They Think We Are Stupid

The Republicans think you and I are stupid. They are dusting off “trickle down economics” for another go around.

Trickle down economics was the scheme advanced by Ronald Reagan that if America only made rich people massively richer with staggering tax cuts, ending anti-trust regulation, and government subsidies for their industries, they would use all that extra free money to build new factories, hire people, and the abundance would trickle down to the average worker.

It was a lie, but it wasn’t the first time the GOP had tried that lie. Then knew exactly what they were doing, and what outcome it would produce. Instead of raising the pay of their workers, the rich people on the receiving end of Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s tax cuts simply added the cash to their investments.

In the Reagan go around, even the rich were skeptical, stating that the owners weren’t “job creators,” (Remember that ploy?) in that it was customers who were the job creators. Any time the number of customers for your product increased, that is the demand for your product increased, production had to increase to meet the demand and so more workers needed to be hired. Any business owner who expanded production in the hope that demand would grow to buy those products was usually soon out of business.

But then again, maybe we are stupid. When Trump proposed his huge tax reductions, mostly for the wealthy, pundits point out that the last time that had happened, there were no new jobs created and the wealthy used their increased wealth for stock-buybacks and other investments that were to increase their wealth even more. There was no outrage raised against the Trump tax cuts, so they were pushed through and what was predicted by the naysayers is actually what happened, again.

The GOP exists to serve the morbidly rich and no one else. And they have been doing it for a long time. Back in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century there was the “horse and sparrow” theory of taxation.

“The sales-pitch was that if you fed horses extra oats, more than they could normally digest, they’d pass through all that undigested oat into their manure for the sparrows to pick at; rich people’s excesses, in other words, would spill over to the average “sparrow” working person. It was embraced by Republicans in Congress and not only didn’t it work; it was blamed, in part, for the ‘Panic of 1896.’” (Thom Hartman)

Then the same scheme was advanced in the 1920s, leading the the famous stock market crash in 1929 and the Great Depression worldwide.

Then Reagan advanced his “supply side economics,” exactly what you should not do in a demand-side economy.

And, of course, the morbidly rich were convinced that politics did not sully their reputations and so they proceeded to buy the Congress, the Supreme Court and even the Presidency.

The rich have been fighting against paying their share of the tax burden in this country since Thomas Jefferson’s time. Giving them more money just fuels their efforts to pay less and less and less.

Oh, and the states are performing their role as the “laboratories of democracy” for the nation as a whole.

“Republicans have been hustling this scam for over 150 years, and in the states they control educational outcomes are plummeting, child and infant mortality is skyrocketing (along with homicides), and infrastructure threatens to disintegrate as funding cuts come online.” (Thom Hartmann)

The Republicans want a return to the conditions of the Gilded Age; they haven’t had servants to serve them since that time, so a new under-class is needed and they are creating one. The middle class is shrinking rapidly and soon there will only be the rich and the poor left, with the poor having to take any job they can get, which often means the same thing as industrial servitude, or personal servitude as “house staff” for the rich.

I end with another quote from the inestimable Thom Hartmann—

“Their sales pitch was effective, so we’ve now had 43 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

“It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked. For example: Republicans told us if we just cut the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else because, they said, the “job creators” would be “unleashed” on our economy.

“Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the developed world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over those 43 years from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 60% of us to fewer than half of us. Because of 43 years of Reaganomics, it now takes two full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.”

Questions to Ask Sincere MAGA Republicans

Q1 Is America a great nation? If the Answer is yes, ask what “Make America Great Again” means. If the answer is no . . .

Q2 If America is not a great nation, which nation or nations are greater and why?

* * *

One cannot declare any status of national greatness without comparisons to other nations. I would be interested in the names of countries mentioned as well as the criteria used to compare them.

I would also be interested in providing a series of descriptions of other countries, without their names, and see if they would judge them to be greater or less great. Imagine descriptions of Norway, Costa Rica, North Korea, Venezuela, Switzerland, and Türkiye on that list.

“Isn’t That Special?”

The Church Lady was a Saturday Night Live character, and with all such characterizations there is a grain of truth at its core. And she came to mind as I was just viewing a post on Medium.com with the title “Like Israel of Old, Is The United States God’s Favored Nation?” While people debate this point I have to ask two things. One, why would people want to be considered “God’s Chosen People,” and two, why would such a god even have a chosen people?

