Consensus and Its Discontents

There is a fascinating study out on studies and results that centers upon what the researchers call the "paradox of unanimity."

In a police line-up, the probability that an individual is guilty increases with the first three witnesses who unanimously identify him or her, but then decreases with additional unanimous witness identifications. 

In a new paper to be published in The Proceedings of The Royal Society A, a team of researchers, Lachlan J. Gunn, et al., from Australia and France has further investigated this idea: The "paradox of unanimity."
"If many independent witnesses unanimously testify to the identity of a suspect of a crime, we assume they cannot all be wrong," coauthor Derek Abbott, a physicist and electronic engineer at The University of Adelaide, Australia, told Phys.org. "Unanimity is often assumed to be reliable. However, it turns out that the probability of a large number of people all agreeing is small, so our confidence in unanimity is ill-founded. This 'paradox of unanimity' shows that often we are far less certain than we think."
The researchers showed that, as the group of unanimously agreeing witnesses increases, the chance of them being correct decreases until it is no better than a random guess.
In police line-ups, the systemic error may be any kind of bias, such as how the line-up is presented to the witnesses or a personal bias held by the witnesses themselves. Importantly, the researchers showed that even a tiny bit of bias can have a very large impact on the results overall. Specifically, they show that when only 1% of the line-ups exhibit a bias toward a particular suspect, the probability that the witnesses are correct begins to decrease after only three unanimous identifications.
The mathematical reason for why this happens is found using Bayesian analysis, which can be understood in a simplistic way by looking at a biased coin. If a biased coin is designed to land on heads 55% of the time, then you would be able to tell after recording enough coin tosses that heads comes up more often than tails. The results would not indicate that the laws of probability for a binary system have changed, but that this particular system has failed. In a similar way, getting a large group of unanimous witnesses is so unlikely, according to the laws of probability, that it's more likely that the system is unreliable.



They supply some real world examples.
In the recent Volkswagen scandal the company fraudulently programmed a computer chip to run the engine in a mode that minimized diesel fuel emissions during emission tests. But in reality, the emissions did not meet standards when the cars were running on the road. The low emissions were too consistent and 'too good to be true.' The emissions team that outed Volkswagen initially got suspicious when they found that emissions were almost at the same level whether a car was new or five years old! The consistency betrayed the systemic bias introduced by the nefarious computer chip.
A famous case where overwhelming evidence was 'too good to be true' occurred in the 1993-2008 period. Police in Europe found the same female DNA in about 15 crime scenes across France, Germany, and Austria. This mysterious killer was dubbed the Phantom of Heilbronn and the police never found her. The DNA evidence was consistent and overwhelming, yet it was wrong. It turned out to be a systemic error. The cotton swabs used to collect the DNA samples were accidentally contaminated, by the same lady, in the factory that made the swabs.


This is important in corporate decisions. The dissenting voice should be welcomed. A wise committee should accept that difference of opinion and simply record there was a disagreement. The recording of the disagreement is not a negative, but a positive that demonstrates that a systemic bias is less likely.


Abbott's main point (and most controversial one): Mathematics is not exceptionally good at describing reality, and definitely not the "miracle" that some scientists have marveled at. Einstein, a mathematical non-Platonist, was one scientist who marveled at the power of mathematics. He asked, "How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?" In 1959, the physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner described this problem as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics." The conclusion on this miraculous correlation with reality? It's wrong.


Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made.


A graph of Gunn's results of line-up studies (the probability that an individual is guilty increases with the first three witnesses who unanimously identify him or her, but then decreases with additional unanimous witness identifications. Different colored lines represent various failure/error rates, with yellow representing zero failure.):


 From Lisa Zyga in Phys.org             

Subsidizing the Rich

With the discussion of The Big Short, I thought I would clutter it with my own experience. Admittedly, that is about as small a sample size as one can get but it is of some interest, I think.

I knew a real estate agent who worked in Maryland's high-end Louden County and I asked her if she had defaults in that rich community at the time of the 2008 crash. She allowed that she had and said one of the biggest was an owner who had purchased, sight unseen, four expensive homes when the banks were giving 125% of equity. He pocketed 25% of the purchase price of each and then defaulted on the payments. He was a Swiss national living in Europe, had no intention of paying the interest, simply took the 25% profit as a gift and walked away.


