Conspiracies, Japan's "recession," voting fraud and other nonsense

This rather moving essay by an immigrant engineer tells of her shock - at first - over something rather simple.  She had seen American cars, houses and streets on TV and in films -- (along with hugely exaggerated violence).  But what stunned her most, apparently, was the reliability of infrastructure.  Like how smoothly citizens rely on the Postal Service, taking for granted and even maligning what she found miraculous. And libraries. And utilities and streets and all the gracious-relaxed assumptions that we hold, that stuff will just work.

"Almost every aspect of the most innovative parts of the United States, from cutting-edge medical research to its technology scene, thrives on publicly funded infrastructure. The post office is struggling these days, in some ways because of how much people rely on the web to do much of what they used to turn to the post office for. But the Internet is a testament to infrastructure, too: It exists partly because the National Science Foundation funded much of the research that makes it possible. Even some of the Internet’s biggest companies, like Google, got a start from N.S.F.-funded research.  Infrastructure is often the least-appreciated part of what makes a country strong, and what makes innovation take flight. From my spot in line at the post office, I see a country that does both well; not a country that emphasizes one at the expense of the other."

You'd expect this to resonate with me.  It is there on the pages of The Postman, how most of us would not respond to a collapse of civilization the way masses are depicted doing, in Hollywood fluff.  (Especially the latest, wretchedly-stupid, Max Max flick.) Rather, as Rebecca Solnit shows in A Paradise Built in Hell, millions of us would have one priority we would put ahead of our own lives. 

On a more mundane level, I have spoken often of the "miracle of the four-way stop sign intersection" -- how just standing there (at least in California) leaves you in awe after a short while, at the stunning ability and courtesy and blithely unaware citizenship that 99% of drivers display, with scarcely a thought.

Civilization. Preserving it. Saving it and bringing it back. Confidently defending it from those who deny it's even possible.

Let's do that, this year.

==  Conspiracy Theories – the great uniter of crazed left and right ==

Both ends of the political spectrum feature righteously angry personalities who indulge in demonization that extends into conspiracy territory.  I've elsewhere dealt with left wing fantasies, like “Loose Change” mania about the 9/11 attacks. But I spend less time there because (1) a very small number of their paranoid ravings do have some basis in fact… and (2) because the far-wingnuts of the left have almost zero influence at national or state levels of the Democratic Party, and hence no access to state power.

In sharp contrast, the litany of stunning, schizo-level conspiracies credited on the American right, by majorities of GOP voters, as well as most candidates and media pundits, is simply appalling.  From “birthers” who have never come up with even a hypothesis why Ann Dunham would have traveled (without leaving a trace) to Kenya to give birth, while her parents conspired to put a false birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser….  

… to ACORN, Benghazi and Planned Parenthood… all the way back to Bircher screeches about flouridation, DDT and Dwight Eisenhower being an agent of the Kremlin.  This article – while one-sided – gives an excellent run-down on a frenzied history of what, alas, is often the conservative mainstream.  

Which I deem a tragedy!  Indeed, there are versions of American conservatism that very much belong at the negotiating table of U.S. political process, as we try to find ethical and practical ways to make a better society for all.  I know some conservatives who are right-on as often as anyone I know… except for their myopia on one issue. Despite having all withdrawn in disgust from the Republican Party, most refuse to admit just how crazy the undead elephant has become.  Not one of them has admitted the obvious -- that it is time for sane conservatives to stand up and loudly rebel against the hijackers of their movement.

This article is, as I said, somewhat biased. Its excoriation of NAFTA, for example, leaves out the way NAFTA has bootstrapped Mexico toward a rapidly enlarging urban middle class, which ought to be the number one U.S. foreign policy objective, for a myriad overwhelming reasons.   (And it is working, spectacularly as the Mexican middle class rises and net immigration to the US has turned negative.)

Strangely, the very worst rightwing nut-theories are left out… e.g. the long chain of pyrotechnic campaigns against science, from “cars don’t cause smog” and “tobacco is wholesome” and "marijuana makes you go kill your loved ones,"all the way to climate denialism. That reflex - to obey oligarchs seeking short term profit - has led and will lead directly to millions upon millions of deaths.  The GOP’s deliberate sabotaging of science R&D, including banishment of Congress's own Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), can only be explained either by insanity or else outright treason.

