Free to Believe Anything

Recent physics data coming from CERN seems to suggest that neutrinos might— I say MIGHT— travel faster than the speed of light. If true, this would prove Einstein wrong about a crucial fact of physics. Already, evangelical Christian fundamentalists are seizing on this to say that, “If Einstein is wrong about physics, then science can be wrong about evolution, too.” This would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetic. For evangelicals to try defending their thoughts about science based on their logic is like an illiterate non-reader critiquing the sentence structure of F Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer.

Here’s the thing. If Einstein is found to be in error about the speed of light, the revision of his theory will come from scientific testing and computation. It won’t come from The Old Testament. And if evolution someday turned out to be a flawed notion (I guess anything is possible) then that revision as well would be based on science, not The Old Testament.

And here’s why this is important to all of us. In the United States we bend over backwards to accommodate the radical anti-science conservative beliefs of the evangelical Christian fundamentalists, because they compose a large voting block when it comes election time. If a large segment of the voting public consolidated themselves around a hardcore belief in Santa Claus, then the political forces would devote some happy talk to Santa Claus too. Meanwhile, China and India don’t burden themselves with The Old Testament or anti-science fundamentalism. In China, EVERY student in eighth grade is REQUIRED to begin their multi-year curriculum in physics, biology, and mathematics. In America, only 18% of high school students EVER study physics or biology at any time in their undergraduate public schooling.

In the United States, people are free to believe in The Old Testament, and they are free to not care a thing about science. They are also free to be poor and unemployed while they watch all the wealth and jobs go to China.

What Was So Different About the 1930s?

Throughout The Great Depression of the 1930s, the national unemployment rate never rose above 30%, and I wondered what was on the mind of the 70% who still had jobs. With very little research, it was easy to find the answer— optimism for the future. An unbounded and ubiquitous optimism pervaded America, and there was a kind of inner confidence that America would soon lead the world to prosperity. This world of tomorrow that everyone imagined even had a name— The March of Progress.

The March of Progress was a collection of anticipated marvels, prophesied in 1939, that were realistically expected to exist in the year 1964: buildings taller than the Empire State Building constructed with lavish use of aluminum and glass, a multi-lane highway system that would allow a driver to travel coast-to-coast without stopping for anything but food and gasoline, the cautious but feasible use of atomic energy for power production, ubiquitous plastics, television sets in every home supported by a broadcast infrastructure, nylon stockings for women, rockets capable of orbiting above earth's atmosphere, radio telephones for occasional use in automobiles, aircraft capable of carrying 200 passengers at 400 mph, antibiotics, warships an eighth of a mile long, prefabricated low-cost houses, and fresh fruits and vegetables available at any time of year. And when 1964 came to pass, every one of these wonders had become reality. Even in 1939, for those in the depths of poverty, technology and innovation promised a better future.

In 2011, there’s a new March of Progress that’s become reality: transcontinental bullet trains capable of speeds in excess of 250 mph, skyscrapers approaching heights of a quarter mile, and supercomputers capable of a trillion computations per second. The thing is, these technological wonders all exist in China and Japan. The U.S.A. is behind Asia in this new, modern-day March of Progress, and as if to put an exclamation point behind that reality, the United States just ended… ENDED its manned space launch capability. We do, however, still have the world’s biggest and best military, although we can no longer win a war.

So what’s on the mind of Americans today, the 90% who still have jobs, and who aren’t yet brain dead from incessant ideologically-biased political happy talk? What do we have to match the optimism of the 1930s? What future can we predict with confidence? Here’s a partial list: the emerging power of radical fundamentalism in both Islam and Christianity, diminishing effectiveness of antibiotics, identity theft, man-made climate changes and rising sea levels, extermination of the world’s supply of edible fish, a series of global economic meltdowns, depletion of natural resources (especially fresh water), escalating and unstoppable rates of Internet crime with pervasive hacking, and corruption in seats of power… all problems with their origins in the growth of population and the disparity of living conditions across the planet. And then there’s a secondary but related set of problems: most countries including the United States are now becoming ungovernable, and most large corporations are unmanageable, and most religions are unreasonable. The optimism of The Great Depression is something we’ll never see again.

