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Why would a major university want to be associated with a company that has spent tens of millions of dollars espousing views that go against mainstream science and the preponderance of historical economic data?

Do I even have to supply the answer? But here’s a hint: It’s in the title of songs written by Pink Floyd, the Beatles, the men in ABBA, R Kelly and the team that wrote the songs for the Broadway musical, “Cabaret.”

The major universities in question include Penn State, Iowa, Iowa State, Minnesota, Oklahoma, among others. The company supplying the stuff that makes the world go round is Koch Industries.

But those worried that Koch money is going to directly poison research into the effects of global warming, government regulation, the minimum wage and unionism, can rest easy. Koch Industries is not giving the research dollars to academic departments.

No, what the Kochs are doing is advertising to fans of the football and men’s and women’s basketball teams of 15 universities.

Koch recently announced a three-year deal to advertise to these universities with Learfield Sports, which is a company that negotiates advertising deals for dozens of college sports programs across the country. The news release announcing the deal calls it a “multi-year, integrated national sponsorship platform,” whatever the heck that is. Besides advertising, Koch will have signs in stadiums and arenas, social media advertising campaigns and other nontraditional marketing programs.

The news release doesn’t really get into what the Kochs will be saying in their ads, except in the most nebulous of ways, such as “Koch looks to Learfield to tell its story..,” “college sports are a great fit for us,” and “develop a meaningful program…to help drive home their goals of being able to give back to the college communities.” We do know that the topic of some of the advertising will be honoring employees and retirees, a common way that corporations combine marketing with employee relations.

A wonderful opinion piece by Kavitha A. Davidson, who writes sports opinion pieces for Bloomberg News, points out the similarities between the goals of Koch Industries and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which is not a party to the deal, except by inference (since the NCAA sets the rules for college sports). Both Koch Industries and the NCAA are fighting unions; Koch has also spent a lot of money opposing the minimum wage, while the NCAA is currently being sued for minimum wage law violations.

Davidson misses another way that Koch Industries resembles college sports: College sports distort the mission of universities, just as the millions of dollars that Koch spends on political campaigns distort our political process and what should be the mission of our elected officials. Sports money corrupts many institutions, as we see in the recent examples of the University of North Carolina and Syracuse University, just as Koch money corrupts our political process.

Even if Koch Industries doesn’t use the opportunity to speak with millions of college sports fans to spread its boldfaced lies about the mythical free market, taxes, the minimum wage, global warming and unionism, it will still be furthering its political agenda, which hurts everyone in the United States except the top .1% in terms of wealth. Every happy-faced employee and retiree lauded for contributing to the community or the company and every mention of Koch Industries sponsoring this or that sports radio feature will improve its reputation with the target market. Plus, there are many subtle ways to sneak in hidden messages: references to the power of the free market to solve problems and the value of volunteerism (as opposed to government programs); citations of the huge number of Koch employees or Koch contributions to communities; faces of happy and hard-working women and minorities. Moreover, the repetition of the Koch name in association with what the audience perceives as a positive experience (college sports) will offset the many references in the news media to the Koch family’s support of rightwing think tanks and political candidates.

So, anyone who has recently asked the question, “How could college sports get any more corrupted and corrupting than it already is,” we now have an answer: Get the Kochs involved.

In Does Altruism Exist, David Sloan Wilson lays down the most advanced theory of how natural selection works. He reduces libraries worth of research and studies to a single statement: Within groups, selfish behavior by individuals succeeds, but between groups, groups with more altruistic behavior succeed.

Wilson defines altruism purely in terms of action, not distinguishing whether the motive is selfish or not. If the action benefits others and not the individual, it is altruistic. If the action benefits the self (or the self more than it helps others), it is selfish. Wilson further distinguishes between low-cost altruism like sharing your popcorn and high-cost altruism like dying in war.

Science finds that within a group, the more selfish individuals thrive, making selfishness within a group or a species the best way to survive, which in the case of evolutionary theory, means transmitting your genes to the next generation. But time after time, groups with higher percentages of altruistic acts beat those with more selfish acts and actors, which means the group with more altruism reproduces more members.

In fact, some scientists now theorize that altruism drove some very fundamental advances in evolution. One cell creatures became multi-cell creatures because so many of the one-cellers started to work together with other one-cellers and then specialized in a function while working together. Instead of acting in their own best interest, they did what was best for the group until they became attached to one another as a brand new type of organism. According to this theory, the same type of cooperation may have caused the transition from bacteria to single-cell creatures with nuclei. No one is saying that bacteria or single-cell animals thought about the group, only that they acted in the group’s best interest. The ultimate in this kind of inter-group cooperation are the superorganisms formed by bees or ants, entire colonies in which certain individuals play lesser roles that advance the whole.

