Politics

Truth, Faith and Reason: Pope Benedict XVI’s Lecture at the University of Regensburg

Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism Volume 16(1) Spring-Summer 2008.

Pope Benedict XVI interleaved two themes in his talk at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006. These are discussed here in two separate parts: Truth, Faith, and Reason and The Dialogue of Cultures. The first addresses the Pope’s proposal to expand scientific reasoning to include the “rationality of faith”; and the second with the threat of radical Islam, and whether a “dialogue of cultures” is possible if the West persists in its belief in what the Pope calls a “reason which is deaf to the divine”.

Truth, Faith & Reason

Goracle Gushings on Faith-Based Science

USA Today Magazine (January 2008) Goracle PDF

We are about to waste an enormous amount of money and effort on carbon mitigation without lowering CO2 emissions one whit. The Goracle and his fellow travelers will carry the day.”

AL GORE won an Academy Award for his skillfully done film, An Inconvenient Truth. It was well-deserved. Had he given as good a performance during his campaign for president, he would have won in a landslide. As environmental drama, it only can be compared with Michael Crichton’s novel, State of Fear. Both have elements of scientific and political fact, and both are excellent fiction.

America’s Left Has Taken a Wrong Turn

USA Today Magazine (May 2007) (PDF)
Socialism, the Left, and its future in the United States.

The Left in the US is in crisis. It has lost the broad support it once enjoyed in the working class and finds itself captive to the past—or, worse yet, to an impotent radicalism. It no longer offers working people a political outlet for their interests, but only a means of protest about issues that are not central to their lives.


Recycling Nuclear Waste

American Physical Society Special Session on Nuclear Reprocessing, Nuclear Proliferation, and Terrorism (15 April 2007)
Coauthors: William H. Hannum and George S. Stanford

In the public mind, the foremost reservation about nuclear power is, “What can we do with the waste?” Fortunately there is an answer: We can use the worrisome, very long-lived components as fuel in the right kind of reactors, and then the rest becomes manageable. Will this lead to proliferation of nuclear weapons or to an increase in the threat of nuclear terrorism? Not necessarily. Prudent recycle of nuclear waste will actually reduce these threats while also reducing the time that nuclear waste must be sequestered to a few hundred years instead of thousands.

(PDF)

Forum on Physics and Society of the American Physical Society

Articles appearing in Physics & Society

Bombs, Reprocessing, and Reactor-Grade Plutonium (April 2006)
Coauthor: George S. Stanford (PDF)

Nuclear Power and Proliferation (January 2006)
Coauthor: George S. Stanford (PDF)

Purex and Pyro are not the Same (July 2004)
Coauthors: William H. Hannum and George S. Stanford (PDF)

Gaps in the APS Position on Nuclear Energy (April 2002)
Coauthor: George S. Stanford (PDF)

The Phantom Defense: America’s Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion

Praeger Press 2001

A Project of the Center for International Policy

Coauthors: Craig Eisendrath and Melvin A. Goodman

Like President Reagan with his “Star Wars” program, President Bush has again made national missile defense (NMD) a national priority at a cost which may exceed $150 billion in the next ten years. Defense experts Eisendrath, Goodman, and Marsh contend that recent tests give little confidence that any of the systems under consideration—land-based, boost-phase, or laser-driven—have any chance of effective deployment within decades. The interests of the military-industrial complex and the unilateralist views of the Bush administration are driving NMD, not a desire to promote national security.

Rather than increase U.S. security, the plans of the current administration, if implemented, will erode it. NMD will heighten the threat from China and Russia, alienate key allies, and provoke a new arms race and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, all in response to a greatly exaggerated threat from so-called “rogue states,” such as North Korea and Iran. Thoughtful diplomacy, not a misguided foreign policy based on a hopeless dream of a “Fortress America,” is the real answer to meeting America’s security goals. Designed to stimulate interest and debate among the public and policy-makers, the Phantom Defense provides solid facts and combines scientific, geopolitical, historical, and strategic analysis to critique the delusion of national missile defense, while suggesting a more effective alternative.

(Phantom Defense at Amazon)

Erratum: p. 86, 2nd full paragraph: The first sentence should read: “Even with nuclear-tipped interceptors it was clear, as early as the 1960s, that, in the words of John S. Foster, Jr. of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the system would . . . limited time available for intercept.”

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