Reading is Fun...damental

I've never listened to Mark Levin on the radio for any longer than it took me to change the station; he has a graceless manner and attitude that make him even less appealing than the usual run of airwave shouter. And that manner often bleeds into his written work, which means my encounters with it are also rare.

But a couple of excerpts of The Liberty Amendments piqued my interest, so I dug in and found it a good deal less heated than Levin usually manages, with some definite food for thought whether you agree with his ideas or not.

Levin's thesis is that the modern federal government differs wildly from the vision of the initial founders, having been brought to such a state by various folks with various agendæ who used the wiggle room in what proved to be imprecise wording in the original operating instructions, the United States Constitution. Levin suggests a slate of amendments to tighten these loopholes and return the function to something closer to these original intentions. Since elected federal officials are a large part of the problem, he favors the amendment process that works through the states, using the second model from Article V.

Whether the amendments he proposes are good ideas or not are up to you to decide if you've read the book. I confess some hesitancy about providing the United States Congress a limited ability to void decisions by the Supreme Court, and I'm not convinced by Levin's interpretation of the Marbury v. Madison case that established modern judicial review. We're talking about Congress here. On the other hand, if no special wisdom attaches to being a United States representative or senator, we should probably remember that "Supreme Court Justice" is not an automatic IQ-raiser either. Supreme Court decisions have supported slavery, affirmed racial segregation and upheld the WWII internment of American citizens of Japanese descent, and the overturning of some of those cases happened many years later. Why should the justices' fallible understandings be privileged over all others?

Term limits are thrown around as a solution to many problems that they may in fact not lessen at all. We can always vote the bums out and every now and again we do. But even though poll after poll shows we even think our lawmakers as a group are as dumb as 535 sacks of hammers, we keep viewing our particular sack of hammers as just what the nail in front of us needs. As long as we expect everyone else to get rid of their congressional idiot while we retain ours, we're stuck in a kind of prisoner's dilemma limbo of legislative inadequacy.

The Liberty Amendments may or may not contain realistic solutions to our nation's problems, and it may or may not be a collection of political thoughts tailored through language and presentation to meet a current vogue of libertarian-leaning expression. But Levin has identified some of the problems that are behind or underneath the problems we see all the time, and he's brought a much less heated view of them to these pages than he often does. Serious consideration of those problems, at least, is not a pointless task.

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One of the problems almost anyone has in trying to get even a sliver of understanding of the quantum physical processes by which our universe goes about its merry way is that they involve math and concepts which are often beyond the limits of most people without advanced degrees in the field.

Another is that many of the people who write about this kind of science are used to writing for the others who understand the math and the sometimes incredible concepts that quantum mechanics offers at just about every turn. Physicist James Kakalios, who teaches physics and astronomy at the University of Minnesota, is not one of those people. Kakalios has a gift for communicating complex concepts in ways that can be understood, and finding examples and illustrations that offer clear analogies to the subject under study.

In his second book, The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics, Kakalios makes some of the fantastic devices and stories of old pulp fiction and comic books as takeoff points for identifying how many modern devices such as MRI machines rely on quantum mechanics to operate. For example, Dr. Jon Osterman is a character in Alan Moore's famous comic book Watchmen. An accident transforms him into a super-being who goes by the name Dr. Manhattan, and the comic suggests that the source of Dr. Manhattan's powers is that he has complete and conscious control over his quantum wave function. Kakalios, referring to different things Dr. Manhattan does in the story, explains what a quantum wave function is and how being able to control it would lead to feats not too different from those in Moore's comic.

Kakalios's humorous but clear style makes him fun to read even if he has several stop-and-back-up-to-try-to-get-that-idea-straight moments. But he's also good at explaining what some bizarre concepts like quantum tunneling and quantum entanglement actually mean using his Buck Rogers examples. Serious engagement with Amazing Story can move that adjective from its older meaning of confused and befuddled to the more modern one signifying wonder and astonishment, and it's well worth the time.