I Don't Believe in Atheists

In this talk, Pulitzer Prize winning author Chris Hedges critiques the self described "new-Atheists" and points out the similarities they share with religious fundamentalists.

If you have the free time to listen to this discussion you may get as much out of as I did.
Click on the address below to call up the video.



http://vimeo.com/7830290

What Bill Clinton Would Do

BACK TO WORK

Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy

By Bill Clinton

196 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.95.

By JEFF MADRICK

Published: December 9, 2011 

Bill Clinton’s new book, “Back to Work,” is less a bold plan to create jobs than it is a passionate rebuttal of “our 30-year antigovernment obsession.” That obsession, he insists, is public enemy No. 1. He also seems to be sending a barely disguised message to Barack Obama to join him in confronting the anti­government chorus.

But coming from a former president who contributed to that very antigovernment narrative in the 1990s, it is unsurprising that the substance of the case he makes is weaker than it should be. In his State of the Union address in 1996, Clinton told us with a sense of triumph that the “era of big government is over.” By absorbing the new American distaste for government after the Republican Congressional victory of 1994, he assured his re-election two years later. And in his second term Clinton was more concerned about restraining government spending and paying down the debt than investing in America.

Clinton now seems to believe the orthodoxy has finally gone too far. He argues that antigovernment zeal led to President Bush’s deep tax cuts in the early 2000s. Those cuts, he tells us, are a major cause of today’s budget deficits, while the stubborn reluctance of Republicans to agree to any tax increases at all has brought the political process to a near halt.

For all the Republican arguments, Clinton says, America did not get a better economy with the Bush tax cuts. According to the Economic Cycle Research Institute, growth in personal income even before the Great Recession was slower under Bush than in any equivalent period since World War II. In the years he was president, Clinton proudly notes, America produced more than 22 million jobs. George Bush’s America created only 2.5 million jobs. The Great Recession, which ended six months after Obama took office, cost America roughly eight million jobs.

As Clinton says, President Obama inherited not only the Great Recession but a trillion-dollar deficit thanks in good part to those tax cuts. And now the nation is in the grips of a torpid economy laden with debt and a high rate of both unemployment and underemployment — those who want and cannot get full-time jobs — that appears intransigent. Despite the recent boom in corporate profits, the typical family’s income is below its level in the late 1990s.

Clinton traces the antigovernment attitudes to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. But in fact, the turn in America’s attitudes goes back to the economic wreckage of the mid-1970s, when inflation and unemployment simultaneously soared and budget deficits were first starting to raise alarms. America was still a moderately progressive country in the early ’70s: citizens supported social programs and voted down efforts to cut taxes. But by the end of the decade, a full-fledged tax revolt had gotten under way, led by the overwhelming passage in 1978 of Proposition 13 in California, which cut property taxes sharply, and the growing Congressional support for the Kemp-Roth tax bill, which proposed cutting federal income taxes by 30 percent. Even before Reagan’s victory, no institution, it seemed, was distrusted more than government.

Yet Clinton concentrates only on the damage done since 2001. He believes that he bequeathed a healthy economy to Bush and that the tax cuts undid it. After all, Clinton’s major legislative achievement was to raise income taxes on the well-off in 1993. The higher taxes relieved the long-exaggerated concerns about the inflationary consequences of a growing deficit. Interest rates started to recede and the economy took off, the unemployment rate ultimately falling to 4 percent by the year 2000. Many conservatives predicted a weakening economy and they were dead wrong.

But there were other contributing factors besides Clinton’s tax increases. Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve sharply raised interest rates in 1994, which was a main source of falling inflationary expectations. Meantime, government spending was dampened because health care costs grew slowly as a result of the rise of H.M.O.’s. Because the cold war had ended, military spending fell as a percent of G.D.P. Perhaps most important, the Internet boom began and sparked a stock market bubble that stimulated spending by consumers, who felt ever richer.

Along the way, Clinton did pass important social legislation, like the expansion of the earned income tax credit and a family leave act, but his administration’s investments in education and infrastructure were modest compared with the growth in the economy — and so were the results. In 1998, for example, the Society of Civil Engineers gave a grade to America’s infrastructure of D. In 2001, after the Clinton investments, the grade assigned was D+. Clinton writes in “Back to Work” that the nation could have eliminated debt completely by 2013 if the Bush administration stuck to his deficit reduction plan. But why was this ever his plan? Should a C.E.O. brag that he can eliminate all his company’s debt, or should he be investing in the future?

BACK TO WORK

Clinton sidesteps his role in financial deregulation. He admits he should have taken steps to control derivatives, the highly leveraged securities that were at the heart of the 2008 crisis, though he says his decision to end the Glass-Steagall Act, the New Deal legislation that separated commercial and investment banks, did not create the crisis. But in fact repeal led directly to the rise of huge financial institutions whose managers believed they could take on both highly risky investments and enormous debt as well. And his administration, along with many Congressional Democrats, was consistently soft on Wall Street in other areas at a time when there were numerous accounting frauds, scams to sell high-technology new issues and hot money racing around the world to find easy profits, destabilizing foreign economies in the process.

