Benjamin Franklin is the Founding Father I find most remarkable and most admirable. The very notion of an "American" identity--the place where one has the opportunity to come from nothing at birth and ascend through discipline, education, diligence, industry and persistence to prominence, success and stature--is more directly attributable to Franklin than to any other Founder. Among the Founding Fathers, historians demark Franklin, Washington, Adams and Jefferson as the Big Four; all others are tiered below them. Born in Boston in 1706, Franklin was in fact a generation older than the others. While Adams commonly is regarded as the Revolution's head and Jefferson its heart, none save for General Washington himself was more directly responsible for and instrumental in securing America's victory against the British than Franklin. He was America's first diplomat, literally and figuratively. Arguably no envoy, ambassador or Secretary of State since is regarded by historians and political observers as commanding the diplomatic acumen and efficacy of Benjamin Franklin. He was the most famous American of the 18th Century (arguably, no American in the 19th Century was so well known the world over as BF), and one of its greatest scientists, though he possessed no formal education beyond age 10. He was without question a genius. Universities and academies in England and Europe conferred honorary doctorates on him. In the Colonies and Europe he came to be known as "Dr. Franklin." So great was Dr. Franklin's public stature, and so beloved was he on returning from France after the War that, in 1788-89 when the young nation was ready to elect its first president, the only real contenders were the Doctor and the General (Franklin and Washington.) In 1788, however, Franklin was already in his eighties and in poor health. Franklin died on April 17, 1790 at age 84. More than 20,000 mourners attended his funeral in Philadelphia, an enormous number in any Age, let alone in colonial America of 1790.
The following is an excerpt I transcribed from pages 108-11 of the chapter titled "The Silence" in Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis (2000). The "Silence" refers to the silence of the Constitution on the issues of slavery and the slave trade. The debates at the Constitutional Convention on those issues nearly tore asunder the fledgling Republic before it had even taken its first step in the form in which we know it. As we know, ultimately the drafters demurred, thus leaving the unresolved cancer of slavery to fester for the next 75 years and culminate in the Civil War. Ellis's gift as an author of American Revolutionary history is in his sagacious ability to depict the perspectives, events, exigencies and political realities as they existed and were perceived at the time by the players involved, rather than from the perspective of an historian two centuries removed who sees the events with the benefit of knowing the outcome. Ellis gives us this anecdote involving Franklin, at the end of his life, confronting the issues of slavery and the slave trade at the Constitutional Convention. It provides a glimpse of the grandness of Franklin's stature in American society at the time, and the greatness of his mind and person. He is, far and away, my favorite among the Founding Fathers.
---
"Any attempt to take decisive action against slavery in 1790 ... confronted great, perhaps impossible, odds. The prospects for success were remote at best. But then the prospects for victory against the most powerful army and navy in the world had been remote in 1776, as had the likelihood that thirteen separate and sovereign states would create a unified republican government in 1787. Great leadership had emerged in each previous instance to transform the improbable into the inevitable. Ending slavery was a challenge on the same gigantic scale as these earlier achievements. Whether even a heroic level of leadership stood any chance was uncertain because--and there was the cruelest irony--the effort to make the Revolution truly complete seemed diametrically opposed to remaining a unified nation.
One person stepped forward to answer the challenge, unquestionably the oldest, probably the wisest, member of the revolutionary generation. (In point of fact, he was actually a member of the preceding generation, the grandfather among the fathers.) Benjamin Franklin was very old and very ill in March 1790. He had been a fixture on the American scene for so long and had outlived so many contemporaries--he had once traded anecdotes with Cotton Mather and was a contemporary of Jonathan Edwards--that reports of his imminent departure lacked credibility; his last act seemed destined to go on forever; he was an American immortal. If a twentieth-century photographer had managed to commandeer a time machine and travel back to record the historic scenes in the revolutionary era, Franklin would have been present in almost every picture: in Philadelphia during the Continental Congress and the signing of the Declaration of Independence; in Paris to draft the wartime treaty with France and then almost single-handedly (assist to John Adams) conclude the peace treaty with Great Britain; in Philadelphia again for the Constitutional Convention and the signing of the Constitution. Even without the benefit of photography, Franklin's image--with its bemused smile, its bespectacled but twinkling eyes, its ever-bald head framed by gray hair flowing down to his shoulders--was more famous and familiar to the world than the face of any other American of the age.