The Church Lady had a catchphrase of “Now, isn’t that special!”

I will start with the second question. It is clear from the Bible that Judaism, the parent religion of Christianity, started out polytheistic or at least henotheistic. Yahweh was part of a panoply of gods. In fact, Yahweh was a Canaanite god, along with El, Ba’al, Asherah, and over 70 gods in total. The Hebrews whittled down all of those until there was only one. Interestingly, Asherah, Yahweh’s mother, was described as Yahweh’s “consort” at one point. She often went, in the Bible, with the sobriquet of “the Queen of Heaven.”

The point here was that Yahweh had to be sold to the Hebrews as their one and only god (and Asherah worshipers didn’t want to abandon her, amongst other roadblocks for this happening, for example the Ba’al worshipers who worshipped via a bull or calf icon). One way of selling the Hebrews on Yahweh as their sole god was to declare that that god considered the Hebrews to be his sole people, which makes no sense whatsoever.

Yahweh was declared to be the creator god and people were his creation. Why would Yahweh single out one small group of people off in a backwater of civilization to be the only group he favored? Were there no other people anywhere on Earth he would show favor to? If so, there is no record of that happening. So, this god creates people, declares them to be “good,” then changes his mind shortly thereafter and kills 99.99999% of all of them, leaving only Noah and his three sons and their wives to start over. Again, a short time later, this god declares the Hebrews to be his “Chosen People” and authorizes them to exterminate any group which is in their way. WTF? The rest of Noah’s descendants? Chopped chicken liver I guess.

Returning to the first question, it is clear that religion is a mechanism by which people claim to be “special.” And Americans have been bragging on their specialness for centuries. Lately we have the claim of American Exceptualism, which is the belief that the United States is either distinctive, unique, or exemplary compared to other nations. We are better than those “shit-hole” nations and everybody knows it. Well, except the MAGA Republicans who insist that America is not a “Great Nation.” They can’t insist that we are great and claim they can make America “Great Again,” well they are bat-shit crazy, so I guess quite a few could and just not see any contradiction.

We seem to have this deep-seated desire to be recognized as being special . . . well, not just by the Church Lady, but by one and all. Our religions must stoke the feeling of being special or we are changing churches, by God! This is a far cry from churches in existence at the beginning of this nation which thundered from pulpits that we were miserable wretches, sinners, doomed to eternal damnation. I guess the church’s marketing departments decided that was a message that wasn’t going to have legs.

Establishing that “’Merica is God’s favored nation” would certainly make us all special, but be careful what you ask for. Yahweh also pummeled Israel and Judah from pillar to post, empowering invaders to trample those countries into dust over and over because the Hebrews wouldn’t “accept the yoke” Yahweh was offering. (If we aren’t cattle to this god, we are sheep or goats . . . now that’s special.)

Whence Evil?

I was reading a post on Medium.com and ran across this: “Of course an obvious solution to this problem for a materialist is that evil does not need an explanation since evil itself is a concept derived from religious language.” The author was addressing the Problem of Evil, but somehow could not resist the claim that for the concept of evil to exist, one needed a religion. If that were the case for the Problem of Evil, that “necessary religion” could not be Christianity because the POE was stated centuries before Christianity began.

I suggest that one only needs an unruly out-of-control child, religion or no to come up with the concept of evil.

One can do “good” or “bad” by accident. This is where the phrase “My bad.” came from. “My bad” means “Oops, I didn’t mean to hurt you, I done you wrong by accident.”

You can also do good and bad with intent to do good and bad. When anyone does something really, really bad . . . with intent to do so . . . then that is evil. And it doesn’t even require an internal judgment of “doing really bad.” For example, Hitler seemed to think that killing all of the European Jews and other “deviants” was an actual good. Our judgment of “bad” trumped his judgment of “good,” unfortunately delayed by racial prejudice.

It is interesting that there is no opposite to evil. Sure, we talk about “good and evil” but they are not opposites. Good and bad are opposites. The opposite of evil is, what? Super duper, really, really good?

Maybe the author was thinking of Steven Weinberg, who said “I think it’s about time that the human species grew up in this respect. It seems to me that with or without religion good people will behave well and bad people will do evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

How Many Games?

Negro League baseball star Josh Gibson now ranks first in career batting average at .372 — including a single-season-record .466 in 1943. The inclusion of Negro League players stats into MLB stats has been a long time coming. But . . . (and you knew that but was coming, didn’t you?) there are some problems.

