The World Moves Ahead to More Cool Stuff

Time for my monthly  cornucopia of cool (and non-political) news from the exciting world around us.

Brinvolved Items:

"FiRe CTO Design Challenge": Author, physicist, and host David Brin leads the challenge of "Water Beyond Tomorrow: Using Technology and Innovation to Provide San Diego (and the World) with Adequate Safe Water for Future Decades"  at this year’s “FiRe Conference (Future in Review). 

I had the honor of hosting and stimulating and challenging some of the brightes high technology officers in modern business, including: Sophie Vandebroek, CTO, Xerox, and President, Xerox Innovation Group; Eric Openshaw, Vice Chair and U.S. Technology Leader, Deloitte; Per-Kristian (Kris) Halvorsen, SVP and Chief Innovation Officer, Intuit; Ty Carlson, Architect, SiArch Group, Microsoft; and Joe Burton, CTO, Cisco.

I was interviewed on the BBC World Service on the issue of “bombing” a lunar crater to discover whether there is ice on the moon.  The interviewers worried deeply about littering... but it turned into a delightful and fairminded treatment of the topic.  If it is no longer up, I hope to post it at http://www.davidbrin.com

See an excellent and eye-opening article about The Participatory Panopticon, by Jamais Cascio, that includes an interview with David Brin about our ongoing rush toward a transparent society. 

Reminder that I still have one or two adult memberships to the Montreal World Science Fiction Convention "Anticipation" that I am willing to sell at a discount on the official price.


Non-Brinvolved Items:

See a new blog by the marvelous Beverly Price. 

See a fascinating interview with Robert Wright, one of the most important authors of our time, about his new book about the roots of religion.

  HPlus Magazine finally releases their new summer issue! It describes the already-existing brain/computer interfaces - and where they could take us - and explains Dartmouth-built robots whose artificial neurons can mimic the human learning process. There's 84 pages of online-only goodness, including laser-stimulated brain cells, artificial muscles, and an interview with NASA's director of research (who suggests robot exploration of Mars). And NPR's Moira Gunn assays the implications of the U.S.'s abrupt welcome for stem cell therapy.

Incredible!  The next game intreractive technology:

See the blog of the production company making "The People Vs George Lucas” --  a full length film, due next year, riffing off my book STAR WARS ON TRIAL.

Think Link appears to address some serious deficits in the current, sad state of "discourse" online.  I envision combining it with a good reputation system.  The result could be a real step toward the kind of "disputation arenas" I described in the American Bar Association's Journal of Dispute Resolution.

Somebody's thinking about What Comes After Email.  I have received several emails from people who think there are similarities to my Holocene Project... which I pitched at Google the same day that the patent was awarded, a while back.  Me?  At a first, hurried glance, I don’t see a whole lot of Holocene in Google Wave... but I can see that it would be vastly improved by incorporating Holocene concepts.  Alas, I have found that many bright fellows cannot see the hand in front of their face.  Ah well, I wish them well.  Opinions?

Stunning. And right now this volcano is affecting our sunsets and dipping global warming.

The issue of cyberwarfare. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/politics/29cyber.html?exprod=myyahoo

A simple way has been found to convert plant cellulose into , a basic building block for fuel, polyesters, and other petroleum-based chemicals...  to extract HMF from plants by using a mixture of copper chloride and chromium chloride to break down the cellulose without creating unwanted byproducts. The chlorides didn’t degrade, which meant that the process could be repeated using the same chemicals, reducing the cost of creating HMF while yielding a product with fewer impurities.  While still a ways off from commercial applications, the process shows promise in creating an alternative to plastics.

"Near-Term Beamed Sail Propulsion Missions: Cosmos-1 and Sun-Diver", James Benford and Gregory Benford, Beamed Energy Propulsion, AIP Conf. Proc. 664, pg. 358, A. Pakhomov, ed., 2003   Um... "Sundiver?

Apropos of tweeting, I couldn't resist sharing this find of Laurie Morrow's!  Do have a look

...and finally...

=== Are We inherently Empathic? ===

New research from Vanderbilt University indicates the way our brain handles how we move through space—including being able to imagine literally stepping into someone else's shoes—may be related to how and why we experience empathy toward others.  

Empathy involves, in part, the ability to simulate the internal states of others. The authors hypothesized that our ability to manipulate, rotate and simulate mental representations of the physical world, including our own bodies, would contribute significantly to our ability to empathize.  The researchers compared performance on the test with how empathetic the subjects reported themselves to be. They found that higher self-reported empathy was associated with paying more attention to the right side of space. Previous research has found that the left side of the face is more emotionally expressive than the right side. Since the left side of the face would be on the right side of the observer, it is possible that attending more to the expressive side of people's faces would allow one to better understand and respond to their mental state. These findings could also point to a role of the left hemisphere in empathy.  (contributed by Stefan.)

Yin vs Yang on Health Care: conservatives make a few points

Lighting the political lamp...  Let’s start with evidence that something special is going on. Everybody, you must watch this. Get to know the guy.  And make your conservatives watch, too. 

Of course, if there are folks on the right who remain impervious to reality.  (As there are some on the left.)  Indeed, the more sensible and moderate and consually wise Obama seems, the more extreme the fantasies concocted by the crazies.  And the more imperative it becomes, for reasonable conservatives to choose the real world. 

Speaking of which...


=== Some Conservatives Really Are Openminded ===

My friend, John Mauldin, the brilliant economic analyst, appears to have joined PIMCO’s Bill Gross and other “conservative realists” in breaking away from the standard right-wing doctrine about taxes.  Not in all ways or on all issues. But enough to declare independence form Rupert Murdoch’s party line.

For example, they are much more concerned about trillion dollar deficits than about the purported investment-stifling effects of somewhat higher taxes on the upper class.  Not only are they resigned (and imply some contentment) at seeing the Bush Era’s biggest set of “largesse” breaks for the wealthy expire, next year, they hint that a modest increase might be the least-bad way to reduce both those deficits and inequities in society.  You haven’t seen the punditocracy comment on this trend very much, on TV.  But it is a sea change among the brightest, reality-oriented conservatives and may represent the front of real change in republican circles, at least among those who see reason and patriotism and pragmatism as higher virtues than dogmatism.

And now... partly in order to honor those rational conservatives, and meet them partway, here’s something sure to rile a number of you.  A remise on last time’s topic of health care.  Only from an alternative perspective.


=== A contrarian view of health care ===

In case any of you have come to the false conclusion that I am a reflexive liberal democrat -- simply because I oppose the hijacked monstrosity that the Republican Party has become, let me make clear that I retain plenty of ways that I can exercise contrary orneriness toward the American left. There are times when even the Frankenstein, undead monster than conservatism has become can startle you, by uttering cogent and reasonable “Goldwater-style” objections, instead of the shrill mania pouring from the Murdoch-Limbaugh-Fox nexus.  We should be ready, whenever this happens, to heap on positive reinforcement rewards!  The biggest reward of all?  To actually listen.

One example is where decent conservatives point out genuine drawbacks to the state-run, “universal single payer” health care systems so widely touted in liberal circles.  As one who lived for extended periods in both Britain and France, I have to tell you that their systems have much we can learn from.. and also some serious flaws.  Without any doubt, they are vastly more fair than ours, and do a far better job at both preventive care and ensuring healthy lives for all kids -- which (as I said last time) should be the core goal of any system.  

If we must make a zero-sum choice between Canadian and US health care, then by all means, let’s dump a horror story, in favor of dull, unimaginative and paternalistically meddlesome decency.  But I am always suspicious of zero-sum games. If we’re to improve, we should recognize what the current U.S. system does well.  

Let’s start by giving conservatives their say. Here’s a quote from Dennis Gartman's eponymous newsletter. "Canada is a wonderful place to have a nasty gash on one's forehead stitched, or to break one's nose in a game of pickup baseball; but have cancer, or need eye surgery, or want an MRI, and the business of medicine in Canada and/or the UK breaks down badly in favor of medical care here in the US. For example... and we wish to thank The Investor's Business Daily for the data noted here this morning...
           "... here in the US men and women survived cancer at an average of just a bit better than 65%. In England only 46% survive. In the US, 93% of those diagnosed with diabetes receive treatment within six months; in Canada only 43% do, and in the UK only 15% do! For those seniors needing a hip replacement and getting one within six months, 15% get it done in the UK; 43% get it done in Canada ... and in the US 90% do! For those waiting to see a medical specialist, 23% of those in the US (fail to) get in within four weeks, while 57% in Canada have not yet done so, and in the UK 60% are still waiting after four weeks.  ......  When it comes to proper medical equipment, in the US there are 71 MRI or CT scanners available per million people. In Canada there are but 18, and in the UK there are only 14! Ah, but the best figure of all is this: 11.7% of those 'seniors' in the US with 'low incomes' say they are in excellent health, which in and of itself sounds rather low ... rather disconcerting ... and an indictment of the system itself, doesn't it? But in Canada only 5.8% do!
            "Yessiree bob, ya' jus' gotta' luv that collectivized, socialized medical care! Let's all go break a collective arm and enjoy the benefits of socialized medicine in the Commonwealth! (Canada) ... but heaven help you if you've got something really, really wrong. If that's the case, you'll be running south to the border faster than you can reach a specialist anywhere in Canada; of that we are certain."

Oh, sure, you can spot the use of cherry-picked statistics, right away. (See below.).  And you’ll note how Gartman airily dismisses the general preventive care that should be the heart and soul of any national system, especially aimed at kids, waving it away as stitching a “gash in the forehead.”  Also, I’d like to see comparison of his figures broken down by age group!  And, frankly, I’d like to smack his smug, dismissive face.  (He is not one of the of those “reasonable conservatives” I was talking about.)

Nevertheless, putting aside his reactionary reflex and total lack of humility, after his side allowed the calamity of the Bush years, still, Gartman has a point. Because what people tend to ignore is that all health care systems practice rationing.  There is simply no way to avoid it, as we all would pay any price, for any chance of health.  Thus, there is very little market elasticity.  We’ll take our dying loved one to the best doctor, period, and screw the price and screw second best.  Capitalist principles are very dicey here.  So are paternalistic ones.

The chief difference between the US and the rest of the civilized world is that we let profit-driven insurance companies do the rationing, and they do it based solely on profit considerations and whatever they can get away with.  By exiling people who have health conditions, by eliminating the poor, by refusing service for the passive or meek or less influential or less-litigious.  On the other hand, those who can pay, and fiercely enforce their insurance contracts, can get their companies to cover vast and endless expenses for procedures aimed even at extending, futilely, the very last and most painful phases of life.  The phases that take up to a fourth of all medical expense, in the United States.

Europe etc are different.  There, socialist-oid state committees ration procedures, based on criteria that seem to make sense both to those committees and to generally accepted social consensus.  While it seems both logical and laudable that they prioritize children and young adults and illnesses that can likely be cured -- a proper role for paternalistic single-payer systems -- it still seems heartless and callous that they pay for this by telling old people, or those with chronic or “hopeless” conditions that little will be spent on them.  Indeed, this is why many of the elderly rich, all over the world, fly to America for treatment.  

What is seldom mentioned is an added drawback to that system.  All the money that America spends (or grotesquely overspends) on unpleasantly difficult conditions - those with a poor prognosis - often results in improved science, treatment and success! In other words, the American system serves as the world’s medical R&D test bed.  This is why MRI machines were available here - for those who could pay out the nose - long before state commissions would buy them overseas.  (And boy, was I glad to get home and use one, back in 1992, even though it cost me $1,000!  Back in Europe, where I had lived, there simply weren’t any available.  At all.)

Is the rightwing wrong about Health Care?  Sure they are, as they have made a habit of being wrong about just about everything, ever since their movement and party drank Rupert Murdoch’s Koolaid and slid into mania, years ago.  The present US Health Care System is a travesty and outrage, period.  Nevertheless, the insistence of the Left upon simply adopting what they see overseas, without discussing the drawbacks, is both lazy and doctrinaire.  It is not worthy of a nation of innovators.

=== Start Down the Road Incrementally ===

Hence, let me return to something I said  before. We could derive the topmost benefit of European style health care if we start by simply providing health care to all kids!  Now, immediately.  Without any “insurance” rigmarole.   Take care of children.  Period. Right away.  Just do it!

One method that would take a one page piece of legislation?  Simply take Medicare and extend it to the other end of the spectrum, the other demographic group that is both helpless and deserving, by simple definition.  Or else, use the kids to experiment with single-payer.  Either way, the political opposition would be in a tough spot putting up much resistance!  Americans are inherently more socialistic when it comes to children than we feel toward adults (who, we think, almost instinctively, should stand on their own two feet.)  Moreover, it lets us act upon prevention and lifelong health investment in youth, by far the best use of medical care dollars.

Seriously, why isn’t this a no-brainer?  A win-win that would let Obama achieve wonders at a stroke, while keeping both cost and complexity down and achieving the greatest bang for the buck.  Poor parents would be relieved of their greatest fear and then be able to bargain better for their own, narrower coverage.  Can anyone explain why this isn’t even mentioned?

And then, with our future safeguarded and the very worst injustice solved, we can gather the best and most sensible people from all sides to compare apples, oranges, grapes and every possible plan for dealing with adult working Americans.


=== ADDENDA ===

“The Obama administration is warning lawmakers that the trust fund that pays for highway construction will go broke in August unless Congress approves an infusion of as much as $7 billion...  Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, said it's clear that Congress must raise the federal gas tax, which is now 18.4 cents per gallon.”

Naturally, I agree with Voinovich.  Our gas taxes are among the lowest on the planet and have encouraged wastrel attitudes for two generations.  Still, I’d like to add one suggestion.  While the gas tax is being raised, also transform it from a flat rate to a PERCENTAGE of the cost at the pump.   That way, it can automatically be indexed to rise when consumption does, and some of that rise can be dedicated to filling strategic reserves and a rainy day fund, to kick in when hard times next return.

*  One of you said:

     “I sincerely hope that those who would mock Dr. Brin’s "10,000 McVeighs" prediction are paying some attention.The murder of Officer Johns at the Holocaust Museum, the murder of Dr. Tiller, the murder of five chilean students in Miramar Beach Florida by a man obsessed with "Illegals" , and now the murder of a nine year old girl and her father by the Minutemen.”   

 Alas. Folks, you ain’t seen nothing, yet.

And finally, oooog.  See why libertarianism is often its own worst enemy. What a shame.

 

GM, Health Care, Transparency & Prisoners of War

Keeping my number of political postings to a bare minimum, let’s just make a potpourri-pile of topical observations.

First... that the bankruptcies of both GM and Chrysler seem to be pretty much following a path I suggested earlier, sending them on a path where they’ll likely become largely employee-owned companies.  Ideally - and if they avoid repeating the (deliberately planned-in) mistakes that turned United Airlines sour - this should turn grumpy hourly workers into motivated owners, and allow American ingenuity to thrive.  It’s been a long time coming.  Both the far left and far right were nuts to oppose it for so long.

Of course, this assumes that the US government will eventually divest its huge stakes in these companies. Which raises an interesting point. 

One recent rightwing talking (ranting) point is to yatter about “unprecedented socialism.”  This calumny deserves open derision.  First, because it's obvious who made our current mess, and who gave unbelievable gushers of “socialism for the rich” to their fat-cat friends -- the Bushite Gang.  

Second, turning eyes toward the future, simply ask Limbaugh et al: ”What do you think Obama wants to do with all that GM stock?”

The answer is obvious, and so capitalistic it would make Adam Smith proud.  Buy low... and sell high!   Dare the ranters to take a bet.  If the federal government no longer owns these companies in 2012... and if the taxpayer by then has made a tidy profit out of buying and then selling the shares... um... is that still “socialism?”  Remember, the Limbaugh types are agile about redefining terms, focusing on the narrow moment... so ask this question now.  And nail down that wager.


=== MAKING A MISTAKE IN HEALTH CARE? ===

On the other hand, I feel that President Obama’s approach to revising Health Care is not well thought-out.  Yes, we cannot take on the whole problem all at once, not in today’s economic and political environment.  But his people are urging that we continue down the road of adding layer after layer of complex insurance subsidies that will work through (and benefit) existing companies and involve a million twists and turns of bureaucracy and entitlement.  It will be maddening, inefficient and easy to ridicule.  Worse yet, it will not cut the Gordian Knot of today’s system at any level or at any point.

Elsewhere, I've offered a simple alternative. Let’s put off for another day any major reform for working-age adults.  If we have limited resources and attention, let’s not do a half-assed job across-the board, but rather take a targeted approach to solve one part of the mess, completely -- the most important part.  Let’s do an immediate and excellent job in the one area where rapid and major transformation could make the biggest immediate difference, where it matters to us all most.

Simply  provide health care to all kids.

One way to do this,, making the legislation incredibly short and simple?  Extend Medicare to the other end of the spectrum, the other demographic group that is inherently both helpless and deserving, by simple definition.  Or else, use the kids to experiment with single-payer. 

 Either way, political opposition would be disarmed from the start. Americans are inherently more socialistic when it comes to children than adults (who, we think, instinctively, should stand on their own two feet.)  Moreover, this step would let us act immediately in the zones where socialized medicine inarguably works best -- prevention and lifelong health investment in youth, by far the best use of medical care dollars. 

This approach then leaves for later the vexing areas where socialized medicine has inherent problems and where we might want to do some more careful thinking.  (More on this next time.)

Seriously, why isn’t this a no-brainer?  A win-win that would let Obama achieve wonders at a stroke, while keeping both cost and complexity down and achieving the greatest bang for the buck? Poor parents would be relieved of their greatest fear, for their kids. With that responsibility taken off their shoulders, they would then be better able to bargain for their own, narrower coverage.  Can anyone explain why this alternative isn’t even mentioned?


--- QUOTING OBAMA ON TRANSPARENCY ---

“And so, whenever we cannot release certain information to the public for valid national security reasons, I will insist that there is oversight of my actions - by Congress or by the courts.

“..... Because in our system of checks and balances, someone must always watch over the watchers - especially when it comes to sensitive information.

“Along those same lines, my Administration is also confronting challenges to what is known as the "State Secrets" privilege... while this principle is absolutely necessary to protect national security, I am concerned that it has been over-used. We must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrasses the government. That is why my Administration is nearing completion of a thorough review of this practice.

