Announcing TASAT is a go! ... and curing the Anti-Modernity Cult.

First an announcement:

TASAT is here!  Are you a sci fi nerd who remembers lots of old stories, plot twists and such? Ever wish you could apply all that expertise to something useful?

How about a project that leverages your memory bank of old stories, toward a slim but real chance of saving the world?  

We're spinning out (at last!) a beta of TASAT or There's A Story About That, a community where scifi plot-geeks like you -- (or maybe (one day) some desperate government agency!) -- get to ask: 

"What if this particular strange thing ever happens? (Maybe something like it is happening now!) Has anyone ever thought it through, in a story, across the last century of science fiction tales?"

We've designed TASAT with that question in mind. Want to see how it works? Visit TASAT.org... and maybe sign on to be one of the beta members. (We've designed it to be a minimal use of time!) And maybe - just maybe - your recollection of that obscure Andre Norton or Pohl or Vance twist might someday save the world!

== Can we defeat the defeatist cult against modernity? == 

Okay let's get back to our politically-fraught year, starting first with something fundamental.

Ensure your basic rights! Check your voter registration, especially if you live in a red state, where lots of suppression and cheat-schemes to purge voter rolls are already going on. Check several times!

And yes, in Polemical Judo I have a further recommendation: Because the Grand Cheat of gerrymandering has rendered the General Election moot in many congressional districts, the smart move is to re-register into whichever party rules the district you live in! That lets you vote in the primary, the only election that matters anymore, when it comes to Congress or the Statehouse. 

Even if it means holding your nose and accepting a label that you loathe, you'll reclaim at least a part of what was robbed from you. Moreover it will protect your registration from being purged! Word to the wise?

== Seriously? This flies with... anybody? ==

Former U.S. President Donald Trump blasted the scale of U.S. support for Ukraine and said that if he is reelected in November he would immediately "have that settled."

Sure, big boy. Pretty much everyone by now can see: there are zero differences on overall agenda between today’s Foxite/MAGAs and Vladimir Putin -- who, along with his Kremlin staffed by 5000 “ex” commissars -- grew up reciting Leninist catechisms, five times a day.  Only then they swapped their hammer-sickle pins for czarist symbols -- and suddenly the U.S. right fell in love with them! (Like Don and Kim.)

Dig it. Putin called the fall of the USSR ‘history’s worst tragedy.’ He openly swore revenge  vs. all US fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service …

…to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror… the heroes who are now raged against by Kremlin stooges in the USA.  Putin’s quisling Fifth Column in America.  Today’s commies.

Again. Today's 'conservatives' rail against... the FBI?  The Intel agencies and military? Now, who would want this situation more than giggling Putin? Tell me how the MAGA enemies list differs, even slightly from that of the slightly relabeled KGB?

Today's GOP is Vlad's dream come true.  And we know who the real commies are.

== Immature speculation? ==

Though one wonders about competence when the recent Trump rally shooter climbed to a roof in plain sight of shouting onlookers. Never mind that. From initial appearances (“he was bullied every day”) the fellow is most likely just another white weasel with a gun and desperation to be somebody. 

Which is one more argument for my longtime suggestion: that dopey, attention seeking monsters should be punished in the best way, by name-erasure. See my "Erastratos Effect" proposal.

Bill Maher also riffed on this, less informatively but with wider circulation. 

(In comments I will cite a scenario for the barely-touching 'graze' wound suffered by Donald Trump. Physically this alternative is vastly more plausible than such a grazing bullet wound would be. But is it more plausible as a real-life theory? No, I think not. Still, a close examination of the wound...?)

== A Sunflower for Ukraine! == 

Oh, but here’s my response to DT’s proposed – Putin-ordered – betrayal of Ukraine. See the sunflower I grew? Close to 6 meters (20 feet) tall. Slava Ukraine! Long live the brave and free Ukrainian people. 

And may peace and freedom and light come to all Russians, as well. 

Which may happen, if WE choose sanity, first.

== What’s fundamental about the treason alliance against the Enlightenment Experiment… and hence America ==

The confederate coalition against everything the Enlightenment West stands for has two components. The oligarchs who own the movement … and the masses of what we now call 'MAGAs' and who Robert Heinlein described as ‘know nothings.’