Putting Josh Gibson’s single season batting average of 0.466 at the top of the single season stats is somewhat troubling, and I will tell you why.

Do you remember when Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s single season home run record there was discussion of placing an asterisk by that record? Do you remember why? It was because the Babe set his record when there were 154 games in a season and Maris broke that record when there were 162 games in a season. Maris had eight more games with opportunities to hit home runs than did Ruth. (There was never an asterisk placed next to the record, although I am in favor of annotating differences in conditions with regard to records being set.)

Now Josh Gibson was a phenomenon and I bemoan not getting to see him play in the major leagues (at least on film and in stories and stats as I was born in 1946), but his 1943 season consisted of 55 games, far fewer than the 154 games being played in MLB. And baseball is replete with story after story after story of players who did this or that “before the All-Star game” and were on pace to . . . <break some sort of record>.

In order for Josh Gibson’s 1943 batting average to take its rightful place in baseball stats it needs to be compared to the batting averages of other players, playing their first 55 games of a season.

As the saying goes, a baseball season is a marathon, not a sprint. It is long, it is grueling and playing week after week under the brutal summer sun (before clubhouses were air conditioned) sapped one’s abilities big time. They were called “the dog days of summer” by the players.

One of the joys of baseball is playing with statistics. One of my favorites was the baseball writer who tracked down the landing places of all of Babe Ruth’s fly balls for a single season and then mapped those onto the outlines of the now current baseball stadia. He then took into account the rule changes (it used to be a ball had to land in fair territory to be called a home run, so balls curling around foul poles into “foul territory” were ruled as foul balls whereas now they would be consider to have “left the field in fair territory, so . . . home run”). He counted up the number of home runs that the Babe would have been garnered had they been in the now current stadia with the now current rules, rather than in 1920 and the Babe would have racked up 119 home runs . . . in 154 games. (Some of those old stadia were immense and many very long fly balls were caught for outs.)

Sometimes a Blurb is Enough—The Mathematical Reality

This ongoing series is my attempt at writing reviews of books you do not need to read. This latest iteration involves the book: The Mathematical Reality: Why Space and Time Are an Illusion by Alexander Unzicker.

Here’s the blurb (on Amazon.com):

Alexander Unzicker is a theoretical physicist and writes about elementary questions of natural philosophy. His critique of contemporary physics, Bankrupting Physics (Macmillan), received the ‘Science Book of the Year’ award (German edition 2010). With The Mathematical Reality, Unzicker presents his most fundamental work to date, which is the result of years of study of natural laws and their historical development. The discovery of fundamental laws of nature has influenced the fate of Homo sapiens more than anything else. Has modern physics already understood these laws? Many puzzles formulated by Albert Einstein or Paul Dirac are still unsolved today, in particular the meaning of fundamental constants. In this book, Unzicker contends that a rational description of nature must do without any constants. A methodological and historical analysis shows, however, that the underlying problem of physics is deep, unexpected and fatal: the concepts of space and time themselves, the basis of science since Newton, could be fundamentally inappropriate for the description of reality, although—or precisely because—they are so easily accessible to human perception. A new understanding of reality can only arise from mathematics. By exploring the three-dimensional unitary sphere, which could replace the concepts of space and time, the author presents a mathematical vision that points the way to a new understanding of reality.

The point I wish to emphasize and will be writing more on later is this: “A new understanding of reality can only arise from mathematics.” This “understanding” is at the heart of why physics and much of the other sciences have gone astray. Ignore reality, it doesn’t exist, but math . . . math is real!

I think you will agree that math is made up. It didn’t exist until humans made it, therefore it is synthetic, no? And, there are branches of mathematics that look more like fever dreams than realities: maths that compare the sizes of various infinities, maths that involve impossibilities, like the square root of –1, creating the so-called “imaginary numbers.” Since most of you didn’t like math I will not extend this list but I think, if you are curious, you can with a minimal internet search effort.

You know who embraced this precept, “A new understanding of reality can only arise from mathematics?” Einstein. And every paper Einstein published was followed by a half dozen additional papers to correct the mistakes made in his mathematics. (More on this later.)

