On Thursday morning, the Wall Street Journalruns an op-ed by one of the best-known mega-donors, Charles Koch, who with his brother backs Americans for Prosperity, which spent $122 million leading up to the 2012 campaign and has already spent more than $30 million in the past six months attacking Obamacare and Democratic senators up for reelection this fall. In the op-ed, Koch explains his heavy spending by warning of the “collectivists” threatening to take over the country. “The fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government,” he writes.
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HMJ observes– America appears to be transforming itself from a democracy to a plutocracy. Plutocracy, the dictionary defines as, “a class or group ruling, or exercising power or influence, by virtue of its wealth.” The most recent ruling of the Supreme Court in expandingCitizens Unitedwith its newest decision in McCutcheon makes it possible for those with mega bucks to influence elections and national and state policy-making in ways the founding father would have never anticipated or thought possible. And these decisions are based on supporting Constitutional guarantees of free speech. Use of money in contributing to a campaign has somehow come to equal speech just like the corporation now has come to have the same legal rights as a person. (Dartmouth, Citizens). The Atlantic continues that: “As the Court confidently declared, “We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” And for skeptics who thought otherwise, the Court provided this additional assurance: “The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.” Oh dear. and I thought I was naive. Most citizens are not surprised to learn that millionaires spend huge amounts of money to help candidates get elected because the donors expect a quid pro quo, something in return, to be rewarded by the winners in some way–a job, an appointment, favorable legislation, or elimination of regulations that limit exploitation of people or the environment, protection against immigrants or people whose views oppose or support certain “religiously based” ethical positions (abortion, capital punishment, welfare, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act, early education,) etc., etc).
The following article from the The Atlantic hits on attitudes and circumstances in America that I deplore. Maybe it’s because I’m an old guy and feel increasingly helpless as to do anything about the situation. I am not encouraged when I look around me for solutions among the’ best and the brightest’ in the next generations who ought to have the time and energy to pursue the remediation of these abuses. Many of them seem to me to be focused on other irrelevant (lightweight) or purely selfish pursuits: texting, or “gaming” or hacking one system or another, clubbing, job-jumping, or trying “to do deals” that will help them to become part of (as movers and shakers) the very system that needs fixing.
I am coming to believe that Chris Hedges is more than a little right when he says that the American democratic and economic system–as it is–will not and cannot self-correct, and that real change will come about only when the abuses become so egregious that a full scale revolution will be the only answer. As the realities of their circumstances continue to pound on the 99%, Hedges’ revolution may not be too far in the future.
2. On Monday, a Senate subcommittee releases a report on the tax avoidance used by Caterpillar, the giant Peoria, Ill.-based heavy equipment manufacturer, which cut its tax bill by $2.4 billion over the past 13 years by allotting $8 billion in revenues from its parts division to a subsidiary in Switzerland, where only 65 of the division’s 8,500 employees work. In an email exchange about whether this was appropriate, a managing director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which was paid $55 million to concoct this arrangement, said: “What the heck, we’ll all be retired when this audit comes up on audit…Baby boomers have their fun, and leave it to the kids to pay for it.”
3. On Tuesday, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan releases the latest version of the famous Ryan budget. To make up for tax reductions for the wealthy, the budget calls for very deep cuts in spending on Medicaid, food stamps and discretionary spending, which includes research and development, transportation and infrastructure. Amtrak would lose its $1 billion in already-meager annual subsidies and have to rely entirely on fare-box revenue.
4. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court releases a 5-4 ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, eliminating caps on how much total money ultra-rich donors can give to candidates, parties and PACs in a given election cycle. Where donors had previously been limited to giving $123,200 to candidates and parties in a given cycle, they can now give as much as $3.6 million. Chief Justice John Roberts writes: “Spending large sums of money in connection with elections, but not in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder’s official duties, does not give rise to quid pro quo corruption.” Celebrating the ruling, House Speaker John Boehnersays, “I’m all for freedom, congratulations.”
5. On Thursday morning, the Wall Street Journalruns an op-ed by one of the best-known mega-donors, Charles Koch, who with his brother backs Americans for Prosperity, which spent $122 million leading up to the 2012 campaign and has already spent more than $30 million in the past six months attacking Obamacare and Democratic senators up for reelection this fall. In the op-ed, Koch explains his heavy spending by warning of the “collectivists” threatening to take over the country. “The fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government,” he writes.
6. Later on Thursday morning, between 9 and 10 a.m., part of the overhead electric line that powers the Acela train comes down onto the tracks near Bowie, Maryland, between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. Virtually all train traffic between Baltimore and Washington shuts down for hours as undermanned crews struggle to repair the line, thereby severely hampering traffic in the Washington to Boston Northeast corridor that carries 750,000 passengers on 2,000 trains per day and also spelling panic for the Thursday afternoon rail commuters heading north out of Washington.
A southbound commuter train from Baltimore to Washington on Thursday morning that was caught just behind the downed lines and a stalled Acela takes four hours and 20 minutes to make the 40 mile journey, one that normally takes an hour. German tourists on the train sit bewildered about what could possibly be happening. Passengers have the consolation of listening to several proudly Republican lawyer/lobbyists on board loudly voicing their opinions on the delay. One declares it is the fault of President Obama, who is “in way over his head.” Another declares that the lack of credible information from the conductor is “just like Benghazi.”