Those who buy this version of evolution—and I count myself among them—will quickly see that the economic theories that currently guide our politics doom us to failure. Since the ascent of Ronald Reagan, we have enthroned the selfish pursuit of material gain as the greatest good for all, and for society. Our basic economic theory—taken out of context from an 18th century economic philosopher—is that if everyone pursues their own selfish interests, unconstrained, all of society will thrive. As Sloan points out, this benevolent “invisible hand” does not really exist.

Sloan, does not, however, put America’s reliance on selfishness into a real-world context. Our infrastructure of roads, bridges and mass transit are in disrepair. Public schools and universities suffer from a lack of public support. We lag behind other nations in terms of basic research into alterative energy technologies. This deterioration in the fitness of the United States results from the selfish acts of wealthy individuals and their factotums in elected offices, all dedicated to the politics and the economics of selfishness. The selfish acts entailed cutting taxes on the wealthy and spending by the government.

But does the decline make us weaker relative to other human groups, most of which face similar social dislocations?

It doesn’t matter, because it certainly weakens the larger group called the human race, makes us less fit as a species to survive. The mindlessly consumer society and the politics of selfishness seem to reign in most parts of the world, although often to a lesser extent than in the United States. Our actions are rapidly heating the world, and at a certain point it will get so hot that it will become inhospitable to humans—too many crop failures, too many epidemics, too many wars over fresh water, oil and other scarce resources, too many massive deaths from super hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes.

We are close to reaching a tipping point, and the only way to avoid it is for all of us in industrialized nations to sacrifice, to act altruistically. Curtailing driving and perhaps ending private ownership of automobiles, using mass transit, composting, keeping the temperature cooler in winter and warmer in the summer, recycling, taking fewer vacations, paying more for energy and products, living with fewer possessions in smaller spaces—this list does not exhaust the major and minor changes that we all have to make. Perhaps most critically, we have to limit our births—one child per person—to reduce our population without war, famine or epidemic. We have to structure our economy to deliver goods and services to a declining population. All these actions will involve restraining the individual for the good of the whole. Whether mandated or voluntary, the actions we need to take to make our species fitter are all altruistic.

There must be some unwritten law that journalists for the mainstream media are not allowed to write about a topic that involves numbers unless they first establish that they dislike, fear or are unable to understand math. Setting aside the issue of whether their narcissistic belief that their own math problem really warrants discussion, these math dummy confessions disqualify the writers from covering the very subject they are supposed to be exploring.

We see the latest example of a math dummy confessional in “Retirement Reality Is Catching Up With Me,” the lead story in the New York Times’ latest “Retirement” section. The article is supposed to be about how the writer, John Schwartz, began his own retirement planning at the age of 58, so we can forgive the narcissism (that is, once we accept the premise that we should care about this one writer’s retirement planning travails).

Schwartz is a long-time Times journalist who has written on such math-heavy subjects as climate change and space travel. And yet he claims to be scared of numbers. Here’s his extended quote on the topic, which we might consider a masterpiece of quibbling, except that it’s exactly the train of thought that Charles Blow used a month ago to attempt to qualify himself as disqualified to write about math education:

“Why has it taken until I’m nearly 58 to open my eyes? My excuse is simple: Numbers scare me. I am not alone in this. Scientists who study math anxiety say that the anticipation of crunching numbers can lead to the kind of agitation that, on a brain scan, looks a lot like the perception of physical pain. As a reporter, I can be stirred to learn what I need to know to cover numbers in science and business and other topics; if I don’t, somebody will fire me. (Incentive!) But I’ve largely kept out of my own business.”

We’re supposed to believe that of all the talented journalists at the disposal of New York Times editors to cover climate change and space travel that they selected someone who is afraid of the language of science?  That someone who infers he is “agitated…a lot like the perception of pain” by the very thought of crunching numbers wouldn’t quickly get himself reassigned to cover stories that didn’t involve something that scared him?

I think it’s more likely that Schwartz is taking a little poetic license: trying to turn himself into an average person, to empathize with his audience, which in this case seems to be people in their 50s and older who haven’t started serious retirement planning. To make himself this average guy, however, he turns to that old canard that math is hard.

