TV - March 15, 2012

The Supreme Court has not actually decreed that someone who has a billion dollars is entitled to a billion votes but when analyzing the fruitfulness of their campaigns, they concentrate as much on the money as on the voters. If the analysts are right then maybe that opening line is not as far off the mark as it should be. And since the same Court guarantees anonymity to the funders of campaign ads, how do you know who is telling you things that you might actually believe? If there isn’t a signature line on the ad, you should discount what you are told exactly. The art of lying in ads is something taught as PR in all the business schools, and the billionaires get what they pay for. So unless you Know well who is jerking your strings, you should lump them all with the “Swift boat veterans” and drop their stories into the round file. What can be bought can be shaped to the purchasers’ liking, especially if they get to rely on your natural credulousness. When the Court makes no room for knowing who is counting on the voters’ good nature, and giving the PR hirelings free rein to hide their motivations, you must know that money talks, and the big bucks talk the loudest, just as if every billionaire had all those billions of extra votes.

ATOMIC - March 8, 2012

It is now 67 years since the Manhattan Project exploded the first atom bombs and put Us all into the atomic age, and about a year since an earthquake and tsunami threatened to reduce the main island of Japan to the condition around Chernobil, thus destroying the lives of millions of the most creative and productive people in the world. We still do not know how much human suffering it will cost in the ensuing century, but the fear of exactly such an accident has hung over all of us for all that time. In the meantime, the same fear has engendered a terror over the consequences of scientific research, especially that of Physics, in antagonism with the promise that the Atom could provide us with limitless power, both electrical and military, far into the future. This threat to progress has engendered a pooh-poohing of the threat by many of those whose lives are tied to the possibility of diminishing some of the ills of humankind through the gathering of the fruits of knowledge. Indeed, there seems to be an opinion to be found among scientists that concern with the dangers of the Atom exists mainly among cowards, who take too much caution from the less-than-perfect record that we have observed in the first 2/3 of a century of the Atomic Age, and this does not even count the total of those stumbles that have been successfully swept out of public knowledge by the public relations people of nations that would be deeply embarrassed if the less tolerable errors had been obvious. We are approaching the time when wind, wave and solar energy might free us of this atomic horror, but still tens of millions of people live under the threat of the Yankee power station in the immediate vicinity of New York City, and that has been labeled as the most dangerous one in the world.

PUBLIC HI ED - March 1, 2012

After finishing HS in 1947, I was awarded a tuition scholarship to Cornell. Since I had no source of money for room and board, I could have attended there only if I could obtain a job for about 20 – 30 hours a week at unskilled labor. My alternative was a New York City public college, much like 4 more years of HS, living at home and riding the subway to school. It killed the dream of Cornell, but I chose Brooklyn College , where I could expect 20 hours a week on the subway, but at least I could often read while commuting, and never paid a cent for tuition. It formed my picture of public Hi Ed and I was truly grateful to New York. When I was the Chair of Mathematics at the London School of Economics every English college student got not only free tuition but also a substantial subsidy for maintenance. That was public Hi Ed writ large, and was probably the high point of Hi Ed in that country. In the meantime, that form of education has deteriorated in that country and in this. The key to the university to this day for almost every prospective student has become family finances or crushing debt. The consequence has become a comedown in the
effectiveness in Hi Ed in both USA and UK compared with 1974 or 1947. Both countries , and many more, are suffering from lesser educational opportunity compared with earlier, more enlightened times. In a study I made in 1994, I compared the cost to USA of producing a 2d Lieutenant or Ensign at any of the service academies as contrasted to the earlier public educations supported by federal money and we must question whether the need for armed forces officers is that much greater than the unit costs in civilian and military training, and the national need for each.

IOUs - February 23, 2012

For what seems like forever, I have been hearing GOP flacks carrying on that SSS is bankrupt, and that the US bonds that constitute its reserve are nothing more reliable than “a pocket full of worthless IOUs.” So it now comes as a surprise to hear the new line: that the temporary pause in the 2% of the employment tax will deplete the solidity of SSS. It would appear that GOP has been paying no attention to their own malarkey, which is about what it is worth. In fact US bonds are the gold standard of national indebtedness and there is no way to degrade even a bad bond below the value of worthless paper. Of course, that comment would be germane if GOP valued their own pronouncements over worthless talk, which they do not seem to do. For an important party to include in their claptrap such contradictions reaches way down beneath cheap talk and into the realm of nonsense. So this latest two-face should qualify as open fraud, beneath the quality of deception that would honor the literacy of even the present low level of US elementary education today. An honest reaction would be for Obama to acknowledge that any shortfall would be made up in a tax increase as soon as the economic revival makes that sound. Judging by their indifference to logic GOP could be expected to switch to crying tax increase without even seeing that the anticipated increase would be years in the future. It makes almost no difference whether their contempt for reason flows from their poor opinion of our thinking or that of their own. I only hope that the Dem Party will hold them up for ridicule if they do it again