One passenger is left thinking that this country could use some more spending on infrastructure, transportation and the general commonweal. Yes, that risks being “collectivist” and would be opposed by a casino magnate with vast holdings in Macau and would leave less for top-bracket tax cuts in the Ryan budget. But heck, it would also mean some more business for Caterpillar, which might even be prevailed upon to keep some of its income stateside, thus helping pay for said investment in the future of the greatest nation on earth.
Alan Guth was one of the first physicists to hypothesize the existence of inflation, which explains how the universe expanded so uniformly and so quickly in the instant after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.CreditRick Friedman for The New York Times
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a year’s appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics.
He was trying to understand why there was no trace of some exotic particles that should have been created in the Big Bang. Instead he discovered what might have made the universe bang to begin with. A potential hitch in the presumed course of cosmic evolution could have infused space itself with a special energy that exerted a repulsive force, causing the universe to swell faster than the speed of light for a prodigiously violent instant.
If true, the rapid engorgement would solve paradoxes like why the heavens look uniform from pole to pole and not like a jagged, warped mess. The enormous ballooning would iron out all the wrinkles and irregularities. Those particles were not missing, but would be diluted beyond detection, like spit in the ocean.
“SPECTACULAR REALIZATION,” Dr. Guth wrote across the top of the page and drew a double box around it.
On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right.
Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.
Inflation has been the workhorse of cosmology for 35 years, though many, including Dr. Guth, wondered whether it could ever be proved.
If corroborated, Dr. Kovac’s work will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or of the Big Bang itself. It would open vast realms of time and space and energy to science and speculation.
Astronomers have found evidence to support the theory of inflation, which explains how the universe expanded so uniformly and so quickly in the instant after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
THE UNIVERSE is just under 14 billion years old. From our position in the Milky Way galaxy, we can observe a sphere — the visible universe — extending 14 billion light-years in every direction. But there’s a mystery. Wherever we look, the universe has an even temperature.
NOT ENOUGH TIME The universe isn’t old enough for light to travel the 28 billion light-years from one side of the universe to the other, and there hasn’t been enough time for scattered patches of hot and cold to mix into an even temperature.
DISTANT COFFEE At a smaller scale, imagine using a telescope to look a mile in one direction. You see a coffee cup, and from the amount of steam you can estimate its temperature and how much it has cooled.
COFFEE EVERYWHERE Now turn around and look a mile in the other direction. You see the same coffee cup, at exactly the same temperature. Coincidence? Maybe. But if you see the same cup in every direction, you might want to look for another explanation.
STILL NOT ENOUGH TIME There hasn’t been enough time to carry coffee cups a mile in all directions before they get cold. But if all the coffee cups were somehow filled from a single coffee pot, all at the same time, that might explain their even temperature.
INFLATION solves this problem. The theory proposes that, less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded faster than the speed of light. Tiny ripples in the violently expanding mass eventually grew into the large-scale structures of the universe.
FLUCTUATION Astronomers have now detected evidence of these ancient fluctuations in swirls of polarized light in the cosmic background radiation, which is energy left over from the early universe. These are gravitational waves predicted by Einstein.
EXPANSION Returning to our coffee, imagine a single, central pot expanding faster than light and cooling to an even temperature as it expands. That’s something like inflation. And the structure of the universe mirrors the froth and foam of the original pot.
By LARRY BUCHANAN and JONATHAN CORUM
Confirming inflation would mean that the universe we see, extending 14 billion light-years in space with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, is only an infinitesimal patch in a larger cosmos whose extent, architecture and fate are unknowable. Moreover, beyond our own universe there might be an endless number of other universes bubbling into frothy eternity, like a pot of pasta water boiling over.
In our own universe, it would serve as a window into the forces operating at energies forever beyond the reach of particle accelerators on Earth and yield new insights into gravity itself. Dr. Kovac’s ripples would be the first direct observation of gravitational waves, which, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, should ruffle space-time.
According to inflation theory, the waves are the hypothetical quantum particles, known as gravitons, that carry gravity, magnified by the expansion of the universe to extragalactic size.
“You can see how the sky is being distorted by gravitational waves,” said Andrei Linde, a prominent inflation theorist at Stanford. “We are using our universe as a big microscope. The sky is a photographic plate.”
Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University, an early-universe expert who was not part of the team, said, “This is huge, as big as it gets.”
“Although I might not fully understand it,” Dr. Kamionkowski said, “this is a signal from the very earliest universe, sending a telegram encoded in gravitational waves.”
The ripples manifested themselves as faint spiral patterns in a bath of microwave radiation that permeates space and preserves a picture of the universe when it was 380,000 years old and as hot as the surface of the Sun.
Dr. Kovac and his collaborators, working in an experiment known as Bicep, for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, reported their results in a scientific briefing at the Center for Astrophysics here on Monday and in a set of papers submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.
Dr. Kovac said the chance that the results were a fluke was only one in 3.5 million — a gold standard of discovery called five-sigma.
Dr. Guth pronounced himself “bowled over,” saying he had not expected such a definite confirmation in his lifetime.
“With nature, you have to be lucky,” he said. “Apparently we have been lucky.”
The results are the closely guarded distillation of three years’ worth of observations and analysis. Eschewing email for fear of a leak, Dr. Kovac personally delivered drafts of his work to a select few, meeting with Dr. Guth, who is now a professor at M.I.T. (as is his son, Larry, who was sleeping that night in 1979), in his office last week.
“It was a very special moment, and one we took very seriously as scientists,” said Dr. Kovac, who chooses his words as carefully as he tends his radio telescopes.
