Almost done posting POLEMICAL JUDO! But here are some vital final features.

 I had hopes that self-publishing my book of 100+ unusual/agile political tactics a year before the 2020 elections would give time for some of the ideas to percolate to the political and punditry castes who might use a few effectively. I should have known better. There are no stronger guild-protection rackets going than the corps of political advisors surrounding every representative, senator and candidate... even the good guys. And they are pikers compared to the closed-shop enforcers who rigidly control the op-ed pages.

That complaint is orthogonal to our current crises, but it exacerbates the dullard incompetence of the democratic/moderate/liberal, scientific-ethical coalition's leadership at turning what could have been a tsunami into a nail-biter. Even if this election turns out to be a 'landslide" against the Putin-Murdoch cult... it could have been spectacularly better.

But we persevere. I'll be finishing these chapter postings and spend the last two weeks ranting and praying, along with everyone else, looking forward to the scenes of celebration November 4, when a billion people around the world spill into the streets in celebration.

Last time we finished Chapter 13... 'What would adults do?' laying out dozens of concepts for governance that could efficiently achieve reform and end the cheating, some of them both surprising and trivially easy.

 Next would be Chapter 14: Our 250 year Family Feud -  Phase 8 of the Civil War? where I explain how this recurring national fever has erupted many times, ever since 1780. (What we call the "Civil War" was only phase 4, though a bad one... as is this phase we're in.) But that topic was already covered in a blog posting, and many of you have seen it before, so let's move on.

This time let's post from the "mini-sections" I arrayed between main chapters of the book. Again remember this was published last November 2019... This one offers capsules that might yet - even this late - help in some polemical battles over the remaining supply of undecideds or sway-ables out there.

Mini-section #1 for…

One-Liners, Zingers and “tl;dr” Quick-memes

  

I. ZINGERS & ONE-LINERS: Meme grenades distilled from chapters.

 

-  “MAGA? Okay wise guy, when do you claim America was greater than today?” Hint: when they say “the 1950s….” pounce! (See Polemical Judo Chapter 3.)

 

- “Fake News problem?” Why do no voices on the right offer to help moderates and professionals to set up an impartial fact-checking service? If all current ones are ‘biased,’ will you name ten eminent and widely respected conservatives to join a commission, charged with helping design acceptable and competing fact-services? What, you can’t name any? (Chapter 5.)

 

- “Fake News Fix.” If you hijackers of the right won’t propose august, respect-worthy American conservatives to serve on such panels, then we will. Retired justices, retired admirals, Nobel winners, or almost any citizen of Utah![1] Folks who may differ from us over markets and regulation – even about guns – but who agree that ‘facts are things’ and Nazis are bad… and that we need a way out of the poison fog of lies. (Chapter 5.)

 

- “Deep State?” Which seems more likely? A ‘conspiracy’ by ten million scientists, journalists, teachers, doctors, civil servants, FBI agents, intel and military officers - the same folks who defeated Hitler, stymied Stalin and won the Cold War and the War on Terror? Or that just five thousand golf buddies in an incestuous CEO caste connive secretly with Wall Streeters, casino moguls, foreign despots and inheritance brats? (Chapters 8 & 10.)

 

- Adam Smith, the core founder of both market economics and liberalism, would today be a flaming Democrat. (Chapters 3, 10 & 11.)

 

- Who’s a commie? How many times must Donald Trump hold secret debriefing sessions with communist despots - or conveniently "ex" communist dictators who grew up reciting Marx - without any reputable U.S. officials present - before you'll admit something fishy is going on? 

 

- Vladimir Putin called the fall of the USSR “history’s greatest tragedy.” All of today’s Russian oligarchs were raised reciting Leninist catechisms. The KGB transitioned without a hiccup. But you folks call them all great guys.[2] Sure, they dropped the hammers and sickles, but surely you didn’t fall for a trick of symbolism? Because nothing else changed. (Postponed for Volume 2.)