These kinds of mindless distortions are delicacies for predators. And we homeowners, investors, taxpayers and consumers are still paying for it.

Cab Thoughts 1/6/16

Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference. Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

 

 

Much of the public debate is over the identification of the ISIS guys as Muslim. There is this righteous posturing that all Muslims are not involved. There is implicit in this position that some sort of intolerance is present in the West that is either feeding the madness or simply unseemly. I have seen the charge that all Muslims are ISIS guys in fact or in spirit only in radical mass email throwaways and have no idea why the debate should be focused upon this straw man. Perhaps because it is simply an easier and more righteous position.


We have a really good opportunity for a little experiment I would love to run on wackos who hope to become important. Apparently some grown men, taking their cue from Occupy Wall Street,  have decided for some reason to occupy an abandoned building, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Oregon. My solution? Ignore them. No pictures. No names. No local TV outside. No concerned interviews with friends, neighbors or family. Ignore them.

 

The Challenger Deep is the deepest known point in the Earth's seabed hydrosphere, with a depth of 10,898 m (35,755 ft) to 10,916 m (35,814 ft) by direct measurement from submersibles, and slightly more by sonar bathymetry. It is in the Pacific Ocean, at the southern end of the Mariana Trench near the Mariana Islands group.

 

The death rate of middle-aged American whites — more particularly, working-class middle-aged American whites — is rising, while that of all other Americans continues to fall. A study by Princeton economists Angus Deaton (the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics) and Anne Case documented the number of deaths by suicide, alcohol use and drug use among working-class whites ages 45 to 54 has risen precipitously since 1999 — so precipitously that the overall death rate for this group increased 22%. That is a staggering change, epidemic-like.

 

Who is.....John Hanson?

 

Studies indicate that putting on a happy face actually makes you happier. It seems that the simple act of a physical smile, authentic or not, tricks your brain into thinking you're actually happy. Smiling also triggers us to think back to joyful memories, further improving mood. In addition to lifting mood and reducing stress, other research has shown that people who smile are thought to be more friendly and likeable, and smiling actually makes those around you cheerier as well.

 

The share of blue-collar jobs in the U.S. economy declined from 28% in 1970 to 17% in 2010. The Economic Policy Institute reports the real median hourly wage for white men with no more than a high school diploma declined from $19.76 in 1979 to $17.50 in 2014.

 

Kipling’s only son John was killed in WWI at the age of eighteen; his father's patriotism was always blamed as he lobbied for his son's commission although he was physically unfit. Kipling had lost his only daughter at sea and this was his only son, for whom he had written "If," perhaps his most famous poem. ("You'll be a man, my son.") Kipling was devastated and wrote the heartbreaking My Boy Jack which starts,

"Have you news of my boy Jack?'
Not this tide.
'When d'you think that he'll come back?'
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide."

 

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had sex with prostitutes, meanwhile publicly declaring that sex work was “modern-day slavery.” He then signed a law that increased penalties for people caught doing it. When Spitzer was caught, he resigned. He's a felon, but he managed to avoid jail. 

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/12/gravity-review.html

Mars, the red planet named for the Roman god of war, has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, whose names are derived from the Greek for Fear and Panic. These martian moons may well be captured asteroids originating in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or perhaps from even more distant reaches of the Solar System. But Phobos orbits so close to Mars - about 5,800 kilometers above the surface compared to 400,000 kilometers for our Moon - that gravitational tidal forces are dragging it down. A recent analysis of the long grooves indicates that they may result from global stretching caused by tides -- the differing force of Mars' gravity on different sides of Phobos. These grooves may then be an early phase in the disintegration of Phobos into a ring of debris around Mars.

 

Dogs can see in color, though they most likely see colors similar to a color-blind human. They can see better when the light is low.

