Anti-Semitism again

I see the world press is once again revealing its latent anti-Semitism. The news on the web from traditional news sources is reporting in gory detail the civilian casualties from Israel’s newest air strikes into Gaza, but saying little or nothing about the Hamas actions that provoked them.

Never mind that it was Hamas who decided to end the truce just before Christmas. Never mind that it was Hamas thugs who fired almost 70 rockets into Israel the next day, and who have fired over 3000 rockets into Israel over the past year when a truce was supposed to be in effect. Never mind that Hamas has been equipping a small army over the past year with illegally-supplied weapons (including rockets) from Syria and Iran. Never mind that while Israel targets Hamas facilities and fighters, Hamas rockets and suicide bombers deliberately target civilians.

I can imagine what would happen if thugs in Canada or Mexico fired 3000 rockets into the USA, or if neighbors fired rockets into England or France or Germany or China or Russia. The response would be swift and decisive.

The Arab world, of course, is outraged, but that is to be expected in the never-never land they seem to live in. What puzzles and dismays me is the one-sided response from the non-Arab world press, who ought to know better.

One might also note that far worse violence against civilians goes on every day in places like Africa without drawing any particular sustained interest or comment from the world press, so one can only assume there are racist overtones as well.

Obama and science

President-elect Obama’s recent appointments for Secretary of the Department of Energy (Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winning physicist currently head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and chairman of the president's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (John Holdren, currently Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government), and head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Jane Lubchenco, Professor of Marine Biology at, Oregon State University) suggest that FINALLY we have an administration once again that recognizes the importance of science to the nation, and will appoint people who know their fields to high positions, instead of just political hacks..

The current neocon-dominated administration has been remarkably blind to the importance of science, repeatedly ignoring or denying scientific evidence that didn’t agree with their ideology, or that might obstruct their business supporters, and even apparently ordering government scientific reports to be redacted to modify or eliminate results unfavorable to their policies.

One can hope that Obama’s choices reflect a change of course, and that this administration might even believe scientific evidence and act on it. Now if Obama will just focus as well on improving the quality of elementary and secondary school science education in the U.S., we might be on the way to a reasonable recovery of our nation’s historical preeminence in science, a preeminence currently being maintained mostly by foreign scientists and engineers coming to the US to study and work.

I visited Silicon Valley a few months ago for the first time in a decade and was amazed to find whole sections in which the store signs and even some of the street signs are in Korean or Chinese – this is a telling indication of how dependent we have become on foreign scientists and engineers to drive the technological part of our economy – not a good sign.

The union dilemma

The auto company bailout plan failed to pass in the Senate, and last-minute negotiations between the Republicans and the United Auto Workers to try and salvage the bill reached an impasse when the UAW refused to agree to a date certain when their members would accept a pay cut bringing their pay in line with the pay of U.S. workers in competing (and profitable) companies like Toyota and Honda. They were offered any day in 2009, but refused to make a date-certain commitment – meaning in effect they refused to accept the pay cut. No doubt the union leaders hope in the end the administration will blink and aid the auto companies without significant union concessions – and in fact they may win this game of chicken in the short run, though they will lose in the long run.

The union dilemma is that on the one hand collective bargaining gives individual workers some much-needed leverage in the eternal competition to divide a company’s profits between shareholders, managers, and the workers. On the other hand, the incentive for union leaders is to gain as much pay and benefits as possible for their membership in the short run, irrespective of the long-term consequences for the company. So now we have domestic auto companies whose labor costs are so high they cannot compete effectively in the market, and are on the verge of bankruptcy. As a consequence, instead of just taking a pay cut, tens of thousands of auto workers may soon be out of a job altogether.

The problems GM and Chrysler and Ford face are not altogether the fault of the unions – the company management has been remarkably inept, and these three companies have been losing market share for years, at least in the U.S. market. Nonetheless, the union demands, backed by occasional strikes, have finally driven the companies over the economic cliff. GM’s average labor costs, including pensions, was about $73.50 per hour, while Toyota’s was about $48 per hour. GM worker health car costs are about $1525 per vehicle, vs $201 per vehicle for Toyota. It is pretty hard for a company to stay in business when its costs are that far out of line with the competition’s costs.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. Union labor costs were one of the primary reasons why the domestic steel companies were driven out of business by foreign competition, leaving us with high rust belt unemployment.

What is needed is some new form of collective bargaining system in which the incentives for the union leadership are aligned with survival of the company, rather than just with short-term gains for the membership. In fact, much the same change is needed for management pay as well in many industries, so that CEO’s aren’t incentivized just to maximize their yearly bonuses.

The great unknowns

One of my granddaughters, just turning 14, is fascinated with the big questions in astronomy and cosmology, and admitted recently that she desperately hopes that the nature of dark matter won’t be determined before she gets old enough to work on the problem herself.

That led me to reassure her that there were lots of big problems still to work on, and if dark matter has been understood by the time she finishes graduate school (unlikely), there will be lots of other interesting problems to work. And that conversation in turn led me to think for while about what some of the other remaining “big unknowns” were.