 

- Wanna bet? Oh, glaciers are advancing? Would you put an actual money wager on any of your ravings, from climate change to inaugural crowds to those mighty Trumpian accomplishments? (In Chapter 15 we’ll see that demanding wagers, rather than being an immature stunt, actually works ferociously well.)[3]

 

-  Wrong, almost always. "Tobacco is harmless,” “Cars don't cause smog,” “No seat belts in cars!” and “Keep lead in gasoline!” then McCarthyism, Burning Rivers, the insane War on Drugs, mass incarceration and Supply Side voodoo... the list of wrong, wrong, wrong is endless. Can you offer times when the GOP was provably/decisively right? Actually, I can! A couple of times. But there’s been so much more wrong. (Chapter 6.)

 

- Conspiracy Theories: show us any of the ones you keep changing and then dropping, that ever proved decisively true? There are conspiracies that pass half a dozen “sniff tests.” But not many. (Chapter 7.) 

 

- IGUS. The recent Whistleblower Crises revealed weakness in one of our major bulwarks of clean government, as the seventy-four Inspectors General of federal departments and agencies endure unprecedented meddling and bullying – or else mal-appointment – by Republican politicians. In Chapters 5 and 10 we’ll see how to restore autonomous oversight by bringing them all under an independent office of the Inspector General of the United States[4] (IGUS), along with other reforms including the Fact Act.[5]

 

- Obamacare was the Republicans’ own damn plan! Cooked up by the Heritage Foundation,[6]it was on GOP platforms through the 90s and enacted in Massachusetts by Republican Gov. Mitt Romney.[7] Now Republicans call their own plan satanic. Which is worse? That hypocrisy? Or failure of any Democrats to mention it?

 

- And by the way… where’s the alternative health insurance plan that Republicans have promised for … what now? Eleven years? Any day now.

 

- Judges and taxes? Millions of U.S. conservatives who are ashamed of all the rest – Trumpism, bigotry, climate denialism, cheating, lies, trashing our alliances and blatant cozying with tyrants – justify their hold-my-nose loyalty to the GOP in one incantation: “judges and taxes.” But if every other fruit is poisonous, might the whole tree?

 

- Aren’t you curious… even a little… about those tax returns? Or Deutsche Bank funneling Trump loans from Russian oligarchs? The contents of David Pecker’s National Enquirer safe ought to fill any American with flaming, nonpartisan curiosity, along with the scores of Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA) that Donald Trump openly brags about.[8] What happened to “We deserve to know!”

 

II. TACTICS DEMOCRATS COULD TRY… TOMORROW:

 

- Some congressional committee could unleash a tsunami of revelations just by offering full protection and immunity for testimony from anyone who has an NDA - or Non-Disclosure Agreement - with Donald Trump. Trump has bragged about his Great Wall of punitive-protective NDAs. Shatter it and let the revelations spill. (Michael Cohen will tell you whom to approach.)

 

- Assume Chief Justice John Roberts will use the Court’s right wing majority to uphold his clever new Roberts Doctrine of "no-interference between the legislative and executive," or non-justiciability, thus allowing GOP henchmen to passively refuse House subpoenas on lame and unprecedented excuses. They think fait accompli resistance will stymie investigation and oversight. But there's a judo move that Schiff and Nadler and Pelosi can try. It means appealing to the Fourth Branch of government. It would work.[9]

 

- Immaturity alert! This one is almost… Trumpian. But imagine if one mid level Democratic politician were to hold a news conference denouncing fellow Democrats for their unsympathetic pestering of an addled-volatile old man who clearly qualifies for extra care and kindness under the Americans with Disabilities Act... I mean it. Paul Krugman and Nancy Pelosi have come close. But go all the way.[10] Close your eyes and imagine that being drawn out, again and again. Even those who don't 'get it' at first will catch on when Trump responds with volcanic fury, ironically proving it's true! What a tweet-storm that would trigger, hysteria that undermines his one pillar of support – the superficial appearance of “strength.” (Chapter 15.)

 

- More immaturity: Bush and Trump and others on that side love to hurl nicknames. And yes, as grownups we avoid schoolyard bully ploys. Still, if you go there, I recommend using “Old Two Scoops.” It’s not overtly sneering or mean or obscene. But it mocks the pompous preening of a narcissistic character trait – emblematic of aristocracy – that even the reddest booster can’t defend.

