How to Vote

Doing Away With the Electorial College

One man, one vote ... but the vote doesn't have to be binary. We have the technology now to use a more useful and expressive way to vote, the Condorcet System, also described on this page. Those two pages describe the Condorcet System well enough that I don't need to elaborate on it, nor add why I think it should be adopted.

But I will anyway.

This country has been dominated by two parties who don't represent the opinions of the people -- neither the people of their parties nor the people in general. Condorcet takes power away from the two major parties and divides it more fairly, more accurately expressing the beliefs of minority parties, such as that to which I now belong, the Libertarian Party.

Going Broke More Slowly

Delia is opposed to debt.

Ever since she first met me, I have been in debt. There were brief intervals when I emerged from my debt, but it has never stayed away. The best I can do is to try to control it.

A number of years ago, Delia took control of my most powerful debt control tool, the mortgage. She wouldn't let me use it until it became an emergency. It became an emergency again this year.

I had moved some of my credit card debt from accounts having an interest rate of 15% or higher to a new card that offered a 5% rate. They even gave me a super high credit limit to encourage the process.

You can probably guess what they did to me: they raised the rate to 28%. I'm pretty sure I didn't have any late payments or other problems but had just become ensnared in their trap.

California's skyrocketing real estate market has worked in my favor. Banks want to loan money on homes and other property at ever-decreasing interest rates. I was able to knock more than one percent off of the fixed rate I had been paying while increasing the monthly payments only slightly.

Despite the slight increase in my mortgage payments, my total monthly payments should drop more than $1,500.

That even pays for the car I bought myself, which Delia has appropriated for her own use and complains about every time she uses it.

If I start to have money left at the end of the month, perhaps I'll retire instead of continuing to try to find a job. The last likely job opportunity escaped me about three weeks ago.

Foreign Political Statement

I shamelessly stole the link Sign in India from Neil Schneider's email message to the KPLUG group. I hope the picture stays there for a while, so lots of people get a chance to see it.

Draw your own conclusions.

Bring Back the Magic

Ooooo, I had fun today! The class at Oasis was titled "Weber's World: Science, Religion, and the Almighty Scholar", which doesn't sound much like fun, I'll admit. Professor Rohatyn of the University of San Diego made it fun.

He started by informing us that this year is the 100th anniversary of Weber's work in which he explained the Protestant Ethic. The following are the notes he handed out to the class on the subject.

---

Weber in a Nutshell

1. Modern capitalism is due largely to the rise of the Protestant Ethic. Other forms of capitalism have always existed, but the decisive difference between modern capitalism and its predecessors is the emphasis on rational calculation of future earnings (the profit motive).
2. The Protestant Ethic is the view that salvation depends on good works, and that accumulation of wealth is at least the sign of election to heaven.
3. Wealth is not meant to be enjoyed, but only to be used (reinvested), to create more and more of it. It is a means, not an end. Work is a calling, not merely a career or an occupation. It is holy, because it serves divine purposes (cf. Perry Miller / Puritan errand in the wilderness).
4. Everything in this world happens for a reason, and is foreordained by God (predestination). Nevertheless, we need not despair, or resign ourselves to fate. Our acts cannot influence God, or change his mind, but they can serve as evidence (proof, testimony) that some of us will be saved. By definition, the gift of grace cannot be earned, yet one who obeys his conscience is homehow entitled to see himself as reborn.
5. Since God's will and judgment are eternal and unalterable, it is pointless to resort to magic or other rituals to make things happen. Instead, the individual must stand before God, accountable (in every sense) for his actions. We live alone, we die alone, we are alone.

These ideas have had vast and lasting consequences:

1. Lonliness, existential anguish, suicide (Hamlet, Camus).
2. Rise of democracy (respect for persons, disdain for all authority except God, and for all learning except the Bible).
3. Rise of science (emphasis on facts, evidence, proof).
4. Disenchantment of the universe (mechanism replaces mystery).
5. Rise of bureaucracy (the most rational way to increase organizational efficiency, productivity and thus profits).
6. Thanks to all that, religion wanes. Yet as it declines, the PE becomes secularized. Hence wealth becomes an end in itself. Result is the "iron cage" of shallow, regimented and meaningless existence which imprisons everyone today.
7. Quixotic attempts to escape: hedonism, eroticism, and various forms of cult religion (charisma), seeking refuge in racism, demagogery and utopian schemes.
8. Only real answers:
   1. Create genuine communities, not masses of bored, alienated and exploited laborers (cf. Marx).
   2. Understand roots of dilemma, to avoid falling into the same trap again.
   3. Treat politics (and social science) as a "vocation," that is, a calling based on an "ethic of responsibility" which harmonizes means and ends, and thus avoids the mistakes of the past (cf. Dewey).

