In this occasional series on science, which started a year ago (2/06) with The Search for Dark Matter, I discussed Einstein's concept of special relativity last August in A Personal Journey Through Relativity.  Jack Wheeler provided an engaging account of it two years ago (2/05) in Aristotle, Einstein, and Ayn Rand.

Einstein though did not have a Theory of Relativity  -- ‘a' as in one.  He had two.  His Special Theory is about the relativity of time.  His General Theory is about the relativity of gravity.  The puzzles and paradoxes of the first pale in comparison to those of the second.

So much so that most anyone can visualize clocks telling time at different rates and astronauts coming back from another galaxy much younger than the people they left on earth.  The math and explanations may be hard but one can at least visualize the effects of special relativity.

It seems well-nigh impossible to visualize gravity not as a force but as a manifestation of curved space.

Jack,
An independent Ph.D. energy economist disagrees with your dismissal of LNG (liquefied natural gas).  He claims "it's economic to transport LNG at $3-3.50 mBTU [million British Thermal Units]," and that "if the world price is high enough, it will make economic sense for producers to liquefy it and send it to China."  In other words, natural gas (NG) is not "de-coupled" from the world market as you say.  He asserts that natural gas is "just as fungible as oil."

John M.

Reply:

John,
Could this fellow be shilling for Chevron or some other outfit hyping LNG?

There was nothing particularly new about President Obama's remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast the other day.  Not that it's unimportant.  It's extremely important. 

But the unfortunate notion that all religions, and indeed all cultures, are morally equivalent has been with us a long time, and it's very fashionable. 

It's now the conventional liberal wisdom, as a matter of fact.  Even Pope Francis is a member of the liberals' Multi-Culti Cult.

I'm not going to dwell on the silly anachronisms and false parallels in the speech - Governor Jindal did it best, I think, when he told the president to relax about medieval Catholicism and focus his concerns on contemporary Islamism - but rather on what we're supposed to do when we encounter religious views that offend us, or seem threatening to us.  

Obama basically said we should just shut up. His remarks weren't made in a theoretical debate.  They come shortly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, and other barbaric acts in the name of radical Islam.  They are part of the doctrine of multiculturalism or "multi-culti," which started as "culturalism," early in the last century.

The Main Enemy:  Islamism
Chapter III: The Ideology of Radical Islam

How did all the recent advances of Islamism, which we summarized in Chapter II, come to pass with little notice in the space of just a few decades?

It is, of course, true that dogmatic orthodoxy and extremism, including its most violent forms, is nothing new in Islam and that Moslem history is replete with movements and individuals who have tried to impose their version of Islamic orthodoxy on fellow Moslems.

Yet the actual practice of Islamic societies, as shall be shown in the next chapter, has been considerably different, in that sharia law, despite being paid lip service to on a regular basis, was seldom applied to governance except as family law.

Contemporary Radical Islam, on the other hand, though seeking religious legitimization in sharia and age-old Islamic dogma, is a modern phenomenon that has more in common with totalitarian revolutionary movements than with any kind of transitory "Islamic revival" as many have argued.

Understanding its Nazi/Communist totalitarian ideological nature and its modus operandi as a highly organized revolutionary movement is essential for comprehending the nature of the threat it poses and designing a strategy to defeat it.