Priceless

 

Ain't Got You

I got a house full of Rembrandt and priceless art    
And all the little girls they want to tear me apart   
When I walk down the street people stop and stare
Well you'd think I might be thrilled but baby I don't care   
'Cause I got more good luck honey than old King Farouk    
But the only thing I ain't got baby I ain't got you

What do you do when things are priceless?

“There are some things that money can’t buy, For everything else there is MasterCard.” So went an advertising campaign in the late 1990s. Economics is about allocating scarce resources.  The most familiar, but not the only way, of allocating resources is setting a price.  So what do you do about setting a price for something that is priceless?  There is also the problem that what is priceless to me, might not be priceless to you. To me, being able to attend the Red Sox 2004 Duck Boat Parade, priceless. To my brother, who is not a Red Sox fan, worthless. There is also the recent brouhaha about $5000 tickets to Bruce Springsteen concerts. ( and the lyrics listed above are from a Bruce Springsteen song). Fortunately, the Boss is not charging $5000 a ticket or the anger would be directed at him.  Instead the ire is directed at Ticketmaster. Their defense is that they are merely charging surge pricing, the same as airlines and hotels.

This assumes that pricing is the only way that a scare resource can be allocated.  It is not. My wife is a runner, I am a sitter, but an example from the running world is instructive.  Marathon bibs are a scarce resource. More people want those scarce bibs than there are bibs available.  The bibs could be auctioned, but that would incur ill will from those runners who can’t afford the price.  Most marathon organizers do not even want the money that could potentially be raised from an auction ( it is not that they want no money, it is just that they don’t want that much money).  Additionally if bibs were offered only to the highest bidders, eventually the losers would eventually not even bother to bid on the bibs and at some point in the future, there might not even be enough runners to keep the race going.  Also some of the runners are so desirable (elite) they should get bibs, even if they do not can’t afford/won’t pay that auction price.  But awarding the bibs on merit, say a qualifying time, is hard to manage and is also discouraging to those who can’t make the time but are willing to bid high on the price.  The bibs could be  awarded randomly ( and this is not a technological challenge.  When I went to a Rolling Stones concert in 1972 at the old Boston Garden, yes THAT concert, the tickets were allocated by a mail-in lottery. )

The most successful marathons allocate bibs on a combination of all of these approaches:

·       Auction ( where the bibs are actually awarded to charities who manage and get the proceeds from any auction);

·       Merit ( which does not have to be say qualifying times to get the elite runners.  It can also be volunteering at events, or as Pearl Jam offers tickets, membership in its fan club) ; and

·       Random  ( and by that, I mean truly random, and not the rope drop, or line sitter, or online multi-screen hacking and bot infected  “lotteries”)

Then you can allocate the scarce resources without having to set a price on something that to someone is priceless.

Intellectual Property II

 

Woodstock

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere was a song
And a celebration

Should the music be free?

In 1969, I was at the Newport Jazz Festival that was cancelled mid-performance because the fences were stormed.  Consequently, I did not go to Woodstock because I made the false prediction that it would also be cancelled mid-performance.  To show how good my instincts are, I also attended the Newport Jazz festival in 1971, the one that was cancelled mid-performance while Dionne Warwick was singing “What the World Needs Now” and the fences were stormed.

The problem is not that music should be free, as at Woodstock, or cancelled, as at the Newport Jazz Festivals.  One of the first things that the US Congress passed in 1790 was the copyright protection act.  If you do not protect Intellectual Property, like music, and the performers and copyright holders are not paid for their Intellectual Property then they have no incentive to create or perform.  You might wish their work was free, but I bet they don’t.  If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Both the Newport Jazz  Festivals and Woodstock were problems in that the expected and protected attendance did not match the actual attendance.  Newport cancelled.  Woodstock 1 gave up.  Once festivals figured out how many people would attend and figured out a way to collect admission fees from the attendees, which the festival, the attendees, and the performers all thought was fair, and like Bonnaroo, Woodstock 2 and 3,  Burning Man , Coachella, etc., etc. festivals happened.  Music, like all Intellectual Property,  isn’t free, and if the system is fair, then everyone will agree that it should not be free.