Dr. Linde, who first described the most popular variant of inflation, known as chaotic inflation, in 1983, was about to go on vacation in the Caribbean last week when Chao-Lin Kuo, a Stanford colleague and a member of Dr. Kovac’s team, knocked on his door with a bottle of Champagne to tell him the news.
Confused, Dr. Linde called out to his wife, asking if she had ordered Champagne.
“And then I told him that in the beginning we thought that this was a delivery but we did not think that we ordered anything, but I simply forgot that actually I did order it, 30 years ago,” Dr. Linde wrote in an email.
Calling from Bonaire, the Dutch Caribbean island, Dr. Linde said he was still hyperventilating. “Having news like this is the best way of spoiling a vacation,” he said.
By last weekend, as social media was buzzing with rumors that inflation had been seen and news spread, astrophysicists responded with a mixture of jubilation and caution.
Abraham Loeb, a Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer who was not part of the team, said: “It looks like inflation really took place. Since 1980, this was really speculative physics.”
Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at M.I.T., wrote in an email, “I think that if this stays true, it will go down as one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.” He added, “It’s a sensational breakthrough involving not only our cosmic origins, but also the nature of space.”
Michael S. Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, hailed it as the kind of discovery that could lead eventually to resolving riddles like dark matter and dark energy, writing in an email, “I am starting to feel like a 20-something-year-old postdoc!”
Lawrence M. Krauss of Arizona State and others also emphasized the need for confirmation, noting that the new results exceeded earlier estimates based on temperature maps of the cosmic background by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite and other assumptions about the universe.
“So we will need to wait and see before we jump up and down,” Dr. Krauss said.
Corroboration might not be long in coming. The Planck spacecraft, which has been making exquisite measurements of the Big Bang microwaves, will be reporting its own findings this year. At least a dozen other teams are attempting similar measurements from balloons, mountaintops and space.
Photo
The Bicep2 telescope, in the foreground, was used to detect the faint spiraling gravity patterns — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart at its birth.CreditSteffen Richter/Associated Press
SPIRALS IN THE SKY
Gravity waves are the latest and deepest secret yet pried out of the cosmic microwaves, which were discovered accidentally by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, both then at Bell Labs, 50 years ago. They got the Nobel Prize.
Dr. Kovac has spent his whole career trying to read the secrets of these waves. He is one of four leaders of Bicep, which has operated a series of increasingly sensitive radio telescopes at the South Pole, where the air — thin, cold and dry — creates ideal observing conditions. The others are Clement Pryke of the University of Minnesota, Jamie Bock of the California Institute of Technology and Dr. Kuo of Stanford.
“The South Pole is the closest you can get to space and still be on the ground,” Dr. Kovac said. He has been there 23 times, he said, wintering over in 1994. “I’ve been hooked ever since,” he said.
In 2002, he was part of a team that discovered that the microwave radiation was polarized, meaning the light waves had a slight preference to vibrate in one direction rather than another.
This was a step toward the ultimate goal of detecting the gravitational waves from inflation. Such waves, squeezing space in one direction and stretching it in another as they go by, would twist the direction of polarization of the microwaves, theorists said. As a result, maps of the polarization in the sky should have little arrows going in spirals.
Detecting those spirals required measuring infinitesimally small differences in the temperature of the microwaves. The group’s telescope, Bicep2, is basically a giant superconducting thermometer.
“We had no expectations what we would see,” Dr. Kovac said. The earlier Planck study had concluded that a parameter r, which is a measure of the swirliness of the polarization, could not be higher than 0.11, which would have knocked many popular versions of inflation. But it was not a direct measurement, as the Bicep team was attempting.
The Bicep measurement of r clocked in at nearly twice that, 0.20, putting the most favored models back into contention.
The strength of the signal surprised the researchers, and they spent a year burning up time on a Harvard supercomputer, making sure they had things right and worrying that competitors might beat them to the breakthrough.
A SPECIAL TIME
The data traced the onset of inflation to a time in cosmic history that physicists like Dr. Guth, staying up late in his Palo Alto house 35 years ago, suspected was a special break point in the evolution of the universe.
Physicists recognize four forces at work in the world today: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But they have long suspected that those are simply different manifestations of a single unified force that ruled the universe in its earliest, hottest moments.
As the universe cooled, according to this theory, there was a fall from grace, not unlike some old folk mythology of gods or brothers falling out with each other. The laws of physics evolved, with one force after another “freezing out,” or splitting away.
That was where Dr. Guth came in.
Under some circumstances, a glass of water can stay liquid as the temperature falls below 32 degrees, until it is disturbed, at which point it will rapidly freeze, releasing latent heat in the process.
Similarly, the universe could “supercool” and stay in a unified state too long. In that case, space itself would become temporarily imbued with a mysterious kind of latent heat, or energy.
Inserted into Einstein’s equations, the latent energy would act as a kind of antigravity, and the universe would blow itself up. Since it was space itself supplying the repulsive force, the more space was created, the harder it pushed apart. In a runaway explosion, what would become our observable universe mushroomed in size at least a trillion trillionfold — from a submicroscopic speck of primordial energy to the size of a grapefruit — in less than a cosmic eye-blink.
Almost as quickly, this energy would decay into ordinary particles and radiation that were already in sync, despite how far apart they wound up, because they had all sprung from such a tiny primordial point, as if the galaxies had gotten together in the locker room to make a plan before going out. All of normal cosmic history was still ahead, resulting in today’s observable universe, a patch of sky and stars 14 billion light-years across.
“It’s often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch,” Dr. Guth likes to say, “but the universe might be the ultimate free lunch.”
