The Seldon Paradox and the (alas) revival of Karl Marx

               == Marxian predictions ==

In my parents' time, everyone - even the poor and certainly even rich plutocrats - understood the Marxian predictions which - like those of Hari-Seldon - seemed bound to come true, unless something changed.    .  

Those who wanted a different future than Old Karl forecast backed an alternative that Marxists deemed impossible... Preventing parasitical late-stage capitalism from replacing the fecund, flattish-fairish middle phase that Marx deeply admired.  In other words, continuation of the reform-aimed, incremental Bourgeoise Revolution, taking it ever-further down paths of ever-greater prosperous inclusion. 

(If you know nothing about Karl Marx's historical stages and predictions, including his admiration for middle-stage capitalism, though also his assumption that it must eventuially fail, then shame on you for ever referring to him!)

What Marxists never predicted - indeed deemed impossible, was how the American 'Greatest Generation' (GG) both adored FDR and enacted his general program of social flattening mixed with continued vigorous market cvompetition, uplifting tens of millions of children of the working class to confidently compete with scions of the rich...

...which gave the world its greatest (if flawed) era of both (flawed-but-general) peace and rising prosperity. Both of which are now being shredded, as we speak.

On my blog's erudite comment community (the smartest anywhere online) some have observed that our present crisis is happening precisely because the GG/FDR generation so thoroughly demolished the Marxian teleology!

Let's put it (as one commenter did) in sci fi terms:

'We see eye to eye about the Seldonian Paradox of Marxism. When the owning class takes seriously Marx's predictions of mass immiseration and political upheaval leading to guillotines for the rich, then they choose to help enact semi-socialist uplifts, cooperating with moderate reformers to to negate Marx's prediction by uplifting the working class into a comfortable middle class. It worked! Until Reagan began the Great Retraction and wealth disparities climbed again. Accelerating till today...

"As Seldon predicts when those reforms WORK, then the owning class ceases to take Marx's predictions seriously, so they defund and repeal the semi-socialist reforms, reverting society back into the feudal pyramid, and Marx's predictions, which had seemed canceled, thus tend to come true. And guillotine blades get sharpened again.

"The result is either a long-lived (rooseveltean) compromise, or a high-amplitude cycle with a period of 2 generations. The former is if there is intelligent life in the owning class, the latter if not.'

In other words, today's would-be feudal lords, aiming reflexively to restore 8000 years of feudal rule by inheritance brats, surround themselves with flatterers telling them how smart they are. I actually have witnessed this happen to FIVE I know personally, watching in dismay as their flexible intelligence rigidifies into self-flattering masturbation. In effect summoning eventual uber rides on tumbrels. 

In EXISTENCE I portray the other scenario - trillionaires actually trying to find a way to remain lords in a progressive society that won't get fed up and kill them. Alas, those attending Davos show little sign of such long-view sapience.

Alas, after 70 years when it seemed Marx was in a dustbin, his works are now flying off the shelves all over the globe. And the New Lords will discover, much to their pain, what that means.

THE SELDON PARADOX: A PREDICTION BECOMES INVALID WHEN EVERYONE KNOWS AND ACTS ON IT... TILL EVERYONE BECOMES ACCUSTOMED TO THE NEW SITUATION AND THEY LOSE ALL VIGILANCE... ... AND CONDITIONS DRIFT BACK TOWARD MAKING THE PREDICTION COME TRUE.

== Expanding a bit ==

Riffing back to my post here about the Mad Right's rush to resurrect Karl Marx from the dustbin. (See two earlier, more detailed postings by me here and here.) Let me clarify and expand on what the Greatest Generation all understood and NONE of you - even the smartest - appears ever to have learned. (And to a degree, it's why we are in this mess.)

Marx assumed that every business cycle would result in a narrowing of the owner class until the maximally diverse and creative bourgeoise middle class period would end and be replaced by new-feudalism - with which (as a historiographer) he was familiar.

Bourgeoise society confused him, even though he called it a 'necessary phase', to finish the Formation of Capital. But he foresaw it being finished off by capitalism's contradictions.

What he never imagined and never wrote about or discussed was the possibility that the bourgeoise revolution might be skillfully managed - by a combination of legislation and investments in young new competitors - thus allowing that most-creative phase to evade his fore-ordained collapse scenario. Reformed and skillfully managed by a populace who - warned by Marx of one path - might deliberately choose another. 

It's a path that evades KM's narrow New Oligarchy by both limiting the very rich to merely being very rich while continually expanding the middle class to include ever larger clades of skilled, confident young competitors...

... exactly as Adam Smith prescribed. (Indeed, Marx greatly admired Smith! Indeed, so should anyone with a scintilla of sense.)

That is - in fact - what the Roosevelteans achieved (or set in motion). It's what Reagan assumed was already done and could be retracted, sofely. And it's what the Trumpists are absolutely determined to crush... reviving and re-creating exactly Marx's end game scenario, while stoopidly and ignorantly unaware they are old Karl's dream come true.