“We plan to embrace several principles for reform. We will apply a stricter legal test to material that can be protected under the State Secrets privilege. We will not assert the privilege in court without first following a formal process, including review by a Justice Department committee and the personal approval of the Attorney General. Finally, each year we will voluntarily report to Congress when we have invoked the privilege and why, because there must be proper oversight of our actions.” - Barack Obama

One of you (“Jester”) commented upon how thoroughly this statement is  in tune with what I proposed in The Transparent Society, adding “Dr. Brin, are you writing his Speeches? ;)”

Ah... if only. Still, how nice to have an adult up there, for a change.


--- AND SOLVING PART OF THE GUANTANAMO MESS ---

The same poster offered a suggestion that might help to get President Obama out of his bind regarding the Guantanamo detainees.  I think we can all agree that the Bushite doctrines there were dismal, loony, horrific and borderline insane.  Those so-called “pragmatists” only made matters far worse for our professional defenders, for example, by making torture legitimate for our enemies to use against our own troops.  Indeed, that alone offers probable cause to investigate charges of high treason.

On the other hand, what to do with the prisoners currently held in Guantanamo?  Or others we might capture amid a war without borders or fronts?  Many are genuinely bad or dangerous men and openly consider themselves to be enemies of the United States.  Others, to be sure, were hapless victims of circumstance, but, even after releasing those guys, President Obama seems caught between unpleasant options, when it comes to the really hard cases:

(1) bring some prisoners to America to face charges, which will be difficult to prove by civilian rules, and surely rile up any state where the trials take place,

(2) extend the duration of a somewhat gentler Guantanamo Prison, which will expose him to charges of hypocrisy and indecision,

(3) ship some of the worst off to home countries where they face likely torment and death... or else see them released to heroic welcomes and a return to plotting against our lives.

Are those his only choices?   There does seem to be a fourth option, never mentioned.   It's pretty simple, as “Jester” pointed out, after a close reading of the four Geneva Conventions.

Those who have openly sworn allegiance to any entity that wages violent war against the US can legitimately be treated as Prisoners of War.

Yes, it sounds a lot like “enemy combatants.”  But that term was simply a Bushite excuse to drop every covenant that we had with decent or civilized behavior... a crazed raving offered by demagogues who tried to make us more afraid of a few hundred bozos with lice-ridden beards, than we ever were of a Soviet Union that bristled with 20,000 hydrogen bombs.  (And we let them do it, didn’t we?)

In contrast, “prisoner of war” has very clear definitions according to the Geneva conventions.  And yes, it can apply to irregular forces, even those that do not represent an official nation state.  (In any event, the Taliban government of Afghanistan was clearly an enemy state and it stood behind Al Qaeda. That regime’s continued existence in exile allows for an extended pretext.)

Calling the violent men in Guantanamo "POWs "does not mean they can be tortured.  In fact, the opposite. They must be treated according to Geneva protocols -- with red cross packages and everything else to make their existence far brighter than it was.  But it does mean they can be held indefinitely, in a military facility on American soil, so long as hostilities continue in a plausible state of war.  Moreover, there is no ticking clock to bring charges against them -- in fact, filing charges against such men might be illegal, if their actions were against even somewhat legitimate military targets.  Certainly there is no requirement to mix them with the regular population of a federal penitentiary.  In fact, that too violates Geneva.

True, this option does not apply to all of the current prisoners -- mostly those who have openly avowed that they consider themselves to be in a state of war against the US.  Moreover, they must be treated very different than they were in Guantanamo... e.g. they must be allowed to mingle with each other and garden and work and write home and appeal their conditions and all the things you see in movies like The Great Escape.  (Except for the tunneling part, we can hope!)

Still, consider how this option lets BHO & co off the hook!  He can end the Guantanamo travesty without letting them all go, or trying to press criminal charges that are inherently hard to stick, by civilian rules of jurisprudence.  Well, it's an idea...

And that's enough for now.

 

Announcements... Coolstuff... and Halliburton

See my latest manic comedy story “Gorilla My Dreams” in UNIVERSE Magazine (online).  This is a very different flavor of humor than my more - well - level-headed comedic serial “The Ancient Ones.”  Subscribe to UNIVERSE with this coupon code EE329517B2 and get $5 off!

And yes, this is one of my catch-all postings, filled with wonders... zipping from topic to topic but ending on a serious (and political) note.)

 Please drop by the GoodReads web site and see if this endeavors, helping readers connect with authors and books, appeals to you.  (Of course, it would not hurt to rate your favorite author there!; ) 

Some folks try this and comment! Scribd, an Internet start-up here, will introduce on Monday a way for anyone to upload a document to the Web and charge for it.

See my brief essay on the can-do spirit of Star Trek, in The NY Daily News site.  I have subsequently thought further.  The self-indulgence of including every character from the original series, right away, is as irritating as ever.  (In fact, I hate it.  The characters spanned a wide range of ages, in fact.)  And the massive death toll was disturbing.  And the “red matter” and “supernova” stuff could have done with a technical advisor -- someone savvy in both science and fiction, to make it more plausible and less, well, boneheaded.  Still, it was overall entertaining and cheerfully manic and within range for me to tune my “expectation dials” and have a rollicking good time.

See a mostly positive article in the Washington Post about the involvement of SIGMA - the think tank of science fiction authors - at a recent conference on Homeland security.

Anyone care to study up on this, telling us more than is in the article?  Tantalizing!  Ultra-dense deuterium may be the nuclear fuel of the future.  I wonder if they are talking about Rydberg Matter. (Thanks Mike G.)

Alas, it’s probably to good to be true.  Says Brian Wang: “It isn't even "microscopic amounts" - for "microscopic" means "visible in a microscope". Do the math, fellow NBF visionaries: 2.3 picometers .....   This is not a union-of-deuterons lasting nanoseconds, or microseconds, or milliseconds, or seconds. No, these are the fragments that lasted just long enough for the D(-1) state to hold together in a laser beam for ATTOSECONDS.”  sigh.

Fascinating look at “The Economics of Star Trek.” 

Side appeal:  See BETTER OFF TED on ABC.  It is hilarious and terrifically written and needs some buzz in order to survive.

Thoughts on the “natural burial” movement... or “be a tree?”

"Isolation of a gene called DARPP-32 helps explain why some people fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, while others can remain calm. .. Those who had the "TT" or "TC" versions of the gene portrayed significantly more anger than those with the "CC" version." Telegraph 6th May 2009.

Here’s a cool looking new magazine with an ambitious theme and a quirky title: Build a Model Orbiter  (!)  Seems I’ll be featured in an upcoming article.   

Somebody do a book report for us on Jacques Pitrat's new book Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness   “...of interest to anyone who likes robotics, software, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and science-fiction.”

=== Miscellany ===

More than 100 schools have partnered with YouTube to make the YouTube EDU channel, including Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and UC.

 Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.

 GM and Segway demonstrated Tuesday an electric two-wheel, two-seat prototype vehicle for use in congested urban environments. The 300-pound, zero-emissions vehicle is powered by a lithium-ion battery and dual electric wheel motors. It features all-electronic acceleration, steering, and braking.

 A new thermodynamic analysis suggests that 10 of life's 20 amino acids must be common throughout the cosmos  for reasons that I explicated in my 1983 SETI review article.

 A roundup of the coolest computer interfaces past, present, and future.

A sixth nucleotide?

 See another TED video about data visualization.  The Allosphere.

 Tweet this: Rapid-fire media may confuse your moral compass.  Um.... duh?

 At a  conference last week, researchers showcased many new and innovative ways to interact with machines, from  to .  Including (out of sci fi) Eye-Tracking Goggles....

 Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes serving the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported. That attack demonstrated a severe fault in American infrastructure: its centralization.

 Ugolog Creates Surveillance Website To Watch Anyone, Anywhere

  Free Will... or at least the place where we decide to act, is sited in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex, new research suggests.

    Looking for signals from distant civilizations might be an effort in futility, according to scientists who met at Harvard University recently. The dominant view of astronomers at a symposium on the future of human life in the Universe seems to be that if other life is
out there, it likely is dominated by microbes or other nonspeaking creatures.   If life did develop elsewhere, Andrew Knoll, the Fisher Professor of Natural History, used the lessons of planet Earth to give an idea of what it might take to develop intelligence. Of the three major groupings of life: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes, only the eukaryotes developed complex life. And even among the myriad kinds of eukaryotes, complex life arose in just a few places: animals, plants, fungi, and red and brown algae. Knoll said he believes that the rise of mobility, oxygen levels, and predation, together with its need for sophisticated sensory systems, coordinated activity, and a brain, provided the first steps toward intelligence.

Josh D supplied these about ZOMBIE animals... and maybe zombie humans...brrrr...
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/25520
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=399
http://www.genomeweb.com/node/916826?emc=el&m=389886&l=3&v=04b8ffc080

Achieving WaterIndependence

Living Machines.  Wowser.  And I portrayed them in EARTH, of course.

CaliforniaWaterAndEnergy

http://www.chooseyoursurrogate.com/ does seem to be based on my Kiln People concept.  But that's not my biggest complaint.  It takes forever to load each page of their site, in exchange for lots of gloss and very little actual information.  Frankly, I haven’t the patience to wade slowly through their interface.  Somebody try it and report?

What would you do with a $40 Linux computer the size of a three-prong plug adapter? Marvell Technology Group is counting on an army of computer engineers and hackers to answer that question. It has created a “plug computer.” It’s a tiny plastic box that you plug into an electric outlet. There’s no display. But there is an Ethernet jack to connect to a home network and a U.S.B. socket for attaching a hard drive, camera or other device. Inside is a 1.2 gigahertz Marvell chip, called an application processor, running a version of the Linux operating system.

-----
And finally, lighting the political lamp...

Halliburton exposed. This is absolutely necessary to view.  A wave of “emergency-override” crony contracts that violated every US contracting law.  Anyone who does not realize that this was the main reason for the war has got to be crazy.  And mind you I wanted to go and get Saddam!  In order to make up for the way Bush Sr. betrayed the Iraqi people in 1991.  But that was never the goal. It was the excuse. 

 Said one viewer: “God, I wish Obama had the balls to go after these bastards. Dig down deep enough, and you'll find the roots leading up to Bush and Cheney.”  Indeed, unleashing totally apolitical auditors and civil servants and prosecutors is precisely the way that BHO can attack without seeming to be pursuing a witch hunt.  Again... see this video! And get others to do so.

*  Oh... and political art dada.

Why Obama is Upping the Border Patrol

First - see me blather in the next “Life After People” - Tuesday on the History Channel. I offer some way-out speculations!

And now the political lamp is lit:  This item wasn’t at the top of the news, but it did make page one of the Times: “Obama budget puts security first at the border - He'll ask Congress to help curb the flow of arms to Mexico before seeking any immigration reform.” 

This is a complex topic, with some strange twists.  But first, let me quote a forecast that I made, way back in December 08, in my “100 Suggestions for the Obama Administration.”  This one really deserves a spot in any Predictions Registry.

“If I seemed to lean a little "left" in some of my earlier missives criticizing a worldwide drift toward crony-aristocratism, and then to the right in supporting a repair of the U.S. military, and then left again by pushing the vital importance of citizen-level resilience... then prepare for another of my patented sudden veers! Because I believe the Obama Administration can, should... and will... act swiftly to regain control over the borders of the United States. In fact, I will lay heavy odds that he does it very soon.”

Although many sneered with doubt, alas, nobody had the guts to meet my bet (and offer of odds!) with real cash.  Too bad, because President Obama has given high priority -- and budgetary support -- to regaining control over the borders of the United States, exactly when and as I expected.  Let’s go back to my prediction:

”This may sound surprising, but it shouldn't, if you had been paying attention to one of the great ironies of the last 16 years -- one that lay in plain sight, largely unnoticed. As one of his first acts upon entering office, Bill Clinton doubled the number of field agents in the Border Patrol. And one of George W. Bush’s first endeavors was to savagely undercut that service.

“It sounds counter-intuitive, of course, and neither political party ever spoke up about it much. But the reasons are simple. Democrats like legal immigration, which results in lots of new voters and new union workers, while illegals drain resources, get embroiled (against their will) into crime, and prevent domestic programs from achieving full effectiveness. On the other hand, Republicans -- well, not your neighbors, but some influential people near the top of the party -- like access to pools of cheap, undocumented labor that won’t talk back. Only when border state citizens began getting riled did the GOP start talking tough about immigration. And talk, for the most part, is all they ever did.”

The correlation is now perfect.  Democrats boost border patrol and enforcement, but hate talking about it, because much of their base is made up of people for whom generosity is a zealous canon.  Hence, Obama needed an excuse, something to distract from his real reasons for regaining control at the border (reversing emphasis from illegal to legal immigration.)  He found his excuse with the ongoing drug gang violence in Mexico.  Blaming much of that chaos on U.S.-originating weaponry, he can claim that the new agents will be there foremost to stanch the southward flow of guns.

Now, the right wing punditocracy and blogosphere has been derisive -- and this time with some cause!  The purported “statistics,” proving that most Mexican gang-guns came from the U.S. ,  are very weak and show signs of being cludged.  Anyway, if the cash-rich mobs want guns, there are countless places to get them.  So it’s a rationalization, all right.

But while Dobbs and Limbaugh & co. eagerly pounced on this discrepancy with ridicule, they have to be very careful about is not letting their audiences dwell too long or think too deeply about any one matter.  They must keep up the rapid armwaving, pointing rapidly thither and yon, in order to distract Red America from connecting the dots.  For if rural or conservative whites ever realize which party is always pragmatically better at defending our borders... or maintaining military readiness, or strengthening alliances, or creating a good climate for small businesses, or nurturing a strong economy... then it will be all over for the neoconservative-GOP shell game.  

Limbaugh et. al. have to keep it all about simplistic strawmen and ideological stereotypes (e.g. after the most corrupt and wastrel administration of all time pummeled US capitalism nearly flat, scream that the new one is “socialist!”)   Because, if the natural anti-authoritarianism of the people living in heartland “red” counties can ever turn away from reflex hatred of bureaucrats, long enough to rediscover Americans’ traditional distrust of fatcat aristocratic thieves, then... well... Rush Limbaugh will have to get a real job.

 Even  more important, genuine classic conservatives and libertarians will have a chance - at long last - to rescue their movement from the freakshow denizens who have hijacked it.


==== MISCELLANY ====

On April 28 the Senate passed financial fraud legislation that would allow for the creation of an investigative panel modeled after the Depression-era Pecora Commission, which unearthed the crimes that led to the 1929 economic collapse. Some are calling on the House of Representatives to act on creating an independent, muscular probe into the roots of today's financial crisis.

 Comics writer Mark Sable was detained by TSA security guards at Los Angeles International Airport this past weekend because he was carrying a script for a new issue of his comic miniseries Unthinkable. Sable was detained while traveling to New York for a debut party at Jim Hanley's Universe today.  The comic series follows members of a government think tank that was tasked with coming up with 9/11-type "unthinkable" terrorist scenarios that now are coming true.

NOTE, I will add a lagniappe below, under comments -- an older item, pointing out that Adam Smith is not the only icon of freedom and liberal markets who has been abandoned by the far right.  Now they have latched onto Thomas Paine.  But they will soon drop him like a live grenade... and I’ll tell you why.

The old and new versions of "culture war"

This month, we note the 50th Anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures," which described the wide and seemingly unbridgeable gulf of language, assumptions and mindset, between people working in the sciences and intellectuals in the literary arts and humanities.  In a a followup essay, "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," Snow optimistically suggested that a new culture, a "third culture," might emerge and close the communications gap. In Snow's third culture, the literary intellectuals would be on speaking terms with the scientists.

According to sci-tech book agent John Brockman ”This never happened. Although I borrowed Snow's phrase in my 1991 essay "The Third Culture", it does not describe the third culture he predicted.”   Indeed, Brockman portrays recent progress as more one-sided than any act of collaboration, with the bridging largely undertaken from the scientific side and most literary mavens playing the unhelpful role of cantankerous curmudgeons. 

”The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. Increasingly, The Third Culture has moved into the mainstream and the questions it is asking are those that inform us about ourselves and the world around us.”

Speaking as someone who has moved across both of these worlds without impediment, all my life, I can say that Brockman is mostly right about this.  High-end scientists do tend to be vastly more agile and forward-looking thinkers, than their counterparts in almost any other field of endeavor.  Instead of narrowly-specialized “boffins,” those at the top of their fields seem to be smarter, more-broadminded and deeply curious than anyone else alive. The reason for this is so astonishingly simple that it seems to have escaped notice.  It has nothing to do with any intrinsic superiority of scientific minds.  Rather, suppose that a person is truly broadminded and eclectic, wanting to excel in a wide span of fields. He or she must thereupon choose the scientific field of interest to work hardest in, at the professional level, simply because science is exceptionally demanding.  That person's other interests, in contrast, can be pursued part-time.   Indeed, nearly all of the top scientists I’ve met (and I know many) also nurtured impressive artistic hobbies and passionate avocations, at near-professional levels.  They bridge the gap not as invaders from science but as brilliant people who never accepted the existence of any gap, in the first place!

Meanwhile, the intellectual curse of vapid, simpleminded postmodernism has been slow to dissipate from hundreds of university English, Literature and social studies departments.  One symptom of this obdurate troglodytism has been the refusal of all but a dozen U.S. universities to pay more than nodding attention to science fiction, the most exploratory and truly American of all genres.  Another diagnosable illness is the slavish devotion that so many have pledged to the rigid storytelling tropes that Joseph Campbell called “fundamental” to myth.  These rigid prescriptions may have been nearly ubiquitous for 4,000 years, but nobody seems willing to also point out the downside -- that those bardic straightjackets were also fundamentally debasing of the human imagination, helping to limit and crush our shared cultural experience... until we finally broke free of our chains.

And yet, having agreed with much of Brockman’s point, I do have to take some exception.  Because the literary types that he and Snow call the “first culture” are not really relevant to the intellectual problems of our age. Self-marginalized and generally silly, the literature profs are no more pertinent for their anti-science thetoric than they ever were a threat to young minds, by promoting “leftist memes.”  These were strawman foes, hardly even worth the time spent shrugging them off.