 

III. WAGER DARES FOR TRUMP: Hey you major public figures or late night hosts: instead of reacting every week to the next distraction outrage, then the next, try openly and repeatedly challenging Donald Trump to:

 

- accept a medical exam by skilled doctors he can’t control, 

 

- prove his “stable genius IQ” with a panel of simple tests applied by professionals chosen randomly,

 

- waive IRS privacy rules enough for them to at least say publicly whether or not there’s an audit, 

 

- roll dice and randomly pick any week’s top five accusations of “fake news” for a jury of respected Americans to audit in detail (see Chapter 5). Or even randomly chosen Americans. 

 

- prove the birther thing, at long last. That Obama’s parents planted – all the way from Kenya – birth announcements in Hawaiian newspapers, or to  golf less than Obama.  Or to pay the money he owes every city where he held a rally.[11] Make that a money bet, right now, 

 

- or swear never again to be alone with foreign despots without trusted American witnesses present.

 

It’s not that any one such demand will be transformative, or even become an actual wager – none of them will (for reasons given in Chapter 15). Alas, no Democratic politician or pundit seems to understand the power of repetition and persistent hammering, despite having witnessed Trump use that method to great effect. 

 

 

IV. WAGER-DARES FOR OTHER REPUBLICANS: A bit different, these in-yer-face challenges are for your confederate cousins. Demands for real-money bets will send most of them backpedaling. Or else (rarely) persuade one to resume viewing at facts as real things. (See Chapters 5, 11, 13, and especially 15). And yes, some of these will be repeated, later in the book.

 

- How many Trump appointees and associates started out described by him as 'great guys,' who later 'betrayed' him? I bet it’s more than any ten other presidents. Whatever the anecdotal merits or turpitudes of any particular case, will you admit it proves he's a lousy judge of character?

 

- Put money on military readiness. Which political party generally leaves U.S. defenses, alliances and resilience in better shape than how they found them? Which party nearly always leaves the American military worse off than before they took over? (And yes, it is the GOP. See pause#10.)

 

- Quick, name a Republican top leader between Reagan and Ryan who was mentioned at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Neither Bush president, nor Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Hastert, DeLay, Romney, McCain… not even mentioned. All “ancient history.” But if you disavow those past Republican administrations, then where is your party’s credibility?

 

- I bet you can’t name a fact-profession not being warred upon by Fox & Accomplices. Even one. (Chapter 5.)

 

- Name one Supply Side “economics” prediction that ever came true. That tax cuts for the rich would be invested in R&D and new factories? That they result in increased revenue and reduced deficits? That they achieve anything other than asset bubbles, collapsed money velocity and skyrocketing wealth disparities? Name one reason we should trust a supply sider with a wet match? (Chapter 11.)

 

- The rate of change of the rate of change of debt was positive (toward reckless acceleration) during almost every year of every Republican administration (post Eisenhower). It was negative (braking the rate of deficit growth gradually toward prudence) in every year of every Democratic administration (post Johnson). How does that fit the GOP’s last ditch justification… that they are the prudent, pragmatic ones?  (Chapter 11.)

 

- Across the last 25 years, the GOP either controlled Congress, or else could thwart it, for all but two. Care to name any positive accomplishments? Not wars or tax gifts to the rich, but major adjustments to law or even major de-regulations? (Chapter 10.)

 

- And again and again. Put money on Trumpian lies for any given day. Pick at random day in the near future.

 

 

V. SLIGHTLY LONGER MEME BOMBS: Also in chapters, with longer summaries.

 

- What if Obama did it? “WODI” can be effective. Every day, your “ostrich” Republican shrugs aside some antic that would have sent them ballistic, if done by Clinton or Obama. A decent bar bet would be to say in advance “Next Thursday let’s try out WODI on that day’s Trump travesty.” It only works on a gal or guy who has a shred of remaining honesty or honor.

 

- Clinton or Obama-related “investigations” – after a quarter of a century and half a billion dollars – and never a stonewalled refusal of testimony – congrats. You proved a husband fibbed about some adult-consensual (while still inappropriate) infidelity and the wife was caught using the same sort of somewhat improper email system as Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Mike Pence, George Bush, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. That’s it. After 25 years without proof, where’s your cred?