 

Alito

 

Everybody’s Crying Mercy

A bad enough situation
Is sure enough getting worse
Everybody's crying justice
Just as soon as there's business first…

Straight ahead, gotta knock ‘em dead
So pack your kit, choose your own hypocrite

Render unto Caesar, the things that are Caesar’s, and to God, the things that are God’s

You would think that Justice “Strip Search Sammy” Alito would know the meaning of justice. But you would be wrong. In his “egregious” majority opinion. he confused his legal obligation to administer  justice with his moral view.  He was not asked to rule if abortion was moral.  He was asked to rule if it was legal.  This was no different than when the Pharisees, who opposed Roman rule, wanted Jesus to either oppose Roman rule and taxation, or accept Roman taxation and discredit himself.  They thought that they were giving him a classic “Have you stopped beating your wife?” question, where you are damned if you answer yes or no. Instead Jesus responded that the question was wrong and asked for a coin, on which was  Caesar’s face, and stated that “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”.  In the NBC sitcom The Good Place, Chidi is faced with the classic ethics Trolley Problem where he is asked to choose between saving 5 people or  saving 1 person.  He “solves” the problem by finding the choices wrong and opts instead to sacrifice himself.

It is especially ironic that "Justice" Alito chose to mock the free speech of others that did not agree with him, given the setting. That mockery might be forgivable if that person resides in France  or Canada, but among those he cited was the Duke of Sussex who resides in, and is supposedly covered by, the Freedom of Speech in the First Amendment to the US Constitution.  “Justice” Alito did not mention that his was not a unanimous decision and did not call out Justices Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor or Chief Justice Roberts for dissenting from him.  The Duke of Sussex was mocked by “Justice” Alito for not only not agreeing with him, but comparing Alito’s  actions to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.  Aside from the concept of free speech , which “Justice” Alito does not seem to get, he acted as if this was a domination game by his SCOTUS majority, which is not very different than the domination game played by Vladimir Putin.  That he was speaking at a forum on the freedom of religion is especially ironic.  Freedom to agree with his religion, I guess. Clearly, he don’t know the meaning of the word.

Transitions

 

Circle Game

And the seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game.

After more years that I care to admit,  I have circled back to the beginning.

When I was a child at St Paul’s School, I was fascinated by the story of God’s casting of Lucifer out of heaven, so much so that I chose the name Michael, after the archangel Michael, as my confirmation name (which might not mean something unless you are Catholic, but this was a big deal to me!)  In high school I was enthralled by the Isaac Asimov’s idea of psychohistory as promoted by Hari Seldon in his Foundation novels.  ( And Apple TV+. A fancy Rubic’s cube for psychohistory?!  Is that the best that you could do?).  However I was born poor and decided that I would have to study it as an engineer.  In my hubris I applied to MIT. My application was rejected and I had to attend my safe school Brown.

(I am grateful to MIT.  I also applied for graduate school at MIT and while I was accepted at UPenn, I kept stalling them because I was waiting to hear from MIT, which eventually rejected me.  But while I was stalling,  UPenn kept increasing their financial offer, and MIT's delay paid off  in a dividend to me in the long run).  But back to Brown.  While at Brown, the closest thing that I could find to psychohistory was Jay Forrester’s (of MIT!) model and land use models. )

Land use modeling was not funded but transportation modeling, which used land use modeling,was, and that determined my course of study. I took a transportation modeling course in my senior year at Brown that was taught by Dr. Stella Dafermos, which I did not know at the time was the one of the developers of the User Equilibrium, UE, assignment  that would be a large part of my career.  My mother was a clerk in the department where her student Anna Nagurney showed that the best impedance function in UE, among the ones she tested, was a fourth power function, That was the basis for the use of  the Bureau of Public Roads, BPR, curve which had a fourth power component, as the standard impedance/Volume Delay Function, VDF.