What Voltaire was to France, Franklin was to America, the symbol of mankind's triumphal arrival at modernity. (When the two great philosopher-kings embraced amid the assembled throngs of Paris, the scene created a sensation, as if the gods had landed on earth and declared the dawning of the Enlightenment.) The greatest American scientist, the most deft diplomat, the most accomplished prose stylist, the sharpest wit, Franklin defied all the categories by inhabiting them all with such distinction and nonchalant grace. Over a century before Horatio Alger, he had invented the role and called it Poor Richard, the original self-taught, homespun American with an uncanny knack for showing up where history was headed and striking a folksy pose that then dramatized the moment forever: holding the kite as the lightening struck; lounging alongside Jefferson and offering witty consolations as the Continental Congress edited out several of Jefferson's most cherished passages; wearing a coonskin cap for his portrait in Paris; remarking as the delegates signed the Constitution that, yes, the sun that was carved into the chair at the front of the room did now seem to be rising.
...
This gift of exquisite timing continued until the very end. In April of 1787, Franklin agreed to serve as the new president of the revitalized Pennsylvania Abolition Society and to make the antislavery cause the final project of his life. Almost sixty years earlier, in 1729, as a young printer in Philadelphia, he had begun publishing Quaker tracts against slavery and the slave trade. Throughout the middles years of the century and into the revolutionary era, he had lent his support to Anthony Benezet and other Quaker abolitionists, and he had spoken out on occasion against the claim that blacks were innately inferior or that racial categories were immutable. Nevertheless, while his antislavery credentials were clear, at one point Franklin had owned a few household slaves himself, and he had never made slavery a priority target or thrown the full weight of his enormous prestige against it.
Starting in 1787, that changed. At the Constitutional Convention he intended to introduce a proposal calling for the inclusion of a statement of principle, condemning both the slave trade and slavery, thereby making it unequivocally clear that the founding document of the new American nation committed the government to eventual emancipation. But several northern delegates, along with at least one officer in the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, persuaded him to withdraw his proposal on the grounds that it put the fragile Sectional Compromise, and therefore the Constitution itself, at risk. The petition submitted to the First Congress under his signature, then, was essentially the same proposal he had wanted to introduce at the Convention. With the Constitution now ratified and the new federal government safely in place, Franklin resumed his plea that slavery be declared incongruous with the revolutionary principles on which the nation was founded. The man with the impeccable timing was choosing to make the anomaly of slavery the last piece of advice he would offer his country.
For more, read Ellis's Founding Brothers. For a magnificent read on Franklin specifically, I highly recommend Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
Excerpt from "Reading Obama," by James T. Kloppenberg | Harvard Magazine Nov-Dec 2010
Excerpt from "Reading Obama," by James T. Kloppenberg | Harvard Magazine Nov-Dec 2010
Professor Kloppenberg, the chair of the history department at Harvard and a specialist in the intellectual history of the United States and Europe, has studied the books Obama has written, the authors Obama read at university and while in law school, and his conception and philosophy of governance. An excerpt of Kloppenberg's book, "Reading Obama," appears in this month's Harvard Magazine. It is an illuminating and worthwhile read.
Professor Kloppenberg, the chair of the history department at Harvard and a specialist in the intellectual history of the United States and Europe, has studied the books Obama has written, the authors Obama read at university and while in law school, and his conception and philosophy of governance. An excerpt of Kloppenberg's book, "Reading Obama," appears in this month's Harvard Magazine. It is an illuminating and worthwhile read.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Astronomers Discover Alien Planet In Our Milky Way : The Two-Way : NPR
Astronomers Discover Alien Planet In Our Milky Way : The Two-Way : NPR
We really do live in a time of unprecedented scientific discovery, and it is positively invigorating! Like goosebumps all over and tingles and butterflies in the stomach exhilarating. The limits of our knowledge and understanding of the Universe seems to be expanding in similar fashion to the very accelerating expansion of the Universe itself! And, equally exciting is the fact that there is so much that we don't know, that remains to be discovered and explained.
In roughly the past 10 years, scientists have discovered more than 500 planets located in parts of the Milky Way galaxy outside our Solar System. Such planets are called exoplanets. See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet. Now, scientists have discovered an extragalactic exoplanet--a planet of extragalactic origin (it entered the Milky Way from a different galaxy altogether). According to the scientists in this piece on NPR, around six to nine billion years ago the Milky Way swallowed up a dwarf galaxy. This recently-discovered extragalactic exoplanet and its star, called HIP 13044, are what is left over from that cosmic merger of galaxies.