 

- Answer both right and left critics of Pax Americana. If the U.S. had behaved like all other empires and imposed mercantilist trade patterns after WWII, then America would have no debt today. Its cities would gleam and factories hum. The country would swim in gold...but hope and prosperity in the larger world would be ruined by the same short-sighted greed that brought down Babylon, Persia, Rome, Pax Sinica, Pax Britannia etc. And when we finally fell, it would be in a tumult of well-deserved wrath. But we didn’t do what all those empires did. We did something very different. (Chapter 9.)

 

- Mitch McConnell’s declaration that no judges should be appointed or confirmed in an election year, then chortling he’ll pass anyone nominated by Trump in 2020… a perfect example of how one complaint – or a few – can be shrugged off as whining. But a concerted campaign of mockery….[12]

 

- Offer an amnesty for Americans now enslaved by blackmail.  It’s speculative! Perhaps no one will step up… or perhaps too many to count… in which case it’s unlikely, amid a tsunami of revelation, that our scheming enemies will survive. As we’ll see in Chapter 8, the long range victory condition for our kind of civilization is a future world that’s filled with open-fair competition, calm negotiation, but above all… light.

 

 

 

* DON’T FOR A MINUTE THINK WE’VE FORGOTTEN…

 

That’s but a sampler list, offered for those who find an actual book “TLDR.” 

 

For the rest of you, hang in there. Chapter 15 will dive into the effectiveness of wager-demands, even – especially - when the other side weasels and refuses to bet! The tactic corners them anyway, by their own macho standards.  It destroys the illusion of macho “strength.” And there will be other distilled “meme bomb” collections, especially near the end of the book.

 

Finally… here’s a challenge that I’ll reiterate many times – in chapters 6 and 12 and 13 – aimed at every dogmatic purist out there:

 

Are you actually asserting that you are absolutely 100% right, with no margin of error?

 

And yes, this question can bedevil purists of the left as well as the right. Dig it (and this is good news!) Your enemies are likely no more than 99% wrong! Possibly as little as 90%. Moreover, have you the character strength to sift through your opponents’ maelstrom of “wrongness” for those slivers where they actually have a point? 

 

We’ll come back to this. It’s not just about being the mature person. Entering and understanding your adversary’s head is a key ingredient that Sun Tzu recommended… for achieving victory.

There's still time to use some of these!!

footnotes

---

[1] This will come up again. Utah is probably the largest concentration of RASRs – Residually Adult Sane Republicans –disgusted, even outraged, by the Trumpian travesties. Outreach by moderate-liberal America would seem timely, even overdue. 

 

[2] The Right’s romance with Russia: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/false-romance-russia/603433/

 

[3] As Christopher Walken’s character in Blast From The Past dubiously observes, when told that the Kremlin had simply dropped communist revolution – or at least all the surfaces and incantations: “You got to hand it to them,” he said, with errie brevity.

 

[4] The Inspector General of the United States http://davidbrin.com/nonfiction/inspectorgeneral.html

 

[5] The FACT Act: http://davidbrin.com/nonfiction/factact.html

 

[6]  See the signing ceremony, April 12, 2006, for the crowning achievement of Mitt Romney's governorship – a health insurance plan that was the template for the Affordable Care Act. The head of the Heritage Foundation crows over the role his group played in designing "Romneycare" based in the earlier Republican Party Health Plan for individual mandates and insurance buying markets or "exchanges" that originated at the Heritage think tank and that was touted as a way to use market forces to solve the problem of the uninsured.  http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/04/10/90621/heritage-romneycare/

 

[7] Think Progress: http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/04/10/90621/heritage-romneycare/

 

[8] Karen McDougal released from her NDA: https://www.spin.com/2018/04/karen-mcdougal-nda-agreement-american-media/

 

[9] As of pub date, 10-25-19, it appears that civil servants are taking matters into their own hands, not waiting for Congressional subpoenas to step forward. I don’t mind seeing some of my “judo Suggestions” bypassed in such ways. We’ll be saved by heroes.