Make that free lunches. Most of the hundred or so models that have been spawned by Dr. Guth’s original vision suggest that inflation, once started, is eternal. Even as our own universe settled down to a comfortable homey expansion with atoms, stars and planets, the rest of the cosmos will continue blowing up, spinning off other bubbles here and there endlessly, a concept known as the multiverse.
The Bicep data does not reveal what this magical-sounding inflating energy is. Antigravity might sound crazy, but it was Einstein who first raised the possibility of its permeating space in the form of a fudge factor called the cosmological constant, which he later abandoned as a blunder. It was revived with the discovery 15 years ago that something called dark energy is giving a boost to the expansion of the universe, albeit far more gently than inflation did.
So the future of the cosmos is perhaps bright and fecund, but do not bother asking about going any deeper into the past.
As Dr. Guth will be the first to say, we might never know what happened before inflation, at the very beginning, because inflation erases everything that came before it. All the chaos and randomness of the primordial moment are swept away, forever out of our view.
“If you trace your cosmic roots,” Dr. Loeb said, “you wind up at inflation.”
Last Thursday Chris Hedges opened a team debate at the Oxford Union at Oxford University with this speech arguing in favor of the proposition “This house would call Edward Snowden a hero.” The others on the Hedges team, which won the debate by an audience vote of 212 to 171, were William E. Binney, a former National Security Agency official and a whistle-blower; Chris Huhne, a former member of the British Parliament; and Annie Machon, a former intelligence officer for the United Kingdom. The opposing team was made up of Philip J. Crowley, a former U.S. State Department officer; Stewart A. Baker, a former chief counsel for the National Security Agency; Jeffrey Toobin, an American television and print commentator; and Oxford student Charles Vaughn.
I have been to war. I have seen physical courage. But this kind of courage is not moral courage. Very few of even the bravest warriors have moral courage. For moral courage means to defy the crowd, to stand up as a solitary individual, to shun the intoxicating embrace of comradeship, to be disobedient to authority, even at the risk of your life, for a higher principle. And with moral courage comes persecution.
The American Army pilot Hugh Thompson had moral courage. He landed his helicopter between a platoon of U.S. soldiers and 10 terrified Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre. He ordered his gunner to fire his M60 machine gun on the advancing U.S. soldiers if they began to shoot the villagers. And for this act of moral courage, Thompson, like Snowden, was hounded and reviled. Moral courage always looks like this. It is always defined by the state as treason—the Army attempted to cover up the massacre and court-martial Thompson. It is the courage to act and to speak the truth. Thompson had it. Daniel Ellsberg had it. Martin Luther King had it. What those in authority once said about them they say today about Snowden.
“My country, right or wrong” is the moral equivalent of “my mother, drunk or sober,” G.K. Chesterton reminded us.
So let me speak to you about those drunk with the power to sweep up all your email correspondence, your tweets, your Web searches, your phone records, your file transfers, your live chats, your financial data, your medical data, your criminal and civil court records and your movements, those who are awash in billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars, those who have banks of sophisticated computer systems, along with biosensors, scanners, face recognition technologies and miniature drones, those who have obliterated your anonymity, your privacy and, yes, your liberty.
There is no free press without the ability of the reporters to protect the confidentiality of those who have the moral courage to make public the abuse of power. Those few individuals inside government who dared to speak out about the system of mass surveillance have been charged as spies or hounded into exile. An omnipresent surveillance state—and I covered the East German Stasi state—creates a climate of paranoia and fear. It makes democratic dissent impossible. Any state that has the ability to inflict full-spectrum dominance on its citizens is not a free state. It does not matter if it does not use this capacity today; it will use it, history has shown, should it feel threatened or seek greater control. The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Hannah Arendt wrote, is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” The relationship between those who are constantly watched and tracked and those who watch and track them is the relationship between masters and slaves.
Those who wield this unchecked power become delusional. Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, hired a Hollywood set designer to turn his command center at Fort Meade into a replica of the bridge of the starship Enterprise so he could sit in the captain’s chair and pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had the audacity to lie under oath to Congress. This spectacle was a rare glimpse into the absurdist theater that now characterizes American political life. A congressional oversight committee holds public hearings. It is lied to. It knows it is being lied to. The person who lies knows the committee members know he is lying. And the committee, to protect their security clearances, says and does nothing.
These voyeurs listen to everyone and everything. They bugged the conclave that elected the new pope. They bugged the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. They bugged most of the leaders of Europe. They intercepted the talking points of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ahead of a meeting with President Obama. Perhaps the esteemed opposition can enlighten us as to the security threats posed by the conclave of Catholic cardinals, the German chancellor and the U.N. secretary-general. They bugged business like the Brazilian oil company Petrobras and American law firms engaged in trade deals with Indochina for shrimp and clove cigarettes. They carried out a major eavesdropping effort focused on the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali in 2007. They bugged their ex-lovers, their wives and their girlfriends. And the NSA stores our data in perpetuity.
I was a plaintiff before the Supreme Court in a case that challenged the warrantless wiretapping, a case dismissed because the court believed the government’s assertion that our concern about surveillance was “speculation.” We had, the court said, no standing … no right to bring the case. And we had no way to challenge this assertion—which we now know to be a lie—until Snowden.
In the United States the Fourth Amendment limits the state’s ability to search and seize to a specific place, time and event approved by a magistrate. And it is impossible to square the bluntness of the Fourth Amendment with the arbitrary search and seizure of all our personal communications. Former Vice President Al Gore said, correctly, that Snowden disclosed evidence of crimes against the United States Constitution.