Read it.You’ll come away stunned and appalled… and better armed to deal with your crazy uncle.

== What's actually up with Japan? ==

A book by my colleague Scott Foster – Stealth Japan - "shatters the myth that Japan is a 'basket case' that has fallen hopelessly behind in the digital world of the 21st Century and makes a strong case that Japan may in fact have created the most successful economy and society in the world today."  

By offshoring much of their production and paperwork, Japanese corporations have been able to effectively keep two sets of books. In one set, shown to the world, the nation has been in recession for two decades. Yet, Japanese citizens easily afford every toy and gadget, innovation continues and social unrest is nil. Read Scott’s fascinating revelations about Japan’s second set of books.

== Voter ID laws and other cheating ==

And now this: "A federal appeals court unanimously struck down a voter ID law in Texas, saying it violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act to discriminate against minority voters." 


Let's be clear.  I do not mind gradually ramping up voter ID requirements. The Left is wrong to oppose them in principle, over reasonable time. 
No, the test of sincerity is whether the state eases-in such laws and provides all the help voters need, in order to comply with a new, state-imposed burden. Have new voter-ID requirements been accompanied by state assistance for poor folks, women, minorities etc to get the needed ID?  Not only for voting but to help them in many other aspects of life?


The answer is... no.  Hypocritically, these states have funded ZERO $ to this.  Zero, in every single case. Not even token or figleaf efforts. 
 Funny how Republicans scream over government imposing new regulatory burdens on rich oligarchs and corperations. Goppers regularly demand appropriations for Compliance Assistance to corporations, yet fund not a penny to help poor Americans retain their vote.

This is hypocrisy of staggering dimensions. Failure to allocate compliance assistance proves their aim was never fair voting. Pure and simple, they are cheaters.  Gerrymandering cheating-lying cheaters.  See it explained here. As for Democrats?  Their inability to parse this and ever mention compliance assistance as the smoking gun? That failure, clearly, convicts them of a different sin.  

Stupidity.

== Obama the "feckless" ==

Yep, that's the latest buzz word.  Feckless. And cowardly.  Unable even to maintain the old "socialist" malarkey with a straight face, even on Fox, they have switched to calling a wimp the guy they earlier accused of being about to black-helicopter America with Leninist martial law.

Some memes only spread through repetition. The “Obama is a wimp compared to Putin” narrative is spewed so relentlessly by Fox & comrades that is has become as accepted as breathing, not only on the right but also on the left.  Against such a tsunami of repetitive incantation-propaganda, I can only reiterate: “To be clear, the Russians themselves are not as stupid as Fox commentators. They do not ignore the devastating setback in Ukraine." 

They deem that blow to have been a hugely aggressive and successful assault on Russian interests by Barack Obama to have been vastly, vastly more significant that Putin's subsequent nibble-back of Crimea. Putin and the Russian media relentlessly portray him as anything but the wimp he is depicted in right wing American press.  They view him as the "most aggressive and successful opponent they have faced, since Reagan.”

The incredible density of our media at failing to report this is so obtuse that Obama was forced - in his recent Stat of the Union Speech - to say what should never have been necessary for a president to say.  To be the one to remind his critics that this "feckless" commander in chief killed... Osama.... bin... Laden.

And our service men and women are dying at a rate one twentieth the average during either Bush Administration.  And the readiness levels of our military units are back at Clinton era levels -- near 100% -- instead of the ZERO percent for major marine and Army units that Clinton and Obama inherited from Bushes.  Sincere conservatives would notice this stuff.

To be clear, what did the GOP do, back when they controlled every single U.S. lever of power?  From 2001 through 2007, they had locks in the White House, Congress, the bureaucracy and the Courts. So what did they do with all that power?  Did they pass immigration or health reform? (Even versions based on conservative values?) Did they balance the budget or bring entitlements under control? (Deals were on the table and ready, but Fox shrugged them aside.) 

Did they even do a thing to make abortions harder to get? Or seal the borders? Or increase aid to Israel?  None of those things.  In fact, those Congresses are documented as the laziest in the history of the republic, meeting the fewest days, holding the fewest hearings, issuing the fewest subpoenas, passing the fewest bills… despite continuing rhetoric and anger, they did nothing to decrease the size of government.

