Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The mind-blowing answer comes from a theory describing the birth of the universe in the first instant of time.
The universe has long captivated us with its immense scales of distance and time.
How far does it stretch? Where does it end... and what lies beyond its star fields... and streams of galaxies extending as far as telescopes can see?
These questions are beginning to yield to a series of extraordinary new lines of investigation... and technologies that are letting us to peer into the most distant realms of the cosmos...
But also at the behavior of matter and energy on the smallest of scales.
Remarkably, our growing understanding of this kingdom of the ultra-tiny, inside the nuclei of atoms, permits us to glimpse the largest vistas of space and time.
In ancient times, most observers saw the stars as a sphere surrounding the earth, often the home of deities.
The Greeks were the first to see celestial events as phenomena, subject to human investigation... rather than the fickle whims of the Gods.
One sky-watcher, for example, suggested that meteors are made of materials found on Earth... and might have even come from the Earth.
Those early astronomers built the foundations of modern science. But they would be shocked to see the discoveries made by their counterparts today.
The stars and planets that once harbored the gods are now seen as infinitesimal parts of a vast scaffolding of matter and energy extending far out into space.
Just how far... began to emerge in the 1920s.
Working at the huge new 100-inch Hooker Telescope on California's Mt. Wilson,
astronomer Edwin Hubble, along with his assistant named Milt Humason, analyzed the light of fuzzy patches of sky... known then as nebulae.
They showed that these were actually distant galaxies far beyond our own.
Hubble and Humason discovered that most of them are moving away from us. The farther out they looked, the faster they were receding.
This fact, now known as Hubble's law, suggests that there must have been a time when the matter in all these galaxies was together in one place.
That time... when our universe sprung forth... has come to be called the Big Bang.
How large the cosmos has gotten since then depends on how long its been growing... and its expansion rate.
Recent precision measurements gathered by the Hubble space telescope and other instruments have brought a consensus...
That the universe dates back 13.7 billion years.
Its radius, then, is the distance a beam of light would have traveled in that time ... 13.7 billion light years.
That works out to about 1.3 quadrillion kilometers.
In fact, it's even bigger.... Much bigger. How it got so large, so fast, was until recently a deep mystery.
That the universe could expand had been predicted back in 1917 by Albert Einstein, except that Einstein himself didn't believe it...
until he saw Hubble and Humason's evidence.
Einstein's general theory of relativity suggested that galaxies could be moving apart because space itself is expanding.
So when a photon gets blasted out from a distant star, it moves through a cosmic landscape that is getting larger and larger, increasing the distance it must travel to reach us.
In 1995, the orbiting telescope named for Edwin Hubble began to take the measure of the universe... by looking for the most distant galaxies it could see.
Taking the expansion of the universe into account, the space telescope found galaxies that are now almost 46 billion light years away from us in each direction... and almost 92 billion light years from each other.
And that would be the whole universe... according to a straightforward model of the big bang.
But remarkably, that might be a mere speck within the universe as a whole, according to a dramatic new theory that describes the origins of the cosmos.
It's based on the discovery that energy is constantly welling up from the vacuum of space in the form of particles of opposite charge... matter and anti-matter.
The Atheism Tapes (BBC)
STEVEN WEINBERG
Jonathan Miller doing reportage Nobel prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg and talking abouth atheizm.
Jonathan Miller doing reportage Nobel prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg and talking abouth atheizm.
A Clear Midnight
The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
By FRANK RICH
Published: August 28, 2010
ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.
Vive la révolution!
There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.
Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.
All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.
Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.
Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”
The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.
The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.
This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).
Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.
Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.
The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.
No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.
When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”
And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.
By FRANK RICH
Published: August 28, 2010
ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Frank Rich
Vive la révolution!
There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.
Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.
All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.
Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.
Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”
The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.
The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.
This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).
Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.
Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.
The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.
No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.
When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”
And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Elizabeth Blackburn
San Francisco Business Times - by Ron Leuty
Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, was named the Nobel Prize winner in physiology or medicine for discovering how chromosomes are protected.
Blackburn will share one-third of the $1.4 million prize with Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University and Jack Szostak of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital.
The trio found that chromosome-capping telomeres — which Blackburn has compared to the plastic ends of shoe laces — and the enzyme telomerase protect chromosomes as cells divide.