Here is how T. Qwinn, in part, reviewed this book “Part III reminds me somewhat like that meme of a conspiracy nut who has a wall covered with newspaper clippings with arrows drawn between them in some imagined causal nexus. Now, to be fair, Unzicker is not a nut painting a conspiracy, but rather is attempting to show how S^3 might be a plausible and better mathematical framework to describe reality than the “3+1-dimensional construction of space and time”. This attempt seems at best scattershot and jumps erratically across numerous incomplete mathematical hand-waving arguments or sketches that each trail off in a ‘this is kinda like that’ or ‘maybe X could explain Y’ lack of resolution. It’s more akin to how one might imagine a group of theoretical physicists after several drinks sounds like when musing on such ideas. But on the written page, it comes across as a such a degree of hand waving that it might lead to rhabdo.”

Mr. Qwinn gave the book 2 stars.

Postscript It seems that physicists have given up on explaining things. The rule of the day is “Shut up and calculate,” ascribed to Richard Feynman and several others. So, we have a theory of subatomic articles claiming that quarks form parts of them, but nothing is explained by that explanation, and the same goes for the Standard Model, so highly touted by physicists. Explain, eshplain . . . we need Tom Lehrer more than ever.

How Science Goes Wrong

I was reading another issue of a newsletter from Quanta Magazine and encountered the following: “When they pelted a thin gold foil with this beam of particles, they observed that one in 20,000 bounced straight backward . . . the physicists had discovered that the gold atoms were mostly empty space, but that the alpha particles were occasionally scattering off the atoms’ dense, positively charged nuclei.”

The author was describing the now famous Rutherford-Marsden experiment which was largely responsible for discovering that atoms had nuclei. Since electrons were already known to be much, much smaller and lighter than any atom it was known that there were “subatomic” particles, at least smaller than atoms, but this was a revelation of their arrangement. (Note: neutrons were yet to be discovered, and this experiment was used to “discover” protons.)

Now, where this statement is wrong is in “the gold atoms were mostly empty space.” The atom wasn’t mostly or even partly empty space, it was instead “full” of electrons. You see alpha particles are 7345 times heavier than an electron, so if they collided, the alpha particle would brush aside any electrons with insignificant effort, that is it wouldn’t have slowed them down. As a commonplace example, when we pour water into a glass, it seems unimpeded because the glass is “empty.” But you and I know that the glass is not empty, it is full of air. But as the water descends into the glass the air is displaced ever so easily, just as if there were nothing there. But that doesn’t mean the glass was “empty” empty.

The trope “atoms are mostly empty space” was a novelty and was repeated and repeated and repeated until it became a dogma.

What the R-M experiment showed is that the vast majority of the mass of atoms is concentrated in a small central core. It did not show that atoms are “mostly empty space.”

I will be expanding upon this theme, “How Science Goes Wrong,” in future posts.

A Slave by Any Other Name . . .

I was reading the transcript of Ken Burns’ commencement address at Brandeis University and ran across this:

“Listen, listen. In a filmed interview I conducted with the writer James Baldwin, more than 40 years ago, he said, “No one was ever born who agreed to be a slave, who accepted it. That is, slavery is a condition imposed from without. Of course, the moment I say that,” Baldwin continued, “I realize that multitudes and multitudes of people for various reasons of their own enslave themselves every hour of every day to this or that doctrine, this or that delusion of safety, this or that lie. Anti-Semites, for example,” he went on, “are slaves to a delusion. People who hate Negroes are slaves. People who love money are slaves. We are living in a universe really of willing slaves, which makes the concept of liberty and the concept of freedom so dangerous,” he finished. Baldwin is making a profoundly psychological and even spiritual statement, not just a political or racial or social one. He knew, just as Lincoln knew, that the enemy is often us. We continue to shackle ourselves with chains we mistakenly think is freedom.”

Mr. Baldwin was no stranger to the truth. So, what is the basis for this human trait, that of enslaving ourselves to various things. In our culture, we have an exception to the point of “No one was ever born who agreed to be a slave, who accepted it.” In our culture, here in the U.S. people volunteer to be slaves, even to the point of using the correct terminology. Christians are urged to “accept Jesus into their hearts as their Lord and Master.” Then they are to give their lives over to “following” Jesus, which means doing what they are told to do. Voluntary enslavement, conscious voluntary enslavement. And practice makes perfect.