We who have been fighting against mass state surveillance for years—including my friend Bill Binney within the NSA—made no headway by appealing to the traditional centers of power. It was only after Snowden methodically leaked documents that disclosed crimes committed by the state that genuine public debate began. Elected officials, for the first time, promised reform. The president, who had previously dismissed our questions about the extent of state surveillance by insisting there was strict congressional and judicial oversight, appointed a panel to review intelligence. Three judges have, since the Snowden revelations, ruled on the mass surveillance, with two saying the NSA spying was unconstitutional and the third backing it. None of this would have happened—none of it—without Snowden.
Snowden had access to the full roster of everyone working at the NSA. He could have made public the entire intelligence community and undercover assets worldwide. He could have exposed the locations of every clandestine station and their missions. He could have shut down the surveillance system, as he has said, “in an afternoon.” But this was never his intention. He wanted only to halt the wholesale surveillance, which until he documented it was being carried out without our consent or knowledge.
No doubt we will hear from the opposition tonight all the ways Snowden should have made his grievances heard, but I can tell you from personal experience, as can Bill, that this argument is as cogent as the offer made by the March Hare during the Mad Tea Party in “Alice in Wonderland.”
“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. “I don’t see any wine,” she remarked. “There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.
I wonder what our university students in Colorado would make of this report…through the haze of pot smoke..and its implications for their future and well as for the future of civilization as we have known it.
The information and judgments in the NASA study are far from new. I was teaching the same stuff from an earlier study by the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth, in the 1970’s.
It appears to be impossible for human beings to curtail their own selfish and greedy demands for more of everything–food, kids, money, people comforts, leisure activities, gadgets, luxury items of all sorts, and on and on. If voluntary personal restraint is required for the survival of civilization–even of the planet itself–I am not very optimistic about the future.
Meanwhile politicians would have us believe that individuals, organizations, and nations are really capable of deferring gratification, policing themselves, self-control, and following even their own rules.
The alarm has been sounding for a long time in our industrial, corporate, capitalistic, world and we have repeatedly hit the snooze button. Our refusal to accept reality–combined with national and world leaders who won’t abandon politics long enough to grapple with real issues–will exacerbate the multiplication and complexity of our existing problems for us, our progeny–if any.
A new study sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center confirmed the prospect that worldwide industrial civilization could collapse in the coming decades under “unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution,” Dr. Nafeez Ahmed reports at The Guardian.
The study dismissed the notion that warnings of “collapse” should remain fringe or controversial, citing the history of the fall of previous civilizations to show that “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.”
Nafeez states the project is based on a new model that integrates data from multiple fields of study and was developed by the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center. It finds that history shows advanced, complex civilizations are susceptible to collapse:
“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.”
The most relevant interrelated factors, the study concluded, were population, climate, water, agriculture and energy. Nafeez writes:
These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity”; and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor]” These social phenomena have played “a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse,” in all such cases over “the last five thousand years.”
The study claims that “elites” in industrialized countries are largely responsible for inequality and overconsumption, and challenges the idea that technology can resolve these problems by simply increasing industrial and economic efficiency:
Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use.
The researchers, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri, concluded that under conditions “closely reflecting the reality of the world today… collapse is difficult to avoid.” One scenario is described as follows:
[Civilization] appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature.
Here’s a truth I discovered early in my life, one that I continue to employ regularly. In the Paris Review, MaryKarr said it well. “[R]eading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.” Wow! Flip a switch is right. I don’t venture out of my apartment for any appointment these days without a book in hand. Haven’t for years. For me, it must be a real book, makes no difference if it’s hard or soft bound, must have paper pages, and so it can’t be an electronic version. Not so fast, Mark! I don’t diss all electronic books because I can–and must– immerse myself in a narrated book on tape when I have to perform any repetitive or mindlessly boring physical activity (e.g., treadmill, recumbent bike) for half and hour or so at a time. I confess that in the gym or doctor’s waiting room I do not read Jung, Kant, Plato, or Shakespeare to escape the drudgery or the fear–those authors require concentration and focus and a Wikipedia close at hand. Rather I go for authors who write what I refer to as “chewing gum for the mind” e.g., Nelson deMille or Vince Flynn, Ken Follett, or Daniel Silva. In the gym setting, it takes but a few seconds of listening to a favorite reader from Audible Books to transport me, entirely, to another place, time, and mental state. These days I am listening to volume 17 of Patrick O’Brian’s 20 volume series of historical novels featuring Aubrey-Maturin. I confess that this is my second time through the series because the narrative is exciting, and because because the narrator’s ability to use a variety of British accents simply ripens the story’s effectiveness in transporting me back in time, up the rigging, and into a life filled with hard ship’s biscuit full of weevils, the taste of lime and Maderia, the smells of tar and gun powder, and the sounds of holystones scrubbing the decks during the morning watch. The novels are set in Napoleonic times, in the British navy, far removed in time and place from my treadmill at 24 Hour Fitness. I listen with deeply padded earphones that eliminate the ambient noise of crashing weights and screams of Zumba enthusiasts. When my trainer arrives to announce that it is time to begin our session, and touches my shoulder to get my attention, I jump as if hit with a cattle prod, as I struggle to return to Denver from the deck of a 64 gun Man of War in the South Seas c.1814. My hyper anxiety in the waiting room of a dentist, urologist, cardiologist, or Emergency Room is almost totally relieved or abated if I can sink my conscious mind into an adventure of espionage or become a participant in realistic military action. So necessary is this kind of reading to my mental health that I have mustered the courage brazenly to turn off a waiting room television set, or at least get its volume muted, so that I can concentrate on my of escape from reality via print. I am unable to remove all distractions, unfortunately, such as the telephone calls being made by the receptionist to remind other patients about their upcoming appointments–usually in a loud and strident voice as if increased volume would somehow guarantee attendance at the scheduled time (think Lily Tomlin without the humor). And don’t even get me started on people who use their cell phone in the waiting room to discuss shopping lists, recipes, school problems, personal problems, or politics. So I’ve figured out how to cope with the realities –and dangers–of my life by flipping the switch, by changing where I am and what I feel by immersing myself in a book. Disassociation has proven to be an important and inexpensive key to improving my mental health. As an added benefit, reading has allowed me to travel without having to deal with the long lines of security checks at airports, to participate in derring-do without putting myself in actual danger, to love-woo-wed-make love, eat sumptuous meals, and to participate in life and events long past. Forget the X-rays and drills, the diagnosis, the blood draw, the tread mill’s endless challenge. Just flip the switch…
Add to the following hated words from Lake Superior’s list, the following words I heard too many times during the recent football season: sports commentators’ repetitive use of “the next level” (will he be able to play on “the next level?”) and observations that a defensive back was able to make a tackle “in space.” And now, “Omaha” is perilously close to being added to my list along with “Hurry Hurry.” Maybe I’m just feeling poorly after the Bronco’s loss to Seattle. (Talk about being out in space–the needle and all).
