory on a mere sixty pages of personal notes, and in a famous letter to August Chevalier just prior to his duel.

“My dear friend, In the theory of equations, I have investigated under which conditions the equations are solvable by a formula:  this has given me the opportunity to make this theory more profound, and to describe all the transformations possible on an equation even when it is not solvable by formula.”  The Equation that Couldn’t be Solved, Mario Livio, 2005

This theory is the mathematics of permutations and symmetries, which are patterns of geometry and number that remain unchanged during some defined operation. They are the invariants that mark the hidden unity and relations in disparate sets of phenomena. Imagine an unknown, multifaceted geometric object, unified, and complex, and dynamically changing.  Imagine its sides and corners are ink soaked. Next, imagine this object tumbling across a white sheet of paper.  The ink will create obscure and puzzling markings.  Group theory mathematics, when applied to these markings, will yield the clues to the configuration and dynamics of this mysterious object.

This theory may well be the most profound in all of mathematics.

Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants, . . . and on those of a 20 year old genius.

A person who finds that he is just never wrong would perhaps now and then be perplexed.  Steve Jobs would be such a person.

“We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users.  So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference in the world.  What we want to do at Apple is make computers into applicances and get them to millions of people.”  Playboy Interview, February 1985.

While the MBA’s came into Apple to focus on countering IBM, he went off to create the Macintosh. It was an astounding success. But never mind, Mr. Jobs is a difficult perfectionist and doesn’t know how to manage for profit.

“Eventually Dr. [Edwin] Land [founder of Polaroid], one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company – which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of. ”  Jobs, 1985 . . .and then . . .Apple lets him go.

Apple’s ten year lead gets ‘managed’ away.

Jobs buys Pixar. He makes Toy Story.  Apple nearly dies. Apple invites him back, as a ‘consultant’.  He brings Next, his from-the-ground-up, unix-based, virus- proof (still) computer software operating system.  After the board turns over – he will not be bit by the same dog twice – Jobs becomes CEO. Never again will he assume he doesn’t know how to manage, and never again will there be naivete’ about the intentions or actions of competitors. He moves quickly to focus Apple, totally, on quality products and the user experience.  Philanthropy is dropped, middle management is cleared, HR is minimized, finance is made secondary, general management is eliminated (managers at Apple are always managers of something), responsibility is clearly defined, (every role has a DRI – directly responsible individual), decisions radiate to and from the top, profit and loss categories are discarded, market research is eliminated.

Attractive products start to sell.

But . . . Disney will bury Pixar!  Sony or Microsoft will crush the iPod! Walmart or Amazon will dwarf iTunes! Nokia and the Blackberry will outdo the iPhone! Expensive laptops won’t compete with Dell!  Apple stores can’t compete with Best Buy! Adobe flash is a must! Google Android will beat iOS!

“The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy – free mechanical energy. . .It changed the texture of society. . . this revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind:  free intellectual energy. . . This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution”. Jobs, 1985

Apple, Inc. is about to overtake Exxon Mobil as the largest valued corporation in the United States.  And on Friday, July 29, 2011, Apple, Inc. had more cash than the United States Treasury.

How has an adopted son of a machinist, who dropped out of college after one year, who never took formal management, or economic, or engineering training, who follows few of the standard or advanced notions of modern corporate management, . . . how has he come to set the standard for leadership of large complex organizations,. . . how has he become the greatest CEO in history?

The iLeader has become the i Master.

The highest ranking captive of the Nazi leadership, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, Commander of the Luftwaffe, was evaluated at Nuremberg by Major Douglas M. Kelley, MD, from Truckee, California, Chief Psychiatrist of the U.S. Medical Corp.  He found Göring to be forthright, engaging, composed, eloquent, smart, . . . even charming.  And Göring was unapologetic and defensive.  He planned to call Britain’s Lord Halifax as a witness to testify to his [Göring's] willingness to pursue negotiated settlements before the outbreak of war.”