As the article progresses and he and his wife confront retirement issues, Schwartz never circles back to the math challenge, never lets us know that most of the math involved in retirement planning is arithmetic or simple algebra, or that the financial planning industry has hundreds of calculators and formulas that do the work for you. He does mention completing a long survey and plugging numbers into a model, yet he never admits that the math was easy or nonexistent. We never see the resolution of his math anxiety. He has no need to, I guess, since his math anxiety was just a scene-setting detail, only important in so far that it carries the hidden message that math is hard to learn.

As I have discussed numerous times in OpEdge, asserting that math is hard is part of anti-intellectualism, which is one of the great ideological principles underlying virtually everything seen and heard in the mass media since the end of the Second World War. Day by day we’re bombarded with anti-intellectual statements and ideological subtext such as “math is hard,” “math causes anxiety,” “math isn’t fun,” “smart people are bad athletes and socially inept,” “college is only about getting a job,” “science isn’t fun,” “geniuses are usually mentally ill or extremely eccentric,” “the cool kids like to party” and “intelligent design is a valid theory,” just to name some of the more frequent variants of the anti-intellectual ideology. The cumulative effect is to create a culture that does not strive for or respect intellectual achievement.

Schwartz begins his article with the sentence, “I am an idiot.” He’s not, but he must think his readers are.

Republicans, and Democrats for that matter, have every right to make public their opposition to negotiating an agreement that will slow down or stop Iran’s development of nuclear weapons in return for lifting severe economic sanctions on Iran.

But I don’t believe foreign policy has anything to do with why 47 Republican Senators signed a public letter warning the Iranians that after Barack Obama leaves office, the next President could rescind any treaty.

No, what we’re talking about here is the latest in a six-year concerted campaign to undermine the legitimacy of our president. The letter belongs under the same rubric as the birther controversy, the frequent accusations that Obama doesn’t understand or love his country, and the snubbing of the president by inviting a foreign leader—Benjamin Netanyahu—to speak before Congress without first clearing it with the Oval Office.

Since Republicans have failed to convince most Americans that Obama is some disruptive stranger void of American values, they act to demean his person by trying to conduct their own foreign policy. BTW, the last time a party out of power ignored a President’s role in foreign policy, it also had to do with Iran—it was the secret and illegal negotiations that Ronald Reagan’s advisors held with Iranians in 1980 to delay return of the hostages until after the presidential election in return for secret weapon deliveries to Iran once Reagan assumed the presidency.

For proof that the letter is merely meant to demean Barack Obama, check out this key sentence: “We will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei.” First of all, while the president could bypass the Senate by signing an executive agreement with Iran concerning development of nuclear weaponry, only Congress can permanently end the economic sanctions against Iran, giving Congress de facto veto power over a deal. But the really wild part of the sentence is the reference to Ayatollah Khamenei, which turns an agreement between two governments into a personal matter between Obama and the personification of the Iranian Islamic right wing. The phrasing of the letter detaches Obama from a standard government process and attached him to one of the leading symbols of “terrifying otherness” bandied about by rightwing fear-mongers in the United States and elsewhere.

What the Republican Senators are really saying with the letter is that Obama is not a real representative of the United States and its government. In the context of the almost continuous attempts to question the legitimacy not of Obama’s policies but of the man himself, the inherent racism behind the letter should shine through to all. Overt racism stands behind the birther and “hates America” comments. The letter and previous Netanyahu speech act more subtly, undermining Obama’s legitimacy, but leaving it to their rightwing audience to supply the reason why Obama is illegitimate in their silent thoughts—“because he’s black.”

It’s easy to forget that there were three Selma marches. March 7 commemorates the bloody first march in which state troopers and a county posse attacked 600 unarmed marchers when they reached the Edmund Pettis Bridge. The marchers had wanted to walk 50 odd miles to Montgomery, the Alabama state capitol, to raise awareness of the fight for voting rights.

The images on television were unforgettably horrifying, and America rose, almost as one, to support the marchers.  People from all walks of life using every means of transportation descended on Selma for a second march.  Now there were 2,500 marchers, led by Martin Luther King, who had sat out the first march. I haven’t seen the movie “Selma,” but as Taylor Branch tells it in Pillars of Fire, King debated whether to risk injury or assassination by leading the second march. I have always wondered what goes into the decision to put your life at risk for an idea. It must be frightening to contemplate your own death, and yet to still walk into the lions’ den.

Although the second march on March 9 was merely symbolic, it held the potential for more violence. The Southern Christian Leadership Council tried to get a court order that would prohibit the police from interfering with the next attempt to walk from Selma to Montgomery. The judge decided to issue a restraining order prohibiting another march until he could hold hearings on the court order. So America watched as King led the marchers to the bridge, where he declared victory and said they would wait for the court order.

