Enlighten Radio Podcasts:Podcast:Paris on the Potomac: Solar Expansions in West Virginia

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Enlighten Radio:Quaker Radio and Old Time RAdio Sunday

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Enlighten Radio Podcasts:Are You Crazy -- radical approaches to health, exercise, food and family

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Enlighten Radio:Highwaymen and Jackson Browne visit the Radio

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Science policy and the Cold War [feedly]

Science policy and the Cold War
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2017/03/science-policy-and-cold-war.html

The marriage of science, technology, and national security took a major step forward during and following World War II. The secret Manhattan project, marshaling the energies and time of thousands of scientists and engineers, showed that it was possible for military needs to effectively mobilize and conduct coordinated research into fundamental and applied topics, leading to the development of the plutonium bomb and eventually the hydrogen bomb. (Richard Rhodes' memorable The Making of the Atomic Bomb provides a fascinating telling of that history.) But also noteworthy is the coordinated efforts made in advanced computing, cryptography, radar, operations research, and aviation. (Interesting books on several of these areas include Stephen Budiansky's Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union and Blackett's War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare Warfare, and Dyson's Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe.) Scientists served the war effort, and their work made a material difference in the outcome. More significantly, the US developed effective systems for organizing and directing the process of scientific research -- decision-making processes to determine which avenues should be pursued, bureaucracies for allocating funds for research and development, and motivational structures that kept the participants involved with a high level of commitment. Tom Hughes' very interesting Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects that Changed Our World tells part of this story.

But what about the peace?

During the Cold War there was a new global antagonism, between the US and the USSR. The terms of this competition included both conventional weapons and nuclear weapons, and it was clear on all sides that the stakes were high. So what happened to the institutions of scientific and technical research and development from the 1950s forward?

Stuart Leslie addressed these questions in a valuable 1993 book, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. Defense funding maintained and deepened the quantity of university-based research that was aimed at what were deemed important military priorities.

The armed forces supplemented existing university contracts with massive appropriations for applied and classified research, and established entire new laboratories under university management: MIT's Lincoln Laboratory (air defense); Berkeley's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (nuclear weapons); and Stanford's Applied Electronics Laboratory (electronic communications and countermeasures). (8)

In many disciplines, the military set the paradigm for postwar American science. Just as the technologies of empire (specifically submarine telegraphy and steam power) once defined the relevant research programs for Victorian scientists and engineers, so the military-driven technologies of the Cold War defined the critical problems for the postwar generation of American accidents and engineers.... These new challenges defined what scientists and engineers studied, what they designed and built, where they went to work, and what they did when they got there. (9)

And Leslie offers an institutional prediction about knowledge production in this context:

Just as Veblen could have predicted, as American science became increasingly bound up in a web of military institutions, so did its character, scope, and methods take on new, and often disturbing, forms. (9)

The evidence for this prediction is offered in the specialized chapters that follow. Leslie traces in detail the development of major research laboratories at both universities, involving tens of millions of dollars in funding, thousands of graduate students and scientists, and very carefully focused on the development of sensitive technologies in radio, computing, materials, aviation, and weaponry.

No one denied that MIT had profited enormously in those first decades after the war from its military connections and from the unprecedented funding sources they provided. With those resources the Institute put together an impressive number of highly regarded engineering programs, successful both financially and intellectually. There was at the same time, however, a growing awareness, even among those who had benefited most, that the price of that success might be higher than anyone had imagined -- a pattern for engineering education set, organizationally and conceptually, by the requirements of the national security state. (43)

Leslie gives some attention to the counter-pressures to the military's dominance in research universities that can arise within a democracy in the closing chapter of the book, when the anti-Vietnam War movement raised opposition to military research on university campuses and eventually led to the end of classified research on many university campuses. He highlights the protests that occurred at MIT and Stanford during the 1960s; but equally radical protests against classified and military research happened in Madison, Urbana, and Berkeley.