Then why talk about this cultural gap at all?  C.P. Snow had an excuse.  Especially in his day, the British education system was in large part designed to cauterize scientific or technical “boffins,” keeping them physically and intellectually isolated while ensuring that real power -- cabinet posts , corporate directorships and such -- would be preserved for those steeped in the classics. (Whereupon, completely subjective grading ensured that the sons of aristocracy would slip gracefully into the high positions set aside for them.)  Hence a nearly complete lack of “breadth requirements” in most British (indeed, European) baccalaureate programs. 

 Meanwhile, U.S. students take an extra fourth year longer for their bachelor’s degree, getting exposure across lateral horizons of interest.  This important feature of American academic life is seldom mentioned, even though it is an inherent expression of a very different intellectual worldview.

Hence, while American lit departments are only slowly awakening from their prickly, faux-European inferiority complex, others on campus have no problem embracing a new culture of change. At the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), for example, several arts departments have joined with scientific colleagues to forge Sixth College, and the Center for the Study of Computing in the Arts, dedicated to the mission of bridging every perceived gap, with tech-savvy artists and art-loving techies.  

No, in America the dangerous gap is not between CP Snow’s old archetype intellectual cultures.  Rather, what we are challenged by is a very different “culture war,” in which every kind of anti-intellectualism is fanned by those who most directly benefit from this put-up distraction.  One of the tools that help to maintain this debilitating chasm?  The metaphor of an obsolete and profoundly misleading, so-called “left-right political axis” -- a curse from 18th Century France that has been a lobotomizing political discourse for generations, focusing attention on a silly, almost meaningless “gap,” when the real chasm is much simpler -- between non-thieves and thieves.

=========  

Want to attend Worldcon? The World Science Fiction Convention is always a marvelous show and this year's event Anticipation -- in Montreal, city of fine food and hospitality -- should prove no exception with great panels, previews, the Hugo Awards and a special min-conference on teaching science fiction in the classroom that I labored to help create, along with the fine folks at www.AboutSF and Reading for the Future.  Alas, it seems my family won't be able to attend, this year, so we have worldcon memberships for sale!  (Three adults and one child, steeply discounted from the regular price.)  

=  OTHER STUFF =

 So cool In case you haven't already seen it -- the launch of a 1/10-scale model of a Saturn V rocket, built by hobbyists. I'd have been impressed if it used liquid hydrogen and multi stages.

 Inside These Lenses, a Digital Dimension -- now appearing... my “TruVu Specs”...  (Please do let me know when anybody spots more on this trend.  I have particular interest.)

 ELECTROMAGNETIC pulse weapons capable of frying the electronics in civil airliners can be built using information and components available on the net, warn counter-terrorism analysts. Yael Shahar, director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, and her colleagues have analysed electromagnetic weapons in development or used by military forces worldwide, and have discovered that there is low-cost equipment available online that can act in similar ways. "These will become more of a threat as the electromagnetic weapons technology matures," she says.  Douglas Beason, a director at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, says it may be straightforward to build a do-it-yourself EMP weapon, but more difficult to make one that can be stowed in an aircraft. 

 BTW - Beason is a Brin-pal. See my own suggested measure we should take, in order to solve this threat.

VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies has developed a miniature telephoto lens that can be implanted into the eye and could soon help people with vision loss from end-stage macular degeneration. (VisionCare) Because only the central parts of the retina are damaged in the disease, magnifying the image on the eye allows the retinal cells. 

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/opinions/20091203-18907.html  

 Chris Phoenix of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology: ”I learned about research that is nearing completion to develop a strain of E. coli which cannot be infected by bacteriophages.  Phages are a major mechanism - likely *the* major mechanism - that keeps bacteria from growing out of control. A phage-proof bacterium might behave very similarly to "red tide" algae blooms, which apparently happen when an algae strain is transported away from its specialized parasites. But E. coli is capable of living in a wide range of environments, including soil, fresh water, and anaerobic conditions.  A virus-proof version, with perhaps 50% lower mortality, and (over time) less metabolic load from shedding virus defenses that are no longer needed, might thrive in many conditions where it currently only survives. The researchers doing this acknowledge the theoretical risk that some bacteria might become invasive, but they don't seem to be taking anywhere near the appropriate level of precaution. They are one gene deletion away from creating the strain.”  Church's recent article describing the possible future benefits of his work, and possible future safety precautions."

Oh, think it’s time for bold amateur sci fi television?
Cool stuff on Stranger Things TV.

Cool Stuff, brittleness and culture war

First, some lighter stuff -- Derek Benson, the lunchbagdude, draws fantastic lunch bags for his son, every day.  See this one inspired by Startide Rising.  How lucky is that kid!

Sci-fi author Greg Bear to feed Halo fans hungry for details.

See Peter Norvig’s terrific “What if Abraham Lincoln had used Power Point at Gettysburg?” http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

Best thing I ever saw come from Microsoft.  It's a peek at how they expect the world to work, 10-15 years from now.  How do YOU think they are on-target or off-base?


Self-righteousness redux...  Clay Shirky addresses one of my major themes in discussing his own recent outrage over a “crime” purportedly committed by Amazon.com (one having to do with bias against gays, the details of which do not matter here)... one that Amazon actually did not commit.  ”In 1987, a teenage girl in suburban New York was discovered dazed and wrapped in a garbage bag, smeared with feces, with racial epithets scrawled on her torso. She had been attacked by half a dozen white men, then left in that state on the grounds of an apartment building. As the court case against her accused assailants proceeded, it became clear that she’d actually faked the attack, in order not to be punished for running away from home. Though the event initially triggered enormous moral outrage, evidence that it didn’t actually happen didn’t quell that outrage. Moral judgment is harder to reverse than other, less emotional forms; when an event precipitates the cleansing anger of righteousness, admitting you were mistaken feels dirty. As a result, there can be an enormous premium put on finding rationales for continuing to feel aggrieved, should the initial rationale disappear. Call it ‘conservation of outrage.’”

Of course, this has resonance with my own notion, supported by growing evidence, that self-righteous indignation actually triggers many of the same neural-reinforcement processes that underlie addiction. This was already known about rage and gambling. But since indignation poisons inter-human discourse in almost every field — spoiling our natural, pragmatic, problem negotiating skills — this “addiction” may do vastly more damage than all others, put together.


A noteworthy non-anniversary? --  A fan with the wonderful name Francesca Flynn wrote in, pointing out that May 2009 was the date on the mimeographed circulars printed by Godon, the Postman, in his lie-that-became the-truth.  Funny thing; his potemkin “National Recovery Act” had a similar name to a bill now before Congress.  Let’s hope and pray things never get that serious in our real world. 


Toward robustness -- I have long complained about trends toward increased brittlness in our civilization.  Surely the “war on terror” should have focused attention upon potential point failure modes that could have devastating consequences?  Back during the Cold War, when “thinking about the unthinkable” became a topic of passionate debate, there was talk of “Fail-Safe” -- a design methodology aiming to ensure that crucial systems, if and when they do fail, would fall back into a safe mode that prevents the very worst outcomes. (e.g accidental nuclear war.)  This meant that, should any of our systems controlling nuclear weapons degrade, malfunction or fall into the wrong hands, those systems would at worst do no harm.  But this doctrine has long ago been set aside, sacrificed on the altar of efficiency and so-called “success-oriented planning.” 

This trend - as we’ve seen - can prove terribly dangerous when a Black Swan arrive... the unforeseen event that hits unexpected.  After 9/11 and Katrina, one would think the lesson would be learned.  But the trend continues to be toward ever-greater reliance upon the perfect performance of a caste of expert first responders, with very little allowance for the possibility of massive first-line casualties, or big surprises, or even a nod toward the wisdom of redundancy.  Examples of this growing worry can be seen in the excess-emphasis on professionalism in the military, the over-reliance on zero-inventory “just-in-time” industrial practices... and in the newest hot trend, Cloud Computing -- which offers a long list of advantages, plus some very plausible dangers, should we rush into a system that puts all our information eggs into very few baskets


Also......See a diverting essay by Rudy Rucker about Stephen Wolfram's 'mazing views of artificial intelligence.  "Wolfram|Alpha looks like a search engine, in that there’s a one-line box where you type in a question.  The output appears a second or two later, as a page of text and graphics below the box.  What's happening behind the scenes? Rather than looking up the answer to your question, Wolfram|Alpha figures out what your question means, looks up the necessary data to answer your question, computes an answer, designs a page to present the answer in a pleasing way, and sends the page back to your computer."


Publicity stunt?  San Francisco-based Pacific Gas & Electric said it was seeking approval from state regulators for an agreement to purchase power over a 15-year period from Solaren Corp., an 8-year-old company based in Manhattan Beach, Calif. The agreement was first reported in a posting to Next100.  Solaren would generate the power using solar panels in Earth orbit and convert it to radio-frequency transmissions that would be beamed down to a receiving station in Fresno, PG&E said. From there, the energy would be converted into electricity and fed into PG&E's power grid.


=== lighting the political lamp ===

NY Times Columnist - and fellow Asimov fan* Paul Krugman - has my respect at many levels.   But he can sometimes miss the big picture.  Recently, Krugman inveighed against President Obama’s purported lack of courageous leadership on the “torture front.” While Obama has moved toward ending shameful practices, shedding light on the past transgressions, restoring the trust of our allies and setting up procedures to prevent repetition, critics maintain that all of this will remain hollow and hypocritical without vigorous prosecuton and punishment of those who either commanded or else executed the travesties.

“What about the argument that investigating the Bush administration’s abuses will impede efforts to deal with the crises of today? Even if that were true — even if truth and justice came at a high price — that would arguably be a price we must pay.”

Here I beg to differ, appealing to folks like Krugman that they should look at every angle.  Look, I too twinge over letting people have immunity for "following orders." In order to avoid bad precedents, this process should at minimum be confessional, as in South Africa's Truth & Reconciliation process. Bushite immunity doctrines have to be savagely rejected.

But is it possible that Obama is not simply wussing out for political reasons?  Might he have priorities that rank higher than punishing the monsters who despoiled America’s honor, for the last decade?  And no, I am not talking about focusing his efforts on fixing the economy -- even that is less important than Barack Obama’s true, historic purpose...

...which is to end the foul betrayal known as Culture War.  The trumped-up pitting of region vs region, rural vs urban, red vs blue, know-nothings vs science, the future assailed by a mythologized past, and the reflex measuring of all matters  against an insanely simplistic “left-right axis” that no longer even maps onto any sane definitions of “liberal” or “conservative,” anymore.

 This twenty-year campaign to divide America has effectively lobotomized the world’s greatest nation, leaving it bereft of foresight or ability to mobilize its most famous trait -- pragmatism -- toward the solution of a myriad 21st Century problems.  A sensible willingness to innovate and negotiate, shrugging aside dogma in favor of progress, based upon incremental problem-solving that is both hard-headed and good-hearted.  That has been the American genius, for several centuries.  While pragmatic incrementalism has never been easy or smooth, it has ultimately paid off, almost every time.  Moreover, it has never, ever been about faux European silliness like “left vs right.”

 And it has never been more needed than now.

Who would even want to thwart such a magnificent trait?  Only those who find the Western Enlightenment -- and America, its foremost champion -- loathesome.  Heck, I won’t even blame the retro-troglodytes of the fundamentalist/creationist awakening, whose hatred of the Enlightenment is visceral  and deeply psychological. They are adversaries, but sincere ones.  No, let’s go straight to the source -- the oligarchs who have financed culture war via agitprop agencies like Fox News. Those are the real beneficiaries of the Bush/neocon era.  And they are the ones who stand most to be thwarted, if Culture War ends and the nation can get back to business.

Seriously, do you see any other winners, including fundamentalists? Certainly markets, democracy, freedom, even capitalism and the Pax Americana that the neocons claim to love, all of these things have suffered terribly under Bushite misrule.  Only a narrow clade -- a small subset of billionaires -- stand to benefit from a continuation of our national illness.  But they have made it clear, they want culture war to go on.

And that is why Barack Obama must pick his battles.  Think! Any drive to indict and prosecute the “torture memo” writers would be counter-productive in many ways.

1) Obama is trying to rebuild the confidence of a US Civil Service, including our defense and intelligence agencies, who were deliberately savaged during the Bush years.  Having those people continue to think of themselves as Bush Era victims is extremely valuable. No single step is more needed, but it would be rocked back by such a campaign.

2) Attacking right now on the torture front would fall into a trap, allowing Fox & friends to portray it as a “liberal witch hunt” at the very moment when the base of the crazy right is crumbling, with millions of sincere, conservative Americans starting to drift away.

Look, even if we’re talking about some heinous stuff, there is precedent. When The US Government pardoned Jefferson Davis, after the Civil War, this action ran against a massive current of popular passion for vengeance. But the pardon has a practical aim.  Davis had planned to use his trial as a soapbox in which to establish that secession had been legal.  The victorious Union wanted the de facto rejection of that principle to  be accepted as a perpetual assumption, trampling the notion of state supremacy under the boots of half a million parading victors.

Parallels to this era?  Walking a tightrope, President Obama trying to find ways to permanently reject the  horrific moral lapses of the Bush Administration and to shine cleansing light upon them, without going to court trials that would further divide the nation and give rant-platforms to neocons, letting them bask in their favored drug of self-righteous indignation at public expense.  In any event, there are bigger and better fish to fry!

The key point is this:  Why should Obama spend political capital to go after one set of Bush -era crimes, when there ought to be others, just as easy to prosecute, that would bear and supply fresh political capital instead?  I am talking about crimes of direct malfeasance, corruptions and betrayal of trust, e.g. in the vetting of “emergency” government contracts to buddies.  Send up a few dozen on explicitly clear evidence of stuff like this and the shrill cries of “witch hunt” will only rile a fringe, while millions of decent American conservatives continue their veer of revulsion, away from a Republican Party that long ago abandoned any genetic connection to Lincoln, Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt.

Those are the crimes we and Obama should be going after, right now. Crimes that demonstrate venality, betrayal, outright criminality and complicity with a program of theft that helped hurt average Americans' livelihoods. That is where indictments will get consensus backing, helping anchor-in Obama's -- and our -- uprising against unreason.

-------

Oh, go hunt down and read this one -- ”The GOP: divorced from reality: The Republican base is behaving like a guy who just got dumped by his wife.” By Bill Maher (LATimesOPINIONApril 24, 2009)  A bit extra-partisan, but worth it for the 2nd-to-last paragraph.

*(PS...Someone tell Krugman about FOUNDATION’S TRIUMPH.)
 

Irony #1: billionaire-subsidized "populists"

First off, a quick note: Last year, I was one of the main pundits on "Life After People," the top-rated show ever to run on the History Channel.  Now comes "Life After People: The Series"... starting 10pm this coming Tuesday... on History.  I’m in some of these episodes, too.

Also: one of you regulars (TwinBeam) offered the following, down in comments: “What should we call our economic crisis?
1929 - 1933 : The Great Depression
2008 - 20?? : The Lousy Depression
Just thought we should start thinking about a name for this dog, in case it sticks around...

T’would be funny, if it didn’t hurt.

And who could let this pass without comment? Texas' Republican Gov. Rick Perry's praise for his state's tea party protestors, accompanied by not-so-veiled references to a potential Lone Star State secession.

Um... weren’t these the super-patriot flag-wavers, just three months ago?  Isn’t this the very same thing we saw in 1861, when Jefferson Davis - who had only a few years before given a speech declaring undying, perpetual loyalty to the USA “right or wrong” - flounced away into treason, before Abraham Lincoln had a chance to perform even one official act? Without even giving Lincoln a chance to negotiate?  Small surprise, actually.  Scratch a redneck “patriot” and you’ll find a fellow who has fantasized, all his life, of riding with Nathan Bedford Forest.

But no, incredible, staggering hypocrisy is NOT the most astonishing thing.

After the rallies, Perry downplayed his secession comments, amending them ] in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, to say: "I'm trying to make the Obama Administration pay attention to the Tenth Amendment." The so-called Tenth Amendment Movement, asserting the rights of the states to claim all powers not granted specifically to the federal government, has been grist for conservatives for more than a decade.

No, what is more mind-blowing is the inability of Democrats to even glance toward hypocrisy as the killer issue.  For example, by pointing out that “states rights” were stomped flat under Bush and that Obama has cut loose the federal handcuffs from many state initiatives....

... or, with Fox News running all these “anti-tax tea parties” how trivial it would be to point out that Fox is largely owned and controlled by two foreign billionaires, one of whom almost hand created Culture War while the other is a Saudi prince and fourth-richest man in the world?  The notion that such people could get away with using populist, anti-elite rhetoric and sentiments to herd tens of thousands of fools into the streets, in order to demand more tax cuts for the very same oligarchs who drove our economy into the tank... that would be positively weird.  But the fact that Democrats seem unable to grasp this nettle and find the right polemical tools to turn the resentful populists on their masters... that part is simply beyond all understanding.

One polemical antidote may be suggested by the wry satire of Stephen Colbert.  What if some people began showing up at these trumped-up “populist” rallies, offering  big posters with the following messages, held-high, perfectly straight-faced.

DON’T TAX BILLIONAIRES!

BILLIONAIRES UNDERSTAND CAPITALISM BETTER THAN ECONOMISTS DO!

THE SUPER-RICH LOVE US BETTER THAN OUR GOVERNMENT DOES!

IN RUPERT MURDOCH AND PRINCE WALID BIN TALAL WE TRUST!

Any other suggested “Colbert-Style” signs to wave at Fox-run rallies?  Only remember to be prepared and thorough. Stay in character! Because stations other than Fox will zoom in to interview you!  So have some good Colbert-ish patter ready.  Like about how America has been going down the wrong road ever since those pathetic leftists, Adam Smith and Thomas Paine preached against aristocracy.  Decry the flat social structure of the 50s-70s as socialism. Poker faced, demand that we keep going down the road pushed by Fox -- toward feudalism.

Also in the news... In 2010, incumbent Rick Perry will face a challenge from Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, in what is likely to be a . Strains are showing between rural social conservatives, who back Perry, and big-city Republicans, whose concern about changing demographics have helped motivate their support for Hutchison.  In any event, one can hope this may lead to the Republicans staging their own “Miracle of 1947.”