Stop Blaming the Government and the Politicians

If China was going down the tubes (the reality for China is quite the opposite), then it would be appropriate to blame the government. In China, the government runs the country. In America, “we the people” run the country. That’s the problem. We now have a democracy— the very kind of democracy that frightened the hell out of the Founding Fathers who wrote the U.S. Constitution. That’s why they gave us a republic instead. The way it was supposed to work— in the original plan— a person might get elected to office by voters who were so petulant and spiteful that they were demanding a complete government shutdown, but then once that person joined other elected leaders in the seat of government, he or she would work in cooperation for the good of the country. And most essential of all, the voters were expected to be sophisticated enough to know they couldn’t always get their own way on everything. That’s how a republic works. That’s how America is supposed to work. That’s all in the past.

Last election, about 50 Republicans (most affiliated with the Tea Party) were sent to Washington with marching orders to shut down the government, and damned if they didn’t do exactly that. That’s true democracy in action. Why should we be surprised at what they’re doing when they said they were going to do it?

So how did America get to this point? I blame four things: Ubiquitous and incessant polling. Massive political advertising on television. The emergence of our current system of primary elections to choose candidates. And 40 years of “dumb down” public schooling. We now have elected leaders who first become candidates by winning a primary, as opposed to being selected by party officials. All too often, this “winning” is achieved by the hiring the best PR agency to design the most effective attack ads while, at the same time, raising the most money to pay for the whole negative advertising process. And the attack ads work because the electorate just isn’t very bright. But here’s the killer. Once in office, elected officials make their decisions and policies based on the poll numbers. And then they crow that they’re following the will of the people, which they are. By definition, that’s democracy, but that’s not how it was supposed to be.

Democracies, if we look back at the historical record of true democracies, never last more than a century or two, and this includes the Athenian democracy in ancient Greece which went belly up after 172 years. The Founding Fathers knew this. In a true democracy, the voters don’t just get what they want. They get what they deserve.

Also see: Dying From "Death By Polling" 6/27/11

Lessons from the Chinese Dairy Industry

Embarrassed by the recent infant deaths from melamine-tainted milk, and anxious to put the scandal to rest, the Chinese courts have mandated the execution of the two men judged to be the most egregiously responsible for the problem, and long prison sentences have been issued for 19 others connected to the tragic safety failure. For me, this story has two profound implications, quite unrelated to each other, but both logically flowing from this harsh verdict issued by the Chinese court.

The first lesson, here, is that China takes its public health image very seriously. The last thing China wants is to be seen as a third-world nation when it comes to the health of its citizens. For this reason, the world can expect official China to hide, or minimize, the full extent of the H5N1 (bird flu) outbreak that is taking place there right now. The high mortality numbers that came to light in Germany this week (see yesterday’s blog, 1/22) are probably correct, and may even be lower than what is actually occurring.

Lesson number two from the death penalty verdict in China is that Communist capitalism may have a large competitive advantage over our unfettered free-market capitalism where it’s every man for himself when it comes to responsibility. Starting with Enron's Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling nine years ago, and continuing right up through John Thain in today’s news, American corporate business has seen an unbroken sequence of CEOs exploiting their companies and their employees for their own enrichment, and nothing in the American system alters or impedes this activity. Worse yet, in some circles, CEO excess is actually admired as a sign of success. What we now have is, essentially, a 21st Century feudalism where the working serfs exist to serve the lords. There is no doubt that if Bernie Madoff had pulled his little scheme in China instead of New York, he would be in his grave instead of his $7 million dollar penthouse. The accountability demanded from managers and executives in China is one reason why China will probably leave America in the dust.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this.

Know Your Audience

The conventions are over, the rhetoric has reached new stratospheric heights, and we are left with the discouraging knowledge that one of these tag-team duos will run the executive branch in just four short months. I don’t fault them, or their speechwriters. The first rule of public speaking is, “Know your audience,” and those politicos that we watched on TV during the past two weeks knew that they were speaking to an audience dumbed down by the worst public education system in the industrialized world. So, based on the rhetoric, here’s what we can expect.