Their only assertive efforts were (1) Bushite wars that bankrupted us and (2) tax favors for the super-rich. Then more, then more for oil and coal, then more for Wall Street.

Please.  If you are a sincere conservative or libertarian, you should be meeting and conspiring to rebel against the Murdochian-Saudi hijacking of your movements.  The rise of Trump and Cruz shows that the conservative masses know something is wrong with those oligarchs and their lies. But they are being given no alternative by real adults.

Reach for the Skies

I had dinner last night with X-Prize impresario Peter Diamandis, at the annual Strategic Investment Conference run by Altegris and my friend John Mauldin. Vernor Vinge and I were invited to ask the first questions of Peter, who earlier in the day had stopped at UCSD's new Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, to help unpack the five finalist entries in the Tricorder X Prize.  Read up on all that, because the future is shifting under our feet.  See especially Peter' Diamandis's orgy of optimism, his book, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think. The trends are amazing.  If that future is stymied, it will be because of treason to humanity.

I'll be chatting with Elon Musk in a few weeks. The ongoing series of accomplishments of this fellow - who is rapidly becoming our generation's cult-Edison figure - only begin with electric cars and fantastic space rockets (soon to land on their tails, the way we kids of the 1950s always knew they would.) Elon's new venture, in selling home battery packs to level the load and let some citizens get off-grid, is terrific. We spoke of it three years ago and I want to be a customer.  But this is just the beginning.  He has his eye on drought problems caused by climate change.  More on that in our next science-dump.

And, of course, there is not just one "good billionaire" out there. Amazon's Jeff Bezos also wants to stimulate the future, using well-earned gains from the real capitalism of delivering goods and services.  (Unlike the parasites who use their lucre to warp democracy and siphon wealth via "financial services" and low-royalty resource-extraction.) See (at last) a good look at the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket.  And much more in the background.

== More amazements! ==

There's a new entry in the space-tourism sweepstakes, without the rush (or danger) of a rocket launch. Recently,  World View completed an unmanned flight that took its balloon 100,000 feet in the air, and safely landed the capsule using a parafoil.Team leader Jane Poynter predicts by the time it’s ready for launch, as early as 2016, World View will have spent less than $100 million on development. That means tickets aboard a World View balloon—$75,000 each—will also cost less than half as much as those to board one of Virgin Galactic’s flights.

Mining the skies...NASA is developing its first-ever mission to identify, capture and redirect a near-Earth asteroid, moving it to a stable orbit around the moon, where astronauts will explore it in the 2020s, returning with asteroid samples.  Watch this informative video. The Planetary Resources company -- founded by Peter Diamandis and Erik Schmidt (Google) and other Pacific Coast style moguls -- intends to make us all richer by accessing the cornucopia that awaits us, out there.  

I'm pleased that NASA is also on this course (instead of the insane Bushite notion of re-landing on the sterile-useless Moon.)  We're helping, at NIAC!

Not all space news is great.  There are setbacks. Simmering in the background news is the apparent destruction of an older U.S. Defense Department weather satellite, spewing yet more debris into low earth. The news stories blame a decaying battery that might have overheated and exploded. But take a closer look. This satellite was in approximately a sun-synchronous orbit, at about 846x837 km altitude…near the center of the band congested with both large debris (mostly Russian) and small debris, mostly untracked, from China's 2007 Fengyun/A-sat (anti-satellite weapon) test — the two biggest sources of destructive space debris. According to one prominent space engineer I know: “I strongly suspect that the satellite was hit by untracked Fengyun debris smaller than 10 cm.”

In other words, the peril that we were shown in the movie GRAVITY is very real, indeed.

 == And More....==

Vigorous climate change denialist Sen. Ted Cruz is chairman of the Senate’s Space and Science Committee.  His recent, hostile interaction with NASA Director Charles Bolden should be the stuff of legend, in which Bolden defended the fact that NASA builds satellites and other missions aimed at studying one particular planet – our Earth.  It seems that those who proclaim “we don’t have enough science yet, to confirm global climate change!” also do not want the science that might answer those questions.

And you are surprised? Under G.W. Bush, NASA was ordered to drop “Earth” from its vocabulary.  Rick Scott's Florida - the US state most vulnerable to rising seas - has banned all state agencies for planning against days that nearly all scientists -- the folks who actually know stuff -- see coming at us like a freight train.