Oh, finally. Re those “tea parties” on tax day... Just a month after the birth of my first child, I made yearly a practice that I began back in the 1970s and that I recommend to all Americans, who both love their country and want to see the next generation less-burdened by the wastefulness of ours.  Beyond honestly and carefully paying whatever taxes that I owe, I also send a small and entirely separate donation to the U.S. Treasury, to be applied against the National Debt.  It isn’t much - a gesture - but it seems a good way to express not only faith and commitment, but also rejection of the Cult of Selfishness that got us into this mess.  If you feel as I do, then send your check (made out to US Treasury) to the Treasury Dept: Bureau of Public Debt, PO Box 2188, Parkersburg WV, 26106-2188. Send enough so that their time logging it and sending a thank you note isn’t a net loss to our kids, okay?  And feel free to use this, next time some ranting flag waver fool tries to “out-patriot” you.   It leaves the “tea-baggers” staring, slack-jawed.  Some of them even shamed. (Of course, tutoring at a homework club accomplishes much more...)

-----
President Obama said he would seek a reform of the U.S. tax code, calling the current tax system is a "10,000-page monstrosity." But that promise has been made by others before.  Whenever somebody proposes tax simplification, we run up against the fact that every “simplification” would gore somebody’s ox.  The more code-trimming you do, the more people will scream.

In fact, I know a simple way the tax code could be trimmed by perhaps 70% or more, without much political pain or obstructionism! Because I designed the method to be mostly politically neutral.  It does not aim at some utopian fantasy (like the Flat Taxers rave about.)  It gores very few sacred cows, and would be cheap and easy to implement. And almost guaranteed to work! (Only accountants should hate it.  Yet, to the best of my knowledge it has never been tried, or even proposed! Alas.

How? It is easy enough to create a program that would take the tax code and cybernetically experiment with zeroing-out dozens, hundreds of provisions while sliding others upward and then showing, on a spreadsheet, how these simplifications would affect, say, one-hundred representative types of taxpayers. The key innovation would be to program in boundary conditions to this experiment.  The top first condition would be “no losers.”  Let the program find the simplest version of a refined tax code that leaves all 100 taxpayer clades unhurt.  If one group loses a favorite tax dodge, the system would seek a rebalancing of others to compensate.  No human being could accomplish this, but I have been assured by experts that a computer could do this in a snap. If the iterative search finds a new, much simpler structure that leaves none of the 100 groups more than 5% worse off than they currently are, then who is going to scream?

Oh, cheaters will scream.  And of course, after simplification would come some genuine tax policy shifts that DO advantage some and disadvantage others.  Like all of you, I have my favorite injustices I’d love to see redressed, behaviors disincentivized, business ventures stimulate...

 But, by starting with “no-losers,” you can use politically neutral optimization routines to find a much simpler system, trimming and slimming the machinery to use the fewest moving parts, in order to achieve the same job it is doing right now.  The, and only then, will it make sense to argue about steering the vehicle in new directions.

-----
Re a common theme of mine -- the fact that oligarchy has always been the worst enemy of freedom, whether it wears raiment of the left or right -- someone wrote in: “The deeper point here is that elites will tend to form in any society regardless of the economic model they follow or the political doctrine they ostensibly espouse. Those familiar with George Orwell's 1984 may recognize this if they recall that the "forbidden book" featured as criticizing the totalitarian regime of Big Brother was titled "The Theory of Oligarchical Collectivism." Note that Orwell, who to the end of his days considered himself a man of the left, placed oligarchy as a qualifier ahead of collectivism.

“The tragic experiences of the 30's and 40's taught Orwell that the economic determinism of the left was hopelessly flawed by its failure to come to grips with reality of the oligarchic impulse. Perhaps the last thirty years, culminating in the crisis of international Capital (ie, oligarchic corporatism), will teach us the same lesson regarding the economic determinism of the right.”

Vital stuff to remember.

-----
Another matter: The US government is to increase security at the country's border with Mexico in an attempt to combat drug cartels, the White House has announced. Let me reiterate.  Democrats talk tolerance and promote it... but also put far more boots on the ground, at the border.  Clinton did it, Obama is doing it.  Bush savagely cut the Border Patrol.  Will any Democrat or liberal pundit, ever, stare this fact in the face and talk about it? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7961670.stm

-----
More reader comments: ”If a corporation is deemed “too large to fail,” then it may be necessary to incur the moral hazard and terrible public expense in order to save it.  On the other hand a clear price for saving it should be to break it up, into units small enough that later failures won’t threaten the public with grievous harm.  Breakup of near monopolies into smaller, more agile units should be a price of saving them.”

Another reader wrote in to comment on how I have been describing the abandonment of Adam Smith by the right. That icon and co-founder of modern capitalism is now an embarrassment to the oligarchs who control today’s conservatism, since Smith called oligarchy the very worst enemy of free enterprise.  

So who has replaced Smith in the hagiography of the right?  Glenn Beck has been ranting lately about Thomas Paine. True, Paine railed against abuse of authority. But the truly heinous betrayal of Paine, by Beck & co., can be seen by actually reading Paine’s pamphlets, instead of turning him into a strawman.  In fact, Paine despised aristocratic oligarchy even more than Adam Smith did and far more radically.

Seriously, read up about this.  Even those Founding Fathers who were aristocrats shared much of this radical attitude.  Today, every last one of them would be laughing at the teabaggers.

Blame the corporate boards... and change them.

I am going to jump in again, this time by simply snipping-in segments from the newsletter of tech-industry pundit Mark Anderson, perhaps his best missive yet!

I had dinner last week in Washington, D.C., with a top lobbyist, who told me proudly that she had led the charge in repealing the Glass-Steagall Act. (This allowed banks to get involved with non-bank, high-risk activities.) I had heard that the bankers spent $1B to get rid of this iconic piece of learning from the Great Depression; she confirmed it. Ten years later she is 38, and she laughingly told me over hors d’oeuvres that she now recognizes it was a huge mistake, adding that she no longer represents the banks.

Oops. I guess that’s how you destroy empires. Which leaves the obvious unfortunate impression: the banks themselves must have known what a mistake this would be.
...
Yesterday, in a lunch discussion with serial entrepreneur Al Davis, we covered all this ground in about an hour, and then he said, “You know, this all comes down to the board of directors.” ...We can blame the regulators who really came from industry, we can blame the bankers and CEOs and their lobbyists, we can blame the politicians who pretended that no regulation was good regulation, we can blame co-presidents George Bush and Dick Cheney. But, with the exception of the last two, there is another layer of governance that should take most, if not all, of the responsibility: the board of directors.

Let me start by breaking the neck of the good-old-boy scheme: most board members are friends (or even relatives) of the CEO, or work for him or her. Those who are not – even the most independent “outside” directors – tend to be selected on a rank of the CEO’s ability to direct, manipulate, or intimidate them; OR because they are guaranteed not to look too closely at the company.

example: AIG wrote insurance in amounts far greater than its total book value, or the value of all its reserves, creating liabilities infinitely beyond its ability to pay. Today, the now-defrocked longtime CEO Hank Greenberg continues to “protest too much” on TV: that he is the good guy, the government got it all wrong, if only he were still in charge all would be fine, the government wrecked his company, and so on.

How did Hank and his short-term successor, Milton Sullivan, get away with it all? It would appear, among other things, that they used the usual tricks: find famous, busy people who make you look good and have no time to dig deeply into company affairs; and make sure your board is too large, so that nothing ever really happens at board level. In AIG’s case, that number was 17, or about eight more than are really useful.

What about the board of Lehman Brothers? Or Bear Stearns? Who exactly authorized 30/1 leverage on contracts that no one could understand, in numbers beyond count? Some board members, from the Old Model, would say: Well, that’s a level of detail beyond what we were asked to look at.
...
Great companies don’t fail because of one madman; they fail because of one too-timid board. And great civilizations don’t fail because of one company gone awry; they fail because core beliefs and values fall away, which we’ve seen in the U.S. recently.


Terrific insights. Wish I could pass on the whole thing. Some followup questions, though.

1) What about the antitrust laws against interlocking directorates? Have you seen evidence that members of one board cozy up to their CEO in part because he can do the same on their boards? If so - and even if it is done third-hand, to mask things - should not people go to jail?

2) To what extent has CEO compensation skyrocketed because of what boils down to a "cartel"?
If a small clade of a few thousand golf buddies control and corner a market -- in this case for "top managerial talent" -- can't they thereupon curtail supply and create the appearance of scarcity, boosting prices just likeOPEC & deBeers?

The very theory of capitalism that these guys praise should have corrected these compensation packages by attracting fresh supplies of new talent into management, bringing competition and hauling prices down again. When something quacks like a cartel, waddles like a cartel, and smells like a cartel... should not some ducks be carted off to jail for restraint of trade?

More important, should not their praise of capitalism and markets be exposed as hypocrisy?

3) I have long felt that "corporate democracy" can be reformed with one simple change. Instead of current proxy-based stockholder voting, in which a vast majority of stock owners simply don't get involved -- favoring whoever is currently in charge, let blocks of stockholders self-organize. Any group that comes up with 20% of shares can send a director to the board. Ideally, you'd get five very different activists. But this way, you'll at least get two.

Hence the danger. If our present crisis lasts too long, the U.S. and the world and its people will suffer badly. But if it ends too soon... then not enough tumbrels will roll, things will remain the same, and civilization will fail to right itself with enough reforms.

Is "Overseas Contingency Operations" a case of doublespeak?

One possible (though not certain) sign that President Obama may be on the right track is the way that he’s attracting fire from dingbats on all sides, and not just the far-right.  One case in point that I feel compelled to comment on, off-schedule, was a load of tomfoolery offered on the Huffington Post by Ira Chernus, professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  

In “Requiem for the War on Terror,” Chernus first  rightfully critiques some of the duplicity and malignity that were rife during the Bush Administration, whose bellicose terminology trumped-up an exaggerated state of emergency as an excuse for irrationality, theft and horrific national management.  

Only then, Chernus takes Obama to task for replacing  the "war on terror" (WoT) with an admittedly clumsy phrase -- “Overseas Contingency Operations.”    Granted, it is an  infelicitous choice, but Chernus sees this as just verbal legerdemain, replacing one excuse for imperialism with another.   Alas, here  he gets it all completely wrong.

But lets briefly revisit where Chernus was on-target.  Bush’s “War on Terror”  (WOT) was, indeed, a farcical Orwellian distraction, aimed at helping to rationalize imperialism, oligarchy and outright fraud.  But the worst crime inherent in the WOT is something so ironic -- and so offset from the standard political axis -- that it goes almost unremarked.  For you see, the "war on terror" was perpetrated by men who styled themselves as realpolitik pragmatists, but who were in fact totally idealistic and ideologically-driven fools.    If these fellows were imperialists, they were profoundly incompetent ones, who completely mangled all the goals that they cynically proclaimed.

The proof is right in front of us, in real world outcomes from the last two decades.  Pax Americana was at its very peak when they entered office.  Under Bill Clinton, we achieved the triple play sought by all previous top-nations, to be respected, liked and feared, in all of the best ways.   After the stunningly efficient Balkans Operation delivered Europe its first peace in 4,000 years, our alliances were firm, popularity high (even among most muslims), military readiness scored at maximum, science, economy and finances were all at peak health.  Above all, our twin reputations for both moral international behavior and rare-but-ferociously effective use of force meant that only suicidally determined maniacs would choose to challenge  the unipolar American Peace.

Sadly, such maniacs existed and made their enmity known.  Their extreme good luck coincided with a perfect storm of ill-fortune and bad moves on our part.  But the subsequent, rapid toppling of the Taliban only maintained and fostered the impression of invincibility that the skilled men and women of our security services spent decades building...

...only to see it all frittered away by the top political leadership casts.  By the very same neocons who uttered the language of force with their every breath.  There is the stunning irony!  American pre-eminence, the purported neocon goal, was virtually destroyed by the neocons.  Our alliances, military readiness, science, economic and social health were all savaged, as fully and effectively as if it had been done on deliberate purpose.

Can no one stare, agape, as I do, at the bizarre juxtaposition.  The liberals who claim to despise imperialism, are good at managing a (light-handed and generally beneficent) empire, while the imperialists prove calamitously bad at it?  If this causes cognitive dissonance, get over it.  There are literally dozens of other strange chords... like the fact that Democrats always guard our borders better, or that small businesses and stocks and budgets all do better under those supposed “free spenders.”  Live with it.

The crux.  There is absolutely nothing inconsistent about Barack Obama wanting to reverse the worst damage done to our world stature by the Bushite neocon gang.  That reversal can and must include restoring alliances, our science, our economic health... and yes, the military readiness and respect for American power that gave the world its longest and best peace since Roman times.  

Reflex liberals like Ira Chernus need to grow up. Just because the neocons stood for addle-pated, moronic, schoolyard imperialism, that does NOT mean abandoning Pax Americana is the logical response. (Recall that the American Peace was the brainchild of Democrats Truman, Marshall and Acheson.  After WWII, the GOP leaders wanted either isolationism or a spasm confrontation with Communism. This gentle imperium was a Democratic construct.)

Furthermore, just because the "war on terror" was trumped-up does not mean we aren't in a memic struggle of cultures!  One that confronts us with determined foes who wish to see us toppled, threatening our fragile Enlightenment with destruction and pain, unless we are willing to defend it.  Hopefully with skill and competence and courage and goodwill, as we did so effectively in the Balkans.  Indeed, that is the ONLY way it can be done, nowadays.

Just listen to the men and women of the US Officer Corps.  Obama is (tentatively) their dream come true.  It is time for democrats to get over the Vietnam war, at long last, and embrace the skilled people who were the worst victims of the Bush era.  Doing so (for one thing) would further isolate the neocons, politically.  It is also the right thing to do.

Alas, Chernus ignores all this, showing that he is a left-wing version of the same kind of doofus we had to suffer under on the right. For example, by failing utterly to distinguish between wars of emergency and wars of national policy.    And here is where we see the point behind Obama’s use of  the contorted term “Overseas Contingency Operations.”

George Bush couched all his overseas adventures in terms of an "emergency" for many reasons, above all so he could bypass contracting rules and award lavish deals to friends, thus helping them to steal billions.  But that hysterical word  "emergency" also covered many other sins, e.g. budget deceits and torture. It was also an excuse for calling up and abusing the reserves and national guard.  

Obama is firmly ending that betrayal.  His "Overseas Contingency Operations" terminology clearly and rightfully reclassifies our engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq as the other kind of war... wars of national policy, in which our armed forces will be used judiciously, carefully, efficiently to pursue rational goals, without using the crutch of a false "emergency" to excuse waste and fraud and concealment of pain. Above all, lacking the frantic justification of the “E-word,” operations that deal with international contingencies must be performed with careful attention to whether each step actually serves the long-term interests of both nation and civilization.  In other words, they have to be much more than worth the cost.

Should we EVER have wars of national policy?  The reflex of the left would be to shout "never!" Same with libertarians.  Americans are uncomfortable with outright imperial enforcement of policy goals by use of force. We don't like to view ourselves as being like Romans, nor should we!

 But until Pax Americana has a reasonable alternative, we should keep to George Marshall's plan, which worked pretty well, so far. Till some kind of wise law envelopes the planet, we have to be willing, at times, to police a dangerous and unruly world.  As the Balkans mission showed, it can be done sagaciously and well, triggering vast international acceptance and goodwill.  The crux is whether the Pax is being led by wise and good pragmatists, not vile and corrupt idealogues.

Laughing at Laffer

Arthur Laffer is at it again. One of the core rationalizers in the push for a New Feudalism, he weighs in against the Estate Tax (ET), which is scheduled to go back to historically normal levels in 2011, after briefly zeroing out in 2010.

(In the Bush Era's final gift to greedy scions, 2010 is known as the year that Mom and Pop hide from their kids, lest they be tempted to hurry the parents along, for tax reasons.)

Laffer starts with the sly trick of offering up a strawman - claiming that top and only purpose of the Estate Tax is to redress a blatant unfairness of some kids inheriting vast fortunes that they never earned, while others languish in poverty. Yes, that is terribly unfair, and Laffer even concedes it. But then, he says, so is the unfair and unequal distribution of inherited talent, intelligence health, attractiveness. He implies that those who admire the ET are pure-pinko lefties, who want to level out everything, with inevitable homogenizing effects that lead to ruin, as in Ayn Rand's book "Anthem" or Kurt Vonnegut's story "Harrison Bergeron."

This is a standard neocon stunt, of course. Couch the debate in terms that none of your opponents ever dreamed of suggesting, then portray yourself as arguing sweet reason against a vile phantom. So, before getting to my main point about the ET, let's first deal with Laffer in his own, rigged playground, by considering the distinction between two types of "leveling."

The kind that right-wingers like Laffer accuse modern liberals of seeking -- confiscating and repressing the fruits of endeavor and successful competition, with the smothering, paternalistic goal of equalizing of all outcomes. Indeed if society ever plunged down that road -- eliminating all inequities and quashing of any natural competitive advantage -- that would, indeed, lead to a "Harrison Bergeon" world...

...and it is not at all what most American Liberals seek. Only a few ditzo, socialist-lefty flakes want that kind of foolishness, and those nuts have been marginalized, ignored by the vast majority of pragmatic liberals and democrats. (A far different situation than the one enjoyed by the nuts and flakes of the far right, who run, rule and dominate the GOP and have for decades. Indeed, the chief difference between Democrats and Republicans has much less to do with fundamentals of philosophy -- Europeans claim to be able to tell the two apart -- than it is simply this; in one party, the inmates have been allowed to run the asylum.)

The other kind of leveling is one that Americans find far less viscerally displeasing. Indeed, it has been the American consensus to pursue it, for generations. The very goal of Classic Market Liberalism (as envisioned by Adam Smith himself) was to maximize the feed stock of healthy, knowing and capable competitors that can enter into the mill of market capitalism. A little state intervention, in other words, with the clear goal of increasing the number and capability of competitive players. This is precisely the chief outcome of many liberal and progressive endeavors, from free public education to civil rights, to womens' rights, to the unleashing of the Internet. And many of them have been fantastically successful at pouring millions of new, avid players into the great, creative game of markets and enterprise.

