How do I write a confession when I don’t know how to write?
I was tortured. I confessed to everything. As I write I am unsure I will have courage enough to publish. For one thing, the odds seem good I may have actually done some version of the shameful things I confessed.
Shame is a powerful motivator. It drives a person to hide, to cover-up, to deny, to forget. It can induce a form of stress psychologists call cognitive dissonance. The chasm between what I think I am and what my tormentors tell me I am becomes too wide. The personality begins to unravel.
N-no. M-my eye doesn’t itch.
Fear, on the other hand, drives a person to act, to survive, to do whatever it takes to reach safety.
Or it can induce a state of paralysis.
Either way, fear intensifies cognitive dissonance to a level where the accused becomes intolerant. Dissonance becomes painful. The sufferer must find release. One way is to confess — confess and become compliant.
This dynamic works well when a person believes they’ve done wrong, and not well when they don’t. Inducing fear to intensify shame is one thing torturers do. When managed skillfully, guilty people confess their crimes. The innocent don’t — most of the time, anyway.
It’s why torture works. Confessing reduces shame through the cathartic admission of guilt. And it offers the hope of freeing the confessor from further physical discomfort.
If torture is not overly arduous, an accused person has a chance to resist with enough vigor to establish their innocence.
”You stole my contacts,” Wild-Man said.
I’m not going to detail what the authorities did to get me to write a four-page signed confession. But the gist is, they threw a psychotic arrestee into my cell. The first thing he did was grab my shoes and hurl them against the wall. (The authorities had told me to tie them together to use as a pillow.)
Wild-Man accused me of stealing his contact lenses. I looked him in the eyes and told him as carefully and with as much love as I could muster, it was good he came to my area, because now we could look for his contact lenses together.
We spent the next twenty-five minutes on our hands and knees searching every square inch of my tiny cell.
When the authorities realized I had taken control of Wild-Man, they came into the cell and led him away. After a few minutes passed, a uniformed woman brought me a legal pad and asked me to write my confession.
Unsure of what was coming next I sat on the cold floor and started to write. Forty-five minutes later on page three I began spilling my guts; I confessed to everything I thought they thought I did.
Many unnerving things occurred after I “confessed.” As I struggled to sleep, someone slammed a steel door over and again to keep me awake. Someone pumped bone chilling cold into my cell. The air made me shake and induced an arthritic pain from which I suffer to this day.
After a night of no sleep someone served a breakfast of curdled milk and soggy hamburger.
Eventually the authorities released me. I learned then that the city newspaper had published parts of my confession on its editorial page.
I was doing OK, until they fed me bad hamburger.
I decided to fully cooperate with the various authorities who handled me during the following months or years, whatever it was going to be. After pleading guilty, a judge sentenced me to probation and community service.
I worked hard. Case workers reported I was remorseful and repentant. They added, I was cooperative and helpful. During community service the people I worked for reported that I was conscientious. I fixed things that were broken. I looked for novel ways to help the needy people who relied on people in trouble with the law to assist them for no fee.
The authorities expunged my crime from public records. The judge set aside my guilty plea. My torturers assured me that my anonymity would be protected as long as I remained the model citizen that I always was before my arrest.
Best of all, they will confirm that I have not committed even a single crime since. Their modification of my behavior has been a complete success.
Opposition to Barack Obama’s health care law began six years ago, before he was even elected President. Opposition has continued through his presidency — Intense, persistent, unabated. As I write this article, advertising against “ObamaCare” is running around the clock in every state.
In June 2013 the Supreme Court overturned part of the new law to allow states to opt out of Medicaid expansion. All the Confederate states except Kentucky opted out, as did Maine and Wisconsin in the north, and the eight central states that divide the country down its middle, north to south.
One-half of the Medicaid-eligible uninsured live in these twenty-one states — five million people. Because their states opted out, these five million folks will continue to lack health insurance long after the rest of us are fully enrolled.
In addition, twenty-eight states refused to set up health care exchanges. This lack of cooperation continues to complicate the roll-out process and adds an unplanned-for burden to the new health plan.
What’s going on here? Anyone with common sense and a knowledge of history knows exactly why the opposition is relentless. Racism is at the heart of our politics, and we have a black president who proposed a universal health care law that enables Negroes in America to finally get health insurance like the rest of us. It’s that simple.