And.... reaching for the skies...A lovely animation of a concept for a lunar space elevator.  

A fascinating article on how constellations of small satellites may deliver broadband to the whole world.  

How cool!  Watching the behavior of stars and gases in collisions of clusters of galaxies… and using gravitational lensing to measure the dark matter… enables astronomers to learn something fundamental about the nature of dark matter.  

A lovely interview at JPL with INTERSTELLAR  screenwriter Jonathan Nolan and my friend Kip Thorne, the physics advisor on the film.

== Two miracles of space! ==

In his book Of A Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer credited the Apollo era NASA with accomplishing two "miracles" of a biblical scale. First - it gob-smacked him one day that "these geeks are actually going to the moon!" The second bona fide miracle? They were actually succeeding at making it boring!

Seriously, of all the mazillion channels of TV, which one covers the most exciting and inherently interesting real life stuff that's going on, right now, in real time? And which one is the most tediously sleep-inducing?  The NASA Channel, of course.  Making all of this worse is the stunning and willful wave of cynicism that has swept all generations, especially of Americans, who used to have such a gosh-wow reputation for their eager, can-do spirit.

What is the anthem of the Baby Boomers? It was provided by Peter Finch, in the movie Network. Remember?  "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" 

An utterly futile paean to sanctimony and the drug high of useless rage, it's poisoned us. As I lay down colorfully here: Indignation, Addiction and Hope: Does it help to be mad as hell?

But -- inspired by Peter Diamandis -- I declare that you don't have to put up with that, anymore. Just pay attention to what we've done, as a people, in the last few months:

Human beings -- well, Europeans -- landed a laboratory on a comet!

One of our robots started climbing a mountain on Mars.

We confirmed Ganymede has more liquid water than planet Earth.

New data doubled the estimated size of our own galaxy.

The New Horizons probe is fast approaching its July encounter with freaking Pluto....

And humanity - via NASA - has arrived in orbit around Ceres! Finding hints that the dwarf planet/asteroid might also have buries seas.

What a year it's been, with all of that... plus discovering scads of extrasolar planets -- numbering up to five thousand at latest count...

...and finally getting satellites out there to study the Earth (after a previous administration deliberately sabotaged science).  Indeed, these are amazing times. And in a couple of months, our New Horizons emissary will sweep past freaking Pluto! Wowzer.  And that's just space.  You know that I could type till my fingers were bloody, and not run out of reasons that you... and yes, I mean directly you... ought to be proud as heck.

Hence, the most amazing thing is that we... aren't!  The cult of fear-mongering cynicism has grown so intense that it's time for you to get mad! Mad at the merchants of fear and doubt and small-mindedness. Mad at the propagandists who seek to keep you "mad as hell" all the time.  Mad at the whole "I'm as mad as hell" ethos that poisoned a generation, a nation, and threatens all our kids.

Next time something cool happens, on Earth or in space, get up and shout out the window "I AM A MEMBER OF A CIVILIZATION THAT DOES STUFF LIKE THIS!"

Watch my rant about how we need to (aggressively!) fight cynicism with pride and joy.

Or else...

... be proud to be a member of the same species as cretins like this one:

 “NASA should stop wasting time exploring other planets because God's only experiment with life is on Earth," according to televangelist Pat Robertson.

We are at war, all right. A war for the future that, ironically, we can only win by fostering the confident song of ambitious joy in our hearts.

                                                                                       

Violence and Progress, Part II: Is Conflict Necessary for Human Advancement?

In Part One we examined the notion that Steven Pinker promotes (in The Better Angels of Our Nature), that palpable progress has been made in reducing violence and poverty, worldwide -- and the harsh reaction these facts ignite, among dogmatics of both right and left. We did this by critiquing a purported pundit's deeply dismal and dishonest "rebuttal" of Pinker.

I won't even go to the real incitement caused by my friend, XPrize-founder Peter Diamandis, in his books Abundance: The Future is Better than you think and Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World, which suggest that progress will soon accelerate so fast that even cynical grouches will be dazzled. That I gotta see. Suffice it to say that Peter leaps far beyond Pinker's cautious and guarded optimism. 