Much happened before the triumphant third march: The KKK beat to death a white minister and he died after the Selma Hospital refused to treat him. President Lyndon Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act before both houses of Congress. There were several protests for voting rights elsewhere in the south. Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers. And of course, the judge granted the court order saying that the marchers could march because they were exercising their constitutional rights.

The third march that started on March 21 was almost anti-climactic, a five-day marathon of media coverage that started with 8,000 in Selma and ended with 30,000 witnessing another timeless speech by King on the steps of the Alabama Capitol Building. It was very much a victory party, since the marchers were well-protected by the troops and it was apparent that Congress was going to pass the Voting Rights Act. Thus, when I wrote a poem about Selma six years ago, I decided to focus on the second march.

Here is my poem, “The Second Selma March.” The poem, by the way, is a serious travesty of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” about five nuns fleeing Prussian anti-Catholic laws who drowned when their steam ship, The Deutschland, sank in the North Sea in 1875. The arrangement of lines, stanza length, tumbling accretion of verbs, nouns and adjectives, hyphenated words, musicality and other aspects of my poem all come from Hopkins’ poem.

 

THE SECOND SELMA MARCH

“I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm…”

            – Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

                        It was on TV

            for all the world to touch:

the bloodied men and women

            reeling on the bridge,

the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama,

feel with them the billy clubs,

            horn-bean branches, rifle butts

on black-brown arms and legs, black-brown noses, chins,

 

                        and lash of bull whips

            swinging hard by hate-sieged men

in uniforms and gas masks,

            tear gas melting lungs and eyes,

on TV for all to see, the bleeding broken

borne on arms and stretchers into church.

            As one the viewers rise

from beer or dinner, stand and cry,

 

                        Is this my land, is this

            the soil of equal hopes, of equal dreams?

and in a common rapture east to west,

            people stop their meetings, drop their jobs,

board buses, railcars, airplanes, autos

bound for bloody Selma for another march,

            another chance to show the world,

to show themselves they live in freedom’s land.

 

                        Dead, dead, dead

            if I should march to Edmund Pettus Bridge,

closed-door Martin’s dread of next day’s plan

            before a watching world, confronts

protected points, every ledge and rock along the way,

every liquored angry cracker white with smarts:

            lay of the land, way to escape

after drawing, pulling, piercing him with searing shot.

 

                      My greater fear:

            to die or disappoint?               

to cease to be or cease to matter?

            March he does

leading new recruits from every state

before the pens and cameras, before the snakelike

            seething men, march he does,

a new rhythm haunting him, a fearless rhythm,

 

                        relentless echo rhythm,

            sun blister cloud water wind shatter rhythm,

rhythm ready to pay the price,

            peaceful ordnance steady step and turn.

And thousands march along, and multi-millions

watch as at the bridge the troopers wave

            their clubs and court orders

and stop them, but only from crossing:

 

                        Martin prays,

            declares freedom victorious,

turns home to wait

            for briefs in court, the slower march,

inevitable camp and walk, sing and praise,

five days fifty miles to Alabama’s capitol steps,

            thirty thousand strong to witness Martin ask

How long, not long, not long at all.

           

 

The U.S. Department of Justice Report on the Ferguson, Missouri police department (FPD) makes clear that the City of Ferguson made raising revenue the primary objective of the FPD and the Ferguson court system. In budgets, memos, emails, commands to police and meeting minutes, the DOJ found an explicit collective program to fund city operations with traffic and parking tickets and public safety fines for minor offenses such as not keeping a tidy lawn. The DOJ documents that Ferguson’s fines are much higher than other Missouri cities of the same size, as are the percentage of all city revenues that comes from fining citizens.

Rural counties in Texas, West Virginia and elsewhere have long had a history of stopping those driving cars with out-of-state plates to pump up the local treasury. Ferguson has taken this gambit one step further by going after its own citizens.

But no one should be surprised or shocked to learn that the Ferguson, Missouri city government financed its operations on the backs of the poor and middle class.  It happens all the time, although usually not with the overtly racist element. When municipalities use tax dollars to build new stadiums with more luxury boxes but fewer cheap seats, as happened in New York, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and elsewhere, it represents a convoluted form of taxing the poor and middle class to fund municipal benefits to the wealthy. When states and local governments decide to fund activities by issuing bonds that constitute safe investments for rich folk and pay off those bonds through taxing everyone, it’s another complicated way to shift financing burdens to the poor and middle class. The report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform a few years back didn’t suggest much to help balance the budget but did propose giving rich folk big fat tax breaks while increasing taxes on the poor and middle class, thus shifting to the latter the burden of paying for government.  The net effect of the several tax breaks and tax hikes over the past 35 years has been to make the poor and middle class pay a larger share of the cost of government and government services.

