Decline of the Empire

Robinson Jeffers, 2012 Ends, Open Thread

With yesterday's post 2013 — Different Year, Same Old Crap, I have said everything I have to say this year.

In the comments, a reader reminded me of the poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962, left), who took a dim view of industrial civilization and its prospects. I had read some Jeffers many years ago, but had forgotten about him. But upon reading his poem The Purse Seine, which I've included below, I realized what a powerful voice he had.

In this poem, we are all fish caught in civilization's purse seine net, tragically divorced from Nature, and, like the fish caught by the sardine fishermen, doomed by a snare that, ironically, we ourselves have set.

You readers surely have things to say about the predictably sorrowful year now ending and the Good Times to come, so this last post of 2012 is also an open thread. The floor is yours.

I'll talk to you in the new year.

The Purse Seine

Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon;

daylight or moonlight

They could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the

phosphorescence of the shoals of fish.

They work northward from Monterey, coasting Santa Cruz; off

New Year’s Point or off Pigeon Point

The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color light on the

sea’s night-purple; he points and the helmsman

Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the gleaming shoal

and drifts out her seine-net. They close the circle

And purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in.

I cannot tell you

How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the

crowded fish

Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the

other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent

Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted

with flame, like a live rocket

A comet’s tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the

narrowing

Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch,

sighing in the dark; the vast walls of night

Stand erect to the stars.

Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top

On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could

I help but recall the seine-net

Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful

the city appeared, and a little terrible.

I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together

into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now

There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable

of free survival, insulated

From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all

dependent. The circle is closed, and the net

Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they

shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters

Will not come in our time nor in our children’s, but we and our

children

Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers

-or revolution, and the new government

Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls- or anarchy,

the mass-disasters.

These things are Progress;

Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps

its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow

In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, splin-

tered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are quite wrong.

There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that

cultures decay, and life’s end is death.

2013 — Different Year, Same Old Crap

In much knowledge is much grief, and he who increases his knowledge also increases his sorrow
   — Ecclesiastes 1:18

The year 2012 is nearly over. Naturally our thoughts turn to the future as New Year's Day approaches. Specific predictions about the future almost never pan out, although on the rare occasion somebody gets lucky. Only trends are important, whether they end with a whimper or a bang.

And the trends say that in 2013 we will experience the same gradual deterioration we saw in 2012 — different year, same old crap. Generally speaking, people come in two varieties: optimists and pessimists. Those in the first group vastly outnumber those in the second, but you can count on all of them to be optimistic or pessimistic right on cue if you give them half the chance.

A quick search of youtube reveals that the pessimists ("bears") are dominating the intertubes, although they are few in number. So if you want some Doom & Gloom forecasts for 2013, watch Harry Dent, Eric Sprott, Jim Rogers, Gerald Celente, Marc Faber or Peter Schiff. If you looking for a special treat, listen to Alex Jones interviewing Jesse Ventura.

All those guys will tell you that some human-caused disaster will befall the global economy next year, and that could happen, this being Planet Stupid, but such an event is not very likely. For example, here in the United States, it is likely "the recovery" will continue, with tepid, phony, annualized GDP growth of about 2% and the economy adding (on average) about 150,000 shitty or imaginary jobs per month, depending on how enthusiastic the BLS statisticians feel when they make the various "adjustments" to the raw survey data.

And yet, regardless of the official recovery story, and all the other bullshit stories, little will change. Current trends will continue apace, to wit—

• The incomes of ordinary Americans will stagnate or deteriorate.
• Wealth and income inequality will get worse.
• Household debt will increase slightly, decrease slightly, or stay the same. In any case, there will be a lot of it.
• The public debt will grow and grow, rendering the word "trillions" meaningless.
• The Federal Reserve will print money to cover most of the new public debt.
• New banking scandals will come to light, but no bankers will go to jail.
• Paul Krugman will call for a "World War II" kind of stimulus to fix the economy.
• Some drivers who spot a box turtle crossing the road will run it over to reassert their pride of place as members of the dominant species on this planet.
• Nifty technology from Apple and other tech wizards will make our lives richer and easier every day
• Our corrupt, dysfunctional government will remain corrupt and dysfunctional.
• The miracle of fracking in low permeability "tight" shale rock reservoirs will prompt optimists at Citigroup to tell us the United States is the next Saudi Arabia.
• Crude oil will be expensive.
• There will be more extreme weather events, which will result in renewed calls to fix global warming, which will be ignored.

