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I was having lunch the other day with about six other people.  We included professionals in law, accounting, public relations, bookkeeping, business insurance, healthcare insurance and real estate.  We all shared several characteristics.  We all are white and all have small businesses that put us in the shrinking echelons of the upper middle class. And all of us work extensively for non-profit organizations.  All except me live in the suburbs.

Naturally the topic turned to the funding problems that our non-profit clients are suffering, all because of budget cuts by local, state and federal governments.  Everyone knew at least one non-profit on the verge of shutting down.

After a few minutes of this commiseration, I stated firmly that the reason for the budget cuts is that taxes are too low and that we have to raise taxes, especially on the highest incomes.

Everyone else at the table had a look of horror, but as I continued to make my points, the expressions on the faces of most began to soften.  I explained that taxes are historically low on the wealthiest Americans, and that we wouldn’t have to make these budget cuts if you went back to the taxes of 1979.  When someone uttered, “90%,” I replied that the 90% rate was in the early 60’s, but forgot to mention that it was only paid on the incremental income over a certain amount that was in the millions. 

I could see by the approval on their faces that I had turned the group, but the epiphany that taxes are too low was shattered when a lawyer and an accountant started chanting, “No new taxes…taxes are too high…no new taxes…taxes are too high.”

These people are not rich.  If Congress did the right thing and rescinded the Bush II tax cut for those earning $250,000 or more, some of my friends might have to pay more, but not that much.  Remember, that the tax rates are assessed incrementally, which means that if the top rate is $250,000 and you earn $290,000, you only pay the top rate on $40,000. 

It is now well documented that the extension of the temporary tax cuts for the wealthy was financed the $38.5 billion of budget cuts ripped from educational, social service, mass transit and other important job-creating programs.  A lot of that money went to non-profit organizations, and not getting it is why many non-profits depending on government contracts are suffering everywhere.

And yet my friends blindly follow the “no tax” line, even as it probably hurts them more than it helps them, because it hurts their client base.  These true believers seem to forget that the government can’t tax your income if you don’t make it.

These are all good people who truly care about their communities and our futures.  They vote and they participate in community activities. 

But they have been sold a bill of goods by right-wingers to think that they are not suffering from the 30-year transfer of wealth up the ladder from the poor and middle class to the wealthy, or not to understand that regressive tax policies have been one of the primary factors in the movement of wealth from the pockets of practically everyone into the pockets of the rich.

I want to point out that one lunch only provides one anecdote, but we have seen middle class suburbs voting Tea-publican recently.

Perhaps that will change when automation and a hyperactive educational system complete the process of slashing the salaries of upper middle class professionals.   In the news recently is the fact that one-third of all law school graduates this year can’t find a job as a lawyer.  Another article pointed out that many lawyers (some of whom used to make $200 an hour) are working for $20 as outsourced professional labor.  Once the upper middle class starts to take as many economic punches as unionized and middle class workers have over the past 30+ years, maybe they’ll understand that lower taxes have helped to lead the United States into a debt-ridden decline

This past Memorial Day weekend brought news from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that it is taking the wrecking ball to the food pyramid, which USDA, nutritionists and countless school curricula have used to try to educate children (and adults!) about nutrition since 1992.

As the article in the New York Times details, nutrition experts have come to the conclusion that the pyramid is too confusing for people to understand and deeply flawed “because it did not distinguish clearly between healthy foods like whole grains and fish and less healthy choices like white bread and bacon. A version of the pyramid currently appearing on cereal boxes, frozen dinners and other foods has been so streamlined and stripped of information that many people have no idea what it represents.”

Well of course it was confusing.  It was meant to be that way.  I’m not talking about the original pyramid concept, which was conceived as building blocks, with more blocks for carbohydrates, fruit and vegetables (near the base of the pyramid) and fewer for meats and almost none for desserts and sweet snacks.  The pyramid concept was and still can be useful in discussing proper nutrition.

But the construction of the pyramid fell into the hands of the pharaonic leaders of the food industry: The dairy industry made sure that dairy products had their own bricks and that there were more of them than they should have.  The pyramid proposed minimum amounts for fruits and vegetables, but maximum amounts for meats, a nice little touch for meat packers. 

But these initial sops to the food industry were not enough.  Still later the USDA replaced the horizontal bricks with vertical strips, each one representing a different food group and all laden with information.  The color of the strips and the fact that they were laid side by side and ascended to a pinnacle made it hard to distinguish the widths of the strips, making it appear at first glance that you were supposed to eat as many sweets as vegetables.  This confusing ordering of geometric space must have also delighted chip makers.

