Jews From The United States

"The proponents of a mandatory retirement age and term limits have underestimated the degree to which the rational actor model applies to Justices. In making many decisions, as the empirical evidence demonstrates, Justices attempt to maximize their own preferences, whether based on policy considerations or other factors. The retirement decision is no exception. Scholars who dispute the applicability of the rational actor model to Justices have either not focused on the persuasive empirical evidence advanced by political scientists or have failed to consider all of the variables that touch upon judicial utility."

"Physics is always a gamble; it is a game of exploration. That’s the fun of it. We never know for sure what will happen. Sometimes, we theorists can anticipate, but nature is the final judge."

"Why is space-time doomed? There are many reasons, among which: In string theory we can change the dimension of space-time by changing the strength of the string force. Thus, the so-called II-A string theory, which semi-classically describes closed strings moving in ten-dimensional flat space for very weak coupling is dual for strong coupling to a theory, called M-theory, that at low energies is described by eleven-dimensional supergravity. By increasing the string coupling we can grow an extra dimension. How can the spatial continuum be fundamental if the number of spatial dimensions can be so changed?"

"Remarkably, the building of the Standard Model — the theory of how particles and forces interact — was the success of the conservatives. It required no revolution at the foundational level. Normal physics, the kind that goes on experiment after experiment, produced the Standard Model."

"Are all the (measurable) dimensionless parameters that characterize the physical universe calculable in principle or are some merely determined by historical or quantum mechanical accident and incalculable?"

"... From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind."

"String theory was not invented to describe gravity; instead it originated in an attempt to describe the strong interactions, wherein mesons can be thought of as open strings with quarks at their ends. The fact that the theory automatically described closed strings as well, and that closed strings invariably produced gravitons and gravity, and that the resulting quantum theory of gravity was finite and consistent is one of the most appealing aspects of the theory."

"The universe has been expanding since the big bang, thus early on it was hot and dense. To trace the history of the universe we must understand the dynamics that operates when the universe was hot and particles were very energetic. Before the standard model we could not go back further than 200,000 years after the big bang. Today, especially since QCD simplifies at high energy, we can extrapolate to very eary times, where nucleons melt and quarks and gluons are liberated to form a quark-gluon plasma."

"Traditionally, fundamental theories of nature have had a tendency to break down at short distances. This often signals the appearance of new physics that is discovered once one has experimental instruments of high enough resolution (energy) to explore the higher energy regime. Before asymptotic freedom it was expected that any quantum field theory would fail at sufficiently high energy, where the flaws of the renormalization procedure would appear. To deal with this, one would have to invoke some kind of fundamental length. In an asymptotically free theory this is not necessarily the case — the decrease of the effective coupling for large energy means that no new physics need arise at short distances. There are no infinities at all, the bare coupling is finite — indeed it vanishes. The only divergences that arise are an illusion that appears when one tries to compare, in perturbation theory, the finite effective coupling at finite distances with the vanishing effective coupling at infinitely short distances. Thus the discovery of asymptotic freedom greatly reassured one of the consistency of four-dimensional quantum field theory. One can trust renormalization theory for an asymptotically free theory, independent of the fact that perturbation theory is only an asymptotic expansion, where it gets better and better in the regime of short distances."

"That foreign adversary was, of course, Russia, and it acted through its intelligence agencies and upon the direct instructions of its autocratic ruler, Vladimir Putin, in order to help Donald J. Trump become the 45th President of the United States."

"What does matter is this: the Russians successfully meddled in our democracy, and our intelligence agencies have concluded that they will do so again."

"What is striking here is the degree to which the Russians were willing to undertake such an audacious and risky action against the most powerful nation on earth. That ought to be a warning to us, that if we thought that the Russians would not dare to so blatantly interfere in our affairs, we were wrong. And if we do not do our very best to understand how the Russians accomplished this unprecedented attack on our democracy and what we need to do to protect ourselves in the future, we will have only ourselves to blame."

"Unlike those people climbing outside the building, they knew it was a lie. The true believers were out there attacking the building. But inside the chamber, my Republican colleagues know it is a big lie"

"If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost. Framers couldn’t protect us from ourselves, if right and truth don’t matter. And you know that what he did was not right. You know, that’s what they do in the old country, that Colonel Vindman’s father came from. Or the old country that my great grandfather came from, or the old countries that your ancestors came from, or maybe you came from. But here, right is supposed to matter. It’s what’s made us the greatest nation on earth. No constitution can protect us if right doesn’t matter anymore. And you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country. You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now. He’s done it before. He’ll do it for the next several months. He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to. This is why, if you find him guilty, you must find that he should be removed. Because right matters. Because right matters, and the truth matters. Otherwise, we are lost."