 

[10] In October 2019, Nobelist Paul Krugman wrote: “I don’t mean that Trump is stupid; a stupid man couldn’t have managed to defraud so many people over so many years. Nor do I mean that he’s crazy, although his speeches and tweets – ‘my great and unmatched wisdom,’ the Kurds weren’t there on D-Day – keep sounding loonier.” Krugman adds, however, that Trump is “lazy, utterly incurious and too insecure to listen to advice or ever admit to a mistake. And given that he is, in fact, what he accuses others of being – an enemy of the people – we should be thankful for his flaws.” Well… we’ll see. The same week, on Saturday Night Live, Weekend Update host Michael Che voiced (brilliantly) a meme I had been spreading about a new and clever way to deal with the weird-crazed phenomenon of Donald Trump. ““I don't know how to ask this, but are we sure that it's OK to make fun of this guy?” he asked. “Did you ever read Of Mice and Men? Remember how Lenny was really ‘strong?’ What if Trump is really strong? I've got a cousin who is also strong. And he loves alligators too, but we don't make fun of him.” https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/paul-krugman-trumps-mental-deficiency-may-actually-save-us-from-disaster-as-he-keeps-sounding-loonier/

 

[11] Minneapolis mayor: We saw Trump stiffing cities for his rallies, so we told him to pay up.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/12/minneapolis-mayor-we-saw-trump-stiffing-cities-his-other-rallies-so-we-told-him-pay-up/

 

[12] Old fashioned terms like honor, courage, dedication, devotion, integrity, etc. These are core values for a lot of people. And they await rescue from hypocrites who have stolen them.

 

What's real? What's fake? Technology challenges our perception of reality.

In honor of Philip K. Dick, let's plunge into an age-old topic of philosophy, science fiction, and nerdy sophomores everywhere... "what is real and how can we tell?" After all, how do I know I am the emperor, dreaming I'm a butterfly, or the butterfly, dreaming I'm a sci fi author?   Starting off --

Artificial Intelligence is Killing the Uncanny Valley - and Our Grasp on Reality: Sandra Upson’s article in WIRED explores the ability of modern AI systems to visually create almost any semblance – or falsification – of reality. “Some AI-generated content will be used to deceive, kicking off fears of an avalanche of algorithmic fake news. Old debates about whether an image was doctored will give way to new ones about the pedigree of all kinds of content, including text.” 

To which I respond that folks should read my chapter from The Transparent Society: “The end of photography, as proof of anything at all.”  There’s not a word I’d change, as the world has caught up with this long- predicted problem… and even parts of the predicted solution.

Sure, the prospect is daunting. “If you were to see a picture of me on the moon, you would think it’s probably some image editing software... But if you hear convincing audio of your best friend saying bad things about you, you might get worried. It’s a really new technology and a really challenging problem.”

Amid all the media frenzy and panic, a small number of folks have written to me about an interview I gave on CNN-Money, way back in 2000, at the tail end of the 20^th Century, which seems all too relevant in 2017, touching upon politicians and sex scandals and the ramifications of these (naturally, in 2000, talking about Bill Clinton). And it mentioned how the public responses to the scandal tended to be wise and proportionate.

== Communities & Communication Key ==

My friends at Alphabet's "X" company received FCC permission to fly their Project Loon balloons over Puerto Rico restoring LTE cell phone connections to the beleaguered populace. I'd be surprised if it happened without serious arm-twisting on those unimaginative stodges at Verizon and AT&T. Had they a scintilla of innovation or patriotism in their souls, they would have long ago activated a capability that's already in all Qualcomm chips, allowing peer-to-peer text passing when phones cannot detect an active cell tower. 

I've been hectoring our Protector Caste for this, for two decades. If it existed, Katrina and the recent Maria devastation would have been far less harmful to millions of people, who could have communicated, self-organized and recovered far faster. Hurrah for X! and Yay Qualcomm. Stay independent and creative.

(Coincidentally, I'll be speaking at "X" on Friday.)

It occurs to me that this might be a good time to call a mini conference about Resilient Communications. The Cell-companies have proved undeserving of the public trust. Here’s my explanation of how phones could work well even in crises. 

I am a big supporter of EFF and you should all join! (Especially in memory of John Perry Barlow.) We have a slight difference over emphasis, but I support their efforts (1) in favor of near-term privacy for citizens and (2) accountability for elites of government, commerce, wealth and police. 