These and other mechanisms for making the poor and middle class pay more are far more subtle than the naked wealth grab we have seen in Ferguson. The headlines in the DOJ report depict a contemporary version of highway robbery:

• FPD Engages in a Pattern of Unconstitutional Stops and Arrests in Violation of the Fourth Amendment
• FPD Engages in a Pattern of First Amendment Violations
• FPD Engages in a Pattern of Excessive Force in Violation of the Fourth Amendment
• Court Practices Impose Substantial and Unnecessary Barriers to the Challenge or Resolution of Municipal Code Violations
• The Court Imposes Unduly Harsh Penalties for Missed Payments or Appearances

We can assume that city officials knew that Afro-Americans were arrested and fined at a much higher rate than their representation in the population, but it doesn’t matter one way or the other: the result of using the criminal justice system as a source of revenue and overtly discriminating against blacks in arrests and court treatment pretty much defines the kind of institutional racism that transcends whatever laws are in place to protect against discrimination.

On close inspection, the political and economic dynamics involving man-made global warming over the past 40 years resemble those of slavery in the United States from about 1790 until the Civil War.

In both the case of slavery and man-made global warming, an overwhelming moral imperative begs us to act as individuals and as a community, but action is forestalled to accommodate the economic interests of a handful of wealthy individuals.

Pretty much everyone except for the hard-core defenders of slavery knew that it was morally wrong by the end of the 18th century. Yet many people like Thomas Jefferson pretended (or stupidly believed) that the main impediment to ending the institution of slavery was the fact that the Black slaves were inferior beings who couldn’t cope with the demands of contemporary society. This belief, often based on a false science called “scientific racism,” persisted despite the preponderance of real-world evidence to the contrary. The lies and distortions used to justify slavery concealed the real reason the institution persisted: slavery was in the economic best interests of a handful of ultra-wealthy and politically connected Southern growers and Northern merchants. Even as more people began to oppose the horrors of slavery and Northern business interests developed alternative economic structures, slavery continued to spread West from the southeastern Atlantic coast towards Texas.

It took the savage butchery of the Civil War to end slavery in the Unites States. In the war to fight secession and end slavery more than 600,000 soldiers died, countless others suffered injuries and the slave-owning states that seceded from the Union saw their economies decimated. Before the war, millions of slaves died from overwork and murder or suffered beatings, whippings, rapes and other violence from their owners and a society that conflated their humanity with private property.

We can see the same dynamics that led to the Civil War working in the case of man-made global warming. It’s as morally wrong to avoid addressing a problem that could lead to the deaths and suffering of hundreds of millions of people in the near future as it was to enslave millions of human beings. BTW, some experts have shown that the adverse effects of environmental degradation hit the poor and people of color around the world much worse than they hit the wealthy.

Global warming deniers tell two kinds of lies to conceal that their main concern is their own selfish short-term interests. The first lie is to deny that the Earth is warming or aver that the warming is part of the natural unfolding of Earth’s history and not because of humans. Another variation of this scientific lie is to postulate that the impact of global warming will not be catastrophic. Just as the super-wealthy whose riches depended on slavery found so-called experts to tell the various lies that justified slavery, so have the ultra-wealthy whose riches depend on polluting our environment. A handful of scientists—less than 1% of those qualified to proffer an opinion—have received undue attention in the mass media for their misrepresentations of the science of climatology; we know that some scientists who deny global warming, like the disgraced and disgraceful Wei-Hock Soon, have been in the pay of groups that deny global warming.

The other big global warming lie is that an expeditious transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources will destroy our economy. Economic studies demonstrate that the impact of increasing pollution limits on fossil fuels and depending on wind, hydraulic and solar energy will be quite minor. Some people will lose their jobs and find others, but that happens in any dynamic economy that routinely introduces new technologies. New pollution controls, research and development into alternative energies, retrofitting manufacturing systems and delivering the new forms of energy to consumers and business will all create new jobs and economic wealth. The big change will be that those who own the means of producing and delivering fossil fuels and fossil-fuel based electricity and those whose industrial processes depend on fossil fuels will see the basis of their incredible wealth upended—which is what happened to slave owners.