This is a set of issues that are very resonant with Science, Technology and Society studies (STS). Leslie is indeed a historian of science and technology, but his approach does not completely share the social constructivism of that approach today. His emphasis is on the implications of the funding sources on the direction that research in basic science and technology took in the 1950s and 1960s in leading universities like MIT and Stanford. And his basic caution is that the military and security priorities associated with this structure all but guaranteed that the course of research was distorted in directions that would not have been chosen in a more traditional university research environment.

The book raises a number of important questions about the organization of knowledge and the appropriate role of universities in scientific research. In one sense the Vietnam War is a red herring, because the opposition it generated in the United States was very specific to that particular war. But most people would probably understand and support the idea that universities played a crucial role in World War II by discovering and developing new military technologies, and that this was an enormously important and proper role for scientists in universities to play. Defeating fascism and dictatorship was an existential need for the whole country. So the idea that university research is sometimes used and directed towards the interests of national security is not inherently improper.

A different kind of worry arises on the topic of what kind of system is best for guiding research in science and technology towards improving the human condition. In grand terms, one might consider whether some large fraction of the billions of dollars spent in military research between 1950 and 1980 might have been better spent on finding ways of addressing human needs directly -- and therefore reducing the likely future causes of war. Is it possible that we would today be in a situation in which famine, disease, global warming, and ethnic and racial conflict were substantially eliminated if we had dedicated as much attention to these issues as we did to advanced nuclear weapons and stealth aircraft?

Leslie addresses STS directly in "Reestablishing a Conversation in STS: Who's Talking? Who's Listening? Who Cares?" (link). Donald MacKenzie's Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance tells part of the same story with a greater emphasis on the social construction of knowledge throughout the process.

(I recall a demonstration at the University of Illinois against a super-computing lab in 1968 or 1969. The demonstrators were appeased when it was explained that the computer was being used for weather research. It was later widely rumored on the campus that the weather research in question was in fact directed towards considering whether the weather of Vietnam could be manipulated in a militarily useful way.)

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

How Jeff Sessions Is Laying the Groundwork for Authoritarian Action [feedly]

How Jeff Sessions Is Laying the Groundwork for Authoritarian Action
http://prospect.org/article/how-jeff-sessions-laying-groundwork-authoritarian-action

Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks to local, state, and federal law enforcement officials in St. Louis on March 31.

With Donald Trump appearing to be on the verge of blowing up the world, it stands to reason that people might not be paying attention to his attorney general's attempt to consolidate support for the administration among local law enforcement by selling off the rights of the American people. Add to that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's suggestion on Thursday that Hitler never used chemical weapons "on his own people," or revelations of the FBI's investigation of a former Trump foreign policy adviser as a possible Russian espionage asset, and your brain may have just absorbed all it can process about the present political moment.

But while you weren't looking, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been courting local and federal law enforcement with the promise of lax oversight of police abuses against citizens, punishment for cities that choose not to use local resources for the hunting of undocumented immigrants, and a renewal of the so-called war on drugs that for decades was little more than a war on black and brown people. On Tuesday, Sessions disbanded the independent, nonpartisan National Commission on Forensic Science—the people who evaluate the scientific soundness of evidence admitted in criminal trials. The idea seems to be to task law enforcement with deciding the means by which it determines which evidence is permissible, even as the administration seeks ways to lock up people on the pretext of drug possession. The responsibility for making recommendations on the scientific soundness of various means of evidence collection will now fall to prosecutors.

But it doesn't stop there. On April 4, Sessions demonstrated his contempt for his department's past interventions on local law enforcement in jurisdictions where abuses of citizens are shown to be systemic, and promised to lighten up on the use of consent decrees that place offending police departments under Justice Department monitoring for a period of time. He's also been on a speaking tour of threats against the (mostly Democratic) political leadership of the nation's great cities, promising to slash their federal funding unless local law enforcement is turned into a locally funded arm of the federal government by participating in the round-up of immigrants who don't have papers. (So much for the right's love of local control.) For good measure, Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, is calling on Republicans in Congress to include these proposed funding penalties against so-called sanctuary cities in the spending bill Congress must soon take up in order to keep the government running—a move that could lead to a government shutdown.

