Wednesday, May 29, 2019

A war against modernity

A little fame can be pleasant... until it's not. You'll get frustrated standing just a rung or two below influencing events, for example. Or see your ideas enacted without credit (lots of times that's just fine! We're in this together.) Or you can become a target of loony ankle-biters seeking to raise themselves by styling themselves as your nemesis. (Yeah, right.) Some of you have written to me lately about one of those three scenarios. 

My response, without getting specific? It is to speak of these matters as I do best... in abstract. Ignoring the piddling and instead taking the big, big overview.

I'll get to that, below. But first:

== The fundamental logic behind the war on science and all smart people ==

The open, all-out war by the confederate cabal against modernity is not centered, as some think, on racism. Oh, what silliness. Most confeds don’t view themselves as racist, even if they are. A majority have come considerable distance, in fact. 

No, if you distill for the common element in the Fox-led campaign against scientists, teachers, journalists, civil servants, and even law/intel military officers, it boils down to lava-hot spite toward Smart People. Smart people of all races/genders/types.
I've spoken of this before, but it bears repeating.

This cult is based on a two-part incantation:

1. We all know that being smart and knowing a lot doesn't guarantee that any individual is wise.

That's an Obvious. No living human would deny it. Oh, but then they warp that obvious-truth into a bizarro version: 

2. All people who are smart and know a lot are therefore guaranteed, en-masse to be unwise.

Blink at that a couple times. And yes, that's a precise distillation - an accurate paraphrasing - of how they aim to discredit every single profession of people who work with those inconvenient things called factsWithout ever making it explicit. Because, if stated explicitly, it is obviously insane.

Again, while individual smart/knowing people can be unwise, in general being smarter and knowing more correlates toward wisdom. Wise/smart/knowing folks built the first society ever to escape from thuggish rape-feudalism, challenged the factual basis of prejudice and unleashed fair-competitive-creative minds to assail a myriad challenges.

No one is demanding obeisance to expert authority. Our system wisely pits experts against each other! Scientists, especially, are the most competitive humans ever created. They are the first "high priests" to write popularizations and do PBS shows. Hence, when they reach "consensus" over a model, there's a good chance it's close enough that we should base policy on it... while still poking at it vigorously.

We must confront this lie! But remember, your confed neighbors have a deep supply of incantations.

Start by making #2 explicit! They seek to discredit half a million scientists, a million scientific workers, half a million "deep state" members of the intel/FBI/law/military officer corps, two million teachers. A quarter of a million journalists, a million civil servants...

...ALL of whom are supposedly in a great big conspiracy against “real” Americans while - um - creating nearly all the new wealth…

…and meanwhile who pays for these concocted, magical hate-incantations, spread by Fox etc? 
An oligarchy of maybe 50,000 aristocrats, casino moguls, mafiosi, inheritance brats, Wall Street parasites, Saudi princes and Kremlin connivers. 

They are all good guys. Just like the Civil War plantation lords who great-great daddy confederate fought and died for. Funny how their subsidized campaign against smart folks would remove the one obstacle to their total power.

Dear Idiocracy. We smart people have kids. You are our neighbors and we love you. But don’t think we won’t fight, if we must, if our kids' future is at stake. And remember that smart people know stuff. We number many millions, and like Dr. Bruce Banner we know lots and lots of stuff. 


== The wisdom of recent, multi-racial tolerance memes ==

Okay, this will seem an odd swerve, but bear with me. Have you been following the vibrant new movements in film?

One of the great things about the terrific movie ‘Black Panther’ (BP) - and seen now in magnificent Idris Elba's role as a cyber-enhanced terrorist leader in "Hobbs and Shaw" - is the liberation of ethnic actors to play meaty-deep villain roles. (It was even better-done in BP!) 

True, we're not done fully incorporating diversity into heroic imagery. (My very first protagonist, in ‘Sundiver’ (1979), was of mixed African/Native-American descent. (How many others from that era?) Minority issues feature in most of my novels. And the world is saved by many empowered autistic persons, in ‘Existence.’) Still, it's worth noting when we've come far enough that the most attractive and admired actor in the world can choose to be a delicious bad guy, now and then.

