Term Limits for SCOTUS Justices?

The whole idea of life-time appointments to the Supreme Court of the U.S. was to provided those justices with judicial independence. They would not have to worry about getting re-elected or re-appointed you see. No one could threaten their positions through those processes. But, would not finite term limits also provide such independence? Say a fixed ten-year term with no reappointment possible? Not having rapid turnover would allow justices time to learn the positions and time to exercise their talents but we would not be stuck with underperforming justices forever and ever, Amen.

Sounds like a good idea to me. And seems more doable than expanding or contracting the size of the court.

Why I Read Thom Hartmann (And Maybe You Should Too)

I subscribe to a number of Thom Hartmann blogs. The quote below is from The Hartmann Report:

As recently as 1900, for example, women couldn’t vote, senators were appointed by the wealthiest power brokers in the states, and poverty stalked America. There was no minimum wage; when workers tried to organize unions, police would help employers beat or even murder their ringleaders; and social safety net programs like unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, food and housing supports, and Medicaid didn’t exist.

There was no income tax to pay for such programs, and federal receipts were a mere 3 percent of GDP (today its around 20 percent).  As the President’s Council of Economic Advisors noted in their 2000 Annual Report:

“To appreciate how far we have come, it is instructive to look back on what American life was like in 1900. At the turn of the century, fewer than 10 percent of homes had electricity, and fewer than 2 percent of people had telephones. An automobile was a luxury that only the very wealthy could afford.

“Many women still sewed their own clothes and gave birth at home. Because chlorination had not yet been introduced and water filtration was rare, typhoid fever, spread by contaminated water, was a common affliction. One in 10 children died in infancy. Average life expectancy was a mere 47 years.

“Fewer than 14 percent of Americans graduated from high school. … Widowhood was far more common than divorce [because of the dire economic consequences to women of divorce]. The average household had close to five members, and a fifth of all households had seven or more. …

“Average income per capita, in 1999 dollars, was about $4,200. … The typical workweek in manufacturing was about 50 hours, 20 percent longer than the average today.”

This is the America Republicans want to return us to today. This is how, they assert, the Constitution wants us to live. The way things used to be.

There is a great deal of information flitting around, and it tends to drown out what wisdom there is on offer. Mr. Hartmann seems to have a large tap to a font of wisdom. I recommend his writings to you.

Addendum to Should Religions or “People of Faith” be Respected?

Should Religions or “People of Faith” be Respected?

I guess the title of this piece would be better as “Should Religions or “People of Faith” be Respected Just Because?” but titles can be too long, so. . . .  What set this off (I am told that for every effect there is a cause, although I don’t actually believe that) was a statement leading a post on Medium.com, “I’m not religious, but I deeply respect people of faith.” This seems to be a hangover from religious indoctrinations.

I learned that respect was earned. We respected our elders, at least at first, because they survived so long. We respected people in power in our government because they had to work their way up to the top (at least of a hill on the shoulder of the mountain of government) earning the trust of voters, etc. Teachers were to be respected because they were authorities in our classrooms and had to go to college to get their positions, etc.

My question, though, is respect something we should confer on religions just because they are religions, and “people of faith” because they are “people of faith?” I do not actually know anyone who believes this. Even the staunchest Christian god-bothers do not believe this. They say “Respect my religion,” but I ask them “Even if you are a Scientologist?” And they say, no, no, not them! If they are conservative evangelicals, I might ask “Even the Catholics?”

Religions are self declared. There is no set of criteria an organization needs to meet to become a religious organization, even a church. Even getting tax exempt status as a church is not all that difficult. Scientology, clearly not a religion, got that IRS designation by bullying the IRS through law suits. Most churches just have to fill out forms and Hey, Bingo! they are tax exempt because they are churches.

And how does someone qualify as a “person of faith?” Apparently simply by declaring to be so. I had a brother-in-law who was described as a “man of strong faith.” Which seems to be a way churches stroke the egos of members to keep them paying their tithes. To me, “being a person of strong faith” means one believes a great deal of nonsense and cannot be reasoned out of any of it. So, close-minded, stubborn, believes things that aren’t so, . . . stop me when you hear something positive.

And is this a reason to respect someone, simply by having that description attached to them? I don’t see how those designations earn the designees a single solitary thing, and certainly not respect. I accept those designations for what they are, but they do not move the needle of my Respect-O-Meter.

The Bizarreness of Space-Time

I am not a fan of the concept of space-time, which will not surprise regular readers of this blog. Much of Einstein’s work is now coming into doubt for various and sundry reasons. And space-time is one concept I would love to see being done away with.