I am sure that only a very few of those who oppose “ObamaCare” would agree that their opposition is racially motivated. People don’t generally examine themselves or their motives. Nor do most people want to change. It’s the part of being human to which the writer of Genesis alluded when he wrote, The Lord saw that the inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.
Few people believe they are evil or even capable of it. No one believes they’re racist, even when it’s obvious to everyone else. Just because messing with the Affordable Care Act has wrecked havoc on minorities and the poor in the states that opted out doesn’t mean we’re mean-spirited, opponents say. We have our reasons.
Are there otherreasons people despise “ObamaCare” that aren’t racist? Of course. Some have to do with greed. The USA has the most expensive health care in the world. People who care have to ask: why?
One possibility is that the USA — unlike most countries — no longer limits incomes.
In the 1980s Congress removed caps on incomes by lowering top-bracket federal tax rates from 92% to 28% (later adjusted to 35%). For the first time since before the Great Depression people could make and keep as much money as they could get their hands on. Owners and executives began to pay themselves as much cash as they could squeeze out of their companies.
Artist’s conception of greed gone wild. Some Americans consider selfish greed a virtue.
Driving down wages, overcharging customers, and misrepresenting company assets & income to accrue additional tax advantages can and does result in huge windfalls, which leaders are now able to keep — under the new tax codes — for their personal enrichment.
Business owners who once spent money to strengthen their company’s infrastructure — or to bolster wages and benefits for employees — now divert it into ridiculous pay packages for themselves and their executives.
In 1990 the USA spent five hundred billion dollars on health-care. Today it’s two-and-a-half trillion — five times as much. Most of the money has gone into increased compensation for “top” doctors and health care company owners and executives.
Excessive compensation of “specialists”, owners, and high-level executives is an embarrassment to our country and a disgrace. It is the reason USA health-care is notoriously expensive and has, during the past few years, soared beyond the grasp of most median-income families.
The wealthy custodians of America’s most lucrative cash cow — the vast health care industry — are in the fight of their lives to keep government as far away as possible from their private treasure trove.
People laughed at this joke. Is it funny?
Under Obama’s presidency racism and greed have joined forces to deny tens of millions of Americans affordable health care. The national campaign to smear the ACA and degrade support by labeling it “ObamaCare” (after the hated Negro president) has been successful enough that people actually laughed at the joke illustrated above when it played on late night television. The put-down went viral on the Internet.
Let’s be clear. Buying health insurance is not mandatory. People who choose not to buy health insurance forfeit a tax deduction — same as when they choose not to buy a house. Why is this hard to understand?
And by the way, deadlines and cut-off dates don’t increase enrollments. They decrease them. They were a concession to opponents in exchange for votes of support.
What have been the unintended consequences of the campaign to destroy the Affordable Care Act? This is where Jimmy Fallon got it right. It has been a Cinderella story.
When this debate is over the blue shirt will know more than the green shirt. Why?
Opposition has worked the way competition between companies sometimes does. It forced advocates to confront errors and mistakes. It compelled the builders of the ACA to address problems sometimes overlooked during roll-outs of big national programs like Social Security and NASA.
Opposition sharpened wits and forced clear thinking from people who might have been tempted to overlook issues until after the roll-out. It mandated an all-hands-on-deck approach to solving the problems of the Health Exchanges after opponents pointed them out.
Love overcomes hate. Believe it.
When people write the history of the Affordable Care Act a hundred years from now, I believe they will say the ACA had a smoother roll-out than many of the successful government projects introduced during the twentieth century.
They will point out that the ACA became the model for the programs of the twenty-first century. They will remember Barack Obama as one of our best and most beloved Presidents.
And once again history will teach people the age-old lesson. Love is more powerful than hate.
And what is love if it’s not helping suffering people who stand helpless before diseases they don’t understand, which will kill them if those who are healthy turn their backs?
May those Americans given much always be a grateful people who offer hope and comfort to the sick and disadvantaged who live all around.
If the United States divested the wealth of the 100,000 wealthiest Americans but allowed divested persons to keep one million dollars to sustain themselves, what could it do with the money?
The question deserves an answer.
The answer may surprise people. Some say the United States could completely pay off the national debt of 17.4 trillion dollars and run the government at current spending levels (5.6 trillion dollars per year) for the next five years. Taxes on everyone, including the wealthy could be completely eliminated for half a decade — until 2020.