In other words, "leveling" can be good and loyal to market capitalism, if it helps to increase the overall levels of vivid, vigorous and creative competition. This is the inherent complexity and irony that men like Laffer have deliberately obfuscated for two decades. One would wonder why... if one did not already know.

Think about it. In his article, Laffer deliberately uses his strawman to dodge the obvious question -- won't some of the funds gathered by the Estate Tax go toward helping other children better leverage their health, intelligence, etc? So long as the discussion is about children, helping them get to the starting blocks all together, to run a fair race, Laffer loses, bigtime, and he knows it.

So he strains to turn the question in other directions -- "we should focus on its impact on those who bequeath wealth, not on those who receive wealth."

You see, it is all about polemic. When the issue is kids, then disparities in wealth look unfair. But when you talk about adults, well, now those disparities were (to some degree) earned. And so, any attempt to take any of those earnings away is unfair confiscation of rightful earnings by a brutal state.

In fairness, Laffer does make a distinction worthy of some note, between an estate tax and an inheritance tax. The estate tax in effect puts the burden of proof on the IRS to prove that the money isn't in fact going to little Stanton III at Harvard, and if you're very rich you can hire better tax lawyers than the government can, thus giving you an advantage over the middle class woman who owns a small business and wants to leave it to her daughter.  The estate tax can thus be twisted to, in effect, work as a force to help create exactly the kind of dynasties we abhor.

An inheritance tax does the opposite.  Stanton has to prove that he's not getting the money--much harder to evade. All right. I am happy to argue details like that, in good faith.

But in fact, I am still falling for Laffer's strawmen. Because this clever master of distraction has done it again!

For the real issue, when it comes to the Estate/Inheritance Tax, is not about any kind of fairness and "leveling" the playing field, at all. No, those are diversions. Instead, our focus should turn to something else entirely, a matter of utter pragmatism -- the very survival of the Western Enlightenment, and the vibrant market-and-competition system upon which it is based.

For there is a ghost at the banquet. It is a stark and ironic truth... that only liberals want those markets to survive. And conservatives like Laffer are doing everything in their power to ensure that markets fail.

How can I say this? Well, one could start with the recent record. Across all the years since the second World War, almost every economic indicator has done better, on average, under Democrats than under Republicans. If you subtract three years of Reagan and three years of Eisenhower, then the correlation is near perfect.

But no, I want more history than that. A lot more. Will 4,000 years suffice? A historical record that spans every continent and every single civilization that ever had both metals and agriculture?

That long and brutal story shows, as Adam Smith very clearly described, that markets, democracy, science and everything we value has had one terrible enemy. A foe that is relentless, because it rises out of human nature itself, every time an elite forms at the top of any social order. It is an enemy that has ruined far more markets and systems of competitive enterprise than socialism or enlightenment governments ever did. It has been THE major enemy of human progress and freedom.

It is conspiratorial oligarchy. Feudalism. Under which the main and central goal of every aristocracy has always been the darwin-driven compulsion of elites to favor their own kin. To warp public policy in favor of cronies and offspring. To become top lords who are exempt from law and market rules, and then ensure that your children inherit your position, so that they can keep using those advantages, all the cheats that come with privilege, in order to keep augmenting that position, and become kings.


At one level, this is simple evolution-in-action... we are all descended from the harems of insatiable men, who succeeded at achieving this profoundly biological goal

Every effort of the right has been aimed, for 30 years, at bringing back a feudal-friendly regime.  Rationalizers and court apologists like Laffer cry out "class warfare" whenever anyone raises this overall issue.  Furiously, they distract attention from the blatant horror-story of human history, spanning every continent and every era, where oligarchs routinely shut down all competition, picking and choosing winners with far greater zeal than the most oppressive bureaucrat, ever.

So far, the campaign of distraction has been most impressive.  Especially enlisting armies of libertarians to march against the very same enlightenment institutions that made free markets possible.  By calling government the sole and only enemy of freedom, they manage to serve their masters well.


In the short term. But not over the long run. Because they are fools if they think a limit won't be reached. We are starting to hear populist rumblings, and this time they are refusing to be diverted into silly-ass "culture war" distractions. The trick of turning rural folk against urban citizens won't work much longer, when both sets of red and blue middle class Americans start realizing and recognizing the Old Enemy.

Now is the time for Laffer's masters to ease off. To recognize what Franklin Roosevelt -- a man born to the top elite -- knew so well. That FDR's liberal restraints upon neofeudalism weren't "treason to his class."

Rather, they were a social compact that SAVED his caste and made America the safest place in all of history... to be rich.

Jokes, predictions and serious prospects for a changed world

Before the sublime... the ridiculous! Google is at it again with April Fool’s yuks:

http://cadiesingularity.blogspot.com/
http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/landing/cadie/
http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/chrome/cadie/
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html

*** Open call for articles about interesting breakthroughs in augmented or mixed reality, especially overlays of virtual objects on realtime surroundings (e.g. through eyeglass headsup displays.)   Also, anybody with contacts with companies either in DC or Phoenix, I’ll be in those two cities and open to suggested folks who might want an inspirational and stimulating speech or consultation about “the future.”

Now here are some interesting folks.   Someone should tell them that I’m “Mr. Transparency.”

Feel free to skip past a couple of micro-rants to some cool miscellaneous items, at the bottom....


  What to do about Detroit?  About toxic assets?

I’ll put aside most political matters for a couple of weeks, but let me just reiterate that there are some alternatives that ought to be on the table.  I have suggested elsewhere that the best way to get the automakers a vastly better deal from the unions, and to get them out of hock, and to revamp management at the same time, would be to admit the core truth, that these companies are already employee owned.  Replacing much of the hourly wage with stock would instantly fix the balance books while prodding workers with a powerful motivation to return the companies to profitability.

I do not understand Treasury Secretary Geithner.  I thought he was supposed to be on our side.  The way to deal with the “toxic assets” is to sop them up in a “negative auction” in which present owners race to the bottom, so we taxpayers get the best deal in buying them up.  But Big G is arranging the opposite kind of auction, in order to boost the banks apparent balance books and keep them “apparently solvent.”  But that appearance of solvency could be solved another way, simply by relaxing the rules for writing down bad debts, temporarily.  Most of the mortgage-backed securities are NOT failing, but banks must liquidate due to reserve requirement rules.  So?  Adjust the rules, for a while!  As long as it takes to buy the toxics at prices that aren’t toxic to you and me.

As if I know what I’m talking about.


Re-Thinking Corporatocracy

To set the stage, see a fascinating article in The Atlantic about why nations in economic crisis never do the obvious thing -- go after the oligarchs who caused it.

Kent Pitman has posted a couple of interesting items on OpenSalon.  One of them is “Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics” which contends that the modern corporation is exactly the wrong model for an intelligent, artificial organism, one whose feral amoral dedication only to stockholder value conflicts diametrically with all of the values that scholars and philosophers found attractive about Isaac Asimov’s famed “laws of robotics.”

Pitman raised interesting points.  Still, I have to demure a little.  Having served as the last author to channel Isaac -- indeed the one to consolidate and tie together all of his loose ends (see Foundation’s Triumph), I became painfully aware of the flaws underlying the Three Laws -- especially the fact that super-intelligent lawyers would be able to interpret them any way they liked.  Indeed, there is an additional complaint against the corporate fiduciary law, and that is the way it so easily is hijacked by parasites, like a simple organism taken over by viruses.  

We have seen this happen in the corporate world, when the top leadership clade in not just one company, but whole swathes of the corporatocracy, were taken over by a single cartel/ingroup of a couple of thousand cronies, who bent every rule or procedure to assist each other in cycles of parasitism that had nothing to do with maximizing stockholder value. Both deceitful and self deceiving at every level. this small cluster of golf buddies did everything that a cartel does -- creating an artificial perception of “scarcity in managerial talent” that then allowed them to jack up prices for CEOs, directors and all other members of the cartel.  Thus, what we are discussing is not an inherent flaw of capitalism, but a failure of our immune system to deal with a calamity that we already know about.  A crime that is already on the books.

Any system that lends itself to parasitical predation so easily is flawed, not just in moral terms (Pitman’s point) but also in terms if simple Darwinistic common sense -- the basis upon which capitalism was supposed to be more realistic and objective than socialism!  Indeed, the failure of libertarianism to realize ANY of this is the overwhelming top reason why that movement has relegated itself to complete irrelevance, at a time when it might have had useful things to offer.

Another interesting Pitman perspective is “Rethinking Mega-Corporations” -- I don’t agree on all levels.  But it is part of the re-appraisal of corporate capitalism that’s badly needed... if we are to save and re-invigorate capitalism as an economic cornucopia. 


Misc New Items...

Amazing new H+ Magazine.   Singularity 101 with Vernor Vinge, Space Solar, First Steps Toward Post Scarcity, Building Your Perfect Memory, Hacking The Economy, and Nanobots in the Bloodstream are among the articles in the impressive new Spring 2009 issue of the online trendsetting edge-culture magazine H+.

See an interesting profile of Freeman Dyson, who has suggested not that Global Warming isn’t happening... (only dingbats and those whores at Cato believe that)... but that there may be a lot of net good to arise out of the warming trend.  He makes some interesting points, and I agree that chicken little scurrying may have gone too far.  On the other hand, rapid transitions... ANY rapid transitions, inevitably spur disruption, habitat extinctions, desertification and local desperation.  Some locales that turn desperate will also have nuclear weapons.  Read and be provoked.

A distinct electric signature in the brain that predicts that an
error is about to be made has been found by UC Davis and Donders
Institute neuroscientists by analyzing recorded magnetoencephalographic (MEG) brain activity. (Donders Institute) About a second before errors were committed, alpha  activity was about 25 percent stronger in the back of the head (the occipital region), and in the middle region, the sensorimotor cortex, there was a corresponding increase in the 's mu  activity.

Myelin (the fatty layer of insulation coating neural wiring in the ) plays a critical role in determining intelligence, and is largely genetically determined, a team headed by UCLA neuroscientists has found. Myelin-coated tracts make up the brain's white matter, while the bodies of neural cells are called grey matter. DTI scans of 92 pairs of fraternal and identical twins. They found a strong correlation between the integrity of the white matter and performance on a standard IQ test.

Resistance to paternalistic secrecy can take many forms.  Satire is among the most powerful.  See the Chinese people fighting back... with humor.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html?em

A fascinating summary of the roots of Chinese history in the conquest of Mexico and the Opium War:

Research spanning 20 years has given us almost a recipe for planting and embellishing false memories in people, said Elizabeth F. Loftus, a professor of psychology and criminology at the University of California at Irvine. This has serious implications for false memory problems that are occurring in society, which are really memory distortion episodes, she said.

An interesting article about lie-detection -- In the first use of fMRI to detect deception in individuals, the researchers used the patterns they identified to correctly determine whether each of the subjects had taken a watch or a ring 90 percent of the time. The use of fMRI represents the cutting edge of lie-detection technology. As far as we know, no region of the brain specializes in lies. But investigators have found that lying activates brain regions involved in suppressing information and in resolving conflicts—such as that between the impulse to describe reality and the wish to contradict it. ...When a subject was fibbing, the scientists noted a burst of activity in a strip of brain tissue at the top of the head that is involved in motor control and sensory feedback and in the anterior cingulate, which performs cognitive tasks such as detecting discrepancies that could result in errors.  Also found that activity in inferior frontal regions and in the right anterior insula, which interprets bodily states as emotions, directly paralleled sweat gland productivity, lending credence to both brain and skin responses as indicators of fibbing.  Otoh, studies of people with antisocial personality disorders, for example, indicate that such patients may have damaged frontal lobes. Because of these discrepancies, a sociopath, psychopath or someone who is simply a good liar might well be able to suppress any suspicious neural responses to the “insider” choices and thus avoid detection. 

An absolute must-see.

The Great Ape Trust in Iowa is engaging in an  experiment, bonobos, which are part of the great ape family that includes chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, have been given their own house in which to live and dwell. In 2005, organizers placed eight bonobos in a multi-million dollar facility in what is hoped will be a successful long term and multi-generational experiment. The house is equipped with 18 rooms that include a kitchen in which to prepare meals and vending machines that dispense snacks. There are flushing lavatories, an indoor waterfall and walls for climbing. When it comes time to eat, the apes help their human handlers prepare meals in a compound kitchen. The bonobos can monitor the front door with a camera and decide for themselves who can come in – although they are known for welcoming visitors and often taking newcomers by the hand to show them around the complex.

A fascinating development in the war between science and postmodernism.  Apparently, some members of the latter -named cult have come to realize that their beloved nonsense became far more the tool of reactionary oppressors than science itself ever was.

See Brockman’s EDGE site for a fascinating essay on the 50th anniversary of CP Snow’s famous “two cultures” epistle, about the gaping divide between the scientific and the academic literary world.  Snow's descriptions of the two cultures are not exactly subtle. Scientists, he asserts, have "the future in their bones," while "the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist." Scientists, he adds, are morally "the soundest group of intellectuals we have," while literary ethics are more suspect.

Speaking of apes.... A truly dismal and misleading article in scientific American about   S. JAY OLSHANSKY, LEONARD HAYFLICK and BRUCE A. CARNES says corectly that “no anti-aging remedy on the market today has been proved effective” and that most of the promises made so far are pipe dreams.  I agree, so why do I find their article dumb and below SciAm standards?  First, they dimiss any thought that aging may involve some kind of expiration clock, hewing solely and exclusively to the “accumulation of errors” theory.  But...
 (1) pure accumulation of errors, all by itself, would inevitably feature far more outliers -- individual exceptions -- than we see in human or animal populations.
  (2) Caloric restriction and sex-delay in many species (e.g. flies and mice) have triggered fundamentally and qualitatively different aging profiles and rates... and yet caloric restriction evidently has NO such dramatic effect upon human populations (a puzzle that I can tentatively explain, but that the authors’ theory cannot.)
  (3) There is a famous mass-vs-lifespan curve for mammals, such that most species seem to get roughly the same number of heartbeats!  Yes, this might be consistent with error-accumulation!  Except primates get more heartbeats, apes even more, and humans three times the mammalian norm!  
   Funny thing, primates are the mammals that NEED longer lifespans because their babies are dependent longer.  More so apes.  And humans needed longer spans even more.  So... we evolved to get them.  Um... that sounds a lot more like a “clock” than error accumulation!  These guys may be right in their cautionary message to the public.  But it doesn’t stop em from being dopes.
 
Please help update the predictions site!

Until I can arm-twist some billionaire to fund a real predictions registry, we can at least continue our group experiment with the little wiki that holds me accountable.  So folks, please do (if possible) drop by and help Tony (and others) revise, fill and update the predictions wiki at:http://earthbydavidbrin.pbwiki.com/Predictions

Not only is it interesting -- tracking the successful... and embarrassingly wrong forecasts from Earth and other books-- but filling it in and taking care of some of the missing sections could actually help your humble host at getting some attention paid to interesting topics. Making the wiki look fairly professional and respectable could make a real difference.If you want to join with full writing privileges, just ask Tony Fisk via the comments section, below.

Oh, someone be sure to keep an eye on Bill Christensen’s much more general sci fi predictions site, technovelgy.com!  And help the two correlate.  This is part of the long slog toward getting society to admit that sci fi knows best!

Ratchet up my prediction score... by a mosquito zap!

This one merited a special posting. Alerted by the inimitable Jamais Cascio...
David, here's an item to add to your prediction hit list from EARTH...or, at least, a very near-miss:

"A quarter-century ago, American rocket scientists proposed the "Star Wars" defense system to knockout Soviet missiles with laser beams. They are now aiming their lasers at another airborne threat: the mosquito. In a Seattle lab, researchers watched a  glass box of bugs. Every few seconds, a contraption 100 feet away shot a beam that hit buzzing mosquitoes, one by one, with a spot of red light. This particular test used a non-lethal laser. But the Cold War missile-defense strategy will soon be reborn as a WMD: Weapon of Mosquito Destruction. [...] Technology might one day draw a laser barrier around a house or village that could kill or blind the bugs...."

Ahem... is that exactly what I portrayed in that 1989 novel?  In fact, some fans have set up a couple of sites to keep a running record of my successful forecasts. Along with the text of a speech I gave, concerning the art of prediction.  In fact, I devote a large portion of my web site to the topic.

(See also http://www.technovelgy.com/  which tracks modern events/trends that were first mentioned in science fiction.)

 Now, if only any folks in positions of influence were actually tracking the most important kind of "intelligence data" of all. How we need a basic scoring system, simply to keep track of who is right more often! (How do you think almost the entire clade of bonus-swilling CEO and hedge-funders would do?)

===== Misc other matters =====

From Mike Gannis: > ... under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing -- at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse. If you ask me, it's all a government conspiracy to keep kids from being exposed to Heinlein juveniles.

==== And with tax season coming ====

Just a month after the birth of my first child*, I began a yearly practice that I recommend to all Americans, who both love their country and want to see the next generation less-burdened by the wastefulness of ours.  Beyond honestly and carefully paying whatever taxes that I owe, I also send a small and entirely separate donation to the U.S. Treasury, to be applied against the National Debt.  It isn’t much - a gesture - but it seems a good way to express not only faith and commitment, but also rejection of the Cult of Selfishness that got us into this mess.  If you feel as I do, then look for the address and instructions, below.

If interested in helping promote this tradition, send your check (made out to US Treasury) to the Treasure Dept: Bureau of Public Debt, PO Box 2188, Parkersburg WV, 26106-2188.  Send enough so that their time logging it and sending a thank you note isn’t a net loss to our kids, okay?  And feel free to use this, next time some ranting flag-waver fool tries to “out-patriot” you.  (Of course, tutoring at a homework club accomplishes much more...)

* In fact I began the practice long before 1992, stretching back to the 1970s.  But there were gaps and my records only prove it starting in 1992.

 

Uplift, Deep Cheating, and the CEO Cartel

Time for my once-monthly political screed.  But first, see “Developmental and ethical considerations for biologically uplifting nonhuman animals,” by George Dvorsky... opining that we humans will soon attempt what I described 30 years ago, when I coined “uplift” in several novels that explored the concept from many angles.  George's fascinating paper, might have benefitted from more on the sfnal history of the idea.  Before me, HG Wells, Cordwainer Smith, and Pierre Boulle depicted humans endowing animals with powers of intelligence and speech - though always in a context of abuse and involuntary servitude.  Indeed, those cautionary tales may have helped ensure that it will be done openly and accountably, hence qualifying the tales as "self-preventing prophecies."  Allowing me to be the first to ponder "what if we tried to do uplift ethically and well?"