If McCain-Palin are calling the shots, we will get a proposal for a Constitutional amendment to turn back Roe v. Wade. The Dems in congress will prevent anything close to 70% ratification, the amendment will fail, and the Dynamic Duo will tell the Christian Right that they, “tried their best to affirm the right to life, but were thwarted by the Left.” Mission accomplished. If Obama-Biden are running the show, they will task the auto makers to double fuel mileage standards by 2020, GM and Ford will go out of business (that will happen anyway) and the Obama administration will leave office with automobile fuel efficiency essentially right where it is now. It’s called, “kicking the can down the road.” Neither administration will use taxation or surcharges to make giant pickups and SUVs less attractive, and small cars more attractive. They are doing this in China, now, and God-forbid that we should copy China.

Neither administration will pull money from the Pentagon budget to rebuild the American railroad system, or to make New Orleans immune to flooding, the way that Holland has been for 300 years. Railroads and sea walls are “old technology” and they’re not as sexy as aircraft carriers. Neither administration will pull money from the Pentagon budget to institute a healthcare system for every citizen, so that we can catch up to the rest of the industrialized world in this area where we currently rank dead last. Neither administration will pull money from the Pentagon budget to fund the kind of “Manhattan Project” science that it will take to develop clean energy that comes anywhere close to meeting our insatiable energy needs. Make no mistake about it—neither administration will pull money from the Pentagon budget for ANYTHING. To even think about such a thing is deemed to be unpatriotic, un-American, and unsupportive of the troops.

Face it folks, we’re much more like Sparta than Athens. If you’ve been through the American public school system in the last 30 years, you probably don’t understand the meaning of that statement.

The DNC Can't End Too Soon

I’m angry! I live on a small farm in Golden, Colorado, with a magnificent view of the towering North Table Mesa out our back window. This morning, the view was different (see the photo above). This is exactly the kind of nonsense that I feared would accompany the DNC circus in Denver this week.

The Chinese Olympics, happening as it did just before the two political conventions, gives us a great insight into the ways that protest fits into the national agenda in China and in the U.S. China had zero tolerance for protests during their Olympics, and the U.S. critics point to this as another sign of disregard for human rights in China. Meanwhile, here in Denver, we see zero outrage toward the protests, along with little or no control, and the champions of the red, white, and blue see this as a good thing. But my question is this, “Does it really violate human rights to enforce the local laws against disorderly conduct?”

I was born during WWII, so my America was the America of the late 1940s, and the 1930s were recent history to me. I’ve always believed that the United States achieved its greatness during that time, and has been slipping backwards ever since. Here’s the thing. If you took videos of the streets in China two weeks ago, and videos of the streets in Denver this week, and you somehow went back in time and showed both videos to Americans in the 40s and 30s, and you asked them which video scenes most looked like America—the people of that time would choose the scenes of China. Back when America was truly great, not just in our mythology, but also in the eyes of the world, the United States looked like China today. We actually had strong laws against disorderly conduct, and those laws were actually enforced, and human rights had its limitations.

But those days are gone, and now I get to look at the anti-abortion message on my mountain every day. I know from hiking on the very spot where those letters appear that they are all over 100 feet high. That message required the work of many people (perhaps as many as 10) to spray paint those words in just one night. We also know another thing. Anti-abortionists put their cause above the cause of the environment and natural beauty. It’s the agenda of the Christian right wing ultra-zealots. Gee, wouldn’t Jesus be proud!

In China, It's About More Then Sports

As the 2008 Olympics draws to a close, I believe that something important has been accomplished, and it has little to do with sports. Thanks to the extensive TV coverage, average Americans have been given their first in-depth look at the country that will pass the U.S. to be the dominant nation in the 21st century. The Chinese people are willing to work, both smart and hard, to make this happen, and this applies most of all to the young Chinese people.