Of course our long range goal is to shatter Category Assumptions that limit any individual's right and power to prove him/her/their/aer/fiz-self to be an exceptional. Sure, along the way, we'll see "forward-lash" and over-reach. Those of us who lived "privileged" as white-ortho-binary males need to make clear what side we're on (I have, a myriad times, as you know), and even shrug aside some unfair lumping, from time to time. 

At my almost all-black 60s high school, I winced as occasionally friends lashed me as a "white devil"... then sheepishly came back to me while we both pretended it never happened. I’ve grown a thick skin... and part of love is patience. So long as the DIRECTION is an arc bending toward justice, we must shrug off some degree of unfair righteous (or self-righteous) overcompensation propelled by sincere passion for progress. 

What I'll not do is pretzel in apology for my own born-not-chosen categories... which include a category that suffered the worst genocide in the history of this planet, costing me all of my 3rd, 4th, 5th cousins and most of my 2nd. That fact doesn't give me "rank" over others in some hierarchy of oppression. Nothing does that*.

What matters is what you seek to do about the world's ills, starting from whatever platform fate planted you upon, and with whatever talents you can bring to bear. So link here to the simplest, easiest way to start:

Hence back to the topic of villainy. Just as you can be a hero even if born underprivileged, there is no cosmic-karmic law that says being a member of some rising category (minority, gender, ability, poverty) enshrines you personally, individually, in nobility and virtue. In fact, character is often orthogonal to such things. Yes, the noblest hero is the disadvantaged person who takes risks to improve the world. That doesn't vouchsafe others - privileged OR disadvantaged - from being recognized as villains, parasites, whiners or damned liars.

This is why the madness that has taken over today's entire right... and small-nasty islands on the far-left... so despises science, facts, burden-of-proof/testimony or even objective reality. Because most apparent villainy can be resolved either by negotiation (as Black Panther attempts to do with his angry brother) or else refutation-via-fierce-Truth, (as he is eventually forced to do, and we are now forced to do vs. Foxite aggression).

Mythmaking - via Hollywood or via sci-fi -- (congratulations Mary Robinette Kowal and other Nebula winners!) -- is helping us combat feudal-racist troglodytism to evolve ourselves toward StarTrekkian wisdom. So persevere!

Still, we must each, personally, choose how to calmly weigh plausibility and credibility and evidence as real life presents us with judgment calls. Dogma is not a reliable guide across a multi-dimensional minefield.

== Psychoanalyzing history ==

Powerful psychopaths are examined in a book by Dean A. Haycock, “Tyrannical Minds: Psychoanalyzing history’s meanest men.” The  key point unmentioned here: In light of how often psychopaths have seized power across history and gone on rampages, what prevents our current psychopath from exerting such power, here and now?  The answer is obvious. Donald Trump has been cauterized and almost completely neutralized by dedicated, professional civil servants, who have learned how to both ignore illegal orders and stymie legal-but-crazy ones with work-to-rule.

Of course, this protection is being chipped away at by the most dangerous thing Trump does, that gets almost no press attention, exercising his power over appointments and promotions. 

Already we see this in judicial picks. Indeed "judges and taxes" are the incanted words used by residually sane republicans to keep supporting what they can clearly see is unsupportable madness. (And of course that makes them the worst sort of knowing and deliberate traitors.) Were he to get 8 years, the effects on the civil service and the "deep state" intel/FBI/military officer corps (the men and women who saved us from Hitler, Stalin and bin Laden and now Putin) would become lethal to our republic. 

Dissected here are most of the many appalling aspects of Trump's 90 minute debriefing phone call with Vladimir Putin. Quote Richard Gayle: “In 1964, the conservative writer John Stormer wrote the book, None Dare Call It Treason, which postulated we were losing the Cold War because liberals were working hand in hand with the communists. Republicans made the book a classic.  How ironic that Stormer may well have been on the right track, just the wrong party. Who is working even more directly with a communist adversary than the leader of the Republican party?”

And finally... Mitch McConnell, gravedigger of democracy: Majority leader's shocking power grab.


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* It's called "oppression bragging." Listing all the persecuted group categories you can check-mark, that give you superior virtue - in lieu of actual achievements - and make you invulnerable to individual accountability. To be clear, a certain amount of this is called for! To counterbalance ancient disadvantages and prejudicial reflexes that are still with us. (More in some than others.) Many kinds of "affirmative action" are still desperately needed! But on an individual basis, category bragging does not cancel out an asshole just being an aggressive asshole.