It's just that beyond the near term, nothing will prevent those elites from seeing us... no laws or restrictions or technologies. Over the long run, it is #2 that will matter. If we have enough of that (accountability for all elites) then what they know about us cannot be used to actually harm us! 

What they do is more important than what they know.  And we can limit what they do to us only if they are naked to sousveillance.

Rent the movie The President's Analyst.  And see how it is coming true.

Oh, but – “Purdue Engineering researchers have developed a system that can show what people are seeing in real-world videos, decoded from their fMRI brain scans — an advanced new form of  “mind-reading” technology that could lead to new insights in brain function and to advanced AI systems.” 

Ponder what that tool would mean to secret police in a future dystopia. It could empower Big Brother so that no resistance will ever be possible. Or else…

…if distributed to all, so that we can detect the lies of politicians or the mighty, such tools could empower us all to make sure that Big Brother happens… never.

== Obsessed with whether they might make us... buy stuff? ==

I'm going to race through a bunch of transparency/freedom related links, now. Hold on.

The Acuvate site asked 22 AI experts: “What is your prediction on how AI will impact the enterprise workplace?” And… well… yes, I came first. But go past and you’ll get some folks who know what they are talking about.

Many articles and words have been spouted over whether big net companies should be getting rich by mining “our information.”  This essay suggests that: “If Data is the New Oil, Are Tech Companies Robbing Us Blind?” Alas, the problem is obvious, while hand-wringers almost always leap to the wrong conclusions or proposed solutions. 

The handy, cheap cameras I’ve been describing and predicting for 25 years are here.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, is a recent book by UCSD’s Benjamin H. Bratton, who suggests seven different regimes wherein planetary scale computing will affect our future —from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems; from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self—quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image? Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User.

A sci-fi-ish disturbing video depicts near-future ubiquitous lethal autonomous weapons, or “slaughterbots.” Of  course, as always, the makers of the film point to a dangerous tech-possible trend… and prescribe rules to limit it, never considering the question of how those rules will apply to the worst and most deviously secretive forces in the world.

Watch the video! Be disturbed, as the makers intended!  Then watch it again and note that the evil deeds happen precisely because of asymmetry of light.  And the only solution… the only possible solution… is to concentrate on shining light on villains, including villainous elites. It is how we got the relative freedom and safety we have now!  It is the only way we can keep it.  See The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

Okay, it's hard keeping secrets in an open society. We must find ways to max out the advantages, while minimizing the hazards. And there will always be the unforeseen: Fitness tracking app gives away location of secret U.S. army bases.

== We may all need to be heroes ==

Back in the 1930s, my father, Herb Brin, infiltrated far right groups like the German American Bund.  Later, in his seventies, he boldly went to Aryan Nations compounds and demanded tours and interviews, knowing that their personality type would fall all over themselves to show him around. We have a web site dedicated to this noted journalist and poet, who sat with Hannah Arendt through the Eichmann Trials and covered some of the top events of our era.

Here’s a young journalist walking in those footsteps, infiltrating today’s lunatic fringe.

Inconvenient facts: The future of news.. and "otherness" has been stolen!

I recently spoke (via Beam robot) at a conference on “The Future of News Media” hosted by the Institute For The Future (IFTF), in San Francisco. An erudite gathering of concerned men and women from around the world discussed problems of Fake News, declining advertising revenues, state interference, self-censorship, and the web’s tendency to corral individuals into self-isolated pocket universes that reinforce their prejudices. In the short time allocated to me as kickoff speaker, I tried to give (ahem) ‘unusual perspectives’ on each of these topics.

Make no mistake, the survival of independent and professionally trained news media is vital to our civilization, just as undermining such experts is essential to the agenda of our rising caste of would-be masters.

I always have lots of unconventional things to say, but one stands out and you will see it repeated forever, till it’s tried on a large scale. Wagers.  Dares! Bets. Putting money on actual verification or disproof.

It is the only approach that will work, in an era when romantics have declared that all is subjective. That incantation works for macho guys… till something tangible is on the table. Then? Recall that most of these fake-news slathering fellows are also sports fans. And they know, deep down, that there comes a time when you can no longer talk your way out of comparing actual facts.