These, and a thousand other things, will continue in 2013 just as they did in 2012.

On the planetary scale, none of the gradually unfolding, disastrous trends I write about will be reversed. Humankind's "progress" on the road to self-destruction is slow (on the human time scale) but steady.

On a personal note, I will complete my 60^th year on this planet in 2013, a scary prospect which was still unimaginable to me a mere 10 years ago. About 25 years ago, I began a long, bumpy journey to find out what in hell was going on on this planet, and I'm now pretty much satisfied that I do indeed know what's happening here. The news has not been good, as the quote from Ecclesiastes implies. It is true—in knowledge there is much grief, and more sorrow inevitably follows from any increase in that knowledge.

As the years went by, as my knowledge increased, as my perception sharpened, as the trends became obvious, as a good-enough approximation of Human Nature was revealed to me, as my sorrow increased, it occurred to me to ask a very simple question—why is the news always so bad? After all, when I started out all those years ago in the same state of delusion and ignorance that most people still live in, the outcome could have gone either way, or so it seemed to me. It wasn't necessarily the case that humans are irredeemable fuck-ups.

But as the years rolled by, and my knowledge increased, in the observation and experience of life, and from books, I was literally pushed into the same depressing—inevitable, ineluctable—conclusions over and over again. DOTE is the result. Why is the news always so bad? Because that's just the way it is. This is very disappointing.

It is these personal considerations that form the world-weary perspective from which I contemplate another year on the Planet Earth, and think about what will happen here. The older and wiser among you will immediately recognize that I am right about our prospects in 2013 (and the year after that, etc.), regardless of whether there are some unpleasant surprises in store for us. And if there are, those nasty surprises will merely be the inevitable outcomes of trends which were cast in stone a very long time ago.

Find contentment where you can, and please try not to make things worse than they already are.

And on that note, I will conclude this 2013 forecast.

Bonus Video — Barbara Ehrenreich on the dangers of positive thinking

 

Remedy du Jour -- December 29, 2012

This year's last Remedy du Jour features jazz pianist Robert Glasper, whose quiet, soulful style fits my winter mood. I particularly like his 2007 Blue Note album In My Element, so I've included four tunes from it. Glasper is playing in a trio backed by Vicente Archer on bass and Damion Reid playing drums.

I hope you've enjoyed at least some of the music I've played for you in 2012. As always, I urge you support contemporary musicians making quality music. In the Corporate Age, you must find a way to get around or climb over the Wall of Manure which pervasive commercialism creates to seek out those whose voice is worth listening to. They will appreciate it, and so will you.

Here's the playlist.

• A live performance, with Glasper talking about his background.
• FTB — from In My Element, as are all the following
• Maiden Voyage/Everything In It's Right Place — live. First tune by Herbie Hancock
• Of Dreams To Come
• G & B

 

 

 

 

 

If You See A Turtle In The Road, Run It Over!

Requires no explanation. The more interesting question, which is unanswerable, is what percentage of drivers who noticed the turtle in the road tried to run it over.

CLEMSON, S.C. (AP) — Clemson University student Nathan Weaver set out to determine how to help turtles cross the road. He ended up getting a glimpse into the dark souls of some humans.

Weaver put a realistic rubber turtle in the middle of a lane on a busy road near campus. Then he got out of the way and watched over the next hour as seven drivers swerved and deliberately ran over the animal. Several more apparently tried to hit it but missed.

"I've heard of people and from friends who knew people that ran over turtles. But to see it out here like this was a bit shocking," said Weaver, a 22-year-old senior in Clemson's School of Agricultural, Forest and Environmental Sciences.

To seasoned researchers, the practice wasn't surprising.