...and now, current events...

---------
"So long as risk is effectively concealed from borrowers and lenders or actually shifted to others, risk-taking will be excessive. The initial phase of excessive risk-taking will manifest itself as an economic boom, but eventually, when actual losses begin to change the perceptions of borrowers and lenders and begin to impinge upon unsuspecting others, the boom will give way to a bust....[A] market system whose credit markets involve risks that are partially concealed from the lender and partially shifted to others will be biased in the direction of excessive risk-taking. And excessive risks are converted in time into excessive losses."  --Roger Garrison

“Neither the U.S. government nor anybody else is capable of estimating the ultimate cost of bailing out such corporate giants as Citigroup, AIG, General Motors, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac (and the list goes on). There are two reasons for this. First, on a stand-alone basis, these companies are opaque and indecipherable entities. Financial innovation left transparency in the dust. Wall Street devoted much of its intellectual and political capital to concealing the risks it was creating. This concealment was deliberate; products needed to be priced inefficiently to produce profits.”  - Michael Lewitt

Ironies abound.  Though I consider myself something of an open market libertarian, I have long warned that we've been slipping into a putsch-coup by a conspiratorial oligarchy.  There is, of course, no contradiction.  The patron deity of capitalism, Adam Smith, declared that the very worst enemies of markets (far worse than socialism), are conniving aristocrats and top lords of finance. 

 Smith made clear (as I'll reiterate) that capitalism and top capitalists are often NOT the same thing.  Indeed, the latter can often be lethal to the former.

 I nevertheless have never favored the notion that the government should set CEO compensation rates.  That populist response to justified public anger, simply answers one anti-market cheat with another, at a time when what we really need to do is restore markets to health.

Alas, I find myself hoping for a bit of a delay in the Big Obama Recover, if only because America needs a taste of radicalization, at this moment of history.  Not enough to send tumbrels through the streets, or mobs waving red banners, or a tsunami of wretched, hypocritical Timothy McVeigh clones blowing up buildings.  But enough to not let the reforms stay superficial -- simply a matter of the government buying out the godawful horrid mistakes of a clade of business morons who styled themselves as geniuses. We cannot continue to ignore the cheat that brought us to this mess and provoked public wrath. This cheat goes deeper than any problem of excessive-leverage, or negligent mismanagement, or failures of regulation. Much deeper, since it caused all of those.


WHAT WAS THE DEEP CHEAT?

 It was the creation of an international <i>cartel in top-level management,</i> which acted monopolistically, in blatant restraint of trade, in order to corner the market in a single valuable commodity -- managerial positions atop major corporations -- especially international financial institutions.

Sure, these guys maintained a superficial appearance of competing... while appointing each other to each others' boards and desperately fostering the mythology of the indispensable, hyper-elite manager.

Along the way, the era of business leaders like Walter Wriston -- a bygone day when banks were led by bankers -- gave way to one of paper-magicians, engaged in smoke, mirrors, and incantations, siphoning commissions off of every churn as they created "wealth" based upon pure subjectivity and illusion.  These fellows justified their cycle of reciprocal compensation boosting -- a clear case of a "circle jerk" -- by claiming to be mutant-level geniuses... like pro basketball players... who were so far at the end of the gaussian curve that normal market laws of supply and demand simply did not apply to them.  

That is a point worth careful pondering. (Yet no one speaks of it.) For if basic economic laws were to apply, then  high CEO salaries should have drawn in talent from other realms, from science, politics, law, the arts, until, by simple economics, the new, copious supply of managerial talent would bring pay levels down again. 

 In other words, the market forces that these fellows claimed to devoutly believe in should have brought CEO compensation rates back to sanity naturally, organically, through Amith's marvelous invisible hand!

In fact, many of these guys did come into management and finance earlier, for precisely that reason, drawn by hope of rich compensation, elbowing aside the Wriston-types who still thought (the old-fashioned fools) that banks should tend the mortgages they sold.  Hence, the clade of super-manager golf buddies did once believe in supply and demand... back then.  

Only, later, these supposed defenders of market capitalism (in theory) declared that supply and demand had no meaning at their stratospheric level of talent!  

Talent that proved -- and let's emphasize PROVED -- to be utterly delusional, at all levels and in all ways.  Almost any sensible person would have done a better job with Citibank.  I would have.  So would you.


THE MIND BOGGLING GALL

What boggles me is that nobody seems at all interested in putting any of this into the context of human history, revealing the pattern for what it is.  Part of a tedious cycle that is - actually - quite typical.  Nearly all human eras saw markets spoilt and ruined by their real foe -- one that (let me repeat) Adam Smith himself decried as far worse than socialism (though socialism also sucks).  That enemy is collusional oligarchic cheating by cronies of the king.

Recall how Louis XIV said “l’etat c’est moi”?  (I am the state.)  In a similar manner, members of the financier cartel proclaim that any attack upon them is an attack on capitalism itself.  But that is the proclamation of all parasites.  And it just ain't true. Capitalism is not the same thing at all as fat, lazy, conniving and uselessly stupid capitalists.  Indeed, the purpose of actual competition is to Darwinnow out the fools and keep the others nervous!  No wonder they prefer a cartel!

In order to save free enterprise from a monopolizing cartel, the answer is simple.  Do not bother trying to set prices or limit CEO salaries.  That is simply acting like a cartel again!

No, the thing is to break up the cartel! There are already laws against interlocking directorates and conspiratorial restraint of trade.  Enforce them. See to it that boards represent a wide variety of stockholder and creditor viewpoints, including dissenters and skeptics.  Ensure that the CEO supervised by one board member does not sit on the board wherever that fellow is CEO!  Insist upon radical levels of transparency.  Seek objective metrics of managerial success that actually correspond to practical decisions.   But above all, break up a conspiratorial cabal of ripoff artistes that threatens our security far worse than OPEC ever did.


BRIN’S “SUGGESTIONS” REDUX

 One proposal that maybe I should not have included in my list of 100 unusual suggestions for the Obama Administration was that we consider a change from 20 years of failure in Somalia and try something else -- possibly supporting the orderly, organized and lawful northern tribes of Somaliland. (In a recent development, it appears that the Obama administration is doing something very similar to what I recommended, only instead quasi-adopting the neighboring Somali region known as Puntland.  Recently, US naval forces delivered several captured pirates ashore at Puntland, for trial, an implicit recognition of sovereignty... even though some pirate ships have always operated out of Puntland but never (apparently) out of Somaliland.)

 Now I have something similar -- to not so much to suggest as to tickle the imagination.  First, consider the awful situation that the Obama Administration faces, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  One is a failed state where “empires go, to die.”  Since Alexander, no imperial pax has ever intervened there without screaming in pain and leaving in ignominious defeat.  We’ve actually done very well, by comparison, but the prospects aren’t good.  

Nor are they bright for Pakistan, a nuclear power, portions of whose population are smart and educated and modern oriented... but thrown into national instability by a northwestern region that is radical, violent and rife with lawless chaos.  See an article that describes how both Waziristan and Swat Province have been effectively handed over to a Taliban franchise, by a Pakistani government that has given up enforcing its own laws.

Deals that the Pakistani government makes with the Taliban are a comprehensive strategic victory for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. One, they ensure that the over hundred thousand Pakistani troops in the region are no more a threat to them or to their goals. By securing their eastern front through peace deals with Pakistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are free to focus their entire firepower on U.S. and NATO forces. Two, the deals give the Taliban and Al Qaeda safe havens where they can train, recruit, and fund raise. These provinces give them a strategic depth against western forces. Now they have safe homes in Pakistan to retreat to and resuscitate in, so they can return to fight another day in Afghanistan. Three, the frenetic burning of girls’ schools, destruction of non-Islamic texts or other books, and demolition of museums and libraries will guarantee this region remains  both backward and a hotbed of anti-western activity.

But the most dangerous consequence is the loss of land. Taliban now control vast territories in the South East of Afghanistan and North and West of Pakistan. They are steadily carving out a Talibanistan — a state perpetually at war — that will nestle between Afghanistan and Pakistan and prey on both of them for territory, fighters and resources.

It is a disturbing and worrisome diagnosis.  If imagination is to be applied - with the aim of offering solutions - then first we must start with a simple question.

Who is causing all the trouble in both Afghanistan and Pakistan? If you answer “radical Islamists,” then you have drunk the same koolaid that has been poisoning clear thinking since long before 9/11.  The same thing happens when you shrug and call the region “Talibanistan.”  By blaming all of Islam, you simply drive more good Muslims into thinking that we hate them all.

 In fact, the Taliban and its allies in Pakistan are driven, at least to a large extent, by the quirks of a particularly passionate and intensely determined tribe called the Pashtuns.  Long before it was called Talibanistan, the region on both sides of the border was known as Pashtunistan.

The Pashtuns are an unusual people by many measures. Realization of this fact goes back to when scholars cited remarkable linguistic and cultural features, suggesting that Pashtuns are direct descendants of the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.” If true, it would be profoundly ironic.  Today, their passion seems directed toward destabilizing both Afghanistan and Pakistan, with radical Islam as the superficial meme.  But if you look at how they treat their fellow Muslims, it is clear that fierce tribalism is a stronger undercurrent.

Of course, the obvious (if cynical) solution is also blatantly impossible -- though it still merits a passing thought -- or some due diligent appraisal at the highest levels, before it’s dismissed.  That solution is separation -- allowing both Pakistan and Afghanistan to cleave off, legally, territories that they have already lost, de facto.  Fashion Pashtunistan into its own entity and encourage those radical Pashtuns who reject modernity to choose life there.  This might allow the remainders of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to go about their business in peace... a result that could be precious beyond pearls.

Might this then leave us with a hostile and radical Pashtunistan that is wholly and directly controlled by the Taliban? A national entity, eager to promote terrorism, the way Afghanistan was, till 9/11??  

Well, here is one of the beauties of statehood.  It forces some degree of realism - not always, but often. For one thing, once you have a formal government, a capital, a treasury, currency etc, you now have something tangible to lose.  If such a state began acting in hostile ways, the Pakistanis -- and the Tajiks and Uzbeks and Haziri etc of Afghanistan -- would be far better placed to retaliate against a state than against a murky guerilla force.  So would the US and NATO. International retribution would be far more feared by a Pashtun state than it is by tribes that have nothing to lose and can just scatter into the hills!  

All right, back in 2001, the Taliban who ruled Afghanistan were in a similar situation, and they proved undeterred in their support of Al Qaeda, even knowing that America would have to come, after the 9/11 attacks.  Still, most observers say that Taliban were rudely shocked by the ease with which their nation was brought down.  It is doubtful that another radical (and non-petroleum producing) Islamist state will be quite so cavalier or careless.  

 Well, it’s a thought.  Even though it certainly won’t happen.


AND THE WORLD’S ECONOMY TURNS

Microsoft’s Steve Balmer recently: “For the past 25 years, the world has certainly enjoyed incredible, incredible global growth. Average incomes around the world grew at unprecedented rates, millions of people moved from out of poverty into the middle class for the very first time.

“I think that expansion was built on three things: innovation, globalization, and debt, increasing debt. American technology was certainly at the heart of the innovation that played the central role in the process. The PC, the Internet, fiber optics: Those things were things that continue to keep America at the forefront of technology, and really at the lead of a growing global economy. But over time, over the last period of time, the balance has really shifted. Instead of innovation and productivity driving growth, it’s really been unsustainable levels, particularly of private debt, that have been a key driver of economic growth.

“In 1929, for example, just before the stock market crash, the private debt-to-GDP ratio was 160 percent. Last year, private sector debt as a percentage of the GDP: 300 percent; far more leverage. And you can see it’s been a steady increase basically since almost the end of World War II. In my view, what we now have will be a fundamental economic reset. The economy is going to have to reestablish itself at a level of spending that reflects the real value of underlying assets before we can all start growing again at a healthy rate.

“In our opinion, in order to reach the reset point, three things need to happen. First, the economy must be deleveraged. Private debt as a percentage of GDP has to be reduced. Restoring health to the nation’s financial system is a fundamental part of this. Second, confidence must be restored. The stimulus package, in my opinion, is vital. It will provide a cushion as we reach the reset point and it will help restart our economic engine.  Third, America really has to return to growth that’s built on innovation and productivity, rather than leverage and private debt.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis. There is a lot of history around that, and frankly if you stop and think about it, 1837, ‘73, ‘29, 2008, it’s almost exactly a whole lifetime between each of the major economic difficulties that we face. But I think it’s also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to think about our priorities again and make the investments that put us on the right foot.”

In fact, Balmer should have included 1819, the nation’s first major depression.  In which case one notices that the gaps between each collapse and the next one are getting longer at a steady rate.  19, then 36, then 57, then 79 years.  Of course this selectively excludes smaller recessions and “panics” so one can be dubious.


OPEN CALL

Anybody who has contacts with companies either in DC or Phoenix (e.g. Motorola), I’ll be in those two cities and open to suggested folks who might want an inspirational and stimulating speech or consultation about “the future.”


AND FINALLY.....

This is perhaps the last installment of the Bush era in comedy. In fact, about half of them were unfair gotchas.  But I'm in no mood to cut him any slack.

A “track record” predicting the future...?

My predictive “hits” keep adding up... but before touting some recent successes, a quick announcement: "Life After People" returns to the History Channel Saturday 2/28 5pm! The most popular show ever on History... featuring yours truly (among others.) And here’s hoping it’s not prophetic!  (Though my next novel will edge daringly close to the same theme.)

Note, the job of a Futurist is actually not prediction per se, but to lay out a range of plausibilities.  Still, some fans do keep track of how often I am right. (And sometimes dead wrong!)   Making it worthwhile, I suppose, to use up one of my twice monthly blogs by updating some recent close calls.

----
Edging toward worker ownership?

The Ford Motor Company can substitute its stock for as much as half of its payments into a retiree health care trust under a deal announced Monday by the automaker and the United Automobile Workers union. The agreement could form the basis for similar deals with GM and Chrysler, which need to cut costs and demonstrate they can survive under terms of federal loans. “The modifications will protect jobs for U.A.W. members by ensuring the long-term viability of the company,” the union’s president said in a statement.

See my list of “100 unusual suggestions for a time of crisis.”  This kind of stock-for-concessions deal was near the top of my list. Still, it is only a half measure that stops far short of both Unions and Company recognizing a fundamental fact -- that the workers in-effect already own the car companies... and ought to start acting accordingly. Only they can buckle down, re-arrange the obligations, and trim the companies down for 21st century creative competitiveness.  If they wake up in time.

We need to get beyond “left-right” cliches.  This is not a matter of socialism, or betrayal of market principles.  There is nothing fundamentally wrong with workers and their organizations and pensioners accepting part of their labor value in equity.  And once they have the guts to admit that things really have changed, maybe they will also find the courage to accept their responsibility to do whatever it takes to make their own companies work.

----
Transparency’s double-whammy in the news...

One topic area that straddles my careers in both nonfiction and fiction is “transparency” and the value of open information flows, in a society whose most fundamental institutions -- democracy, markets, science and law courts -- turn rancid and die, whenever the players cannot know what’s going on.  My book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? forecast many of today’s quandaries, including economic ructions caused by secretive or opaque business practices. Sound creepily familiar? (It is one of the only public policy books of the 20th Century not only still in print, but quoted more, every year.)

Hence, it was with some pleasure that I read a piece by WIRED Magazine senior writer Daniel Roth last week: Road Map for Financial Recovery: Radical Transparency Now! in which he lays down the importance of business reporting standards that are not only thorough and honest, but also clear and easily parsed by any citizen armed with a good computer.  So-called market defenders who call transparency “oppressive meddling” can only be hypocrites, who do not really believe in the most fundamental of all capitalist principle -- that of people making their own best judgements, based upon genuine and useful information.


Along similar lines... Pat Matthews wrote in with the following, about a forecast that I made 20 years ago in a novel -- that Swiss banking secrecy would become a major issue: ”I remember reading EARTH and taking the Helvetian War for granted as the major early-21st Century Crisis, without bothering to wonder what triggered the public mood of anger at their secrecy and covering up for dictators etc.- a worldwide economic crash in which the Swiss Bankers appeared to be the primary culprits, and the witch hunt is on until Helvetia glows in the dark. Yes. This makes SUCH good sense. Different timeline, of course, since it's the American financiers who are now in danger of being tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. But - google for UBS in trouble. Now, several months into the current recession, it becomes painfully clear that you knew what you were prophesying!”

Alas, though, we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

--- Heavenly Messengers ---

And in the realm of science... see my doctoral dissertation at work --  ”Dark comets may be prowling the Solar system, posing a deadly threat to Earth. They are formed when reflective water ice has evaporated away, leaving behind an organic crust - similar to tar and related to the richest parts of carbonaceous chondrites - creating a surface that only reflects a small fraction of the light of normal asteroids.”  

My predictive hit on this?  Well, it is in two parts.  First, my PhD thesis predicted that such layers would form -- now the standard model of comets.  Second, my novel (with Gregory Benford) HEART OF THE COMET was the work that predicted the surface layer would be extremely dark.  All right, that’s more obscure than forecasting technologies and secrecy campaigns against Swiss banks.  Still....


--- Speaking/Consulting in Phoenix?  And/or Washington D.C.---

It appears that I’ll be spending the last 3 weeks of July in beautiful, warm Phoenix Arizona, helping the US government in a project brainstorming certain aspects of the future.  I’ll have some time on the side - especially evenings - so I’m open to suggestions (and introductions) re: Phoenix-area companies or groups that might want a consultation or speech, laying open some vistas and perspectives on an era of rapid change.  Stunning insights guaranteed!  

Likewise I will be in Washington DC, for government consultations, April 27-29.  I might be able tack on some events either before (4/26-27) or after (4/29-30) if companies or groups make arrangements soon.


------ INTERESTING MISC ITEMS --------

Twisting radio beams into a helical shape as they are transmitted could help ease the congestion in spectrum available for wireless communication, encoding huge amounts of digital data into the pitch. 