---

Given this nutshell summary and a brief history of Weber's life, the discussion was off. First on the agenda was witchcraft. Until the 17th century, people believed in witches, witchcraft trials were common and millions of witches, mostly women, were put to death. After, when rational thought displaced such beliefs, the trials ended ... except for one in the United States, which was eventually found to be based on fraud and hallucination and thoroughly discredited. This tendency to rational thought led to dissenting opinions about religion, thence to the Protestant Reformation. Not all Protestant groups were comfortable with each other, so the Calvinists left Europe for the New World, settling in and about Massachusetts.

Ahhh, the poor Calvinists. They said they were working in this imperfect world to earn themselves a place in a better world to come, but their efforts created a better world here, one the wealthy could enjoy before dying. Ben Franklin helped secularize the process, taking God out of the picture, summing up in three words what others had taken entire books to say: "Time is money".

I kept wishing I had a recorder with me. My memory isn't adequate to the task of keeping in mind the high points of the talk, much less the interesting details. It was a rich and complex talk, with good questions and better answers.

I do remember that disparaging remarks were made about the inflated ego of one of my heroes, Carl Sagan. B.F. Skinner was also mentioned, or his followers were, as having founded communes; I remember Skinner for his statement, "Anything you don't know about yourself can be used by somebody else to control you". Something along those lines was discussed, but not directly in relation to Skinner.

The curse of a rational universe is that there is no more magic. You can see the end coming and it is ... the end. Nothing will follow it. There will be no magical heaven nor any magical rebirth to a new life.

You can always live like a Liberal: "Yes, there will be an end ... but it will never come". The stereotypical Liberal may be forced to admit that consequences exist in the impossibly distant future but never, ever in the immediate, near future. They live life like it will go on forever and never consider the alternative.

Or you can deny that there's no magic. You can go on believing the religious fantasy of your choice. You can come up with detailed pictures of what heaven will be like. Meanwhile, you can joke about the poor sucker whose vivid vision of the virgins of his heaven has driven him to take a few hundred or thousand other lives along with his own. He believed. Surely belief can make it so. Can't it?

Like it or not, we live in a rational world. It would be hard for most of us to bring back the magic.

By the way, in 1920 Weber saw a charismatic speaker on a street corner in Germany, a certain Adolf Hitler. Fulfilling his predictions and worst fears concerning irrational, emotional, escapist cult movements, the presence and rise of that speaker quite possibly added sufficiently to his anxieties as to, with Weber's tendency towards depression, contribute to his death that year.

Thanks for the Memory

The first computer I had anything to do with used vacuum tubes instead of integrated circuits. Many of you have never seen a vacuum tube. They are about the size of an elongated light bulb and produce just about as much heat as a light bulb does. The computer was physically large, taking up three stories of one wing of the building it was in. The large number of vacuum tubes meant that failures were frequent, and the computer usually ran for about twenty minutes before something burned out and had to be replaced. Input and output were by punched cards, and the program had to be able to read in, read the data, perform all the calculations and produce its output in twenty minutes.

The computer's speed was glacially slow by today's standards. Programming for it was an art, as there were no compilers or assemblers, only machine language. The memory used acoustic delay lines -- eight tanks of mercury, each almost twenty feet long, with a sonar transducer at each end -- and instructions had to be interspersed with data in such a way as to make the data available at the best possible time for the calculations being performed.

There was a total of four kilobytes of memory in a space twenty feet long by ten feet wide, shock mounted and insulated against outside noise and vibration.

I have seen, but have not used, the old eight inch floppy disks. The first machine I had with a floppy drive used single sided 5.25 inch floppies, each with a capacity of 180 kilobytes of storage. That's 45 times as much storage as that first commercial computer I used, and it took up less space than half a page of paper.

Floppies continued to grow in capacity, first going double sided, then going to high density. Then the 5.25 inch floppies were replaced by the 3.5 inch floppies with a capacity of 1.44 megabytes, eight times the capacity of the first floppies.

Some of you have never seen a 5.25 inch floppy. The 3.5 inch floppies have started to disappear.

Now there are CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs. The DVDs will soon be going to multiple layers for increased capacity.

Meanwhile, hard drives have improved to the point that the home user can economically have a terabyte of storage in his computer.

I keep all of my writings on a small memory device about the size of three cigarettes placed side by side. It is so small I keep it on a cord, a long shoelace, to keep from losing it. It contains 256 megabytes of storage, almost 178 times the capacity of a 3.5 inch floppy. That's 65,536 times the capacity of that old computer whose memory was the size of a living room, the first computer I worked with just 45 years ago.

Political Viewpoints

We spent Sunday with some Bush supporters.