"You cannot trust this President to do what's right for the country"

"If the Trump campaign, or anybody associated with it, aided or abetted the Russians, it would not only be a serious crime, it would also represent one of the most shocking betrayals of our democracy in history."

"There is nothing more corrosive to a democracy than the idea that there is no truth."

"If they [the Department of Justice] are investigating Hillary Clinton, it doesn’t take a genius, let alone a stable genius, to see why. It’s not because there is some new evidence that has come to light. It’s because they’re being badgered by the White House to do it. I think that these cracks that we’re seeing in the independence of the Justice Department ought to concern every American."

"The stakes are nothing less than the future of liberal democracy. We are engaged in a new war of ideas, not communism versus capitalism, but authoritarianism versus democracy and representative government."

"My colleagues may think it is OK that the Russians offered dirt on a Democratic candidate for president as part of what was described as the Russian government's attempt to help the Trump campaign. You might think that's OK. My colleagues might think it's OK that when it was offered to the son of the president, who had a pivotal role in the campaign, that the president's son did not call the FBI, he did not adamantly refuse that foreign help. No, instead that son said that he would love the help of the Russian....You might think that it’s O.K. that the president’s son-in-law sought to establish a secret back channel of communications with the Russians through a Russian diplomatic facility. I don’t think that’s O.K. You might think it’s O.K. that an associate of the president made direct contact with the G.R.U. through Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks; that is considered a hostile intelligence agency. You might think that it’s O.K. that the national security-designate secretly conferred with the Russian ambassador about undermining U.S. sanctions. And you might think it’s O.K. he lied about it to the F.B.I. You might say that’s all O.K. You might say that’s just what you need to do to win. But I don’t think it’s O.K. I think it’s immoral. I think it’s unethical. I think it’s unpatriotic. And yes, I think it’s corrupt. And evidence of collusion."

"Stephen Sommers certainly knew what he was doing. Indiana Jones is a hardened cynical guy with a heart of mush and Stephen created an Indiana Jones-lite, one who was a jocular guy willing to take a pie to the face, handle a gun, work in a fist fight, and handle all the requirements of an action hero. Brendan has the unique ability to take a pie to the face, let himself be in a situation where he feels overwhelmed, and then survive. This was definitely in the wheel house of Indiana Jones and always has been. It was quite conscious on Stephen’s part and now I’ve done something different with it."

"You have to not be arrogant and say you know better, and you have to not thwart their creativity because they are creative people and they have a very different point-of-view than a filmmaker on how to get people in the seats. So, it’s a balance, like everything in life, between keeping your focus and being overly constricting. So, if you want to be a filmmaker, you have to realize what a long arbiter a movie is cut of and shaped on, how many phases there are to it, and how long you have to be totally focused on your story and the movie itself, and how it seemed one way but making a film is really trench warfare."

"Lefschetz made a brief trip to Rome, and I asked Severi what he thought of Lefschetz's work. È bravo,' Severi told me, meaning more or less 'he is talented.' The word bravo,' as far as I can tell, has no equivalent in other languages. 'He is no Poincaré,' Severi added. Poincaré was an eagle, un'aquila—and at this, he raised his hand high. Lefschetz was a sparrow, un passero,' and he lowered his hand halfway. But Lefschetz was talented, è bravo però, è bravo."

"I would read Lefschetz's book on analysis situs and algebraic geometry - the book about which Hodge used to say that all the important statements were true and all the others false."

"Solomon Lefschetz had a reputation for “kibitzing” during the lectures of colleagues; at perhaps the first public talk on computing that von Neumann ever gave, von Neumann said, halfway in, “Well, so far so good” — and Lefschetz added, “and so trivial.” (The students passed down an impious faculty song about their elders; the verse for Lefschetz ended, “When he’s at last beneath the sod, he’ll then begin to heckle God.”)"

"It will be remembered that the positions on a Riemann surface are treated by Hensel, Landsberg, and Jung as arithmetical divisors. At bottom the associated symbolical operations are in no sense different from those that occur in connection with the Noether-Brill theory of groups of points, elements being merely multiplied instead of added."

"As is well known, when one endeavors to pass from one-dimensional birational geometry to the higher dimensions, the difficulties multiply enormously. Many results do not extend at all, or if they do, they are apt to assume a far more complicated aspect or else to demand most difficult proofs."

"The numerical relations existing between ordinary or so-called Plückerian singularities of a plane curve were determined as early as 1834 by P, but the inverse question has been left almost untouched. It may be stated thus: To show the existence of a curve having assigned Plückerian characters; and is equivalent to the determination of the maximum of cusps κM that a curve of order m and genus p may have. V ... has solved the question for rational curves."