The Atlanta Regional Commission adopted VDF curves that varied by Time of Day.  The reaction of my colleagues was that was nonsense because the VDF curve should be based on the physical behavior of vehicle and that should NOT vary by Time of Day, but instead should only be a form of thr BPR curve.  When I had the chance to investigate travel reliability measured as time, I found that reliability DID vary by Time of Day, because the drivers in different time periods had different expectations of reliability.  I speculated that the VDF curve was based on the combination of the behavior  of vehicles AND the driver’s of those vehicles.  In trying to include reliability in the VDF, I was forced to propose a new speed-volume curve, which had a transition from laminar, orderly, flow, to turbulent, chaotic, flow when the volume approached capacity, just like the behavior of fluids in pipes.  Since I have found an underwhelming response to this curve, I was forced to seek other metaphors.  One is that as you approach an absolute, i.e. capacity, you may transition from an orderly domain to a domain governed by chaos/entropy. 

Which leads me to propose that Lucifer was NOT cast out of heaven by God.  He cast himself out of heaven by trying to be too much like/approach God.  Which completes my circle.

Luck

 

I’d Rather Be Lucky Than Good

I’d rather be lucky than good,
Tough than pretty,
Rockin in the country than rolling in the city.
Spend my life rolling them dice,
Instead I’m living like everybody says I should.
I’d rather be lucky, rather be lucky than good.

Would you rather be lucky than good?

Einstein’s discomfort with Quantum Mechanics was that ”God does not play dice with the universe.”  His objection was the random element of luck in Quantum Mechanics. This random element is summed up in the Heisenberg  Uncertainty principle, which says that there is an intrinsic random error such that if you know the momentum exactly, then you can not know the position exactly,  and if you know the position exactly, then you can not know the momentum exactly. The minimum position is also known as the Planck length. A hyperbolic universe, spacetime, is consistent with this minimum, Planck, length.[1]

If you know the minimum time, and the minimum energy density,  then the Planck length is an outcome of the Einstein field equations for general relativity and a hyperbolic universe. Thus the quantum randomness is a consequence of the hyperbolic universe. It means that we can not construct equations in this universe that can eliminate this randomness. This means that God DOES play dice with the universe, but he uses a loaded dice in that he knows the outcome, but we can’t. If you want to be like God, then you don’t need to be lucky.

---

[1] Mabkhout, S.A., 2012. The infinite distance horizon and the hyperbolic inflation in the hyperbolic universe. Phys. Essays, 25(1), p.112.

Forever

 

On A Clear Day

And on a clear day...
On a clear day...
You can see forever...
And ever...
And ever...
And ever more...

So far is forever?

Because the universe is locally flat, Euclidean, we might think it is universally flat. However it was proposed that universe is hyperbolic and it only appears flat locally. [1] I am copying a figure from that article because it shows curved spacetime, ....and because it is so darn pretty.

Treating spacetime as hyperbolic solves a number of problems,  not the least of which is estimating the size of the universe.

A hyperbolic universe has to be expanding after the Big Bang. Dr. Mabkhout’s article presents equations, based on Einstein’s equations and a hyperbolic curved spacetime, which is consistent with the age of the universe. A flat universe has to resort to dark energy and dark matter to explain the expansion of the universe and the inconsistency between the age and size of the universe. However if the universe is hyperbolic, without resorting to dark matter or energy, the implication is that the age of the universe, 14 billion years, is consistent with the size of the universe, 1.3 x10²⁸ cm, 8.6 x 10²² miles, 14 billion light-years. Of course since the universe its still expanding, check back in a few billion years and there will be a different answer for forever.

---

[1] Mabkhout, S.A., 2012. The infinite distance horizon and the hyperbolic inflation in the hyperbolic universe. Phys. Essays, 25(1), p.112.

Hope

 

“Hope” Is The Thing With Feathers 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers 
That perches in the soul 
And sings the tune without the words 
And never stops - at all 

Hope is the belief that there is a future. 