The number of box turtles [image above] is in slow decline, and one big reason is that many wind up as roadkill while crossing the asphalt, a slow-and-steady trip that can take several minutes.

Sometimes humans feel a need to prove they are the dominant species on this planet by taking a two-ton metal vehicle and squishing a defenseless creature under the tires, said Hal Herzog, a Western Carolina University psychology professor.

"They aren't thinking, really. It is not something people think about. It just seems fun at the time," Herzog said. "It is the dark side of human nature."

Herzog asked a class of about 110 students getting ready to take a final whether they had intentionally run over a turtle, or been in a car with someone who did. Thirty-four students raised their hands, about two-thirds of them male, said Herzog, author of a book about humans' relationships with animals, called "Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat."

The Obligatory Hope

Weaver, who became interested in animals and conservation through the Boy Scouts and TV's "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin, wants to figure out the best way to get turtles safely across the road and keep the population from dwindling further.

Among the possible solutions: turtle underpasses or an education campaign aimed at teenagers on why drivers shouldn't mow turtles down.

The first time Weaver went out to collect data on turtles, he chose a spot down the road from a big apartment complex that caters to students. He counted 267 vehicles that passed by, seven of them intentionally hitting his rubber reptile.

He went back out about a week later, choosing a road in a more residential area. He followed the same procedure, putting the fake turtle in the middle of the lane, facing the far side of the road, as if it was early in its journey across. The second of the 50 cars to pass by that day swerved over the center line, its right tires pulverizing the plastic shell.

"Wow! That didn't take long," Weaver said.

Other cars during the hour missed the turtle. But right after his observation period was up, before Weaver could retrieve the model, another car moved to the right to hit the animal as he stood less than 20 feet away.

"One hit in 50 cars is pretty significant when you consider it might take a turtle 10 minutes to cross the road," Weaver said.

Running over turtles even has a place in Southern lore.

In South Carolina author Pat Conroy's semi-autobiographical novel "The Great Santini," a fighter-pilot father squishes turtles during a late-night drive when he thinks his wife and kids are asleep. His wife confronts him, saying: "It takes a mighty brave man to run over turtles."

The father denies it at first, then claims he hits them because they are a road hazard. "It's my only sport when I'm traveling," he says. "My only hobby."

That hobby has been costly to turtles.

It takes a turtle seven or eight years to become mature enough to reproduce, and in that time, it might make several trips across the road to get from one pond to another, looking for food or a place to lay eggs. A female turtle that lives 50 years might lay over 100 eggs, but just two or three are likely to survive to reproduce, said Weaver's professor, Rob Baldwin.

Snakes also get run over deliberately. Baldwin wishes that weren't the case, but he understands, considering the widespread fear and loathing of snakes. But why anyone would want to run over turtles is a mystery to the professor.

"They seem so helpless and cute," he said. "I want to stop and help them. My kids want to stop and help them. My wife will stop and help turtles no matter how much traffic there is on the road. I can't understand the idea why you would swerve to hit something so helpless as a turtle."

I hope you now fully understand my interest in exoplanets

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Warming Rapidly

We got another of strong indicator of the ongoing planetary meltdown a few days before Christmas. E! Science News reported the new data in Study shows rapid warming on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

In a discovery that raises further concerns about the future contribution of Antarctica to sea level rise, a new study finds that the western part of the ice sheet is experiencing nearly twice as much warming as previously thought. The temperature record from Byrd Station, a scientific outpost in the center of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), demonstrates a marked increase of 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4 degrees Celsius) in average annual temperature since 1958 — that is, three times faster than the average temperature rise around the globe.

This temperature increase is nearly double what previous research has suggested, and reveals — for the first time — warming trends during the summer months of the Southern Hemisphere (December through February), said David Bromwich, professor of geography at Ohio State University and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.

The findings were published online this week in the journal Nature Geoscience.

"Our record suggests that continued summer warming in West Antarctica could upset the surface mass balance of the ice sheet, so that the region could make an even bigger contribution to sea level rise than it already does," said Bromwich.

"Even without generating significant mass loss directly, surface melting on the WAIS could contribute to sea level indirectly, by weakening the West Antarctic ice shelves that restrain the region's natural ice flow into the ocean."