It is a deeply important matter, especially as getting to this promised land will entail not only rejecting fanaticisms of the far-left and entire-right. Or some of the "abundance" geeks - not Peter - who think it will come blithely, naturally and easy. No, the opportunities are there, but we'll have to work for them.

But I am not done being provocative.  For you see, another factor is whether some harshness in the human experience in one more essential ingredient. Whether even war might be part of what has moved us forward.

== The power of opposition ==

A pair of best-selling books by Stanford Professor Ian Morris make the bold assertion that dynamic competition is just as important for human development as cooperation and shared purpose. His titles are deliberately provocative: “Why The West Rules — For Now” and “WAR! What is it Good For? Conflict and Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots.”

Well, well. From that alone, you can catch a strong whiff of Morris’s argument, that competition — even the violent kind — can be a core driver that leads to stronger and better human civilizations.

Of course this might, at first sight, appear to be an endorsement of enduring right-wing nostrums — that society should emulate nature, red in tooth and claw, because competitive evolution has been the great driver of adaptation and change, from bacteria to fish to mammals. Species improve their fitness by allowing the devil to take the hindmost. It is a bloody business. Also a slow and highly inefficient one, when competition manifests under Mother Nature.

Nor was it much better across the six to ten millennia since human tribes gathered together in regimes larger than tribes. Urban civilization required a top tier of rulers and priests, whose main obsession soon became staying on top, and ensuring their sons could take other mens’ women and wheat. Below that paramount level, a veneer of specialist scribes and artisans also benefited from taxing the mass of farmers and serfs, though arguably giving value, in return. 

Across these eras, in a vast majority of cultures, priests and kings generally suppressed any spirit of lively or fair competition, far more than they encouraged it. Status was inherited, as heaven obviously intended.

Still, despite this pattern of oligarchic conservatism, Morris makes the case that progress often happened anyway, especially when those pyramids of feudal privilege clashed with each other. Indeed, history is a tragic mess of delusion and horrific statecraft. But our ancestors do seem to have stumbled ahead a bit quicker when the lords were worried about other barons across the hills. Spured by outside threats, the elite castes devoted more effort to encouraging  innovation from bright subjects, instead of repressing it.

Examples from the past would include the Five Kingdoms of ancient China, which developed far faster than during the subsequent Qin Unification era.  And of course post-Renaissance Europe, when innovation skyrocketed under competitive pressure among nations of a fractured continent.  Indeed, this lateral competition is likely what led to the Industrial Revolution and its subsequent rapid leveraging of fossil fuels and sail and metals.

== Lateral drive ==

Looking at eras in parallel, comparing apples to apples, past eras tended to be more productive when they featured lateral competition than when they were rigidly top-down hierarchical. The same is true of industrial societies, when viewed in parallel.

Lateral competition can also be unpleasant and destructive! The examples I gave were also times of great violence. In China and Europe, some moderating forces helped keep violence from ruining the renaissances. Still, generally, average folk lived calmer, safer lives under an imperial “pax” like Pax Romana, Pax Sinica and Pax Brittanica, than in eras filled with lateral strife.

But we are discussing progress here, and without question progress does benefit from competition. Ideally competition in which many moderating forces, like law and democracy and mass education regulate the rivalry, maximizing market virtues and minimizing cheating or blood on the floor.

I’ve gone into and discussed the innovative ways that first Periclean Athens and Republican Florence tentatively tried to use rule-systems to keep competition flat-open-fair… then a much stronger experiment ensued, in which (mostly) western markets, democracy, science and courts regulated competition with one foremost aim — to maximize creative output in positive-sum ways by minimizing cheating.

Please dig this as I repeat it: cheating and blood were the chief hallmarks of feudalism, whose variants dominated 99% of societies with agriculture. Fierce repression to maintain inherited privilege was always the biggest kind of cheating, stifling ambitious innovation among those consigned to lower orders.  There is no greater defining trait of feudalism… in all its many variants… than conniving cartels of cheaters.

== More comparing oranges to oranges ==

During the 19th and 20th centuries, innovation thrived most in nations that encouraged middle class ambition, through education, social mobility and some degree of democratic rights. Bismarck’s Germany retained many feudal trappings and privileges, but it accelerated to catch up with the liberal societies of France, England and the U.S. precisely when education, land and rights reforms removed cheater dominance from the necks of  farmers, tradesmen, skilled workers and the bourgeoisie.  