Now add these two lists to my earlier blog, and take an aspirin.
Lake Superior State University 2014 List of Banished Words
Has the honor of receiving the most nominations this year.
“People have taken pictures of themselves for almost as long as George Eastman’s company made film and cameras. Suddenly, with the advent of smartphones, snapping a ‘pic’ of one’s own image has acquired a vastly overused term that seems to pop up on almost every form of social media available to us….A self-snapped picture need not have a name all its own beyond ‘photograph.’ It may only be a matter of time before photos of one’s self and a friend will become ‘dualies.’ LSSU has an almost self-imposed duty to carry out this banishment now.” – Lawrence, Coventry, Conn. and Ryan, North Andover, Mass.
“Named ‘Word of the Year’ by Oxford Dictionary? Give me a break! Ugh, get rid of it.” – Bruce, Ottawa, Ont.
“Myselfie disparages the word because it’s too selfie-serving. But enough about me, how about yourselfie?” – Lisa, New York, NY
“It’s a lame word. It’s all about me, me, me. Put the smartphone away. Nobody cares about you.” — David, Lake Mills, Wisc.
Dayna of Rochester Hills, Mich., laments how many people observe “Selfie Sunday” in social media, and Josh of Tucson, Ariz., asks, “Why can’t we have more selflessies?”
TWERK / TWERKING
Another word that made the Oxford Dictionaries Online this year.
Cassidy of Manheim, Penn. said, “All evidence of Miley Cyrus’ VMA performance must be deleted,” but it seems that many had just as much fun as Miley did on stage when they submitted their nominations.
“Let’s just keep with ‘shake yer booty’ — no need to ‘twerk’ it! Hi ho, hi ho, it’s away with twerk we must go.” – Michael, Haslett, Mich.
Bob of Tempe, Ariz. says he responds, “T’werk,” when asked where he is headed on Monday mornings.
“I twitch when I hear twerk, for to twerk proves one is a jerk — or is at least twitching like a jerk. Twerking has brought us to a new low in our lexicon.” – Lisa, New York, NY
“Time to dance this one off the stage.” – Jim, Flagstaff, Ariz.
“The fastest over-used word of the 21st century.” – Sean, New London, NH.
“The newest dictionary entry should leave just as quickly.” – Bruce, Edmonton, Alb.
HASHTAG
We used to call it the pound symbol. Now it is seeping from the Twittersphere into everyday expression. Nearly all who nominated it found a way to use it in their entries, so we wonder if they’re really willing to let go. #goodluckwiththat
“A technical term for a useful means of categorizing content in social media, the word is abused as an interjection in verbal conversation and advertising. #annoying!” – Bob, Grand Rapids, Mich.
“Typed on sites that use them, that’s one thing. When verbally spoken, hashtag-itgetsoldquickly. So, hashtag-knockitoff.” – Kuahmel, Gardena, Calif.
“Used when talking about Twitter, but everyone seems to add it to everyday vocabulary. #annoying #stopthat #hashtag #hashtag #hashtag .” – Alex, Rochester, Mich.
“It’s #obnoxious #ridiculous #annoying and I wish it would disappear.” – Jen, Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.
“#sickoftheword” – Brian, Toronto, Ont.
TWITTERSPHERE
To which we advise, keep all future nominations to fewer than 140 characters.
“There cannot possibly be any oxygen there.” – Matt of Toledo, Ohio
MISTER MOM
The 30-year anniversary of this hilarious 1983 Michael Keaton movie seems to have released some pent-up emotions. It received nearly as many nominations as “selfie” and “twerk” from coast to coast in the U.S. and Canada, mostly from men.
“It was a funny movie in its time, but the phrase should refer only to the film, not to men in the real world. It is an insult to the millions of dads who are the primary caregivers for their children. Would we tolerate calling working women Mrs. Dad?” says Pat, of Chicago, who suggests we peruse the website captaindad.org, the manly blog of stay-at-home parenting.
