name=crazyHeinlein Got It Right
Americans are considered crazy anywhere in the world.
They will usually concede a basis for the accusation, but point to California as the focus of the infection. Californians stoutly maintain that their bad reputation is derived solely firom the acts of the inhabitants of Los Angeles County. Angelenos will, when pressed, admit the charge but explain hastily, "It's Hollywood. It's not our fault--we didn't ask for it. Hollywood just grew."
The people in Hollywood don't care; they glory in it.
--And He Built a Crooked House--, by Robert A. Heinlein
The Bogotomaths
One of the nice things about mathematics is that a theorem, once proved, stays proved, with very few exceptions (and those, such as the Russell paradox, don't affect this discussion, because they got fixed). Math is thus the least bogus of the realms of human endeavor.
Now that doesn't mean that mathematicians are immune to bogosity. When they aren't proving theorems, they are as bad off as the rest of us. That includes any time when they are talking about their opinions of what math should be, rather than about what we can prove. The most egregious example was the Nazi campaign against "Jewish mathematics", specifically against George Cantor's theory of infinite numbers. Today Cantor's work is fundamental to every branch of mathematics. In Cantor's own time, and for decades afterward, it was denounced by mathematicians, who at least had some idea what the issues were, and by anti-Semitic German nationalists who didn't know and didn't care about the substance of the mathematical questions.
The earlist historical example of utter bogosity in mathematics is due to Pythagoras. One of his disciples proved that the side and diagonal of a square cannot be measured as integral multiples of the same length, or equivalently, that the square root of 2 is not a ratio of whole numbers. Pythagoras had him taken out to sea and drowned.
In both of these cases, and in a few others that have occured over the millenia, the difference between what mathematicians can prove and what they believe they should be able to prove spilled over into religious and political controversy. The Pythagoreans were a religious brotherhood (although there was one woman admitted as a member), and of course we know about the 19th century German nationalists and the Nazis.
Pythagoras was certain--absolutely, totally, positively certain--that everything in nature could be represented by the counting numbers, or as we would say today, positive integers (no zero, which wasn't invented intul much later). If the side of a square is taken as the unit length, then the length of the diagonal is the square root of 2. So the Pythagorean who proved that the square root of 2 is irrational prompted Pythagoras to go into a murderous rage.
Later, Greek mathematicians thought that everything in geometry could be constructed by ruler and compass, and were flummoxed when the oracle of Apollo called on them to construct the cube root of two (actually, to construct a cube twice the volume of another cube, but it comes to the same thing). This time they took it better, and only killed a hundred bulls (as a sacrifice to the god, of course). Much later, non-Euclidean geometry and "imaginary" numbers struggled for acceptance for centuries, but nobody got killed over them. Then there was Cantor.
Cantor's ancestry was Jewish, but he wasn't a religious Jew (which made no difference to racist anti-Semites, of course). The name Cantor refers to the singer who is a vital part of Jewish religious services, as you can see in Eddy Cantor's movie
The Jazz Singer.
Anyway, our Cantor proved that there are more points on a line than there are counting numbers, and that there were more functions than numbers, and then kept right on going, proving that no matter how many infinite numbers we find, even more remain. This contradicted an old idea of Aristotle's, who held that there was no actual infinity in mathematics. At most there was the "potential" infinity of the length of a line that can be extended past any possible limit, or of the counting numbers, where we can always count higher. A real infinity, and an even bigger infinity, and then a never-ending infinitiy of infinities, was too much for them. As a result, the Nazis and their allies the Italian Fascists drove out or killed all of their Jewish mathematicians and scientists, and anybody who objected. And as a result of
that, the US got the bomb first, due to the efforts of the emigré scientists, including Fermi, Einstein, and Szilard.
Can we draw a moral from all of this? Well, one clear conclusion is that if you manage not to be bogus, that certainly doesn't mean that you will be safe. But we knew that. More significantly, if you want not to be bogus, you have to be prepared to go where the truth takes you, even if it makes your head explode. Religious and political prejudices, and even mathematical prejudices (prejudice of course being a sufficient condition for bogosity) can result in murderous rage against the messenger under some circumstances. You can't avoid having opinions. You can, however, remember that opinion is what you think you know, and you have to be ready to give it up if it turns out that it just ain't so.
California Schemin'
Well, ladies and gentlement, it's official. The California recall election is bo-o-o-ogus. It's so bogus that Dave Barry is complaining about California trying to grab back the title of Doofus State from Florida. There are 190 candidates registered to be on the ballot.
According to the current poll results, here is how the election would come out if held today.
Round 1 Recall: Gray Davis gets 46% of the vote, and loses.
Round 2 Replacement: Arnold Schwarzenegger gets 25% of the vote, and wins. By law, Gray Davis can't be a candidate in the replacement election. Otherwis he would win if he could maintain 46% of the vote, and we obviously can't have that. It would go against the will of the people who just threw him out.
Round 3 The losing 75% start a petition drive to recall Arnold--the Democrats because he's a Republican, and the Republicans because as far as they are concerned he isn't.
Of course, we don't know how the real election in October will come out. Davis could win back the 4% he needs to stay in, or Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante could solidify Democratic support and beat Arnold. Whatever happens, we end up with a moderate Republican or a moderate, even centrist Democrat. Maybe California gets its first Latino governor, or maybe its first Austrian-American governor. Hooray for diversity!
In any case, none of this matters. Gray Davis and the Democratic legislature have muddled through the energy crisis and the economic meltdown with significant pain but without catastrophe. A Davis successor would have no better luck trying to invalidate long-term power contracts in the courts, and would face the same problems getting the required two-thirds majority in the legistlature for next year's California budget, even with a much lower projected deficit to cover. The Republicans will refuse adamantly to raise taxes, and the Democrats will refuse adamantly to cut programs. The deadline will be missed, the State's credit rating will suffer, and a compromise will eventuallly be reached, while pundits wring their hands over the broken state of California government.
Of course, "broken" means completely different things to the Right (Those Commie knee-jerk Liberals want us rich people to pay for their programs for the poor. Us! Can you believe it? They not only don't want to pay taxes, they want refundable tax credits for everything.) and the Left (Those Fascist Scrooges want us poor people to pay for their programs for the rich. Us! Can you believe it? They not only don't want to pay taxes, they want refundable tax credits for everything.).