The very same thing happened in Japan. Indeed, the beginnings of this phenomenon were seen in late Czarist Russia. The process is one that Karl Marx understood far, far better than today’s ill-read leftists do.

What neither Marx nor the classic right expected was the Twentieth Century Crisis that began with European monarchies and oligarchies self-destructing in a stunning maelstrom of stupidity, obstinacy, class-rigidity, stupidity, delusion and stupidity. Whereupon fanatical quasi-religions in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia repressed free thought and crushed the diversity of viewpoints that engenders flat-open-fair-confident competition.  

If the Nazis drove away all their scientists, the Soviets tried to tightly channel creativity. Both empires set up top-cabals of cheating nobility almost exactly like the classic human pattern… based on party membership that soon was heavily family-inherited.  Both empires became uncreative and stagnant, as did Maoist China.

If I sound like I am crowing the right’s triumphalist line, then forget it! Cheaters abound and cleverly seek new ways to cheat. Today — as happened in America’s “Gilded Age” — cabals of would be feudal lords are attempting a putsch to crush our diamond-shaped, flat-open-fair competitive systems back into feudal-style pyramids of inherited privilege.  

Between the left’s silly rejection of competition as a creative force, and the right’s delusion that flat-open-fair competition can happen without intense regulation to stave off cheaters, it seems we are starved of the intellectual understanding that we need, in order to keep this renaissance going.

== Summing up ==

Yes, pre-industrial societies did innovate! But note how many things were lost — Bagdhad batteries, Hero’s steam engines, Antikiythera-geared computers — all for lack of a patent regime that would protect and reward innovators for sharing, instead of forcing them to rely on secrecy… which was itself a kind of elite cheating.  And secrecy of method led, inevitably, to countless innovations simply being lost, the next time a city burned or a master died childless. The result was relentless, cyclical amnesia.  

Add to this deliberate repression by policy, as when a Chinese emperor rejected his father's anomalous enthusiasm for curiosity; he burned all of Admiral Cheng-He’s ships and trashed the records of those great voyages, thus setting in stagnation. Indeed, later Ming Dynasty emperors were amazed by the clocks provided by visiting Europeans, till scholars chimed in: “Oh yes, we used to have such things.”

Hyper-conservative societies were unable to totally stifle innovation precisely because they were unstable.  But in the future that may not be so. Both Orwell and Huxley showed us methods that - if adopted by a fierce autarchy - might empower it to be both all-seeing and permanent. And paranoid toward any new thing that might disrupt the stable order.

Lest any of you misconstrue that I am saying that primitive societies are inferior,  I am not. They did their thing and the few that did move forward, against terrible handicaps, helped to create the dais upon which we stand and accomplish wonders.

No, I am critical of a honey-pot attractor style of governance that seems to have pervaded 90%+ of all societies, in all eras.  Till now, that style merely impeded and slowed us down.

In the future… and perhaps across the cosmos… high tech methods of control might not just slow progress, but stifle it completely. Especially technologies like space travel, that would threaten any rigid caste system. 

And that is why we must fight today’s oligarchic putsch by an aristocracy-loving entire-right-wing seeking to end the Enlightenment, while we also keep a wary eye on the manias of a far-left that sneers at liberalism for its belief that competition can be a great, creative force.

The First Liberal — Adam Smith — was right (as Ian Morris contends) that competitiveness is the great steed that will overcome all obstacles and take us far — perhaps even across the galaxy.  

But it is a steed that requires close attention, regulation and care. Because 6000 years have shown us what happens otherwise.

==

Return to Part I: Violence, War and an Improving World: The Pinker Effect

Ways to make civilization robust

The resilience of our entire civilization is increasingly reliant on a fragile network of cell phone towers, which are the first things to fail in any crisis, e.g. a hurricane or other natural disaster… or else deliberate (e.g. EMP or hacker) sabotage.

I have been nagging about this for almost two decades. My recommendation — offered to national and corporate leaders since 1995? That our pocket phones should have a backup communication mode that is peer-to-peer, that could pass messages from phone to phone through any afflicted area until they reach a zone with cell service, at which point the messages would spill into the continental network.