The first component consists of the elites who control – or who think they control - today’s undead monster that’s taken over the Party of Lincoln. These elites are a mélange of inheritance brats, casino mafiosi, hedge lords, incest CEOs, "ex" commissars and openly avowed commissars (differing only in their lapel pins) and murder sheiks. All of them are united in one goal: restoring 6000 years of dismal feudalism. They’ve had a lot of victories along this path. For example, the chief outcome of “Supply Side” never-ever-once-correct “voodoo economics” has been skyrocketing wealth disparities around the globe. Now surging past French Revolution levels. (Learn the word 'tumbrels,' guys.)

Despite their many victories, these elites know that world citizens could wake up, at any moment. They must complete their conversion of the globe back to inheritance status before all the world’s young people fully acculturate with rambunctious individualism. Moreover, the oligarchs know there is one major obstacle blocking their full takeover. 

Rule of law, enforced equally and governed by facts. Hence, in order to achieve their goal, they must suppress the defenders of fact-based rule-of-law. The nerd castes. 

They must stir all-out war vs ALL fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on Terror. (All the western strengths who Vlad Putin openly blames for the fall of the USSR.)

Which brings up the second component of the anti-modernity cult. This one is vastly larger… the MAGA /confederate ground troops in their millions. They share the same agenda, only in the opposite order. Their top wish (as Robert Heinlein explains) is suppression of nerds, not out of self-interested rivalry, like the oligarch masters, but out of basic, cultural hate. (Not all of it unjustified!  As I describe elsewhere.) 

The want to humiliate the university, fact-wielding smartypants! And in order to get that, they’ll gladly help the oligarchy achieve restored feudal rule by inheritance brats.  

Same goals, in slightly different order.

I just explained for you the devil’s bargain between our would-be lords and their vassals. It is exactly the same as in 1778 when Cornwallis went South to find more tories who supported the King… or in the 1860s when a million poor whites marched off to fight and die for their plantation lord class oppressors. Or when Appalachians - who owe FDR and the Democrats absolutely freaking everything - now spit in the eyes of those who helped them out of Deliverance hell.

As Heinlein describes, it's a cultural thing. And yes, you nerds out there simply cannot grasp why – using facts and logic and appeals to common decency and progress – you can accomplish nothing against this devil’s alliance.

== Notes from Civil War Phase 8 ==

Miscellaneous addendum to the first part of this missive... another of my wager challenges. This one demanding MAGA support their incessant jeremiads against universities.  And wow, on social media that campaign is at full throttle!

Sean T. Smith's novel Tears of Abraham is a terrific and scary novel about a US civil war, far better than the recent movie Civil War, by Alex Garland. I touted it before and will again. 

In the wake of Donald Trump's ear-clipping, if anyone, anyone, tries to accuse Dems of “inflammatory language” – read to them aloud from this volcanically horrific call by Alex Jones for this own leader’s violent demise. Then demand a wager with your MAGA, whether his side only spews violent yowlings ten times as much, as opposed to (actually) 100x, than democrats or even ANTIFA. 

And bet over compared death rates wrought by their cult vs those few (any?) actually caused by US leftists.

Or by vaccines.

== Want even deeper fundamentals? ==

 My general political essay in four parts is about - among many things -- the insipid/lobotomizing left-right “axis”- how history betrayed competitive creativity...

...and what libertarianism might look like, if it ever grew up.

Political Totemism and the Danger of Metaphors: 

Part 1 followed by....

Part 2.  and Part 3.  and Part 4.

== A script for a killer advert ==

Hey Lincoln Project!  Want a script for a potentially powerful ad vs. Mafia Don?

 

   2014 – He promised proof – “Next week!” - that Obama was born in Kenya. Week after week, for years. Then stopped. Did any of you ever ask… “Well?” 

   2016 – He promised “great financials!” and tax returns “as soon as the audit is done!” There was no audit. And it’s been 8 years. 

   2017 – He vowed to end terrible Obamacare and replace it with “wonderful, perfect healthcare!” A plan that he promised to reveal “in a couple of weeks.” He repeated that promise every month for years… then went silent when Obamacare proved popular and worked! Have YOU ever seen Trump’s Great New Healthcare Plan? Has anyone? Maybe ask for it now?

   2017 - He promised to “Build the Wall!” Republicans controlled Congress, the Supreme Court, the Executive Branch… every lever of power! They could have built the wall. They didn’t. Did you ever ask why?