Delightful to all merchants of processed food was the overall confusing muddle into which the USDA turned the pyramid structure.  To those selling food products full of salt, sugar and chemicals, even more advantageous than no information is a confused tangle of information from which consumers can freely select what they want to follow.  

The new symbol of ideal nutrition proposed by the Obama Administration is a round dish.  USDA hasn’t released the final composition yet, but it promises that half of the plate will be dedicated to fruits and vegetables.  Although I fully approve of the First Lady’s campaign against childhood obesity, which highlights nutrition and fitness, I have seen the Obama Administration sell out to the interests of industry time and again, so I’m dubious about the USDA commitment to making the dish reflective of what an ideal diet should be.  Already, we have learned that it will come with a separate smaller plate representing dairy products, which must gratify the dairy industry.  Will we end up with several plates, for appetizers, side dishes and dessert as it were?

The 20-year history of the food pyramid is really the story of American enslavement to advertising and its siren call of immediate gratification. Junk food is sold at every event.  It’s given out at every play date.  Snack machines are in virtually every office building.  The amount of TV programming dedicated to food has grown geometrically, so when we see people on TV, they are often doing what we’re doing as we watch them: eating.  Our youth are addicted to chips, soda, dry cereal, fast food…and overeating.  And most of the many food ads we see on TV are for the worst of foods: for every pitch for blueberries or apples we see on TV, there must be dozens if not hundreds of ads for hamburgers, all laden with high-calorie sauces, bacon and cheese.

So while I’m overjoyed to see this symbol of our enslavement fall, I also wonder with trepidation what the government and food industry are planning to dish out next.

From time to time, I analyze pop science and pop psychology articles that try to infer in current mores the echoes of primordial genes trying to propagate themselves through the selfish behavior of the animals containing them.  On any number of occasions I have demonstrated that these little Darwinian myths or fairy tales are pure speculations that reflect the belief system of the writer and by implication of the publication.  These myths always uphold conventional beliefs, e.g., that men like to play around while women want one mate or that women find dumb but athletic men more sexually attractive.  See for example, my blogs of December 22, 2009,  February 25, 2011 and November 17, 2009.

Tim Flannery, the Australian scientist and global warming activist makes the same point in his latest book, Here on Earth, when writing about Richard Dawkins, who was the first to propose the concept of the selfish gene, i.e., the idea that we are just shells for the replication of our genes, which are engaged in a brutish battle for survival with all other genes and therefore always act selfishly. 

Here is Flannery’s entire paragraph:

We have a tendency to use ideas such as selfish gene theory to justify our own selfish and socially destructive practices. It’s significant, I think, that Dawkin’s book received wide acclaim on the eve of the 1980s—the era when greed was seen as good, and when the free market was worshipped. As our experience with social Darwinism illustrates, we need to be eternally on guard against the siren song of self-interest if we wish to live in a fair and equitable society.”  

Compare Flannery’s paragraph with what I posted on OpEdge earlier this year: “The first thing we notice is that selfishness is equated with both the natural and the good.  Selfishness is the reigning spirit of state-supported capitalism and justification for an inequitable distribution of wealth.  Thus the hidden ideology of all Darwinian myths is the glorification of free-market capitalism.  It is no coincidence that the proliferation of these Darwinian myths in English and American popular science began around the time Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took office.  It was, and unfortunately remains, the zeitgeist.”

I’ll take Flannery on my side of an issue any day.  He is one of the most articulate and right-thinking scientists around, and I’m surprised that he hasn’t taken over the Carl Sagan role of “Mr. Science” in the mainstream news media.  Perhaps it’s because the mainstream news media is so in thrall to the right-wing that it really doesn’t want to call attention to science by having a universally recognized expert. 

I recommend any of Flannery’s books to anyone, but in particular, The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America, which plays out the history of North America as a long series of successive invatisions from other parts of the earth, each invasion dramatically changing the ecosystem of the continent.

As usual, I can’t criticize the pop science of Darwinian myths without stating unequivocally that I believe in the theory of evolution because all the facts support it.  What I object to is the attempt by some to spin scientific myths in support of ideology and in particular the false ideology of selfishness.  I’m delighted that Flannery agrees with me about both the theory of evolution and its ideological misuse.  

After President Obama’s capitulation to the right-wing in the budget deficit plan he presented yesterday, I thought it might be in order to review what progressives got when we hoped Barack Obama would make a more effective president than his primary opponent, Hillary Clinton. 