Andrew Monaghan, study co-author and scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), said that these findings place West Antarctica among the fastest-warming regions on Earth.

"We've already seen enhanced surface melting contribute to the breakup of the Antarctic's Larsen B Ice Shelf, where glaciers at the edge discharged massive sections of ice into the ocean that contributed to sea level rise," Monaghan said. "The stakes would be much higher if a similar event occurred to an ice shelf restraining one of the enormous WAIS glaciers."

Researchers consider the WAIS especially sensitive to climate change, explained Ohio State University doctoral student Julien Nicolas. Since the base of the ice sheet rests below sea level, it is vulnerable to direct contact with warm ocean water. Its melting currently contributes 0.3 mm to sea level rise each year — second to Greenland, whose contribution to sea level rise has been estimated as high as 0.7 mm per year.

Due to its location some 700 miles from the South Pole and near the center of the WAIS, Byrd Station is an important indicator of climate change throughout the region.

You can find the abstract for the Nature Geoscience finding and some graphs here.

This finding got a lot of attention from such mainstream luminaries as the New York Times and Time Magazine. Other more important research does not get nearly this much attention, but if the WAIS melts down altogether, sea level will rise by an estimated 3.3 meters (10 feet). Right now, it is estimated that the WAIS contributes about 0.3 millimeters fo sea level rise each year. Although time estimates are always risky, it seems likely we will lose the ice sheet in a few hundred years, and by that far-flung future date, the most spectacular fireworks will be over

But do The People care? Hell, no! And why should they? They don't live in Antarctica — you can't live on the WAIS, dummy, it's too fucking cold!

What do The People care about? Well, let's review the top-40 hits of 2012, which I present today in my never-ending attempt to attract more readers to DOTE.

And as a test of your endurance, see how long you can watch the video below without going into convulsions caused by irreversible brain damage. If you feel the risk is too great, don't watch it!

Have a nice weekend.

 

Disposable Income Isn’t Coming Back Anytime Soon

The phony GDP number keeps going up. The phony jobless rate keeps going down. Yet, disposable income goes nowhere at all.

Disposable income growth hasn’t kept up with broader economic expansion during the recovery, and it’s likely to remain under pressure for the foreseeable future.

Income after taxes, or disposable personal income, per capita has grown just 1.2% since the recovery began in June 2009 through the third quarter of this year. By contrast, inflation-adjusted gross domestic product per capita has increased 4.7% over the same period. To be sure, GDP fell further than income during the recession, but the path of recovery has been steadier for economic growth as a whole than individual income.

Consumers have managed to prop up growth in recent quarters. Increased spending accounted for more than a third of the 2.7% GDP growth recorded in the third quarter. Job gains have helped boost spending, but without advancing incomes it will be hard for consumption to drive economic growth.

Bear in mind that the graph shows aggregate disposable income, thus it lumps together the income of the rich, the income of the poor, and the income of those in the middle. Imagine what the curve would look like if you eliminated the top 5% of wage earners from the disposable income calculation.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, millions of jobs have been added over the last 4 years. Yet, disposable income went nowhere. Why would we think the addition of another 1-2 million jobs this year will change the income situation? And if you look at the graph above, you'll see a bump in 2011 which was not sustained. Why did that occur?

Despite recent improvements, there’s still a lot of slack in the job market. Unemployment remains high, and employers don’t face as much pressure to raise wages with such a large pool of potential new workers.

Another factor likely to cut into disposable personal income in the New Year is higher taxes. Even if Congress manages to avoid the fiscal cliff, some taxes are likely to rise. Few lawmakers are discussing an extension of the payroll tax cut enacted for 2011 and 2012... When the payroll tax cut took effect in 2011, after-tax income saw a nice bump. The expiration will likely take a similar-sized bite.

Even if you think the "Fiscal Cliff" is so much hot air, it is almost guaranteed that somebody's taxes are going to up. The outcome is yet to be determined, but you will see the effect on disposable (after tax) income next year.