Saturday, May 25, 2019

From AI to a changing planet... to UFOs?


We've been wowed watching David Attenborough's latest eight-part nature series - Our Planet. This gorgeous and powerfully vivid documentary provides abundant evidence for human impact on climate. Dare your assigned RASR to sit beside you. Say that you’ll watch three hours of Fox if he’ll watch this.

Or else get him to put actual stakes on his Fox-assertions. Because…. alas... straight from EARTH (1990)... Greenland ice is now melting much faster than expected. And how I wish I had been wrong.

On a more science fictional - and somewhat optimistic note - is the newest novel by Eliot Peper: What if a giant tech company became sovereign and democratic? In Breach, hackers and spies grapple over the future of governance. Dark, lush, and philosophical, Breach is a globe-trotting, near-future thriller brimming with intrigue and big ideas.

Okay, so what's really happening?

== Evolving life - and a changing planet ==

Chinese scientists have put human brain genes in monkeys — and yes, they may be smarter. And who saw this coming?

No Uplift required - that we know of. “A chimpanzee proves adept at thumb-swiping through photo sets on a phone.” Fiben's ancestor? Or does it show we've been Downlifting our new human generations?

After the shocking discovery of Denisovans, there may be evidence for yet another previously unknown hominin species, this one dating back 60,000 years in the Philippines.

Archaeology now confirms native legends of a war and massacre between Alaskan tribes during the Little Ice Age of the 1600s.

A truly amazing article.  A fossil discovery in North Dakota is believed to be a fish that was blasted and killed on precisely the very day that the Cretaceous ended with the Chicxulub meteorite impact, 66 million years ago And that's just the beginning. If this holds up -- and there are some huge skeptics -- it may be the most incredible (and precise) paleontological discovery of the century, so far, vividly portraying an event that was calamitous for so many, but that paved the way for us.

Earlier – another disaster that may have spurred life along – was the end of the last “Iceball Earth” episode, now dated almost precisely to 635 million years ago, when accumulated greenhouse gases burst from below a planet-spanning ice sheet, causing an abrupt finale to the Kirschvink Epoch. It is likely no coincidence that almost immediately came the burst of complex organisms including multicellular animals and plants leading to the Cambrian Explosion. After almost three billion years of creeping-along, evolution was ready for a series of mighty leaps. (Are we about to do it again?) This episode may have "fermi" implications.

And scientists see the fingerprint of warming climate on droughts going back to 1900.

Researchers have observed a sudden appearance of numerous deep-sea volcanic vents in the Gulf of California, along with gaudy mat, crystal structures and amazing seemingly “alien” life forms.

== AI and Humanity ==

Consider: How Southern Baptists Are Grappling With Artificial IntelligenceAmerican evangelicals are not the only faith group pondering the intersection of A.I. and religion. The Southern Baptist document appears just a few months after Pope Francis met with the president of Microsoft to discuss the ethical use of A.I., a topic he has raised publicly several times. The Vatican and Microsoft are co-sponsoring a prize for the best doctoral dissertation this year on the topic “artificial intelligence at the service of human life." Of course Jews and Buddhists have long contemplated artificial beings made of clay. As did I, in KILN PEOPLE.

It seems almost weekly someone asks me to consult about AI. Here’s video of my talk on the future of A.I. to a packed house at IBM's World of Watson Congress - offering big perspectives on both artificial and human augmentation. (Text version also available.)

This Reuters interview conveys – in a very brief space -- important concepts about AI ignored by most AI researchers.

I generally like Zach Weinersmith's SMBC comics - and this one on robots, AI and humanity is thought provoking... Almost none of the assertions that it makes are true, or have any useful bearing on the issue of how we'll relate to AI. Or indeed human evolution. It is, however, something that a fearful AI might write as a propaganda morality plea. (Synthetic-much, Zach?;-)

How will humans fare in this new era? The recently released, The Robots Are Coming: The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation, by Andres Oppenheimer, looks toward future changes in banking, automation, medicine and legal work.

Oh, The RE-WORK Applied AI Summit is back in San Francisco June 20-20. The two-day summit is set to bring together 90 speakers and over 600 attendees to discuss the latest research and application methods in AI and Deep Learning. Was invited to speak. Can't make it. Busy in DC.

