Trump, his tariffs, the law and the Supreme Court

 

The law can 'decide' the question of whether POTUS has the 'power' to impose tariffs but cannot settle the issue. 

That is because it is, finally, a political, not a legal dispute; it puts democracy and the law - that is, the existence of legal restraints on democracy - at odds.

Trump and his legal advisers are well aware of this but will continue to press their case because they do not believe in liberal democracy and accept the spirit of the law (or to be exact about Trump's attorneys, because they are commissioned to challenge those concepts). They are advocating together a form of fascism: elective dictatorship.

The only way the Supreme Court - if the matter gets that far - seems to have round this is to take the Constitutional view of the separation of the powers and decline to hear the case.

Whether Trump has the power to impose tariffs, or the power to do anything else he likes, can only be settled by whether American voters continue to support him. That is, whether they let him.

That's the reality. That's democracy. What other choice is there?

Ein Heldenleben

As you'll remember (I wrote to a friend who'd asked if I knew Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben), I first heard the usual pairing of the Wagner Prelude and Liebestod on May 4 1954. 

One of the clearest things I've written is about that first time. It changed my life, and not so much changed as expanded beyond all expectation what music had been to me till then: traditional jazz, bop - the trumpet starring because I played one myself - Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton. 

But after that experience, I couldn't get enough of what people oddly call 'classical' music, graduating to Mahler, Bruckner, Stravinsky, Shoenberg, Vaughan Williams, Debussy and all sorts of things by Delius and Nielsen and Richard Strauss, who had been widely considered the most brilliant composer in the world around the turn of the twentieth century but tarnished his reputation by staying on in Hitler’s Germany. 

The connection between the Wagner family and the Nazis no doubt accounts for much of the antagonism to that Richard too, not to mention his deeply unpleasant writing about Jews. Knowing nothing of all that at the time, I held Wagner in awe, thrilled and moved also by Ein Heldenleben and Don Juan, the Four Last Songs, Metamorphosen, Salome, the glorious Der Rosenkavalier.

I can never quite get down in words what all this great music meant to me. It was somehow or other about everything, mixing, and mixing up, beauty, love, hopelessness, all the confused yearnings of youth. I don’t sit now to listen to it like I did then because the memories that come with it sadden, though I find myself listening on YouTube often enough. Ravel's Sheherazade there is as ravishing as ever.

It is still Wagner most. After all the years, as the productions move with the times, I see more than ever his remarkable intelligence and unique vision and feel more intensely his feeling for people, life and love. 

Then I imagine him working in some room in Switzerland, or in the villa in Venice now a casino, hearing, getting it down, re-thinking, hearing again; in the middle of everybody else's ordinary day actualising Tristan and Isolde; to be free of the unearthly demand inside him alone in all the world.

Unintelligible, amoral: is that how the Universe is?

 

Why do humans have morals, a sense of right and wrong? Humans have at least three explanations. Leave out the one that says there is no right and wrong and consider two others.

There is an absolute Right and Wrong, as Plato had us believe before Christianity, and later the Christian God implanted a sense of both in every one of us. 

The other, secular explanation is we are social beings and our sense of right and wrong, and moral conduct, are evolved adaptations that enable us to survive. Without them, there would be no restraints. Living together, society, everything we do, would be impossible.

While everyone argued the two, Edwin Hubble showed a century ago that our vast galaxy of the Milky Way was not the entire Universe. And one hundred years later, we find the Milky Way is not vast but tiny, just one of billions of galaxies in a Universe expanding in all directions faster than the speed of light.

To many people, our arguments seem as nothing in the circumstances. The Universe races further and further beyond the furthest reach of our imagination, as our morality falls further and further short of an explanation for it. 

We only know science will never give up trying to understand and religion will never give up insisting on right and wrong. Otherwise we humans are alone with what the Universe is telling us.

How toothpaste caps explain science

Just so everyone's clear, science is talking probabilities, not preaching the 'truth'. You hear only about the scientific 'theory' of this or that.

A scientific theory may refer to some feature of the natural world observed and established by experiment. It is not 'proof', but it is more than 'belief', and it is definitely not 'final'.