Blackburn and Szostak discovered that a unique DNA sequence in the telomeres protects the chromosomes from degradation while Blackburn and Greider, who received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, identified telomerase, the enzyme that makes telomere DNA.
If the telomeres are shortened, cells age. Higher telomerase activity, meanwhile, maintains telomeres length.
The discoveries have an impact on cancer research as well as research into aging and other diseases. Blackburn and her UCSF colleagues have found, for example, that telomeres are worn down in people who are stressed for long periods of time, like a parent caring for a chronically ill child.
Blackburn is the fourth UCSF Nobel Prize winner, joining Stanley Prusiner, Harold Varmus and former chancellor J. Michael Bishop.
It’s Witch-Hunt Season
It’s Witch-Hunt Season
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 29, 2010
The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to murder. And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment — at one point taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its Christmas card list.
Paul Krugman
To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly.
So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?
Anyone who remembered the 1990s could have predicted something like the current political craziness. What we learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of Americans just don’t consider government by liberals — even very moderate liberals — legitimate. Mr. Obama’s election would have enraged those people even if he were white. Of course, the fact that he isn’t, and has an alien-sounding name, adds to the rage.
By the way, I’m not talking about the rage of the excluded and the dispossessed: Tea Partiers are relatively affluent, and nobody is angrier these days than the very, very rich. Wall Street has turned on Mr. Obama with a vengeance: last month Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group, the private equity giant, compared proposals to end tax loopholes for hedge fund managers with the Nazi invasion of Poland.
And powerful forces are promoting and exploiting this rage. Jane Mayer’s new article in The New Yorker about the superrich Koch brothers and their war against Mr. Obama has generated much-justified attention, but as Ms. Mayer herself points out, only the scale of their effort is new: billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife waged a similar war against Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, the right-wing media are replaying their greatest hits. In the 1990s, Mr. Limbaugh used innuendo to feed anti-Clinton mythology, notably the insinuation that Hillary Clinton was complicit in the death of Vince Foster. Now, as we’ve just seen, he’s doing his best to insinuate that Mr. Obama is a Muslim. Again, though, there’s an extra level of craziness this time around: Mr. Limbaugh is the same as he always was, but now seems tame compared with Glenn Beck.
And where, in all of this, are the responsible Republicans, leaders who will stand up and say that some partisans are going too far? Nowhere to be found.
To take a prime example: the hysteria over the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan almost makes one long for the days when former President George W. Bush tried to soothe religious hatred, declaring Islam a religion of peace. There were good reasons for his position: there are a billion Muslims in the world, and America can’t afford to make all of them its enemies.
But here’s the thing: Mr. Bush is still around, as are many of his former officials. Where are the statements, from the former president or those in his inner circle, preaching tolerance and denouncing anti-Islam hysteria? On this issue, as on many others, the G.O.P. establishment is offering a nearly uniform profile in cowardice.
So what will happen if, as expected, Republicans win control of the House? We already know part of the answer: Politico reports that they’re gearing up for a repeat performance of the 1990s, with a “wave of committee investigations” — several of them over supposed scandals that we already know are completely phony. We can expect the G.O.P. to play chicken over the federal budget, too; I’d put even odds on a 1995-type government shutdown sometime over the next couple of years.
It will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular, we’re still suffering the after-effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and we can’t afford to have a federal government paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president govern. But that’s what we’re likely to get.
If I were President Obama, I’d be doing all I could to head off this prospect, offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe.
Friday, August 27, 2010
The J. Robert Oppenheimer Lecture - Frank Wilczek
Frank Wilczek a Nobel Lauriat in physics presents the grand unification of the forces as well as I have heard. He presents the subject in a manner which I could completely follow (almost) without simplifying it. His dry humor was evident and appreciated.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
By David Evans
August 17, 2010
Eliminating or lowering the risk from terrorist attack is the reason given for the continued war in Afghanistan. Other supporting reasons put forward for the war is to civilize the country and emancipate the woman as well as nation building. I do not accept any of these other supporting reasons to continue the war.
I would support the war if it could be demonstrated that war would substantially reduce our chance of being attacked by terrorists.