• We’re in three wars now, instead of two.
• The prison-cum-torture-chamber at Guantanamo is still open and the accused terrorists are getting military trials.
• We just witnessed a $39 billion dollar transfer of wealth from the middle class and poor, who are losing government benefits because of budget cuts, up the ladder to the wealthy, who saw their temporary Bush II tax break extended another two years and counting.
• And those among us who are concerned by the impact that humans are having on the environment, consider this: one of the biggest losers in the budget deal announced over the past weekend was high-speed inter-city rail transit.

And now we get President Obama’s idea of a fair way to close the deficit, which is large only because the wealthy have enjoyed 30 years of the lowest income tax rates in the history of the industrialized West: Obama echoes his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in proposing that for every one dollar that taxes are raised we cut three dollars from the federal budget. 

That’s less money for mass transit.  Less money to repair roads, bridges and tunnels. Less money to research ways to clean up the environment and make industrial processes less polluting. Less money for research into alternative fuels and power generation. Less money for community health centers and nutritional programs for disadvantaged children.  Less money to help poor people get the education they need to improve their lives. 

I’d like to write “less money for wars and weaponry,” but that’s not guaranteed.  The brokers of the budget deal found $10 billion extra for the military, and we know that our Iraqi and Afghanistan wars are considered “off budget,” which means they don’t even count in budget computations.

There is, however, one large unspoken “more” in the president’s proposal: more of our nation’s wealth in the hands of those who already have too much.  The President’s plan means that the wealthiest will continue to enjoy a low-tax regime which has enabled them to hoard more and more of the nation’s wealth over the past three decades.

The only good thing about the President’s proposal is that it’s less unfair than the Republican’s plan, which includes draconian cuts to Medicare/Medicaid.  But that’s damning with almost no praise.  It’s like saying that the 1962 Mets, a long-time icon of futility, looked good next to the last place team of a Municipal D softball league

Some are saying that what the President laid out is his negotiating position.  But it sounds to me as if he has already given away the store and the only term to negotiate is who will pay to ship everything to the new owners. . The New York Times says Obama’s plan retains “core Democratic values,” but to me it looks like a full surrender to the right wing.

If President Obama were politically vertebrate, he would have called for the deficit to be eliminated over time by a series of gradual tax increases falling primarily on those who have enjoyed such low taxes for so long.  He might have even proposed the French custom of assessing an annual tax on wealth for those with more than a certain amount, say $5 million. 

Unfortunately, Obama is the Democratic president that we have and we’re stuck with him, and the Republican alternatives are so frightening, we hope to be stuck with him through 2016.  But I can’t stop asking myself: what mass hysteria persuaded progressives that an Illinois unknown would be a more effective Democratic president than the accomplished, articulate and steely Hillary Clinton?

A great example of fixing the game before the game starts can be seen in “5 Things to Consider When Choosing Where to Retire,” which Investopedia distributed to Yahoo! Finance and other portals aggregating articles on personal finance over the past week.

In the article, writer Stephanie Christensen, gives us the five following factors that we should consider when considering where to live in retirement:

• Taxes
• Climate
• Work opportunities and recreation
• Cost of living
• Housing market

Note that Ms. Christensen never mentions the following factors to consider when planning a retirement location:

• Cultural activities
• Mass transit
• Access to tertiary medical facilities (regional hospitals)
• Services for seniors

Christensen has consciously decided to list the criteria for which the south and suburban areas have advantages, while ignoring those criteria for which cities, and in particular older northern cities like Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, are noted.  The most obvious example is to mention recreation like “national parks, historical sites, military parks, campgrounds, and state parks,” while completely ignoring cultural activities like symphonies, concerts, theatre, museums, major universities, historic buildings and libraries.

More subtle, though, is the mention of taxes as a consideration:  It is true that taxes can potentially be devastating for senior citizens since they are typically on fixed incomes, but only potentially so.  Keep in mind that only seniors who are wealthy will end up paying significant taxes and that many municipalities and states protect retirees from increases in property taxes.

The writer never poses the question, what do you get for your taxes.  For example, the residents of New York City and Boston get far more for their taxes in the way of mass transit, senior programs and public spaces than do people in virtually any city in the south and all suburban sprawl-opolises.