Just as slavery continued for decades in the face of growing opposition, even as more people come to realize that continuing to rely on fossil fuels is immoral and short-sighted, the pollution not only continues, but grows.

There is one difference between the dynamics involving slavery. The death and destruction wrought by slavery was apparent to anyone who cared to read the works of abolitionists or to visit a large plantation. The harm caused by man-made global warming and other environmental degradations is harder to picture. We look at the ocean from a beautiful beach and do not see the increased carbon dioxide in the water that’s slowly killing important ecosystems. It’s hard for most people to connect the dramatic increase in extreme weather events with the increase in both average temperatures and ambient carbon dioxide. Moreover, the conflagration—which may involve environmental disasters, weather calamities and wars for resources—is still in the future.

Slavery was a horrible institution. Millions of slaves lived their lives under the yoke of violence, their freedom and dignity denied. I believe that every American should spend at least one minute every day thinking about our nation’s collective guilt in enslaving and mistreating millions of our fellow human beings.

But make no mistake about it. If we don’t act both quickly and radically to address man-made global warming, the death and destruction from it will end up being much greater than what Africans and African-Americans suffered under slavery.

Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s reasoning makes as little sense as his overall strategy.

Netanyahu is determined to scuttle the imminent deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries over Iran’s development of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. (BTW, P5+1 refers to the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—the United States, Russia, China, United Kingdom and France—plus Germany.) Netanyahu argues that by signing a 10-year deal, the United States and the other countries are giving Iran de facto permission to construct nuclear weapons when the agreement ends. Netanyahu is convinced that once Iran has a nuclear capability, the first thing it will do is use it on Israel.

There are three major holes in Bibi’s logic:

1. From what we can tell, the agreement will likely halt Iran’s development of nuclear weapons for 10 years, postponing for a generation the possibility of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel.

2. If, after the agreement ends, Iran begins an active program of nuclear weapons development, the United States and other nations can always renew the severe economic sanctions that have been crippling Iran for years.

3. Tehran is less than 1,000 miles from Tel Aviv, close enough that any nuclear bomb exploded in Israel would poison the Iranian air and water for decades. Moreover, Israel would likely respond to a nuclear attack from Iran in a like manner, leading to the immediate deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Iranians. The doctrine of mutually-assured destruction that has kept the United States and the Soviet Union (and now Russia) safe from a nuclear conflagration would likely also prevent Iran from attempting a first strike against Israel.

But as illogical as Netanyahu is thinking, his overall strategy is even more absurd. How will giving a speech in front of the U.S. Congress sink the talks? Most observers note that the speech represents a marriage of convenience between Republicans, who want to embarrass President Obama, and the Israeli Prime Minister, who thinks the speech will win him votes in the upcoming Israeli elections. In the short term, this strategy is risky, and in the long term it is doomed to failure. His planned speech gives the growing number of American Jews uncomfortable with Israel’s actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians another reason to unite, funnel money to Israeli progressives and jawbone their elected officials. It pisses off many in the United States, already uncomfortable with Netanyahu’s support of additional West Bank settlements. And it worsens his relationship with the head of the country that protects Israel and shtups it with $3.1 billion in military aid every year.

President Obama and others have objected to Netanyahu’s speech before Congress because it comes too close to the Israeli elections and therefore goes against the American tradition of not appearing to interfere in foreign elections. In breaking this tradition, with whom has Netanyahu gone to bed? The American right, which before Reagan had a long history of overt anti-Semitism and still has its share of racists and Jew-haters.

Joining with Republicans to embarrass a Democratic president really has to make a lot of Jewish Senators and Representatives who are Democrats pretty unhappy; even the most militaristic of them may now listen a little more carefully to the arguments of those who want to apply more pressure on Israel to stop building more settlements in the West Bank and finally negotiate a two-state solution. Of course Netanyahu’s insult to the president must please all those Jewish Republicans in Congress—oops, there’s only one!

We haven’t come to the big strategic question—how could Israel possibly be against rapprochement with Iran? What could Israel possibly lose by bringing Iran back into the stable of nations dedicated to peace? Who benefits from the current state of affairs in the Middle East? Of course the Israeli and Jewish equivalents of Islamic and Christian extremists get to keep the status quo, which is helpful to their side. And Israeli and American arms manufacturers certainly benefit from continued tensions, as they will be able to sell more guns, bullets, tanks and aircraft. The status quo suits these groups and their political factotum Netanyahu just fine.

