George Rebane

The initiative to revamp California’s electoral college make-up continues unabated.  The topic also came up with recent correspondents during which we mulled around both sides of the arguments which so far consist mostly of charges and counter charges.  It seems to me that the press could be a bit more helpful.  For example, in today’s Sac Bee Armando Acuña would have been more clear had he explained that each side has its own particular ‘utility’ that is trotted out to back its position on the initiative.  The left’s is that ‘It is California’s influence that is most important, and its strength/weight in the electoral process is maximized when all of its votes are cast as a block.’  The right’s is that ‘Nearly half the people in California are disenfranchised in today’s block voting schema, and it’s the people who count more than an amorphous political unit called California.’  The validity of each side can be seen with one’s shift in perspective.  In principled negotiations, the next step would be to discover a meta-utility that permits the evaluation of these two arguments.  Is that too complex for newspaper readers to understand?

Some local post-enquiry adherents (PEAs) on climate change have taken me to task on my views on the matter.  (Russ Steele of NC Media Watch regularly suffers similar charges.)  They appear not understand the complexity of the issue and therefore combine skeptics such as me with their pejorative grouping of “Deniers”.  This was recently again visible in my posting of ‘Climate Change Revisited’.  Here I just wanted to highlight two examples of the points I made therein.  First, climatologist Fred Singer’s recent peer-reviewed article (press release here) debunking the CO2 claims made by PEAs is a worthy counter-example of the many world class scientists who also consider themselves skeptics.  And second, since establishing scientific truth is not a democratic process, the current excitement about the new ‘E8 Theory of Everything’ in physics proposed by a definitely non-mainstream scientist eerily reminds one of the unknown patent clerk in Basel shunned by the physics establishment a century ago.  Let me be clear that these remarks in no way are intended to suffice the excellent questions posed by James Currier in his comment to ‘Climate Change Revisited’, the answers to which require a bit more preparation.