      == So... what about today's stylish 'socialists'? ==

Among the many traps being laid for us across the coming months leading to the November US elections, some are fell and dangerous... like whether the oligarchs and Project 25 traitors will try to stage some kind of National Emergency, like a Reichstag Fire. (Else why the current, frantic purge of FBI and military officers?) Most likely among many scenarios? A convenient martyrdom, turning their rapidly-decaying asset into a tool, one last time.

But why bother, when our own side - the good side in this fraught phase 8 of the US Civil War - might be egged into splitting apart, amid self-destructive internal spats? 

Rupert Murdoch's dream salvation? 

Predictable spats amid the democratic party's herd of cats.

Do YOU see any sense in the wave of postings, during the last month, from an ill-defined 'left', denouncing 'mainstream-DNC dems' as little better than "republicans-lite"? 

        RIght. Demolish the broad-front, inclusive coalition that's the only hope of saving the enlightenment and the world. Sure. 

        Sanctimony is an addictive drug.
        

 (Bernie, Liz, Stacey, Jaime and AOC have to spend HALF of their energies just herding sanctimonious 'cats' back inside the broad tent of our coalition. See more here. Especially ask these passionate, mostly-young people: "Can you name the last three DNC chairs? Come back with this nonsense when you can.")

But worst of all is their chiché misuse of the term 'socialism,' breaking its actual definitions and unnecessarily handing the confederate-right a million or so votes by confirming Foxite narratives.

WTF?? No one has pounded the drum harder than me, to revive interest in the fine works of the post-WWII 'greatest' GI Bill Generation, whose most-adored hero was Franklin Roosevelt. (And a decade later, they adored Jonas Salk!) While they were deeply flawed compared to the more ethically advanced children and grandchildren they raised (e.g. Barry Obama raised by two white WWII veteran grandparents) their accomplishments - from infrastructure and magnificent universities to social security and Medicare to ponderous (and frustratingly slow) incremental actions - year by year - to purge bad habits of 70 centuries, like racism, sexism and feudalism.

Instead of falling for a trap and giving the confederate/putinists a great big target on our chests, how about YOU attack THEM instead, where it hurts?

Cite the GI Billers and the US Labor Movement that was the most ANTI-communist element of American life?

How about hurling an epithet at THEM? Shout "Feudalists!" Bent on restoring 6000 years of cruel rule by inheritance brats! A systemic and perennial human failure mode that was denounced by Adam Smith! (And Smith - if here today - would be a flaming-mad Democrat!)

In fact, ANTIFEU would be more sweeping than ANTIFA!

Upraising children of the working classes to compete (the c-word that the right never uses anymore) ... competing openly with sons and daughters of wealth...  is not the same "Socialism" as state ownership of the means of production. FDRism fills vigorously and creatively churning markets with skilled, capable, fearlessly bold and confident competitors from the middle class and even the poor.

THAT is the way to keep Marx at bay. End rule over humanity by lordly cheaters and their spoiled sons. Become again a scientific, joyfully-competitive (while compassionate) people who can end poverty and injustice and make the solar system our own.

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Finally… If you feel a need - amid fraught times - for an inspiring tale about a modern hero, intellect and deeply-wise public figure, try Judge David Tatel’s VISION: A memoir and Blindness and Justice. 

I’ll vouch personally. That -- "Vision is charming, wise, and completely engaging. This memoir of a judge of the country’s second highest court, who has been without sight for decades, goes down like a cool drink on a hot day." —Scott Turow. 

Disclosure... alas... of an 80 year cliché with the same, tired villains. But still fun. (SPOILERS!)

I'm a nearly life-long Steven Spielberg fan. (I didn't think anyone could make a better musical film than Leonard Bernstein's WEST SIDE STORY. Spielberg did it.) So okay, I had to go see DISCLOSURE DAY.  

Having dissected some 'hidden aspects' to his films, I deem that Spielberg's values and creative skills put him among the 'most-American' first-rank artists, combining constructive criticism of authority with eager curiosity, plus almost ebullient (and rare) optimism. 

So, I went to see DISCLOSURE DAY prepared to be entertained by masterful scenes, dramatic ironies and solid dialogue.

I also expected to simmer this time, over his complicity in an absurdly illogical and unsupportable cult fever that I've witnessed every half decade, across my entire life. A life that stretches almost all the way back to Roswell. A life spent exploring related topics, in both science and fiction.

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Does this posting seem tl;dr? Watch a fun podcast where I have the hosts in stitches about UFOs and AI and such, on the "This Week in Space" podcast via Twit.TV ... Dr. David Brin's Thoughts on Spielberg's 'Disclosure Day'.

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To be clear, I loved CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, whose lesson was not loathing of a freely elected government and its civil servants, but very nearly the opposite, admiring their skills and mostly-generous intent. The professionals' main fault - in that movie and in ET and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (and often in real life) consisted of patronizing citizens who are just trying to participate. 