Thus the only way to understand Netanyahu’s campaign to upset the negotiations with Iran as reasoned action is to conclude the he is an ardent supporter of the current instability in the Middle East. And that makes him a warmonger. We can only hope that Israeli voters realize Netanyahu’s way leads to more bloodshed and vote him out of office on March 17.

Does your spell check program ever frustrate you when it changes the grammatically correct “the person who” to the incorrect “the person that” or misses your mistake when you write the incorrect “the company and their employees” instead of the correct “the company and its employees?”

We can blame these mistakes on the humans who programmed the software.

But who will we blame when computerized robots decide to bomb a village of innocent civilians while searching for an escaped soldier? Or when an autonomous weapon decides on its own to start shooting wildly into a shopping mall?

I’m not talking about drones, which humans operate at a distance. Humans maintain full control over drones.

No, I’m referring to the next advance in weapons of mass destruction: automated weapons that make the decision to shoot, to bomb or to torch without human intervention, based upon the weapon’s completely independent analysis of the situation. They’re called Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) and military contractors all over the world are working furiously to develop them. The United States, Britain, Israel and South Korea already use technologies seen as precursors to fully autonomous weapons systems, according to a New York Times report that’s almost two years old. 

You probably haven’t heard much about LAWS. My Google News search revealed a total of 159 stories about them on the same day that close to eight millions stories appeared about the aftermath of Rudy Giuliani’s absurd accusation that President Barack Obama doesn’t love the United States and almost 4.5 million stories covered the death of a minor actor named Ben Woolf (who?).

Use of LAWS raises many technical issues. Opponents of LAWS wonder if we can ever program a robot to make the subtle distinctions between an enemy combatant and an innocent civilian, or to understand that the enemy has moved its antiaircraft radar device to the roof of a hospital (an example I borrow from the Times Bill Keller)? Then there is the issue of faulty programming that plagues automated systems meant to check spelling and grammar, analyze loan applications, translate from one language to another, evaluate essays or select products for purchase. And what happens if an electrical surge or scratch in a printed circuit makes an autonomous weapon go haywire? Or if some rogue programmer implants malware into the system?

The moral issues raised by having robots make battle field decisions for humans are even more troubling. Virtually all systems of human morality start with the principle, “Thou Shall Not Kill.” Since the beginning of recorded history thousands of philosophers, historians, soldiers, politicians and creative writers have written many millions of words pondering when killing another human being is justifiable.  We honor those who kill in society’s name and punish those whose murderous deeds society considers as unwarranted.  The issue of the “just war” is one of the most important themes in moral philosophy since at least the fourth century before the Common Era.

From the birth of humans until today, every killing in peacetime and war, condoned and unsanctioned, single deaths and mass murders—all of it has been committed by individual human beings to whom we can assign praise or blame, guilt or innocence. Taking the decision to pull the trigger, drop the bomb or throw the grenade out of the hands of human beings and putting into the hands of software is inherently immoral because it makes it impossible to determine who really is responsible for a wartime atrocity. The generals will blame the robot or hide behind the robot for justification, claiming that the software is infallible.

Some proponents of LAWS argue that automation will lead to more humane wars, since robots are not subject to mistakes in analysis, vengefulness, panic, fear or other emotions that color the decisions made by men and women in battle. That’s my definition of a sick joke—something that is both funny and horrifying at the same time. The lack of emotion in a robot may cause it to decide to level the village for strategic reasons, whereas a human being might recognize that the deaths of innocents or destruction of historic structures would make an attack unthinkable. And consider how much easier it will be to go to war if all a government had to do was send out the robots. The history of recent American wars suggest two dynamics: 1) the more our soldiers die in a war, the more likely people are to turn against the war; and 2) the number of deaths on the other side doesn’t sway most of the population from supporting a war. It seems clear that having an army of autonomous robots that hold within their operating systems the final decision to shoot or not will lead to more and more violent wars. Holding computers up as more virtuous than humans because they analyze dispassionately is the same kind of illogical thought process as the standard rightwing argument that businesses can regulate themselves but that society must carefully watch food stamp and Medicaid recipients for fraud.

Building the atom bomb was a bad idea that many of the scientists involved later regretted. Building lethal autonomous weapons systems is another bad idea.

I’m advising all OpEdge readers to write, phone or email their Congressional representatives, Senators and the President of the United States every three to four months asking them to come out in favor of banning all LAWS research and development in the United States and to work for a global treaty to ban LAWS R&D internationally. The United States should impose the same harsh sanctions on nations developing LAWS that we now impose on the Soviet Union, Iran and North Korea. We should refuse to buy any military armament from any private company doing LAWS R&D.

