Carbon Entropy:

The western world has for the past 175 years fueled what we call the Industrial Revolution by burning carbon fuels. Until recently the resulting carbon dioxide was considered harmless. This is no longer the case. We now realize that the truly massive amounts of carbon dioxide we have produced as a side product to the heat necessary to run the engines of industry can make changes to the climate of the whole planet. Scientists are convinced of this fact even though the lay public is only recently becoming aware of these facts. Indeed some world leaders elected to ignore the problem and there have been some who say global warming is not occurring.

Entropy is the process whereby things tend to their lowest state of energy. Entropy explains why balls roll down hill. The reason is because the ball at the bottom of the hill has less potential energy than it did at the top of the hill. When you burn carbon you get two things: energy in the form of heat and carbon dioxide which has a lower energy state than carbon itself. The oxide part comes from atmospheric oxygen. So what we have done is to combine carbon with oxygen to yield carbon dioxide and heat. Simple enough and we as a race have used fire to warm us and to cook our food all the way back to prehistoric times. But the key fact is that we did not burn massive amounts of carbon. This balance began to shift as soon as our requirement for energy to drive our machines became large.

All things in nature tend to run down. Carbon burns and balls roll down hill. The only way we can reverse carbon entropy is by using living things called plants. Plants you see take carbon from the atmosphere and by using chlorophyll change the carbon into part of their cell structure. Interestingly enough the process uses energy and carbon dioxide to make cellulose and liberate oxygen to the atmosphere. This is functionally the reverse of burning carbon. With the proper engineering of simple plants like algae the output of this process can be modified. That is to say things other than cellulose can be made by these plants.

Our race has only in the past 15 years made enough progress in genetic engineering to modify plant structure. Currently this effort has been to make plants more disease resistant. As our knowledge of genetic modification becomes more extensive we should be able to have better control over plants and how to establish living factories to terra form the planet Earth. The alternative is of course that a large portion of the race perishes on a world that has significantly less land area due to the rise in sea levels. We are the dominate life form on this planet and it is about time we grew up and began to take care of the planet we all call home.

Toxic Assets:

The current problem centers about the value of loans that very large banks have made. These banks are hesitant to state the true value of the loans they have made. There are reasons why this is so but most of those reasons come down to the fact that these loans have a “true value” of between 18 and 30 cents on the dollar. To say that another way these recorded transactions are worth only a fraction of the amount which they are being carried on the books.

America and the banks of America are in denial. How could this have happened is the question they ask over and over. Like the victim of a horrific traffic accident they are in a state of shock. The shock is causing them to react in a strange manner. Strangest of all is their stubborn refusal to admit the facts and take action to correct the situation as it exists.

So long as the book value of a bank or indeed any business does not reflect the true worth of that business then investors are going to elect to not become involved with that bank or business. When a business appreciates in value everyone quickly knows about that and people respond by buying up some of the outstanding shares of stock in that company. This causes the value of all shares of the company to go up. Stockholders are happy and company managers are happy. Everyone stands to make a profit and that is after all what capitalism strives to do.

However when the owners of a company lie about the value of that company and get caught in that lie as the managers of Enron did the value of the stock plunges and stockholders lose money. If the lies told are big enough the entire company may go into receivership, to say this another way this company is bankrupt. At this point any remaining assets are seized and divided amongst the people to whom this business owed money. In this case almost everyone loses with stockholders and company officers loosing the most. This is the dark side of capitalism and frankly many in America have forgotten this side. The last time we saw this ugly side of capitalism was in the years 1929 to 1933.

There were lessons learned when America went through this last great depression. Those lessons were expensive and the solutions found were expensive. What the current administration is attempting to do is apply the same solutions to this current financial crisis. Will these solutions work this time? If they do not work we will simply modify them and try again. Sitting by and wringing our hands in a state of denial will not solve the problem. Of that I am sure.

Contract Equity:

The events in congress this past week truly could be called March Madness even though they had nothing to do with basketball. This does not bode well for bringing America back from the edge of the ledge on which my country teeters. This of course refers to the bonuses awarded to AIG account managers.

From a constitutional point of view passing laws that target a specific group is directly in breach of the clause to the constitution that forbids bills of attainment. So it seems to me taxing these bonuses simply will not work from a constitutional point of view. As the government now has a majority stake in AIG it would seem that the government can rescind these bonuses and demand that the money be returned. No need to do anything as silly as passing a questionable tax specifically targeted at financial sector bonuses. When congress passed the legislation to provide assistance to the American car industry they insisted that labor contracts be modified and salary levels reduced for those on the assembly line. Rank and file labor had to and did agree to these reductions. The question becomes why congressional leaders are hesitant to demand the same level of sacrifice from employees in the finance area of the economy.