The issue as I would present it is this: are we safer from attack from terrorists launched from by any part of the world because we are fighting in Afghanistan, or not?
My point is that the chance of attack is about the same whether we carry the fight to Afghanistan and other places or withdraw from this part of the world altogether. It is obvious to me that this part of the world is so large that when we fight in one place there are always other places to plan and train terrorists to attack us.
The quality and seriousness of purpose placed in our efforts to defend the homeland is what is important and what we should ultimately depend on.
August 17, 2010
Eliminating or lowering the risk from terrorist attack is the reason given for the continued war in Afghanistan. Other supporting reasons put forward for the war is to civilize the country and emancipate the woman as well as nation building. I do not accept any of these other supporting reasons to continue the war.
I would support the war if it could be demonstrated that war would substantially reduce our chance of being attacked by terrorists.
The issue as I would present it is this: are we safer from attack from terrorists launched from by any part of the world because we are fighting in Afghanistan, or not?
My point is that the chance of attack is about the same whether we carry the fight to Afghanistan and other places or withdraw from this part of the world altogether. It is obvious to me that this part of the world is so large that when we fight in one place there are always other places to plan and train terrorists to attack us.
The quality and seriousness of purpose placed in our efforts to defend the homeland is what is important and what we should ultimately depend on.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Yale Course Explains Special and General Relativity for Me
I decided to save these videos here because I found that they explained physics which I have trouble understanding because of my weakness in mathematics.
Friday, August 13, 2010
The State of the War
The New York Times
EDITORIAL
The State of the War
Published: August 12, 2010
We believe that the United States has a powerful national interest in Afghanistan, in depriving Al Qaeda of a safe haven on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This country would also do enormous damage to its moral and strategic standing if it now simply abandoned the Afghan people to the Taliban’s brutalities.
But, like many Americans, we are increasingly confused and anxious about the strategy in Afghanistan and wonder whether, at this late date, there is a chance of even minimal success.
The trove of military documents recently published in The Times showed, once again, why this is so hard: the weakness of the Afghan Army and the corruption of the Afghan government; the double game being played by Pakistan; the failure of the Bush administration, for seven years, to invest enough troops, money or attention in a war that it allowed to drag on until it has now become the longest in the nation’s history.
The WikiLeaks documents, however, end in late 2009 and don’t show us how the war is going now or whether President Obama’s decision in December to send 30,000 more troops (the last won’t be in place until the end of this month) has a chance of altering those realities.
The answer to that question also depends on whether President Obama and his top advisers can finally secure the full commitment and cooperation of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and Pakistan’s military commander, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.
The first test of the new counterinsurgency strategy, in Marja, population 60,000, did not go well. American Marines drove the Taliban from Marja’s center in late February, but the “government in a box” that was supposed to win over the population with security, services and honest governance didn’t arrive. Competent Afghan officials didn’t want the risk or the hardship of moving there.
Taliban fighters quickly began a campaign of intimidation and assassination. Many local residents have been too frightened to sign up for American-financed reconstruction projects. With too few Afghan security forces to hold the town, the Marines have not been able to move beyond Marja.
American officials say things are improving. Some schools and markets have reopened, and as of mid-July there were 21 Afghan officials working at the Interim Government Center, with another 7 to 10 positions unfilled. Marja remains isolated and dangerous.
We were told that Marja was a rehearsal for a major offensive this spring around Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city and the Taliban’s spiritual base. Breaking the insurgents’ hold there was supposed to send a powerful message that the tide of the war is finally changing. After Marja, though, the Kandahar offensive was postponed, reinforcing the impression of drift.
Mr. Obama has promised to review his policy this December. We agree that the “surge” and his new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, need time. But reports from the ground have been so relentlessly grim — July’s death toll of 66 American troops was the highest since the war began — that Mr. Obama needs to do a better job right now of explaining the strategy and how he is measuring progress. Here are some of the things Americans and American allies, who are even more anxious about the war, need to hear:
THE PLAN AFTER MARJA Do the president and his generals still believe that counterinsurgency — securing crucial areas and building up local governments — is the best chance for driving back the Taliban? Is it even possible? What lessons were learned in Marja? How has it changed their approach in Kandahar?