Tools of a typical tax accountant: calculator; complicated forms; toy blocks.
As a practical matter, the United States can’t divest 100,000 of its wealthiest citizens — not without crashing the economy. And, sadly, information about wealth and its distribution is frustratingly opaque. Economists can’t trust what they think they know.
Nevertheless, the United States can put in place tax policies that lift the burdens of filing and paying taxes from the backs of the vast majority of citizens. It can easily pay for things like education, health care, research, and retirement while stimulating economic investment and growth. And it can protect our freedoms and egalitarian way of life from individuals who have sequestered an unreasonable share of our resources. (Read Capitalism and Income Inequality elsewhere on this site.)
This is the visible hand.
The wealthy, and those who support them, tell us that the closer a civilization resembles the natural order of things — that is, a state with the least amount of government possible — the better off that civilization will be. The invisible hand of free markets will enhance the destinies of all. Free markets, fewer taxes, fewer regulations — policies like these take the brakes off the economy and improve everyone’s lives.
Since we all plan to be wealthy someday, what could possibly be wrong with reasoning like that?
Bullies rule on unregulated playgrounds.
Well, for one thing, it ignores why folks create civilizations in the first place. In the eons before civilization, humans made little progress. Think of an unregulated school yard or imagine a jungle with no rules. What always happens? Bullies and predators end up running everything. The meek and the fragile have to hide or be eaten. Whatever ideas or contributions they might make to enhance the quality of life get lost.
It’s been like this in jungles and on playgrounds for as long as jungles and playgrounds have existed. It’s never going to change. It’s why folks need playground teachers and yes, civilization. With civilization we can organize ourselves. We can make rules to protect the weak and improve the lives of both predators and prey.
We know from history, it’s the powerful who create civilizations to protect their advantages. For thousands of years bullies in expensive garb have run the show on every continent on Earth.
Our nation’s founders said that all people were created equal before God.
Two-hundred-and-forty years ago something new came along. Our ancestors won a revolution. They organized a civilization that would eventually empower the powerless and give voice to the weak.
Yes, they codified slavery, because what else could they do? Africans had been slaves in America for a hundred years already. For a hundred-and-fifty years two-thirds of whites had come to America as indentured servants, a temporary form of slavery that ended, typically, after seven years of servitude.
The habits of history weighed heavily on our founders, and being unsure of their steps, they gave-in to the pressures of greed to better form the consensus that would permit the birth of something new in the world. And guess what? Our new-born civilization grew up, matured and ninety years later ended slavery in the United States of America.
Earth needed a new way — a way based on the dignity of people, their rights before God, their need to be free from humiliation by others more powerful and crafty than themselves. They needed a new kind of civilization, and our founders found a way to build it, blemished and imperfect as it was.
It took time; it didn’t happen overnight. I was twenty years old before black folks got the right to shop freely; to buy a soda in a drugstore; to buy a house; to get a loan. Maybe two-hundred years seems like a long time for a constitutional republic to get serious about freedom for individuals and families. It is a long time. We might as well admit it.
The flag should stand for what is right, just, and fair. It is the symbol of our civilization.
Today, as the civilization we built slides into the shadows of an unregulated jungle, people need to stand up and shout, No! This can’t be right. In a civilization built by hundreds of millions, we can’t let a few thousand of the most clever humans sequester twenty-five percent of the wealth. It’s an unreasonable reward for cleverness, and it’s unfair.
Why did our ancestors build the civilization we call America? Why did they take hundreds of years to shape and change our way of governance?
It’s because they intended to make America succeed for everybody. I’d like to believe that they didn’t want it looted and plundered by the powerful. They didn’t intend for average people to be “gated” out of the desirable places to live, or for the disadvantaged poor to be locked away to rot deep inside our inner cities.
We still have work to do. The work falls on each generation to make the world a fairer, safer, more loving place for every person who lives and breathes.
Thomas Piketty was an instructor of economics at MIT during the 1990s; he is the founder, Paris School of Economics; Director, Department of Social Sciences, Ecole Normale Supérieure; and Director of Studies, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Fortunately, America has allies around the world ready and able to help do what’s right, if we only listen. One is Thomas Piketty, the French economist.