Voltaire's talent was for writing, and his temperament was towards toppling rather than upholding authority. At age twenty-one he was exiled from Paris for five months, having stepped on the wrong toes with some satiric verses about the decadent life at Versailles. Six months later he was arrested again for similar offences, this time put in the Bastille.

 

The deadliest natural disaster in the U.S. was the Galveston hurricane of 1900, which killed between 8,000-12,000 people.

 

The controversy over whether bisphenol A, a component of plastics and can linings, is dangerous to humans is now in its 17th year. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on research by the US and other governments around the world. “In a new study of Cincinnati-area kids, girls exposed to higher levels of bisphenol A before birth had more behavioral problems and were more anxious and over-active than those only exposed to small amounts of the chemical,” said Reuters Health. But the study began with a sample of 468 but analyzed only 237 or 239—it is not clear how many were actually analyzed from their data section in the results. Regardless, the sample is roughly 50 percent of their original sample. We never know (from the authors) how much the missing data contributed to the results.

 

John Hanson, the first president of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation, is sometimes called the first president of the United States, but this is a misnomer, since the presidency did not exist as an executive position separate from Congress until the federal Constitution created the role upon its ratification in 1789.

 

Lassitude: n: 1. weariness of body or mind from strain, oppressive climate, etc.; lack of energy; listlessness; languor.
2. a condition of indolent indifference: the pleasant lassitude of the warm summer afternoon. ety: Lassitude stems from the Latin term lassus meaning "weary." The suffix -tude appears in abstract nouns of Latin origin.

 

Nathanial West wrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, about disgruntled characters inside the Trojan Horse. Only 500 copies of the book were printed when it was published in 1931.

 

While hardly definitive, this is a fascinating study, more for its conclusions than its substance: Older black men who have surgery for prostate cancer may have more complications and pay higher out-of-pocket costs than white men, a U.S. study suggests. Study author Dr. Quoc-Dien Trinh of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said, “My interpretation is that all this talk about blacks having more biologically aggressive disease and hence worse survival may in fact be more of an access to care or access to treatment problem.” So any variation from the mean is suspect? These non-scientific pronouncements are common in the lay press but are getting more frequent in sciece where funding is so important. No scientific thinker would run to a block in a city that had seven cases of lymphoma with the thought that there was a local reason for the high rate--or would never have done so in the past. But now....

 

AAAAaaaaannnnnddddd.....a graph:

 

 

Emmanuel Conseil: Suspicion and Discovery

An amateur astronomer named Emmanuel Conseil discovered a "new star" or nova in the Triangulum Galaxy on Christmas Day. I was immediately suspicious. Emmanuel? Christmas?
Emmanuel is from the Hebrew name עִמָּנוּאֵל ('Immanu'el) meaning "God is with us". This was the foretold name of the Messiah in the Old Testament. It has been used in England since the 16th century in the spellings Emmanuel and Immanuel, though it has not been widespread.
"Conseil" means....."a council."

So....
Apparently this is all true. Mr. Conseil made the discovery using the online Slooh observatory, whose telescopes are located in the Canary Islands. It was the second time Conseil had discovered a nova this way. Some guy created a business renting telescope access.

It is all rather amazing.

Slooh is a robotic telescope service that can be viewed live through a web browser with Flash plug-in; that is it is an online astronomy platform with live-views and telescope rental for a fee. They use telescope feeds from all over the world.
The name Slooh comes from the word "slew" to indicate the movement of a telescope, modified with "ooh" to express pleasure and surprise.
A nova or "new star" is basically a gigantic nuclear explosion that occurs when a white dwarf star steals material — mostly hydrogen — from its stellar neighbor. When it gathers enough material, it causes a runaway nuclear fusion reaction, which blasts the material out into space. The nova is usually visible for several months afterward.
The Triangulum Galaxy, where the nova was discovered, is a spiral galaxy — a flat, rotating disc of stars, gas, and dust with a central bulge of stars. At 2.7 million light-years away, it's the most distant object you can see with the naked eye, according to "EarthSky."

