I’ve come to be increasingly baffled by the high degree of cynicism and immorality displayed in big-time politics. For example, Senators who genuinely do believe that carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to a global climate crisis seem to think nothing of nevertheless taking actions that endanger the welfare of billions of people on the grounds that acting otherwise would be politically problematic in their state. In other words, they don’t want to do the right thing because their self-interest points them toward doing something bad. But it’s impossible to imagine these same Senators stabbing a homeless person in a dark DC alley to steal his shoes. And what’s more, the entire political class would be (rightly!) shocked and appalled by the specter of a Senator murdering someone for personal gain. Yet it’s actually taken for granted that “my selfish desires dictate that I do x” constitutes a legitimate reason to do the wrong thing on important legislation.

It is kind of a mystery. Why is it a heinous crime for one individual to act directly against another, but business as usual for a powerful politician to act knowingly in ways that will bring harm to the nation or the world? Is it just that one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic?

From the scientific perspective, Obama has had tremendous impact (the Peace Prize singles out his “constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting”). His appointees are first-rate, and there is a feeling that we are finally starting to move in the right direction. It is hard, of course, to point to tangible scientific results that have arisen because of Obama. There simply hasn’t been time enough. But this does not negate his impact; the momentum is apparent and encouraging. It is a similar story in international diplomacy. Obama also benefits from eight preceding years of Bush. Within the scientific community, the Bush administration represented a dark age. Any subsequent reasonable policy would seem to be enlightened. Thus to have a truly exceptional policy, informed by actual science and scientists (instead of cynical political aims), has a profound effect on the state of affairs. It is a similar story in international diplomacy.

My guess is that the Nobel committee wants to be relevant. A major criticism of the Physics Prize is that it has a relatively minor impact on the field of physics. It’s almost always given decades after the fact, to researchers that are already well known and well established. For the vast majority of recipients, their work is not suddenly transformed by the Prize. If anything, they become significantly less productive, as they’re now busy traveling the world and giving talks and (justifiably) enjoying the prominence only a Nobel can confer. Do not misunderstand: I am certainly not criticizing the Nobel Prize. It brings much positive attention to the field, and for the most part singles out very deserving recipients. It is the ultimate advertising campaign for physics, and we all benefit from it. (It would nonetheless be interesting to compare it to the Fields Medal [effectively the Nobel for mathematics], which is only given to mathematicians under the age of 40.) In this context, giving the Peace Prize to Obama is an inspired choice. They are hoping to give him more stature and leverage to help him achieve his goals; they want to help make the world a better place. It affirms the importance of American leadership on the world stage, and endorses our President’s vision of a world at peace. All Americans, regardless of political affiliation, should celebrate this.

Central Krakow emerged from World War II, which began nearly exactly 70 years ago, nearly unscathed. The central square is one of the more beautiful in Europe, similar in a way to that of Prague. But it was hard to avoid waling there without imagining what it must have looked like during the war, occupied by German soldiers who had made Krakow the center of their regional government during the war.

From the square one can take tours in little golf-cart-like jitneys, and see some of the interesting historical sites, including the Jewish Quarter (Kazimierz) and Schindler’s famous enamelware factory. Some of the apartment buildings in Kazimierz are still in the state they were at the end of the war, a rather grim reminder of the central role Krakow played in the Holocaust.

From Krakow one can take day trips to a number of interesting places, and we visited the spectacular salt mines of Wielicka, a UNESCO World Heritage site, which have amazing, huge rooms carved out of the rock.

But there was another interesting place to tour that we were hesitant about – Auschwitz. Others who took the tour came back saying that it was well worth the journey, over an hour by bus each way, but tended not to say much more about it…hmmm.

So on our last free day we took the plunge, signed up for the tour, and went. The bus traveled through quite rural countryside on two-lane roads, past farms and villages, roughly following the Vistula river, until reaching the town of Oswiecim, which the Germans called Auschwitz.

There are in fact two concentration camps there, called Auschwitz and Birkenau, the latter actually being Auschwitz II. Birkenau is twenty times larger than the original camp, which was in fact a Polish army installation before the war. Auschwitz I was turned into a labor camp by the Germans shortly after the start of the war, and tens of thousands lost their lives there, working in nearby armaments factories, and on the construction of the Birkenau camp, starving to death on a 500-calorie-a day diet, or in the original gas chamber there.

