CapitalistImperialistPig

We used to turn out the lights and bring in the Pumpkin a bit after 8:00 PM, but this year I kept the operation going until 9:00. We had too much candy, I'm afraid. Oops, just got three more. We've noticed a lot of changes from twenty-some years or so ago when our kids were in the demographic. Fewer local elementary school age kids, for example - probably because the neighborhood has aged. Many more older kids, 11-16, who wouldn't have been caught dead trick or treating back when. Our neighborhood has always gotten a sort of late surge, hordes of kids coming in vans, ten or twelve at a time, not sure from where. It's gotten smaller lately, and less concentrated - a van with five to seven kids instead of ten. Maybe the big vans, whom I sort of facetiously imagined being dispatched from candy stores in Juarez, have moved on to more lucrative neighborhoods. Or families and vans have just gotten smaller. The costumes were pretty good this year. Several kids said ...

The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, by Rick Perlstein - some views from a reader at sea in the text. I bought an electronic copy of Rick Perlstein's book, the third of his trilogy on Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan because I thought I could use a fast easy read or two to spell the relatively dense astrophysics textbooks I was working my way through. If it had occurred to me to check the hardcover page count (880 pages) I might have rethought the fast and easy part. Perlstein is not mainly interested in telling a tale of competing ideologies, much less one of horse races, but rather of drawing a fully fleshed picture of the country, as the blurb puts it: a dazzling portrait of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the tumultuous political and economic times of the 1970s. Of course I was there in those years, present as an adult voting citizen, or at least as a graduate student who happened to be a military veteran. Military friends of mine wer...

Tesla CEO and famous technology innovator Elon Musk has repeatedly warned about AI threats. In June, he said on CNBC that he had invested in AI research because “I like to just keep an eye on what's going on with artificial intelligence. I think there is a potential dangerous outcome there.” He went on to invoke The Terminator. In August, he tweeted that “We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.” And at a recent MIT symposium, Musk dubbed AI an “existential threat” to the human race and a “demon” that foolish scientists and technologists are “summoning.” Musk likened the idea of control over such a force to the delusions of “guy[s] with a pentagram and holy water” who are sure they can control a supernatural force—until it devours them...... Adam Elkus in Slate . Elkus devotes his article to a lame brained attack on Musk's fears. I say lame because Elkus fails to engage Musk on substance or even seem to grasp the nature of the perceived thr...

The liberal arts, or education appropriate to a free person, originally consisted of the Trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the Quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. As knowledge and universities became more specialized, the liberal arts continued at first to encompass much of the curriculum, including science and mathematics. Various forces seem to have propelled more and more studies into science, engineering, business, fine arts and other distinct colleges, while what was left of the traditional liberal arts became ghettoized into a Humanities college, a mini-university of people who counted on their fingers, often with only history, literature, philosophy, and some fragments of language studies as their subject matter, or sometimes lumped a bit uncomfortably with social sciences like anthropology and psychology. Naturally this loss of centrality has the liberal arts professoriate angry, disoriented and perhaps dazed and confused. At a time when stu...

The fifties, sixties, and early seventies were years of sky high top bracket income taxes, strong economic growth, and rapid improvement in median American incomes. They were also the last years of Democratic Party political dominance. Sometime between then and now, the Democrats lost the confidence of the American working class, especially working class men. How so? Well, of course, it's complicated. Wars, race, oil shocks, terrorism all played their parts. Political parties tend to be dominated by elites. The great depression and it's economic questions, and the struggle against Fascism and Communism had dominated the Democratic Party and its elites for a generation, but by the sixties and seventies social issues had come to the fore. Social issues have dominated the mind of the party elite every since: civil rights, feminism, abortion, immigration, gay rights. Enormous progress has been made on many of these issues, in the law and in public opinion, but these wars w...

I caught Jon Stewart's interview with Bill O'Reilly the other day. Jon tried to get O'Reilly to admit that "White Privilege" existed in the US. O'Reilly handed him his head, incidentally demonstrating why Stewart would have been a terrible, awful, no good choice for news show host. Stewart is a wonderful satirist, and a very funny guy when interviewing his show business buds, but in trying to conduct a semi-hostile interview with O'Reilly he wound up looking like the befuddled pot head he described himself as being in his college years, while O'Reilly looked like the skilled debater he is. Part of his problem was that he saddled himself with the dumb formulation: "white privilege", which is a lame and inaccurate way of describing the sorts of obstacles blacks face in America. A privilege, says my online dictionary is: ...a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people. That...

Lockheed engineers recently claimed to have a breakthrough idea for a fusion reactor. Cheap, plentiful fusion power is only 20 years away! Cynical observers familiar with the long history of fusion power research contained their enthusiasm. 50 years or so ago, when peaceful fusion power had already frustrated the expectations of its devotees for a while, a prescient wit observed that fusion power was fifty years away - and always would be. If that's been updated to twenty years away - with the same qualification - that might be considered progress of a sort. The possibility of extracting energy from nuclear fusion was first understood in the 1920, and the great astrophysicist Eddington quickly appreciated that such fusion must power the stars. The Wikipedia article cited above notes that the first fusion reactor patent dates to 1948. Getting hydrogen atoms to fuse to form helium is a multi-step process, but the basic idea is simple: get two protons close together and they ...