"In the development of the theory of algebraic functions of one variable the introduction by Riemann of the surfaces that bear his name has played a well-known part. Owing to the partial failure of space intuition with the increase in dimensionality, the introduction of similar ideas into the field of algebraic functions of several variables has been of necessity slow. It was first done by Emile Picard, whose work along this line will remain a classic. A little later came the capital writings of Poincaré in which he laid down the foundations of Analysis Situs, thus providing the needed tools to obviate the failure of space intuition."

"It was my lot to plant the harpoon of algebraic topology into the body of the whale of algebraic geometry."

"In its early phase (Abel, Riemann, Weierstrass), algebraic geometry was just a chapter in analytic function theory. ... A new current appeared however (1870) under the powerful influence of Max Noether who really put "geometry" and more "birational geometry" into algebraic geometry. In the classical mémoire of Brill-Noether (Math. Ann., 1874), the foundations of "geometry on an algebraic curve" were laid down centered upon the study of linear series cut out by linear systems of curves upon a fixed curve ƒ{x, y) = 0. This produced birational invariance (for example of the genus p) by essentially algebraic methods."

"It is quite obvious that he was strongly influenced by the similar problems in algebraic geometry, and in particular by the theory of correspondences, studied since the middle of the nineteenth century by Chasles and the school of “enumerative geometry” (de Jonquières, Zeuthen, Schubert), then by Hurwitz in the theory of Riemann surfaces, and which had been thoroughly investigated by Severi in the first years of the twentieth century; this influence explains the rather unusual frame within which Lefschetz developed his theory."

"What made the West successful was neither capitalism, nor science, nor an historical accident such as a favourable geography. Instead, political and mental diversity combined to create an ever changing panorama of technologically creative societies."

"Technological systems, like all cultural systems, must have some built-in stability."

"By ignoring and evading rather than altogether abolishing obsolete rules and regulations, eighteenth century Britain moved slowly toward a free market society."

"Economists have traditionally been leery at mentalités as a factor in long-term economic development. In the budding literature on the economic rise of the West, such factors have been ignored or curtly dismissed. In the past, economists’ hostility to religious factors stems from the incompleteness of such theories. Attitudes were a matter of degree, not of absolutes."

"If England led the rest of the world in the Industrial Revolution, it was despite, not because of her formal education system."

"The distinction between micro- and macro inventions matters because they appeared to be governed by different laws. Micro-inventions generally result from an intentional search for improvements, and are understandable -if not predictable- by economic forces. They are guided, at least to some extent, by the laws of supply and demand and by the intensity of search and the resources committed to them, and thus by signals emitted by the price mechanism. Furthermore, in so far as micro inventions are the by-products of experience through learning by doing or learning by using they are correlated with output or investment. Macroinventions are more difficult to understand, and seem to be governed by individual genius and luck as much as by economic forces. Often they are based on some fortunate event, in which an inventor stumbles on one thing while looking for another, arrives at the right conclusion for the wrong reason, or brings to bear a seemingly unrelated body of knowledge that just happen to hold the clue to the right solution. The timing of these inventions is consequently often hard to explain. Much of the economic literature dealing with the generation of technological progress through market mechanisms and incentive devices thus explain only part of the story. This does not mean that we have to give up the attempt to try to understand macroinventions. We must, however, look for explanations largely outside the trusted and familiar market mechanisms relied upon by economists."

"Before the Industrial Revolution all techniques in use were supported by very narrow epistemic bases. That is to say, the people who invented them did not have much of a clue as to why and how they worked. The pre-1750 world produced, and produced well. It made many path-breaking inventions. But it was a world of engineering without mechanics, iron-making without metallurgy, farming without soil science, mining without geology, water-power without hydraulics, dye-making without organic chemistry, and medical practice without microbiology and immunology. The main point to keep in mind here is that such a lack of an epistemic base does not necessarily preclude the development of new techniques through trial and error and simple serendipity. But it makes the subsequent wave of micro-inventions that adapt and improve the technique and create the sustained productivity growth much slower and more costly. If one knows why some device works, it becomes easier to manipulate and debug it, to adapt to new uses and changing circumstances. Above all, one knows what will not work and thus reduce the costs of research and experimentation."

"As Hooykaas (1972, p. 101) argued, the pervasiveness of religion meant that for any idea to become socially acceptable, it made a huge difference whether it was resisted, tolerated, or sponsored by prevalent religious beliefs."

