Thoughts Before The Alarm Sounds

Since medieval times, corporations have been legal formats created by the government, such as the Crown, Governor, Legislature, etc., to enable citizens to do business as a group. As the American colonies developed and won their independence, corporations for the most part remained in the background. (The Boston Tea Party, wherein the Sons of Liberty dumped 342 crates of British East India Company tea into the ocean, was a notable exception.) The vast majority of Americans at the time lived and worked on small family farms. The real threat was the unilateral, unaccountable power of King George III, and the founders of a new nation, skeptical of that kind of power, formed a government of checks and balances to prevent any one branch from getting too powerful. Although corporations were not mentioned in the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson famously noted that representative government’s purpose was “to curb the excesses of the monied interests.” After the American Revolution, corporatio...

     It was no surprise that all the articles on the National News page of Monday's newspaper were concerned with the “officially” ended recession and various reactions to it. The major story discussed whether the ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement is here to stay or will just fade away as so many social movements have done in the past. I will get to the other articles shortly.      The OWS movement is based on the premise that the one percent of households who control the “vast majority” of the nation's wealth do so while the remaining 99% are suffering as they struggle to make ends meet. Just as the Missouri mule skinner had to get his student's attention by hitting him with a baseball bat, I believe the term “vast majority” was picked out of the blue in order to get the attention of potential sympathizers; I do not believe that using fictitious figures will help the movement.      Don't misunderstand me – the true...

     On September 23rd researchers at CERN, Europe’s main physics laboratory, announced that subatomic particles called neutrinos had apparently sped from the lab’s headquarters near Geneva, through the Earth’s crust, to an underground detector 730km (450 miles) away, around 60 billionths of a second faster than light would take to cover the same distance. If this observation turns out to be true, it will mean that Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, which sets the speed of light as the limit of velocity in the Universe, is in need of tweaking.      According to the Special Theory, traveling faster than light would open the possibility of travel through time, which would lead to several paradoxes. For example: There was a young lady named Bright, Who could travel faster than light. She took off one day, In a relative way, And came back the previous night. Could a person travel back in time and kill his grandfather before the ti...

     Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. - Isaac Asimov.      Isaac Asimov (1920 – 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. A prolific author and editor of more than 500 books and 90,000 letters and postcards, his interests ranged from science fiction to popular science to humor, and are listed in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, has stated that it was Asimov's concept of psychohistory that inspired him to become an economist.      In my opinion , the above quote is one of the most incisive statements Asimov made during his lengthy career. Following are some well-known examples of popular opinions that are contrary to the facts of the situation....

     Session two of the four part series was presented by Mahlon Fuller, the watch supervisor of the Pittsburgh International Airport's control tower and radar room on the morning of 9/11/01. He participated in the shutdown of the nation's air space; with some 4,000 planes in the air, the mission was accomplished in less than three hours.      Shortly after the Pentagon was hit, Fuller evacuated the radar room and control tower after a hijacked plane, later determined to be United 93, was spotted heading directly for the facility. When he returned to the radar room the plane was off the scope. Although he was indoors and did not see the it, Fuller believes the plane passed directly over the tower before crashing near Shanksville. eight miles beyond Pittsburgh's radar coverage.      His narrative was accompanied by an NTSB animation of the last three minutes of United 93, showing not only the flight path, but also the air spee...

     The retirement community which I call home is presenting four seminars on the title subject of this blog entry. I attended the first, Flight 93 , last Monday. The movie on A & E was nominated for eight Primetime Emmys, and won two of them. If you have not seen it, you should.      It is the story of one of the four ill-fated airliners that were hijacked by Muslim terrorists on September 11, 2001. Three of them hit their intended targets, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but thanks to heroic efforts by the passengers, Flight 93 missed its intended target, believed to be either the National Capitol or the White House.      Through cellphone calls to their families, the passengers learn about the fates of the other three planes, and it gradually dawns on them that they are also on a flight destined to end in death. The scenes go back and forth between the passengers, their families, and the authorities, and the...

     It would be nice if there were just two sides to every question, but it's just not true. For example, if I were to ask what needs to be done to end the current recession, the answers would run the gamut from more government spending to cutting spending to the bone, from increasing taxes on the wealthy to cutting taxes for everyone, and countless other real and imaginary solutions.      Even in court the question ostensibly is guilt or innocence of the defendant, but we all know that the verdict goes to the attorney who successfully convinces the jury that his analysis of the “shades of gray” is the correct one. If it were not so, no “guilty” party would ever later be set free on the basis of better evidence.      One of the problems with growing older is that one can discern the gray shades; as a result one's judgment swings back and forth between the “sides” of the question. It can get very confusing.   ...