American officials now insist that it was wrong to think about Kandahar as a set piece offensive. The city is already under the formal control of the Afghan government, and they say Special Forces are already pounding the Taliban outside the city while efforts to improve services and security inside are under way. Claiming that the media somehow didn’t get it right doesn’t help. The White House and Pentagon need to explain clearly what is happening there.
One of the first bureaucratic fights General Petraeus won after assuming command was his insistence on spending more than $200 million for diesel generators and fuel to increase Kandahar’s electricity supply. That sounds like a sensible way to win local support.
We are concerned about the administration’s decision not to challenge the control of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s younger brother and chief of Kandahar’s provincial council. American officials have long claimed that the younger Mr. Karzai is involved in the opium trade and other corrupt enterprises. (He also has been on the C.I.A.’s payroll.) Washington’s new line is there are suspicions but “nothing that will stand up in court.”
How can a more credible government be built in Kandahar with Ahmed Wali Karzai still in place? What is the plan for bringing in and protecting more honest officials? And for tamping down the resentment of other local leaders who complain that the younger Mr. Karzai has grabbed all of the lucrative security and supply contracts? President Karzai could give a major boost to the Kandahar campaign by urging his brother to take a year or two abroad. Failing that, what is Washington doing to ensure that the two Karzais help rather than hinder the effort?
A CREDIBLE PARTNER At a recent international conference in Kabul, President Karzai said all the right things about fighting corruption and Afghans assuming more responsibility for their own security. (For a change, there were no anti-American tantrums.) Does the administration finally have a plan to get him to deliver? Indeed, we are still not clear about the benchmarks that are being set for adequate governance. Has Mr. Karzai been given a detailed list? How can Americans judge if they are being met?
Most urgent, has the administration warned Mr. Karzai of the disastrous consequences — in Afghanistan and in the United States — if next month’s parliamentary elections are as tainted as last year’s presidential vote? Some American officials are so worried that they are hoping a way can be found to get the Afghans to postpone the vote at least until next spring.
Confronting Mr. Karzai head-on hasn’t worked. The White House has now decided to play nice, at least in public. We hope American officials are a lot franker in private about the limits of the American public’s patience. General Petraeus skillfully managed self-defeating politicians in Iraq. He will need to bring that skill to bear with Mr. Karzai while cultivating a wider array of leaders. He cannot do that alone.
The constant infighting among top American officials over how deeply to invest in the war has to end. It has undermined Americans’ confidence and made it far too easy for Mr. Karzai to ignore Washington’s advice and demands.
MILITARY AND POLICE TRAINING Like everything else about this war, the effort to train the Afghan Army and police was shortchanged for years under the Bush administration. President Obama has done better, but there is still a very long way to go. News of the way an ambitious Afghan military operation turned into a bloody rout by the Taliban is the latest reminder of that.
In November, the United States and NATO opened a new integrated training mission. Its leader, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV, has increased the number of trainers (the allies still need to ante up hundreds more), revamped the Afghan Army leadership program and standardized police instruction, including adding new literacy courses. American military officials said this week that this year’s goal of 134,000 Afghan National Army troops and 109,000 police officers has already been met.
After days of discussion, General Petraeus persuaded President Karzai to support the creation of new, lightly armed village defense forces.
Still, we are concerned about a recent report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which found serious flaws in how the United States military has been measuring the readiness of Afghanistan’s Army and police for the last five years. It also described widespread problems with drug use, corruption and high attrition rates. General Caldwell said the report was based on out-of-date information; the No. 2 American commander in Afghanistan said they were developing a more rigorous system. We are eager to learn about that system and hear the evaluation.
REINTEGRATION AND RECONCILIATION American officials say that any exit strategy will almost certainly include some deal with some Taliban. Americans need to hear more about the plans to woo back lower-level fighters with offers of aid, jobs and security.
We also need to hear more about the plans for reaching out to the insurgency’s leaders. An Afghan peace conference in June called for creating a council to negotiate a deal with senior Taliban. Washington has laid down what it insists are clear red lines: Taliban leaders must forswear all ties to Al Qaeda and accept the Afghan Constitution, with its protection of women’s rights. Mr. Karzai has embraced the same conditions.