If we pay close attention to the findings or the study of successful societal decision making as put forward by Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed we can see that the decisions made must put the makers of those decisions at risk. To say that another way if the decision is a bad decision then those making the decision must suffer along with everyone else. We have seen that no attempt has been made to fix social security largely because congress is exempt from social security. The same is true of Medicare. The congress does not participate in the social welfare programs they have their own program which is far more liberal in providing benefits.

I think what we must do as a nation is first of all treat people in an equitable manner. If we ask for sacrifice by one part of our society then all must be asked to share in that suffering. To do anything less is an insult to all the struggles that we as a nation have made. If we don’t behave in an equitable manner to all of our citizens then the light of liberty’s torch has been extinguished and the world becomes truly dark.

Power Sources:

When it comes to governing people the most basic of questions is where does the power to do this come from. Sooner or later someone is going to ask “Who gave you the power to tell me what to do”? A valid government damn well better have a good answer for this question. The two most accepted sources of power are divine and human. In the first case the populace at large is convinced in some manner to believe that God Almighty approves of the government.

In more recent times two other methods of justification are used. Loosely those can be summed up as power of the bullet and power of the ballet. In many parts of the world the government exists because the power for that rule is force of arms. At the core of this type of government is the implied fact that you do what you are told to do or we will shoot you dead. It is important to note God is not going to strike you dead with lightening. No you are going to be killed by the soldiers who support the government. One might say the uncertainty factor has been removed.

The most modern form of power administration is the government that is elected by the people through voting. This like military rule is a human centered form of government. The government may or may not acknowledge the existence of god. It does not say that god has sanctioned their power. At least the wiser of the governments do not say such things. The problem of course is which god the government should endorse. Because endorsing a god may cause unhappiness in some parts of the population that does not believe in that particular god governments try to avoid the issue.

Where America started to get into trouble was when another form of human centered government evolved and that form was socialism. Socialism was a result of the research of principles put forth by Karl Marx. Socialism is really more of an economic thought process than a governmental thought process. I have heard it said that communism is socialism with electricity. Socialism is really an attempt to determine how the wealth-pie will be cut up and delivered to the citizens. As such socialism should be contrasted with free enterprise not governance. America confused communism and socialism. And that is why “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance.

It will be interesting to see America thread her way through the current set of problems she faces. With leadership that acknowledges that all power flows from the people and not god and definitely not the army I think we shall not only survive we shall prosper. However I remind all my fellow citizen that this government is an ongoing experiment. Only we can determine if the experiment is successful or if it fails. It is our government … let us make it work again for all of us not the chosen few.

The New Teacher:

From time to time there is a change in how teachers teach. This happens because the consensuses amongst those responsible for broad patterns of education feel they have found a better way to explain the subject matter to the students. This happened back in the 1980s with the introduction of set theory as unifying concept mathematics. Many parents felt that because they did not understand the underlying concept the approach was wrong.

The same thing happened earlier when the biological concepts were expanded to include the theories based on Charles Darwin’s findings. Here however the new theory was clashing with not just parental understanding but the religious establishment felt compelled to enter the resulting discussion. The resulting discussions became composed of more heat than light. In fact this discussion continues thinly veiled as intelligent creationism.

What is currently occurring is far more fundamental and can be far more important to the future. For the first time in human history a major portion of human knowledge is available to a very wide audience. What has brought this change is the most significant invention of the last century. That invention is neither the atomic bomb nor nuclear reactors. The invention that may propel the human race into the future that might well prove to be boundless is the personal computer. The application that is changing teaching is by a company called Google.

For the first time the teacher can teach their students skills that will in fact last a life time. Imagine learning something at age 15 that would serve you well when you were 70. Reading is such a skill. Being able to write clearly in an understandable way is another life time long skill learned when you are young. Add to reading and writing a third skill that can now be taught. That skill is how to query a search engine like Google. Basically once a student learns how to ask meaningful questions and refine those questions he has mastered a universal skill as fundamental as reading itself.

What must happen now is that all of our teachers should embrace the method. Beginning in grade schools the use of computers as knowledge sifting devices must be encourage and the students taught how to use these devices to educate themselves. I think that if the total human knowledge can be easily accessed by all humans everywhere a measure of democracy unimagined in the past might be possible. Because today’s new knowledge rests upon yesterdays known facts and theories having access to the whole of human knowledge will lead to solutions to problems that have not even been conceptualized yet.