And what about inflation? The promise of the dreaded deflation—real declines in the prices of goods & services—was that the purchasing power of your dollar would go up, not down. Lance Roberts of StreetTalkLive points out that stagnant aggregate income during "the recovery" has lagged behind real changes in prices (by the official CPI).

While the economy is likely to continue to muddle along in the months ahead, largely due to the impact of $85 billion a month in liquidity from simultaneous QE programs, the strain on the average consumer will remain. This is due to the spread between the annual change in real wages and headline inflation [graph below].

This spread deteriorates purchasing power and drags on savings. Of course, you don't need to go much further than your own pocketbook to realize that your cost of living has increased markedly over the last few years even as reported inflation remains low.

The Federal Reserve has done everything it can to avoid the dreaded deflation, so we've had understated inflation. But if incomes don't rise, most Americans are up shit creek without a paddle. That's exactly what the graph above shows.

I have harped on the income numbers many times this year. This is obviously the last time I will do so in 2012. I pay close attention to this issue because it is the single biggest determinant of the economic future of the vast majority of Americans. (Rich Americans will still be rich even if they see some decreases in their disposable income.)

Everybody should be able to relate to this. Even if you don't know anything else, you still know how much money is coming in to your household, and, if you're on top of things, you're paying attention to how much is going out. This is just basic, right? That's what enables your day-to-day life. That's why the quantity of jobs created is not nearly as important as what those jobs pay.

Otherwise, for you, if you have no income, or your income falls below your need to spend on basic costs, you are fucked. And if you are currently fucked, getting all worked up about the unpromising future of our species Homo sapiens is a luxury you can't afford right now.

And that's why I pay attention to the trend in income. There's one helluva lot of bullshit for you to sort through in the good ole United States of America, but the historical and current income trends do not lie.

Paul Krugman Gets A Clue!

Just as a mind is a terrible thing to waste, getting a clue is a precious thing. However—and this is important—it is not enough to get the clue. One must also follow through and pursue the clue. The vast majority of people never get a clue. Among those who do, there is rarely any follow-through because doing so invariably requires a major shift in a person's world view. It will almost always be the case that the clued-in person will discover that his life and self-created identity are fraudulent!

So we are forced to conclude that the clue which Paul Krugman appears to have received in his December 12, 2012 column Robots And Robber Barons may not "stick" in the way we would like to see. My first hint that Krugman had gotten a whiff of the truth came in his follow-up note Human Versus Physical Capital.

One more entry in the robots and all that discussion, just to stress how much recent trends require a new storyline.

Our discourse on inequality has been dominated for decades by issues of education and talent — and for what were good reasons at the time. There was a big increase in the college premium in the 1980s and to some extent in the 1990s — but since then, not so much...

Meanwhile, the people at BLS have sent me an update of their labor share calculations:

The labor share of business costs (labor income, benefits) since 1947. The diminishing share is obvious in the data. The decline started in the early 1980s, and after a brief upsurge in the early 2000s, the decline has accelerated greatly over the last decade.

And now, here's that all-important clue—

So the story has totally shifted; if you want to understand what’s happening to income distribution in the 21st century economy, you need to stop talking so much about skills, and start talking much more about profits and who owns the capital.

Mea culpa: I myself didn’t grasp this until recently. But it’s really crucial.

Krugman has discovered the evils of Capitalism! Guess what? — it's not a perfect system! There are winners and losers. (Workers are always the losers.) One can only presume that Krugman thought up to now that economies grew and grew, and everybody benefited, including labor—a win-win situation, even if not everybody benefited equally. Not so!

If Paul were to follow this clue to it's natural conlusion, he might conclude that economic Progress is an illusion. His entire world view would lie in ruins, his life a shambles.

And just to rub it in, let's look at this chart, which shows the labor share and corporate profits on the same graph.

The labor share of income versus corporate profits, 2000-2012. Source

If you want all sorts of details about labor shares, rising inequality, the alarming U.S. GINI index reading and all the rest, read the Cleveland Fed's Labor's Declining Share of Income and Rising Inequality (September 25, 2012). Krugman must have missed that one.

