Unsightly Mental Blemishes

On the other hand, new North Carolina State Senator Jeff Jackson (D – District 37) seems unafraid to tote up the failures of North Carolina leadership on his Facebook page:

North Carolina’s 30-year teachers make $50,000.

Houston’s first-year teachers make $49,100.

Not sure if that’s adjusted for COLA, but it’s probably not much of an adjustment – and it indicates the shrine of choice for North Carolina legislative leadership.

Since I appear to live in a hole in the ground (pun fully intended), I had not heard of this effort by some architects to do their bit in reducing carbon emissions: building skyscrapers using wood, which will sequester carbon, rather than steel & concrete, which emits carbon (and is hardly sustainable).  Michael Green makes the case at TED:

These are my buildings. I build all around the world out of our office in Vancouver and New York. And we build buildings of different sizes and styles and different materials, depending on where we are. But wood is the material that I love the most, and I’m going to tell you the story about wood. And part of the reason I love it is that every time people go into my buildings that are wood, I notice they react completely differently. I’ve never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings and hug a steel or a concrete column, but I’ve actually seen that happen in a wood building. I’ve actually seen how people touch the wood, and I think there’s a reason for it. Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood can ever be the same anywhere on Earth. That’s a wonderful thing. I like to think that wood gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings. It’s Mother Nature’s fingerprints that make our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment.

Helen Waters, also at TED, gets more information from Michael in a visual essay, which covers a number of topics, including the common concern: fire.

Peter Wilson at the Discover Magazine blog The Crux discloses the CO₂ cost of concrete:

This ability to use a renewable material to provide a positive response to a key environmental issue facing the construction industry, namely global warming, is nothing short of transformational. The use of concrete is already responsible for 5% of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

CityMetric covers a proposed wooden skyscraper in Vienna:

Unlikely as it sounds, wooden skyscrapers are a thing these days. As we noted last year, concerns about the environmental impact of steel and concrete are driving some architects and designers back to wood as a more eco-friendly alternative. There’s already a nine storey tower built from specially laminated timber in London, and a 12 storey wooden building under construction in Bergen, Norway.

A planned tower for Vienna, however, is due to leapfrog both in terms of scale and height. The HoHo project in Vienna’s Seestadt Aspern area will feature two wooden towers, the tallest of which will stretch to 25 storeys and 84m. The towers will be 76 per cent wood; Kerbler, the firm behind the designs, claim the material will produce 2,800 tonnes of CO2 when compared to a similar sized tower built from concrete.

The fire brigade in Vienna was a trifle irate, but they’re working with the builder to certify the construction materials.  Meanwhile, Lloyd Alter @ TreeHugger reports on the next step up:

Some think that architect Michael Green is pushing the envelope and perhaps his luck with his proposals for 30 and 35 storey buildings. Now he is working with Finnish lumber giant Metsä Wood to design and build a virtual Empire State Building, just to show that they can. The point of it all: “To challenge preconceptions and explore the possibilities of wood construction.”

Given that Michael is based in seismically active Vancouver, you have to think the seismic challenges for wood have been assessed; I probably just missed that section.

Here is Wood Skyscrapers.

A reader has a dismal reaction to the G7’s late move on the crisis:

I don’t read that with nearly the optimism that many commenters seem to have. It sounds more like hot air (no pun intended). Even if they were concrete goals which would be met in 2100, it’s probably way the hell too late. The only hope is in your final remark about it’s not so much about government as it is about the (small chance of a) tidal wave of public sentiment change and action. But I never over-estimate the public. As such, I’ve been busily mentally drafting a letter to my son, for when he’s a mature adult and I’m dead, apologizing profusely and long for bringing him into a world his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents generations so royally screwed up.

My hope centers around physical manifestations of the problems with fossil fuel overuse.  It’s one thing to point at subtle temperature changes and proclaim disaster in the offing, it’s quite another when food prices soar because of crop dislocations caused by out of normal range temperatures, etc.  Then the question will become whether we can change fast enough.  Once enough people abandon or show they’re willing to abandon fossil fuels, then the infrastructure will be abandoned and the hold outs won’t have a choice – economics at work, you might say.

The Australian experience may be illustrative of this process, at least politically speaking.  Whether it’ll work here and in China – two radically different political situations – remains to be seen.

It seems the North Carolina legislature is still failing to give its teachers any love, as we can see by this contribution from a North Carolina educator:

The N.C. Senate this evening started rolling out portions of its proposed budget, however we are still awaiting some of the details. Here is what we know right now.

• The Senate proposal will not make a dent in our dismal per-pupil spending and average teacher pay national rankings.
• Students and schools will be heavily impacted by the decimation of the state’s teacher assistants. According to reports, the Senate plans to cut more than 13,000 teacher assistants over two years. So much for the Senate’s job creation budget!
• Once again the Senate is shortchanging experienced teachers by giving them smaller, or in some cases, the most veteran teachers, no raise. The Senate also did not include restoring master’s pay as did the House budget.
• At a time when we are at the bottom of the heap in education, Senators used a $400 million surplus for the Rainy Day Fund instead of investing in education.
• Only $29 million in additional funding for textbooks and digital resources, the lowest of the three budget proposals.
• The Senate did include a proposal to reduce class size, but we are still trying to crunch the numbers and understand what it really will mean for schools.
• $6.8 million for private school vouchers.

Quite the dismal proposal.  I wonder how many of the legislatures legislators have children in the school system?

(Updated to insert a missing word. And again..)

I’m not religious, never have been.  But Pope Francis has been a great relief after Pope Benedict’s concentration on orthodoxy and theological purity, although perhaps I was negatively influenced by Andrew Sullivan’s view of the former Pope.  Francis’ public comments which I happen to stumble across seem more connected to the real world; his 3rd world origins give us a flip-side view of USA dominance of the world which is refreshing and important.

So now MarketWatch‘s Paul Farrell reports on the content of his upcoming (June 18th) encyclical.  I’ll take them one at a time:

Capitalism is threatening the survival of human civilization

A “threat to peace arises from the greedy exploitation of environmental resources. Monopolizing of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness.”

This is difficult to deny in the face of the destruction of the Amazon.  Let’s face it: raw capitalism is an unbalanced system in the sense that, while a libertarian will tell you that a wise owner will husband their resources in order to wring maximum long term profit, that has the hidden assumption that long term profit is desirable.  This is not always true; sometimes short-term profit is the desire of the owner, whether that’s rational or not.

There is a second hidden assumption: that value is objective.  It is not: value is, by and large, subjective.  Sure, we all value clean air and water … when it’s our water and air.  I discussed this a while ago here:

In the early days, the only international companies were the trading companies such as the Dutch East India Company; the overwhelming majority of companies were strictly local companies.  This resulted in the owners and the management having to live with the results of their decisions.  If you made a decision to treat your employees poorly, you heard about it: at church, at your office, and, if you were not a monopoly, at the clerk’s counter, as the customers decided to take their business elsewhere.  Communities did not exist to further the fortunes of companies, but to further the fortunes of the citizens, and they realized that betterment of the community resulted in the betterment of the citizens.