I’m excited about this book. Many reviewers say it’s important. It is the culmination of years of research by a brilliant scholar. It presents, I’m told, a paradigm shift in thinking about the problems economies have delivering fairness to average people.
If Piketty’s book strengthens the courage of economists in the United States to speak openly about the touchy subject of inequality, he will have done our country and its people an enormous favor.
Gold jewelry and coins held in an overseas bank.
The United States, though proud of its wealth, seems to go to great lengths to under-report it. It’s primary focus is to collect taxes, I guess.
Assets not subject to taxation hold little interest for government accountants. The Feds limit their count to households and tell us that our total wealth is 54 trillion dollars. Other economists say it is higher — maybe as much as 188 trillion; they include in their tally many assets not normally taxed.
The subject of how wealthy America really is — who holds the wealth and in what amounts — is murky at best. According to John Cassidy, Thomas Piketty’s call for households to declare their net worth and be taxed on it will provide the reliable statistics needed to un-muddy the waters and enable policy makers to fashion the sound and fair tax policies required to protect the benefits of civilization for everyone.
Billy Lee
Post Script:Billy Lee advocates for a standard of maximum personal-incomes and estate-sizes established by the United Nations as ratios pegged to each country’s minimum wage. Violations would be treated as felonies by international courts.
Billy Lee’s proposal and some of its economic and moral advantages are described in the article, Capitalism and Income Inequality. The Editorial Board
I hope by now you’ve read my article, Scale. It hints at something odd about the Universe.
Saturn back-lit by the Sun. Earth is the tiny dot inside the artist’s circle to the left of the gas giant. In this pic Earth is 900 million miles or so into the page behind Saturn. Click pic to enlarge in new window.
When looking up into the night sky people sense the vast distances between the objects they see. But when looking down at the ground they experience something different. It seems that objects are solid, without internal structure.
No one can know by looking that solid objects are made of tiny molecules separated from each other by tiny gaps. Even sophisticated instruments like microscopes provide experimenters with no chance of seeing any molecules. Molecules are too small.
This algae is a single cell composed of many billions of molecules.
Think about it. No one has ever seen a molecule.
No one.
Computers have created pictures based on programming rules and data from sensors to provide an idea of what molecules might look like — if molecules lived in the world at human scales and reacted to sensors and probes the way people do. But, of course, they don’t.
Model of a single porin molecule. These molecules stack to create tunnels for passage of smaller molecules through cell membranes. Each molecule is made from hundreds of atoms.
Few professors emphasize to kids in freshman chemistry, as far as I know, that they are learning the rules from models of molecules which have been invented — fabricated — to help make sense of lab experiments done on substances that are able to be touched by hands and seen with unaided eyes.
Worse, visual models can never be realistic when applied to the objects scientists call atoms. Atoms are what molecules are made from. They must be completely fanciful. It’s true. Scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs) have been used since 1981 to “feel” the forces of atoms with “nano” probes. Based on plots of these forces, pictures of atoms that look like stacked billiard balls are generated by computer algorithms.
Whatever it is that atoms are, they aren’t resolvable with light, which is what brains use to view and imagine things. The constituents of atoms are quantum objects that don’t behave like anything familiar to ordinary life. Everything folks think they know about atoms is made-up by scientists who are struggling to make sense of the way substances behave under every set of experimental circumstances imaginable.
Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) provided data to an IBM computer, which constructed this image of a benzene molecule. This technology cannot resolve the structure of the individual atoms, which impart to the molecule its geometric shape and electrical properties.
Scientists have invented models of atoms, which are made from protons, neutrons and electrons (that whirl inside s, p, d, f & g orbitals) — whatever — to aid their thinking. No one examines an atom to see if it looks like its model, because they can’t.
Whatever it is scientists are modeling can’t be seen by eyes or microscopes. If the model helps scientists predict what will happen in experiments, they are OK with it. Physicist Stephen Hawking calls it model-dependent realism. The models are good enough.
Artist rendering of quarks. It is impossible to see quarks or to know what they really are. They were invented by physicists to help make sense of experiments done in particle colliders, which show that protons, for example, cannot be fundamental, but must have (thus far) unobservable internal structures, which in the case of protons are most realistically modeled by two ”up” quarks and one ”down”. Quarks have color as well, to help explain their interactions with gluons — which carry the ”strong force”.