A clue is a fragile thing, as I explained in the introduction. In almost all cases, if a person gets a clue, the full import of that clue never truly sinks in. Will Krugman go with the clue? Because if he does, if he chooses to ride that Clue Train, it could be next stop Socialism!

And if Paul gets really ambitious and rides that Clue Train all the way to the end of the line, the poor bastard might end up like me, a poor blogger with relatively few readers and no friends. Krugman would have to give up his academic appointment at Princeton, his Nobel Prize, his weekly column at the New York Times, and all the other perks that give his privileged life meaning. He might die penniless and alone.

So don't look for Paul to follow-through on that clue any time soon.

Merry Christmas

I decided to go in an unorthodox direction today. In this order, we've got Ry Cooder, Fred McDowell & the Hunter's Chapel Singers, and Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny.

Merry Christmas to one and all.

 

 

 

Is Our Solar System Unique Or Rare?

As I became older, I developed a rule of thumb for formulating hypotheses about things I was studying—what's the worst case? I would then come to some subjective conclusion about what the worst case was, and use that as my initial hypothesis about what's going on, subject to revision in the direction of less worse (but still bad) outcomes. This habit of mind has served me well. This is not my natural disposition; earlier in my life, I had the same hopes and optimism I ridicule today on this blog. Life taught me to think this way. This was one of the painful lessons of experience.

What is the worst outcome when it comes to "intelligent" technologically advanced life on Earth? Quite simply, it is that Earth life is unique or fleetingly rare, that species with the same abilities humans have are unique or fleetingly rare, and so on. That's been my hypothesis for a long time now. No new data has forced me revise it.

And why is that the worst outcome? Quite simply, it means that when Homo sapiens brings about its own destruction and another mass extinction, that might be all she wrote for "intelligent" life in the Milky Way, or even the observable Universe. This astonishing natural experiment on Earth in which the Universe became (very briefly) self-aware and capable of observing itself would  be over, and that's that.

2012 was another big year in the discovery of exoplanets, which are planets revolving around other suns. If you had followed this news the way I do, you would have marveled at all the discoveries of either "Earth-like" planets or planets which potentially host life because they are in the "habitable zones" of their parent stars, meaning that liquid water might exist there.

The only problem with all these happy announcements was that the "Earth-like" planets were not "Earth-like" and planets in the "habitable zone" were actually planets orbiting dwarf-stars in very tight orbits. For example, let's look at Earth-like planet discovered next to our solar system.

It is the type of planet they've been searching for across the Milky Way galaxy and they found it circling a star right next door — 25 trillion miles away. But the Earth-like planet is so hot its surface may be like molten lava.

Life cannot survive the 2,200 degree heat of the planet, so close to its star that it circles it every few days.

Needless to say, a planet whose surface temperature is 2,200 degrees is not Earth-like

That did not curb the enthusiasm of the planet hunters.

The astronomers who found it say it's likely there are other planets circling the same star, a little farther away where it may be cool enough for water and life. And those planets might fit the not-too-hot, not-too-cold description sometimes call the Goldilocks Zone.

That means that in the star system Alpha Centauri B, a just-right planet could be closer than astronomers had once imagined.

It's so close that from some southern places on Earth, you can see Alpha Centauri B in the night sky without a telescope. But it's still so far that a trip there using current technology would take tens of thousands of years.

But the wow factor of finding such a planet so close has some astronomers already talking about how to speed up a 25 trillion-mile rocket trip there. Scientists have already started pressuring NASA and the European Space Agency to come up with missions to send something out that way to get a look at least...

And one of the European team's main competitors, Geoff Marcy of the University of California Berkeley, gushed even more about the scientific significance.

"This is a historic discovery," he wrote in an email. "There could well be an Earth-size planet in that Goldilocks sweet spot, not too cold and not too hot, making Alpha Centauri a compelling target to search for intelligent life."

Harvard planet-hunter David Charbonneau and others used the same word to describe the discovery: "Wow."

Isn't it satisfying to discover that hard-core scientists, especially planet-hunting astronomers, are just as delusional as everybody else? (They're much like economists in this regard.)