   2018 – He ‘fell in love!’ with murder commie tyrant Kim Jong Un. (We want those love letters; they’re public documents!) All the remaining communist despots on Earth support him, along with all the “ex” commissars and “ex” KGB agents in today’s Kremlin, who grew up reciting Lenin and working for America’s downfall… who then changed a few lapel pins and took over the Republican Party.

   2020 – He pooh-poohed Covid 19, predicting it would not come to America… and later that it would ‘pass naturally in a little bit’ … then bragged when scientists and civil servants delivered vaccines! … then swerved to anti-vax and back and forth amid calls for swallowing bleach and lasers… while the economy tanked and a million Americans died.

2021 – “I wuz robbed!!” Oh, the whining about losing by 8 million votes! Especially in six Red States that had Republican governors and officials running the election.  Always promising ‘evidence’ of a ‘steal’ but never ever delivering any. No real evidence at all!  Not to a single judge, jury or grand jury across the nation… while refusing to cooperate with independent investigation panels. 

The biggest single tantrum in the history of our Republic… until 2024, that is.

2016-to-now – A firehose, a tsunami, a supernova of lies! Over 100,000 of them, according to one ongoing list. Naturally, he won’t revisit or explain even one of them.  And his followers are fine with that, fleeing or distracting, when you bring up any of the lies. 

(Let’s pick a dozen from that list and bet $$$ on them! Got guts?)

And now… - almost without exception, Republicans wage all-out war vs all fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror. 

Now who (*cough-Vladimir*) would want Americans to do that?

We could go on with more examples, you know we could. 

Only here’s the deal. If any one of these are true, then many of our neighbors are in a mad cult. 

And gently - with malice toward none - we need to wrest power from what Heinlein called the worst, dark streak in American nature.

Your nerdy love of sci fi could save the world! Announcing… TASAT

Here’s a Major Announcement of a project that's been in my thoughts for a long time. A way that you -- yes you -- can be part of an action team of science fiction readers who might someday use your powers of SF'nal story memory to help save the world!

Bear with me while I explain. 

Fretting about potential threats to civilization, members of the Protector Caste (intel agencies and all that) keep inviting authors of “hard” or realistic science fiction to offer big perspectives, or terrifying possibilities. “You sci fi guys think up the scariest things,” one official lauded. The same can be said for tech innovators and visionaries seeking insights into where we're heading. 

Yet, there's a frustration. When pondering some real or hypothetical scenario, I often think: hasn't some earlier author considered this, amid the vast number of past tales?

== A solution? TASAT (There’s a Story about That!) ==

Consider the vast library of science fictional thought-experiments published since Mary Shelley first wrote about how the creation of new kinds of life might be mishandled—a warning with new variants in Planet of the Apes, Jurassic Park, I Robot, and Ex Machina. 

Some are “self-preventing prophecies” like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Soylent Green, Dr. Strangelove or Silent Spring. Other SF projections come true.

Alas, for every SF thought experiment that achieves renown, hundreds molder in back issues of Astounding or Galaxy, or some novel only recalled by a few dozen fans out there—tales about how the world might veer in unexpected directions. Shouldn’t those concepts be available, as a background library of worked-out scenarios, in case we ever face some sudden choice?

== Activate group memory! ==

Imagine some government or NGO must respond quickly to a First Contact situation, as in the film Arrival. In a hurry, they gather “experts” who leap to premature conclusions.

So they call on the TASAT hub—part of sci-fi fandom’s collectively sagacious Group Mind— to cite and provide stories published across the last century. Short tales, novels, movies, think-pieces and art that offer unusual scenarios, potential mistakes, or surprise twists, helping our leaders or emissaries to perceive a wider picture. 

Or take the developer of an augmented reality app, a spacecraft designer, or a company revolutionizing communication technology. Might even some outlandish tale help to inform the next wave of science fact? 

You can be part of this informal network. The only qualification? Having read a lot of stories! Watched a lot of flicks. Played bunches of realistic games. There may come a time when you — by pointing to some obscure tale — could help to save the world!

== Examples! ==

Suppose a company has developed a new bacterium that pulls Nitrogen out of the air faster and better than anything known, creating massively cheap fertilizer? What could go wrong? A TASAT alert on this prospect would likely cause someone to cite Hal Clement's novel The Nitrogen Fix, along with a warning to be careful.