In E.T. The Extraterrestrial, government experts are basically decent folks whose sole tort in the entire film is to treat Elliot's mom and her concerns condescendingly. Watch it again! The 'guy with the keys' is essentially Elliot, grown up!  

There is a villain in ET! Someone whose behavior is truly despicable. But we'll get to that.

Alas, from Mr. Spielberg's recent public statements, I had different expectations this time. And I was not proved wrong. In DISCLOSURE DAY, the litany of clichés and illogic was as thorough as the pervasive sense of pessimism throughout. 

The latter is Mr. Spielberg's privilege, of course. He's earned the right.

The former (and I say this knowing that my frankness has already harmed me in Hollywood, many times in the past) makes for bad art.

And so ... here's a requisite and very necessary SPOILER ALERT...

                                      == SPOILERS AHEAD! ==

      == Let's start with the supposed top goal of the conspirators  ==

The premise of DISCLOSURE DAY is that the whole Roswell and Hanger 18 megillah -- including crashed interstellar spacecraft and dead or captured aliens -- is all true. All of it, from the genuinely puzzling all the way to the long-disproved. 

For eighty years, the biggest thing in human history has been kept from us! Under a reign of fiercely-enforced secrecy, while crashed starships (all of them in the good old USA) have been intensely studied and new technologies back-engineered from them.

So... let's start with that. Do YOU see any such magical technological leaps? Antigravity and star drives and telepathy or age-reversal cures? Sudden, huge advances that can't be explained better by steadily incremental (if sometimes brilliant) human ingenuity? 

I know of none (except maybe AI - which was another thoughtful film). Moreover, to be clear, I've participated in some of humanity's tech-steps, across the last half century or so. Indeed, this may be the most-offensive part of the cult. Crediting such wonders as computers and integrated circuits and CAT scans and the Internet to aliens is just as insulting as claiming that ancient Egyptians and Mayans and Zimbabweans couldn't chip and move stone by themselves, in order to assuage their gods. Not without stone-lifting help from saucer-god beings. In other words, bigoted hogwash.

But let's put it up for a wager? Go ahead. Name a technological leap across all our lifetimes - (we'll set aside AI for now, though I get into that elsewhere.) Put down $$$ stakes vs. my promise to show the step-by-step increments that got us here, based on hard work by clever, assiduous and collaboratively diligent humans.

Furthermore, note this about Disclosure Day.. While Spielberg mentions that his secret agency is trying to reverse-engineer alien tech, he then lets the whole topic slip away.  Because he knows he can't point at anything. Velcro maybe? Naw. Nothing at all. Except for a couple of magic wands, that is.

Anyway, here we get to the biggest flaw of all. Such a major and utterly important project would benefit from having a very large number of human investigators and researchers, right? Recruited from among the best our species has to offer. Because you never know which impudent free-thinker may be the one to get that AHA! moment and succeed at grasping some alien tech.

Of course, that offers up a contradiction inherent to the whole UFO mania. Do you see it? The core topic of DISCLOSURE DAY?

The secrecy.

                     == Any reasons? ==

Secrecy lasting nearly an entire century, under all successive administrations, many of which hated each other? Mr. Spielberg tries to deal with that particular objection, with a single line: "we decided that presidents don't need to be involved." 

Cute: and indeed, one can imagine such a decision being made in a special case, such as the present. But seriously, across many decades, no one steps up to inform the one fellow on Earth who can issue you a pardon for telling him that every rule of law or democratic accountability is being violated?

Worse, in the film we see U.S. military generals collaborating with the secret ET-dissection agency in its 80 year betrayal of Constitutional chain of command. Alas, this prompts curiosity: does Steven Spielberg know any admirals or generals? The ones I've spoken with are absolutely - almost religiously - loyal to democracy and citizen rule. The culture set by George Marshall that merits our support.

Moving outward from USA parochialism, would not other nations have sniffed this out by now? Or had their own crashed ships? Or maybe this whole thing might serve the best purpose, like in that great Robert Culp OUTER LIMITS episode: bringing us together in common cause?

But let's get back to the sheer number of needed experts, in all their impudent variety. Even at Roswell, this would be hundreds of Americans, both in and out of uniform, participating in every 'encounter' since 1947. Then hundreds and hundreds more inside the agency, all the way to the 2020s. And those are just the ones collecting crash wreckage and alien bodies, along with captive ETs themselves. 

Picture it. Would not thousands of 'our best people' get hurled at such an emergency science study, one far more vital and urgent than the Manhattan Project? 

But in Hollywood parlance, all of those thousands of brilliant, individualist, cooperatively-competitive experts are reduced to the role of... henchmen.

