Change to Reading List: Roadside Geology of Arizona

Chronic, Halka. Roadside Geology of Arizona. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1983. xiv + 321 pages. Glossary. Index. ISBN: 978-0-87842-147-3. $18.00. Paperback.

Read April 16-May 25, 2010.

If you're not familiar with the Roadside Geology series, the next time you're planning a road trip, either close to home or farther afield, pick up the book covering the appropriate state. I would suggest that you read over the chapters covering the route you plan to take before you leave, or, at least, read about each day's itinerary the previous evening. When you hit the road, you'll know what you're looking at. It makes travel more interesting to realize that you're crossing a gigantic lava flow, or that the little ridge you just crossed is a dike of igneous rock thrust up between layers of sediments.

Last fall we dipped into the northwest corner of Arizona, from Sleeping Ute Mountain up in the Four Corners, down to Chinle and Canyon de Chelly. Lots of rocks, mountains, canyons, outcrops, and formations to see. Roadside Geology of Arizona is an excellent source for understanding why the scenery looks the way it does.

Change to Reading List: Tales of Los Alamos

Brode, Bernice. Tales of Los Alamos: Life on the Mesa 1943-1945. Los Alamos, NM: Los Alamos Historical Society, 1997. 165 pages. Glossary. Glossary of Names. Index of Names. About the Author.

Read April 17-May 8, 2010.

This is a very good book, giving a personal view of one of the most important scientific and military developments in American, and world, history. It is well-written, and the photographs alone would make this a book worth reading.

Happy Independence Day, George Will!

I used to read George Will's columns all the time. That was when I subscribed to Newsweek, and Will's column was one of the many items that magazine picked up from its parent newspaper, The Washington Post. I'm not such a fan anymore, partly because George turned out to be a hypocrite on family values, like so many "conservatives," and partly because I now prefer The Economist to any of the American newsmagazines.

This column, from April 28th, is pretty good, however. I might note that one of the Senators on the Judiciary Committee actually asked Elena Kagin one of Will's suggested questions. (It was the one about Thurgood Marshall's statement that "You do what you think is right and let the law catch up." She dodged the question by pointing out that, if confirmed, she would be Justice Kagin, not Justice Marshall. That's trivially obvious; the point is: Would she make decisions on the basis of Justice Marshall's dictum?

Will supports Justice Scalia's notion that the Constitution doesn't change, and that, in fact, the purpose of constitutions is to prevent change. That's fair enough, but this whole original intent idea founders, it seems to me, on one fact. From the text of the Constitution, as ratified, it is clear that the intent of the framers and ratifiers was to count slaves as 3/5ths of free people. It is also clear that no one, no one, at the Constitutional Convention actually liked this provision. The Southerners wanted to count their slaves as full people, not out of regard for human rights, but because that would have given them a lock on the House of Representatives, as well as the Senate. Many Northerners didn't want to count the slaves at all, because the slaves were not allowed to vote and lacked the other rights of people included in the citizenry. In other words, the original intent was to make a compromise between incompatible positions, so that the Constitution could be completed. I don't see where a modern judge gets a lot of guidance from that, except for Abraham Lincoln's point: It's all about the Union.

Success Breeds Failure

Robert Samuelson finds a parallel between the BP disaster and the financial crisis: Our very success over a long period of time led to carelessness and complacency, which led to disaster. Every silver lining has its cloud!

One of the problems with human beings having the power to change the earth is that we really aren't very good, by and large, at calculating probabilities and acting appropriately. There seem to be built-in biases toward optimism or pessimism which have very little to do with any objective measure of risk. This is, in large part, why the mass of investors buy at the top of the market and sell at the bottom. They aren't ready to change their behavior until there has been a long trend in one direction, which is actually an indication that the forces driving the trend are nearing exhaustion.

Another problem lies in the phrase "a long period of time." Humans don't do well at evaluating processes with time dimensions outside the human lifetime. One of the underlying drivers in the global warming debate is our inability to deal with time. On the one hand, I think we have too little data, over too short a time period, to be as certain as some people are of the consequences for the climate. Climate operates in cycles of hundreds of thousands of years. On the other hand, some people give far too much weight to a record cold day in their town as indicating that global warming isn't happening. There is a lot of randomness in the weather system.

This is sometimes called, I believe, the local fallacy. That is, people give far too much weight to proximate events, occurrences close to them in time or space, and far too little weight to more distant phenomena.

Souter Rejects Originalism

This is one of my favorite arguments. I think I've referred before to Original Meanings by Jack N. Rakove (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Now E. J. Dionne uses his column to bring to our attention a speech given by retired Associate Justice David Souter reaffirming the intellectual poverty of originalism.

Souter gave the commencement address at Harvard this year, and he used that occasion to give a rather important speech on the flaws in the orginalist (or as he called it, "fair reading") approach to constitutional interpretation. One of those flaws is historical. The Constitution is a political document, created over a period of time in a contentious political process, and is not a unified whole, developed in a single, philosophically consistent mind. Therefore, there are tensions among various principles enunciated in the Constitution.

These tensions were based upon the tensions among the fundamental principles whose fulfillment we desire. Dionne quotes Souter as saying that "the Constitution emodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well." When the French said they wanted "liberty, equality, and brotherhood," or when Jefferson asserted our right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," they failed to acknowledge that these aspirations may be incompatible, even conflicted, in practice.

Dionne offers another good essay, and I'm glad he has brought Justice Souter's speech to our attention.

Ignatius on European Finances

Daniel Gross laid out some of the opportunities and pitfalls for the U.S. in the European debt crisis. (See my previous post.) David Ignatius writes about the roots of the panic, and the key statement may be this: "Investors keep pounding Europe in part because they don't yet see the mechanisms that will enforce discipline."

Ignatius asserts, with the backing of Italian President Napolitano, that much of the problem is that Europe has a single currency, the Euro, in use by 16 countries with independent fiscal policies. The need to enforce consistent policies to support the Euro and make the market-wide economy work confronts the nationalist feelings of the people.

We saw this in the Greek riots, in the signs condemning the IMF and the EU. Well, Greece joined the Euro because they Greeks thought they'd get the advantages of a strong, well-managed currency, without having to change their lax fiscal policies. Now they get the pain of fiscal discipline, and the currency in question is hitting new lows against the dollar. Such is life!

The Silver Lining in the Greek Cloud

There is an old, old saying: "Every cloud has a silver lining."

Years ago I came up with my own variation, "Every silver lining has a cloud."

Daniel Gross is looking at the silver linings in the Greek debt crisis, and then at the clouds behind those silver linings. Because of the European reaction to the Greek (and Portuguese, and Spanish) debt problems, the price of oil is down. This could be why we did not see the usual Memorial Day hike in gasoline prices, at least, not here in Colorado. So that's good for the U.S. economy.

But a lot of our recovery has been based on exports, and a weakening Euro means that U.S. goods are more expensive in Europe. More Italian wine may be imported, and less California wine exported, than might have been the case without the Euro's recent problems.

Cloud, silver lining, cloud, silver lining - out of all this alternation and uncertainty, some sort of balance has to arise.