Discerning the Real vs the Unreal

Before weighing back into the political morass, let me link to this article on why we seem to be eating – instead of investing in – our innovation seed corn.  Combine with failure of management with foreign theft of intellectual property from the Inventing Nations… plus the War on Science (and every other fact-using clade in American life), and you get an assault upon the wellspring of all our successes as a nation and as a civilization.

Take the 58% cut of the Fossil Energy Office which is not a den of evil, folks. FEO research enabled scores of small players to do the slant drilling that had been limited to Big Boys, like Exxon. The resulting plummet in natural gas price is what made coal virtually extinct in the U.S. and brought us (under Obama) so close to energy independence we could (and did) shrug off threats from petro sheiks and Russian oil mafiosi. Til they bought themselves a White House.

How bad can it get, when the new Trump Budget – in order to fund yet another insane Supply Side tax gift to oligarchs – is slashing research at every level, from cancer and biomedicine to canceling California’s $10 million earthquake warning system. And if that sounds like a petty child taking revenge on a state that did not vote for him, sift through the budget and find scads of other examples. For example, arm-twisting Boeing and Lockheed to move production from Washington and California to (in order to to prop up) failing Kansas, or else lose out on Saudi contracts.

Let’s be clear, this is not “politics.” Under Democratic administrations, gushers of net tax money have always flowed from blue states to red states. Because we are one nation and our brethren have needed help. Oh, but you know brothers. Some are smart and generous. Others….

Only note the latest news. Over-riding a veto by their insane Gov. Sam Brownback, the chastened Kansas legislature has rescinded most of the Supply Side tax cuts for the rich that Brownback pushed for almost a decade. Like every single other Supply Side experiment, it delivered only deficits and pain and red-ink and bankruptcy and pain for everyone except those oligarchs. But prepping for another round at the federal level is the number two reason for Trump's slashing attack on R&D and other federal investments in our future. The number one, of course, is just hate.

== Impeachment redux - and the Great Despotic Axis! ==

There was a lot of commentary and feedback from my earlier posting: Don't Impeach! Plus why is Trump really in Saudi Arabia?

Regarding the first of those two topics, a Constitutional scholar weighs in with perspectives on why, if possible, we should approach any talk of impeachment with cautious and grownup deliberation.  (And please re-read that posting of mine! Every reason I gave just doubles, every week. Leave Trump right where he is. Seriously.)

Regarding the second topic from that post, some of you offered hope that Rouhani's landslide re-election in Iran might put the kibosh on Saudi-centered drums, beating a call fro the U.S. to attack the Persian Republic. The hate-Iran screeches are growing frantic! Some are railing that Iran will attack and conquer the entire Sunni world any minute now... despite being vastly outnumbered, out-gunned and their nearest Sunni neighbor having stacks and stacks of nuclear weapons!

Oh, but then the connivers can always try a Tonkin Gulf or Gleiwitz Incident, alongside their terrorist Reichstag Fire. And they might get complicit help from the Iranian mullahs, who can see their grip on power gradually slipping away. A nice little war would suit them, too, reinforcing their grip. And Putin would love seeing stupid U.S. attacks drive Iran into his orbit. Winners all around - that is among despots.

Along similar lines, note the cozying of Trump with Ankara... and here’s a basic IQ test. Why is Philippines President Duterte jumping like a lapdog for Vladimir Putin in Moscow? Putin's anti-western axis now stretches from Ankara and (he hopes soon) the mullahs of Iran, all the way past partial ally Beijing to Manilla and... yes... Washington D.C. And if none of you can put the pieces together, I hope and pray our Intel Community has.

== Can we set up a fact-checking service immune to "partisan" charges? ==

The portion of that blog getting the most attention was a small suggestion I made, toward the end, that strong bipartisan efforts be made to develop something the nation and civilization desperately needs – a fact-checking service that is above all conceivable dogma-based reproach. 

Our counter-intelligence professionals are deeply worried about new kinds of attacks upon America by foreign powers that are vastly more sophisticated than the ones that meddled in our 2016 elections. They are struggling to  understand the battlescape of this new information war. “As Americans tweet and like and upvote their way through social media, they generate a vast trove of data on what they think and how they respond to ideas and arguments--literally thousands of expressions of belief every second on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Google. All of those digitized convictions are collected and stored, and much of that data is available commercially to anyone with sufficient computing power to take advantage of it," writes Massimo Calabresi in Time.

