Optimism... even about alien invasion?

Of course both optimism and pessimism are simplistic reflexes, unworthy of a modern mind... which is why, here at Contrary Brin, we'll poke at any over-simplifying nostrum. Today, of course, that means I must side with optimists more often, because pundits and media and ravers push the mostly-fact-free notion that we're all plummeting into hell.

One fellow who makes me look like a cynical playground-snarling pessimist - Peter Diamandis - offers up “Why the World Is Better Than You Think in 10 Powerful Charts.”  Do we have lots of problems to solve? Some of them perilous to the planet and our kids? Sure! But one of the worst of our problems is snarling cynics who refuse to look at the mountains of good news.  And conclude that problems can be solved!  Because some have been.

Another example. In Foreign Policy, J. M. Berger offers a thoughtful rumination on public-spectacle violence, starting with Roman gladiatorial matches going all the way to Islamic State public beheadings… and relates it all to science fiction tales from Rollerball to The Purge. 

Of course this has gone political, well summarized in this painfully funny cartoon, showing HClinton and DTrump using exactly the same words, in opposite directions and meanings. 

== Alien Visions ==

This blog posting sat a while, since July 4, in fact. Independence Day. Which provoked two thoughts. 

First, what if we met scary and advanced aliens? Would it even be possible to adapt quickly? The greatest historical example would be Meiji-Era Japan, which decided to end several hundred years of self-imposed isolation and suddenly begin studying the ways of dauntingly advanced western powers. Within a single generation, the Japanese had iron rolling mills and made the warships that defeated much-larger China. A couple of decades after that, they defeated one of the world powers — Russia — both on land and at sea. It took immense concentration and sacrifice… and no one knows if anything similar could happen across the potentially vastly larger technological gaps that might yawn between us of aliens.

I speak to this in my Uplift Universe, where humanity does face that problem, having to catch up rapidly to a billion year old Galactic Civilization. Sundiver goes into that dilemma in detail, and our hero contemplates both the Meiji Era Japanese and the Cherokee of Georgia, who handled the problem a little differently.

Of course some folks ask this question with an agenda: that they believe aliens have “taught” us things in the past. To drag sticks through sand or pile stones to draw signs to spacecraft. Or that star beings used psi-tech to help us build pyramids or Easter Island statues. To which I answer… feh! That conceit so insults our ancestors, who imagined that building such things might propitiate gods and save them from their grueling-primitive poverty. Hence, believing that, they innovated! Cleverness and fervor and strenuous labor chiseled and move stones! No alien intervention need be invoked. The poignant universality of this story - inventive and labor-intensive projects appealing for help from above that never, ever came -- is one of the most tear-inducing I can picture.

If aliens did demand such tasks of human tribes, then they were space-jerks, who could have helped us vastly more by opening one teensy community college. Or just by giving us glass lenses, printing, free speech and the germ theory of disease. Once we had those things, we took off on our own!

We had better not learn any UFO stories are actually true. Because if they are - even one of them — then some cosmic punks are really in for it. Go Air Force.

== Hypocrisy vs problem solving ==

Speaking of fact-based optimism. A new study predicts that the federal forecast of national health care spending under President Obama's signature health law was a big overestimate — by $2.6 trillion over a five-year period. In other words, the decline in growth of health costs in the U.S. under Obamacare has been vastly, vastly better than anyone, even optimists, predicted… and that comes after the added expense of finally getting tens of millions of kids and adults insured.

If there were sanity instead of reflex on the American right, conservatives would do one of their favorite veers… and claim credit for this!  After all, the ACA (Obamacare) was always based on the GOP’s own… damn… plan!  It was. But it’s a bit late to claim credit now.

So Dennis Hastert, once the top Republican official in America, is now in prison. Not for his top crime - treason - for deliberately conspiring to destroy politics - the art of open-adult negotiation and compromise - as a problem solving method in dealing with an onrushing future. He and other monsters wrecked US politics, leaving us weak and terminally polarized...

...but instead he is imprisoned for lying about being a child-molesting pervert and hypocrite. Like OJ Simpson doing time now for armed robbery instead of axe-murder. Okay. We'll take what justice we can get.

Oh, see the weapon used most by mass shooters.  Read the whole article.

== Fertile Ground for ISIS ==

How Kosovo Was Turned Into Fertile Ground for ISIS: "Saudi money and influence have transformed this once-tolerant Muslim society at the hem of Europe into a font of Islamic extremism and a pipeline for jihadists," writes Carlotta Gall in The New York Times. And "mosques built here with Saudi government money are blamed for spreading Wahhabism — the conservative ideology dominant in Saudi Arabia — in the 17 years since an American-led intervention wrested tiny Kosovo from Serbian oppression."

Do any of you actually swallow the Fox-News line that the Saudi R'oil House (Fox partners and investors) opposes Isis/Al-Qaeda extremism? ISIS has bought or reprinted thousands of standard Saudi textbooks to indoctrinate youth in the territories they control.  The same textbooks and many of the same teachers and texts who molded Osama Bin Laden (remember him) and the Al-Qaeda and ISIS leaderships and that petro-dollars still ship to thousands of radicalizing madrassas all over the muslim world.

Back to Kosovo: "Americans were welcomed as liberators after leading months of NATO bombing in 1999 that spawned an independent Kosovo," writes Gall. Now? "“They spent a lot of money to promote it through different programs mainly with young, vulnerable people, and they brought in a lot of Wahhabi and Salafi literature. They brought these people closer to radical political Islam, which resulted in their radicalization.”

Is it any wonder that the (partly) Saudi-controlled American right has sabotaged moves toward efficiency research and energy independence - and science, in general - for 30 years?  But that effort could only harm us - and the planet - for so long, before non-confederate scientific ingenuity came to the rescue. Sustainable energy is taking off! Plummeting in price and now competitive even with natural gas. 

We are weaning ourselves off the carbon teat. And our future is the stars -- not nostalgia for caliphate.

And finally...

It is now reported that almost 500 million social media posts are fabricated by government factotums in China every year, according to this report. You can expect these methods to be copied (possibly with hired consultants from Russia or the mystic-east) extensively during U.S. elections, especially now that the Kochs and others have found that money spent on TV ads no longer accomplishes much of anything. But a few trolls in a boiler room, spreading “never Hillary” memes among disappointed Bernites could be golden.

  

Vladimir Putin, more popular with Americans than either presumptive presidential nominee?  Interesting, though this lousy article does not parse the obvious – that there’s huge overlap between Putin lovers and Trump lovers.  After a decade of lavish, gushing adoration of Putin on Fox, you’d be surprised?

This list of the top 50 accomplishments of the Obama Administration is a bit iffy… some were less profound than stated.  Still, it shows efforts on behalf of middle class people.  Show me something similar for the Bushes?  Compare actual outcomes.

Oog.  I started this one out to be one of my weekend non-political ones.  Science!  Optimism! Okay okay.  I'll keep trying. Only...

...remember that one of the candidates -- just one -- said "I believe in science."