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.

Join the Adventure!

It is odd that no one seems very upset about Crimea being stolen from Ukraine by Russia. But it is a country that no one has heard of and it is so far away from the US. Yes, they did take a vote in Crimea to join Russia (under the watchful eye of 20,000 Russian troops not wearing any insignia), but that is not the point at all. If a vote was taken in Maine to join Canada, or in Southern California to join Mexico, would we just shrug our shoulders and say “whatever”? When groups of counties in California and Colorado try to secede and form new states, the news is full of stories and talking heads saying they cannot lawfully do that. But when it comes to foreign aggression, the result is a resounding “Who cares?”

Carlos Santayana said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Seventy-six years ago, Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia where a majority of residents were German. Again, Germany justified the move to protect the German residents against the Czech government, although there was no evidence of any discrimination. Now, I am not comparing Putin and the Russians to Hitler and the Nazis, but the similarity of the situations is startling.

Of course, you don’t have to look that far in the past to see the same thing. In 2008, Putin and Russia invaded and annexed part of the nation of Georgia. It was the same old story. “We must go in to protect our fellow Russians”, even though there was no evidence of harm to them. Where will this end? Will anyone care if all of Ukraine is annexed? What about Moldova? The Baltic States? Poland? Hungary? Eastern Germany? And the list of former Soviet satellites goes on.

My point is not that we should ship 100,000 troops (or any troops) into Ukraine. But when our leadership says Russia is acting out of weakness, or that Putin is acting like a 19th Century leader for whom there is no place among enlightened 21st Century leaders, the specter of their naiveté gives me a sick feeling in my gut. The world is a nasty place. Putin, Kim Jung Un, Mugabe, Khameini, Assad, and Bashir are all 21st Century leaders. You and I can go to Starbucks and have a latte, or sit back and write books about the future, but we cannot allow ourselves to be led by those who do not understand the dangers of the world around us. Let us not be blinded by our disinterest anymore. Martin Niemoeller famously said:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out– Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out– Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out– Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.