We need to sit a minute to take this in, because surely it cannot mean what it looks like, right? At a moment when the White House is occupied by a unilaterally acting authoritarian populist, his top law enforcement officer is signaling an expansion of law enforcement powers and the reduction of rights for citizens.

By now, every well-informed person knows that the war on drugs failed to ameliorate America's thirst for illegal substances, and that the war's selective targeting yielded an absurdly high proportion of non-white prisoners. Soon, those law enforcement entities can return to entering into evidence, without compunction, test results yielded by methods the forensic science panel had deemed unreliable. If police have all the power, who needs reliable evidence?

The enforcement of authoritarianism in a sprawling nation made up of myriad entities requires the buy-in of law enforcement at all levels and in all jurisdictions. These aggressive moves by Sessions are too easily written off as rhetorical red meat for the Trump base, even as the man himself reneges on campaign promises (such as avoiding further involvement in the armed conflicts of the Middle East). But Sessions's moves are far more than that. Each of these actions and threats by Sessions plays a part in laying an infrastructure for the enforcement of the administration's will, whether by legal or extra-legal means.

How easy will it be to quash dissent when a pinch of pot and some bad science could see you locked up for years? I'm guessing pretty easy.

Of all the many things warranting protest and the scrutiny of Congress, this is the big one. Should Sessions prevail, the people's ability to peacefully resist unjust actions by its government will be gravely diminished.

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Rumbling on the Left in France

Rumbling on the Left in Franceby Arthur Goldhammer  
Samuel Boivin/Sipa USA via AP Images

Jean-Luc Mélenchon gathered about 130000 people in Paris for a large gathering of "La France Insoumise."

Just as the French presidential race appeared to be settling into a comfortable two-person contest, with polls showing Marine Le Pen in a dead heat with Emmanuel Macron in the first round leading to a comfortable (and comforting) Macron victory in the second, the previously moribund left of the Left discovered that what Marx called "the old mole"—popular discontent well-concealed in its underground lair—still has some life left in it.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who had been languishing at around 12 or 13 percent in first-round estimates, well behind the front-runners at around 24 percent each, suddenly began rising. He is now at 18 or 19, even with or slightly ahead of the right-wing Republican candidate François Fillon and within striking distance of the front-runners, and thus with a slim but real chance of making it into the May 7 runoff.

Who is Jean-Luc Mélenchon and what accounts for his sudden surge? Born in Morocco in 1951, he first became involved in politics as a high-school student in May '68. For most of his career he gravitated toward the left wing of the Socialist Party and in the early 2000s served as a junior minister (for vocational education) under Lionel Jospin. Socialist support for a new European Union constitutional treaty in 2005 drove Mélenchon farther toward the party's left fringe, and in 2008 he concluded that the balance of power among the party's factions had shifted too far to the right for him to remain a member. He therefore resigned and founded his own Left Party, modeled on Germany's Die Linke. In the 2012 presidential election he ran in alliance with what remained of the French Communist Party as the candidate of the Left Front. Although pre-election polls showed him close to Marine Le Pen that year, he finished with only 11 percent to Le Pen's 18.

This year he chose to run again but initially found himself tied for last place among the five top-tier candidates with Benoît Hamon, the surprise Socialist nominee, to whom Mélenchon had been close when both were members of the PS. Hamon, who defeated former prime minister Manuel Valls, the candidate of the party's right wing, which Mélenchon had staunchly opposed, appealed to the same segment of the electorate as Mélenchon: voters hostile to any compromise with capitalism, suspicious of what they took to be the European Union's embrace of neoliberalism, highly critical of the Hollande presidency (especially for tis liberalization of labor laws and subservient posture toward Germany), and unimpressed by the independent candidacy of Emmanuel Macron, who had served as minister of the economy under Hollande before launching the En Marche! movement, which is liberal on social issues and neoliberal on economic ones.