As I said in an earlier blog post , https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/07/faith.html, the three biblical virtues are Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest was claimed to be Love. I previously made a pitch for Faith, trust, because without trust, you may not accept Love. I also want to make a pitch for Hope in the future, because without it there is no point to Love. 

I have a special fondness for Hope. As a native Rhode Islander, I know that Hope not only is the shortest American State motto, but in the Greek myth, Pandora opened the chest which released evil into the world, but remaining in the chest was Hope. Hope is a belief that there is a future. And it is the future of the group, not oneself. Old men plant trees that won’t bloom until long after they are gone because their hope is for the group, not themselves.

 The future does not have the same value as today, even if it is not zero. “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush,” etc. Requiring a profit is merely expressing that the future is worth less than the present. If you say that the future has a value of 0.91 of the present, then this is consistent with saying that you expect a 10% profit. 

A problem with valuing the future is that we also know that as individuals we have a limited life. But the value of the future should not depend on our age. A 5-year old toddler, thinks that their next birthday is a long way off because each birthday is 1/5 of their life. They do not think of how many birthdays they will experience. A 20-year old’s next birthday is  1/20 of their life but they might reasonably expect that it is merely one of 60 more that they will experience. A 70 year old's next birthday is only 1/70 of their life, but it is only one of 10 more that they might expect to have. However the group may celebrate your birthday long after you have departed. Is the next birthday “A long way off”  as a toddler might think, or “Not so far away, but only  a few more of them” as the elderly like to think. 

	Self	Self	Group	Self	Group
Age in years	5	20	20	70	70
Expected number of birthdays to come	75	60	60	10	10
Value of next birthdays based on age	0.83	0.95	0.95	0.99	0.99
If only your life matters	.94	0.75	1.00	0.125	1.00
Effective net value of next birthday	0.78	0.71	0.95	0.125	0.99
Implied Interest Rate for Future	29%	40%	5%	700%	1%

 A toddler has not yet been civilized and thinks only of themselves, not any group.  The elderly thinking of the group, might think that the future has the same value as the present and ignore the fact that they only have a limited number of birthdays in the future. This is bad, since there are more future days than the present day and this leads to a belief that the future is worth more than the present.  The selfish elderly might think since they only have a few more birthdays left,  “Après moi, le déluge”. This would be equally wrong since it says the future has no value.  It seems like a future of 0.9 times the present, which is more consistent with a selfish 20-year old might be a good value for the future.  As long as the future has a value greater than zero, then we do have Hope.

 

 

Big Brother

 

Every Breath You Take

Every breath you take and every move you make
Every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you
Every single day and every word you say
Every game you play, every night you stay, I'll be watching you

Is your cellphone watching you?

Your smart cell phone may not know if “you’ve been bad or good” and it may not know whether “you’re sleeping” or “you’re awake”, but it probably knows where you have been. It  can use some additional processing to determine where you are between say 12 AM and  4 AM and might decide that the most frequently observed location is your home. It can use some additional processing to determine where you are between  9 AM and 12 PM on weekdays and decide the most frequently observed location is probably your workplace.  

With access to another database, that home location might be used to provide other information such as an address, and the work location might be used to provide a company or agency name and an address. In some cases that information might have been intentionally blurred, but combining datasets might yield information which was not intended to be disclosed. 

There have been court cases where cell phone location has been used to try and associate absence, or presence, near a location with activity at that location.  “Your Honor, my client could not have committed the crime because his cellphone shows he was nowhere near the scene of the crime at the time of the crime.”  So be good for goodness sake.

Stampede

 

Stampede

Stampede they're comin' up to draw
Stampede three thousand herd or more
Here they come a smokin' fire boys you better earn your hire
Stampede and hell to score

Don’t be stampeded.

A stampede is  defined as running away in a large group from something especially because of fear. Man is a group animal and, like any large group, man can be stampeded. A stampede at a concert or sporting event is among the most frightening things. Attendees have been trampled in those stampedes. Deliberately  starting a  stampede is among the worse things that could be done, because the group may act in a way a that is harmful to itself and others.