== Tech advances & challenges ==

China already dominates the electric vehicle supply chain. It produces nearly two-thirds of the world’s lithium-ion batteries - compared to 5 percent for the United States - and controls most of the world’s lithium processing facilities. Says one of the quickly extinctifying residually sane republican pols: “We need to find ways to more efficiently develop our nation’s domestic critical mineral supply because these resources are vital to both our national security and our economy.” Sounds okay, though watch roadblocks thrown up by certain… most... other republicans.

Israeli Scientists 3D-print a tiny, live heart made with human tissuecomplete with muscles, blood vessels, ventricles and chambers. The cells used to print the heart came from a donor’s fat tissue, changed into embryonic stem cells, and finally differentiated into the various types of heart tissue used in the printing process. Eventually, the cells in the heart began to beat spontaneously. Maybe Larry Niven’s organlegger dystopia is forestalled… along with a lot of death. (Likewise Beyond Burgers and tissue culture meat. Might we then be worthy to be let out of the zoo?)

Researchers have discovered a fundamentally new way to measure brain function using a technology known as magnetic resonance elastography (MRE), mapping tissue stiffness using an MRI scanner to track brain function activity on a time scale of 100 milliseconds, far quicker than before. It can show  which regions of the brain stiffen or soften under different types of stimulus timing.

Stronger and more flexible than graphene, borophene – a monolayer lattice of Boron atoms -- is a good conductor of heat and electricity, and can be superconducting.

Despite horrific meddling and obstruction by truly evil oligarchs and their cult-minions, the price of sustainable energy keeps plummeting, undermining coal in the best possible way, with technological competition.

== Hiding anything, much? ==

Setting the stage…. The U.S. Defense Department has canceled its contract with the Jasons – a consortium of academic researchers who have advised DoD for half a century. I do not know details, but I do get a spidey tingle.

Okay now… In 2017, the Pentagon first confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a government operation launched in 2007 to collect and analyze “anomalous aerospace threats” from “advanced aircraft fielded by traditional U.S. adversaries to commercial drones to possible alien encounters.” … In some cases, pilots — many of whom are engineers and academy graduates — claimed to observe small spherical objects flying in formation. Others say they’ve seen white, Tic Tac-shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these vehicles all had no air intake, no wind and no exhaust.

Consider in context: It's been 25+ years since any new techs were announced from the various Defense Department Skunk Works. Used to be, we’d get some kind of revelation, e.g. stealth bombers, at least once per decade, showing something for our tax dollars. I do know things are at least marginally farther along than we are told, when it comes to hypersonics, lasers, and ABM abilities, though by how much?

Another piece to the puzzle. Some years ago the National Reconnaissance Office gave NASA two Hubbles. Yes, two Hubble Space Telescopes. Well, not quite. They were obsolete Earth observing spy satellites, and we thus discovered that the Hubble had been a “beard” for the spysat program, all along. (Perhaps explaining why Hubble’s optics were initially a bit off for astronomy purposes.) The gift put NASA in a bind – getting two billion-dollar spacecraft for free is nice, unless you don’t have the quarter of a billion it would take to repurpose them for real science.  One of them has been repurposed now and will launch soon as a great new mission, but it took a while. (Ask me about the other one!)

But the lesson is clear. Stuff goes on, behind the scenes. Some “wasted” funding may have only been diverted (see my old novella “Senses, Three and Six.”) Some civilian events or endeavors may be (partly) “beards.” Above all, we need to pray and hope that members of our defender caste really are (as I believe) nearly all devoted public servants and not how Fox and ilk portray them – as Deep State enemies of the people.



Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Crushing Crazy

Below, I'll offer two lists concerning American conservatism. One recounts "conservative" stances that have always been welcome at the negotiating table... in fact we'd be poorer not to have voices speaking up for them and demanding accountability from liberal zealotry. 

The other list - alas - is much longer, case after case in which conservatives destroyed their credibility by screaming against clear science, genuine progress, or honesty itself. Example after example in which time proved them utterly wrong. From tobacco and smog to drug wars and gerrymandering, it's a long litany that our neighbors want desperately to forget.  

And yes, there were liberal errors, too. Two of them on a par with any single item on the conservative list. I'll cite those, down at-bottom.

First though... let's start with the sort of screeching insanity we're getting today.