This  excellent journalistic exposé takes you through the scary path that this underground campaign of social sabotage has taken — following patterns that Fred Pohl eerily predicted in The Cool War — revealing how our own technologies have been turned against us, and why we are so vulnerable.

What the story leaves out is the central, core fact that ties it all together. For you see, most of these failure modes rely on subjectivity — the ability to sway people with appeals to emotion, group loyalty, crowd momentum and rumor mongering. 

All of these approaches fail when people are calmly willing to weigh facts. So the agenda relies utterly upon demolishing two things… both calm and facts.

In my recent blog posting, I propose four reforms that could be enacted if just thirty mature-adult Republicans joined with Democrats in Congress. But the most important would be to appoint a commission to find some way that all Americans could verify clear facts or refute blatant falsehoods. Clearly, if facts do not start gaining advantage over lies and rumors, we are doomed.

 == Is a truly trustworthy fact checking service even possible? --

Here is how I answered one noted journalist.

I suppose my main point has to do with the much-better alternative to impeachment that might solve so many more things. That would be the Great Adult Republican Defection (GARD), that so many of us have been hoping for, across the last 25 years. Sure, it never happened, despite the ever-deepening spiral into madness on the American right, for a number of reasons.

1. Brain scans show that conservatives have much stronger reflexes for both disgust and loyalty. Hence, millions of them, who wince and admit "Yes, my side has gone crazy" will also grimace at anecdotes about screaming Berkeley protesters, and growl: "But liberals are worse." That is the essential Fox line, nowadays. At the high end, it is the mantra smoothly conveyed by the Worst American -- George F. Will.

2. Republican politicians have been terrorized into tight discipline, first by the Hastert Rule, then by the Tea Party and Fox, and now by the ferocity of Trump supporters.

3. Some, like John McCain and Susan Collins and David Brooks, may now just be waiting for the right time and for the right excuse-narrative.

It's vital that we offer the remnant community of adult conservatives a way to step up that both saves face and will not seem - at surface - to be a betrayal.  I think they might be persuaded to view the deliberate Demolition of Facts - and the accompanying war upon all fact-using professions - as an existential threat to the republic, one that is orthogonal to the left-right spectrum.  Moreover we now know that foreign foes have weaponized lie-based propaganda, making this a matter of national security. See: Inside Russia's Social Media War on America.

At present, both Facebook and Google are struggling to come up with systems to identify rumors and refutable lies, but it's not easy.  

Long ago I saw this coming and proposed a method that would truly solve this, over the long run. But we need something quicker.  (My concept was lead article in the American Bar Association's Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000, "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition."  Available on Amazon.  

No, what we need right now is a means to grade fact-checking services and protect them from the standard-reflex dismissal that they are "partisan." This can happen in a number of ways, but they all boil down to seeing the top, venerable sages of grownup conservatism step up to bolster the effort with their reputations.  In addition to McCain, Collins, Brooks, Rubin and so on... envision Sandra Day O'Conner, Warren Buffett and -- yes -- George W. Bush... all backing a temporary bipartisan commission (non-governmental) to come up with trustworthy ways people can refute what's false.

Why would these Republicans do this, joining with eminent Democrats and others? Well, for one thing, it would combat the madness without explicitly betraying their party. They could even say it's for the long term good of American conservatism. (It is.) 

Of course, one can foresee screams of outrage from the Murdochians, calling this an attempt to form a "Ministry of Truth." Hence a counter-narrative must be ready -- e.g. that the commission aims to help design a framework for competitive fact-checking, distributed among rivals and with citizen level involvement. But the framework must have at-top a supervising layer of the most reputable Americans - especially adult conservatives - who can say "these fact-checkers are mostly non-partisan. We vouch for them."

In essence, this restores the old rebuttal rules that Fox fought against, decades ago. Indeed, if I had my way, the GARD would include restoration of those fairness doctrines. But the key point here is that this issue would give the long-awaited (and till-now cowardly) Adult Conservatives a platform to act in ways that are ostensibly not a betrayal of party. An act that could do more for the republic than any other.

My other proposals from that blog posting -- e.g. giving the joint chiefs authority, if unanimous, to passively delay rash presidential orders, or opening the president's appointments calendar, or for moderate senators to vet his appointees together -- all are emergency measures that might ease the panic and pressure, if impeachment talk starts to boil. Those three would demand more guts from McCain & co... more desperation.

But the fact-checking suggestion is different. It is urgently needed, whatever the state of the "I-word." And it could happen in ways that save some face.