There are also reports that the Afghan president has been secretly negotiating with the Taliban and that Pakistan is eager to broker a deal. American officials say any negotiations have to be Afghan-led, while admitting they are not fully certain who is talking to whom.
We don’t know if there is a deal to be had with the Taliban. We are sure that Washington cannot sit on the sidelines. The administration also needs to be thinking hard about a diplomatic strategy to engage or at least neutralize all of the region’s meddling players.
MANAGING PAKISTAN The most alarming parts of the WikiLeaks reports were the ones that described how Pakistan’s military intelligence service was cynically colluding with the Afghan Taliban, which it sees as a proxy force to ensure its influence in Afghanistan and keep India’s at bay.
The administration has said and done many of the right things to try to change Pakistan’s behavior: committing to long-term economic aid and constantly reminding Pakistani leaders that they are playing with fire and that extremists, on both sides of the border, pose a genuine threat to their own survival. It is not clear whether they are getting through.
Pakistan has pushed back against the Pakistani Taliban and has allowed the Americans to fly drone strikes against Al Qaeda and other fighters along its border. It also continues to shelter and aid some of the most destructive and dangerous armed factions fighting United States and allied troops in Afghanistan. Americans need to understand what more the administration plans to do to end this support and draw Islamabad fully into the fight — on the right side.
THE DEADLINE President Obama was intentionally vague last December when he said that American troops would begin to transfer out of Afghanistan by July 2011. At the time, we agreed that a deadline, so long as it was not set in stone, made sense. Americans need to know this war will not go on forever. Mr. Karzai needs to know that American protection is not open-ended. American generals and diplomats need to know that their work is being closely reviewed.
Since then, the administration has sent a host — a cacophony — of conflicting signals about the deadline, the strategy and its commitment to the war.
Americans need regular, straight talk from President Obama about what is happening in Afghanistan, for good and ill, and the plan going forward. More ambiguity will only add to the anxiety and confusion.
EDITORIAL
The State of the War
Published: August 12, 2010
We believe that the United States has a powerful national interest in Afghanistan, in depriving Al Qaeda of a safe haven on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This country would also do enormous damage to its moral and strategic standing if it now simply abandoned the Afghan people to the Taliban’s brutalities.
But, like many Americans, we are increasingly confused and anxious about the strategy in Afghanistan and wonder whether, at this late date, there is a chance of even minimal success.
The trove of military documents recently published in The Times showed, once again, why this is so hard: the weakness of the Afghan Army and the corruption of the Afghan government; the double game being played by Pakistan; the failure of the Bush administration, for seven years, to invest enough troops, money or attention in a war that it allowed to drag on until it has now become the longest in the nation’s history.
The WikiLeaks documents, however, end in late 2009 and don’t show us how the war is going now or whether President Obama’s decision in December to send 30,000 more troops (the last won’t be in place until the end of this month) has a chance of altering those realities.
The answer to that question also depends on whether President Obama and his top advisers can finally secure the full commitment and cooperation of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and Pakistan’s military commander, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.
The first test of the new counterinsurgency strategy, in Marja, population 60,000, did not go well. American Marines drove the Taliban from Marja’s center in late February, but the “government in a box” that was supposed to win over the population with security, services and honest governance didn’t arrive. Competent Afghan officials didn’t want the risk or the hardship of moving there.
Taliban fighters quickly began a campaign of intimidation and assassination. Many local residents have been too frightened to sign up for American-financed reconstruction projects. With too few Afghan security forces to hold the town, the Marines have not been able to move beyond Marja.
American officials say things are improving. Some schools and markets have reopened, and as of mid-July there were 21 Afghan officials working at the Interim Government Center, with another 7 to 10 positions unfilled. Marja remains isolated and dangerous.
We were told that Marja was a rehearsal for a major offensive this spring around Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city and the Taliban’s spiritual base. Breaking the insurgents’ hold there was supposed to send a powerful message that the tide of the war is finally changing. After Marja, though, the Kandahar offensive was postponed, reinforcing the impression of drift.