Dr. Robert Massey of the UK's Royal Astronomical Society notes the significance of this discovery: It provides the first hard evidence of a planet of extragalactic origin. Put another way, it is evidence that planets exist not just in the Milky Way. Planets may -- very probably do -- exist in galaxies throughout the Universe. Quite possibly ALL galaxies throughout the Universe. Can you grasp the profundity of that?
Let's do some simple math. Maybe that might help you get your mind around that profound significance, that which should render one flat dumbstruck with awe.
Let's assume the Milky Way is an average galaxy. The Milky Way is 100,000 light years across and is estimated to contain somewhere between 200 and 400 billion stars. Let's say 300 billion, or 3 x 10^12 (read "three times ten to the twelfth power"). Our Sun is one of those stars, and it has 8 planets in its solar system (yes, 8, because Pluto has been demoted from planet status because it does not meet the criteria for planet classification developed in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union. Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, a member of the IAU and director of the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium, recently had a very entertaining and educational special on PBS about his role in demoting Pluto to dwarf planet status). Observations strongly indicate that another solar system in the Milky Way containing the star, Gliese 581, contains at least 6 planets. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581. Let's crudely estimate that, on average throughout the Milky Way, there are two planets around each star. That gives us an estimate of 600 billion (6 x 10^12) planets in the Milky Way. With me so far? Don't tune out yet.
Now, there are an estimated 200 billion (2 x 10^12) galaxies in the "visible" Universe. See http://www.universetoday.com/30305/how-many-galaxies-in-the-universe/. I say visible because a whole part of the Universe is expanding away from us faster than the speed of light (yes, that's possible. Google some of the works of Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss to understand why). Consequently, it is impossible for us ever to see that part of the Universe. Assuming that those 200 billion galaxies in the part of the Universe that is visible to us are, on average, like the Milky Way, then the total number of planets in the visible Universe is 600 billion multiplied by 200 billion. Sounds big, right? How big is that number? It's 12 x 10^24. That's a 12 with 24 zeros, which looks like this: 12,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's so big, we don't have a name for it. We refer to it simply as 12 times ten to the 24.
Even if this number is off by a factor of 100,000, we're talking about the possibility of the number of planets being in the neighborhood of 1 x 10^18, which is still incomprehensibly large. To give you an idea of the bigness of that number, think of it this way: If all the lotteries that have ever been played across the world were combined, your odds of winning would be really small. Impossibly small, right? Inconceivably small (think Vicini, the little Sicilian guy in The Princess Bride). The bigness of 12 x 10^24 is bigger in its bigness than the odds of all of those combined lotteries is small in its smallness (I haven't actually done that calculation, but I think that's right).
The profound, philosophical aspect of a Universe that very well may contain 1 x 10^18 to 1 x 10^24 planets is that the probability asymptotes infinitely close to 100% that billions or trillions or even crazier big numbers of these planets exist in the "habitable zones" around their respective stars and are rocky planets similar to Earth (as opposed to gas giants like Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune where life is not possible). Earth is in our Sun's habitable zone: It lies not too close to the Sun where water would vaporize and remain in vapor form or dissipate into space; it lies not too far from the Sun where water would remain constantly frozen. It's also called the "Goldilocks Zone" because conditions are juuuuuust right for the existence of liquid water. As far as we understand life, it exists because of the presence of liquid water. So, the odds are literally astronomically high -- close to 100%, in fact, based on the mathematics -- that there are gajillions of Earth-like planets in Goldilocks Zones throughout the Universe where conditions for life exist. The discovery of exoplanets and extragalactic exoplanets, combined with some rudimentary arithmetic and the observations of the Universe scientists have been able to make because of the Hubble telescope and other instruments, enables us to offer an answer to that most profound philosophical question which humans across cultures have asked and wondered about for thousands of years, "Are we alone in the Universe?" It is almost 100% certainly, No.
We really do live in a time of unprecedented scientific discovery, and it is positively invigorating! Like goosebumps all over and tingles and butterflies in the stomach exhilarating. The limits of our knowledge and understanding of the Universe seems to be expanding in similar fashion to the very accelerating expansion of the Universe itself! And, equally exciting is the fact that there is so much that we don't know, that remains to be discovered and explained.