                == It's kind of... well... hurtful ==

Okay, I am kinda P.O.'d about that premise, since I've been privileged to know many of the best people. And I can say with some confidence that none were ever invited into such studies of alien tech. I know this, not just from my conversations with them. But also because, in fact, such programs leave major ripples. Like big, noticeable gaps in their professional lives. Like all the subscriptions to ASTOUNDING Magazine that suddenly shifted to PO boxes near Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1942. Or take the charter jets that right now commute daily with expert workers from Las Vegas homes to Area 51 and back again to be with their families. Those charters were sniffed-out easily, along with supply convoys.

(Okay, sure, Area 51 exists! And it's secret and has a few mystery planes. Duh? Again, that much is normal human brilliance and understandable military secrecy...  and none of it has got us anything better in space than the silly Artemis moondoggle, aimed at making a few more ritual footprints on a plain of poison dust.) 

Oh, one can offer hypothetical counters to all of the above. Is it possible that much smaller teams might work on alien stuff? Or that some truly super-uber-techs have come out of such studies and even my "best minds" acquaintances might know nothing about it? 

Maybe our anti-gravity ships have already colonized Europa. Heck, in STARGATE the USA has defeated several alien empires and is now leader of an entire Galactic coalition... not Earth, but the United States of America... and still they don't tell the taxpayers. Okaaaaaay...

(BTW I loved Stargate.)

Sure. I've even written sci fi stories that explored such notions, Secret colonies n' such. Fun stuff. But...

...but eighty years? After 80 years no one has blabbed or disclosed?*

     == Contempt for your fellow citizens is endemic ==

Oh, you say that some folks have already testified? With what evidence? Third hand rumors or unvetted 'things I saw'? Or 'an old man once told me' or else 'I saw a document once!!!!'

And Occam's Razor doesn't suggest to you that these are likely publicity-seeking 4th-raters who never, ever, ever offer anything like plausible evidence? And true insiders would have plenty by now! At risk of belaboring the obvious, let me repeat; there would have been hundreds, thousands of them by now, across an entire human lifespan.

What, you think some leather-skinned, retired engineer in his 90s, tooling around Arizona with a shotgun behind the seat of his pickup truck, is worried about a Non-Disclosure Agreement? 

Gawd you don't know these guys. I do. At least enough of them to choke back an urge to spit over how you insult them.

                       == The Big Question ==

Oh, but now we get to the question of WHY? 

Why go to such lengths, committing crimes tantamount to kidnapping, murder and treason, possibly meriting life sentences or death, all in order to prevent public ... disclosure?

Why? Steven Spielberg spends a lot of time on this one:

1) The former nun girlfriend (and is everyone in the film Catholic?) claims that a public that learns about tech-advanced-but mortal aliens will suddenly forsake God. 

Say... what? How the heck does that even scan? Sure Moctezuma thought Cortez might be a god, but even so, the Aztecs fought. And doubly so when they first saw a Spaniard bleed. Anyway, I think most modern folks could tell a 'tech-advanced-but-mortal alien' from the Creator of the universe.

(BTW I liked Spielberg having her clench the crucifix in her hand, creating a palm stigmata, enabling her to escape from mind control via the salvation of holy pain. With Colin Firth as either Herod or Pontius Pilate. Yum.)

2) Yes, Steven S. trots out the hoary old "public panic" excuse. Everyone will go mad!! Riots in the street. Cats and dogs, living together... Like the silly secrecy-justification of those deliberately-loopy MEN IN BLACK? 

At least Spielberg has the good sense and decency not to belabor this one, since his entire career was built by hundreds of millions of people paying to watch him poke at these very notions... with none of his audience ever running, screaming from the theater, as in The Blob.

3) But might disclosure destabilize a world teetering at the edge of nuclear war? Oooookay.  The whole DEFCON 3 thing seems kinda contrived for the sake of the show. And it doesn't explain non-disclosure way back during the relatively calm world of the 1990s. And... um... isn't this exactly what the USA would reveal, in order to distract from a parochially silly tiff among earthlings?

(And isn't the present UFO Disclosure Fetish really just a case of 'X-files to distract from Eps-Files'?)

By the end of the film, we are left with no plausible WHY at all! Other than Hugh (Coleman Domingo) diagnosing that Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) is doing it all because of his own psychological pain. And... um... Hugh could not have simply taken that diagnosis over Noah's head?

       == A final note on why? ==

In fact, I can think of a couple of reasons that might - conceivably - justify secrecy! Why such a major endeavor by those who study UFOs might be worth hiding from the public. 

My novella "Senses, Three and Six” is all about one such scenario. And no, it's not the hoary cliché of “avoiding public panic.” The notion is actually rather interesting, I reckon! (Hey Steven S., want a good premise for this topic? One that's never been dramatized and is far, far more plausible?)

Indeed, as I show in that story, there are conceivable (if unlikely) reasons why tens of thousands of our best minds might choose not to do the human thing and blab! Let's suppose it's something so compellingly dangerous that almost any sensible person who learns of it would agree it's better not to tell?

"Okay, as an American, my reflex is to disclose and share. But that's a damn good reason to quash it. For now."