In Disney’s The Lion King, Scar starts a stampede to kill his brother, King Mustafa and frame his nephew, Simba. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”

If a political party promotes the fear of …immigrants, religions, races, gender, sexual orientation, etc. aren’t they trying to stampede the voting population for their own benefit. When you vote, listen without fear. Don’t let yourself be stampeded.

RINOs

 

This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us

Zoo time, is she and you time?
The mammals are your favorite type, and you want her tonight
Heartbeat, increasing heartbeat
You hear the thunder of stampeding rhinos, elephants, and tacky tigers
This town ain't big enough for the both of us
And it ain't me who's gonna leave

Should we be hunting stampeding RINOs?

There has been a call for an open season on the hunting of RINOs, which are supposedly Republicans In Name Only. While the Republican Party has a disagreement on the size and role of government with the Democratic Party, both parties vie for the election of Constitutional officers who will swear an oath to support and defend that Constitution. Thus there should be no difference between the parties in the form of government. When Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government that the founding fathers gave us in the Constitutional Convention, he  famously said “a republic, if you can keep it.”  A republic is not the only from of government that could have been possible. Monarchism or authoritarianism are alternative forms of government. If those who support authoritarians are calling themselves Republicans, then they are truly rINOS, because they do not support the republican form of government.

Those who support a limited, but republican, form of government are the only Republicans worthy of the name. Those who support an authoritarian government are rINOs and are either oath breakers, or potential oath breakers, since they have no intention of honoring the oath to support the Constitution. Those complaining most loudly about RINOS are probably themselves rINOS and it is time for Republicans to take back their party. The commandment to not speak ill of fellow Republicans should not include those rINOS who are only pretending to be Republicans.

Lauren Boebert II

 

Everybody Loves A Clown

Everybody loves a clown, so why don't you?
Everybody laughs at the things I say and do
They all laugh when they see me comin'
But you don't laugh, you just go home runnin'
Everybody loves a clown, so why can't you?
A clown has feelings, too

Colorado, the joke isn’t funny anymore. Take back your clown, please.

 “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it” Lauren Boebert,  Cornerstone Christian Center, June 26, 2022.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Lauren Boebert, as Representative for Colorado’s Third Congressional District, swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies. If the Constitution says that Congress is supposed to make no laws establishing religion, which church is Rep. Boebert talking about directing Congress and the government? The Baptists? The Presbyterians? The Catholics? The Methodists? The Muslims? The Buddhists? The Jews? I believe that the founding fathers were pretty clear on the subject, What part of NO does Rep. Boebert not understand?

There are six justices on the current SCOTUS who are Roman Catholics. Let’s have them decide that Papal Infallibly and veneration of the Virgin Mary are the law of the land. While that might make Justice Amy Coney Barrett very happy, I suspect that it would upset the congregation of the Cornerstone Christian Center. Since it would  require Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sotomayor voting with Justices Alito, Thomas, Barrett, and Kavanaugh, I don’t expect this to happen any time soon, but with this SCOTUS, who knows.

Knowing Your Place

 

Street Fighting Man

Hey! Think the time is right for a palace revolution
But where I live the game to play is compromise solution
Well, then what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band
'Cause in sleepy London town
There's just no place for a street fighting man, no

What is your place?

Man is a group animal. That means an individual man lives in a group of men. Every group has a leader, a sovereign. The problem is that the best tactics for becoming a leader are not the best tactics  for being a leader.

Leaders are often chosen by domination over challengers for that position  This requires that an individual be better than others, e.g. his challengers. He has the best User Optimal solution.

However once a leader, he should take on a servant’s role for the group. He administers the best System Optimal solution.

The problem is that an individual has a limited life, but the group of which he is member does not have a limited life. Sovereigns will eventually die or be replaced , but the group lives on with a new sovereign. That is meant by the seemingly contradictory phrase the “The King is dead, long live the King.”

Leaders who achieve their position through dominance, seek to prevent challengers to their position, do not wish to have others with power. They wish to surround themselves with those who will protect them, and not protect the group that they are supposed to lead. The only way to remove a dominance leader may be through dominance.