In roughly the past 10 years, scientists have discovered more than 500 planets located in parts of the Milky Way galaxy outside our Solar System. Such planets are called exoplanets. See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet. Now, scientists have discovered an extragalactic exoplanet--a planet of extragalactic origin (it entered the Milky Way from a different galaxy altogether). According to the scientists in this piece on NPR, around six to nine billion years ago the Milky Way swallowed up a dwarf galaxy. This recently-discovered extragalactic exoplanet and its star, called HIP 13044, are what is left over from that cosmic merger of galaxies.
Dr. Robert Massey of the UK's Royal Astronomical Society notes the significance of this discovery: It provides the first hard evidence of a planet of extragalactic origin. Put another way, it is evidence that planets exist not just in the Milky Way. Planets may -- very probably do -- exist in galaxies throughout the Universe. Quite possibly ALL galaxies throughout the Universe. Can you grasp the profundity of that?
Let's do some simple math. Maybe that might help you get your mind around that profound significance, that which should render one flat dumbstruck with awe.
Let's assume the Milky Way is an average galaxy. The Milky Way is 100,000 light years across and is estimated to contain somewhere between 200 and 400 billion stars. Let's say 300 billion, or 3 x 10^12 (read "three times ten to the twelfth power"). Our Sun is one of those stars, and it has 8 planets in its solar system (yes, 8, because Pluto has been demoted from planet status because it does not meet the criteria for planet classification developed in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union. Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, a member of the IAU and director of the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium, recently had a very entertaining and educational special on PBS about his role in demoting Pluto to dwarf planet status). Observations strongly indicate that another solar system in the Milky Way containing the star, Gliese 581, contains at least 6 planets. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581. Let's crudely estimate that, on average throughout the Milky Way, there are two planets around each star. That gives us an estimate of 600 billion (6 x 10^12) planets in the Milky Way. With me so far? Don't tune out yet.
Now, there are an estimated 200 billion (2 x 10^12) galaxies in the "visible" Universe. See http://www.universetoday.com/30305/how-many-galaxies-in-the-universe/. I say visible because a whole part of the Universe is expanding away from us faster than the speed of light (yes, that's possible. Google some of the works of Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss to understand why). Consequently, it is impossible for us ever to see that part of the Universe. Assuming that those 200 billion galaxies in the part of the Universe that is visible to us are, on average, like the Milky Way, then the total number of planets in the visible Universe is 600 billion multiplied by 200 billion. Sounds big, right? How big is that number? It's 12 x 10^24. That's a 12 with 24 zeros, which looks like this: 12,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's so big, we don't have a name for it. We refer to it simply as 12 times ten to the 24.
Even if this number is off by a factor of 100,000, we're talking about the possibility of the number of planets being in the neighborhood of 1 x 10^18, which is still incomprehensibly large. To give you an idea of the bigness of that number, think of it this way: If all the lotteries that have ever been played across the world were combined, your odds of winning would be really small. Impossibly small, right? Inconceivably small (think Vicini, the little Sicilian guy in The Princess Bride). The bigness of 12 x 10^24 is bigger in its bigness than the odds of all of those combined lotteries is small in its smallness (I haven't actually done that calculation, but I think that's right).
The profound, philosophical aspect of a Universe that very well may contain 1 x 10^18 to 1 x 10^24 planets is that the probability asymptotes infinitely close to 100% that billions or trillions or even crazier big numbers of these planets exist in the "habitable zones" around their respective stars and are rocky planets similar to Earth (as opposed to gas giants like Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune where life is not possible). Earth is in our Sun's habitable zone: It lies not too close to the Sun where water would vaporize and remain in vapor form or dissipate into space; it lies not too far from the Sun where water would remain constantly frozen. It's also called the "Goldilocks Zone" because conditions are juuuuuust right for the existence of liquid water. As far as we understand life, it exists because of the presence of liquid water. So, the odds are literally astronomically high -- close to 100%, in fact, based on the mathematics -- that there are gajillions of Earth-like planets in Goldilocks Zones throughout the Universe where conditions for life exist. The discovery of exoplanets and extragalactic exoplanets, combined with some rudimentary arithmetic and the observations of the Universe scientists have been able to make because of the Hubble telescope and other instruments, enables us to offer an answer to that most profound philosophical question which humans across cultures have asked and wondered about for thousands of years, "Are we alone in the Universe?" It is almost 100% certainly, No.
seven-score-and-seven-years-ago-what-you-dont-know-about-the-gettysburg-addre... - StumbleUpon
seven-score-and-seven-years-ago-what-you-dont-know-about-the-gettysburg-addre... - StumbleUpon
Speaking of Lincoln, today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln gave this 2-minute speech seven score and seven years ago on November 19, 1863.