As long as both Hamon and Mélenchon remained in the race, drawing approximately equal number of voters from the same pool, there seemed to be no hope for the left of the Left to make it to the second round. But things began to change after the first presidential debate. Although Hamon had delivered, the day before, the speech of his life and one of the best political speeches I have ever heard, his performance in the debate was generally considered lackluster, while most observers agreed that Mélenchon, who is eloquent, erudite, and quick on his feet, beat all four of his top-tier rivals. In the next televised debate, which included not just the top five but all eleven of the candidates who qualified for the race by collecting at least 500 validated signatures of elected officials, Hamon was again passive while Mélenchon turned in a stunning performance, including a memorable exchange in which he caught Marine Le Pen flat-footed on the question of permitting conspicuous religious symbols in public spaces. Le Pen opposes Muslim veils but favors allowing Nativity scenes in city halls on the grounds that these are not religious symbols but simply manifestations of French "tradition." Mélenchon deftly skewered the flagrant contradiction.

From that point on, his rise has been rapid, and Hamon's symmetrical fall has been equally precipitous. This shift in voter sentiment has destabilized the race. Macron, who had appeared to be the inevitable choice of voters for whom stopping Le Pen was priority number one, no longer seems inevitable. Some on the left were finding it difficult to vote for Macron. His insistence that he was "neither left nor right" but would take the best ideas from both sides struck many as equivocal if not downright hypocritical. His debate performances seemed somewhat rote and bloodless, while Mélenchon displayed considerable verbal agility. Whereas his fiery invective had alienated voters in 2012, this year he seemed calmer, more mature, and prepared to pose as a sage offering lessons to his less experienced rivals.

Mélenchon is the candidate of leftist nostalgia. He is sympathetic to Russia, arguing that the West has pushed Putin into a more aggressive stance by threatening Russia's near abroad. He has nothing but good to say about Third-World dictators such as Castro and Chavez. He attacks the EU as an agent of neoliberalism and threatens, as does Le Pen, to withdraw France's membership unless the treaties are revised in ways to which other members will never all agree (and unanimous consent is required). He will impose a 100 percent income tax on anyone earning over 400,000 euros per year, despite the fact that France's Constitutional Council ruled Hollande's 75 percent tax on individuals earning more than one million euros unconstitutional. And he will abolish the Fifth Republic (he says without specifying how), diminishing the importance of the office for which he is running and returning power to the legislature.

Yet despite the unrealism of his program, Mélenchon's newfound supporters find him more persuasive than Hamon, who foresees a future of zero economic growth and diminished need for work, with the state providing a minimum basic income to those left without jobs. Compared with this utopia, Mélenchon's nostalgic socialism might seem familiar and perhaps even feasible if the stars were to align correctly (which they won't, since even if he were to win the presidency, his chances of putting together a legislative majority are nil).

Mélenchon's surge has called into question the few certitudes that remain in this year of extraordinary political upheaval in France. The early favorites—Juppé, Sarkozy, and Valls—were eliminated in the primaries (which undoubtedly has the parties, or what is left of them, rethinking the wisdom of primaries). The seemingly unstoppable upstart, Macron, has slipped slightly in the polls and seems to have run out of reserves from which he can draw new first-round support. He has captured the soft left—Valls threw his support to Macron several weeks ago (a mixed blessing from Macron's point of view), the center (François Bayrou chose not to run against him), and much of the Juppéist right. But he cannot seem to crack what remains of the marxisant left, and if Mélenchon succeeds in stealing still more votes from Hamon's base, he could make it to the second round.

At this point, one can envision a second round pitting any two of the top four candidates against each other. And make no mistake: a Mélenchon-Le Pen face-off would come as a thunderclap from Olympus, a sign that, as Raymond Aron put it four decades ago, "Ce peuple est encore dangéreux." One might have thought that the French had overcome their romantic attachment to revolution, to the idea that the slate of the past can be wiped clean and everything started anew, but there is an outside chance that the old mole is even now grubbing its way somewhere close to the surface and will spring forth on the night of Sunday, April 23. For some this is a sign of hope, for others an occasion for mounting fear.

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John Case
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