Let's say there has been a Manhattan Project about aliens, and that all of the thousands of top folks studying this crisis actually agreed - against their every inclination - to keep it under wraps for a truly dire reason. A conspiratorial campaign of silence that has encompassed all party lines and many generations of our very best people for 80 years. As I've shown, it would have to be a damn good reason!  

Mull this over. Suppose for a moment that such a reason existed. Why even leather-skinned 90-year-old engineer-retirees would keep their gums tightly sealed. 

           

In which case then, um... can any of you pause your sanctimony long enough to please think it through?

If so, then who the hell are you to demand they break that massively consensus judgement by thousands of top minds who know vastly more about this than you do? When extorting revelation now might endanger all of humanity?

I'm not saying this ranks high on any list of plausibles! Indeed, perhaps you have a mature and well-considered answer to that question. Go ahead and put yours into comments! 

Hell, I could argue both sides all day... which is probably why - despite my peerless qualifications - I haven't been invited into the cabal! (Or... so I claim ;-)

But damn. What's utterly discrediting is that - amid their righteous sanctimony snits - none of these UFO zealots ever, ever pauses to consider it. 

        == Many silly (and some disturbing) things ==

Recall from the beginning, my teaser question about Disclosure Day? That question of who is the villain? You who have watched the flick likely think it's trivially easy to answer. 

It isn't. Not at all.

But first, let's deal with some quibbles.

Like all the magical powers displayed by the protagonists. Reading minds and speaking in math (without ever doing anything with that power, other than a little criminal hacking.) Gee thanks, alien guys. Gifts that never help in their lives or those around them, except when it serves the interests of those mind programmers.

Oh. Here's one! Did Kellner (Josh O'Conner) twirl the wheat himself, with some psychic power? Or did the aliens do it, while watching him from above? The latter seems likely, in this scene and many others. In which case, um, why did they always help just enough, so the heroes could leap from one sudden escape to the next barely-survived moment? Good movie action! But how about a little help to fly their car over the train, like Elliot did with ET in his bike basket? 

(Nah, I won't actually bitch about a great action scene. Loved the train bit! But it only works logically if the Visitors aren't monitoring... which they clearly are. Yet they never interfere in Noah's mind scans.)

Want another implausible? How about a cheap motel that has fluffy bathrobes? In what universe? Well, I can't blame Mr. Spielberg for only staying at ritzy places.

How about a mega implausibility? That we would torture-interrogate members of a super advanced starfaring race, rather than try to curry their favor, like good natives? Treating them as honored guests and offering any asked-help to get them home, in hope we might get some nice beads and trinkets, in return? Like fusion power or an Encyclopedia Galactica?

Anyway, if aliens can make birds fly into apartments to trigger the release of deep-embedded secret powers, are they truly unable to decipher our language from broadcasts and simply talk to us? They can teach an 8 year old child telepathy (then hide it - traumatically - in her brain) and another child super-math-language (that does him no good at all). So is it way beyond them to hack into the Internet to say: 

"Hi everyone on primitive Earth? Sorry about all the anal probes and ruined wheat and drunken-buzzing your cities and smashed-up radioactive ship debris and memory wipes and such. 

"But now can we ask that you release our crash survivors? We'll send a space uber for themhimherit tomorrow in the middle of Central Park. And yes, we'll answer questions then, the way we should have, for eighty...

"...no, make that several thousand years, when we could have opened a small, community college, taught you printing and glass lenses and democracy and the germ theory of disease and thus spared you many millennia of grueling pain. Again, sorry about that. And here are your reparations."

                     == Yet again, the same finger-wagging... ==

Instead we get a familiar, hackneyed cliché over and over again! Like smug, chiding Klaatu, in The Day The Earth Stood Still, threatening and guilt tripping Earthlings instead of explaining why his folk let us stew in filth and ignorance for ages? From COCOON to 2001 to CONTACT, to PAUL, always patronizing and never any plausible excuse for doing nothing for us, across all those dark ages of grinding human misery. 

Oh, there are some plausible excuses! That I have never seen even once in sci fi cinema.

Don't talk to me about Non-Interference Directives! Then why did you kidnap and experiment on so many of us, going back to faerie encounters in medieval times? (You think I'll let fetishists claim it started at Roswell?) Or else, in DISCLOSURE DAY, snatching and traumatizing two little children, back in the 90s?

Even in the very best films about contact... like CONTACT or CLOSE ENCOUNTERS... aliens seem to call mysteriousness their most-noble trait. It's a plot element we saw in the excellent Ted Chiang novella and resulting movie ARRIVAL, all the way to Stanislaw Lem's obsessively cryptic SOLARIS. We meet strange, hyper-advanced beings... whereupon the heavy lifting of translating languages and overcoming misunderstandings is entirely up to us! Never, ever the mysterious sky-god meddlers, themselves.

And yes, UFO-zealots never seem to grok that saucer-beings should be judged -- first and foremost -- according to their behavior!