Mr. Obama has promised to review his policy this December. We agree that the “surge” and his new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, need time. But reports from the ground have been so relentlessly grim — July’s death toll of 66 American troops was the highest since the war began — that Mr. Obama needs to do a better job right now of explaining the strategy and how he is measuring progress. Here are some of the things Americans and American allies, who are even more anxious about the war, need to hear:
THE PLAN AFTER MARJA Do the president and his generals still believe that counterinsurgency — securing crucial areas and building up local governments — is the best chance for driving back the Taliban? Is it even possible? What lessons were learned in Marja? How has it changed their approach in Kandahar?
American officials now insist that it was wrong to think about Kandahar as a set piece offensive. The city is already under the formal control of the Afghan government, and they say Special Forces are already pounding the Taliban outside the city while efforts to improve services and security inside are under way. Claiming that the media somehow didn’t get it right doesn’t help. The White House and Pentagon need to explain clearly what is happening there.
One of the first bureaucratic fights General Petraeus won after assuming command was his insistence on spending more than $200 million for diesel generators and fuel to increase Kandahar’s electricity supply. That sounds like a sensible way to win local support.
We are concerned about the administration’s decision not to challenge the control of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s younger brother and chief of Kandahar’s provincial council. American officials have long claimed that the younger Mr. Karzai is involved in the opium trade and other corrupt enterprises. (He also has been on the C.I.A.’s payroll.) Washington’s new line is there are suspicions but “nothing that will stand up in court.”
How can a more credible government be built in Kandahar with Ahmed Wali Karzai still in place? What is the plan for bringing in and protecting more honest officials? And for tamping down the resentment of other local leaders who complain that the younger Mr. Karzai has grabbed all of the lucrative security and supply contracts? President Karzai could give a major boost to the Kandahar campaign by urging his brother to take a year or two abroad. Failing that, what is Washington doing to ensure that the two Karzais help rather than hinder the effort?
A CREDIBLE PARTNER At a recent international conference in Kabul, President Karzai said all the right things about fighting corruption and Afghans assuming more responsibility for their own security. (For a change, there were no anti-American tantrums.) Does the administration finally have a plan to get him to deliver? Indeed, we are still not clear about the benchmarks that are being set for adequate governance. Has Mr. Karzai been given a detailed list? How can Americans judge if they are being met?
Most urgent, has the administration warned Mr. Karzai of the disastrous consequences — in Afghanistan and in the United States — if next month’s parliamentary elections are as tainted as last year’s presidential vote? Some American officials are so worried that they are hoping a way can be found to get the Afghans to postpone the vote at least until next spring.
Confronting Mr. Karzai head-on hasn’t worked. The White House has now decided to play nice, at least in public. We hope American officials are a lot franker in private about the limits of the American public’s patience. General Petraeus skillfully managed self-defeating politicians in Iraq. He will need to bring that skill to bear with Mr. Karzai while cultivating a wider array of leaders. He cannot do that alone.
The constant infighting among top American officials over how deeply to invest in the war has to end. It has undermined Americans’ confidence and made it far too easy for Mr. Karzai to ignore Washington’s advice and demands.
MILITARY AND POLICE TRAINING Like everything else about this war, the effort to train the Afghan Army and police was shortchanged for years under the Bush administration. President Obama has done better, but there is still a very long way to go. News of the way an ambitious Afghan military operation turned into a bloody rout by the Taliban is the latest reminder of that.
In November, the United States and NATO opened a new integrated training mission. Its leader, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV, has increased the number of trainers (the allies still need to ante up hundreds more), revamped the Afghan Army leadership program and standardized police instruction, including adding new literacy courses. American military officials said this week that this year’s goal of 134,000 Afghan National Army troops and 109,000 police officers has already been met.
After days of discussion, General Petraeus persuaded President Karzai to support the creation of new, lightly armed village defense forces.
Still, we are concerned about a recent report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which found serious flaws in how the United States military has been measuring the readiness of Afghanistan’s Army and police for the last five years. It also described widespread problems with drug use, corruption and high attrition rates. General Caldwell said the report was based on out-of-date information; the No. 2 American commander in Afghanistan said they were developing a more rigorous system. We are eager to learn about that system and hear the evaluation.
REINTEGRATION AND RECONCILIATION American officials say that any exit strategy will almost certainly include some deal with some Taliban. Americans need to hear more about the plans to woo back lower-level fighters with offers of aid, jobs and security.