The selection of criteria is completely ideological, whether on a conscious or an unconscious level.  Warm weather leads you south; recreation leads you either south or to smaller, exurban areas. Taxes lead you away from the blue-state north and west coast to the red-state south.  Cost-of-living as an absolute (without considering services) leads you south and away from cities. 

Thus, without saying that life is better in the automobile-dependent suburbs (and south) of shopping malls, chain restaurants and sparse public space and services, Christensen drives us to considering these places first when thinking about retirement.

A writer sincerely interested in giving useful advice to those considering a change of address in retirement would have listed all the criteria and then discussed how some of the criteria can act against others—better mass transit may mean more taxes, but it may be worth it to many seniors.  To others, golfing and hiking may be of less interest than checking out the exhibit of Yuan dynasty masterpieces at the Met or attending that cheap Thursday rehearsal of the Pittsburgh Symphony. 

Christensen could have closed such an article by saying that the first thing to do is to decide which criteria are most important.  That would have helped people organize their minds to consider where they really want to spend their golden years.   Instead, she prefers to force-feed us a car-dependent lifestyle in which the options are driving to a nearby national park for a hike or shopping for more stuff at the mall.

My final point is that when reading any how-to or advice column in the mass media—newspapers, magazines, websites—the first thing you have to ask yourself is, what is the writer selling?

Everyone in Washington looks as happy as cherrystone clams at high tide this morning after the budget compromise that prevented a shutdown of the federal government.

“Today Americans of different beliefs came together again,” said President Barack Obama.

“We made history instead of repeating it,” said Speaker of the House John Boehner.

Republican Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, he who wants to eviscerate Medicare/Medicaid, called the budget plan “good news.”

All this patriotic and chest-swelling bipartisan pride is about what may be the biggest heist in history.  In this unarmed robbery, the rich stole from everyone else, and in particular the poor.

Obama’s delight in compromise ignored the sad fact that the $38.5 billion in cuts serving as centerpiece of the compromise will mean decreases in spending in the following crucial areas:

• Head Start, which prepares poor and disadvantaged children for school.
• WIC, which gives federal grants to states for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income mothers, and to infants and children up to age five who are found to be at nutritional risk.
• Infrastructure projects and programs to improve roads, bridges and mass transit
• A program that provides international aid that directly and literally saves lives from pandemic diseases
• Proven work and income supports that lift families out of poverty
• Support for education, especially in low-income communities

It doesn’t take an Aristotle to see that these cuts will hurt people already suffering and postpone repairs and improvements to the infrastructure that could boost our economy.

And none of it would have been necessary if the Democrats and Obama had not compromised with Republicans last December to extend temporary tax cuts for the wealthy  and instead allowed them to expire.  Remember that at the time, they controlled both houses of Congress.  If the Dems had forced the issue during the campaign season, they might have had an issue that appealed to voters and done better in last November’s election.

Put the two compromises together and you have a net transfer of wealth of $38.5 billion and counting, all of it going up the economic ladder from the middle class and poor to the wealthy, who already were doing well, having improved their share of all of America’s wealth by 70% and their share of total income by about 66% over the past 30 years.

Most of the media coverage of the compromise this morning reported on the drama of negotiation and the exuberance of avoiding a shutdown.  Very few reporters bothered to list the cuts.  Nothing devious there—it’s just the standard media preference for focusing on personalities and the drama of struggle over considering the details of issues.

But I did find it interesting that in all the “sound and fury” and “cries and whispers” reported in the media leading up to and immediately following the budget compromise, there has been virtually no mention of the fact that the Pentagon’s budget is being increased by $10 billion.   That means that instead of dedicating $10 billion to helping people in need, we are going to buy more guns, bullets and planes and shoot up Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and wherever else we are making a muck of things.

Imagine seeing the following movie:

Hitler learns that on his visit with Mussolini, he will have to attend a formal ball.  It will be expected that he dance at least three or four dances, certainly with Mrs. Mussolini and perhaps also with some of the wives and daughters of the German high command.  But Adolph is a complete klutz and he is fearful he will embarrass not just himself but the whole of Aryan manhood, and at a critical time, when they are planning to respond to the difficult international crisis.  So on the advice of Himmler, Hitler engages a ballroom dance instructor who has an uncomfortably unconventional style.  But over time they bond and the student learns. The evening of the ball, Hitler reminds the assembled German and Italian bigwigs of Fred Astaire, only more virile.  The dance instructor, Himmler and a couple of very nice-looking ladies are all moved to tears. 