Sunday 1/3/16

 Today is The Epiphany, Christ being revealed to the Magi who follow a star to reach Him. It is a curious event as it is iconic beyond the obvious. Here three men, outside the world of Israel, travel through difficulties to find Christ, worship Him, bring Him gifts  and then protect Him from Herod. It is often described as the subservience of science, the world of knowledge, to the Divine. The image of the three wise men is one of the most recognizable images of Christianity although they are on the stage for but a few minutes and are gone. But their importance is gigantic as they are gentiles.
I first remember "epiphany" through James Joyce, the novelist, who felt it part of his writing style, a literary device defined by Beja as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether from some object, scene, event, or memorable phase of the mind--the manifestation being out of proportion to the significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it"--particularly in The Dubliners but also in Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. Usually it involves insight, usually personal but sometimes into the world.
It is a small but remarkably indelible picture in the extraordinary huge story of Christ.
 

Cab Thoughts 1/2/16

"As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Community organizers like Huerta don't teach anyone how to fish: they teach activists how to steal their neighbors' fish. This is what Huerta and her ilk call social justice." --Matthew Vadum


A different slant on the terrorist death cult: Essential to our modernity and prosperity is our open and competitive global commerce. It's easy to imagine how very poor you and your family would be if you traded only with people who live in your immediate neighborhood. You'd also be much poorer if you traded only with your co-religionists, or only with people whose native language is English, or only with other Americans.

This reality is no small matter. Being poorer doesn't mean only that you take less-pricey vacations, that you dine at restaurants less often, and that you buy one or two fewer new shirts or pairs of earrings each year. Being poorer means also that you have less leisure time to enjoy with family and friends.

In short, being materially poorer would not only narrow our access to material things; it would also impoverish us culturally and spiritually.--Bourdeaux

Centaurus A is the closest active galaxy to planet Earth, only 11 million light-years distant. Spanning over 60,000 light-years, the elliptical galaxy is also known as NGC 5128. Forged in a collision of two otherwise normal galaxies, Centaurus A is a jumble of young blue star clusters, pinkish star forming regions, and imposing dark dust lanes. Near the galaxy's center, left over cosmic debris is steadily being consumed by a central black hole with a billion times the mass of the Sun. A billion times the mass of the Sun!

When the terrorists stormed the Paris venue where Eagles of Death Metal were performing, the song the band was playing was "Kiss the Devil".  The lyrics?
Who'll love the Devil? Who'll song his song?Who will love the Devil and his song?
I'll love the Devil, I'll sing his song, I will love the Devil and his song
Who'll love the Devil? Who'll kiss his tongue?Who will kiss the Devil on his tongue?
I'll love the Devil, I'll kiss his tongue I will kiss the Devil on his tongue
Who'll love the Devil? Who'll sing his song? I will love the Devil and his song
Who'll love the Devil? Who'll kiss his tongue?I will kiss the Devil on his tongue
Who'll love the Devil? Who'll sing his song? I will love the Devil and sing his song
.....Maybe not the song to placate a fundamentalist Muslim.

Early Roman women were forbidden to drink wine, and a husband who found his wife drinking was at liberty to kill her. Divorce on the same grounds was last recorded in Rome in 194 B.C.

Some a-words form a close-knit group: abed, abreast, aflame, asleep; afresh, anew, and so forth. They are made up of the prefix a (the remainder of the prepositions on or of), followed, as a general rule, by an easily recognizable noun or adjective. None of them can be used attributively: the man is asleep is fine, while an asleep man is impossible. However, not all a-words are equally transparent. Afraid is the past participle of the verb affray; agog is probably an adaptation of Old French en gogues “in (the state of) merriment”; the evidently foreign source of askance, as The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology informs us “has been much disputed [and] remains unknown”; akimbo may be a continuation of a Scandinavian three-word phrase meaning “bent in a curve”; abaft is also the sum of three words (for -baft is b- + -aft, whose modern reflexes are by and aft[er]); aback, originally a nautical term, like abaft, acquired its figurative meaning, unconnected with the sails of a ship being laid back against the mast by a headwind, only in the 19th century (to take someone aback), and ajar is obscure despite the existence of its alleged source on char, that is, “(on the) turn open.” Abroad is a- + broad, but one wonders why it means “in foreign lands” if it traces back to the unattested phrase on brede (brede “breadth”).--From Anatoly Liberman

In October 2008, Congress raised the debt limit to $11.3 trillion. Then presidential candidate Barack Obama denounced the action as “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic.” He just says these things.