This would be frightfully easy to accomplish, especially for simple text messages. In fact, the technology has been incorporated in Qualcomm’s latest chip sets. Though the major carriers — AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc — have all refused to activate it. This despite the fact that they would be perfectly free to bill for any P2P-passed messages -- that's easy. For years I asked national officials to require this backup, as a matter of overall robustness and public safety. Access to working phones made the biggest difference between two disasters... 9/11 - "the Day of the Citizen," when average folks were able to self-organize and step up - vs the calamitous collapse of civilization during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Now comes terrific news. “Qualcomm and other wireless companies have been working on a new cellular standard—a set of technical procedures that ensures devices can “talk” to one another—that will keep the lines open if the network fails. The Proximity Services, or so-called LTE Direct, standard will be approved by the end of the year.”

I am tempted to proclaim that “nagging eventually pays off!” But of course, there are lots of smart people out there who could see the same things that I did. When I gave a talk at Qualcomm about similar ideas, some years ago, I described how simple it would be to do this with packets, like text messages. The next time I spoke to some of their managers, I was stunned to learn they had not only made great strides in Peer to Peer, but were proposing a version that could even do P2P for real-time voice communication! Now that’s some ingenuity. That’s some company.

== Hey, you, get offa that cloud ==

Oh, but trends are far worse on the business side of the Internet. Any company (or person) who tries to be “efficient” by entrusting crown jewel data to the Cloud has got to be crazy. Take this from Mark Anderson, one of the smartest tech-industry pundits:

“There are two chilling trends in Internet security that were underlined this week with the announcement by Hold Security of a Russian crime ring taking around 1.2 billion user names and password combinations from perhaps 420,000 different hacked websites. The first is a ramping of theft success on all scores, from personal IDs to nations stealing crown jewel intellectual property, which simply can no longer be tolerated if innovation and commerce are to continue. 

“The second is a massive movement to cloud computing, driven by financial requirements rather than security requirements, at a time when our internal sources indicate that clouds have already been hacked.”

This is related to a another point I’ve made since 1995… and in The Transparent Society… that everything leaks, sooner or later. And we are better off making ourselves and our systems robust, able to shrug off and adapt to this inevitability, than whining and thrashing about, expecting the next “security” measure to work, at last.

It is disparities in transparency that threaten the health of freedom, markets, science and civilization.

Remember this.  Most villains (just like vampires) are fatally allergic to light.  Hence, the trick will be to expose them to it!  Lots of it. The solution is not to cower in the few remaining shadows hoping for concealment.  They are better at that, than you and I are.

== Transparency-related news ==

Here’s an algorithm that could use Facebook Likes alone to reliably determine six million users’ private traits like their sexual orientation, IQ, religious beliefs, life satisfaction, and personality traits—even when the Likes seemingly had nothing to do with the traits in question. Do not get outraged. This is absolutely inevitable! What you can do is shift your passion over to sousveillance.

Another insightful article explores the many potential advantages, when civilians become empowered to fly their own drones. The ability to independently verify events, ensure accountability for public officials and police, provide situational awareness, deliver or fetch important items…. Yes there will be privacy concerns. But how better to catch that neighborhood voyeur than with a drone of your own, so that you can track the peeping tom and tell his mom!

And in the category of how do you plan to stop this? “By 2010, license-plate scanners had become standard equipment for most urban repo firms, and the number of plates stored in national databases was growing by tens of millions a month. ... The richer the data gets, the easier it is to make predictions about a driver’s home address, workplace, gym, or favorite restaurant. Digital Recognition Network (DRN) has one of the largest plate-capture databases in the country, with a fleet of more than 2,000 affiliated trucks and upwards of 1.8 billion scans.”

Answer: Any attempt to repress this - or face recognition - will only ensure that elites still have this power — governments, corporations, criminals — but such laws will make sure you and I have no access.   They will become gods and we will be permanent peasants. If this is inevitable, then let us all see. And then let’s learn - because of that light - to leave each other alone.

Oh, but then… artists are putting into practice my point about rendering surveillance visible to the rest of us. Some very interesting… and pointedly clever… innovations.

And finally, here’s something that’s simultaneously funny and deeply, deeply offensive. But also a clever way for a company to make its point... and that means it is likely they were all actors, after all, invalidating the whole thing. All told, a clever META view of where we are heading in the VR/AR holodeck world. Faked nuclear war….