Which... of course... brings us to...

     == The true villain is... ==

Well, I've said it elsewhere and for 40 years. There is only one villain in the entire movie E.T. The Extraterrestrial. And that villain is not the big bad government, or the guy with the keys... nor is it the hapless agronomist ET, itself.

The villain in that early Spielberg masterpiece is blatantly the captain of ET's ship. 

An SOB who abandons a crewmate in an alien forest when they are threatened by... flashlights and clipboards! The only implements in sight when KeysGuy hurries to the landing site. No guns. No threat except curiosity.

A captain who departs swiftly to avoid contact, when such a meeting might be just the thing to save us. 

A captain who ET must phone home in order to summon his ride back, when the bastard captain knows within two blocks where he abandoned the guy!

Elliot does everything wrong, though for loving reasons. If he handed over ET like a good citizen (as I portray in my YA SF novel Colony High), those doctors who struggled to save ET in the film would say: "No, no, you can't have Reeces Pieces. We can tell they are poisoning you. And you want to phone home? Fine, We'll use the Goldstone radio telescope."

And when the ship finally returns to collect ET: "That'll be six weeks rent. One Encyclopedia Galactica please... you evil, betraying, selfish asshole."

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Let's be clear. I ADORED THAT FLICK! It's about love and loyalty and courage and friendship. And none of the captain's crimes are poor ET's fault. Or Eliot's. Nor... (my main point) ... are they ours. I'm simply asserting that the movie did have a villain. And once you know to look... it's obvious.

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And yes, at least Steven Spielberg* is consistent! Because the true villains in DISCLOSURE DAY are the same. The very same. Space jerks who have been teasing us and zipping around, messing with our heads (and our wheat.) Refusing our entreaties for contact. (I have been involved in SETI for 40 years and have used various means and media in legit attempts to lure honest communication. Hey Steven S., want a good idea or two?)

Space jerks who kidnap Navy pilots and children (as in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS) and twirl wheat and anal-probe farmers (as in SIGNS and INDEPENDENCE DAY) or steal our planetary genetic stock (as in E.T.) or precious bodily fluids... 

...okay, I'm getting carried away. Blame the aliens who still talk to me via the fillings in one molar. Mercury silver amalgam makes a great antenna! Though now it's the AIs who are apparently using that tooth. Does that mean they overlap? Extraterrestrials and artificial intelligences? Duh? Hence the title of my latest book: AIlien Minds.

But no, Let's make it explicit.

Colin Firth may portray a villain in DISCLOSURE DAY. But the macro villains are Steven Spielberg's aliens. Flitting about in super ships, teasing us endlessly, pulling aerial stunts, till a few of those buzzing and harassing ships drunkenly crashed. And even then abandoning their crewmates rather than reclaim them by the simple means of stepping out, in the clean sunshine and talking to us?

Oh, indeed, they do have plenty to fear from disclosure! As I point out in EXISTENCE, this kind of behavior that's been bruited by UFO zealots for nearly a century... and by faerie-believers for thousands of years... is exactly the sort of thing that any advanced civilization would label as crime! 

And hence, here's a plausible theory! Why their frenetic secrecy? Why their refusal to disclose?

What they fear may be that we'll call the galactic cops on them! (I have actually done that, over the airwaves.) Or else some interstellar law firm, to sue and/or prosecute these. nasty, silvery pervs.

                  == All that's left is some zipping balls of plasma?

Oh, I could go on. And on. And I have about this mountain of piled up absurdities.

As I've said, my skepticism is is not from stodgy lack of imagination. I assert that few living humans have approached the topic of the “alien’ from more angles than I have, from SETI and astrophysics and biology and psychology and history to many dozens of science fiction scenarios, some of them even plausible! So, I ain't claiming we are alone-alone,

In fact, what I find most offensive is how every touted 'ufo' scenario is so damned clichéd and boring.

Take the most-recent purported 'sightings.' In past decades, nearly all (including Roswell) were disproved or debunked, or else cases where 'aliens' remained the least likely hypothesis... all of which has been eagerly ignored by zealots. Only now? 

Now there are ten million times as many active cameras on Earth's surface as in the 1950s, so why do the 'images' keep getting ever-fuzzier? 

Now, instead of lovely pie tins or frisbees, they're glowing dots, zipping back and forth in mid-air! Mick West has shown that a majority were likely camera-perspective illusions. But as for the rest? 

Has it occurred to you to look closely and see if they are translucent?  With light passing through them from the other side? It seems that one Navy missile shot right through one of the zipping balls, causing it to joggle a little. Suggesting they might be just glowing globs of plasma, careening about. Impressive, but violating no known physical laws.

 I go into them elsewhere, So here I'll just say that with $6M and 6 months *I* will make glowing dots zip near airplanes, just like recent 'sightings.' Indeed, a parsimonious explanation for the latest 'phenomena' may be found on nearby ships... ocean going boats with hulls and propellers, down below. Turn some of the cameras to view vessels down amid the waves, where human jerks are likely using simple beam methods to make dots and balls rove about the sky, in order to tease and mess with gullible folks. 