“I am a stay-at-home dad/parent. And if you call me ‘Mr. Mom,’ I will punch you in the throat. – Zachary, East Providence, RI.
“Society is changing and no longer is it odd for a man to take care of his children. Even the Wall Street Journal has declared, “Mr. Mom is dead” (Jan. 22, 2013). I think it is time to banish it.” – Chad, St. Peters, Mo.
T-BONE
This common way of describing an automobile collision has now made it from conversation into the news reports. While the accident’s layout does, indeed, resemble its namesake cut of beef, we’d prefer to dispense with the collateral imagery and enjoy a great steak.
“As in ‘crashed into another car perpendicularly.’ Making a verb out of a cut of beef?” – Kyle, White Lake, Mich.
_______ ON STEROIDS
New! Improved! Steroidal!
“Please, does the service at my favorite restaurant have to be ‘on steroids’ (even though the meat may be)?” – Betsy, Los Angeles, Calif.
SUFFERING SUFFIXES:
Many in advertising and in the news took two words – Armageddon and Apocalypse and shortened them into two worn-out suffixes this year.
–AGEDDON
–POCALYPSE
“Come on down, we’re havin’ car-ageddon, wine-ageddon, budget-ageddon, a sale-ageddon, flower-ageddon, and so-on-and-so-forth-ageddon! None of these appear in the Book of Revelations.” – Michael, Haslett, Mich.
“Every passing storm or event is tagged as ice-ageddon or snow-pocalypse. There’s a limited supply of …ageddons and …pocalypses; I believe it’s one, each. When running out of cashews becomes nut-ageddon, it’s time to re-evaluate your metaphors.” – Rob, Sellersville, Penn.
POLITICS:
Politicians never fail to disappoint in providing fodder for the list.
INTELLECTUALLY / MORALLY BANKRUPT
Used by members of each political party when describing members of the other.
OBAMACARE
A wandering prefix (see 2010’s “Obama-“) finally settles down. We thought it might rival “fiscal cliff,” the most-nominated phrase on the 2013 list, but it didn’t come close.
Cal of Cherry Hill, NJ wonders, “Are there intellectual creditors?”
“Because President Obama’s signature healthcare law is actually called the Affordable Care Act. The term has been clearly overused and overblown by the media and by members of Congress.” – Ben of Michigan “What more can I say?” – Jane, McKinney, Tex.
SPORTS:
ADVERSITY
Heard often in the world of football.
FAN BASE
Why use one word when apparently two are twice as better?
“Facing adversity is working 50 hours a week and still struggling to feed your kids. Facing third and fifteen without your best receiver with tens of millions in the bank, is not.” – Kyle, White Lake, Mich.
“From the world of sports comes the latest example of word inflation. What’s wrong with the word ‘fans’?” – Paul, Canton, Mich.
Here’s an interesting article that I ran across the other day. Some of my older readers may appreciate the list.
I miss the taste of paste (wintergreen) and the smell and feel and visual glory (and names) of Crayola brand crayons (which I actually collect to this day). I also miss clapping erasers together to remove most of the chalk dust, and then opening the port to the built-in vacuum system to let the negative pressure do the rest. I also miss blackboards and using white and colored chalk. (I’ve taught in classrooms with the “revised updated” green boards and those white boards that use foul, chemical-smelling markers that stain hands, sleeves and shirt fronts). Cursive writing, for me at least, was always easier than printing which we were never taught. While my results were never as good as Lucy Stansbury’s (class artist), they were passable and I learned to write quickly. I even learned some symbols to speed up taking notes such as “&” for “and” along with the use of arrows and balloon circles.
I also miss my special Scripto automatic pencil with its shorter round, see-through red or blue barrel and pink eraser. I will not miss the wall-mounted pencil sharpeners that I had to clean and that left my hands filthy with carbon black. But I will miss the sharp points that those wall mounters gave my lead pencils (#2 yellow Ticondaroga or Dixon), a point that hand-held sharpeners can’t duplicate. I do miss 16 mm. Bell and Howell movie projectors, less so the slide projector–even those with carousels– or the film strip projectors with their funny beeps. Cigar boxes, of course, were a luxury item for those of us who lived in non-smoking households. I had a deal with the local pharmacist who saved me some every now and then. Cigar boxes could be made to hold a variety of secret, amazing items, including de-coder rings, single edge razor blades for model airplane building, a skate key, a missing jigsaw puzzle piece, a chess piece, a folding scout knife with multiple blades, a match book, cloth “wolf-bear-lion” patches from my blue cub scout shirt, and a spare (oft-misplaced) needle valve that we used with a bicycle pump to inflate basketballs and footballs. You get the idea.
I wonder if enforced good manners have also disappeared? Coloring between the lines? Cutting construction paper to make Christmas Tree chains or Valentines–with a deplorably dull set of round pointed tin scissors? How about peanut butter sandwiched between the halves of a hamburger bun, warm milk in half pint cartons with a straw, fig newtons, brown bananas, or the surprising first taste of V-8?
I reserve a special place in my memory of elementary schools for the smell of mimeograph sheets or ditto sheets. The scent of that ink can still take my imagination through history–across the world, over the times tables, up and down animal kingdom, and in and out of Presidents and capitals. I knew so much, so easily, then. Uncomplicated process and no Software building and testing errors.
You don’t see this much anymore. (Three Lions/Getty Images)
Modern technology has changed the American classroom in many ways, as have parental attitudes. Here are some elementary school essentials that are either long gone or starting to disappear from the classroom.