It is no surprise, then, that there is no Roosevelt moment in “Back to Work” — nothing equivalent to a new New Deal. Clinton’s jobs plan is largely a repetition of Obama’s recent recommendations, which include a temporary cut in payroll taxes and a reversal of the Bush tax cuts for the well-off. He also calls for an aggressive program to relieve mortgage debt. All this is a decent start, but not very likely to be enough.

Without explanation, Clinton backs proposals to balance the budget that seem to depend significantly more on spending reductions than tax increases (he never makes the calculation). He would make some cuts in Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit. He would cut military spending, but only cautiously. Always a good policy wonk, he knows that America’s true fiscal problems are the rising costs of health care, not Medicare and Medicaid themselves, but he continues to propose cutting entitlements spending. The 1990s Clinton is still talking.

MOst disappointing, for a man who warns us that America is falling behind other rich nations for lack of public investment, he makes no major proposal to raise taxes significantly once the economy is back on track. He tantalizingly points out that reversing all of the Bush tax cuts, including for the middle class, would come close to restoring an adequately balanced budget over the next 10 years. But he doesn’t advocate this. He mentions the possible need for a value-added tax — a national sales tax — while he is at best ambivalent about a financial transactions tax. His recommendations on transportation investment are merely to doff his cap to an infrastructure bank and a few well-worn energy initiatives. These are the big-issue problems America must ultimately face but, like most of Washington, he pushes them down the road.

Many inside the Beltway welcome Clinton’s modest pragmatism. They think it politically realistic. But if those few people who have a national megaphone — like a former president — don’t use it to influence and change America’s thinking, who will? The nation badly needs a counternarrative to the antigovernment orthodoxy Clinton describes. His is welcome. But even if we adopted all of his suggestions, America would still have a long way to go.

Rest Easy, Einstein—Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos Would Not Violate Relativity

By now you’ve probably heard the widely reported news about the possible discovery of neutrinos that allegedly travel faster than light. The OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion tRacking Apparatus) collaboration of almost 200 scientists working at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in central Italy has discovered a phenomenon the physicists could simply not explain. For over three years, the scientists have been collecting data on the flight of neutrinos—those mysterious, nearly massless particles that can travel through anything at immense speed—originating in the SPS accelerator at CERN, near Geneva, and traveling underground all the way to Gran Sasso, 731 kilometers (about 450 miles) away. The experiment showed that the 16,000 neutrinos measured at Gran Sasso had traveled there through Earth’s crust at faster than light speed.

searchers went to great lengths to remove any sources of error in their measurements: they measured distances using an extremely high-precision GPS called PolarX, measured time at the two locations to an accuracy of one nanosecond using cesium clocks, and accounted for the tides, Earth’s rotation, variations between day and night and spring and fall, etc. The statistical significance of the finding was six-sigma—meaning that the probability that the experimental result was a random fluke was only one in a billion. For a full hour after the presentation, Dr. Autiero was grilled by a roomful of physicists, and seemed to be able to account for all of the many potential errors brought up by the audience.


But physicists remain very skeptical. They want to see a confirmation of the findings from another experiment in a separate laboratory before they accept such a bizarre finding. After all, this result, if true, would appear to run against the spirit of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. When I showed the Gran Sasso paper to Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, he told me: “It looks pretty impressive, but I still think that this will go away.” The sentiment was echoed by almost every physicist I have spoken with since. The results seem mind-boggling. After all, nothing can go faster than light, right?


Popular accounts of Einstein’s theory of relativity describe the speed of light as a kind of cosmic “speed limit,” conjuring images of a person driving a car on a highway, accelerating until they see flashing lights behind them: the limit has been broken. This analogy seems to work for most particles found in nature. The protons of the Large Hadron Collider, for example, require immensely powerful superconducting magnets, and the electrical energy equivalent to that consumed by an entire city, to accelerate them to close to the speed of light. And everyone knows that it is impossible to make them actually reach light speed: for this to happen would require infinite energy, and the protons’ masses would then effectively become infinite.


But the “speed limit” model does not work for all particles. When you turn on your flashlight, the photons created by the light bulb are born with light speed—they speed away at exactly the speed of light: they don’t accelerate to it. Of course photons are massless, so they are allowed to travel at that speed. Neutrinos, too, are born with their speed, whatever that speed may actually be. Neutrinos are particles that pass through everything, and they likely do not start at a low speed and accelerate to reach a higher one as do the LHC protons. And they are not known to slow down, either. In fact, it would take a light-year of lead to effectively block a neutrino. It won’t slow down—it would just interact with matter, eventually, through the weak force, and cease to exist as a neutrino.