Those tiny little Chinese female gymnasts do much more than lie about their age and win gold medals. They also study biology, chemistry and physics. These studies are mandatory for 100% of the high school students in China, while in the U.S. 18% of our high schoolers are willing to tackle the sciences. The young Chinese idolize Bill Gates. The young Americans idolize Miley Cyrus. Educated predictions say that by 2020, 90% of the world’s scientists and engineers will be working at their trade in China and India. The prestigious American scientific universities such as MIT have been heavily attended by Chinese and Indian students for decades now, but in the past, most of those students stayed on and built their careers in the United States. But now, most all of them go back to Asia.

You might ask why everyone in high school needs to study the sciences. After all, not everyone can go on to be a scientist. I believe, and this is just my personal opinion, that such a curriculum is necessary for a person who wants to be truly intelligent about the modern world. We live in a scientific world, and scientific ignorance is a recipe for failure in such a world. If you want an example of this, look no farther than the millions of people who listen to Rush Limbaugh tell them that oil doesn’t necessarily come from decayed prehistoric plants, and they believe it “because Rush said it.” With Limbaugh working on our side, the Chinese have a huge advantage given to them in their quest to be number one. But that’s just my opinion.

A Few Random Thoughts About China

Today is the kick off of the Chinese Orympics (phonetic spelling. Sorry, but I needed to get that out of my system). If you believe the sports writers, the games are shaping up as a super-power match between China and the U.S.A. to see who will win the medal count. Lucky for the Americans, the competition is athletic, rather than scholastic or academic. If the contest was the latter, the Chinese would win handily and the U.S.A. would fall to near the bottom of the medal count. In China, where learning is valued even above athletics, the high school drop-out rate is near zero compared with the American drop-out rate of over 25%. But the next two weeks are all about muscle power, so we might do okay.

The media is filling air time between competitions by fawning over the giant “bird’s nest” stadium, and wondering if it will be visible through the haze of pollution on a day to day basis. They are actually missing a terrific irony, here. China now has the world’s largest bird’s nest, but no birds. Chairman Mao, during the Cultural Revolution, told his people that birds competed with them for seeds and grain, and he suggested that killing off the birds would solve hunger problems. That competition ended with a score of Chairman Mao—1, Birds— 0.

During the Cold War, the Soviet—U.S.A. race to dominate the medal count during the Olympics was seen every four years as a kind of metaphor for the bigger contest to dominate the super-power race for supremacy. That same scenario is now shaping up with the China—U.S.A. competition. What makes this interesting on the larger scale is that the U.S.A. is very much in decline in everything but military might, while China is in a state of ascendency in pretty much everything. They’ve chosen to go with a single-party free-market capitalism, and we have our two-party free-market capitalism. Right now, they seem to be on the right track. Without any philosophical anchor like our Constitution, they approach everything from the standpoint of pure functionality and pragmatism, and they solve their problems on a kind of “ad hoc” basis. It seems to work for them. The Western industrialized nations of Europe and the Americas had a 300 year head start heading into the modern world, and China has managed to make up for lost time while dealing with a population of 1.3 billion citizens. Not bad.

Human rights suffer in this rush to modernize their culture while keeping control over their people. This fact was pointed out to them yesterday by none other than George W. Bush (He’s like Eddie Haskell. He never rises above the low expectations you have for him). But when functionality takes precedent over human rights, some interesting dynamics occur, and they’re not all bad. If Enron had been a Chinese company, Jeff Skilling and Ken Ley and several others would have been dragged out from their posh offices and summarily executed for their innovative management style. I guess that whether or not this would be a human rights violation would depend on where you stood in the Enron Corporation. When the Chinese equivalent of our head of the FDA took bribes in return for letting substandard pharmaceutical compounds flow into the Chinese drug system, his ethical lapse was rewarded with a bullet in the head. That happened two years ago. That only needs to happen a few times, and people of responsibility suddenly get “born again” with regard to their ethics.

The 20th Century was called, The American Century. The 21st Century is already shaping up to be The Chinese Century. In the meantime, I say, “Let the Orympic Games begin.”