Depending on the date and provenance of such a film we would take it as a campy parody, like “The Producers,” or a piece of propaganda like “The Eternal Jew,” a 1940’s Nazi-made piece of anti-Semitic swill.

Would you think that any American, or even German, reviewer would describe such a film thusly?:

• “…transcends its historical setting to present a compelling portrait of quiet heroism.”
• “…a moving and remarkable story of friendship and triumph.”
• “A beautiful story of one man’s finding his…”
• “A film of extraordinary humanity and spirit.”

Yet these are some of the many positive and entirely serious comments that reviewers and critics have made about “The King’ Speech,” which depicts with no irony the struggle of King George VI of England to learn not to stutter.  These quotes are completely representative of the positive critical response the movie has gained.

Before proving that my provocative comparison of King George VI to Hitler is accurate and appropriate, I wanted to review the ideas for which all kings stand:

• Certain people by birth are better than everyone else.
• The ruler of a nation is hereditary or decided by a very small number of people all of whose positions derive from birth.
• The ruler makes all decisions and can not be overruled.
• A class of people above all others has special rights and deserves better treatment.
• Every resident of a geographic area must fight to preserve the rule and special rights of the person on top and his family.

Now why are we glorifying a person who is the absolute symbol of these obnoxious beliefs just because he was rich enough to buy the best teacher possible to help him meet a challenge as an adult that most of us face by fourth grade (and in the case of poor children who stutter, sometimes with no help whatsoever)?

Even if you agree with me that that George VI is a symbol of these disgusting royalist views, you might still think it unfair to compare George VI to Hitler because he is only a rather weak and vestigial type of symbol called a “constitutional monarch.”

But consider:  Who killed more people and made more people suffer, the British royalty over about 800 years or the Nazis between 1930 and 1945? And since George VI is primarily a symbol and all symbols are vessels, we can extend his symbolism beyond England to encompass all of royalty, who surely in the history of the world were personally responsible for more deaths and more suffering than the Nazis.

I’m not saying that “The King’s Speech” didn’t deserve its 12 Oscar nominations and 4 Oscars.  Movies about the “banality of evil,” as Hannah Arendt put it, often are worthy of praise. What I am saying is that the critics and judges should have dealt with the film with the sense of irony and/or disgust with which they would deal with a serious film about Hitler, Stalin or Richard Nixon facing a personal crisis.

What I’m asking is that people, especially Americans whose ancestors shed blood twice to establish the principle that all men are equal, should begin to consider royalty as reprehensible.   

To those Americans who have flag decals on their cars or hang flags out their windows, I suggest that a more patriotic act would be to write or email every media outlet in which you see a story about the upcoming royal wedding and tell them that you don’t want to see any more stories about the personal lives of the royalty, which inherently glorify these leeches on society by reveling in their unearned celebrity. 

The Science Times, the New York Times’ weekly science section, just can’t get enough of those pseudo-scientific stories in which the reporter tries to connect contemporary sexual mores with the theory of natural selection.  The argument, always, is that we do it because in early times those who did it were more likely to have more children, thereby passing on their genes to future generations.  

In the story in question, first published in this week’s Science Times, reporter John Tierney details a few interesting studies about human mating behavior.

Here are some of the findings reported in the article, all valid and interesting.  I put the Darwinian myth that the reporter used to explain the finding in italics:

• Men in a relationship think other women are less attractive when they are in the fertile stage of their menstrual cycle, whereas guys on the prowl think the fertile woman more attractive. Darwinian myth: “Natural selection favored those who stayed together long enough to raise children: the men and women who could sustain a relationship by keeping their partners happy. They would have benefited from the virtue to remain faithful, or at least the wiliness to appear faithful while cheating discreetly.”  Note the contradiction in the explanation!
• At peak fertility, women with unattractive men are more likely to notice other men. Darwinian myth: “This fits the ‘good genes’ evolutionary explanation for adultery: a quick fling with a good-looking guy can produce a child with better genes, who will therefore have a better chance of passing along the mother’s genes. But this sort of infidelity is risky if the woman’s unsexy long-term partner finds out and leaves her alone to raise the child. So it makes sense for her to limit her risks by being unfaithful only at those times she’s fertile.” Just throw out Occam’s razor, that core principle of science and philosophy which proposes that the simplest explanation is most likely the right one. 

The research was worth presenting, but why do we have to draw such convoluted and speculative conclusions from it?  The studies demonstrate that we communicate on the chemical level.  To my mind, that’s enough of a finding for an interesting article.  I don’t need the BS reasoning that sounds more like religion than science.