The proliferation of exoplanet discoveries (other solar systems) has literally forced some astronomers to admit that the systems they are finding, which are populated with "Super-Earths" and "Hot Jupiters", are very strange, and not at all what they expected to find, given our own solar system. Consider Tau Ceti has habitable planet, just 12 light years away.

One of the closest stars to our own, Tau Ceti, appears to have five planets, including one that's in the so-called habitable zone and could be suitable for life.

Not only is Tau Ceti a near neighbor, at 12 light years away, it has the same spectral classification as our sun. Previously, the nearest planet believed to be capable of supporting life — found just last month  — was 42 light years away.

The new-found planets are estimated to have masses between two and six times the mass of the Earth, making this the lowest-mass planetary system yet detected.

The planet that lies in its habitable zone has a mass around five times that of Earth, making it the smallest planet found in the habitable zone of any sun-like star.

OK, here's the money quote.

"This discovery is in keeping with our emerging view that virtually every star has planets, and that the galaxy must have many such potentially habitable Earth-sized planets," says Steve Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

"We are now beginning to understand that nature seems to overwhelmingly prefer systems that have multiple planets with orbits of less than 100 days. This is quite unlike our own solar system, where there is nothing with an orbit inside that of Mercury.

So our solar system is, in some sense, a bit of a freak and not the most typical kind of system that Nature cooks up"

The international team made the discovery using a new method that, they say, can detect signals half the size previously thought possible.

"We pioneered new data modeling techniques by adding artificial signals to the data and testing our recovery of the signals with a variety of different approaches," says first author Mikko Tuomi of the University of Hertfordshire.

"This significantly improved our noise modeling techniques and increased our ability to find low-mass planets."

While over 800 exoplanets have been discovered so far, most couldn't possibly host Earthlike life, and most are at very great distances. Discovering planets — and particularly one that might be suitable for life — so close to home will open up a vast range of new research possibilities.

Is our solar system unique? Or are solar systems like ours quite rare? If so, we might conclude once again that we humans "got lucky" in yet another important respect. But it is too early to provide definitive answers to these questions. As the Tau Ceti article implies, what we can observe is heavily constrained by the technology we are able to bring to bear. Mikko Tuomi notes that we "have increased our ability to find low-mass planets." "Super-Earths," which are thought to be rocky planets, have a mass several times that of our Earth.

But as we wait for better observational techniques and better data to settle these questions, it remains true that of the 800 exoplanets discovered so far, most couldn't possibly host Earth-like life. It's a pity that we self-absorbed humans have so little appreciation of our perhaps rare, privileged (and perhaps unique) place in our galaxy and the observable Universe.

Let's Call This America Thing Off

It is now two days until Christmas, and as I was casting about for something to write about today, I got so depressed that I thought I'd write this little essay instead. Over my entire lifetime, I can not remember a time when the Holiday Season was as dreary as it is in 2012.

The reason is simple—there is nothing to be festive about. Nothing at all. America is a defeated nation, and its self-defeating behavior is everywhere on display.

The 2012 election charade, which changed nothing, morphed seamlessly into a Fiscal Cliff charade which only proves beyond a shadow of doubt that nothing changed. This silly debate is the latest distraction "designed" to give Americans the impression that important changes are afoot. Nothing could be further from the truth. This country's fate was cast in stone decades ago. No current policy debate changes our fate in the slightest, but these sham debates do serve to remind us of how helpless we feel.

As if that weren't depressing enough, the ghastly massacre at an elementary school in Newtown is still fresh in our minds, and has now morphed into the usual, futile gun control debate. This showed up in my e-mail inbox, from the Wall Street Journal—

The National Rifle Association, in its first public remarks since the Connecticut school shooting, proposed putting armed police officers in "every school in this nation." NRA CEO and Vice President Wayne LaPierre said gun-free school zones tell killers that schools are places to inflict maximum pain at minimum risk, saying "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." He blamed the media and entertainment industries for treating violence as a "joke." Two protesters holding signs holding anti-NRA signs interrupted the speech and were escorted out.