"Hooykaas (1972, p. 100) writes that especially commercial and industrial cities were intellectually dynamic, far more so than sleepy university towns. These cities also tended to be more tolerant of different religions and multilingual. Modern research has found that especially cities involved in Atlantic trade were institutionally dynamic."

"In discussing the distinction between minor inventions, whose cumulative impact is decisive in productivity growth, and major technological breakthroughs, it may be useful to draw an analogy between the history of technology and the modem theory of evolution ( ... ) Some biologists distinguish between micro-mutations, which are small changes in an existing species and which gradually alter its features, and macromutations, which creates new species. The distinction between the two could provide a useful analogy for our purposes. I define micro inventions as the small, incremental steps that improve, adapt an extremeline existing techniques already in use, reducing costs, improving form and function, increasing durability, and reducing energy and raw material requirements. Macroinventions, on the other hand, are those inventions in which a radical new idea, without clear precedent, emerges more or less ab nihilo. In terms of sheer numbers, micro inventions are far more frequent and account for most gains in productivity. Macroinventions, however, are equally crucial in technological history."

"The distinction between micro- and macroinventions is useful because, as historians of technology emphasize, the word first is hazardous in this literature. . Many technological breakthroughs had a history that began before the event generally regarded as “the invention,” and almost all macroinventions required subsequent improvements to make them operational. Yet in a large number of cases, one or two identifiable events were crucial. Without such breakthroughs technological progress would eventually fizzle out."

"The physical and social environment is important in determining the actions of individuals, although it is not solely responsible for the outcome."

"Nowhere is patriarchy's iron fist as naked as in the oppression of animals, which serves as the model and training ground for all other forms of oppression. Its three basic strategies — the club, the yoke, and the leash — operate similarly in the oppression of women and minorities. The club strategy is to kill animals for gain, sadistic pleasure, and the "affirmation of manhood." It is domination through brute force. The yoke strategy is to domesticate animals to carry burdens and pull vehicles; supply eggs, wool, and milk; and provide flesh and skins. It is domination through enslavement. The leash strategy is to tame animals to provide the psychic benefits of direct rule of master over pet. It is domination through deceit. … It is a surprisingly close progression from hunting animals to hunting and torturing people — catching and lynching blacks or "smoking out" Jews during the Holocaust."

"Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, [historian] Richard Pipes and many other American politicians and publicists are frozen in a mode of thought they developed a long time ago. With unchanging blindness and stubbornness they keep repeating and repeating this theory about the supposed age-old aggressiveness of Russia, without taking into consideration today's reality."

"Within a month of taking control of the German government, the Nazis suspended constitutional guarantees of the inviolability of private property. Property was to be respected, but only as long as the owner used it for the benefit of the nation and state: in the words of a Nazi theorist, ‘[P]roperty was . . . no longer a private affair but a kind of State concession, limited by the condition that it be put to ‘correct’ use.’"

"At the same time, Kissinger, Carter and détente were condemned as weakening the West by a group of conservative Democrats led by Henry (Scoop) Jackson, a critic of SALT, as well as by key Republicans who were influential in the Ford administration (1974–7), notably his Chief of Staff, Richard (Dick) Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. They drew on advice from commentators such as Richard Perle, Richard Pipes and Paul Wolfowitz who warned about Soviet intentions. The continuity of this group, through 1990s’ opposition to Clintonian liberal internationalism, to the neo-conservative activism of the early 2000s, especially against Iraq, is notable."

"The Cold War remained a struggle for Western minds as much as a competition in weapons development. All academic institutes and political ‘think tanks’ in the USA were hostile to the Soviet Union. The same was true of most such bodies in western Europe (although a few of them produced work untouched by criticism of Soviet history and politics). The great dividing line was the question what to do about the Kremlin. One wing of opinion wanted a stronger position to be adopted in any agreements with the USSR. Soviet politicians were depicted as slippery ideologues bent on internal repression and territorial expansion. If they wanted to trade with the USA, then they should be constrained to respect human rights as agreed in the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-Operation in Europe signed in Helsinki in August 1975. But better still would be the introduction of a cordon sanitaire around the communist states. Eventually, it was predicted, communism would implode in the USSR and elsewhere. Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes and Martin Malia were prominent in making the case. They argued that the communist order was doomed and that there was nothing to be gained by prolonging its death agony. The Soviet Union was the most pernicious existing example of totalitarianism, and the extension of its type of state to China, eastern Europe and other countries was the greatest tragedy of the second half of the twentieth century."

"The economic policies of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany resembled the ‘state socialism’ which Lenin wanted to institute in Soviet Union upon coming to power, under which private enterprise would work for the government—an idea Lenin was force to abandon under the pressure of the ‘Left Communists’."