For most members of the group, there is little or no interest in who lead the group. ”Meet  the new boss, same as the old boss.” Dominance sovereigns are tempted to view their position as part of the estate which they can leave to their heirs, not to the group, e.g. Monarchs, but even authoritarians are inclined to believe this. Kim Jong-un, the “Great Leader” of North Korea, is the son of the former leader, Kim Jong-Il, who is the son of the leader before him, Kim Il-sung. In addition to sharing the problem with dominance sovereigns, of being reluctant to give power to anyone else in the group lest that person  challenge them, inherited sovereigns might not even have the best, dominance, User Optimal solution.

In a republic, the sovereign is the group. The United States, in its Constitution, declared that it was a republic. ( As Ben Franklin said, if we can keep it!). The members of its group included all people, living in the States that were being United, without distinction as to race, religion, nationality, citizenship, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, etc. The only exceptions were Indians who were already members of their own Sovereign Nations, and the provision that chattel slaves counted as only 3/5 of a person ( and chattel slavery was eventually eliminated by the 13^th Amendment).  Officers of the United States NEVER become sovereigns. The sovereignty remains with the People which is why officers of the United States swear an oath to the Constitution, NOT to any individual.

As Senator Corey Booker has said, the most dangerous  words you can utter to an officer of the group are "Do you know who I am?"  The proper response should be "Yes, but don’t worry. I will not let that influence my duty to the group."  Your duty is to the group not yourself, even if you are a leader of that group.

. 

Precedents

 

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Then how the reindeer loved him
As they shouted out with glee
"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
You'll go down in history"

Is history a good way to make laws?

Arguing that there is no historical precedent for a law is silly. If that were true, then there would be no ”firsts” because if it were not done before, then there IS  no historical precedent. There ARE historical precedents for legal instances of slavery, genocide, segregation, primo geniture, witch burning, etc. and none of those practices are considered to be acceptable today. Looking at the historical record should not preserve those actions. The Constitution was ratified by individual states and their people to transfer power to a federal government. However individuals in those states recognized the danger of this and did not ratify the Constitution without guaranteeing  certain rights which the individuals did NOT surrender to the government. That is what the Bill of Rights is all about. One of those “Rights” was the Ninth Amendment which reads.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The People wanted to ensure that if they forgot to list a right in the Constitution, that right should NOT be construed as being surrendered to the State. A right does not have to be listed in the Constitution, or the historical record, to be a right retained by the People. Abortion may not be listed in the Constitution, but it  also "forgot" to list cell phones, the internet, internal combustion engines, refrigeration, air conditioning, automobiles, etc. because none of those existed at the time the Constitution was written.

Abortion might be one of those unlisted rights, but it is already protected. Life begins at conception, but legal personhood under the Constitution begins at Birth, NOT Conception. The unborn fetus has moral rights before birth, but it has no constitutional rights before birth. Forcing a woman to carry a fetus to term is taking a woman’s womb until birth by the government without compensation. That action by the state is constitutionally forbidden. Does the state have the right, and responsibility, to protect a viable fetus? Absolutely! That fetus, if viable, is one of the People. Before viability? Not legally one of the People.

Supreme Court III

Revolution

You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We'd all love to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead.

But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait

On July Fourth, it seems appropriate to ask if we are in another revolution?

The (Supreme) Court serves as a crucial guardian of the rule of law and also plays a central role in major social and political conflicts. Its decisions have profound effects on the life of the nation. Though conflict surrounding the processes by which the President nominates and the Senate confirms Justices is not new, it has become more intensely partisan in recent years.

So goes the introduction to the Final Report of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. There has been, IMHO,  a judicial coup in the Supreme Court. A majority of the Court representing  a view of a minority of the Nation have rendered decisions that only intensify this partisan debate. These opinions, IMHO, are themselves “egregiously wrong,” in Justice Alito’s current usage of the word, not the original usage of the word. Justice Thomas has written opinions which make statements that are factually incorrect. Justice Thomas has also stated that constitutional issues on contraception, same gender marriage, etc., should be reviewed, although selfishly not miscegenation, which could effect him personally. If the SCOTUS ruled that one plus one was three, it would not make this statement correct. SCOTUS is supposed to make factual statements to render opinions about the constitutionality of laws. If it does not, it is in conflict with its oath to uphold the Constitution. 