-------
According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (very liberal): The "envipolcon/project," study identified that environmental laws in Europe, Japan, Mexico, and the United States had converged toward stricter and more similar regulation in the last 30 years.  Simply put, instead of a race to the bottom due to regulatory competition -- the lowering of national environmental standards as a consequence of participation in international competitive markets -- the exact opposite has taken place. Environmental regulation has grown stricter over time in countries that have participated in globalization.

------
In four studies carried out across different cultural, religious, and political contexts, we investigated the association between religion and popular support for suicide attacks. In two surveys of Palestinians and one cognitive priming experiment with Israeli settlers, prayer to God, an index of religious devotion, was unrelated to support for suicide attacks. Instead, attendance at religious services, thought to enhance coalitional commitment, positively predicted support for suicide attacks. In a survey of six religions in six nations, regular attendance at religious services positively predicted a combination of willing martyrdom and out-group hostility, but regular prayer did not. Implications for understanding the role of religion in suicide attacks are discussed.

-----
Message from Stefan Jones:Philip Jose Farmer dead at 91   Ninety one! May he end up at a good spot along the river(world).

-----
From Frederic Bastiat's 1845 Petition from the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, Sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected With Lighting:“Dear Deputies [of Parliament]: We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price. This rival is none other than the sun ... We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds -- in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country."

---
Germany Generates Half the World's Solar-Cell Electricity (from the Progressive Policy Institute...)  Germans installed 1131 megawatts of solar cells in 2007 -- up from 81 megawatts in 2001 and 5.3 in 1995 -- and now have 3862 megawatts of solar cell capacity. This is nearly half the world's solar-cell megawattage. The panels produced 4.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity last year, or 0.7 percent of Germany's total 621 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. By comparison, America's solar cell capacity is now 830.5 megawatts, and combined with concentrated solar power contributes about 0.2 percent of America's electricity.

-----
From anthropologist David Buss:  “Wilson and Daly (2004) provided evidence that men possess a specialized adaptation for discounting the future, valuing immediate goods over future goods. When given a choice between a smaller sum of money tomorrow versus a larger sum of money at a later date, men more than women tend to choose the immediate resource. The discounting function became especially steep after men viewed images of physically attractive women. This shift in the steepness of future discounting did not occur after men viewed images of unattractive women, nor did it occur for women viewing either attractive or unattractive male faces. The male-specific shift in future discounting, rather than reflecting maladaptive impulsivity, reflects an adaptation designed to obtain immediate reproductive benefits when future opportunities are uncertain.”  Yeesh.  Buss does take some of the impulsive mystery out of it all.

---- Just a wee bit of politics? ----

It’s not about how high executive pay has gone.   If you want to see definitive proof which side has is right -- whether the catechism is true that cutting taxes stimulates the economy and raising them quashes the economy -- look at Russ Daggatt’s devastating examination of 1992 to the present.    Seriously, go look at this entry.  Only monomaniacal loonies would continue to maintain a mantra that has proved so overwhelmingly false.  Adults are supposed to admit it, when their every single prediction proved diametrically wrong, across twenty years. The only similar example I can think of is the 70 year delusion known as the Soviet Communist Party. 

Also: See a rather clever and painful description of some underlying American (actually, human) reflexes in terms of a deeply immature “cargo cult mentality.”  Important caveat.  Don’t just think about your opponents, while reading it.  Ponder your own side.  Even yourself.

Also: Ward Three Morality, by David Brooks, that appeared February 2, 2009 in the New York Times.

--- Finally.... Last chance to Hugo Nominate ---

Alert!  If you are a member of the World Science Fiction Convention - (held this year in Montreal in August) -- you have till Saturday night to nominate works for the Hugo Award.  I have something available in the novella and “related-book” categories.  But don’t let that sway you! At this point, there’s only time to do it online. 

(Or whip out your credit cards and join for that purpose! ;-)

Oh, if any of you know a schoolteacher or librarian or educator who works in Montreal, let me know...

Thrive & endure.
db

Science fiction, science fact, and misc wonders

 Making a series of announcements can offer an excuse to slip in one extra posting, this month... so....

Here's a special offer for Hugo Award voters (and everybody else)! Baen's UNIVERSE Magazine has now posted my new novella "Shoresteading" online for open-free access to anybody who wants to read a rollicking, near future adventure story, set in a world of rising seas, big ideas and strange hopes!

Also, see a (totally free) article about some of us SF authors appearing on highly popular “salons” on Second Life.

I provided the very first editorial for the newly launched site of SIGMA - the “think tank of scientific science fiction authors.” SIgma formalizes what has long been a practice at many government agencies of consulting SF writers about our area of most intense interest -- the future and processes of change. The theme of my editorial is one I have discussed before... the increasing brittleness of our civilization - one in which we depend ever-more upon a paint-thin layer of skilled professionals to anticipate and protect us from all possible dangers.  An approach that is fragile and deeply contrary to the American tradition.  We need to remember our roots, as a civilization that has always depended, also, upon resiliency.

Rounding out a list of “David Brin announcements...”

Starship Sofa has produced -- on its audio magzine Aural Delights a spoken version of my story “Temptation.” The narration is by Julie Davis. A story by Geoff Ryman makes the lengthy experience worthwhile.
   
     The second part of “Temptation” is also up (1hr 20min in to the show). Part 3 will appear soon.

A list of “Top 100 Writers’ Blogs” features Contrary Brin, around number 30.


OTHER INTERESTING ITEMS

Steven Sweet of the Charles G. Koch Foundation has written to me suggesting I let you all know about a great opportunity. The Koch Associate Program is a year long, competitively paid program designed to help liberty-minded young professionals develop the knowledge, skills, and experience necessary for a successful career with free-market thing tanks, policy institutes, and other non-profit organizations.

Toys of tomorrow! 

A fascinating epistemological analysis ‘The trouble with conspiracy theories’ by Edward Feser, addresses some of the matters I have raised before, e.g. the difficulty of recruiting - and maintaining loyalty from - skilled henchmen in any sort of large scale and ongoing/concealed betrayal of the proncipal belief systems that most of them were brought up in.  Neither Fesr nor I deny the existence of small scale conspiracies.  In fact, I believe he downplays conspiracies too much.  

There are many logical holes in his neat refutation. For example, there are ways that  a tight-knit “inner conspiracy” of a few fanatics could control much larger groups who did not consciously think of themselves as committing a betrayal.  (Suppose, for example, just half a dozen blackmailed/suborned men held the highest offices in a nation; they could then appoint fools and delusionally partisan rationalizers into lower positions, who could then achieve high levels of damage without the ever becoming aware that they were doing so.  The same effect can be achieved through clever use of prodigious amounts of cash.)  Still, it is an interesting perspective.

Come to the San Diego Science Festival this year. 

Speaking of which, see a lovely essay about how the “rightful place” of science is not only in making better tools for a better world, but in teaching by far the highest moral values. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/science/27essa.html?em

The color red can make people’s work more accurate, and blue can make people more creative. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/science/06color.html?_r=1&bl&ex=1233982800&en=60e0a8a5ed47f70d&ei=5087%0A

Google Earth now lets you zoom around Mars.

Note the following might be claimed as a predictive hit on my part... even though some aspects of the reportage itself strike me as, well, a bit fishy. Researchers in Great Britain and the United States have imaged the first high definition imprints that dolphin sounds make in water. The resulting "CymaGlyphs" are reproducible patterns that are expected to form the basis of a lexicon of dolphin language, each pattern representing a dolphin "picture word."

The CymaScope captures actual sound vibrations imprinted in the dolphin's natural environment -- water, revealing the intricate visual details of dolphin sounds for the first time.  "There is strong evidence that dolphins are able to 'see' with sound, much like humans use ultrasound to see an unborn child in the mother's womb," said Florida based dolphin researcher Jack Kassewitz. "The CymaScope provides our first glimpse into what the dolphins might be 'seeing' with their sounds."  The CymaScope will be used to image the sounds so that each CymaGlyph will represent a dolphin "picture word." The ultimate aim is to speak to dolphins with a basic vocabulary of dolphin sounds and to understand their responses."

There is growing evidence that dolphins can take a sonic "snapshot" of an object and send it to other dolphins, using sound as the transmission medium, so the dolphin's primary method of communication may be picture based.

It sure SOUNDS like what I described many years ago....    (Alas, the link stopped working.  As I expected, it may have been too good to be true.)

See the web site of my friend and fellow author T. Jackson King, who has posted a cool variety of stories and chapters  at 

See an incredibly alien place on Earth

---
“A major Indian-German geoengineering expedition set sail this week for the Scotia Sea, flouting a U.N. ban on ocean iron fertilization experiments in hopes of garnering data about whether the process  actually does take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sequester it in the deep ocean, a technique that may help reverse global warming.”  There are so many variables.  (1) I cannot believe that iron will do this all by itself.  Indeed, we should start by replicating nature and doing ocean fertilization by stirring up mud from the ocean bottom... exactly as I depicted in EARTH.  (2) One issue is iron-caused acidification.  (3) Also, could this stimulate more “desert ocean” areas to be useful fisheries?  By itself worth testing.  (4) There are also regions e.g in the Gulf of Mexico, that are dying of Eutrophy or too MUCH fertilizer washing in from farms up the MIssissippi.  In those cases, installing bubblers that inject air into the water might cause fisheries and CO2 absorption.”

China officially started construction of a Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the largest in the world, in a remote southwest region on Friday. Preparation and research for the project took some 14 years. The dish-like telescope, as large as 30 football fields, will stand in a region of typical Karst depressions in Guizhou Province when it's done in 2013.  FAST's main spherical reflector will be composed of 4,600 panels. Its observation sensitivity will be 10 times more powerful than the 100-m aperture steerable radio telescope in Germany. Its overall capacity will be 10 times larger than what is now the world's largest (300 m) Arecibo radio telescope developed by the United States, according to Nan Rendong, the chief scientist of the project and an NAO researcher

Mike Gannis stumbled on this Wikipedia entry for a clever but terribly meanspirited British “reality” show.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadets

  As Stefan Jones pointed out: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory as via government, big business, formal education, church has succeeded to the point where gross obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG." And now, they have finally put a lot of the WHOLE EARTH archives from 1968-1971 online.  Have a look at this marvel. Why, it's like finding out that people were trying hard to invent the internet before there were personal computers!  So far just a few of the articles are PDFs. But literally thousands of pages of the ginormous Whole Earth Catalogs and the various journals have been scanned in. Go flip through the first 20 or so pages of The Last Whole Earth Catalog; it's like finding a sub-index of the Encyclopedia Galactica.

I highly recommend looking at the site for Random Acts of Conditionless Kindness (RACK) offering ways to do little things that help a lot.
http://www.whataRACK.org/

Bruce Willis’s film SURROGATES will appear in September.  “Set in a futuristic world where humans live in isolation and interact through surrogate robots, a cop (Willis) is forced to leave his home for the first time in years in order to investigate the murders of others’ surrogates.”  And yes, it does eat off the same plate as KILN PEOPLE... with also some resemblance to Asimov’s THE NAKED SUN.  Ah well.  I will forgive all if it turns out to be an actual original movie that’s smart and well done!  In this era when most studio execs should be shot for cowardice and lack of imagination, that’d be really something.

Researchers Evaluate Climate Cooling Potential of Different Geoengineering Schemes.

Among highlights:  

*Existing activities that add phosphorous to the ocean may have greater long-term carbon sequestration potential than deliberately adding iron or nitrogen. COMMENT: Then farm fertilizer runoff may not be so bad?  Theplume of algae that is "killing the Gulf of Mexico" comes to mind.  Might such a site be the best place to seed iron, to try shifting the bloom from algae to plankton?  Or would such a plume better reach its potential by bubbling in air, so that anoxic conditions reverse and algae-eaters can then swoop in, turning the region into both a new fishery and a carbon sink?

* On land, sequestering carbon in new forests and as bio-char (charcoal added back to the soil) have greater short-term cooling potential than ocean fertilization as well as benefits for soil fertility.

-----
Interesting anti-cynicism from the Progressive Policy Institute:

In dollar terms, America's ties with poor nations span aid, charity, trade, and remittances. Government aid and private charity flows, at $22 billion and $9 billion, account for the least money but are essential in emergencies and can bolster public health, primary education, and other public services. Remittances are larger -- immigrants send at least $45 billion home from the United States each year  raising family incomes in rural districts and urban slums. Imports from low-income countries, excluding energy and goods from China, totaled $405 billion (or $35 billion per month) in 2007. This is a much larger figure than those for aid, charity and remittances, but complements rather than replaces them by supporting tens of millions of middle-class and lower-middle class urban jobs and raising farm incomes, in poor countries.

A quick table on the U.S. role in poor-country finance, excluding energy and China, as of 2007, finds the United States buying about a quarter of poor-country exports; providing a fifth of foreign direct investment, foreign aid, and remittances; and accounting for nearly two-thirds of charitable donations.

The World Bank defines "absolute poverty" as life on $1.25 a day or less (in constant 1993 dollars) and has estimated poverty rates on this basis back to 1981. In that year, 52 percent of the world's people were very poor. By 1990, the figure was 42 percent. In 2005, the most recent year available, only 25 percent of the world's people were very poor. East Asia recorded the most progress, with the absolute-poverty rate falling from 78 percent in 1981, to 55 percent in 1990, and 16 percent in 2005. In one generation, then, Asian poverty fell from the near-universal experience of life to the sad exception. Drops elsewhere in the world have been slower but real: Since 1981, Latin America has cut absolute poverty from 13 percent to 8 percent; India and its neighbors from 60 percent to 40 percent; the Middle East from 8 percent to 4 percent; Africa from 54 percent to 51 percent. In eight low-to-middle income countries without oil -- Chile, Jamaica, Mexico, Uruguay, Egypt, Jordan, Thailand, and Malaysia -- the absolute-poverty rate has fallen below two percent. Conclusion: if poor countries have good education, financial, infrastructure, anti-corruption, and other policies; if they are free of wars and coups; and if rich countries help through aid, trade and easy remittance, poverty often falls quickly and permanently.

        United States World Total
Goods imports*     $405 billion ~$1.8 trillion
Service imports     $71 billion ~$350 billion
Remittances**     $45 billion $248 billion
 investment     $41 billion $215 billion
Foreign aid     $22 billion $105 billion
Private charities     $9 billion $15 billion

* Excluding oil, gas, fuel and Chinese goods. With energy and China trade, the figure was $1.1 trillion.
** $248 billion in total

 The World Bank charts the decline of poverty, 1981-2005:
And has a shorter note on the falling rate of malnutrition.

 

All right, that last excerpt was a bit long.  But it's thought provoking and suggests there still may be hope.

 

 

Invite the Fillibuster!

Just a brief thought here.

Like anybody sensible, I have reservations about the great big Christmas Tree Stimulus Bill.  Half a dozen GOP senators are doing what the whole party ought to do, pointing out reasonable objections and negotiating about them in good faith.  Partly because there are still a few reasonable  Republicans in the Senate (gerrymandering has insured  there are almost none in the House) and in part because they were deputized to do so, by a party that knows what will happen, if they obstruct too much.

But a thought occurred to me that I must share (despite breaking my vow to limit political postings to a minimum.)  You see, there is a fascinating mythology going around. Everybody seems to think it's necessary for the Democrats to gather  a super-majority of 60 votes in the Senate, in order to pass legislation, because that is the number needed to invoke a motion of cloture, limit debate and terminate a fillibuster.  But consider underlying assumptions. 

 First , that Republican party discipline will remain uncannily strong.  Second, that a fillibuster of the Stimulus Bill comes without silver linings. Yes, party discipline is strong in a GOP that has been honed into an instrument of incredibly narrow dogmatism, especially in the House. But this runs counter to the country's mood, and may backfire.

Remember that a fillibuster is - above all - an act political theater. (Which is one reason Democrats used it so seldom during the Bush years.) In fact, it is a bluff.  If the majority ever called that bluff, the minority would have to maintain a tiring, round-the-clock tag team blather festival, in which elderly, bleary-eyed, elderly Southern senators would have to keep on talking and talking -- trawling for increasingly incoherent things to say in front of CSPAN cameras -- calling themselves "heroic" for standing up against legislation that has the backing of a popular president and a large majority of Americans.

And this is a losing situation for the Democrats... how? And who then gets the blame, with every bad piece of economic news?

There is something to be said for having the Dems deal with the fillibuster threat right up front, by calling the Republicans' bluff.  Forcing the issue while the President is popular and the issues are stark would put the GOP on notice and also set the precedent that Obama is willing to face such threats down. 

 Then, once this shiboleth is broken - and true to his nature -  let the President offer his hand.

Now is the winter of our discontent... made glorious summer by “that one” Barack....

Get it? Rolls off the tongue? Ah well.

Having cut back my political screeds to once a month - and maybe twice a month for other matters - let me start February's mensual political flashflood with....

1. THE OTHER “C-WORD”

In my previous missive, I remarked on how President Obama’s inaugural address proposed to “restore science to its proper place.” Signifying that we may (at long last) be departing a proudly know-nothing era.   Only later did I recall where I had seen a similar phrase:

Our countrymen have recovered from the alarm into which art and industry had thrown them; science and honesty are replaced on their high ground.
     - Thomas Jefferson, on entering office and repealing the Alien & Sedition Acts

Dang, is Obama mining everybody for ideas?  First Lincoln, then both Roosevelts, JFK, Reagan, Ike and now Jefferson?  Not that I’m complaining about the quality of his sources...

Also last time, I spoke of what I considered to be the most “telling” word in his speech - notable because he did not have to mention it.  Of course, I was glad to hear tolerance, responsibility, justice, progress, openness, accountability and so on, spoken with intense sincerity, for a change.  Other virtues, freedom and leadership, seemed to be rescued from the bizarre half-meanings they held in recent years.  Still, in a sense, he had to mention all of those.  But what sparked my interest was a word that nobody expected - and that would win no particular political or rhetorical points.  It was totally his own volition to include curiosity.  I suggested that this may reveal much about the man.

As a quick followup, before heading on to other matters in a long monthly compendium, I must turn from curiosity to the other “c-word” that lurks, like a ghost at the banquet. Almost diametrically opposite, this anti-virtue represents perhaps the worst trait of the awful gang who left our country such a shambles.  No, not “corruption” or “criminality” or “cretinous.” The worst Bush era anti-virtue was certainty.  