We also need to hear more about the plans for reaching out to the insurgency’s leaders. An Afghan peace conference in June called for creating a council to negotiate a deal with senior Taliban. Washington has laid down what it insists are clear red lines: Taliban leaders must forswear all ties to Al Qaeda and accept the Afghan Constitution, with its protection of women’s rights. Mr. Karzai has embraced the same conditions.
There are also reports that the Afghan president has been secretly negotiating with the Taliban and that Pakistan is eager to broker a deal. American officials say any negotiations have to be Afghan-led, while admitting they are not fully certain who is talking to whom.
We don’t know if there is a deal to be had with the Taliban. We are sure that Washington cannot sit on the sidelines. The administration also needs to be thinking hard about a diplomatic strategy to engage or at least neutralize all of the region’s meddling players.
MANAGING PAKISTAN The most alarming parts of the WikiLeaks reports were the ones that described how Pakistan’s military intelligence service was cynically colluding with the Afghan Taliban, which it sees as a proxy force to ensure its influence in Afghanistan and keep India’s at bay.
The administration has said and done many of the right things to try to change Pakistan’s behavior: committing to long-term economic aid and constantly reminding Pakistani leaders that they are playing with fire and that extremists, on both sides of the border, pose a genuine threat to their own survival. It is not clear whether they are getting through.
Pakistan has pushed back against the Pakistani Taliban and has allowed the Americans to fly drone strikes against Al Qaeda and other fighters along its border. It also continues to shelter and aid some of the most destructive and dangerous armed factions fighting United States and allied troops in Afghanistan. Americans need to understand what more the administration plans to do to end this support and draw Islamabad fully into the fight — on the right side.
THE DEADLINE President Obama was intentionally vague last December when he said that American troops would begin to transfer out of Afghanistan by July 2011. At the time, we agreed that a deadline, so long as it was not set in stone, made sense. Americans need to know this war will not go on forever. Mr. Karzai needs to know that American protection is not open-ended. American generals and diplomats need to know that their work is being closely reviewed.
Since then, the administration has sent a host — a cacophony — of conflicting signals about the deadline, the strategy and its commitment to the war.
Americans need regular, straight talk from President Obama about what is happening in Afghanistan, for good and ill, and the plan going forward. More ambiguity will only add to the anxiety and confusion.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Now Is Now
There can be only one legitimate reason for committing our military forces to wage war. That reason is to protect the United States of America from a serious and overwhelming threat to the homeland.
Other reasons are not legitimate reasons for our troops or allied troops being used for war. If you look at “Background Notes” by our Ambassador to Afghanistan located on the official State Department web site you will find his reasons for being there. Nowhere is it stated that the United States military is present to defend the integrity of the homeland. Rather it is stated that our mission is to help Afghanistan rehab itself and to assure other good humanitarian stuff for the country.
The reality is that we have committed our human treasure and our scarce financial treasure to an operation that does not provide any prospect of protecting the homeland from terrorist’s actions.
If we fight and “win” what have we accomplished? We will have too many dead soldiers. We will have too many human beings who were sent there to be broken physically, emotionally and mentally. Many will never be fixed. Will we have fixed the problem we set out to fix, that is, protecting the homeland from terrorist attacks? No, the terrorists will just move elsewhere to continue doing what they do. And the terrorists do not even require a friendly host country to do what they need to do. They need only a country where they can mingle with the population and practice their skills. In fact they could practice their skills right here under our noses.
What are we to do then? Play defense and play it well, it is the only game. If the United States takes some hits from terrorists while playing defense we would take the same hits while waging war. This is a war, no doubt about it but it is unlike other wars and must be waged wisely. And wisely means keeping our defense alert and ready for the challenge.
What have we learned from the past? Nixon and Kissinger knew we were going to withdraw from Vietnam but they delayed the pull out for an insufferable period of time. Our next action must be to remove our military from Afghanistan immediately.
David Evans☮
Reisterstown, Maryland
August 3, 2010
Note: The United States Department of State -- http://www.state.gov/p/sca/ci/af/
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/3525vaux/blog#ixzz0vbgtZtOk
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