With the Rorschach inkblot and psychiatric assessment, Kelley diagnosed Göring as . . .normal.  He had no sign of mental illness.  He was sane.

“My conscience was named Adolf Hitler“.

Göring displayed “extreme fondness for and tenderness toward his family and friends“, such that Dr. Kelley was moved to help locate and bring to him his wife and daughter. But there were the glimpses of the narcissism and cold calculation of the charming psychopath. Göring spoke of having a close associate murdered. How could he? “Göring stopped talking and stared at me, puzzled, as if I were not quite bright. Then he shrugged his great shoulders, turned up his palms and said slowly, in simple one-syllable words: ‘But he was in my way’ “.

Göring was responsible for the ‘Hunger Plan’, the Nazi plan to starve the conquered eastern Europeans and Russians, in order to feed Germans and depopulate the lebensraum.  He made decisions on execution versus forced labor, as the war circumstances required.  It was he who ordered Heydrich to devise the Final Solution, initially framed as being about forced labor and deportation, but he had to know it was in reality about genocide.

“Of course, we rearmed.  We armed Germany until we bristled.  I am only sorry we did not rearm more. Of course, I considered treaties as so much toilet paper.”

When asked why he had always been Hitler’s ‘yes man’, he replied: “Please show me a ‘no-man’ in Germany who is not six feet under the ground today.”

Göring was addicted to the narcotic, paracodeine, since just before meeting Hitler in the early 1920′s. Narcotics drugs, it is known, create and enhance antisocial personality. They effectively block feelings of empathy, shame, and guilt for its users. Was Nazi evil deepened by narcotics?  Hitler’s first mentor, and important early supporter, Dietrich Eckart, was a morphine addict.

Göring managed to commit suicide with cyanide, just hours before his scheduled execution.  This was his coup, his final refusal to bow.  How did he obtain the cyanide?  We don’t know.  Dr. Kelley had abruptly left Nuremberg before the psychiatric work was completed, for reasons unclear, taking his papers with him (only recently released by his family for this article).  He became alcoholic, and on New Year’s Day, 1958, at age 45, during a domestic drinking episode, he put a cyanide capsule between his teeth, and threatened to bite down. And then suddenly he did, and he died instantly.  His son was there. He believes it was an accident.

And then modern humans came, leaving Africa some 100,000 years ago, again traveling thru the Levant and on to the steppe, and then west and east, all the way to Australia.  In southern France and central Spain, about 40,000 years ago, they encountered the Neanderthal, and over next the 12,000 years, as the modern humans flourished, the Neanderthal retreated, first into small areas of France and Spain, and finally to a last stand near Gilbraltor.

We have no archeology of a war.  Neanderthal had bigger brains, and stronger bodies, but modern humans had something else, and that something gave them larger group cooperation, better tools, more successful hunting.  They unleashed a veritable ‘explosion’ of cultural creativity.

In the river ledge caves of the valleys of the Pyrenees, at Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira, and many others, there is the luxuriant, compelling art of these pre-historic modern humans.  There are life-size paintings of running, prancing, rearing, and charging horses, bison, tigers and reindeer.  The animals are regal and robust, boastful and healthy, herding and crowding, standing off and mocking.  They are relishing their lives on these great, lush grasslands, with gleaming eyes, suspicion, intention, pride, and fear.  They own the world. Their human artists hold them in awe.

It was the mind’s eye, in these caves, that painted these paintings. Modern humans had something new. They could hold their visual memories, consciously, long enough and intensely enough to recreate the vivid images of these animals in the darkness of the caves.  And not just descriptive details, . . no, also details of salience - posture, emotion, and personality.

Intelligence is the strong use of memory.  It is rich retrieval of memory, conscious analysis of memory, and parsing of the key elements of memories.  This power, the artistic power, the power of the mind’s eye, is the new power that came with modern humans.

Modern humans made success in virtually all of the ecological niches of the world, harvesting the bounty of wild animals.

And then, 10,000 years ago, from the fertile crescent came the farmers, and the Anthropocene, the time of humans, began.