Interesting proposal by Obama, ostensibly to raise the pay of workers who work overtime. Although some of the public commentary on this proposal asserts that it will raise the annual incomes of the affected workers, the proposal itself argues that the principal effect of forcing workers to charge 1.5X overtime will not be to increase these workers’ incomes but, instead, to incite these workers’ employers to hire other workers to perform the tasks that were previously performed by the affected workers when they worked more than 40 hours weekly. Quoting page 14 of the proposal: “The first [objective of the proposal] is to spread employment by incentivizing employers to hire more employees rather than requiring existing employees to work longer hours, thereby reducing involuntary unemployment.” So how does this translate to minimum wage thinking? And what is the government doing setting any wage or any price?

Who is.....Daguerre?

U.S. archaeologists in Greece have uncovered the skeleton of an ancient warrior that has lain undisturbed for more than 3,500 years along with a huge hoard of treasure, the Greek culture ministry announced. The treasure is "the most important to have been discovered in 65 years" in continental Greece, the ministry said. The wooden coffin of the unknown soldier -- evidently a person of some importance -- was found on the site of the Mycenaean-era Palace of Nestor on Greece's Peloponnese peninsula. It was built between 1300 and 1200 BC; the palace's ruins were discovered in 1939.

When he turned 50, Einstein granted an interview in which he was asked point-blank, do you believe in God? “I am not an atheist,” he began. “The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds."

Our Nig  is a novel, an autobiographical slave narrative of an indentured mulatto servant girl in Pre-Civil War New England. It is a tragic tale of racism in her employers and her neighbors. It was written to awaken the public to racism in the northern States before the War. The author was originally thought to be white. From the cover: This 1859 Book "Is Considered The First Novel Published By An African-American Woman On The North American Continent." " The Author, Harriet Wilson (1825-1900, Is Considered The First Female African-American Novelist To Publish A Novel." "This Novel Was Published Anonymously In Boston In 1859 And Was Not Widely Known."

Golden oldie:

 http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/07/adult-questions-and-government-answers.html

Some 96 foreign hostages were taken and held during the Lebanon hostage crisis between 1982 and 1992. The victims were mostly from Western countries, and mostly journalists, diplomats or teachers.Twenty-five of them were Americans. At least 10 hostages died in captivity. Some were murdered and others died from lack of adequate medical attention to illnesses.
The hostages were originally taken to serve as insurance against retaliation against Hezbollah, which was thought to be responsible for the killing of over 300 Americans in the Marine barracks and embassy bombings in Beirut. It was widely believed that Iran and Syria also played a role in the kidnappings.

Tesla  spoke eight languages: Serbian, English, Czech, German, French, Hungarian, Italian and Latin.

Ireland plans to decriminalize small amounts of heroin, cocaine and marijuana. An officially sanctioned "shooting gallery" is also coming to Dublin by early 2016, said Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, the chief of National Drugs Strategy on Monday, according to the Independent. Subsequent “supervised injecting rooms” will follow in Cork, Galway and Limerick. In a speech on Monday, Ó Ríordáin said that drug treatment needed to move away from shame and criminalization. While taking drugs won’t be seen as criminal, profiting from their sale or distribution will remain punishable by law. So we will judge no behavior--but we will judge profit from it.  

The City of Angels Camp held the first modern frog jump in 1928. It became part of the annual Fair in the 1930's. The Top 50 frogs qualify for the International Frog Jump Grand Finals, which are held every Sunday afternoon of the Jubilee. The current world's record was set in 1986 by Rosie the Ribeter. Rosie jumped 21' 53/4". The cash prize for breaking the world's record is $5,000. Professional Frog Teams travel from all over the state to compete. The Calaveras County Fair and  Jumping Frog Jubilee is held the 3rd weekend every May. The Jubilee starts with a children's parade in downtown Angels Camp and ends with a Destruction Derby on Sunday evening.  