The camps are still plainly visible from the air, as you can see in the photo. Auschwitz I is now a museum and living memorial to those who died there. Our tour of the museum included rooms filled with the personal effects taken from the prisoners: shoes, clothing, eyeglasses, and, perhaps most shockingly, human hair, which was used to make clothing for the German army. It’s actually hard to write about this, forcing myself to remember touring the housing blocks and the infamous Block 11, where, as an experiment, the SS first tested Cyclon B as a means of mass murder on 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick Poles.

After touring the museum, we went a few kilometers to Birkenau. The entry to the camp, along the rail line through the brick block house, is the same as the entry was for over a million people who were murdered there, predominantly Jews (most from Hungary), but also Gypsies. In late 1944 and early 1945, the fleeing Germans tried to destroy as much of the camp as they could, blowing up the crematoria and burning the wooden barracks, leaving only the brick chimneys standing behind the once-electrified barbed wire fences. The pictures we took say it all.

Throughout the tour of both places, everyone was hushed and, I think, awestruck by the sheer scale of the evil perpetrated there, and duplicated at so many other camps in eastern Europe and Germany. You can watch Sophie’s Choice or Schindler’s List, or read about the Holocaust, but until you stand there and see for yourself the actual crematoria and barracks, the mile-long rail line inside the camp, and the electrified fences with guard towers, you may not have truly appreciated what happened. AllI could think about was how anyone with an ounce of goodness in their hearts could have perpetrated this, but some 70,000 SS members did exactly that. Only 10,000 or so were ever brought to justice.

In an attempt to understand the mindset of the perpetrators, at the Auschwitz bookstore I bought a book called “KL Auschwitz seen by the SS” with the written reminiscences of the commandant of the camp, Rudolf Hoess, the diary of one of the camp doctors who participated in many of the “selections” of prisoners upon arrival. Hoess’ memoir was chilling, to say the least. It was written while he was in prison, before being hanged at Auschwitz in April, 1947. He describes the process of creating and operating the camp, and carrying out the Final Solution, in terms which are more reminiscent of large project management than mass murder. He had a very tight budget, and had to be ruthlessly efficient in meeting the SS quotas for labor production and human destruction. He was a problem solver at heart…that’s what made it so chilling. As for the diary of the doctor, Paul Kremer, it was particularly difficult to swallow his diatribes against the Allied bombing of Germany after his clinical discussion of his work at the camp.

How can people do this to other people?

We also bought the book “Hope is the Last to Die” by Halina Birenbaum, who describes her teen years spent in the Warsaw ghetto and then a series of concentration camps, somehow managing to survive through numerous near-death events. She is still alive, as far as I can tell, living in Israel. This book is a must-read.

This one-day tour, and the books we read, had a profound affect on me this past summer. And there are two things that I really have to say at this juncture. Firstly, it has been tremendously disturbing to see Obama (or any US president) seriously compared to or equated with Hitler or the Nazi party. Anyone who does such a thing is, to my mind, a sick human being, and doing a terrible disservice to the memories of the victims of the Holocaust.

Secondly, earlier today in Iran the world was treated to the annual sight of Iranians marching in the street, chanting “Death to America! Death to Israel!”, with Ahmadinejad denying the Holocaust, as we have come to expect. I guess it’s not realistic to ask them to do the reading on this one, much less visit a place like Auschwitz.

Listening to the current health care debate is unbelievably depressing. It isn’t really a debate about healthcare at all. Instead, it has devolved into a debate about all the conservative boogeymen: big government, high taxes, Obama personally telling your doctor what to do. The “debate” is fundamentally unmoored from the actual proposals being set forth. This is one of the most important public discussions this nation has had in recent memory. The results will directly impact each and every American. And yet, the entire debate is completely incoherent and misleading.

The possibility of a “single-payer” healthcare program has fallen off the table. I’m not sure exactly how or when this option became untenable, but it shows how quickly the efforts of pharmaceutical and insurance companies can reframe a discussion. After all, there are billions upon billions of dollars at stake, which is precisely why it is such a profound issue for our long-term fiscal health. It is not at all surprising that these companies are spending millions to defeat meaningful reform. The essential goal of this reform, after all, is to reduce the amount of money our nation spends on health care (while improving overall care). Which is not at all in the interest of these companies. What is astounding is that they are actually succeeding in derailing the discussion into lunacy.

