The Way the Future Blogs

Some numbers about assorted people’s grasp of arithmetic:

• % of population who think they know enough household mathematics to handle problems:
  80%

• % of population who got at least one-half of test questions on a sixth-grade arithmetic test right: 42%

The less math people know, the more confident they are in their decisions.

• Scores on a test of simple arithmetic of people who have already been foreclosed:

• Score in top quartile: 5%
• Score in bottom quartile: 30%

• Willingness to seek help and/or do research:

  • Best informed: most likely
  • Least informed: least likely

A few months ago some fed-up Americans decided to let Wall Street know that they were a bunch of greedy, conscienceless pigs, and so they marched down that short, narrow — and crooked — street. It made the papers, and the next day there were a few more of them … and then more still … and then other cities caught the fever, and where it will stop no one can say. And I personally could not be more pleased.

Think it over. When was the last time you saw a spontaneous mass movement in America? We have seen plenty of the cooked-up kind, as where two super-greedy billionaire brothers give in to their appetite and hire experts to start a mass movement to cut their taxes — or a TV network beats the drums 24 hours a day for a “spontaneous” mass meeting.

This is the real thing. It’s the real people, the 99 percent of us, whose incomes are faltering or falling — or gone! — while the richest 1 percent among us are bending the laws and brining our legislators to make them richer still. Can that be called anything less than rapacious greed? It is, in truth, class warfare, an unrelenting effort to take away what even the poorest among us have.

Does anyone leaving a job need a $126 million (Gene Isenberg at Nabors Industries) parting gift? And he is by no means the only one — Eric Schmidt at Google got $100 million, and at IBM, Sam Palmisano stuffed his pockets with an unbelievable$170 million to ease the pain of leaving his job.

That isn’t just disgusting, it’s gross whole-hog piggery. It is one of the many battles the 1 per cent’s class war against the rest of us wins day after day.

If there is one thing we’ve learned in the past few years, it is that the very rich don’t care what happens to the rest of us. When Wall Street’s uncontrollable avarice came within a hair’s breadth of destroying the economy in one villainous spree in 2008 — selling people securities that they knew to be worthless and mortgage loans that they could never in this world pay back, and then evicting them for those unpaid loans — our government gave them nearly a trillion dollars — that’s $1,000,000,000,000 — of your, the taxpayers’, money to save them from bankruptcy, ostensibly in order to help the home owners. But the financial institutions didn’t help the home owners. They took the money and kept it for themselves.

What else have they thought up to do? Well, for a long time, American businesses have been pretending to move to another country in order to avoid paying what they owe America in income tax. Now they’ve gone farther. They’ve kept the vast profits of their deceitful offshore actions offshore. They have all the profits of their activities in overseas banks, where the U.S. can’t tax them for what they owe. (That’s another trillion or so.)

Bluefin tuna: Threatened with extinction.

So far in the history of life on Earth there have been five Great Extinctions. One was caused by the giant meteor that hit what is now the coast of Mexico, two by freezing in the oceans and the lowering of the sea levels, one by huge, widespread volcanic eruptions, one (probably) by gigantic meteorite showers.

They were all many millions of years ago — all but the sixth Great Extinction, which has barely started. That is the one the scientists are calling the “Holocene,” and its cause is annihilation of species of birds, animals and — especially, for example — edible fish.

And the cause of that is Us.

How do we cause extinctions? Oh, we have lots of ways. For fish, we harvest the tastiest ones en masse until there are none left (it’s estimated that we have removed nearly 90 percent of large fish from the sea). We destroy habitats. Most of all, we cause global warming. Anyway, our work in this matter has gone far enough for scientist to refer to the present as a new age, the Holocene.

TAD says he’s tired of getting up-to-date scientific and political news from this blog, and can I recommend other sources?

I can tell you what I read every week, which is five weekly publications: Science, New Scientist, The New Yorker, the Sunday New York Times and Newsweek.

Science is mostly pretty technical. New Scientist is an English magazine and fairly expensive in the U.S., but you can read much of it online, and maybe some nearby public or college library gets it and will let you read it. (If not, get on the one most likely to listen to you and tell them they should.) If I could subscribe to just one magazine, this would be it.

The New Yorker may sound like a lightweight choice but its articles in depth can’t be beat, and often they are on scientific subjects. (They also have great cartoons and much else.)

I also read about a dozen other periodicals and miscellaneous other stuff, but far the most of what I know and keep replenishing is from these five.