RELIGION - February 16, 2012

The rage over religion in the national elections might remind us of that in 1928, when Al Smith, a Catholic, ran against H Hoover. Some GOP railed against the Dems as the party of Rum, Romanism and Rebellion, and raised the spectre of papal control of DC. It was not until 1960 that a Dem could put out that hate-fueled fire and promise that that political panic was a ghost. Liberal USA, school in skepticism in the intervening years of scientific tolerance, would accept Kennedy’s honeyed words, and another 44 years until the Archbishop of St. Louis would pronounce excommunication on Sen. Kerry and those supporting his bid for the presidency, using his Catholic authority to aid in defeating him. Today, religious arguments from all of those bishops have been turned against Obama with a lock-step unanimity that is reminiscent of the days of the Spanish Inquisition. In the meantime, some students schooled in the virtues of scientific skepticism emerge from better schools ready to apply to all claims of divine inspiration the same lack of belief that religious preachers apply to other faiths than their own. This results in GOP claims that higher education propagandizes today’s youth against what they believed in childhood to be the revealed word of one divinity or other. This distortion the GOP candidates call a war on religion. Over the centuries the pronouncements if science, while admittedly occasionally found to be wrong, are less often abandoned than the reports of those resting on divine revelation, their own or others’. It appears true that well-educated people are less credible than others about such claims, and that such skepticism is more often sustained, on the whole, than competing ideologies.

IRAN - December 8, 2011

We have been hearing so much these days about Iran, and the danger that their nuclear program supposedly subjects us to that one might reasonably think there is no foundation for the trouble there or to the animus of so many Iranis to the US, and especially also to the UK. Actually, the trouble between the Iranis and the English goes back some 200 years at least, and the US has joined on the UK side only in the wake of WW II and the Eisenhower administration. As soon as the nascent UN had finished off the imperial pretentions of Germany and Japan, the US resumed the cold war that had started between the elites of capitalism and the USSR with Lenin’s October Revolution. It had been paused for the 4 years 1941-45 while part of the world set aside the doctrinal hatred of the sort that Europe had seen since the French Revolution in order to crush Hitler. Then the US immediately started to collect the remaining forces of the plutocrats from fear that the spectre of Communism would take away the sand pile that we call our world. The world was split between the protectorates of the West and those of the Soviet Union. In the middle, a small package of countries that wanted no part of yet another world war opted out and formed the shaggy uncommitted bloc, notably Yugoslavia, India and little Iran. Although Truman had lived easily with countries that resisted being US protectorates without joining the Warsaw Pact group, the Eisenhower administration under the leadership of John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen implicitly declared that all those that were not with us were against us, and Ike joined the UK in overthrowing the elected government of Iran, which had just then nationalized the oil under Iran. They installed the military fascist regime there, which the Iranis overthrew in 1979, dumping the dictator, and violated international precedent by taking the US keepers as hostages. For some reason, the Iranis thought they had a grievance against US. We live today with the remains of that history.

ELECTRICITY - December 1, 2011

We are now embarking again on the famous WI winter. This year, there has been an especially large outbreak of rains, floods and snows that have had the effect of felling trees, many falling across power lines and depriving whole areas of electricity, often for an extended period. Whenever this happens, it reminds me of my effort to interest MG&E in the enormous benefits that could accrue to places like the City of Madison if it were possible to be less dependent on long-distance power lines. Such a condition could be obtained by Madison and many other towns and cities, many in WI, through the advantages that could accrue to us if we had widespread mini-combined heat and power, abbreviated mini-CHP. This technology, which has been proven in use in Europe, especially Scandinavia, would provide electricity each user as a nearly free by-product of home heating. The yearly cost of natural gas and electric power for each such user would be about the cost of gas alone, with savings of about 50%. Into the bargain, the supply of electricity would be a nearly perfect guarantee to the user of continuity of that service, while saving about half the cost of the two utilities billed separately. MG&E advertises that they are eager to help us cut our total energy use, thus saving both money and nearly half of the natural gas and its attendant electricity. I was never successful in winning over the gas company to this proven technology and the side benefits of almost total freedom from power outages due to felled grid lines. There may be some unknown reasons why this company, which could profit handsomely from the benefits that could flow from mini-CHP, refuses to undertake a test in a few dozen homes that would demonstrate the benefits that would flow to the whole city, including the gas and electric company itself.