Supporting Bush is not, in and of itself, wrong, but I was surprised at the manner in which these people defended their hero. They have obviously heard and memorized a number of standard arguements against Bush. As soon as any of us started to say or ask something, they classified our unspoken thoughts into one of their categories and interrupted us to present the appropriate counter to the expected arguement. We never got a chance to say or ask anything. Their responses were highly inappropriate to what I, in particular, had been planning to say -- and were at a much higher level of vocal volume than I was willing to use for something so trivial -- and they were embarassingly emotional about the whole thing.

Following a Bush can get you into a lot of trouble. When Moses led his people out of Egypt, he went up on the mountain and spent a few days talking to a really hot Bush -- who gave him some rocks with laws carved on them -- and he and his people wound up lost in the desert for the next forty years.

The senior Bush gave us one war in the Middle East to boost his popularity and then invaded Panama and kidnapped its leader. He carefully picked very weak targets and hit them with overwhelming force. Both times, he stopped when he achieved his objective and was able to pull out cheaply but without losing face.

Young Dubya thought the same plan would work for him ... but he didn't want to stop when he should have. He wanted to finish the job, the way he thought his father should have. He picked two unpopular and weak opponents and hit them hard. And he stayed, looking for the leaders he had gone in after, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, one of which was actually found alive.

Those wars, while profitable, were completely unnecessary.

Both of the bad guys we went after were our creations. We trained and armed both of them. Saddam Hussein did our bidding up until the very end, using the weapons of mass destruction we and the Russians provided him against his Kurds as well as against Iran in a futile eight year war designed to bring financial ruin to both Iraq and Iran.

It would have been much better to simply have removed the sanctions against Iraq decades ago and let them sell their oil on the open market.

Israel wouldn't have liked that.

Israel wants Iraq and Iran to be weak and defenseless. They have been known to launch attacks against Arab neighbors who get too strong or prosperous, and they have between 200 and 300 nuclear missiles with which to attack.

To keep Israel happy, so they keep their nuclear toys locked up, we pound on their enemies for them. It's good sport.

Bush has promised more of the same. Kerry has promised to do even better.

They leave little to choose from, between the two of them. It's like having to choose between head lice and dandruff.

I worry about Bush, though. He isn't the smartest president we've had. He's sincere ... just not all that bright. I'm afraid his followers are leading us down some paths that will prove, in the not too distant future, to lead to great domestic intranquility and unrest.

Solstices and the Great Clock

I attended an Oasis class on the Summer Solstice on the day of the summer stolstice. It was a mixed bag for me, a subject that interested me taught by an astrology apologist who was dismally ignorant and not very bright:

• She was unable to explain precession of the equinoxes as the wobble typical of the earth as a gyroscope with very low friction;
• She couldn't explain what an equinox was apart from being the date half-way between two solstices;
• She had no idea what kind of material the Greeks wrote on;
• She kept insisting the Greeks spoke Latin;
• She kept confusing the solstices and the spring equinox as being the pointer for determining which age of the Zodiac the sun currently points to.

Plenty of new information was presented, though, including a summary of the Osiris legend cycle that clearly brought out its similarity to the Hamlet / Norse Amlodi legend cycle for explaining the nearly universal messiah legend. The conclusion that the Age of Aquarius should begin following the end of the year 2012 was presented on the basis of a series of coincidences, with no evidence to support it. The last time I checked, over a decade ago, it appeared that the Age of Aquarius was hundreds of years away. I'll have to get out an astronomy program and have another look.

We were given a break after nearly an hour of lecture. Over half of the class left at that time, either unable to understand the subject matter as presented (lots of technical astronomy was thrown out, much of it incorrect) or simply disgusted at the presentation. I stayed until the bitter end, gleaning a few more nuggets from an increasing pile of trash as the subject matter wandered into the area of chakras and meditation.

I was reminded of that old saw about the danger of a little bit of knowledge. The speaker clearly demonstrated her lack of education in history and technology during the discussion. Despite her apparent failings, the audience who remained had good things to say about the lecture (I kept my mouth shut, having benefitted despite my misgivings).

New material included evidence from the pyramids that in the First Age, beginning about 12,800 years ago, the pyramid builders left markers showing their awareness of the changing elevation of the constellation Orion, which ancient Egyptians held in particular regard. 13,000 years is about half of the Great Year of the Zodiac, and the peaking elevation of Orion placed the Great Year at its equivalent of the summer solstice, just as we are now approaching the Great Winter Solstice, supposed to be a time of great technological advance and the lowest ebb of spirituality.