Mark Twain lived in a cabin south of Angels Camp. Legend has it that Twain overheard a story in a local tavern that insprired his first published work, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County".

Daguerre was a French inventor who devised one of the first practical photographic processes—the daguerreotype. He, in collaboration with Nicéphore Niépce, found that a permanent image could be formed on a silver iodide-coated copper plate if it was exposed to light, then fumed with mercury vapor and fixed by a solution of common salt. His daguerreotype process was announced in 1839 at the Academy of Sciences. As the imprint required long exposure, the technique was used mostly for portraits. (This also led to a rather startling side effect: If you did a portrait of a person in normal surroundings, anything that moved was missed so, for example, street scenes showed the subject on an empty street.)

AAAaaaaaaannnnnndddddddd........a composite of image data from space- and ground-based telescopes of Centaurus A:

Centaurus A  

1/1/16

Hogmanney is the Scottish New Year, a mixture of ancient traditions and, possibly, a more modern reaction to the strict Cromwellian restrictions of the Middle Ages. It has a number of characteristics. Bonfires are a part, perhaps from Viking or Clan days. "Redding" the house is another. It is a ritualistic cleaning, a readying for the new year. The fireplace is swept and some read the ashes, like auguries. After midnight, neighbors visit, bringing small gifts, usually food, and receiving them, usually whiskey. Importance was placed on the first to enter in the new year, the "first foot." (Tall handsome men were good, redheaded women bad.) The house and the livestock are blessed with water from a local stream--which sounds really old--and then the woman of the house would go from room to room with a smoldering juniper branch, seemingly counteracting all the "redding" with smoke. Robert Burn's version of the traditional Scottish Auld Lang Syne, which translates to “times gone by,” is sung.

One of the curiosities of New Years Resolutions is the unspoken belief that new and better ideas are coming to the fore. I hope that is true but my advice is probably a hash of old suggestions:

Do not go out of the house in your pajamas.

Spend less than you earn.

Show gratitude, even when it is a reach.

Learn a good quote once a week.

There are better ways to do military-type lifts that pressure bones and joints but no good reason to do them at all.

Keep boundaries. Always reassess them.

One thing at a time. Multitasking has been shown to be terribly inefficient.

Do not be on time, be early.

Never use the phone at social events, dinner or in the car.

Keep up-to-date phone numbers and addresses of friends. Use them.

Get seven hours of sleep a day.

Broaden your base.

The time before and after exercise  is very important. Warm up and cool down.

People will not remember presents but they will remember how you made them feel.

Make the bed every morning.

Have a number of diverse news sources. Do not rely on one--or one slant.

Ours is a period of downgrading. Let's start a mild upgrade with more effort on appearance.

And some book suggestions.
The Asimov Robot series is quite good and thoughtful. Some of it is quite provocative. Sci-fi is not for everyone, though.
The Devil is a Black Dog, an Easten European reporter's view of the Middle East through short stories. I liked a lot of it, much I did not, but it is revealing and informative.
Sackville-West's Joan of Arc is a good counterpoint to Twain's, but I preferred Twain's.
Imperium by Robert Harris is a novel about Cicero. I like Harris--loved Archangel, Fear Index not so much--but this is good although Man of Iron is better.
Alan Furst is my new favorite airplane-book writer. Very simple, straightforward espionage stories about Germany before the second war. His "cafe stories" are better.
Mantel's Wolf Hall was terrific. A different approach to Wolsey and Cromwell and very engaging.
The most beautifully written--and remarkably simple but profound --book I read this year was Cather's Death of the Archbishop.

Paul's Letter to the Galatians says that Christ on earth means that all men are adopted sons of God, heirs to His infinite creation.
So every man, regardless of station or circumstance, wealth or heritage, birthright or appearance, sickness or health is equal in the eyes of God. There have been a lot of notions--from nihilism to castes, from divine right to class conflict, from Freud to Malthus--that have come down the pike since the beginning of recorded time but has there ever been a more radical, more hopeful, more optimistic idea than that? And could there be a better thought to start the new year?


Happy New Year.