So now we see there are two dimensions to value: relative location as well as differing judgments on value itself.  So when I say the system is out of balance, it means resources are used for short-term profit because of different requirements, because valuations differ, and sometimes because people are idiots.

The managed capitalism practiced in first world countries is also destructive as it’s difficult to regulate the externalities involved.  It may help to remember that capitalism is often characterized as using  human selfishness to better the human condition; unspoken is the assumption that most of the selfishness balances out and the rest can be handled through minor regulations and the efforts of non-capitalist institutions … such as churches.  What is thought to work automatically is sometimes quite ramshackle.

Capitalism is destroying nonrenewable resources for personal gain

This is quite evident, not only in second and third world countries, but in the shorn off tops of mountains in the United States.

Capitalism has lost its ethical code, has no moral compass

Indeed, it’s hard not to see it as another religious institution for many folks these days.  And, given previous economic alternatives, it’s not a difficult thing to understand: it offers economic mobility, predicated on the notion of meritocracy.  There is nothing wrong with this notion.  Consider the idea of being stuck in your station for the rest of your life, a fate that beset millions prior to the notion of capitalism.  (Which may seem fine if you’re a programmer making a good living; now consider the janitor, the shoe salesman, the waiter.  While professional examples of each may be found, in general they are not considered stepping stones to a better life when they’re the final stop.)

Communism featured its own brand of social climbing, one that had little to do with merit.  Socialism is not well known, or understood, in the USA.

Back to the point; capitalism, as the dominant economic system in many countries, especially the USA, has come to the point where many think it IS the point.  Efficiency becomes the point, not building an institution attractive to both customers and employees – and leaves one of our most storied companies stained with embarrassment.

Not all companies have fallen into this mistake, of course; conscious capitalism (briefly discussed here) is an explication of the purpose and practice of responsible capitalism.

Capitalists worship the golden calf of a money god

Certainly a question for many Wall Street types.  On the other hand, some folks simply worked hard at their company and made millions.

Capitalists pursuit of personal wealth destroys the common good

… An economic system centered on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it.

What a great phrase, it really makes you think a bit.

Capitalism has no respect for Earth’s natural environment

There is no inherent value in the natural world as-is (and we’ll skip the discussion about Nature not being a static entity, either) for the capitalist; at least, not until their destruction of it rebounds on their heads to great effect, with, no doubt, a few exceptions.  But this is where we live, it is what supports us, so it behooves us to consider our actions and how they may negatively effect us.

Us.  Us.  Consider that word, a unitary word for a collective entity, an entity which doesn’t communicate particularly well outside of its own immediate circle.  The Internet may in fact be a symptom of this problem, and an attempt to ameliorate it.  But keep that in mind: “Us” is a misleading word, as what I write may only impact those who read it, and no one else.  The folks building a coal-fired power plant on the Amazon will not realize what impact that may have upstream, downstream – or on the other side of the world.

Capitalists only see the working class as consumers and machine tools

Sure seems that way sometimes.  See conscious capitalism.

Capitalism is killing our planet, our civilization and the people

And yet … the benefits of capitalism have been undeniable, its superiority over the previous systems make it beloved of anyone ground into the dirt – if they were able to use it to improve their lot.  There’s a lot to say for it, so that last statement is provocative, to say the least.

Mr. Farrell:

Imagine Pope Francis addressing a hostile GOP controlled joint session of the U.S. Congress in September. There’s no chance of changing the minds of those hard-right politicians, all heavily dependent on fossil-fuel special-interest donations. But he’s clearly laying the groundwork for a global revolution, and his enemies know it.

Indeed.  But, if it’s phrased so confrontationally, will it be wise?  Hardening the position of those who back unfettered capitalism may make it that much harder to win the war.  Declarations are fine when speaking to the home team, but you need reasoned arguments, preferably using their own ideology against them, to win the important battles.

And, on that note, what is the life expectancy of the Pope?  Will his successor, picked by the Cardinals, rather than by himself, be up for the job of continuing the battle?

(h/t Accumbens @ The Daily Kos)

(Updated – fixed a missing apostrophe, changed formatting for readability – 7/22/2015)

… which sounds rather like a weapon from Star Trek, but is not – it’s the code word for the movement away from fossil fuels and thus blunting the impact of anthropocentric climate change.  The G7 nations agreed to remove fossil fuels from their economies by 2100, or at least so the communique is interpreted.  From whitehouse.gov:

Urgent and concrete action is needed to address climate change, as set out in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report. We affirm our strong determination to adopt at the Climate Change Conference in December in Paris this year (COP21) a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) applicable to all parties that is ambitious, robust, inclusive and reflects evolving national circumstances.

The agreement should enhance transparency and accountability including through binding rules at its core to track progress towards achieving targets, which should promote increased ambition over time. This should enable all countries to follow a low-carbon and resilient development pathway in line with the global goal to hold the increase in global average temperature below 2 °C.

Germany’s dw.de reports on environmentalist reactions:

Lutz Weischer, of the German environmental NGO Germanwatch, told DW that the decisions on climate change constituted an “important moment in the international climate debate.” The commitment to global decarbonization, he added, was “a significant step.”

Samantha Smith, who leads the WWF’s global climate and energy initiative and was also in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, was less enthusiastic: “The G7 have given us some important political signals, but they’ve left out the concrete commitments from themselves as nations,” she told DW. Concrete, immediate actions to cut emissions, Smith added, “would have had a big impact,” particularly in the run-up to the summit. She did, however, call an initiative agreed by leaders to roll out renewable energies in Africa and other emerging countries “very positive.”

But,

Concrete financial pledges were, however, not made in the 17-page communiqué, which was hammered out by the delegations on the sidelines of the meeting. Leaders also pledged to lift 500 million people in developing countries out of hunger and malnutrition by 2030 – also without making concrete financial commitments.

Climate Central suggests this is too little, too late:

“Decarbonization by the end of the century may well be too late because the magnitude of climate change long before then will exceed the bounds of many ecosystems and farms, and likely will be very disruptive,” Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said.

The goal is a step in the right direction, but not very meaningful considering greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced dramatically within the next decade, well ahead of the G7’s timeline, Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, said.

“In my view, the science makes clear that 2050 or 2100 is way too far down the road,” he said. “We will need near-term limits if we are going to avoid dangerous warming of the planet.”

350.org warns investors:

The commitment should serve as a dire warning for investors considering new dirty projects, like the Galilee Basin coal mines in Australia, or investors who continue to hold shares in companies such as Exxon and Chevron, who refuse to acknowledge their climate risk and continue to spend massively on high carbon projects.

And Big Oil may become Tiny Oil:

More ambition is needed, but even these targets should send shivers down the spines of major fossil fuel companies. Scientists are clear that meeting the 2°C target will require leaving at least 80% of known fossil fuel reserves underground. Any new investments in extracting or finding new reserves will only further inflate a carbon bubble that is bound to burst.

G7 leaders also reiterated the need to phase out the fossil fuel subsidies, a push that will only gain momentum between now and the G20 summit in Turkey this November.