The ancient Egyptians also saw the Milky Way as an extension of the river Nile, it seeming to rise from the point where the Nile seemed to originate. They painted the heavens as a reflection of their Middle Earth, the Milky Way as Nile, and placed their three Great Pyramids at the point that most seemed to reflect the three major stars that form the belt of Orion. The rift in the Milky Way was considered to be a symbol of the Mother Goddess, a fertility object, and the sun's passage through that area of the sky was considered particularly significant, the sun representing the Father God.

The Great Year, the time it takes for one wobble in the precession of the equinoxes, is just under 26,000 years. The First Age, the Age of Leo, started nearly half a wobble ago. We are in the Fifth Age, the Age of Pisces, where we've been for slightly over 2,000 years. We are now on the verge of the Age of Aquarius. This lecturer says we are about eight and a half years from that new age; other sources say we have centuries to go.

Either way, it's just a tick of a clock.

We make the world we're going to live in.

Strands

Connections

James Burke had a program that appeared on the Science Channel that he called "Connections". In it, he would go from one scientific or historical point to another by way of a chain of coincidences or chance relationships. There were two versions of the show, one taking half an hour and the other a full hour, each leading from the chosen initial point to a related point that, without the chain he presented, would seem otherwise to be completely independent. Along the way, much amusing historical and scientific trivia was explored.

I intend to do something similar, a short exploration of threads. I can't promise to be as amusing as Mr. Burke, but I don't have as big a budget to work with as he did.

An Unpigmented Strand

It was two inches long, or perhaps slightly longer. It seems strange that such a small thing could produce the panic and disgust that Cathy was demonstrating. We all produce thousands of new hairs each year. In slightly under 29 years, Cathy has produced only this one that was colorless. But it assumed a symbolic magnitude greatly exceeding its physical stature.

Her first gray (or grey) hair!

Making Body Armor

At one time, Chinese warriors used body armor made partly from silk, a strong fiber produced by the larval stage of a moth as it enters into its transformation to the adult stage. Silk is still pretty good for making protective fabrics, but some other fibers, natural and artificial, are stronger. The strongest is the fiber produced by spiders.

Harvesting fibers from spiders is not a productive process. Each spider has to be handled individually and kept apart from others of her kind, who would either eat or be eaten by her. The quantity of fiber produced by each spider is small. Producing the fiber directly from spiders is expensive.

Modern science has taken the gene by which spiders produce their web material and implanted it in the fertilized eggs of goats, producing nanny goats whose milk contains large amounts of spider web protein. This protein is easily and cheaply extracted from the milk in the form of a white powder. This protein powder is then spun into fibers by machines, mechanical spiders that operate in much the same way live spiders do.

Bulletproof vests are being made from spider web fiber produced from goat milk.

Illusion of Fire

Streamers of smoke came over the tops of ridges as if the fire was just on the other side. The smell of fire hung heavy in the air.

Panicked residents called emergency services to ask where the fire was. Fire trucks, some with their sirens going, cruised the streets and freeways, searching for the fire. Helicopters circled overhead, searching for the fire in San Diego.

There were actually two fires contributing their smoke to San Diego, but neither was here. Several houses were burning in Tijuana, Mexico, and there was a brush fire in Santa Barbara. Freak weather conditions, a rotating air mass, brought the smoke from those two distant fires to San Diego in such a way that the fire seemed just over the next rise.

It was a mistake, strange weather creating the illusion that San Diego was burning again.

This time.

People Pump

During the times that humans have existed, the glaciers have advanced and retreated at least 27 times. During this period, one special place has become favorable to humankind, drawing them in during times of heavy glacial advance because the grasslands favor the animals we love to hunt for food, then casting them out as the land withers and becomes desert during glacial retreat. Currently a giant desert, this land we call the Sahara sits between Africa, where the human race probably originated, and the rest of the Eurasian continents.

Humans began as wanderers, but our movements were most pronounced when the climate changed. We moved into the Sahara when it became fertile, then eastwards or northwards as it dried up. Every few thousand years, the Sahara would draw a new breath of people, from the south or from the east, to expell them a few centuries later.

It was like the beat of a giant heart.

When we discovered agriculture in the fertile crescent, it pushed us to circulate that knowledge into India and China.

But then we tamed cattle, goats, sheep and pigs. This knowledge flowed from northeastern europe towards the south and west. The later domestication of the horse, in the steppes farther east, requiring great tracts of land to support the large herds that denoted power, led to conquests ever farther westwards. These movements were powered by the innovations themselves, not by the great pump of the Sahara.

We are at the end of a glacial period. The last few glaciers are drying up and disappearing. The polar ice caps have diminished. The world is in a warming cycle.

The Sahara is hot and dry.

But the glaciers may come again. The poles may freeze up once more. The Sahara may bloom and become a fertile grassland once more.

It may happen many more times.