In fact, these Darwinian myths by which we attempt to justify all behavior by natural selection have less to do with the science of evolution than with the philosophy of Leibniz.  He’s the late 17th century and early 18th century German philosopher who created calculus independently of Isaac Newton but is better known for his ridiculously optimistic philosophy which states that by definition whatever is, is for the good.  In Voltaire’s Candide, Leibniz becomes the buffoonish Dr. Pangloss, who proposes that no matter how bad things deteriorate we are nonetheless living in “the best of all possible worlds.”

Here’s the Leibnizian thinking of the Darwinian myth-makers: Whatever we do has a reason and that reason is always our own selfish self-preservation which is embedded into us by nature and therefore has to be good.   

The first thing we notice is that selfishness is equated with both the natural and the good.  Selfishness is the reigning spirit of state-supported capitalism and justification for an inequitable distribution of wealth.  Thus the hidden ideology of all Darwinian myths is the glorification of free-market capitalism.  It is no coincidence that the proliferation of these Darwinian myths in English and American popular science began around the time Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took office.  It was, and unfortunately remains, the zeitgeist.

Now let’s take a deeper look: ­More than 90% of all species that have ever existed on earth are currently extinct.  That means that not everything that animals do leads to their survival.  Okay, lots of these extinctions resulted from extreme weather change, continents moving or another animal changing the environment rapidly.  But lots of times, species just outgrew their environment or developed habits that impeded survival in even a slightly changed condition.

In other words, just because we do it, doesn’t mean it helps us survive.  And more important, just because it helped us survive 10,000 or 35,000 years ago doesn’t mean it will help us survive today. Natural selection is not necessarily always good, at least as it concerns human beings.

Ken Jennings, the “Jeopardy!” champion who lost a globally-watched three-day match of the TV game to the Watson computer, got it completely wrong when, upon acknowledging his defeat, he said, “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.”

All those headlines that said that the computer defeated a human are dead wrong, too. 

Neither Watson nor Deep Blue, the computer that defeated world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, nor any other computer is our overlord.  Watson “remembered” only what humans had programmed into it, and only answered questions through “thought processes” (called algorithms in computer talk) that a human had programmed into it.  In other words, a team of humans using a very expensive tool beat a single human.  Big deal!

We don’t consider cars, which travel both faster and further than humans can, to be our overlords.  Nor do we consider guns and other weaponry as our overlords, although we usually defer to those who have them pointed at us.

Like the “Deep Blue” victory, the success of computer researchers in programming a computer to beat a human is stunning.  It marks a milestone in our ability to extend our power to manipulate knowledge through machines.   Keep in mind, though, that it entailed humans creating the algorithms the computer needed to supply questions beginning with the word “What is…” to statements and giving the computer a bunch of trivial facts. 

Let’s hope the Watson victory doesn’t also represent a symbolic milestone in the abdication of human critical thinking.  Unfortunately many people defer to folks with big computers without first investigating the knowledge base and ideological assumptions of the programmers, and that’s a shame. It’s all too easy to say that computers are smarter than we are and let them make decisions.  In reality, though, all computers are programmed by humans so when you have a computer decide what book to read or gift to give a loved one, you are really having another human being or a group of humans decide for you, because it is their thought processes and the facts they select that are fed into the computer.

I hope that one day we replace these human-against-machine competitions with machine-against-machine battles.  After the first time, it’s really no fun seeing a human race against a car, but it is quite exciting to see humans race other humans (which I love) or humans driving cars versus humans driving cars (which I hate, but which I admit is one of the most popular sports in the world). 

Imagine a league for computers that play chess, “Jeopardy!”or Scrabble.   In time, perhaps, the head computer programmers could attain the level of celebrity of those whom operate automobiles, such as Dale Earnhardt and Mario Andretti.   

So let’s celebrate this victory of the human spirit and its unfathomable and indomitable will to create machines that extend its physical abilities.  And let’s bend our heads to no machine.

One final note: On the same day that Google news reported 3,125 media covering a computer winning a game of “Jeopardy!,” only 198 reported that a new study provides incontrovertible evidence that human activity is resulting in increased storms around the world.  The New York Times put the Watson-Jennings match on the front page, the very place it put that silly survey which a year ago said half of all weather personalities (none of whom have degrees in climatology and half of whom have not even studied meteorology)  don’t believe in global warming.  The study that proves that humans are driving climate change was hidden on page one of the international section.  Once again, the real news is buried under trivia and ideology.