Archives for September 2011

For some people, Americans are best represented by a hero such as Captain America. For others, we’re best represented by a doofus such as Homer Simpson. The truth is somewhere in between.

It’s self-evident to me that people are pretty much the same all over the world. Some are good. Some are bad. Most are in between. Some cultures are sicker than others — and I wonder frequently about ours — but you can’t really say that one is better than the rest.

That’s right. “American exceptionalism” is pure fiction today, even if there might have been a bit of truth when Alexis de Tocqueville dreamed up the concept in the early 19th century. His idea — that America was somehow different and better than any other country ever before — led to the imperial idea of Manifest Destiny and gave generations of Americans the dangerous fairy tale that they were superior to everyone else. (It’s interesting to note that the phrase “American exceptionalism” was coined by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as a derisive term.)

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There is no real search for truth in the modern political system. Maybe seeking truth has never been a priority for any political system. I’m not sure. What I am sure of, though, is that what passes for truth-seeking today is nothing but partisan political theatre.

Republicans in the U.S. House attempted to grill the top executives of the failed Solyndra solar energy firm on Friday, but the chief executive officer and chief financial officer for the company declined to answer any questions, repeatedly invoking their Fifth Amendment right against answering questions that could incriminate them. (I’ve written about the ongoing scandal before, if you’re one of the few who hasn’t run into it already.)

Why were Republicans so eager to go after this egregious example of government stupidity? Was it because they were suddenly concerned about half a billion of U.S. taxpayer money being handed to a company that will never pay it back? No, it was because a Democratic administration was the one who gave them the loan and because the industry being subsidized was one they don’t like.

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A scientific belief that undergirds most of modern physics might have just been proven wrong. If so, what does this tell us about what we’ve thought we understood about physics for the last hundred years?

In 1905, Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity proposed that nothing in the universe could travel faster than light in a vacuum. For reasons far too geeky to explain — some of which are beyond my understanding — this is a fundamental building block of the standard model of modern physics. But scientists at the CERN physics lab in Switzerland have observed a particle traveling faster than the speed of light. Does  this mean we don’t know as much as we think we know?

First, it doesn’t mean that the practical applications of modern physics are all wrong. Laws of science based on Einstein’s theories have given us lasers and CDs and all sorts of amazing modern products that we wouldn’t otherwise have. But it does mean — once again — that we see that scientists can have a firm belief in things they state as fact which turn out to be wrong.

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