LHC Mania

21 Days until the LHC gets turned on in Geneva!  I don’t understand science particulalry well, so I found claims that the LHC might destroy earth a little troubling.  But then, I read some more, and have come to realise that this seems to be a poor exercise in public reason. I am not sure what will happen when the LHC is turned on. Neither do the physicists. If they did, they would not say there is a miniscule chance of danger. They are saying miniscule because they cannot think of any danger they could create given the world as they understand it.

My favorite argument against the LHC is the one which takes the form: “According to Hawking’s theory of the universe, black holes will burn off Hawking radiation… but Hawking’s theories are disputed.”  Of course, as I understand it, you have to agree with Hawking’s theories about the universe to expect mini black holes MIGHT be created in the first place.  I don’t know much about cosmology, but I do think it seems like an unreasonable premise to be worried about a theoretical risk because you do not trust the cosmological understanding that generates the risk in the first place–I don’t think that you can sort of grocery shop what you do and don’t think quantum physics implies the way that critics are doing… maybe I’m wrong.

Mostly, I am thinking about Hume and inductive reasoning. The LHC seems to me to be a revelatory moment that we link our actions to expected outcomes with a strength much closer to habit than reason as to be a little upsetting.  Why do I think typing on my keyboard won’t destroy the universe?  It’s not because I can mentally rule out all possible catastrophic chains of events coming from writing this as much as because I do it all the time, and in fact, lots of people do it all the time and it seems to be a pretty safe physical collision almost every time (save carpal-tunnel syndrome and writing inflamatory messages).  I am not initially scared of a super-collider because I know that it will be dangerous. I am initially scared because I do not know what it does.  Even in acquiring enough information to believe that it is safe for the best possible reasons, and knowing that there is an inductive pattern of the same objections against smaller colliders that have all not destroyed earth, knowing that it might work does not provide the same comfort as experience. In that way, it is a great bogeyman of doomsday proclamation to threaten all future experience with destruction from an experiment that could not be more alien to me. Once I am honset about that, it becomes easier to come back to reason to restore my faith in it as how to make public decisions.

FISA Flowchart

This has been posted a lot of places, but I want to post it here in case someone has not seen it, and also so I can search my own blog to find it. It is two flowcharts that show the changes made to the FISA process in the new compromise bill.

Unitary Executive Theory Question

Do believers in the unitary executive believe that the Constitution somehow supercedes the Congressional power to designate particular bureacracies and their activities?  Here’s what I don’t get: I do not see how the Unitary Theory of the Executive makes the President the unrestricted “boss” of the whole executive branch without invalidating the bureacracies themselves.  If people have to do whatever the President orders regardless of what Congress thinks of such behavior, then the particular bureacratic designations of different bureacracies by Congressional Act is just some non-binding nicety that the President does not really have to follow.  If everyone simply does what the President tells them to do, it is simply a matter of personal choice for the President that the FBI looks like a recognizable version of the FBI, or Treasury, or OLC, or NSA.  If this is the case, what is the point of the Congressional acts creating bueacracies?  What would it mean, if anything, for Congress to withold passage of legislation for the creation of a bureacracy if the President can simply command existing bureacrats to do whatever the President orders, so long as no laws are violated, anyway?  What I mean is that if Congress creates an executive agency, it seems like they are creating a particular agency with particular functions rather than creating some alternative type of agency which their legislation does not create. In doing so, they seem to in effect be setting the rules of behavior for what the agency can do, and by implication cannot do.  If the Unitary Executive Theory believes that all executive activities are truly “fully vested” in the President alone, then it seems to me that the Cognressional acts that create “Agency X (and “Not Agency Y”) cannot be meaningful because if creating “Agency X” comes with no guarantee that you have also created “Not Agency Y,” then the entire reating of bureacratic agencies seems to be nonsensical.

Let me put it in an absurd example to help clarify what I am asking. If Congress creates a Federal Bureau of Investigations and specificies generally what the stated hopes and positive benefits are for creating the agency, and that the do so knowing that they are authorizing payment forthe FBI and that if it is not a “plus value” use of tax money on the whole, voters will get upst with them.  According to the Unitary Theory of the Executive, if the President deemed it acceptable for all FBI employees to play basketball games all day, every day, Congress has no authority to intervene. It is on the President’s shoulders to decide what count as prudent and imprudent use of his employees time in executivng the laws.  So, If any federal bureacratic agecy can be turned into a pick-up basketball league wihtout Congressional intervention, what’s the point of creating the agency in the first place?  I fear the answer is that the legislature has to trust the executive, but I am suspicious that there is some stronger argument that I am missing. I also suspect that the trick in selling this legal theory in argument rests largely in hoping that no one notices the massive amount of esirable political relationships that are desirable.  I wish I could pose the question more clearly, but maye that’s part of the reason I am puzzled. Any help out there?