Okay, where to start? Let us start with the concept of space. Concepts about space were initially centered on locations. Primitive people wanted to know where to find drinkable water, prey to hunt, etc. Communications probably focused on paths, basically where to put your feet on a journey. (Some argue that tracking signs on those paths led to the development of language and possibly consciousness.) This was there, that was over there, a warm place in winter was far, far away that way, etc.

As we became more intellectual we characterized space with organizing schemes with directions, units of distance, directions such as “keep the Sun at your back,” and “head toward that mountain,” etc. Math students are familiar with the Cartesian coordinate system, a framework for mapping three dimensional space. We also have the system of latitude and longitude to grid out locations on the surface of the earth. All such systems, however, have to be pegged down somehow. We have the prime meridian, for example, and the equator, and the north and south poles all of which are arbitrarily placed. Even the Cartesian coordinate system has an origin, which must be placed in a fixed position with the three axes then placed into fixed orientations to be able to be used to locate things.

I think you can see that space is not a thing. It has no grounding in nature. Sure we can talk about how we need to add onto our houses because we “need more space,” or Hitler went to war so as to have control over lebensraum, basically space in which Germans could live and grow crops, etc. talking about space as if it were a real thing, but it is not.

So, when Einstein embraced the idea that space could expand it was basically bizarre to most of the other physicists at the time. It was not without some logic. Gravity, unlike all of the other forces in nature, didn’t seem to have a medium and also seemed to act instantaneously. Having objects that move by moving along distorted lines of space solved a number of problems, but created an even greater number (most of which have been swept under various rugs).

How is it that masses (not volumes) of matter can distort space, warp it in fact? If a moving asteroid approaches Earth it follows the “grid” of distorted space-time, and follows a curved path toward the Earth as if the Earth were attracting it. But why do such objects always follow those grid lines down, rather than away from the masses causing the distortion? This “gravity is due to spatial distortion” idea is incomplete.

And then we have time, something we still struggle to define. Basically it was a measure of duration. We say things like “I was sick for three days.” That gives your listener an idea of how long you suffered. But is time a “thing?” Can it be expanded or contracted? Subjectively we feel time is quite capricious in how it seems to pass in our experience. But instruments we have devised to track durations, clocks, watches, etc., seem to tick along consistently showing no such variations. It seems like time can be subjective or objective.

But is time a dimension? The definition of the term dimension includes “a measurable extent of some kind, such as length, breadth, depth, or height.” So, time can be considered to be a dimension and we often create graphs showing how things change over time. But this is merely for our convenience and edification, it does not establish that the dimension of time is a physical thing, certainly not one that can expand or contract.

And the creation of space-time? The three spatial dimensions are linked together through the simple fact that all physical objects are three dimensional, Guy Fieri’s joke about “meat sliced so thin it only has one side” aside. But time is a measure of duration and this might be linked to an object (like a rain drop that evaporates) but linked to other non-time dimensions? On what basis? Is there a ratio linking the two, e.g. how many parts of space are equivalent to one part of time, etc.

So, space (not a thing) is linked to time (not a thing) and it is expanding because . . . because. . . .

People are not told inconvenient details, for example according to current theory space-time is expanding, but only between the galaxies, not within them. Then the explanation of “expanding space-time” does not include a reason for this being even possible, possibly due to a reliance on the General Theory of Relativity of Einstein being a largely mathematical construct and not a conceptual one. Other theories do account for this but those theories are “out of fashion,” I guess would be the term.

And the BBT theory is linked to a particular aspect of GRT, that being that space is inherently “empty.” Photons of light are traveling to us though empty space and since they are red-shifted, their wavelengths must be lengthening because space-time is stretching. No explanation is given why objects in space would be stretched as space containing them was being stretched, of course.

There is more than one fly in this ointment. For example, the physics community was convinced BE (before Einstein) that space wasn’t empty, that it was filled by what was called the “luminiferous aether” or just aether for short. The existence of this was hypothesized as being the medium through which light traveled through otherwise empty space.

There was an experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, which was an attempt to measure the motion of the Earth through that aether and it came up with a near null result and so some concluded from that that the aether didn’t exist, but that is not what that experiment showed. This was one of those situations in which scientists get their exercise by jumping to conclusions. All kinds of interpretations were possible and eventually experiments done at different altitudes produced different results, thus supporting the existence of an aether. Also, a simple reason that the M-M experiment got near null results is that the Earth might be dragging the aether along with it as it rotated in space and revolved around the Sun. After all the Earth drags its atmosphere around with it.