Take the "Flynn Effect" ...where the last three generations of children in the West have had successively higher average IQ. Suppose it accelerates, suddenly and rapidly. While some might ponder the "Children of the Damned" flicks, or cite Poul Anderson's novel Brain Wave. Others might suggest Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration, wherein IQ-rise is triggered by a venereal disease. No one suggestion need ever be right! It could be enough that such examples cause the responsible parties to widen their horizons, and not leap to the first, logical theory.

Then there's the almost infinite supply of alien First Contact tales, with some even portraying a TASAT-like process. Take the Niven and Pournelle opus Footfall, in which the government wisely establishes both optimistic and pessimistic committees.  Another of you (under comments, below) cited Gordon Dickinson's "The Alien Way," in which the protagonist digs through library stacks to find a half-remembered scientific article about bear behavior that will help him to understand the instinctive underpinnings of  an alien race.

If ever we find ourselves in a possible contact situation, our very survival might depend on having available a wide variety of scenarios, suggesting: what's "obvious" ain't necessarily so.

== Sign up! ==

So browse the TASAT Site! Join the community to get TASAT alerts. Even pose one, now and then! 

This is not just another sci fi discussion/argument site, but a place to cite actual, accessible stories, perhaps even pertinent to hurried decision makers.

(Did I mention the TASAT Facebook site, as well?)

Harness your nerdiness for the good of civilization!

TASAT is affiliated with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego.  

So sign up for TASAT! Be part of the nerdy community that might save us all, someday, by chiming up with an obscure link, saying: 

"There's a Story About That!"

====

====

Sci Fi Warnings and Optimism: calling fans to advise us with stories!

You don't have to choose! Between pessimism and optimism, that is. A sane person uses dollops of both - simultaneously - to help navigate a path ahead. Because making a better world requires two phases. First finding the errors, snake-pits, land mines and quicksand that lie in wait, as we charge into the future.  Those dangers are best revealed by eager complainers shouting “look out, you fools!” It is the supreme value of reciprocal criticism -- and science fiction has played a role, by issuing very effective self-preventing prophecies.”

But there is another vital phase.  Responding to such warnings with: “Oh… that? Well, sure. I guess we’d better roll up our sleeves and work together (or compete) to solve it. Which we can do!”  

That confident (and nowadays so-rare) can-do spirit was the theme and topic of Disney’s movie Tomorrowland, an ode to ebullient optimism that was crushed by today’s overpowering Cynicism Machine. A sick-addictive habit spread deliberately by those who profit or benefit from a pervasive public mood of despair.

Have a look at this moving tribute to the can-do spirit, by Jim Wright. Oh, sure, it devolves into a cynical rant of his own, in the middle (while making some good points).  But the beginning and the end are crystal clear, urging us to fight back against the cynics and gloom merchants. Stand up. Tell them “I will listen to your warnings. But in order to discuss with ambitious folks how to solve them! Keep your damn gloom away from me.”

== Self-preventing prophecies ==

Fred Kaplan, author of Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, describes how the Matthew Broderick 1983 film War Games so disturbed President Ronald Reagan that he ordered the nation’s first high level investigation of cyber-security, resulting in major redesigns of national and military systems. Again, science fiction helps us to avoid errors with “self-preventing prophecies”… powerfully affecting destiny by drawing attention to threats to freedom (Orwell), to our ecosystem (Soylent Green and Silent Running), or to peace (Dr. Strangelove, On The Beach, Fail-Safe, War Games.) 

And it goes on. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has been holding meetings lately about applying science fiction to stimulating public enthusiasm.... in STEM education for example. A few months ago an event in Los Angeles introduced space scientists to Hollywood mythmakers, along the theme of "homesteading in space."

At the latter gathering I raised an older topic that all SF writers and fans have pondered, at times...

.... that the vast trove of Science Fiction novels and short fiction represents a library of thought experiments that might prove useful to policy makers at some point -- about the pitfalls we may face in the future.

A new biography of Ray Bradbury suggests that, "Bradbury conceived his early science fiction as a cumulative early warning system against unforeseen consequences." 

Suppose our leaders ever face a sudden, disturbing and scientifically surprising event - ranging from real alien contact to a disrupting energy technology, to some drug that amplifies both human intelligence and insanity. You name it and there have been scifi "gedankenexperiments" that explored it.  Now imagine that policy workers had instant access to a network of nerdy expert-readers, ready to speak up about that library of ideas:

"You know, these 15 tales explored - in varied detail - something strangely similar to this situation. A few of the stories point to possibilities you may not have considered." 