Bjorn Lomborg’s take at MSN is here.  Clean Technica reports,

Merkel and US President Obama, as well as President Hollande of France, have stood at the forefront of the G7 decarbonization movement. Jennifer Morgan, director of the global climate program at the Washington, D.C.-based World Resources Institute, said that “It’s pretty clear that Canada and Japan are in a different place than the rest of the G7 on the issue of climate change.”

Obama cannot make this succeed on his own, however.  International Business Times reports Sir David King of the UK is optimistic:

For him, Monday’s G7 agreement to “decarbonize the global economy” means a workable global climate deal is likely in Paris, he said late Wednesday 10 June.

“That commitment from the G7, to me, was a critical turning point,” said Sir David King, the UK’s Special Representative for Climate Change, in a process where “progress has been painfully close to zero.”

After failed talks in Copenhagen in 2009, “I think we’re coming to a very different point now,” he added. King is leading the UK’s efforts abroad to secure an ambitious deal at the crucial UN Climate Change Conference in Paris. …

During the G7 Heads of Government meeting on Monday, 8 June, world leaders from the developed nations pledged to remove carbon from the global economy by 2100.

The conditions for creating a global climate deal are now “realistic,” King said, because various carbon tax schemes are “emerging country by country.” Currently six Chinese provinces are trading carbon credits, with all provinces in the country set to take up the scheme in 2017.

As is Sami Grover @ Treehugger:

This is a significant coup for climate hawks, especially given that the G7 includes tar-sands rich Canada. And yet I see many Internet commenters voicing their incredulity: 2100 is simply too slow, given the speed at which the climate is already changing.

In many ways these angry voices are right. Many were hoping for more ambitious push by 2050 – and many individual G7 member countries including the United Kingdom and the United States have emission reduction targets of around 80 percent by that date – but this collective commitment to actually phase out fossil fuels completely, now signed onto by recalcitrant nations like Canada and Japan, represents a significant statement about where the future is headed.

As I’ve argued before, once we are firmly headed in a particular direction, the pace at which we get there becomes less about specific government targets, and more about the sheer momentum of social and technological change.

A correspondent writes about the effect of the economy on North Carolina’s citizenry:

People see the nation going to hell in a hand basket. They then (mistakenly) blame gay marriage, liberals, scientists, blacks, poor people, marijuana, Democrats, immigrants, atheists, the “elite”, Hollywood, etc. while missing some the real, biggest causes: corporate capture of government, ignorance, income disparity, polarized politics, cultural ghettos.

I think there are a couple of points to make here.

First, I don’t even think it takes “hell in a handbasket” – I think just change is enough.  Whether it’s gay marriage or electric cars, as the environment transforms from their formative environments, people often take it as as a step down.  For example, from my youth I recall the importance of a high fidelity stereo setup.  These days, that high fidelity is not as important as mobile access – of having those ear buds in and listening to something, no matter how bad the quality.

If I think about it, it makes sense to have instant access anywhere – but it’s a little disconcerting to realize the kids really don’t seem to care about quality, only about access.

But let’s take this thought a little further – let’s add in the idea, the concept, of people who do not try to approach morality from a rational point of view, but from a static, “revealed” point of view.  To such a person, where morality is the Word of God, completely perfect, what does it mean when the world around them changes in some meaningful way?  When they lack an intellectual approach to morality?

If you can’t evaluate change in a meaningful way, you can either panic or condemn, to be overly blunt about it.  The idea that a moral system is imperfect is the first step to evolving that moral system so that it doesn’t permit obvious unjust situations.  A “revealed” moral system, as its source is God, is difficult to evaluate since there will be many who take joy in the emotional proclamation of its existence.  And logic is easy: if it’s from God, it’s perfect, so don’t mess with it..

And, yes, that’s overly blunt: We no longer burn witches, stone adulterers, or whatever it is we’re supposed to do – if you’re in the Christian tradition.  People do think, often against their will, but eventually the received word is modified to a form less likely to leave society riven with tragedy and mutual hatred.  But it is a painfully slow and murky process.

(And let me say right here that “rational morality” is simply my code phrase for people behaving in a thinking and reasonable manner.  While someday I intend to explore the ramifications of rational morality, it’s not happening here.)

Secondly, let’s consider what I loosely term tribalism, the tendency to congregate and put the group ahead of the individual.  I’ve been meditating on this since I read this Daily Kos piece on sexual abuse in a fundamentalist family.

As I had described in a previous post, my stepfather, who was popular and handsome, insisted that we function as a “Christian” family. He was also a violent pedophile living a double life, one as a child abuser, and the other as the male head of a church going Christian family. …

At some point the pastor spoke to my parents. He encouraged my mother that she was fulfilling the will of God by staying married to a pedophile who molested all three of her kids because God hates divorce. My stepfather broke down and cried when confronted saying he was sorry for what he did. He claimed to repent (only when he was caught and confronted) and the pastor felt that the chapter was closed. I was firmly told that my stepfather had repented and that he was forgiven and transformed by God, and I should forgive him too. It seemed that Jesus would not forgive me for my sins unless I forgave others for theirs. I was directed to receive pastoral counseling from another area pastor. My stepfather wasn’t expected to get any counseling at all. The pastor I received Christian counseling from also believed in the transformative power of Christ which it seemed would be the key to my healing.

The social dynamics are fascinating once we toss in thoughts about revealed morality vs rational morality.   The group, as it offers a moral system, becomes paramount as morality is perceived as the primary mechanism through which a peaceful and successful society is to be achieved; more importantly, as the group and its moral system is definitionally good, if something of a non-good nature should occur within the group, then this is a threat to the moral system, which should only have good outcomes.  Those who’ve put their trust in the group, who’ve made it a fundamental part of what they are, will not willingly accept that their morality has led to a bad outcome.  In the above, the stepfather insists on a Christian family, thus he must be Christian; his activities that are not-good, then, are a product of the “revealed” moral system.

So there are a few logical paths: you can proclaim abusing your children as good; you can proclaim that the victims brought it upon themselves; or, as in the above, you can repress the evidence, because it’s a danger to this moral system which, having been dispensed by God, is good and is the mechanism through which the group is held together.

Add in a few leaders that have become addicted to power – a common human fallibility – and the victims are enmeshed in a web that reinforces itself so long as the leaders are more or less human.  The group is paramount – which, it could be argued, is a survival mechanism – and when the morality is static, the group becomes static and then twisted as the inability to allow for flaws in morality, to transform it into something better, is not available.

In case you missed it, Rosetta’s Philae lander has reawakened!  Here’s the Rosetta Blog:

“Philae is doing very well: It has an operating temperature of -35ºC and has 24 Watts available,” explains DLR Philae Project Manager Dr. Stephan Ulamec. “The lander is ready for operations.”

For 85 seconds Philae “spoke” with its team on ground, via Rosetta, in the first contact since going into hibernation in November.