The notion that more guns make us safe is insane. Bat-shit crazy. (I don't really have to spell that out for you, do I?) If you read my post Adam Lanza's Mother Was A Doomer, it might even occur to you here to add 2 + 2 together to get 4. In short, the "prepper" view also says that more guns will make them safe. You can see what happened in the Lanza case. That's why I started that post off this way—

This post is about mental health, or lack thereof. God Only Knows we can't change the Human Condition, but we can control how we react to it and how we live within it. The rule of thumb for sane people says try to not to make things worse than they already are. But crazy people can't help but make things worse because they're crazy, and of course they don't know it.

Perhaps now you can see what I meant by that. And as I also said, American society breeds mental illness like there's no tomorrow. If you doubt that, merely turn on the TV. Then, as I was reading about this absurd gun control debate, I read There's Little We Can Do to Prevent Another Massacre by Megan McArdle at the Daily Beast.

Most crimes are motivated by unlovely impulses that are at least comprehensible: the desire for money, sex, respect, revenge.  We don't do these things because we have been taught that "good people don't do that!"--and we want to think of ourselves as good people, or at least have the neighbors and our parents think of us as good people.  Or perhaps we're merely afraid of getting caught and punished.  But we can understand why people want to--we know what someone is after when they hold up a liquor store, or even kills their spouse for the insurance money.  Understanding is not sanction: these crimes still have the power to anger and horrify.  But they're comprehensible, and that comprehensibility is surprisingly comforting.

The alternative is Newtown.  When one tries to picture the mind that plans it, one quickly comes to a dead end.  Even if I had been raised with no moral laws at all, even if there were no cops and no prisons, I'm pretty sure that I still wouldn't want to spend a crisp Friday morning shooting cowering children.  Trying to climb this mountain of wickedness is like trying to climb a glass wall with your bare hands. What happened there is pure evil, and evil, unlike common badness, gives an ordinary mind no foothold.

Since we can't understand it, we can't change it. And since we can't change it, our best hope is to box it in. Gun control opponents are angry that liberals immediately started talking about gun control, but this seems like a natural instinct to me. It's not the best way to get good policy, mind you; hard cases make bad laws, and rules passed in the wake of tragedies tend to be over-specific, and under-careful about unintended consequences. But it's not somehow indelicate to want to talk about this now; if thirty children had been killed in a landslide, I hope that we'd be talking about whether there might be some way to keep that from happening in the future.

Maybe Megan's limited little mind can't understand what happened at Newtown, but of course what happened there is comprehensible. Start with my short post Rambo Versus The Kindergarten, and then read The President's Remarks At Newtown, and then read the Doomer post. Megan therefore concludes that "we can't change it [and] our best hope is to box it in." The only box here is the one Megan lives in. I don't believe I've ever seen such a frank admission that when it comes to comprehending and changing the Human Condition, and all the terrible things humans do, our species is simply not up to the task, our species does not have the Right Stuff. What you see is what you get and always will be. Live with it.

And if humans can't change their behavior, which implies they can't regulate it or box it in, because (like Megan) they live in The Kingdom of The Blind, and that's really the issue here, then they will never be able to prevent atrocities like the one that happened in Newtown. Megan doesn't want to talk about the Human Condition, which is not surprising, but she especially doesn't want to talk about the abject failure which passes for "culture" in the "society" called the United States because these paramount, fundamental problems don't exist for her. For example, America's astonishing homicide and incarceration rates didn't arise from nothing. It is literally unthinkable for humans beings (like Megan) to question the very nature and legitimacy of the society they live in, let alone the never-changing tragicomedy called the Human Condition.

That satirical Onion video I put up on Friday ends like this—

Lawmakers have reached a bipartisan agreement that the U.S. desperately needs tigher firearm restrictions, or looser firearm restrictions, or, according to a Belt Way insider, quote, "honestly whatever option makes these things stop, do that one." President Obama's speech this week on the proposed reforms is expected to last five straight days, and will culminate with a vote on whether or not to call this whole America thing off.

Sounds good to me.

Bonus Video — Here's George. I used this video in The Kingdom Of The Blind (linked-in above)