They grasp the idea that a wager has to be resolved. And it will turn on what can be proved. And now machismo becomes our friend, since it over-rules subjectivity!  If you flee from a bet, you are shamed. And if you refuse to pay-up, you are un-manned, period.

I broached this at the conference, as one of many observations and speculations about the future of news. It only got blinks of confusion from those erudite folks, showing how alien is their elite, mature, fact-loving world from that of the Confederacy that gave us this tsunami of fake-news. But give it time. Experiment with it. Because something has to be done. And this approach will go to the root, the heart of the problem.

== "Otherness"... redefined by monsters! ==

Ouch! Do we never get to keep nice things? Way back around 1990 I coined a term that later became the title of my 2nd story collection: OTHERNESS. It stood for the trend - in our recent, enlightenment renaissance - to be fascinated with horizons. To look beyond the immediate and near and familiar. And, yes, this manifests in many of us - those with some confidence - in a willingness to expand our boundaries of inclusion, to encompass "others."

Extending my essay "The Dogma of Otherness" (in OTHERNESS), I later showed how this process is inversely proportionate to fear, and has been, across most (maybe all) human cultures. It explains why the calmly confident society crafted by the Greatest Generation became one obsessed with expanding horizons.

Alas, all that has been sabotaged. Instead of rising in confidence - as Americans and all advanced and advancing nations should be doing now, amid very good times - we are letting ourselves be talked into quaking, quivering terror.

That I find upsetting. But want to see me really pissed off? Now my optimistic and brave term - "otherness" - has been stolen! Appropriated not only without credit or provenance, but given diametrically opposite meaning!

It's like the way they took the term "fake news" - which stood for their tactic to rile up an unsapient confederacy - and grabbed it as one more polemical weapon to use - in stunning irony - against real news media.

Alas, even those writing cogently against the madness keep falling for these traps, as with this fellow, who blithely accepts the alt-right definition of "otherness," ceding ground, even while whining about it. We can do so much better.

== Teaching the young – and old farts ==

Stanford professor Sam Wineburg lays out the steps educators need to take to help students discern what is fake news or not. “The tools we’ve invented are handling us,“ he says, “not the other way around.”  

A commenter suggested that the way to counter “alternative-facts may be to use their own s### against them: “When Trump says that 3 million illegals voted in the last election, tell them it doesn't matter because a majority of them voted for Trump! If he asks where you got the information, just say it was from the same source that he did. Or that it is common sense. Or that you "heard it on the internet." Or all the other lame excuses they use.

“When they make up stuff, make up stuff about their stuff. Be truthful about our stuff, but for their stuff, let you imagination run wild. Without facts to back up their claims, there is no way they can disprove any claim you make.”

It is a very, very dumb proposal.  We have other ways to win.

== The fact people ==

Evonomics is the place for erudite and fact-rich proof that inequality and huge wealth disparities are NOT healthy or faithful to fair-competitive market enterprise or even capitalism. 

An article online about cheating in economics explains how we are rediscovering the wisdom of Adam Smith and how parasite “rentiers” are not the friends of capitalism. Monopolists, “finance wizards” and passive lease-collectors create nothing and certainly do not compete. See both how Smith denounced the vampire effects on markets… and how it’s played out - to Dracula proportions - today.  

The Real "Takers" in America: Michael Lind’s article in Evonomics shows the kind of rooseveltean thinking that the oligarchs deeply fear might take hold. “An Anti-Rentier movement would oppose unproductive, ill-begotten wealth, not the rich in general. Wealthy individuals who get richer by investing in start-up companies or funding long-lived, creative blue-chip firms provide a valuable benefit to society, even as they risk losing their own money. Such risk-taking investors are the opposites of financial sector rentiers who seek to bribe policymakers into letting them privatize their gains while socializing their losses.”

Radical? A bit, sure. But what’s the alternative? Do the rentier-oligarchs actually believe they can crush us back into inherited-nobility and feudalism?  If the coming re-set is not a moderate-pragmatic, rooseveltean one - as instituted by the Greatest Generation - then it will be something much more radical. Already, search results for Karl Marx” have skyrocketed, in recent years.

Finally, someone else is pointing out that "Obamacare" was always the Republicans' own plan, all along! This young, democratic Congressman lays it out so clearly that even a Fox-watcher would understand… and perhaps start scratching his head, asking: "So what was all the screaming about? And why did I ever watch Fox?" 