If there is indeed an aether, then the light from distant galaxies would not be traveling through a vacuum but through a medium and light always loses energy when traveling through a medium. Since it cannot slow down, the loss of energy would show up as a frequency shift downward/wavelength shift upward (toward the red end of the spectrum). And the longer it traveled, the more energy it would lose and the more red-shifted it would become.

Oh, and by the way, later in his career, Einstein switched back to the position that there was an aether after all, even though it made quite some bits of this theories obsolete.

Books have been written explaining physics with an aether included. Studies are still being done. More than a few of the weirdnesses of modern physics get explained very simply through these alternative theories without getting into theoretical dead ends like dark energy, dark matter, cosmic inflation. But because they are “out of fashion” the best minds aren’t focused upon them, which we really would need to create better progress.

Stay tuned.

Why Is Science Even Possible?

In the introduction to an article of the title above, the author (actually podcast host, Steven Strogatz) stated:

“But why is nature like this? Why is it so comprehensible? And why is math so uncannily effective at explaining it, not just in physics, but also in chemistry, in astronomy, and even in some parts of biology? In short, why is science even possible?”

As to the question’s answer (I didn’t continue to read the piece), it was provided recently by none other than Richard Dawkins, in the form of “It works, bitches.” If we had tried it and it didn’t work, you would only find references to it in intellectual history books.

But that is not what I intend to focus upon. My focus here is on the phrase “And why is math so uncannily effective at explaining it. . . .” Math doesn’t explain shit. Math can be considered as being a language and languages do not explain themselves. They can be a medium by which an explanation can be stated, but they do not explain anything just by being implemented.

The attitude underlying this quote, I believe humbly (not), comes from the struggle of many to address math when studying science. For example, a significant hurdle for chemistry majors in undergraduate school is the topic of physical chemistry, which I described at the time I was taking it as “all the worst chemistry, physics, and calculus has to offer combined into a single course.” I was very proud of getting a B in the first semester and an A in the second. (That was before everyone got As for just showing up.) My pride stemmed from not being a particularly good student in math, or really much of anything, so those grades in a tough course were a significant source of pride for me.

And really, questions such as “But why is nature like this? Why is it so comprehensible?” are not worthy of our attention. Science is built upon regularities we observe in nature. If those regularities did not exist, then there would be chaos instead . . . and we would not exist to ask the questions. Our very existence is based upon the regularities of natural processes.

This post was in a highly regarded science blog, but it needed a bit more editorial direction. Maybe they were short on content for an issue.

I remember when I first wrote for the magazine I had signed on to edit, when back then we were “in print” and you couldn’t just post a smaller or larger issue. We had 48 pages and none of them could be blank, and I had a one and a half page hole with nothing to fill it. I learned a new definition of terror, but I filled that hole and as I found similar holes often enough, I found my voice and now I have published dozens of books, along with many dozens of those magazine articles. Among them I suspect there is more than a soupçon of nonsense, like the above, so mea culpa.

Find Waldo’s Logic

Note—Well it is Sunday again, and today’s posts will be religious, at least according to Christians who insist science is a religion. Steve

* * *

Labeled as an “interesting fact” in a post I found in my inbox is the following:

“It takes the sun (and thus the rest of the solar system) around 250 million years to orbit the center of the Milky Way. The first dinosaurs appeared at the dawn of the Triassic Period around 250 million years ago, and for most of their very long reign — namely the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods — our humble planet was in a completely different neighborhood of the galaxy. That means, of course, that the stars the dinosaurs saw in the sky would have looked different from the view we have today.” (Emphasis mine.)

If the entire galaxy is rotating, our sun and all of the stars in our arm of the galaxy are rotating together. So, how would the “stars the dinosaurs saw” be much different from what they might see today? I can understand this if the Sun were in its own orbit and the other stars were in theirs, maybe, but I fail to see the logic in this. It is not as if the cosmic backdrop is very prominent. (All of the stars we see in the night sky are “local” as it were, not from far off.)

The title of this piece was “Earth was on the Other Side of the Galaxy when the Dinosaurs Were Alive.” Earth was also on the other side of the Sun for many months and other non-interesting tidbits.

Why Is Science Even Possible?