During the past fifty years or so experiments have revealed new layers of complexity, which older models of the atom don’t address. So scientists have devised new models to help them reason more clearly about the strange events they were observing.
Scientists invented more structures and more “particles” — quarks being the best known — to explain and simplify the fantastic results of recent experiments.
Before the idea of the quark, scientists struggled with the complexity of a theory that included hundreds of particles. Frustrated physicists referred to the complexity as the “particle zoo.” After the theory of quarks was accepted, the number of particles in the “standard model” dropped to seventeen.
Periodic optical lattice potentials for atoms. At a certain ‘magic wavelength’ of the trapping light one finds identical polarizabilities for ground state atoms and Rydberg atoms (see the inset), such that the trapping strength no longer depends on the internal atomic state. (Excuse me, but anyone who understands what they just read is a genius, a mad scientist, or both.)
Some current models of the subatomic world postulate point-size masses immersed in vast volumes of interstitial space. These models reflect the mathematics used to build them, but are probably not helpful for understanding what is really going on.
John Wheeler, the theoretical physicist who coined the terms worm-hole and quantum-foam, said this about the very small: …every item of the physical world has at bottom — a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation…
At the smallest scale anyone can realistically work with — the scale of molecules — the structure of matter is dense. The space between molecules in a lattice is not much larger than the size of the molecules.
The force fields inside the molecular lattice are powerful — powerful enough to make the lattice impermeable. Vast volumes of empty space don’t exist within. Matter and energy seem to be working together in a kind of soup of symbiotic equivalence.
Atlas particle detector at CERN. See human inside for scale. Are they kidding? This monster machine detects so-called ”particles” that cannot be seen by humans, even with microscopes.
It might be reasonable to expect that at smaller scales, forces and fields take over. Matter, as folks usually think of it, is gone. Fields (whatever they might really be) predominate. When fields interact with detectors, the detectors provide data as if they interacted with massive particles immersed in vast volumes of empty space.
It might be an illusion that leads people to miss an underlying reality of smaller scales — descent into the abyss of small scales reveals regions of disproportionately less space, not more. The stairway to smaller scales may lead to densities of force/energy and limitations of space/time like those found in black holes.
In a typical black hole — a hundred million may inhabit the Milky Way Galaxy — a typical event horizon might have a circumference of thirty miles. Its diameter could measure millions of miles. Dimensions like these violate the Euclidean rules of geometry everyone expects. According to the rules, a spheroidal event horizon with a thirty mile circumference can’t measure more than ten miles across.
A diameter of millions of miles for an object with a thirty mile circumference seems crazy at first, until the implications of relativity are examined, which demand that the volume of space and span of time within a black hole be densely distorted and wildly warped.
A black hole contains within its volume the energy-equivalent of all the matter of the collapsed and vanished star that formed it plus all the energy-equivalent of any other matter that may have fallen into it. It is a region mostly devoid of matter — it is energy rich but matter impoverished — analogous perhaps to those tiny spaces some think might exist within and between atoms and inside the sub-atomic realms of ordinary matter.
Said plainly, whatever exists at tiny scales is not understood, but maybe knowledge about black holes can provide insights. I think so. The problem: knowledge about black holes is speculation based on mathematics; unless we are already living inside a black hole, no one can experimentally verify the ideas of smart and talented people like Stephen Hawking, for example.
The problem of understanding the very small is serious. The most advanced particle detector humans can afford to build blows up protons to examine their debris field. The detector “looks at” debris that measures about 1/100th the size of the protons it smashes. Accelerators — like the one at CERN — can’t “see” anything smaller.
From these tiny pieces of accelerator-trash theories of nature are fashioned. The inability to resolve the super small stuff is a problem. No one can see quarks, for example. Scientists at the ALICE Lab at CERN hope to fashion a “work around” by using the nuclei of iron atoms to make progress in the coming years.
To examine debris at Planck scales — which would answer everyone’s questions — requires a resolution many trillions of times greater than CERN can deliver. Such a machine would have to be much larger than the one at CERN. It would have to be larger than the solar system. In fact, it would have to be larger than the Milky Way Galaxy. Even then, the uncertainty principle guarantees that such a machine could not remove all the quantum fuzziness from whatever images it might create.