The role of the Chief Justice may be the most significant role in overcoming this judicial coup.  The most important decisions of the United States require a super majority. https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/06/supermajority.html. A criminal case requires a unanimous decision. A civil case requires a less than a uniramous decision but still a supermajority. Simple majorities invite a culture of domination, where the majority dominates the minority. The Constitution was designed to insure that the majority does not dominate any minority. Mankind is a group animal. There are decisions that must be decided by the group,  The question is how to make those decisions. 

 A unanimous decision can be blocked by any minority, even a minority of one. A majority decision invites tyranny of the majority,  which is expressly what the Constitution was trying to avoid. An efficient supermajority was found by Caplin and  Nalebuff[1] to be 64%. Within one standard deviation from the mean in a normal distribution will contain 68% of the values. Both are remarkably close to the Constitutional mandate of two-thirds. If two-thirds of a group support a decision then it probably does reflect the decision of the group, not just any majority of that group.

 In keeping with the role of the Chief Justice, it would seem that the decision of HIS Court should reflect the will of the Nation, not just the majority of the court. It takes four justices to decide that Supreme Court will even hear a case. The Chief Justice can, and should, impose a rule that the opinions of HIS Supreme Court are not the binding on the Nation unless a supermajority, not a simple majority, supports that decision. That means under the current SCOTUS,  decisions should require the support of six of the nine justices to be the decision of the nation. To do otherwise is to risk that decisions on gun control, contraception, marriage, and other issues including abortion could be decided by a majority of the SCOTUS but a minority of the nation. 

There are probably other recommendations that are appropriate from the Commission’s Final Report concerning  membership and size of the Court, terms, and term limits,  and other items that are not under the Chief Justice's purview.  On this Fourth of July lets us hope that Chief Justice Roberts can find the time to read the report and help prevent another revolution.

---

[1] Econometrica, Vol. 56, No. 4 (July 1988), 787-814

Faith

 

Faith

Before this river becomes an ocean
Before you throw my heart back on the floor (I just gotta have faith)
Oh, oh, baby, I reconsider my foolish notion
Well, I need someone to hold me but I'll wait for somethin' more.

In whom do you have faith?

St. Paul, in First Corinthians 13:13 ( or One Corinthians, if you are a certain Orange Menace) said the three remaining virtues are Faith, Hope and Love and the greatest of these is Love. But we could not receive Love if we did not have Faith in the person giving us Love. We have faith that even if we do not understand something, that some person we trust is telling us the truth, is not lying. That person may be a person of authority or a celebrity that we trust. That is why endorsement deals are so lucrative. A company is using that endorser as someone, say a sports figure, or some agency, say the American Dental Association, who is trusted.

One of the agencies that we trust is the state. In most states, there are licensing authorities.  To be a teacher, land surveyor, doctor, lawyer, cosmetologist, nurse, building contractor, counselor, therapist, electrician, etc. you may have to obtain a state license to be able to practice. This license says that the state has served as a gatekeeper and will back your trustworthiness. To be married by the state you have to obtain a marriage license. To drive you have to obtain a driver’s license. In each of these cases you are examined by the state and found to be trustworthy for this particular activity.

Another agency we trust is religion. We believe in God. We are not God and do not know everything God knows. But there are leaders of that religion who we will trust not to be lying, knowingly or unknowingly.

Still another group whom we trust is a political party. When we vote for a candidate endorsed by that Party, we have faith that the candidate has the beliefs consistent with that party. That means for example we can vote for upper case R Republicans who are candidates because we think they believe in a lower case r republic.

But gatekeepers can deny trust to those who should be trusted, a false negative. And agencies whom we trust can be lying, a false positive. Faith means we expect there only to be  true positives.