Beware of That Patriotic Lapel Pin

I became a patriot in 1948, when I began to learn about my country in second grade. At that time, the GDP of the United States was one-half of the GDP of the entire world, and the manufacturing and industrial capability of the country was one-half of the world’s total capacity. 88% of all the cars in the world were American made, running on American roads, and fueled with gas refined from domestic oil being pumped out of the ground in Texas, Oklahoma, and California. Our food production was sufficient to feed the world because the global population was only about two billion. Our military arsenal contained, maybe, a half-dozen atomic bombs, the only such devices anywhere on the planet. Not surprisingly, the American notion of patriotism was intimately tied to the notion of supremacy. The two went hand-in-hand, and that equation was totally valid in 1948.

Time passes, and things change. Today, we are mostly known for being number one in prison population, divorce rate, drug use (both legal and illegal), cosmetic surgery numbers, illegitimate births, and of course, military spending. So it’s quite surprising that our notion of patriotism is still equated with supremacy in the minds of most Americans. I guess old notions have a hard time going away. As a result, a candidate for political office risks his or her career if they take note of the national deficiencies, and for everyone else, acknowledging our shortcomings is seen as a lack of patriotic pride. The patriot-supremacists have even co-opted the American flag lapel pin as their talisman, which can, by its absence, identify those heretics who might tend toward a lack of pride and a bit of national pessimism. The willingness to wear it identifies the true believer. People without the lapel pin are immediately suspect when it comes to their patriotism. The thing is, all lapel pins are now made in China.

Since most of the patriot-supremacists are notoriously paranoid about things like the Antichrist and the Federal Reserve Bank, I think that now is the time to give them another reason for paranoia, and spread the Internet rumor that all Chinese-made lapel pins are imbedded with powerful radio chips to enable the Chi-Commies to track everyone wearing the talisman. I defy anyone to disprove this.

The Modern-Day Version of Cleopatra's Barge

Five months to go until the 2008 election, and new polls show that 82% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. This causes me to ask two questions. The first and most obvious question is, “What the hell is going through the optimistic minds of the 18% who still don’t get it?” And the second and more subtle question is, “Would the 82% do what was necessary to turn things around if they knew what it would take?” Would they ever vote for a candidate who wanted to cut the defense budget by 70%? Would they follow a leader who suggested mothballing our carrier fleet? Could they ever be seduced away from the national love affair with the military?

It’s no secret to most Americans that we spend more on our military-industrial machine than the entire rest of the world spends on their combined armaments. We have a military presence in 130 foreign countries. These are supposed to be sovereign nations, but we figure our invasiveness should be okay with everyone because we’re the good guys. Anyway, that’s our story, and we’re sticking to it. The funny thing is, the ancient Romans viewed the world the same way. So how did we get to this point?

In 1947, the War Department and the Department of the Navy merged into what we now call the Department of Defense. The primary reason for this consolidation was to raise the status and clout of the military arm of Government so that it could compete for funding with State Department. In 1947, State had seven times the budget of Defense. And for the next 44 years of the Cold War, the strategy made sense. The problem is, the Cold War ended. But nothing changed militarily for the United States. And now the iconic personal image that America presents to the rest of the world is not that of a businessman or scientist or statesman, but the image of a fully-battle-armored Marine. The U.S. State Department is now nothing but a footnote. As for the rest of the world, they are too busy making America irrelevant to care what we do militarily. They know that global influence no longer correlates with military power.

The world’s largest publically-traded corporation and the world’s tallest skyscraper are both Chinese. In neighboring India, Bollywood has passed Hollywood as the film capital of the world. Six universities in India provide graduate education in science and engineering that surpasses MIT and Cal Tech. At least three dozen industrialized nations have a lower mortality rate than the U.S. because of better healthcare systems. Toyota is now the most successful car maker, and 54 nations have more efficient railroad and airline infrastructures. The ten largest shopping malls on earth are outside of the United States. Most multi-billionaires are foreign, not American. And the American dollar is quickly losing status as the major global currency. Quite simply, the rest of the world looked at everything that projected American dominance- all of our financial and cultural and technological triumphs- and they worked diligently to surpass us in these areas. But the most visible icon that was intended to project American dominance, our Naval super-carrier fleet, was profoundly ignored by the rest of the world. Nobody outside of the United States considers an aircraft carrier to be anything but a truculent modern-day version of Cleopatra’s barge.