(h/t Al Kolman-Stich, Kathy Melaas, CNN)

General Benjamin F. Butler, commander of Fort Monroe, declared that fugitive slaves reaching his command were contraband.  This legal maneuver led to their freedom.  Archaeology‘s Marion Blackburn has the story of Fort Monroe and how the city of Hampton, abandoned burned by the Confederates to prevent its use, instead gave the slaves free reign to build their own community:

In command at Fort Monroe was Major General Benjamin F. Butler, a criminal defense lawyer from Boston who had accrued a fortune by winning clients’ freedom on technicalities. Before the war, he had become known as something of a social activist for instituting a 10-hour workday—a reform at the time—in a mill he had purchased. Using his familiarity with legal loopholes, on May 24, 1861, Butler made what has come to be known legally as the “contraband” argument. Because the enemy considered slaves property, he reasoned, and because their labor was being used for the war effort, Butler concluded that runaway slaves were to be treated as any other illegal war goods would be—as contraband, subject to seizure by the Union, rendering them free.

Butler was “a lawyer first, and a general second,” says Michael Cobb, curator of the Hampton History Museum, adding, “He had the disposition to help people who were defenseless in many ways.” An agent for Charles King Mallory, [three escaped slaves’] owner, visited Fort Monroe to collect his “property,” and Butler explained that the law no longer applied in Virginia, which claimed to have seceded—but that he would return slaves to any owner who pledged loyalty to the Union.

“Butler’s fugitive slave law,” as it came to be known, drew thousands of slaves to Fort Monroe from as far away as North Carolina and Maryland, provided valuable Union labor, and represented a threat—real and existential—to local Confederate loyalists. Just months after Butler’s decision, on the order of Brigadier General John B. Magruder, the Confederate commander at Yorktown, the Confederates abandoned and burned Hampton. Their destruction of the city may have been intended as a provocation to the Union, but it had a different effect. It left a city’s worth of land and materials, albeit charred, for the newly freed people.

This was before the Emancipation Proclamation, making the legal maneuver all the more clever; it set an example that was emulated in more than 100 locations.  Butler, however, was not without controversy and suffered military defeats, which may explain why he’s not remembered today.  It’s a lovely article, and, judging from Wikipedia, Butler was quite the progressive.

Samir Patel of Archaeology Magazine writes a report on how the Romans might have designed their transportation network:

… Physarum polycephalum, consists of a single large membrane around many cell nuclei, and has drawn the attention of a wide range of scientists because of its uncanny ability to solve almost impossibly complex computational problems.

It’s a fascinating sentence: impossibly complex recalls a previous discussion of free will.  If a problem not solvable through mathematics is solvable through some other means, what does this say about the strictly mechanistic view of the universe when mathematics cannot resolve problems directly resolved by the Universe?  Does the slime mold prove free will?  Well, as usual I’m probably a little too far out on a limb here, but I do find the idea of a slime mold solving difficult computational problems to be fascinating.  It’s difficult to make a brain think in new ways, but perhaps the visual image of a slime mold solving problems may spark new ways of thinking about certain classes of problems.

Through rhythmic contractions of its membrane, called shuttle streaming, the slime mold grows out in search of food. If you put a P. polycephalum into a maze with two food sources in it, over a few days the organism will grow toward the food sources and retract from everywhere else except the shortest path between them. Mathematicians and network analysts call this the “shortest path problem.” When presented with additional food sources, the slime mold forms ever more complex and efficient networks. These “Physarum machines,” as they are known, may help in the understanding of communication, road, and transport networks, which also, over time, come to balance complexity and efficiency.

The new study applied the power of a Physarum machine (and a computer program that simulates its behavior) to landscape-scale archaeology, specifically Roman roads in the Balkans. Researchers placed a P. polycephalum in a petri dish containing 17 little bits of food representing 17 urban centers in the Balkans from the Roman imperial period. The slime mold “imitated rather spectacularly the two main military roads of the area, the Via Egnatia [across Macedonia] and the Via Diagonalis [from central Europe to Constantinople],” says archaeologist Vasilis Evangelidis of the Hellenic Ministry of Education. This was a test case, but future experiments with P. polycephalum might reveal previously unobserved patterns in complex networks of human settlement, trade, and migration.

I wonder if, and how, they simulated geographical features as well.

I managed to get ahead of myself yesterday and had not finished reading the article before posting this.  Current hypothesis on the original wall is that it stood 12 feet tall, was 200 feet long, and contained 25,000 words; this is extrapolation from the discovered fragments.  The discovered fragments criticize the Stoics, and argues the Gods are indifferent to human affairs.  Archaeology does provide a short online slide show of this site.

A final quote from Diogenes (the article is not entirely clear as to whether it’s from the inscriptions or another source), concerning his motivations for setting up the wall:

Not least for those who are called foreigners, for they are not foreigners.  For, while the various segments of the Earth give different people a different country, the whole compass of this world gives all people a single country, the entire Earth, and a single home, the world.

– Diogenes of Oinoanda

Wassim Bessem of AL Monitor reports on the termination of the hand-woven carpet industry in Iraq:

“I’ve been weaving for many years. I employed some workers and together we would make three or four carpets per month. Work was profitable and in high demand to the extent that buyers would order carpets in advance,” she said. According to Umm Hassan, completing the work on a carpet took about two weeks and in the ’80s and ’90s the carpets cost about $40 each, a relatively expensive price at the time.

However, time and circumstances conspired against Umm Hassan, and she got tired. She was no longer able to work, except for limited periods, given the absence of opportunities that could capitalize on her expertise and train a new generation to master the skills of this traditional industry.

The destruction of culture appears to be taking place.  It’s unsettling to realize that this happens because of our bloody removal Saddam Hussein, a dictator.  As with Marshal Tito, he provided a source of stability amongst factions who hated each other.

The majority of people suffer from a common disease, as in a plague, with their false notions about things, and their number is increasing … I wished to use this stoa [covered walkway] to advertise publicly the [medicines] that bring salvation.

– Diogenes of Oinoanda

Found this in Archaeology (July/August 2015, print edition only).  Applicable then, applicable now.  The idea that the great mass of humanity isn’t as smart as ourselves appears to be a long standing attitude.

The medicines Diogenes advocated was the philosophy of Epicureanism.  The author of the article, Eric. A. Powell, explains further:

It was grounded in physics, held that the pursuit of pleasure is the highest good, and eschewed belief in divine intervention.

The Wikipedia link clarifies the pursuit of pleasure:

Epicurus believed that what he called “pleasure” is the greatest good, but the way to attain such pleasure is to live modestly and to gain knowledge of the workings of the world and the limits of one’s desires. This led one to attain a state of tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from fear, as well as absence of bodily pain (aponia). The combination of these two states is supposed to constitute happiness in its highest form.

As the story of North Carolina continues, we discover that the Legislature’s Republicans have overridden the Republican governor’s veto and passed legislation that … well, the local ABC affiliate, ABC11, has the facts:

A measure allowing some court officials to refuse to perform gay marriage responsibilities because of their religious beliefs became law in North Carolina on Thursday, with the state House voting to override the governor’s veto of the bill. …

The law, taking effect immediately, means some register of deeds workers who assemble licenses and magistrates to solemnize civil marriages can decide to stop performing all marriages if they hold a “sincerely held religious objection.”