Later Mr. Burns states “And if I have learned anything over those years, it’s that there’s only us. There is no them. And whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life that there’s a them, run away. Othering is the simplistic binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self imprisonment, which brings me to a moment I’ve dreaded and forces me to suspend my longstanding attempt at neutrality.”

And if there is anything more divisive than religion I am unaware of it. Our religions are larded with enemies. In our “Judeo-Christian heritage” (not that there is really such a thing but people talk as if there were) we come from a religion which says “thou shalt not murder” but that only applies to others in the in-group. Their god ordered murders of many, many thousands of “others” as a good day’s work.

When he finally gets around to providing advice to the graduates he includes this: “At some point, make babies, one of the greatest things that will happen to you, I mean it, one of the greatest things that will happen to you is that you will have to worry, I mean really worry, about someone other than yourself. It is liberating and exhilarating, I promise. Ask your parents.”

This is a brilliant piece of work by a brilliant man and I recommend the whole speech to you wholeheartedly . . . here.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Are you “pursuing” happiness? Is it something you plan for and execute your plans, to be happy?

Too many people interpret the pursuit of happiness as a chase or hunt for a thing we want. But the intent of those words misleads people. The word pursuit in this context means “practice” like when a lawyer says they are pursuing a law career, that is “practicing” law. They are not chasing, but doing, and in the doing become good at it.

So, the words, from the Declaration of Independence, are:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

What they mean is that we are all equal with regards to our rights (not abilities!) and that those rights cannot be taken away, nor can we give them away or transfer them, or . . .  I think you get the idea.

With life, with liberty, if we pursue happiness, that is practice being happy, we can create a stable and supportive society of the people, by the people, and for the people.

So, don’t skip happiness practice, we all need to get good at it.

Great Flood Nonsense

According to the Hebrew Bible, 1700 years (est.) after the material universe and Adam and Eve were created (and declared to be “good”) God changes his mind (!) and in a snit declares it was all now bad and creates a Great Flood to wipe out all but a miniscule portion of all of the people and other animals, and plants, . . . , and well, everything.

When Noah lands there are no plants for the herbivores he “saved” to eat, so they starved to death, and those dying animals provided some sustenance for the carnivores he saved, but that very limited source of food resulted in all of the carnivores dying out, too. With no plants to eat, and the animals on the ark dispersed or eaten, the people starved, too. End of story.

Well, they leave out a bit of the rational stuff, but you get the idea.

My question is: is that how an all-powerful god would be expected to act? The supposed “god of love,” causes unspeakable pain and fear in all of his creations that are subject to such, including babies, the elderly, unborn babies, fetuses, puppies, kittens, guinea pigs, hamsters, goldfish, etc. So, what are the alternatives, you ask?

Well, this god could have snapped his fingers, real or mental, and gone back in time to the beginning and started over, correcting his mistakes. Oh, you claim your god doesn’t make mistakes? Well, the Bible contradicts you in that because your god bemoaned the fact that he had ever created humans, so if that is not a mistake, what is? And, like any all too common asshole, he doesn’t just punished the humans, he kills everything!

Or . . . again, with just a thought, he could have eliminated all of the “bad” humans and started over from there.

Or . . . he could have “fixed” the “bad” humans by eliminating the flaws incorporated into them when they were first created, again this would require only a mere thought.

Or . . . well, I think you could see that here are myriad solutions to the perceived problem that would make better use of its god powers other than “make it rain.” (Maybe he loved hearing women screaming “Make it rain, Daddy, make it rain!)

Being all-powerful doesn’t mean one is also “all-smart.” This god is supposed to be all-knowing, which means it should know the consequences of any actions it might take, but that begs the question: why did he declare his creation to be “good,” and then shortly later declare it to be “bad?” Didn’t he know. . . ?

And knowing all of the options doesn’t mean this god would have the judgment to pick the best possible option out of that pool of options. In fact having an infinite pool of options would take an infinite amount of time to sift through and . . . again, you can see the problems.

In summary, my point is that the Great Flood is a dick move, not taking advantage of its god powers (other than “make it rain”) and is unbecoming of a god anyone might want to worship.

So, I ask, why are Christians so enamored of this Jewish story, to the point of making plush Noah’s Ark toy sets for baby cribs and teaching programs for Sunday School? Why do they want to show up their revered god for being so lame, so vindictive, so cruel and for no purpose? Why are they celebrating the near extermination of the human race and most animal species?

I guess it is just another lesson in “Fear your god, fear it!”