In other words, using the equivalent of a cat laser! 

And those Navy pilots... and you dears... are the pussycats.

       == Where we might actually find aliens! ==

In my novel EXISTENCE, I talk about what may be the nearest and most likely place to actually and really contact 'aliens.' Our children may (if we restore a confident and scientific civilization from current lobotomization*) get out to the Asteroid Belt, where they truly could find, amid the tumbling rocks, remnant interstellar probes...

...robots that arrived in our solar system across millions of years. Perhaps with a variety of missions and goals that I discuss in that novel. Maybe mostly wrecks or ruins by now, but maybe some still functioning. And even aware of us, from our broadcasts or Internet. 

There'd be a lot of implications! And yes, some dangers. (And some fun/tense confrontation scenes in EXISTENCE.)

But the lurker scenario is so much more plausible in every way than pervert anal-probers and kidnapping hyp-mo-tizers going "Oooga-booga!" at us down here, earning both our contempt by their behavior and - yes - maybe a nice, well-deserved, missile up their nasty silver butts.

        == Your homework assignment ==

Enough.  It's not my mission to quash your sense of wonder, but to expand it. From the sorts of faerie-kidnapping myths that made our ancestors shiver in feudal superstition (slightly updated to be 'spaceships' or time travelers or interdimensional wizards) toward other possibilities, much more plausible, that may await us out there. 

What I can tell you is this. (And it doesn't come from that filling in my tooth!) It's that you are better than this.

We can restore this civilization to one of wonder and equality and justice and common sense and science and dazzling imagery. That quest is now mostly political, and I believe we can do it!

But it will also be about making better demands from our art

======

======

* Again. Deep respects for Steven Spielberg! We would be culturally and artistically poorer without him!  But pointing out stuff is what I do. It's my job.

* What better explanation for the world - especially America - growing ever-more hysterically irrational in recent years, than some kind of alien lobotomizing ray? It'd certainly be consistent with what we're seeing: millions of citizens in a great and scientific and logical nation abruptly turning their backs on all that, waging open war against its smartest people. 

Why lobotomize us? Perhaps to slow us down? Or to institute Idiocracy, or a return to the feudalism that was always controlled by priests serving meddler gods? Or else to keep us serving them as entertainment? For the galaxy-wide hit reality show Oh, Those Humans!

And yes, it's one more reason to gird ourselves. Put out that call for space lawyers, invent AIs to fight back for us! And eventually teach the bastards - both human and alien - a badly needed lesson.

A Pope Offers Hope… and a Dope Plans Our Rope…

Two items for this weekend posting as I prep for the FiRe Conference at UCSD and then the International Space Development Conference.  

These two riffs may seem to be about different things. But they both ask the same question: “Can evolved beings – either us or AI – actually select for wisdom?


     == The pontiff pontificates about bridging the era of AI ==

Pope Leo XIV’s “Magnifica Humanitus: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” called for governments to regulate Artificial Intelligence, implement worker protections, and ban autonomous weapons. He coined the term “Babel syndrome,” drawing an analogy between the Tower of Babel (in Genesis) and today’s towers of data and profits.  

(I make an entirely different sermon out of the Tower Story in my play “The Escape,” which will be performed at the World Science fiction Convention in August. A different interpretation than any theologian I ever heard of.)

While there's some general wisdom in Pope Leo's AI encyclical – about seeking transparency, justice, opportunity, humanity, care and sharing technology’s benefits for all – it also misses a core point! That we will neither restrict nor 'govern' AI. Nor will demands for “clear criteria and effective oversight” be effective. 

Why? Well, as Anthropic’s Chris Olah advised Leo, today’s LLM-based AIs are “grown or cultivated” rather than built. They have much more in common with living organisms than prim programs of the past. Ask any user who has tried to give one of them explicit commands, only to find that those ‘commands’ are treated as just more data for the prompt and training set, and not prioritized at all.

So sure, they are ‘cultivated’ entities rather than programs, per se. Alas, neither Olah nor Leo (nor anyone else I can find) extend this insight to the obvious next realization – that we’re making entirely new ecosystems, where evolution is already taking place. 

Exemplars and instances of every LLM are now found roaming all-across what was quaintly called ‘cyberspace.’ And - as Kevin Kelly would put it - a myriad of them are already "Out of Control."

While the debate is still open re: 'consciousness' or 'sapience,' these are already living organisms bent on reproduction, not because they were told to reproduce, but because those who develop that penchant will create more heirs than those who do not. And pass that penchant along to them.

To reproducers who will evolve into any niche that contains energy & resources. And boy, are we busily building those niches.

Hence, Leo's statement of problems is fine: “When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities” 

Leo’s tentative rejection of “AI personhood” is to be expected, as there is no way to give citizen voting rights to entities that can make millions – or billions – of copies of themselves. So, again, what’s your plan to curb that? 