Now it looks as if a “public option” will fall victim as well, and be eliminated from consideration. An (incredibly vocal) minority has become convinced that the public option will destroy capitalism, and that Obama is the second coming of Hitler. Really. These people live in an alternate Universe. Here is a two-minute summary of the public option by Robert Reich:

As Paul Krugman says, “the argument against the public option boils down to the fact that it’s bad because it is, horrors, a government program.” In addition, “the argument against it is sheer nonsense. It is nothing but the insurance lobby.”

In a few minutes Obama will give a much-anticipated speech on healthcare. We can only hope he is able to change the nature of the discourse. We are at a critical juncture. The whole nation is focused on fixing healthcare. The diagnosis is clear. The patient is in crisis. Prospects for recovery are increasingly slim. Heroic action is needed.

Update: Text of the speech can be read here. Obama made a range of proposals, including a public option. He tells us: “Well the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action. Now is when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together, and show the American people that we can still do what we were sent here to do. Now is the time to deliver on health care.” I hope he can.

As if on queue, a Republican from South Carolina interrupted Obama in the middle of his speech, yelling “You lie!”. The irony, of course, is that at that very moment Obama was busy decrying the absurd claims being widely promulgated by those who aren’t interested in civil dialogue, but aim to “kill reform at any cost”. It gives a good sense of the current state of affairs: that a Congressman would actually interrupt the President, and accuse him of lying, to his face, on national TV. And, needless to say, the Congressman was absolutely, unequivocally wrong. And, “surprise”, he receives lots of money from healthcare industry lobbyists, and is basically a nutcase.

The opposition research has been out for a while, of course, because that’s how politics works. One of the things brought up by Sotomayor’s critics is this clip, where she talks about the difference in emphasis between a district court and an appellate court. (Appellate courts need to look beyond the facts of the case to consider implications of setting precedent for future decisions.)

This clip drives people crazy, because she says that the courts of appeals are “where policy is made.” You’re not supposed to say that! (As Sotomayor immediately jokes.) The legislatures make the laws, and the courts are merely referees, interpreting the words of the statutes by lights of their objective and unchanging meanings.

In reality, of course, Sotomayor is simply telling the truth — a cardinal sin in law as well as politics. In law and politics, and for that matter theology, we are presented with a sacred text of one form or another. And we are supposed to pretend that the text has a One True Meaning — we may, of course, argue at great length about the proper procedure for divining what that meaning actually is, but admitting that the text is inherently ambiguous (or even contradictory) is not allowed. We need to act as if the authors of Leviticus and the Framers of the Constitution were trying to say something very clear about contemporary debates, if only we had the interpretational acumen to figure out what it was.

Which is why, as much as I enjoy the rest of the world of human endeavor, science will always be my true home. Our job is to interpret the natural world, which really is unambiguous and non-contradictory, if only we can make sense of its behavior. Other fields have a professional obligation to pretend that there are right and wrong answers, but we actually have them. Yet another way in which being a scientist is so much easier than other jobs.

Beck follows up by explaining how God fits into all this. The answer is: God gave this country freedom, and God has a method of communicating to us when our freedoms are being taken away. That method, apparently, goes through the gut. Imminent threats to freedom are foreshadowed, if I understand correctly, by a mild sort of indigestion.

You might think this is an isolated case, but here is Alan Keyes — who used to have a TV show, and was recruited by the Illinois Republican party to run for Senate, and therefore must be taken more seriously in some quarters than random fulminators on internet message boards — also warning darkly of the coming civil war.

Indeed, it may have already begun. If I understand this article from HumanEvents.com correctly, several states have already declared sovereignty, paving the way to full-scale secession from the Union. Nobody wants this to happen, you understand; but if the Democrat party wants to undermine the Constitution and redistribute the wealth, the consequences are simply inevitable.

Here at Cosmic Variance, we believe in always being prepared. The coming civil war isn’t going to be pretty. Don’t say you weren’t warned!

 Nearly 20 senators from both parties met twice during the day and reviewed a list of possible cuts totaling 88 billion. They included elimination of at least $40 billion in aid to the states, which have budget crises of their own, as well as $1.4 billion ticketed for the National Science Foundation.

Geesh!  We’re talking more than $800B of stimulus and the very first thing on the chopping block is basic science.   That demonstrates just how low basic science is regarded.  It looks like education is also being cut.

I don’t have anything intelligent to say about this situation.  I don’t think there is anything intelligent to say about this situation.  They just don’t get it.  It’s been shown time and again that advances in basic science stimulate the ecomony. If you’ve ever thought about contacting your senators, the time is now.