And here’s the final irony. The United States has the raw power to destroy every human being on earth, but our Pentagon can’t win a modern 4th generation war. For those countries and cultures that still believe in projecting themselves through violence, they have learned during the last seven years that their wars can be waged on the cheap, using nothing more than brilliant imagination and handmade explosive weapons, and sometimes just suicidal commitment. Trying to intimidate that kind of enemy with an aircraft carrier is like threatening a pesky house fly with a ball-peen hammer.

In early 2007, the Pentagon released an estimate that the insurgents spend about $100 to kill one of our boys. Their costs are so artificially low because the insurgents use captured U.S. military hardware, and arms that have been diverted from supplies given to the Iraqi army, and residue from pre-invasion stockpiles, and, of course, munitions supplied by Iran. They fight their side of the war in the same way that the “good guys” in Star Wars fight The Evil Empire. This is what’s meant by 4th generation warfare. 9/11 was another example of this. By way of comparison, we spend about 50 million dollars to kill one of them (the trillion-dollar cost of the war divided by the 20,000 that we’ve killed so far).

All of this takes us back to the idea that America is on the wrong track. It’s not that we can’t afford our huge military expenditures. We actually spend a lower percentage of GDP on defense now than we did in the late 1950s. It’s wasted money, but we can still afford the cost. What we can’t afford is the global perception that we, as a country, are just big and stupid. To use an analogy from the school environment, the rest of the world is hitting the books and excelling at extra-curricular activities, and The United States is bulked up on steroids and focused only on the Friday night game.

Only 100 Days Until the Orympic Games

There are no birds. You don’t notice it at first, but then after a day or two you realize that you just never see a bird. In China, nobody has seen a bird for almost thirty years. Back around the time of the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao convinced his population that the birds were competing with hungry Chinese children for precious grain and seed morsels, and he declared that the people should kill the birds to save their food supply. The people obediently complied, as they have always done in China. Final score: Mao 1, Birds 0. End of story.

There are other problems in the air as well. While you are looking upward for birds in China, you can’t help but notice the sky, and you eventually come to realize that it’s never blue. The pollution is always there, even on windy days, and the color of the atmosphere fluctuates between a very light, almost-misty gray, and the kind of dark ominous gray that would precede a storm in most other parts of the world. This perpetual gray sky has become something of a PR problem as China looks forward to hosting the Orympics (phonetic spelling). At least one world-class marathon runner has announced his intention to boycott the race rather than breathe the polluted air.

To me, a discussion of the Chinese sky seems like the best way to highlight the environmental problems faced by the world’s most populous nation. The startling statistics are another way to define the problem, but you can’t actually see statistics. We read them so often that we can probably recite them from memory. One third of all the concrete poured on the planet is poured in China. One new coal-fired electric power plant comes on line every nine days. The largest telecom company on earth is China Wireless, and they clear a spot for a new cell tower every three minutes. Automobile congestion on Chinese roads is the worst on earth, and this is at a time when only one out of every one-hundred Chinese citizens owns a car. With the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, the upper Yangtze River is now the most polluted natural body of water on earth, with bacterial levels comparable to the holding ponds in sewage treatment plants. I saw this for myself recently, and I held my nose as I watched the prow of my boat slice through a foam of floating feces. Happily, the Orympic rowing events will not be held on this venue.

At the western end of this new cesspool stands Chungking, known in China as “The Furnace.” Temperatures there in summer hover around 130 degrees Fahrenheit, in spite of the fact that the sun seldom penetrates the perpetual cloud cover. I was in Chungking on a day in June when the temperature was only 115, and it bore no resemblance at all to a hot day in Phoenix or Las Vegas. In Chungking, the sun doesn’t cast a shadow. The reason, again, is that Chinese sky. In another 100 days, with the Orympic Games taking place in August, the whole world will know exactly what I’m talking about.