It seems 12 states have already passed laws granting all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the majority of the popular vote in the country as a whole. We all remember Al Gore winning the popular vote but losing the election due to the Electoral College system our Founders gave us. I understand people’s ire with that result, but we need to really consider why the Electoral system was envisioned as the optimal choice for our great country.

Even though the Federal government has been growing like a weed for decades and most people have forgotten, the United States was formed as a union of independent states. When the country was founded, the people in each state were proud of the culture, history and way of life in their state. I would like to believe we feel that way to this day. In my opinion, the elimination of the Electoral College is a direct affront to state’s rights, and may well lead to state governments being nothing more than the local branch offices of the Feds. I don’t think that would be a good thing. Here are a couple examples:

Let’s say you live in Iowa, where I spent many years and attended college. At the 2010 census, Iowa had a population of 3.0 million. In some future presidential election, imagine that 99% of Iowans vote for candidate A, about 1.5 million votes. Candidate B ends up winning the popular vote by 500,000 votes nationwide. With these new laws, Iowa gives all their electoral votes to B, negating the votes of virtually all Iowans. Perhaps the best candidate did win, but the will of the people of Iowa is wiped away.

Now here is the insidious part. According to that same census, the US population in 2010 was 312.9 million. The nine most populated states account for more than 1/2 of the total. The top 16 states account for 2/3s of Americans. The rest is spread among the remaining 34 states and our territories (mainly Puerto Rico). In a United States without the Electoral College, no candidate is going to campaign heavily in any of those other states or territories. What’s the point? Focus on the highly populated states and major cities. Spend a little money on a network on the next tier of ten states. The rest only account for 16% of the popular vote. You can afford to ignore them and spend money where the bodies are. If you prevail, you’ll get their votes by default.

To me, this will disenfranchise those states, turning them into back waters no politician every talks about or visits. That isn’t right. Each state should have its own voice and it should be heard. And so this isn’t considered a partisan post, here are the bottom ten on the list, excluding territories: New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Washington DC, Vermont and Wyoming. Combined into one state, they would be the 12th largest in population, but now their 8 million voices will be silenced.

What the Electoral College does is to force candidates for President to campaign in every state. Not only is each person’s vote important, but so are the issues and needs of the states they live in. I believe these new laws will lead us backward in time to the days of the Boston Tea Party. What was that brouhaha about? Taxation without representation. Every state counts. When I was younger, I did not really understand state’s rights or the Electoral College. Now it seems so clear, and our Founders were right!

Did anyone see the Canadian ambassador to the United States on Fox News yesterday?

His take on the Keystone XL pipeline was amazing. First of all, he obviously has no dog in this political hunt. He is Canadian (much more liberal than the USA), and represents his country’s interests, not the Dems or Reps in our country. What he said is critically important, although no one is talking about it. He said that his country has already looked at the environment impact, as has our State Department. His point is that the oil is already flowing from Alberta to the American refineries. Right now, and into the future, that oil is moving by rail and tractor trailers. Therefore, the ruse that canceling XL will help the environment is a lie. He said the pipeline will actually help the environment as Keystone XL moves the oil by pipe rather than rail or truck, which generate significantly higher CO2 emissions than pipes. Therefore, fighting Keystone XL is actually a desire to increase pollution, not lower it.

Believe me, the Canadians are more environmentally focused than us, and that isn’t good, but in this case it lays bare the political agenda behind the fighting in Congress. The fricking market will do what it will do. The ONLY other option is to kill the pipeline, let the oil stay on rail and increase pollution, or ship it directly to China, where they don’t give a damn for the environment, and raise pollution even higher. Let’s all take a step back, and do what’s right for the USA for once. All of the helter-skelter in Washington is  a ruse (as it has always been) for the folks there to control all of us. If you love the NSA spying and all the other governmental abuses of power, you won’t care what I say. If you still think, consider this.

First of all, to be clear, this post does not express an opinion on the validity of claims of anthropomorphically caused climate change or global warming. What I wish to discuss is actually more important than that. When I heard the President of the United States claim during his State of the Union address that climate change was “settled science”, I almost fell off the couch.

Perhaps the President and other laypeople can be forgiven for their lack of understanding of how science works, but using the bully pulpit to say such things should make you squirm in your chair. The idea that anything in science is settled contradicts the very nature of scientific experimentation. Many progressives talk about the fallacy of religion, and yet, thousands of years ago when those faiths were beginning, they were the highest state of knowledge. When Isaac Newton discovered the laws of thermodynamics and physics, that was the state of the art for its time, even though the works of Einstein and others have shown Newton’s laws are approximations that work well within the macroscopic confines of our existence on Earth. Now, physicists know there is much more to science that what Newton knew, and that is fantastic. We live and we learn.

What does science know today? Probably a lot more than I can imagine, but let me share a few things I learned from reading and watching science television. First, we know that matter acts very differently on the quantum level than it does on a larger scale. The computer I’m typing on and all modern electronics rely on how things happen on the quantum level. Our machines work because those tiny bits that make up atoms and everything else act like both waves and particles and can be in many places at the same time. It is one of the great challenges facing science today to link quantum mechanics and macro-scale physics into a grand unified theory. So far, no luck on that one, which means we know how big stuff works, and we’re glad the small stuff does what it does, but we don’t know how to reconcile the two. In other words, there are two types of physics out there.

Then there is dark matter, which accounts for roughly 25% of everything in the universe. Without it, the galaxies would spin apart, since there is not enough mass in them to hold their lovely spiral (and other) shapes. What is it? Who knows? And don’t forget dark energy, my personal favorite, which makes up 70% over everything there is. When you ignite a firecracker, there is a big pop as energy is released, and then it’s over. Using that logic, after the Big Bang, the universe should have expanded very fast until the energy of the explosion dissipated and then start to slow down. Perhaps due to the vacuum of space, that could take a long time. Well, to our surprise, after 13.8 billion years, the expansion is accelerating! Imagine lighting a firecracker a billion years ago, and the explosion is still going and getting bigger. How can this happen? Dark energy. What is it? Don’t know.

So, science knows a lot about the quantum and large-scale action of 5% of the universe, but not why the two are different. While science is amazing and I love it, for a school child, that’s like getting an A in kindergarten. There is so much more to know than we can possibly imagine. Nothing in science is settled.

By the way, I love the Morgan Freeman series “Through the Wormhole” and “Beyond the Wormhole”. Those programs showcase real scientists working on some of the anomalies of science. Over the last two weeks, some pretty outrageous ideas have been floated. During one program, scientists were explaining their experiments that “prove” there is no such thing as free will. Wow! That’s really bad news for Al Gore. If that is true, there is nothing we can do about global warming, since we do not make choices. We are just going through the motions. I do not believe that, but I am no scientist.

Last week, it was suggested that existence is an illusion. I have heard that before, with scientists speculating that reality is on a sphere at the edge of the universe, and our reality is just a hologram. It all seems very unlikely, but it did remind me of my favorite book ever, Illusions by Richard Bach. After hearing those discussions, my head was spinning, but the one thing I realized is that nothing in science is settled.

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