== And now, this. What has driven our neighbors mad ==

Broadcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said it was a “form of psychosis” that caused him to believe certain events — like the Sandy Hook massacre — were staged. Jones, who founded InfoWars.com - carried on more than 160 stations - repeatedly called the Sandy Hook shooting a “giant hoax” carried out by crisis actors on behalf of people who oppose the Second Amendment. InfoWars also suggested the September 11 attacks were an inside job orchestrated by the US government.

In a defamation case brought against him by Sandy Hook victims’ families, Jones tried a number of writhing excuses, like: “I’m a performance actor!” Now it’s “a form of psychosis back in the past where I basically thought everything was staged, even though I’ve now learned a lot of times things aren’t staged,” he said. “So I think as a pundit, someone giving an opinion, that, you know, my opinions have been wrong, but they were never wrong consciously to hurt people.”

Putting aside the fate of this spectacularly evil traitor, the more general key words are Credibility and Accountability. Can we find ways to apply them systematically? That is the core question in The Transparent Society

I've long pushed that people on the sane-Union side of this culture war demand wagers, since the prospect of having actual stakes dependent on their ravings sends these cultists into blind panic, and can force a few RASRs to start admitting their own political psychoses. 

Dig it, the Sandy Hook parents' lawsuit was essentially a forced wager! It proves I'm right - the essence of this war is not left-right or even Putin-Saudi-Mercer-Koch-Murdoch enemies. The essence is the very existence and primacy of objective reality. Demonstrable facts, and the professions that use them.

I am not the only one who sees around us harbingers of hard times for the American Union. I’ve called this Phase Eight of the U.S. Civil War, a recurring mental illness and curse which dates all the way back to 1778. I’ve touted Sean Smith’s novel Tears of Abraham which portrays how many millions might die, if thing get hot, as our enemies – foreign and domestic – clearly intend.


== Defend the defenders ==

The administration is forming a National Security Council panel stacked with climate deniers, which reports suggest is intended to challenge established science, over-riding widespread opposition from former military officials, security experts, and climate scientists. While the Navy has been furious about denialism for a decade, facing loss of Norfolk, the greatest naval base in the world, plus many others, the Air Force is now learning the cost, with a $5 Billion burden repairing bases just from Hurricane Michael alone… money taken away by Trump’s “emergency” wall grab. 

Meanwhile, the Russians are opening twelve new bases along the increasingly ice-free arctic. And Putin and the Saudis giggle over how easy it has been to lobotomize America.

Liberals, dump your obsolete reflexes! This is a time to recognize the men and women of the U.S. military -- despite their crewcuts -- as allies in saving America and the world. 

Welcome them into our Big Tent of national - and world - salvation.

== Hope for rationality ==

This is worthwhile, even if you already knew some of it from my own postings. “A Field Guide to Bad Faith Arguments: Once you recognize these weak tactics in your mentions, you can easily outwit them.” For example, while climate denialists declare “We need more data and the jury is still out!” the cult has sabotaged satellites, cancelled instruments, banned research and silenced scientists, while claiming that any forward movement would leave us all “shivering in the dark.”

A good faith position would be “let’s find out more while taking policy steps that would help us all, whether or not 99% of scientists prove right.” 

This article covers other specious and valid arguments, and you – yes, you - need these insights to do your duty…

… which is to peel just a few RASRs (Residually Adult-Sane Republicans) out of the Fox-Putin hypnosis orbit and into the light. If each of us can manage just a couple, this phase of the U.S. (and world) civil war – the Idiocracy’s all-out war against smartness and all smart people -- will end in a rout.

 Lies are defeated by competition but it should be fair. See my FACT ACT.


== Capitalists who get it ==

This is an essential story about an immigrant who became an American business mogul, who now says "Capitalism is committing suicide." With the steady reduction of corporate investment ROI (return on investment) horizons -- from decades down to mere months -- corporate R&D outside of Detroit and Silicon Valley has plummeted, relying ever more on government research that members of the CEO caste then politically disdain. (The Bush-McConnell-Ryan cuts to US science are vastly amplified, under Trump.)

500 golf-buddy members of the CEO-caste ramp-up compensation packages, secretly divvy-up markets and allocate consumers among themselves, "planning" the economy with specificity that's similar to the Chinese Politburo, but without any long view. Moreover, not a single prediction ever made by "Supply Side" (voodoo) economics ever came true. (Repatriations of foreign held profits weren't even a quarter of the amounts predicted under the 2017 tax cuts.)