Most of the Democrats and the Governor have expressed their disappointment. Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog points out the vagueness of the new law:

The goal, not surprisingly, is to stand in the way of same-sex couples who want to wed, but the measure doesn’t specify that, which raises the prospect of some pretty broad problems. If a county magistrate has a religious objection to an interracial couple getting married, he or she can refuse.

The same is true if the local official objects to a couple from different religious backgrounds. If the local official objects to marrying someone who’s been previously divorced, the same thing.

Another writer comments about Kansas:

I liked the recent study which showed that standard Republican policies (cut income taxes, cut corporate taxes, reduce regulations, etc.) actually result in a poorer business climate. Strangely, it seems that happy, healthy employees and productive, non-economically stressed customers and local citizens are actually better for business than a tax cut. Who would have guessed? Certainly not the Republicans, apparently. Which is why Wisconsin is dead last for creating new businesses.

Since the tax cuts benefit the rich far more than the poor, the economy’s improvement would depend on the greater spending of the rich.  But do the rich need to spend?  No – they have what they need in terms of long-term purchases, and how much more can they buy in the area of consumables?

Chris Reeves @ The Daily Kos has some juicy quotes from the more conservative Republicans:

In the Kansas House last night, Rep. Rubin (R-Johnson County) spoke up and said “Taxes are evil. They are evil” at one point, which brought strong approval from the anti-tax ralliers in the balcony.

I asked them as the debate wore on what they thought and their position was clear “Taxes like this are the things socialists do, not a free country.” …

Kasha Kelley (R-Ark City) in her speech to the floor earlier: “This is the first step toward socialism”. (House)
Greg Smith (R-Johnson County), Senator, “Taxes are thievery, nickel and dime thievery.”

The last quote reminds me of holding a similar, if less extreme, position twenty years ago.  I bring this up to observe that part of the problem (and it’s a hard one) is a moral system in which goods & services are either obtained through trade (good), or they are taken by force (evil). In at least my educational venues, very little attention was given to any other economic transaction and its moral/ethical facet, such as whether or not taxation falls in the good or evil. Since taxation doesn’t immediately fall into the category of good, it must be evil, no?

Well, no. Senator Smith has evidently not given any thought to the positive contributions of government to the citizenry, from defense to services; his assertion, if indeed a true quote and not out of context, would leave me shaking my head and suggesting it’s time to replace them.

But the real point is a more nuanced discussion about the role of taxation in society, how it benefits society, and how they can be misused – this sort of thing is far more necessary to counter the mindless mantra that

TAXES ARE EVIL!

Some folks may be wondering why a deal is necessary, why the Israelis didn’t just knock out the nuclear facilities in Iran when they began to worry about them.  Israeli columnist Ben Caspit, writing for AL Monitor, reports on that recent history from a Jerusalem Post conference in NYC this past June 7th:

The much talked-about argument broke out toward the end of the discussion, when [Senior Columnist Caroline] Glick, who is known for her hawkish, right-wing views, claimed that in 2010, two members of the panel “were given an order to prepare the military for an imminent strike against Iran’s nuclear installation, and they refused.”

Quick to protest these allegations, [Maj. General] Dagan got into a vociferous argument with Glick. “It was an illegal order,” he said. “You were not there. You don’t know what happened there.”

Glick refused to concede: “Had you not brought in your expert legal opinion to determine whether or not the prime minister of Israel and the defense minister of Israel have a right to order Israel to take action in its national defense, then we would not be where we are today.” She blamed Dagan and [Lt. General and Chief of Staff] Ashkenazi for the current situation, which, according to the Israeli right, leaves the country with no way out. What she was effectively saying is that the heads of Israel’s security forces conducted a quiet putsch against the political leadership, preventing them from launching an Israeli assault against Iran’s nuclear facilities following plans prepared well in advance. …

Were they refusing a direct order? Was this a mutiny, or possibly a military putsch against the country’s political leadership? The answer is no. Glick’s question focused on a very specific incident, which occurred at the end of a meeting of the Septet, Netanyahu’s ministerial forum for strategic consultation. It was a private forum of ministers, without any statutory standing and therefore unable to make any decisions. …

Netanyahu is an overly cautious prime minister with an aversion to military adventurism, for reasons of personal political survival. He knew that if something went wrong with the attack and it then became public that he gave the order despite the recommendations of all of the professionals in the security services, it would be the end of his political career. At first, he invested enormous energy in trying to convince some of the defense chiefs to adopt his position. The event reported here occurred when he finally gave up.

The question that the Israeli right should ask Netanyahu is why he didn’t attack Iran in the summer of 2012. As far as Netanyahu was concerned, that summer was seemingly the ultimate moment: The heads of the security forces had left the IDF and were replaced with a new crop of generals lacking experience, charisma or influence among the public. At that time, Netanyahu had a weak and anonymous chief of staff in the person of Benny Gantz, a novice director of the Mossad with Tamir Pardo, a new chief of military intelligence and a new director of the Shin Bet on the way. At the same time, the United States was caught up in a bitter presidential election, in which President Barack Obama was fighting for his second term. Netanyahu was seemingly free to act. There was nothing to prevent him from attacking Iran in July, August or September 2012, but he hesitated and eventually put his dream aside. At the time, however, there was no one to interfere in any significant way.

So why didn’t he go through with it? First of all, because Netanyahu was afraid. Second, Barak [Obama] made a sharp, last minute U-turn and switched to the opponents’ side. And there must be other reasons.

Interesting.  One must assume that Mr. Caspit is fairly right-wing, if he’s willing to label Netanyahu as overly cautious.  A report to be read with some caution, with a feeler out for just what sort of political waters are swirling about, unseen.

Get a flu vaccination:

[Chris Reiber at Binghamton University in New York and Janice Moore at Colorado State University in Fort Collins] have found that people were far more sociable in the 48 hours following their annual flu vaccination than in the 48 hours preceding it. “This is highly suggestive that the virus is manipulating human behaviour for its own ends; that is, to spread itself to other potential hosts,” says Reiber. Another possibility, however, is that humans subconsciously become more sociable in anticipation of needing help and support ahead of disease.

The main article suggests there may be a link between Toxoplasma gondii and schizophrenia.

NewScientist (30 May 2015, paywall)

A FB correspondent remarks:

The trouble is, presenting facts doesn’t work. They ignore their failures, and just repeat their mantras. Bah. I wonder if the people of Kansas will bother to notice.

Let’s look at what we can know, which is the results of surveys.  Governor Brownback, former Senator for Kansas, was elected in 2010, winning a four way race with 63% of the vote, according to Ballotpedia.  At the time, cjonline.com (Topeka Capital-Journal) reported,

Immediate priorities in the Statehouse will be cutting state taxes and regulations in an effort to spur private-sector job growth, Brownback said. He vowed to reduce state government spending.