It is here that the problem with the “speed limit” description is buried. Einstein’s special theory of relativity does not say that nothing can go faster than light. It says that you cannot cross the light-speed barrier: you can’t accelerate to and past the speed of light in vacuum. But the special theory of relativity allows the possibility that a particle is born with a speed greater than light. In such a case, it can’t slow down to cross the speed-of-light barrier from above. If you are born subluminal, you must stay subluminal, and if you are born superluminal, you have to remain superluminal.


So if the results of Gran Sasso are borne out by other experiments, then neutrinos are, in fact, tachyons—hypothetical particles, never before observed (except on Star Trek), that travel above light speed, and stay there. They are allowed to exist by the special theory of relativity and they do not contradict it. Of course, a whole host of other problems would then emerge: their mass would have to be “imaginary” (described using the square root of -1) and they would open the Pandora’s box of the possibility of time travel and its effects on causality (though Sean Carroll argues that FTL neutrinos wouldn’t necessarily be able to go back in time).


It’s important to reiterate that most physicists are skeptical about the OPERA result, many of them leaning heavily on data from a supernova observed in 1987, during which neutrinos were detected on Earth. These physicists say that if neutrinos were really as fast as the Gran Sasso data indicate, the neutrinos from the supernova, 168,000 light-years away, should have arrived on Earth some years before the photons from the supernova. However, the neutrinos from the supernova arrived just a few hours before the light did and astronomers say that lag was because the photons got delayed in the collapse of the star, while the neutrinos whizzed right through. Still, these neutrinos did arrive before the light did—a result that could also be consistent with a superluminal assumption.


Why did this very exacting experiment find signs of neutrinos appearing to travel faster than light? Is there a fiendish error skewing the data? The physics world thinks so, but only more experimental data will answer the question for sure.

Amir D. Aczel is a researcher at the Center for the Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and the author of 18 books about mathematics and physics, as well as numerous research articles. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a frequent commentator on science in the media. See more at his website or follow him on Twitter: @adaczel.




http://www.phy.ornl.gov/orland/aboutorland/

A Touch of Evil

"Faster than Light" or We Live in Exciting Times for the Study of Physics

I believe I remember somewhere that according to Einstein nothing could travel faster than the speed of light, (186,000 miles per second). Recently neutrinos were measured traveling faster than the speed of light. This, of course, challenges a cornerstone of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which itself forms the foundation of modern physics. "The experiment is called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), and lies 1,400 meters underground in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. It is designed to study a beam of neutrinos coming from CERN, Europe's premier high-energy physics laboratory located 730 kilometers away near Geneva, Switzerland. Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are electrically neutral, rarely interact with other matter, and have a vanishingly small mass. But they are all around us—the sun produces so many neutrinos as a by-product of nuclear reactions that many billions pass through your eye every second".

I read a comment of one observer who said that Einstein never wrote that nothing can travel faster than light. “There are phenomena which certainly can. Einstein's restriction applies to mass or energy. If the results of this experiment are repeatable and verified, then it might suggest that neutrinos have no mass and transport no energy”.  Another observer commented, “Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity never constrained particles from going faster than the speed of light. Only particles with a "real" rest mass are limited to less than the speed of light. Particles with an "imaginary" rest mass are constrained to go faster than the speed of light and are called ‘tachyons’ ”.  And of course, there is always string theory mathematics to fall back on.  We shall see how this plays out.  

Even I who knows very little about these matters thought of something.  If neutrinos are able travel faster than the speed of light interesting things may be occurring right under the scientist’s noses in the vicinity of black holes.  Just as particles of atoms can escape a black hole it may be possible for neutrinos to not only escape a black hole but may sail right through the black hole.  (If it is found that this is not true it may not be that the neutrinos are not traveling at the speed of the light but they are not traveling at sufficient greater speed to escape.  The mathematics would have to be worked out if that is true.   


After thinking it over longer, I realize I am in over my head.  The fact that neutrinos have little or no mass does not exempt them from being subject to infinite gravitational forces keeping them prisoners in the BH.

My Memory of Jim Morrison and the Doors

As I have aged and reflect back on my limited experience with Rock and Roll my liking for certain individuals and groups have  of course changed, time does that to most everything. One individual's talent and on stage personality stands out as a cut above most others,  Jim Morrison and the Doors.  

“I wouldn't mind dying in a plane crash.  It'd be a good way to go.  I don't want to die in my sleep, or of old age, or OD.  I want to feel what it's like.  I want to taste it, hear it, smell it.  Death is only going to happen once.  I don't want to miss it.”


It does not appear that Jim got his wish. There is controversy on how he died in Paris in 1971. He was just 27 years old.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CFoJuRcjHU&feature=related