This was predicted by Adam Smith, who said that top aristocracies will always turn to cheating, vampirism and passive rentier tactics, rather than risky-productive investment. And recall that feudal-syndicate oligarchy was the hateful oppression that American Revolutionaries rose up against.

... and now the topic I teased about, above...

==  A place for conservatism? ==

I call for a Big Tent that welcomes the saner versions of conservatism -- versions that remind us that market competition is the greatest generator of the wealth that then enables good things. Indeed, before the entire movement was suborned by petro-sheiks, coal barons, casino lords, tabloid monsters and re-branded KGB/Kremlin conspirators, there were American conservatives who staked reasonable negotiating positions on:

- generating market alternatives to government solutions...
- reducing the overhead burden of excessive paperwork...
- only 'picking winners and losers" when there's a clear long range need 
          (e.g. sustainable energy)...
- encouraging responsible gun ownership...
- encouraging voluntary service...
- encouraging entrepreneurship...
- encouraging home ownership and a rising middle class...
- ecological stewardship...
- investment in an educated/healthy workforce...
- investment in infrastructure...
- investment in federal R&D beyond most corporate ROI horizons...
- honest, long range thinking in board rooms...
- defending the right of millions to live demure lives without in-your-face 
         shock confrontation.

Alas, out of all of these goals, only a metastacized, bilious version of the last one remains in today's mutant conservatism. The rest have all been functionally (if not polemically) adopted by a liberalism that already had plenty else on its plate. (And yes, Democrats did all the useful DE-regulating; offer me wager stakes on that, please.)

Let's be clear. U.S. Conservatives are in no position to lecture us, given what they’ve allowed to happen to their movement. Moreover, while conservative skepticism-toward-excess-bureaucracy is welcome, when it is sane, we need to recall how often they have simply been wrong, wrong, wrong, and again wrong... and now want us to forget:

Aid to farmers? Never!
Break up monopolies? Never!
Tobacco? No worries...
Cars and Smog...
McCarthyism...
Burning Rivers...
The insane War on Drugs...
Vietnam*...
Resisting Civil Rights* and hating on MLK...
Watergate, defending Nixon long past proof of treason...
Resisting Women’s rights...
Supply Side lies and outright theft of trillions...
Resisting easy fixes to the Ozone Layer...
Unleashing the upsurge in gambling, vice, mafiosi and casino moguls...
Climate Change denialism and science hating...
Claiming moral superiority while Red America scores worse in every moral category
      from teen sex/pregnancy/STD/abortions to domestic violence, alcoholism etc...
Endless Drug War and ever-more supply side never-right voodoo theft...
Most traitor spies since 1955 were Republican...
Most child molester politicians...
Iraq Wars, based on outright lies...
Undermining energy independence...
A proved track record of far worse economic outcomes... 
Gerrymandering and dozens of other blatant cheats...
Open war against all fact-centered professions; science, teaching, journalism, 
        medicine, law and "deep state" public servants...
Kowtowing to Vladimir Putin, Rupert Murdoch, Saudi princess & Trumps...

Skepticism toward "socialism"? Sure, criticism is welcome. But remind your neighbors how incredibly consistently and repeatedly the GOP/dixiecrat stance has been simply, factually wrong.

They know it's about credibility. Name one major gop leader between Reagan and Ryan who was even mentioned at the 2016 Republican Convention. Except for Newt, all were brushed under the rug, including both Bushes, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Dennis (friend to boys) Hastert, Tom (convicted felon) DeLay, Boehner. This shows how writhing ashamed Republicans are, of their record at governance. And if you disavow those past Republican administrations as incompetent, Russia-hating, enterprise-destroying, warmongering liars, then where is your party’s credibility?

And yes, liberals make mistakes! Their worst: Vietnam and desegregation through forced school bussing. Republicans supported the former more vigorously than democrats. But the latter was titanically evil and stupid and it did more to shatter the Rooseveltean coalition than anything. So don't automatically assume that everything that's PC is automatically correct. I could name a dozen latter-day rants and exaggerations that some of you push, that are not being helpful right now. 

But I don't dare. And that fact is the most damning of all.

Welcome allies and refugees from the madness/treason. Spread the tent. Defeat monsters. Welcome your neighbors.