It is perfectly possible to replace one scientific theory with another, but you cannot replace a scientific proof by another proof. The first proof was wrong. Or maybe the other one isn't right.

Confusing. But the confusion can easily be cleared up by a little trial and error at home. 

If you twist the top of the toothpaste anticlockwise, it almost certainly will not come off and you will very probably not do that again.

However, that does not 'prove' that the tops of all toothpastes cannot be removed anticlockwise. You can never be absolutely certain after one hundred or one thousand tests. And you don't have time for that.

You can then of course start to believe the tops of toothpastes always come off clockwise and say to others it's a fact.

And that's what causes all the trouble.

You can even say it's a scientific law and been proved. Though the fact is science has proved no such thing.

Neverthsless two nice things encourage you to stick with the belief. First is if you refuse to believe science and its methods, you can believe anything you like. Second, should the top of a toothpaste open anticlockwise anywhere ever, you can say that proves science is wrong. 

Does God exist? A straightforward answer Part II

Although I thought I'd been clear in the first part of this, someone who read it suggested I wanted to 'sit on the fence' ... 

"On reflection, I think you are right that I want to 'sit on the fence'. I sit there from what I know as me, from who I am, not from what religion or science are alleged to have me believe on the subject.

I believe in evolution because it can make sense to me more than a Creator God. But that does not mean I have 'proved', even to myself, that God does not exist, or that I have some solution to why we and everything are here. 

You and I disagree on many points, but I do agree that religion and science are irreconcilable. In everyday language, they are entirely different ways of explaining what it's all about. 

There are of course scientists who know. And there are scientists who do not know. Without being a scientist myself, I am in the latter camp. No one knows. I don't believe anyone will ever know.

As far as I am able to tell, the Universe is eternal and infinite and meaningless. But though I definitely do not get that from religion, I also do not get it from science.

Thank you for the civilised exchange." 

 

Understanding why people don't believe in science

 

Some suggest it's a low IQ. But what's a high IQ? Ability to do IQ tests, or to have doubts about IQ tests and skip them to do something practical? 

Isn't it more absence of science? Not of brains to grasp quantum mechanics or relativity, but of a popular understanding of it and of the thinking that questions, is curious, doesn't settle for what passes as common knowledge.

After thousands of years of not inquiring, getting by on magic and authority, it's no surprise we can see science as an upstart bent on destroying everything of value, tried and trusted

Long past is the inspiration of some Ancient Greeks and Chinese and the bits they worked out. There's no comparison to be made anymore. In just 400 years or so science has utterly transformed Reality, racing on now to who-knows-where for who-knows-what.

That's not what we learned at school or thought until quite recently. Science got things right; we could take what it says for sure; it would make people wise and the world a better place. That was the truth. 

For science, that was never the truth. It isn't the truth for anyone who thinks for themselves. Especially those who also believe in magic.

 

Does God exist? A straightforward answer at last

The question does not require a discussion of particle physics or materiality. And let us not start by saying God does not exist because science 'proves' or cannot 'prove' it. It is not a question for science.

The question poses an idea and needs answering as an idea.

The straightforward answer runs like this. 

If God created Herself/Himself, then two things must follow: 1] there is/was some power or event of creation once that we humans cannot comprehend; or 2] God did not create Herself/Himself and is eternal and infinite. That is also incomprehensible to humans but may be agreed by all those willing to accept the idea of God on those terms.

What is clear is that you can replace the word God in the above with the word Universe and neither point 1 nor point 2 needs to change. That is to say that if God could have created God by some mystery, or could be eternal and infinite, something we call the Universe could have done, or be, the same.

The Universe is what a scientist and anyone else who does not follow a religion speak and speculate about in a wide variety of ways. A scientist and anyone else who does follow a religion will also speak of God.

In short, these are personal explanations, arising inevitably from our consciousness and individual cognition, not a confirmation of one thing or another existing ‘out there’.

It may help if I mention that I believe the Universe is eternal and infinite because nothing else makes sense to me. But that is not science. And definitely not faith.