In the introduction to an article of the title above, the author (actually podcast host, Steven Strogatz) stated:

“But why is nature like this? Why is it so comprehensible? And why is math so uncannily effective at explaining it, not just in physics, but also in chemistry, in astronomy, and even in some parts of biology? In short, why is science even possible?”

As to the question’s answer (I didn’t continue to read the piece), it was provided recently by none other than Richard Dawkins, in the form of “It works, bitches.” If we tried it and it didn’t work, you would only find references to it in intellectual history books.

But that is not what I intend to focus upon. My focus is on the phrase “And why is math so uncannily effective at explaining it. . . .” because math doesn’t explain shit. Math can be considered as being a language and languages do not explain themselves. They can be a medium by which an explanation can be stated, but they do not explain anything just by being implemented.

This attitude, I believe humbly (not), to come from the struggle on many to address math when studying science. For example, a significant hurdle for chemistry majors in undergraduate school is the topic of physical chemistry, which I described at the time as all the worst of chemistry, physics, and calculus has to offer combined into a single course. I was very proud of getting a B in the first semester and an A in the second. (That was before everyone got As for just showing up.) My pride stemmed from not being a particularly good student in math, or really much of anything, so those grades in a tough course were a significant source of pride for me.

And really, questions such as “But why is nature like this? Why is it so comprehensible?” are not worthy of our attention. Science is built upon regularities we observe in nature. If those regularities did not exist, then there would be chaos instead . . . and we would not exist to ask the questions. Our very existence is based upon the regularities of natural processes.

This post was in a highly regarded science blog, but it needed a bit more editorial direction. Maybe they were short on content for an issue. I remember when I first wrote for the magazine I had signed on to edit. Back then we were “in print” and you couldn’t just post a smaller or larger issue. We had 48 pages and none of them could be blank, and I had a one and a half page hole I had nothing to fill with. I learned a new definition of terror, but I filled that hole and as I found similar holes often enough, I found my voice and now I have published dozens of books, along with many dozens of those magazine articles.

Louisiana Rewrites Scripture

By now you will have heard that the legislature of the State of Louisiana has decreed that all state schools shall prominently display the Ten Commandments. I don’t expect this to survive, but with the corrupt Supreme Court now sitting, who can say?

And, the Ten Commandments listed in the law are not to be found in any Bible. You see they made a few editorial tweaks to make them better, don’t you know.

The Founders claimed that not separating church and state would keep both politics and religion pure. Here we see the repercussions of religions wedging themselves into politics, with politicians wedging themselves into religions.

As the article in Forbes magazine asked “What students in Louisiana will get is the Louisiana legislature version of holy scripture. While the rewrite is not radical, it sets a troubling precedent. Should we welcome legislators editing anyone’s scripture?”

This state legislature has been banning “indoctrinations of students” in public schools galore, but can’t seem to be able to resist a bit of indoctrinating themselves. When people start complaining “You got the Ten Commandments wrong!” they will probably be inclined to declare them to be part of the State of Louisiana Bible and soon to follow will be the Church of the State of Louisiana.

By the way, the “Holy Bible” (not the Louisiana version) has three different lists of the “Ten Commandments” and almost 600 more commandments that these Holy Rolling Legislators are ignoring.

Go Wales! It Is a Start!

According to an article in The Conversation (“Wales could become world’s first country to criminalise politicians who lie,” June 19, 2024).

“Research published in 2022 showed the British public overwhelmingly wanted lying politicians to face consequences.

“And while the UK’s general election is grabbing the headlines, a proposal in Wales’ Senedd (Welsh parliament) is seeking to address this issue by introducing new legislation that would criminalise politicians who lie. If passed, Wales would become the first country in the world to introduce criminal sanctions for lying politicians.

“Under the proposals it would be a criminal offence for a member of the Senedd, or a candidate for election to the Senedd, to willfully, or with intent to mislead, make or publish a statement that is known to be false or deceptive. Proceedings would have to be brought within six months from the date on which the statement was made.

“It would be considered a defence if it could be “reasonably inferred” to be a statement of opinion, or if it were retracted with an apology within 14 days. Being prosecuted for such a law would disqualify a person from being a Senedd member.

“The proposals are not yet law, and the bill has further debate stages yet to go. Price’s amendment is supported by Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Conservatives and the Welsh Liberal Democrats.”

(Source: All quotes are from the article referred to.)

Can you imagine Trump trying to function under such laws? His speeches would devolve to “I . . . uh . . . well, . . . but . . . surely . . . and I’ll bet you agree.”

And I think it would also be just to prosecute those who “modify” videos to show something untrue.