“My vision for Kansas is to see our economy grow so we will be able to fund the state’s core services,” he said. “My economic growth team and I are working hard to develop a balanced budget and tax plan, which will release the entrepreneurial spirit of Kansans and create the economic environment necessary for Kansas to become more globally competitive.”

Taking his vote percentage as an approval rating is probably a dubious practice, but it’s indicative of his dominance (second place had 32%).  What happened in the 2014 election?  Again, according to Ballotpedia, this time he won 49.8% to 46.1%, with a libertarian candidate taking the rest.  His approval rating in 2011,  according to local news station KWCH, was 51%, but in 2013 fell to 35% ; during the 2014 race, polling seemed to show he was frequently behind his opponent, to the extent that his campaign protested the cjonline.com poll, conducted by SurveyUSA:

In the midst of a challenging re-election campaign in 2014, Brownback’s staff now takes a disparaging view of SurveyUSA’s capacity to sample the public’s political pulse. The Clifton, N.J., company’s latest poll in Kansas’ race for governor, revealed Tuesday, had Democrat Paul Davis leading 48 percent to 40 percent for Brownback.

“SurveyUSA has a history of inaccurate polling,” said John Milburn, a spokesman for the governor and former Associated Press reporter who covered Brownback and other Kansas politicians for more than a decade. “This latest release from the organization is more of the same.”

Brownback campaign manager Mark Dugan, who worked for Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, discounted SurveyUSA’s work product as “another absurd poll showing the governor losing.”

Was the polling inaccurate?  Biased?  FiveThirtyEight had forecast Brownback to lose – big:

Republican Gov. Sam Brownback is in trouble for three related reasons: a Republican party split, economic woes and education. For as long as most of us have been alive, Kansas has leaned to the right, practicing its own brand of moderate Republicanism. Brownback, though, has governed as a pure conservative.

It has hurt him; Democrat Paul Davis has been endorsed by scores of moderate Republicans upset by cuts to education necessitated by Brownback’s large tax cuts.

According to SurveyUSA, taxes and education remain among the most important issues to voters in 2014. The result has been disenchanted Republicans. The share of registered Republicans in Kansas was 9 percentage points higher than the share of self-identified Republicans, according the latest Marist College poll. Many of these Republicans now identify as independent, a group Davis is winning by a 26-point margin.

Although polls have narrowed from a few months ago, most surveys have Davis riding Republican discontent to a lead. He’s an 82 percent favorite.

However, they do not appear to have conducted any polls of their own, just relied on others.  I found this courtesy Kevin Waisfeld, who goes on to enjoy a bit of schadenfreude.

So, back to the original question: do people learn?  I think they do.  Not enough, in this case; or perhaps they decided to accept the Governor’s assertion that he just needs more time.  That might be understandable, although in four years a lot of damage can be done.  But I think that electing a governor involves issues that are close to home: highways and education.  Let’s be honest: even WAR seems far away and irrelevant if you don’t have family members in the service – and there’s no draft to spread fear and discontent amongst the eligible; foreign policy?  For wonks.  Social Security and MediCare – hardly anyone touches those any more, and if they do they get to retire.

But when it’s close up and personal, then people do learn.  Which, of course, doesn’t really explain the Minnesota experience of an improved economy resulting in the Democrats losing the state House of Representatives.

American artist Bruce Shapiro combines motorized sand tables and ball bearings with computer programming to demonstrate what he calls the “art of motion control.”

See more here

The States which make up the United States of America are, famously, the laboratories of democracy, and Kansas is another state electing officials who hew to the Republican orthodoxy: cut taxes and watch the resultant prosperity generate more than enough revenues to cover the resulting budget deficit.  Or, as former Kansas Budget Director (12 years, 3 governors) Duane Goossen puts it on The Kansas Budget blog:

The selling point for hefty Kansas tax cuts was irresistibly seductive.  Kansas can lower income tax rates, exempt business profits from the income tax entirely, and state revenue will still remain the same, or maybe even grow, and the state economy will prosper.

But this premise proved to be completely false. General fund revenue did not replenish. It fell $700 million (11 percent) in one year, and the recently revised official revenue forecast now predicts that receipts will stay at that low level into the future. Nor did the economy prosper. The Kansas economy is plodding along, but growing at a rate below our surrounding states and the national average.

Peter Roff at USNWR wishes to disagree concerning Kansas, Paul Krugman, and appears to be ignoring the Louisiana story as well:

Then there’s Kansas, where Republican Gov. Sam Brownback has put the state on the path to abolishing its income tax. It was a bold move, one that required him to recruit candidates to run for the state legislature against members of his own party in order to get the votes to do it.

He won the policy battle and – if he wins re-election – he’s established a model other Republicans can and no doubt will follow going forward.

This, of course, is the most dangerous development of all. The modern Democratic coalition is based on the idea that the revenue the government collects will be spread around among its constituent political parts. It’s a kind of “share the wealth” program on steroids that allows for everyone to get along because no one walks away from the table without their share of the vigorish, which justifies the amount of money that the unions, the environmental groups, the trial lawyers and the civil rights groups take from their members to get Democrats elected in the first place.

If Brownback triumphs, the pie shrinks – which means there just won’t be as much taxpayer money to divide up in the future. So the Democratic coalition groups have to win and make sure no one ever tries to abolish a tax again, even if they have to stretch the truth to do it.

The article is somewhat old, so perhaps he’s since revised his thinking.  The Atlantic has published this:

The yawning deficit is widely blamed on the deep income tax cuts that Brownback, along with a Republican legislature, enacted during his first two years in office. They not only slashed rates, but more importantly, they created a huge exemption for business owners who file their taxes as individuals. By Brownback’s own description, the tax plan was a “real live experiment” in supply-side economics, with the idea being that lower taxes would spur investment, create jobs, and refill Kansas’s coffers through faster growth. Yet even under the most charitable analysis, revenue has plummeted much faster than the economy has expanded.

So how are the anti-tax pledges doing?  The Wichita Eagle has the low-down:

Gov. Sam Brownback, who pushed for those deep income tax cuts, wants fellow conservatives to ignore the no-new-tax pledges many of them have made since 2012.

He proposed higher taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, an idea that has been coolly received in the Legislature. The governor’s budget also depends on a $136 million tax increase on health maintenance organizations.

Leading lawmakers have entertained their own ideas, including increases in sales or gas taxes or a tax on “passive income,” including earnings from rent.

Another proposal would close a loophole that lets wages go untaxed for owners of limited liability companies, sole proprietorships and the like. Although income from those businesses was supposed to be tax-free, the wages paid from that revenue were always still intended to be taxed, lawmakers said.

But efforts to raise taxes run headlong into opposition from conservatives who ran for office touting anti-tax credentials.

About of a third of the 125-member Kansas House has signaled an unwillingness to raise taxes when revenue falls short of spending. Almost half of the 40-member Kansas Senate is on record as opposing new taxes.