1. BlackboardsThe first classroom blackboard was reportedly installed at West Point in 1801. As the railroads spread across the U.S., so did chalkboards, as slate was now easily hauled long-distance from mines in Vermont, Maine, and Pennsylvania. By the 1960s, though, blackboards began to go green — literally. Steel plates coated with porcelain enamel replaced the traditional slate boards; the green was easier on the eyes and chalk erased more completely off of the paint. In the 1990s, though, whiteboards began creeping into classrooms. Turns out that even “dustless” chalk annoyed kids with allergies and got into the nooks and crannies of the computers that were beginning to become classroom fixtures.
2. RecessThere are many reasons why some schools are eliminating or shortening recess: Students need every available moment for academics in order to prepare for standardized tests, too much liability lest a child gets injured, not enough budget to hire sufficient playground supervision, etc. Some schools that do still have recess have banned dodgeball or games like tag. Other schools have Recess Coaches who provide structured play and conflict resolution (Rock-Paper-Scissors rather than Pink Bellies) on the playground.
3. Cursive penmanship Who could have predicted that one day, cursive handwriting would become a hot-button issue along the lines of school prayer and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance? But thanks to computers and texting and all that fancy technology, script handwriting is slowly going the way of the abacus. Many educators believe that legible printing and good typing skills are all today’s students need to learn to succeed in the world, and cursive is a non-essential skill. I recall feeling quite grown-up when I started learning cursive in the second grade — I could now read all that “secret” stuff my mom and other adults were writing down!
4. Wall-mounted hand crank pencil sharpeners Maybe teachers were made of sturdier stuff Back in the Day, or maybe they just had a stock of Valium in the teacher’s lounge…how else did they survive without the “Classroom-Friendly Pencil Sharpeners” that are all the rage? Some are electric, some are manual, but they are quiet and many have a pop-out feature to prevent over-sharpening. Sure, these old-style sharpeners were awkward for southpaws to use, but to take away the fun of grinding a pencil down to a stub just for the heck of it? Sheesh.
5. PasteMany school supply lists today require glue sticks, not the good ol’ white paste in a jar with an applicator that smelled so minty good it always inspired at least one kid to eat the stuff.
6. Film projectorsThe really fancy models came with a playback device that “beeped” when it was time to advance the filmstrip to the next frame. And it always seemed to take forever to get the picture just right on the screen (propping it up on one book, then two…then focusing…). But we didn’t mind the delay — it was just that much more time that we didn’t have to spend actually studying or paying attention.
7. 16mm movie projectorsThe A/V captain had to turn the volume up to 11 most of the time, due to the poor sound quality of the ancient films and the clack-clack-clack noise of the sprocket holes moving through the machinery. Sometimes a series of holes were broken and the film would get “stuck” or skip. The projectionist knew then to stick a pencil in the lower loop and pull it just so to get the classic Coronet or Jiminy Cricket “I’m No Fool” educational short back on track.
8. Pencil sharpeners with exposed razorsYou probably don’t see many pencil cases with built-in times table cheat sheets any more, and even pocket pencil sharpeners have undergone a transformation in recent years. The models sold for student use are much more safety-oriented, with the blade concealed in a plastic cup or enclosure of some sort. In fact, in 2008 police were summoned to a school in Hilton Head, South Carolina, when a student was “caught” possessing a small razor blade. The police report stated that the “weapon” was obviously from a pocket pencil sharpener that had broken (the kid had the broken plastic pieces, too), but the school was obliged to call the law due to their “zero tolerance for weapons” policy.
9. Cigar boxesEven back in the 1960s, you could buy “school boxes” that were the same size and had the same hinged lid as a cigar box, but they had cutesy pictures of the alphabet and school supplies painted on them. And they cost money. So when kids brought home that list of necessary school supplies every year, many parents went to the local drugstore and got an empty cigar box for free. There was something rather soothing about opening that box up during the day to retrieve a pencil or ruler and getting a quick whiff of rich tobacco aroma. By the end of the year, of course, ol’ King Edward had an eye patch and warts drawn all over his face. Thanks to the decline of smoking in the U.S. and the idea of a tobacco product being near a first grader’s desk, most students bring those store-bought boxes to class these days.
10. Mimeographed sheetsSometimes called “dittos” and technically referred to as a spirit duplicator, they reproduced multiple copies of an original document in dark purple ink for the teacher to pass out. But the most important thing about a ditto sheet was the aroma — a fresh one smelled heavenly. It was pretty much a reflex — as soon as you were handed a freshly mimeographed paper, you lifted it up to your face and inhaled that delicious, indescribable fragrance.
A miracle: Team Oracle pulled it off after being so woefully behind that American ‘yachts people’ were wringing their hands in despair. As for me, I have been depressed and in despair since I first glimpsed the trials on YouTube. The new racing devices bear little resemblance to contenders of yore, and I confess that I could get no emotional juices running this year.
Oracle was a technological miracle, fast as the wind (even faster, it’s said), sported little hull in the water, and could accelerate like a Porsche. Cost of the hardware was well in excess of $10 million. Crew and sponsorship were hardly American.
Call me an old fogey, but I much preferred the line and grace of Lipton’s J-boats and the design and refinements of the subsequent 12 meters that raced to keep the Cup in the NY Yacht Club. Those were beautiful yachts that relied more on design and sailing skill than on mechanics, carbon fibers, and technical sophistication to achieve maximum hull speed.
I celebrate America’s victory, therefore, with a muted “hooray.”
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