Speaking of Lincoln, today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln gave this 2-minute speech seven score and seven years ago on November 19, 1863.
Torture memo author John Yoo has the audacity to criticize Obama over the Ghailani trial | Media Matters for America
Torture memo author John Yoo has the audacity to criticize Obama over the Ghailani trial | Media Matters for America
With regard to John Yoo, I am reminded of a quote attributed to a speech by Abraham Lincoln about a political adversary in which Lincoln said that his adversary had "dived down deeper into the sea of knowledge and come up drier than any other man he knew."
With regard to John Yoo, I am reminded of a quote attributed to a speech by Abraham Lincoln about a political adversary in which Lincoln said that his adversary had "dived down deeper into the sea of knowledge and come up drier than any other man he knew."
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Soon to be in the queue by my reading chair
I'm looking forward to the shipment in transit from amazon.com. Its like a food pyramid custom made for my intellectual appetites.
For my recommended daily allowance of science/evolution, I've got Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong by Harvard prof. Marc Hauser. For my RDA of cosmology, The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow. For my thirst for Revolutionary-era history and constitutional history, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution by Richard Beeman. For my on-going endeavor to understand the nuances and workings of our democracy, it's Justice Stephen Bryer's Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View. For my economics and decision-analytics appetites, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely. And for my guilty pleasure of fantasy fiction it's the penultimate book, Towers of Midnight, in the egregiously long Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson. I'll probably cheat and start with dessert. Fantasy is so savory. Bon appetit.
For my recommended daily allowance of science/evolution, I've got Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong by Harvard prof. Marc Hauser. For my RDA of cosmology, The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow. For my thirst for Revolutionary-era history and constitutional history, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution by Richard Beeman. For my on-going endeavor to understand the nuances and workings of our democracy, it's Justice Stephen Bryer's Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View. For my economics and decision-analytics appetites, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely. And for my guilty pleasure of fantasy fiction it's the penultimate book, Towers of Midnight, in the egregiously long Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson. I'll probably cheat and start with dessert. Fantasy is so savory. Bon appetit.
Landmark terrorism trial ends in acquittal on all but one count. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/11/17/ny.terror.trial/?hpt=T1
Congressman Peter King (R-NY) calls the verdict rendered by a 12-person jury in a trial presided over by a respected federal district judge a "miscarriage of justice." Liz Cheney, Dick's brat, called on the Obama administration to "reverse ...course [on trying alleged terror suspects in the federal court system] ... and use the military commissions at Guantanamo." ... Where to start this rant?
Congressman Peter King (R-NY) calls the verdict rendered by a 12-person jury in a trial presided over by a respected federal district judge a "miscarriage of justice." Liz Cheney, Dick's brat, called on the Obama administration to "reverse ...course [on trying alleged terror suspects in the federal court system] ... and use the military commissions at Guantanamo." ... Where to start this rant?
First, it's good to know that the Judicial branch is indeed co-equal with the Legislative and Executive branches in terms of rabid (and vapid) Republican animus and hyperbole, and that this verdict, too, is Obama's fault. Even though the conspiracy conviction alone carries a minimum sentence of 20 years in federal prison, and even though prosecutors obtained it with their hands tied by the inadmissibility of much of the evidence given the illegal means by which it was obtained during the suspect's detention.
Second, since it opened Guantanamo has housed 770 detainees; more than 580 of whom were released without charge, including more than 530 who were released while Bush was POTUS after no doubt enjoying a years-long, all-expenses-paid-by-the-A
Third, in June 2006 the United States Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld held that the military commissions violated U.S. law and the Geneva Convention.
Finally, statements and other "evidence" obtained from a suspect by coercion or, you know, torture, are not admissible; they're not evidence.
If dipshits like Congressman King and Liz Cheney want to blame someone for not-guilty verdicts in alleged terror suspect cases, they aught look no further than the CIA and military personnel who tortured detainees with the explicit authorization of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, thus insuring that any statements or other "evidence" obtained could not be admitted for use at any trial. And if they want the trials conducted in a venue which has been ruled by the Supreme Court to violate U.S. law and the Geneva Convention, then they know nothing of or have a naked contempt for U.S. and international law. If there were crimes for ignorance and stupidity, it is King and Cheney who would be guilty, and I would volunteer my time pro bono to be part of the prosecution.
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