There’s a meeting of the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) dedicated to the issue of autonomous weapons on April 13-17. I recommend that all readers email CCW at ccw@unog.ch and tell the organization that it should come out against any further development of LAWS and recommend sanctions against nations and businesses that develop LAWS.

In short we have to make LAWS against the law. Let’s not let this genie get further out of the bottle.

I have no problem with the fact that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker didn’t finish college. Having a college diploma is not an absolute requirement for serving as assemblyperson, county executive, governor or even president.

Of course our only president without a college degree since the 19th century had a pretty shabby record: He helped to start the cold war. He selected nuclear power over solar as the primary energy source for the government to support. He nationalized steel plants to stop a strike. He let demagogue Joe McCarthy walk all over the country and tacitly approved the red scare. His name was Harry Truman and he also approved the two most barbaric single acts in human history: dropping atomic bombs on two Japanese cities after Japan had started negotiating its surrender, thereby killing from 150,000 to 200,000 innocent civilians in two fell swoops.

Just because most elected office holders have college degrees doesn’t mean one has to have one to succeed, just as the fact that the overwhelming number of business executives have diplomas doesn’t mean that we can’t see the occasional Bill Gates, Michael Dell or Mark Zuckerberg. That virtually all of these non-degree-bearing business titans (Steve Jobs was the very rare exception) came from wealthy families probably matters the same as the fact that many if not all of our past presidents without degrees came from wealthy families. Of course, some might say that Walker, even if born to a solidly middle class background, has been recently adopted by the ultra-wealthy Koch family.

Thus, while I would advise a young person who wants to go into politics to get a degree or acquire a wealthy family, I am not opposed to Scott Walker merely because he dropped out of college when he still had between one and two years worth of credits left to earn a degree.

I do, however, wonder what courses Walker missed by leaving Marquette University early?

He obviously missed some economics classes. He buys into the Reagan program of lowering taxes on the wealthy, cutting basic government services, killing unions and reducing regulations—all the policies that have led to the greatest non-violent transfer of wealth in world history over the past 35 years, taking wealth and income from the poor and middle class and giving it to the wealthy.  Study after study disputes the economic premises of the rightwing, and yet they persist in proposing lowering taxes, cutting money for public education, ignoring our crumbling infrastructure of mass transit, roads and bridges, passing laws that discourage unionization and opposing regulations that protect our environment and create jobs in new earth-friendly technologies. We could cynically conclude that these right-wingers are supporting a program that helps their major constituency, the ultra-wealthy, but in Walker’s case, might it be that he missed the econ classes that would help him through some of the more arduous number-crunching of mainstream (read: Keynesian) economics?

Walker probably missed some science courses, too. He has signaled many times that he doesn’t believe in human-caused global warming. He promised not to support any legislation that would raise taxes to combat climate change, and has spoken at the climate-denying Heartland Institute. He is also on record as disliking resource recycling.  No one knows Walker’s views on evolution, because he keeps dodging the question. But his comment “Both science and my faith dictate my belief that we are created by God,” seems to suggest that he really doesn’t understand science, since science neither proves nor disproves the existence of a deity. Science investigates how things work, not why they do. Walker’s current attempt to turn the University of Wisconsin, one of the world’s leading research institutions, into a glorified trade school certainly shows a lack of understanding of the importance of new scientific discoveries for the continued well-being and improvement of society.

Another class Walker probably didn’t have a chance to take—or maybe he just didn’t attend the lectures—is Ethics.  His reign as Milwaukee County Executive was as full of scandals involving his friends and cronies as has been the political career of Republican Governor Chris Christie, and that’s not a good thing. Walker has been investigated for illegally coordinating contributions from a super PAC.  His latest illegal and unethical shenanigan has been to refuse to pay the annual Wisconsin state contribution to state pension programs, another Christie trick.  Finally, one has to question the ethics of any candidate who takes millions of dollars from the Koch money machine, since the Kochs are known for injecting false notions into our national discussions about the environment, global warming, taxes and industrial policy.

My question, then, is whether Scott Walker would hold and promote so many false ideas if he had finished college. Judging from the large numbers of diploma-holding Republicans who say they share his beliefs, the answer is probably no. If we want to look for the reason Walker proclaims such ignorant views, we would probably be on firmer ground just following the money—right to the front doors of the Kochs, Adelson, Anschutz, Waltons, Scaifes and other American oligarchs who seek to distort our political discourse by flooding the marketplace of ideas with lies.