The article goes on to note that some members are ready to toe the line, while the others are having an unhappy meeting with reality.  The New Republic notes that Kansas’ reserve fund is becoming depleted:

On Tuesday, Brownback signed legislation that would balance the budget by diverting money from other funds, particularly one for highway projects, to the general fund. It would also reduce contributions to pensions for teachers and government workers, pushing those costs into the future. It’s a deeply irresponsible budget that hides the costs of the tax cuts with short-term patches. But this is just the beginning: Kansas faces a projected $600 million budget shortfall in the 2016 fiscal year—and now there is no money in the reserve fund to cover any of it.

Mother Jones has a nice, if partisan article, subtly entitled, “Kansas Is Totally Screwed“, concerning the general situation and, in particular, education.  Kansas’ constitution guarantees an adequate education, but ….

The [state Supreme] court said the government had failed to allocate enough money for its students, and the justices tossed the decision back to a lower panel to determine what exactly would constitute a sufficient level of spending. Last week, that lower court ruled that funding for students “is inadequate from any rational perspective of the evidence presented or proffered to us.” The three-judge panel held that per pupil spending should be between $4,654 and $4,980 per year. Either number would be a huge jump over the $3,852 per student that the state currently spends.

The current Kansas Budget Director Shawn Sullivan was sent to warn recalcitrant lawmakers, KMBC-TV notes:

Kansas would likely be forced to lay off prison guards, cut aid to public schools and reduce payments to health care providers and nursing homes if legislators don’t increase taxes, Republican Gov. Sam Brownback’s budget director told GOP lawmakers Monday.

Budget Director Shawn Sullivan said that without tax increases, the most likely option for Brownback is cutting $400 million from a budget approved by legislators for the fiscal year beginning July 1, to avoid a deficit. He said the cuts would most likely be a 6.2 percent across-the-board reduction in their state funds, taking effect in late July or early August.

From The Atlantic article, we get a response from Brownback:

And like any politician on the ropes, he is preaching patience. “These things take time,” he said last month. He also acknowledged the toll his stumbles have taken on his image. “We’re in Lent season, so I’m giving up worldly things, like popularity,” he joked to a small crowd. Brownback has blamed the budget shortfall in part on automatic increases in education spending (a subject of a long-running court dispute), and he’s cited a recent uptick in job growth as evidence that the tax cuts, on the whole, are working. “Kansas is on the rise, and the state of our state is strong,” the governor proclaimed in an annual budget address in January.

Finally, this is surely enlivening discussions at Traditional Republicans for Common Sense.  From their “About Us” section:

Kansas has always been about the people, about doing what’s right and about putting others first. Radical elements and extremist politicians may have taken over our process, but it’s not too late to take it back from them. We must. And, together, we will continue to ensure that Kansas is the best place to live, work and raise a family.

Nice to see some of the old-line Republicans resent the ideologically bound amateurs that have pushed them aside.

Steve Benen at MaddowBlog reports on the effect the Norquist anti-tax pledge is having on one state – Louisiana:

Norquist is an anti-tax crusader who’s convinced all kinds of GOP policymakers to sign something known as “the pledge” – in order to get ahead in their party, Republicans agree in writing never to support raising any tax on anyone by any amount for any reason.

But occasionally, far-right policymakers discover that the mindless, knee-jerk commitment stands in the way of actual governance in the real world. Louisiana’s Republican-dominated state government, for example, is facing an enormous budget crisis, caused in part by Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R) tax breaks. Now the state can’t get its fiscal house in order, and as TPM reported, it’s asking Norquist to give Louisiana a break.

Grover Norquist and his Americans For Tax Reform group has been around for just about as long as I can remember (the group was formed in 1985, which somehow doesn’t sound long enough), and Norquist populated the pages of REASON Magazine quite often when I was a regular reader – usually as subject.  And he was usually one note.  He didn’t seem interested in questions of governance, simply in reducing the tax burden in any way possible, regardless of the consequences.

The results in the Louisiana case are striking:

– a $1.6 billion budget deficit
– inability to conduct Advanced Placement tests in schools next year
– proposed closing of schools and universities

The above courtesy the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.  They note the contributors to Louisiana’s problems:

With the exception of his first year in office, 2008, Jindal has constantly faced state financial shortfalls. Of course, falling energy prices certainly haven’t helped recently and account for a large portion — $400 million — of the shortfall.

But tracing the origins of Louisiana’s budget crisis is complicated. Lawmakers and economists agree that Louisiana’s finances face a “structural” budget problem that has nothing to do with the energy market. The state simply isn’t set up to collect enough revenue to cover its expenses, even during oil and natural gas booms.

Here’s what that means.

First, more money than the state could spend 

During the last two years of Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s administration, the state budget reached record heights. In the 2007-2008 fiscal cycle, Louisiana had a spending plan of $28.6 billion. That was a major increase from the year before Hurricane Katrina, when total spending was only $16.5 billion, according to the Louisiana Legislative Fiscal Office. And it’s nearly $3 billion more than the estimates for state spending in the current budget cycle.

“In 2007-2008, we were really rolling in money,” said Jim Richardson, a Louisiana State University economist who sits on a panel that oversees state revenue. …

Lawmakers, governors and the voters have constitutionally shielded large swaths of Louisiana spending. Much of the state’s primary and secondary education funding automatically increases — and can’t be cut — if more students enroll. This past fall, voters adopted ballot measures that make it difficult to cut the Medicaid budget.

There are also tax credits that entitle business and individuals to a portion of the state funding pie, or at least make it likely Louisiana won’t collect as much in revenue. Some have grown astronomically. Most prominent is the film tax credit, which requires the state to reimburse certain film and television production costs. Last year, the state paid out around $250 million in film tax credits alone.

The above lovely article goes into quite a lot of detail concerning how Louisiana has begun to approach the status of laughingstock of the nation.

Now, faced with a shortfall through financial mismanagement, the Republicans, according to Benen, ask for permission from Norquist to roll back tax credits or raise taxes.  And didn’t get it.

Gentlemen, it’s called cojones.  (Apologies to any ladies in the Louisiana legislature.)  And maybe a few have some.  The Advocate of New Orleans reprints an AP article from Melinda DeSlatte:

“They’ve used all the smoke that was in the can and all the mirrors that they could buy and now they’re out of tricks. Their solution is to gut higher education like a fish,” said Republican state Treasurer John Kennedy.

But let’s not stop here; speculation on the mindset of Governor Jindal and his fellow Republicans (I’m tempted to call them cultists at this juncture) is interesting as I see this as one of the consequences of team politics, as we’ve previously discussed.  When unnaturally strong hierarchical links are forged between the members of a party, and the folks who’ve clambered to the top (using blatant threats to unseat those folks who displease them, in this case) do not have good judgment, this is what happens: poor decisions, rigid ideologies based on the favored myths of those at the top of the heap, and, generally, disaster.

It’s akin to what happens to dictators who think they’ve slipped the surly bonds of societal norms and can do anything their ideology pleases – eventually, they get dumped in prison, and their damned ideology gets dumped in the river.  Like this chap.

Perhaps this will be an inflection point for the Republicans – if Louisiana legislators get up on their back legs and reject the rigid ideologies that has inflicted great unhappiness on their state, perhaps they will lead the GOP out of its current Dark Age of ignorance and denial, despite their national prominence, and back into relevance where they might be trusted to govern.