Oh, I am gonna keep my eye on this Rep. Brendan Boyle fellah.

== Other things that got (a lot) better ==

Expect a new section in these missives: Bad News/GoodNews.

The Bad News: Obama’s Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz is an example of the brainpower and expertise that we lose. He’s a nuclear physicist for MIT who has been involved in government energy projects for two decades. His designated successor, former Texas governor Rick Perry, has no comparable educational or business background that would equip him for the job.

(To be clear, I am miffed that our present situation leaves me delighted to see Perry in the cabinet. For all his faults and awful limitations, RP seems at least to be an American of normal IQ and no cultist. Such a low bar.)

The Good News:  Read how Moniz says that our accomplishments in developing efficient, sustainable and non-carbon technologies are irreversible. Despite treasonous obstruction by The Cult, these techs have now taken off, reaching beyond break-even, drawing every utility and energy-using entity away from carbon sources. “Smart government policies have encouraged and reinforced this evolution, but it now has a life of its own, studies suggest.”

Filthy coal has collapsed as U.S. supplies of much cleaner natural gas burgeoned, with America attaining effective energy independence under Obama, for the first time in 40 years.  The Energy Department estimates that 61 percent of the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions in the power sector from 2006 to 2014 came from switching from coal-fired plants to gas-fired ones. (A side effect no one seems to have reported: even with our troops helping governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no longer a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group in the Middle East. We just don’t need that region for our own survival, anymore.)

Gas is a stopgap. “Continuing declines in the costs of alternative energy sources are making them increasingly competitive. Since 2008, costs have fallen 41 percent for land-based wind power and 64 percent for utility-scale solar power. The cost of efficient LED light bulbs has fallen 94 percent since 2008. The cost of battery storage has declined 70 percent over that period, making electric vehicles more affordable. As of last August, there were 490,000 electric vehicles on the road.”

Want another? Chart some national statistics and how they did across the Obama administration. In only one case was there not a huge improvement… the national debt.  But the size of the debt is a huge lagging indicator.  Far more significant is the rate of change of the rate of change of debt. By that metric, any fiscal conservative can see on a single chart (that I provide) how they would be insane ever to trust a republican with a burnt match.

Ah, but PrezDon screamed that all favorable statistics under Obama were lies... but now that the momentum on jobs is continuing... it's all real!  

The ultimate answer to government is useless: Evonomics chose my essay as ideal to cap off a tumultuous year, and to welcome one that might be much better. That is, if we choose to remember where all our good stuff came from. It came from a civilization that (once) encouraged negotiation based on facts. One that benefited from educating millions. One that developed the fantastic tool known as science.

One of you wrote in to comment about how intense public reaction stopped Paul Ryan’s reavers from: 1- neutering the Congressional Ethics Office, 2- rushing Trump’s confirmations before ethics reports come in, and 3- canceling the ACA before a new health plan is ready.  Sayeth Stefan: “Calling and emailing your representative and senators WORKS.  You look up their contact information here. 

And if you want to get involved in organized resistance, you read the Indivisible guide and join one of their local groups.”

And yet, while I will write letters and even sometimes march... that is not how we'll win.  It's yummy and satisfying, but only entrenches civil war. This sumo is what they want. It's necessary, but if we only do sumo, we lose.

Victory will only come via Judo.

== The expert on despotism ==

Populism and Totalitarianism: Roger Berkowitz Sheds light on probably the greatest expert on despotic regimes, Hannah Arendt. In her chapter on “The Totalitarian Movement” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt notes that the leaders of movements are marked by their “extreme contempt for facts as such.” The reason for this contempt for facts is that the world is complicated and uncertain. For the masses of people who are suffering dislocation, instability, and meaninglessness in their lives, “movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.”

The great danger in all movements is that they can have no firm goal; as movements, they continually need to stir up their supporters who drive them forward. If any goal is met, a new one must be contrived. So movements are motivated less by a firm end than by a promise to fulfill a deep spiritual need. That is why movements mobilize masses who are longing for a “completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world.” There is a “desire to escape from reality because in [the mass of the people’s] essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects…”