Nima Arkani-Hamed, theoretical physicist, born April 5, 1972
According to IAS theoretical physicist, Nima Arkani-Hamed, it might be possible to burrow down to an understanding of the very small by using pure thought — as long as it is consistent with the mathematics that is already known for sure about quantum physics and relativity theory. The problem is, no one will ever be able to confirm the new models by doing an experiment.
The good news, Nema says, is that constraints imposed by knowledge already confirmed may so reduce the number of paths to truth that somebody might find a way that is unique, sufficient, and exclusive. If so, folks can have confidence in it, though experimental verification may lie well beyond the reach of technology.
But again, fundamental problems — like trying to observe an intact, whole atom — remain. No technology of any kind exists that will permit anyone to observe an entire atom at once and resolve its parts.
Physicists are reduced to using what they learn from observing atomic-scale debris to help fashion, in their imaginations, what such an entity might “look” like. No one will ever have the holistic satisfaction of holding an atom in their experimental hands, observing it, and pushing on its quantum-endowed components to see what happens.
Artist rendering of an alchemy research laboratory.
Where does it all lead? At this stage in its history, science is struggling to figure out what’s happening.
In the USA, (where the big money is) science seems to serve the military and companies struggling to create products that capture the imagination and pocketbooks of a buying public. For the moment at least, science is preoccupied with serving better those who pay for its services.
But someday — hopefully soon — scientists may refocus their considerable talents on the questions that really matter most to people:
Where are we? What, exactly, is this place? Is anyone in charge?
Airlines spend serious money to convince consumers flying is safe. Not only is flying safe, they insist, but it is waymore safe than driving.
The Miracle on the Hudson improved airline mortality statistics, because no one died. (78 were injured)
Why is it, then — every time some folks board planes, settle into the seat, place the tray-table up and the seat-back in the upright position, hear the engines ignite and roar, and feel the pull of the plane against their backs — hands begin to sweat, the heart pounds, guts squirm, and minds start screaming helpless, desperate questions: What if they’re wrong? What if I die? Why didn’t I take the car?
If anyone is like me, they enter a car to go somewhere five or six times a day. In other words, people participate in driving events thousands of times a year. Is it really possible that boarding a plane thousands of times a year is safer than driving? Many humans would die from heart attacks alone, if they did such a thing.
Even if anyone has two or three car accidents per year, it is unlikely that someone will die. In fact, stats reveal that one auto-related death occurs per 100 million driving miles. It amounts to 3.4 million hours of driving.
It’s equivalent to one driver navigating their vehicle 390 years continuously — 24/7 — without a break. Does anyone believe an airplane of any kind at all can fly that many years accident-free? When it crashes, hundreds of passengers die. It’s not so hard to figure out.
When airplanes, helicopters, and jets crash, it is unlikely anyone will survive. An aircraft must fly perfectly or people die, more times than not.
Not so with cars.
This accident in San Francisco had little effect on mortality statistics for the Boeing 777, because only three people died. (181 were injured)
It’s probably un-helpful to spout a bunch of numbers and ratios and statistics to prove the obvious. People in panic-mode don’t do well with numbers, anyway.
But let me make this observation: smart people in the airline industry are serving up a mess of misleading statistics to get the flying public to underestimate the risks of boarding an airplane.
Guess what? Airlines perform this charade to separate the traveling public from its money. Is anyone surprised?
The only way flying will ever be safer than driving is if folks fly as few times a year as possible. All the favorable statistics airlines like to quote rest on this simple premise: If people fly less, they are less likely to die.
People get into planes fewer times than into cars. Therefore flying is safer than driving. Cogito ergo sum. Quoderat demonstrandum.
Arrow points to intact flight-cabin during Challenger disaster.
Remembering the Space Shuttle program may bring the point into sharper focus. As the public knows now, the government discontinued the space-shuttle after observers pointed out that it was unreasonably dangerous to the astronauts.
At first the program seemed safe. Then an accident took a dozen lives. Afterward, it was safe again. Then another accident. More deaths.
Soon it became obvious. Every thirty flights the program was going to lose an entire crew. A way to improve the odds couldn’t be found. The program was scrapped.
The government threw up its hands and said: Let private companies handle the space program. Look at the great job they are doing for the airlines.