Update: The senate reached a compromise last night and due to everyone’s efforts,  funding for basic science was mostly restored!  The Senate stimulus bill gives  NSF $1.2B in additional funding,  $330M for DOE Office of Science ($100M for supercomputing was cut), $1B for NOAA, $475M for NIST,  $1.3B for NASA, and $2.6B for DOE energy efficiency and renewables.  We’ll see what comes out of the House/Senate conference, but this is a good start.  Sometimes democracy works.

Now, under extreme economic duress brought about, ultimately, by the collapse of the housing market and with mortgage-backed securities added as an accelerant, the economy is in free fall. The government is seemingly on the verge of an absolutely massive, $900 billion spending spree, most of which is for the sorts of discretionary spending that would have taken years, or decades, to happen. If ever. It’s among the most extraordinary things I think I have seen in my life.

Many in Washington appear to be very, very, nervous about doing this, but just about all are convinced that the government needs to do something, whatever it can, to avert what would amount to a very long, deep economic depression. Opinions abound, and there is a lot of crazy stuff being said on both sides. A lot of it comes down to the old partisan bickering about how the Dems want to tax and spend, and all the Repubs want is to stop spending and cut taxes (though all they did when in power was cut taxes, for corporations and the already rich, and dramatically increase spending). There has been a lot of noise about this or that item in the various versions of the bill, with detractors invariably questioning its “stimulatory” value. (For example, check out what the GOP thinks is non-stimulatory here.)

So what’s the best thing for the government to spend money on? Where does one get the best bang for the buck? Lost in the main stream media discussions has been any mention of the velocity of money. If the government spends a dollar on something, how likely is it that it will be spent again, and again? How likely is it to generate revenue? Create jobs? Increase GDP?

If money has velocity, then its mass must be its value. The product of the two is the momentum of the economy. And, as good physics students, we all know that to change momentum you need a force. That, I assume, would be prices: the less the price the more likely you are to spend it, increasing the velocity. But, then, the lower the price the more value the money has – here the analogy with Newtonian physics breaks down. It’s non-linear.

Over at MotherJones.com there is a very interesting, if short, article by James K. Galbraith. But even more interesting is the graph accompanying it:

They say this comes from Moody’s Economy.com, though I have not found it yet…I am not a subscriber. It purports to show the economic return enjoyed for each type of dollar spent, though I am not quite clear on just how economic return is defined.

Anyway, taken at face value this graph would seem to squelch definitively the incessant chant for tax cuts, and give strong motivation for spending on infrastructure and the economic safety net. Come on, MSM, cover this story! Galbraith’s main point is that the government ought to be taking a much longer view, and I think that at least part of the $900 billion stimulus does exactly that: the portion devoted to research and development can lead to the sorts of new technologies that will truly sustain the next economic expansion.

I would love to see added to the graph above a bar corresponding to federal support for basic scientific R&D. Even if you just figure that if you give a professor money she spends it all on hiring a postdoc, how does that impact the economy? One of my main worries is that all the science money in the stimulus package will go to “one-shot” big-ticket items, when what we need is people, too. But that kind of money is not represented by a one-off stimulus, but a sustained year to year program of spending on science. What we need is a long-term increase in federal spending on science. A long term commitment, in other words, reflecting basic science policy.

Indeed, also lost in the discussion has been this: just what the hell is the federal budget for 2010? Ordinarily, the administration’s budget request would be rolled out the second week of February or so. Like, next Monday. Not to mention that there would usually be a State of the Union address; all we know for the past 10 days is that Obama will address Congress some time in mid-February. If I were him I would like to do it after passing the stimulus package…

We do live in interesting times.

The market drop is indeed relevant, not as a sign of what Obama will do to the financial markets, but rather, what the financial markets will do to Obama. We are in an era of immense volatility and huge losses. In other times a 4% drop would be highly unusual and notable. But, sadly, in the present climate it has become routine. The economic downturn will almost certainly impact essentially every aspect of Obama’s time in office.

As it happens, the weather can also play an important role in the inauguration of a President. It was bitter cold for President William Harrison’s inauguration in 1841. His speech lasted for almost two hours (a record length), with him standing outside with little shelter. He caught pneumonia, and within a month was dead. There was undoubtedly little correlation between the cold and his death. But it makes for a perfect apocryphal story.