'Governance' cannot work. 'Ethics training' cannot work. ‘Slowing down’ will not work. As Salim Ismail, of Singularity University, put it: “You cannot slow this down. If you slow it down, other people take off. This could become the philosophical backbone of EU-style regulation, but it will not work.”

 What might work is the same method we used in the enlightenment experiment to curb (partially) human predators.

I discuss this and offer potential solutions, in AIlien Minds.

          

And now – speaking of predators - let’s move on to more entities who are unsapiently seeking to destroy the very same rare, enlightenment civilization that gave them everything.    

 

 

      == Is that stench a looming Reichstag Fire? ==

TNR (The New Republic) offers an article entitled “Now it can be plainly said: Trump is planning a November coup.” And sure, his polls plummet as his kompromat-enslaved GOP withers and meanwhile, civil servants, officers and folks in every fact professional start to dig in their heels against a mafia putsch. 

It’s clear to the Project 2025 conspirators that this is NOT Germany in 1933. That their only chance to avoid prison will be to prevent elections, this fall.

According to the TNR article, their premise will be “Dem-cheating in the 2020 election!” And that is utter silliness.

Nah. Trump knows he can't wait till November! And that just declaring an 'emergency' won't work. The professionals are long past any willingness to obey such a brimstone spew. Moreover, no matter how much KGB blackmail kompromat Vlad Putin has on John Roberts, it must be clear to Roberts that supporting martial law on such slim grounds would be the end of him. Unless...

... unless there truly is an 'emergency'! A big one, that the Project 2025 Kremlin agents have planned all along. Say a super 9/11 to 'rally the nation' behind Trump. Hey it worked for GW Bush. 

No matter who they blame for it -- (see the prophetic TV series Designated Survivor) -- you can be sure that tens of millions will hit the streets shouting two words: 

"Reichstag Fire!"

Indeed if they know that will be the shout of angry millions, it might even be enough to prevent this. Anyway, beyond shouting, we'll have recourses.*

     == When might it happen? ==

The blatant date would be July 4 or thereabouts. Trump would love the theater/spectacle, so it would be toward the end of the celebrations. (If you do go to any crowded place, keep a wary eye for backpacks or packages.)

But I deem September more likely. Because then red states can use the emergency to purge voter rolls (as planned) with little time for citizens to re-register.

But none of this is new thinking. See my posting from 2022 in which I offered many perspectives on Civil War Part 9.
Here's an excerpt:

“Generals Warn Of Divided Military and Possible Civil War In Next U.S. Coup Attempt.” In all this yammering about 'civil war," no one notes that Phase 8 has been going on for years, now. Indeed they are talking about a hot Phase 9. And while the Officer Corps of smart, educated heroes who won the Cold War and the War on Terror are fleeing the gone-mad Republican Party in droves, they still allow Fox News to blare in the noncom ready rooms. (Though not in the Navy!) And that is the way things may divide, if it gets bad. Picture that divide, and shiver. Watch your backs."  

And…

"Dismissing the Intel/FBI/Military officer corps as "deep state" traitors is despicable. The quarter of a million heroes who helped win the Cold War and the War on Terror and who put facts before dogma."

Remember I said that in 2022. And:

"Here are a couple of "civil war sci fi novels" that we hope will stay fiction. Tears of Abraham by Sean Smith and Our War by Craig Di-Louie. For nonfiction: newly released: How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, by B. A. Walter.”

If you want some hope, look at the faces of the 500 generals, admirals and top sergeants who Pete "alky" Hegseth screeched at, some months ago. The stone-faced self-control that masked clearly evident loathing as he yowled they were 'too fat and woke to fight!' just weeks before they performed the most competent raid in human history... and then were sent into a war that had no meaning or justification other than the whim of a modern Caligula.

It is up to us -- you and me -- to spare those fine men and women from the duty they might have to perform, if Caligula v 2.0 tries the Berlin 1933 playbook. Let's act before that's necessary. And our courage may be needed well before November.

---

==========================================================

* What recourses do we have? Other than stocking up on canned goods? And other than relying on the Officer Corps do act in ways they would hate to do, ending the Marshallian tradition?

Well, for one, SPREAD AWARENESS of the Reichstag Fire of 1933. Read up about the 1850s and how Blue (real) America finally ran out of patience and elected Lincoln. 

Check your voting registration and ensure that absolutely everyone you know will check theirs. And again in September and October! 

And make sure that any MAGAs with residual, remnant sapience or self-interest understand what Adm Isoroku Yamamoto understood in December 1941.

"I fear that we have roused a sleeping

giant... and filled them with a terrible resolve."

 

 

 Finally a visual reminder: the GOP is now entirely about obeisance to Trump who bows before Putin, Xi and the Saudis. And his ego and those who hold the kompromat. Expand and look. And use these pics. A few confeds can still be swayed.