The kind of absolute certainty manifested by a clade that demolished the very same Pax Americana they claimed to love, by pursuing, with absolute determination (plus contempt for all criticism) policies that proved to be at-best wrong, and often criminally delusional. Even the “reform minded” McCain-Palin ticket shared this strange and childish anti-value, stressing proudly, over and over, their perfection of will, an iron-jawed grit that arises straight from the gut, not out of any namby pamby enlightenment process of assertion, evidence, argument, negotiation or reciprocal accountability. A stubborn, schoolyard obstinacy that is elevated and extolled as something somehow admirable.

This, I believe, is the root cause of the situation that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell bemoaned last week, in a blunt warning to Republicans: “We’re all concerned about the fact that the very wealthy and the very poor, the most and least educated, and a majority of minority voters, seem to have more or less stopped paying attention to us. And we should be concerned that, as a result of all this, the Republican Party seems to be slipping into a position of being more of a regional party than a national one.”

No doubt, in McConnel’s mind, the GOP “region” is geographical -- largely the South and the Mormon Belt.  But I think a map that would be even more telling is wherever towns and counties have seen their smartest young people move away, via university and profession, leaving behind those who feel viscerally abandoned, resentful and hurt.  I refer to Limbaugh-Land, where citizens have only limited access to diversity, or diverse opinions, but live instead immersed in media voices who preach nothing but indignant fury.  And if there is one thing about addictive indignation, we know that it flourishes best in an ambience of unswerving, unquestioned certainty.

Oh, there are some things in life that do merit gritty resolution. Love of family.  Loyalty. Freedom (in the true sense, and not reducing it to a tribal totem-slogan). Also courage, charity, and a willingness to keep fighting for a better world -- first through negotiation but also by confronting bona fide “evil-doers.”  Heck, I can go for all of that, and fie upon snooty/urban fools who sneer at such things, from an equally-flaky left!  We need to improve, a great deal!  But of all nations -- especially those that were ever tempted by great power -- none could ever brag of a higher ratio of goodness over villainy and error.

Anyway, wasn’t that supposed to be the purpose of Pax Americana?  Moreover, from the ecstatic worldwide reception given President BHO, perhaps people all over the world still feel that ought to be our role.  We may have one more chance to prove we deserve it for the crucial time that it takes to forge a grownup civilization.  Of that much, I feel certain.

Nevertheless, it’s become clear why right-wing “certainty” has such a grip, festering still, in at least a quarter of the nation.  It offers a clear and simple rebutal against those postgrad-educated folk who talk like they know so much -- and probably do -- but who are so superior and irritating.  After all, in Hollywood films, isn’t it the villain who goes on and on, in polysyllabic, explanatory monologues about how logical his plan is?  Until the hero -- Bruce Willis, or Sylvester or Arnold -- simply shouts “Oh, yeah?” and blasts the scoundrel with utter moral... certainty?  

In other words, doesn’t this attitude resonate in American tradition?  Without it, might we long ago have tumbled into a different nightmare?  Technocracy, or rule by the smartypants? Ew!

During our present pendulum swing back toward sanity and calm thought, let’s remember that the know-nothings do have a complaint.  It is 95% crap, but we would be wrong to respond to their moronic contempt with a similar (if reciprocal)... certainty.


2.  AN ILLUSTRATION OF HOW BAD IT’S BEEN

Which leads me to an article published recently in the Wall Street Journal by Eliot A. Cohen, Condoleeza Rice’s foreign policy advisor, or the (supposedly) smart guy who guided the smart people who guided Pax Americana for all but two months (so far) of the 21st Century.  In “How Government Looks at Pundits” Cohen offered his list of reasons why government insiders have little patience or use for input from others, beyond the narrow circle of those who receive “three-to-six-inch-thick briefing books, every day.”

 On the discussion list of SIGMA (the “think tank of scientific science fiction authors”) several members were all-aflutter over how this splash of cold water should remind us outside consultants to keep our expectations low, no matter who is in power or what philosophies or personalities guide our myriad agencies.  

Appalled at this complacent acceptance, I’m afraid I went a bit ballistic!  Nobody else seemed to recognize Cohen’s article as a lengthy and utterly horrific apologia by one of the chief architects of the demolition of the American Pax,. In-effect, a longwinded whine about how nobody but a uniform and self-referential ingroup should ever expect to be heeded.

In vain, I searched his article for any mention of processes that might track outcomes and/or re-appraise policies in light of predictive success or failure.  No mention of the pragmatic aim of finding people - both inside and outside of government - who happen to be right a lot and bringing them into the “briefing books” layer.  No interest - or curiosity - about how his own error-avoidance methods might improve.  Nor, of course, any awareness that the self-limiting perspective that he described might be a pathology. A perniciously destructive one, that merits correction by smart, sincere, skilled and patriotic people.

What I did find was the following especially bizarre excerpt:

”Do not prescribe a policy that the current group of officials cannot hope to implement because of who they are. I have had highly intelligent individuals -- including some with senior government experience -- sit in my office and lay out perfectly plausible policies that the current team, limited by time remaining in office, the pressure of competing and more urgent crises, and the all important mix of personalities, could never hope to put into effect. Moreover, core beliefs and style constrain policy makers profoundly. So don't ask them to do something outside their range of psychological possibility by, for example, proposing cold-eyed realpolitik to a band of idealists or vice versa.”

So, let me get this straight.  We are to be guided by a core “band” that steers the ship of state with gut-level certainty, while accepting no advice, no feedback or course-correction based on ongoing metrics, having culled themselves of not only diversity of philosophy, but any difference in personality?   As if any leader worth more than a bucket of warm seawater would not make sure to employ realists and idealists and all kinds that might both temper and challenge one another?  Questioning assumptions and seeking good ideas, whatever the source?

Reminder, this was the best and most highly-touted kind of “expert” that we got under Bush.  The very brightest of the brightest of those who have been ruling us, all but two months of the 21st century. With results and outcomes that are blatantly obvious to all.  


3.  CAN WE BE MORE ROBUST?

What bothers me above all else?  I’ve raised it many times before, from Defense Department consultations to magazine articles -- the issue of fragility vs resilience, and how much less robust we’ve become.  Especially, my teeth ache over small tweaks of public policy that might address so many these manmade fralities and potential failure modes.  A few examples:

1) Reversing the inventory tax (e.g Thor Power Tools) into a mild inventory incentive could ease a curse that was bequeathed on us by the same MBA dunces who invented "efficient investment instruments."  I speak of "just-in-time" delivery practices that leave our industries and cities without any reserves, to keep us going in case of transport disruptions.  (Taxing inventory would seem to be especially unwise right now, when unsold goods are piling up at companies in delicate health.)

2) A minuscule tax on un-hardened electronics - something very small would do no harm but exert perpetual pressure on Intel, Ford etc to come up with chips and electronics that won't be fried by a simple EMP.

3) Require that all cell phones have a backup peer-to-peer, packet-based system, allowing simple text messages to leave an afflicted area, even when normal cell towers are down.  Thus empowering citizens to communicate, when they need it most.

4) Tax incentives for companies to sponsor CERT team (civil defense) training among employees and neighbors.

Those are just four (of many) relatively small "stitch in time" policy endeavors that could add robustness to society without costing much at all.

Here is another one from author Wil McCarthy: Adding some capacitance to the power grid would be a big deal, too. The  reason our current grid can't support more than about 10% wind power is because it's an LRC circuit with no C. The reason power failures can cascade out of control: same deal. The current system is very brittle. A power grid with distributed capacitance could, for example, go into a  "safe mode" where all the interconnects were severed either regionally,  locally, or even down the neighborhood level, and run independently for a few minutes (or even hours) while the problem is sorted out. The ability to break up the grid for even a few seconds would make it a lot less vulnerable to spikes, EMP, sabotage, etc. Why not pay property owners to house an ultracapacitor or battery bank, the same way cell phone companies pay for towers? For serious storage, you can even go to hydrolysis and fuel cells, although that's more hazardous and requires more infrastructure. I'm also a big fan of the Mormon practice of keeping a two-year supply of food on hand.


4. A SUGGESTION FOR DEALING WITH GOP TACTICS

Some of you have checked out my “100 unusual suggestions for the Obama Administration”     Now here’s another.

 Facing Obama’s 70% approval ratings (the highest since Eisenhower), and especially after experiencing the President’s forthcoming and genial engagement, Congressional republicans are playing nice... verbally, that is. Said Mitch McConnell: "I know I'm speaking for every single member of our conference that we appreciated his coming up (to meet with Coingressfolk), and enjoyed the whole exchange." To some extent, Republicans -- along with the rest of the country -- may still be getting used to having a president who realizes Congress exists as an independent branch of the federal government, and not merely as a collection of 535 minor irritants to be alternately steamrolled or ignored. As another GOP aide joked, Obama paid more attention on Tuesday to House Republicans than George W. Bush did in most of the last eight years.

Alas, this did not extend to offering any support for the economic rescue package. (Which, frankly, has in it some items I would like to have seen the GOP members assertively and pragmatically bargain-down!  The aren’t always wrong, at the level of specifics.) The GOP members voted nay, as a bloc, in order to position themselves, in case BHO’s program fails.  

One tactic the dems might try -- pass, by a narrow partisan majority, a bill without any GOP-loved sweeteners.  Then offer a vote on a replacement package that contains such sweeteners, but requiring a super-majority.  Let’s see if their business constituents will act swiftly to null out the political gamesmanship.


5. REMINDER OF RECENT ITEMS

Those who have been following my political commentaries know that I have long favored efforts to wean our more decent conservative neighbors away from their reflex-driven alliance with the kleptos and know-nothings who have hijacked their movement.  Conservatism, in its better form, deserves a place at the negotiating table, but it can only return to credibility if its saner members gather the courage and patriotism to do what democrats and liberals did in 1947 -- by cutting themselves off from monsters, dogmatists, troglodytes and a bona fide criminal gang.

And an older essay (still relevant).

Those interested in following up on this concept can find more grist for thought in "Building a Rhetorical Bridge To (and For) Reasonable Conservatives," by my colleague in the SIGMA think tank of scientific science fiction authors, Dr. Charles E. Gannon. Most insightful.

Ex GOP Congressman and Heritage Foundation co-founder Mickey Edwards writes about his realization that today’s neocon movement has abandoned Ronald Reagan’s version of conservatism -- along with Locke and Madison and any kind of common sense.  Of course, I’ve been long pointing out that it is much worse than that.  Today’s “conservatism” has betrayed - above all - Adam Smith and market capitalism.  Indeed, its central paradigm is to assist the quasi feudal crony-aristocratism that Smith despised as the worst and most consistent foe of market enterprise.

Somebody refer Mr. Edwards to my paper about the “miracle of 1947”? 


6. SATIRES

Atlas Shrugged Updated For The Current Financial Crisis. by Jeremiah Tucker http://mcsweeneys.net/2008/11/20tucker.html

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?  http://www.independent.org/blog/?p=513


And now... although I have more items (a lot!) to offer, I’ll clip and offer them only to the die-hards among you!  By posting them below, under “comments.”  Some are cute or weird.  All political.

Above all, I am hoping that politics will simply matter less, real soon! I am tired of it.  I want civilization to consider politics just another problem solving tool, one among many, and no longer obsess on it, as (ironically) has been the case under the error... er, era... of the neocons.

 

 

 

Secret (and telling) words in the Inaugural Address

Even amid my pleasure and relief, that the moment had finally come,  I  felt compelled to examine Barack Obama's Inaugural Address, closely and critically.  If for no other reason, then to see if the new president would telegraph something different and revealing, about his underlying goals or character.  Some indicator that went beyond the expected eloquent platitudes, or reassuring words of determination and optimism.

Of course, those would have been enough for a good start. I was duly inspired by President Obama's call for a new spirit of purpose and idealism, evoking history and mission, duty and vision.  Indeed, I hope the speech moved all Americans, along with people around the world - even those whose guarded respect is as-yet tinged with suspicion.  Perhaps even grudging doubters will be swayed toward firmer feelings of appreciation, over the coming years, not only by words, or the skill and character of the Obama team, but also by events.   By the historical validation that is bestowed by great success. 
 
And yet, I don't feel compelled to write very much about those soaring themes and sentiments, all of which will be noted by others.  Instead, what I'll do - out of habit - is bring notice to a few side-glimmers and exceptional points that won't (I reckon) be mentioned by most pundits, or even historians.    

For example, it struck me that President Obama repeatedly called upon us to rise up as adults from the quagmire of dogma and culture war.  In order to do this, we'd have to do more than just listen to the angels of our better natures, or simply heed our high ideals.  Both in the campaign and on his first day in office, he emphasized the need to rediscover arts of negotiation and problem-solving. The calm pragmatism that undergirds all those lofty principles, without which they so easily dissolve into platitudes or self-righteous rationalizations. (As, indeed, the word "freedom" was cheapened in recent years, into a mere totem  for "my side.")

Other nations have known duty, honor, patriotism, self-sacrifice... and even freedom  But it is the mix of those fine things with other ingredients -- with patience and craftsmanship, with both eager competition and willing cooperation, with reciprocal respect and healthy self-doubt -- that made our loftier ideals truly world-transforming.   And that notion of anchoring idealism in pragmatic action is the message that I felt through my bones - deeper than through my ears - during Barack Obama's inaugural address.

It was the same message that he pushed the day before, in dedicating Martin Luther King Day to practical public service. Do you want other examples?

"To those (overseas) who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."

How simple an offer, based upon a clearcut image of cause-and-effect.  Then came a sentence that both rebuked the recent past and expressed far greater confidence in us than we have seen expressed (alas) by recent leaders:

"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."

Of course you'll recognize a central theme of my book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? And especially since the dire events of 9/11, as I kept hoping (and preaching) that Americans should reject the dismal and insipid "devil's dichotomy" we were constantly offered for eight years, as fools demanded that we trade-off between two things we cannot live without.

Those two passages were certainly noted by others. Moreover, without question, President Obama had to say them, whether or not he meant quite the emphasis that I perceived. 

 But two other paragraphs contained - tucked within - what I feel are vital hints to Barack Obama's character and agenda.  Because they are things he did not have to say.  Very few of the two million people attending in Washington, or close to a billion watching around the world, will remark upon them.  But I suggest that you do.

"We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age."

Yes, yes.  Education, sustainability, health, plus the new technologies that may not only help save the nation and planet, but also kick-start the next economic boom, in much the same way that our government's internet research sparked the last one... all of that was profoundly welcome, and expected.  But to put science first, ahead of all the others, and thus signaling it's "rightful place," struck me deeply.  This is one lawyer who knows that good decisions cannot be based upon incantations, but must ultimately depend on actual, honest-to-God facts.  

We have had enough of leaders who arrogantly believed that all you need to govern is one thing, a powerfully certain and egotistically subjective force of will.  

But then, it can be argued that Obama also "had to" mention science, after all the travesties of recent years.  Perhaps that, too, was no surprise. Or I may be reading too much into it. So let me reach deeper for my final clue.

"Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task."

Did you see it?  The word he did not have to mention?  And hence, one that he chose to insert, simply because he thought it important?

It is an under-rated word, though in some ways deeply sacred, since it represents a deep and profoundly American value -- one that stands behind our greatest achievements and underpins our loftiest ambitions.  Yes, all the other values that he listed in that paragraph are profound and vital.  But the one that caught and briefly transfixed me is a crucial, though oft-forgotten trait that makes us at-once both wondrously childlike and yet also mature, in the best sense of the word.  

Mature enough to ask that precious question (the foundation of true science) "what if I am wrong?" The question that we have learned - the hard way - leads to wisdom, justice, self-discovery, empathy, humility, and incremental progress.

Look again.  It is the one word that you never heard used to describe the dismal bunch who have finally departed and who will not be missed.  Even though, crossing all party lines, it once applied - and may yet again - to broadminded conservatism, as much as it does to liberals.

 The new president did not have to mention it.  But he did.  And that one word -- tucked in among so many fine phrases -- tells us plenty. It shows that he wants not only to preside and rule.  He wants to learn.

 =======

My 100 "Unusual Suggestions for America and the Obama Administration" are posted.  If you find any of them unique or worthwhile, feel free to spread word. Or join the discussion.  Meanwhile, here's to hope, confidence, and a renaissance. 

 

"Suggestions" posted...

...so please now spread the word!!!

One benefit of "change" is my fond hope that politics will be less important in coming years, letting folks like you and me relax enough to go back to stimulating the world with great projects and keen ideas! 

But first, let me announce that the series  of "unusual proposals" that I ran here - important ways that both the new president and the people might make things better - is now conveniently gathered and presented in a clear way. (With deep gratitude to our charismatic and highly skilled webmaster, Beverly Price!)

It seems everybody has "suggestions" for Barack Obama and an incoming emergency Government of National Sanity. My own list includes some sure to be so unusual, even you brainiacs haven't seen them before. Crackpot? Well, yes, some of them. (I'd hate to disappoint, after all ;-)  

But different. Guaranteed.

The other posting I want to announce carries forward a theme of mine... that a main political goal should not be to "crush conservatism" (that will only help Karl Rove maintain his unholy alliance), but to show decent conservatives how their movement has been hijacked by monsters... and thus break up a bizarre coalition that transformed the GOP into a modern Know Nothing Party.  (Hint: to do that, try showing your neighbors that change is needed, even from a decent conservative perspective.)

 One allegory that I offer concerns a strange event that happened sixty years ago -- the Miracle of 1947 -- when liberals and Democrats went through a wrenching, painful self-transformation, similar to what decent, patriotic conservatives should do, in 2009.

Thus, we may win the greatest victory of all, one not of parties or single points of view, but of reason and pragmatism over an insane Culture War that has poisoned a once great nation.  Well, one can dream.

And now -- putting faith in people, nation, civilization, more than any one man (but hoping for him, too) -- let me shout -- enough #*$#! politics!

Back to the future!

David Brin

 Visit me via:  http://www.davidbrin.com  or: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/

PS... this was a LOT of work!! You folks helped and devoted time too.

Please do find ways to circulate the concepts. Especially, if any volunteers want to cross post at change.gov? ???

Me? I promised. Fiction. Must ... write... fiction...