This would be a perfect job for an an ad hoc and informal band of science fiction fans. Envision an advisory group called TASAT -- or "There's A Story About That." It wouldn't take much  - and almost zero funding - to get such a group rolling.  Perhaps one panel at a Science Fiction Worldcon might suffice to get it rolling. And the effort could more than pay for itself, if useful SF'nal insights came in handy during an emergency. 

Perhaps someone should suggest this as a panel topic at the coming MidAmerica Con?

== More Dire warnings ==

For the direst, larger-scale warnings, see 12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy the Entire Solar System, by George Dvorsky on io9, with scenarios ranging from AI super-intelligence run amok to an interplanetary grey goo disaster.

Quite a number of sci fi scenarios will be brought to television or movies in the next few years, with upcoming adaptations of novels such as: Foundation, Robopocalypse, Spin, Annihilation, Little Brother, and Ancillary Justice. See this extensive list -- stories full of both optimism and warning.

The prediction biz just gets better. In EARTH I foresaw a “Swiss Navy” that might enforce the rights of a Sea State - flotillas of ships bearing displaced populations.  In EXISTENCE the wealthiest have bought rights to distant reefs and island nations drowning under rising oceans, in order to perch new “seastead” enclaves upon them, according to plans hatched in the Alps. 

Now see how Swiss submarine-maker Migaloo is offering a 100,000 sq.ft yacht-island that would be at home in either near-future… a custom-built multistory mega-yacht that comes complete with a penthouse, submarine bays, a beach club, and a shark elevator -- to help the 0.1% avoid the rising seas of climate change.

And yes, I portrayed Chinese forces contesting over these reefs. (Calling that Prediction wiki!)  Only… wait a minute.  “Swiss submarine-maker”? In real life? Wow, man.

== Tales of pitfalls ahead ==

Cumulus, by Eliot Pepper, presents a gritty view of a near future of accelerting economic inequality. Most public services have been taken over by private companies. And a high-tech Google-like corporation, Cumulus, reaches its tentacles ever deeper into all aspects of daily life. Omnipresent surveillance raises questions of corporate accountability: who is monitoring the surveillance feeds? In a city divided between the haves and have-nots (Greenies vs Slummers), anonymity is virtually impossible...  except for a few insiders who have the power to subvert the system for their own purposes. See Cumulus reviewed here.

Tears of Abraham, by Sean T, Smith, is an action-packed page turner, that's also thoughtful about loyalty, honor, courage and what it takes to be American, especially when the chips are down. Those chips tumble as the U.S. spirals into a violent new phase of our recurring civil war -- a fate we can avoid, helped by warnings like this one.

The Only Ones, by Carola Dibbell, offers a near-future scenario where pandemic has struck down much of the population. A 19-year old “hardy,” Inez Fardo, is immune to the virulent plague. Surviving on the edge of society, willing to sell anything for money, she is hired to donate her genes in an experiment to create an immune baby for a wealthy woman. When the woman backs out, Inez ends up alone, with a child who is an identical clone of herself. Since cloning is illegal (with clones hunted down by religious fanatics), she must hide the identity of her child, as they struggle to simply stay alive in a dismal post-apocalyptic world.

(Look, post-apocalyptics are okay. I wrote one! (Though my novel The Postman was about citizenship and our neighbors being wiser than slime molds.) Still, have a look where I decrypt why PA has become the reflexive go-to premise for so many authors and directors.)

Here's a cute and well-made web site about counter-terrorism and the world of Intel & Spies revolves around publicizing SyFy’s new TV series “Hunters,” which ponders a terror campaign led by… aliens, of course.

Another dire scenario: Phage, by Mark Tamplin offers a suspense-filled look at a virulent epidemic set off by a genetically-engineered pathogen -- intentionally released by a psychotic madman, a rogue government biochemist with a long-simmering grudge. Our hero, Dr. Sam Townsend is on the verge of developing an antidote, a phage to kill the pathogen, when he finds himself targeted by the terrorist. Tamplin, a microbiologist, incorporates lots of science coupled with fast-paced action. And yet, suspicion of authority is taken to an extreme to drive the plot in this novel.

And in the end, science (and transparency) are the keys to problem-solving...