• We know a great deal about the neuroanatomy of the brain, and even a good bit about the molecular processes going on in and between brain cells, but we still have no idea how all of these mechanical and chemical processes result in a self-aware, thinking mind.

• We understand in great detail the working of gravitational fields, and can predict with high accuracy the effect of gravity of satellites and spacecraft and planets, yet at a fundamental level we still really have no idea how mass distorts spacetime in its vicinity to cause a gravitational field.

• We understand in great detail how to create and control electromagnetic fields, and routinely use this knowledge to build such sophisticated things as directional radio antennas and containment fields for plasma jets, yet at a fundamental level we still have no idea why an ordinary magnet draws some materials to it and not others.

• We now understand that black holes exist (a wild, off-the-wall idea only a few decades ago), and even that black holes seem to be essential to the formation of galaxies, and seem to exist in the center of most if not all galaxies, including our own. Yet we understand almost nothing about what goes on in a black hole. Calculations based on standard physics go awry (give indeterminate answers or go to infinity) in the center of a black hole.

• We know life exists, because it exists here on this planet, but we as yet have no idea if life is common or rare in the universe, and if the basic structure of earth life (DNA-RNA based) is the only form it can take. Neither do we know if, where conditions allow enough time for it to evolve, intelligence is rare or common in the universe.

• We understand the pace at which radioactive materials decay, according to the half-life rule, but we have no idea what causes a particular radioactive atom to decide to decay at one moment rather than another. Nor do we understand the recently-discovered fact that the rate of decay of radioactive elements all across the earth apparently fluctuates minutely but synchronously.


It’s worth remembering that just because we have equations that can accurately describe and predict an effect does not mean that we truly understand the effect, just as fire was used practically for tens of thousands of years before anyone had the slightest idea what was going on in a fire.

Rest assured, dear granddaughter, that there will be plenty of big problems left to work on when you grow up.

A qualitative change

There has been a qualitative change in the world, and we need to learn how to adapt to it. The change didn’t occur on 9/11/2001. That’s just the date on which we began to wake up to the fact that the change had occurred. We still haven’t really grasped the magnitude of the change, or the magnitude of the effort we need to adapt to that change.

There are two things which have changed.

We have always had violent maniacs, deranged fanatics, thugs, and ambitious and unprincipled leaders among us. We have always had a reservoir of deluded and misguided souls whom those leaders could manipulate to their own ends. And we have never lacked for pathological beliefs, or real or imagined grievances that are used to justify the most inhuman and outrageous acts. But until recently the damage such people could do to society was limited. With swords and machetes and even firearms there are only so many people an individual or small group can maim or kill. Even truck bombs or commandeered airplanes can only bring down one or two buildings at a time.

Up until now, to really destroy a nation or a civilization, to level their cities and salt the earth they stood on, required the resources and armies of a nation, or coalition of nations.

The first thing that has changed is the advent of nuclear and biological weapons. With these a small group, even a talented individual, now has the capability to destroy cities, perhaps nations, perhaps all life. It still takes the resources of a nation to produce weapons grade uranium or plutonium, but it only takes a small group to buy or steal those materials and assemble them into a crude but effective weapon capable of wiping any major city from the map, and to deliver that weapon in a truck or car or boat to its target.

Biological weapons are even harder to control. The raw materials exist in nature all around us, the knowledge can be found in any good university, and the required equipment can be bought from supply houses or on Ebay or even homemade from materials from a local hardware store. And the potential damage from releasing a highly infectious lethal disease on the world is immense.

The second thing that has changed is that our society is now much more vulnerable to disruption than it used to be. Even 250 years ago most of our ancestors could, if they had to, make do with what they could grow or find in nature. Much of the world still can, but not our first world economies. First world economies abound in critical bottlenecks – places where a single failure would cause extensive disruption. And the many facets of our civilization are so tightly interdependent that a single failure in one place can cause havoc throughout.

For example, we are wholly dependent on our electric grid. These days, if the power went down for days or weeks, much of our food supply would spoil. Even oil-powered transportation would halt, because the electric pumps needed to move the fuel wouldn’t work. The average store couldn’t even ring up a sale because their checkout computers would be down. The average home would have no heat, because electricity drives the oil or gas furnace blowers. Almost all business and finance would come to a halt, because computers and machines wouldn’t work. And so on. Just look around and see what our lives would be with no electricity. And yet our electric grid – thousands of miles of high tension lines running unprotected across remote parts of the country – is a highly vulnerable target.

Spend a few minutes thinking about this and one can think of dozens of other similar vulnerabilities in our high-technology first world civilizations.

So what has changed in the past few decades, and what we are just now beginning to really notice, is that small groups or even individuals now have the capability to do us massive harm, even to destroy us as a civilization, even to destroy us as a species. And we will never lack for individuals who want to do us such harm.

There is no easy answer to how we adapt to these changes, but adapt we must, and soon. The sort of token cosmetic changes the government has been putting in place to date – like more screeners at airports – simply shows that the political structure doesn’t yet recognize either the magnitude or the seriousness of the threat.