If they do, it might be fun to write every Republican state legislator in all 50 states and ask them to reject any allegiance they might have to that pernicious anti-tax pledge – and see how they reply.

And then turns serious during the interview with the spokesman …

John Horgan at the Scientific American blogs interviews George Ellis , a cosmologist who worked with Hawking, physicist, a Quaker, and winner of the controversial Templeton Prize, and in the interview they touch upon, among other topics, the nature of free will, recently discussed here and, briefly, here:

Horgan: In some of your writings, you warn against excessive determinism in physics, and science. Could you summarize your concerns?

Many scientists are strong reductionists who believe that physics alone determines outcomes in the real world, This is demonstrably untrue – for example the computer on which I am writing this could not possibly have come into being through the agency of physics alone.

The issue is that these scientists are focusing on some strands in the web of causation that actually exist, and ignoring others that are demonstrably there – such as ideas in our minds, or algorithms embodied in computer programs. These demonstrably act in a top-down way to cause physical effects in the real world. All these processes and actual outcomes are contextually dependent, and this allows the effectiveness of processes such as adaptive selection that are the key to the emergence of genuine complexity.

At first, I wasn’t quite certain how this is demonstrably untrue.  However, I think he sees the contents of the brain as operating in a reality separate from our tangible reality.  The Wikipedia article on Ellis states that he is a platonist:

… refers to the philosophy that affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to “exist” in a “third realm” distinct both from the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism (with a lower case “n”).^[1]

Keeping that in mind, it becomes clear how he could justify his assertion that free will comes from thoughts in the mind, since they, in his view, are not subject to the laws of physics.  His further assertion that an algorithm implemented in a computer is also in a different realm must derive from the idea that algorithms are a construct of our minds, and an implementation of such also comes from a realm differing from our physical reality.

I am not a platonist, so I find these assertions to be dubious.

As I stated above, mathematical equations only represent part of reality, and should not be confused with reality. A specific related issue: there is a group of people out there writing papers based on the idea that physics is a computational process. But a physical law is not an algorithm. So who chooses the computational strategy and the algorithms that realise a specific physical law? (Finite elements perhaps?) What language is it written in? (Does Nature use Java or C++? What machine code is used?) Where is the CPU? What is used for memory, and in what way are read and write commands executed? Additionally if it’s a computation, how does Nature avoid the halting problem? It’s all a very bad analogy that does not work.

This should appeal to my Arts Editor, who enjoys baiting the occasional mathematician; and it’s true, in my humble view, that mathematics is a subset of logical systems in which the behavior of the operations is chosen to mimic reality.  While it seems like an obvious truism, a few mathematicians have disagreed, suggesting,

Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.

(from Wikipedia’s article on Mathematical universe hypothesis.)  While that’s a fascinating thought, I currently am inclined to the former view, partially for reasons found later in this post.  Now, with regard to physics-as-algorithm, it’s interesting that he claims physical laws are not algorithms: how does he know that?  He doesn’t say, quite understandably.

But here we might learn something from Noson Yanofksy’s book, mentioned in this post: The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell us.  If we take his assertions to be true, that some problems embodied in physical phenomena cannot be solved using mathematics, then that suggests they are not mathematical at all; their essential nature is only partially understandable through mathematics.  They are something else.  As something else, they may in fact have a stochastic component … thus leading to the unpredictability which would refute the reductionism necessary to proclaim a lack of free will.

Horgan: Einstein, in the following quote, seemed to doubt free will: “If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the Earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord…. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.” Do you believe in free will?

Ellis: Yes. Einstein is perpetuating the belief that all causation is bottom up. This simply is not the case, as I can demonstrate with many examples from sociology, neuroscience, physiology, epigenetics, engineering, and physics. Furthermore if Einstein did not have free will in some meaningful sense, then he could not have been responsible for the theory of relativity – it would have been a product of lower level processes but not of an intelligent mind choosing between possible options.

I find it very hard to believe this to be the case – indeed it does not seem to make any sense. Physicists should pay attention to Aristotle’s four forms of causation – if they have the free will to decide what they are doing. If they don’t, then why waste time talking to them? They are then not responsible for what they say.

This is a fascinating conundrum – if a physicist truly believes in the lack of free will, then why award them any prizes for their discoveries?  After all, they were predestined.  So why bother?

Of course, one can argue the prizes were predestined as well.  However, at this juncture I’m beginning to feel like an ant in an ant-farm – or part of a large computer simulation (given the similarity of the smartphone addicts to a network of processors, I can say, with nary a grin, that I’m not joking).  We can either begin speculating on the nature and motivations of whatever has set our Universe in motion, or we can accept that free will does exist, but is perhaps not yet understandable, and move on to trying to understand it.

In case you’re interested in Ellis’ thoughts on causation, he discusses this in a separate interview, available at IAI News:

A key question for science is whether all causation is from the bottom up only. If forces between particles are the only kind of physical causation, then chemistry, biology, and even our minds are emergent, bottom-up properties of physics. On the other hand, it might be that these emergent higher level structures, such as cells, neurons, and the brain, have causal powers in their one right.

In the first instance, all the higher levels are epiphenomena – they have no real existence – and so the idea that you are responsible for your actions is false. But in fact top-down causation takes place all the time, with the higher levels controlling the lower levels, not by any magic force, but by setting constraints on lower level interactions. This means that higher levels such as cells, neurons, and your brain have real causal powers, and this means you can indeed be held accountable for your actions.

By whom?

(h/t Discover Magazine)

Related to this topic, concerning declining membership in the GOP, Gallup is now reporting a change in the composition of the GOP:

The percentage of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who describe themselves as both social and economic conservatives has dropped to 42%, the lowest level Gallup has measured since 2005. The second-largest group of Republicans (24%) see themselves as moderate or liberal on both social and economic issues, while 20% of all Republicans are moderate or liberal on social issues but conservative on economic ones.

What does it mean?  Hard to say, since the historical graph indicates an even larger dip in 2005, followed by a local peak four years later.  Gallup still claims, though, that this is symptomatic of the GOP’s oldest voters basically dying off, since conservative on both issues correlates with age.  Given that just a year ago, the percentage was 51, I would want to see a continued trend down next year before declaring a big trend.

However, this does correlate, in some dubious manner, with this Gallup poll concerning general social leanings of voters:

Thirty-one percent of Americans describe their views on social issues as generally liberal, matching the percentage who identify as social conservatives for the first time in Gallup records dating back to 1999.

If these trends continue to hold up, then the GOP is going to have to change in order to remain a nationally important political party – and that can only be a good thing for voters.  As an independent, the ideal situation for myself is to see balance and reasonableness in both parties.  The GOP has not resembled a reasonable party since at least the impeachment of President Clinton, if not longer.  Governance is an important subject requiring intelligent, sober people, not folks like … well, go ahead and supply your own names.  And balance and fair competition – not this (“Court says Va. must end gerrymandering”) – leads to the creativity necessary to survive in this new age of global threats.  Steadfast denial of reality does not count as creativity.