How did Politics Become Only About Incantations?

While degree and severity differ from far-left to the entire-right, so much of today's politics is about symbolism that it's hard to recall, sometimes, our heritage as pragmatic, scientific civilization bent on fact-driven self improvement and reform.

Some of these symbol battles are long-overdue, like tearing down Confederate monuments-to-utter-treason that were imposed on us by the 1920s KKK. I'm less convinced by the some of the more extreme 'trigger warnings' that give Tucker-Hanninanity nightly grist, but clearly some linguistic adaptations are timely and worth negotiating. 

It's far worse, of course, on today's entire-right, where almost every issue is symbolic. Seriously, name an exception, from "wearing a mask turns you into a slave" to excusing 35,000 registered Trumpian lies because "at least they owned the libs," all the way to an obsession over the naming of naval warships. Oh, and their nightly rants accusing liberals of symbol-obession.

Again, please chime in with even one Foxite 'issue' that's not fundamentally more symbolic - or based on disproved mantras like Supply Side - than about practical solutions,

Oh, sure, a clear majority of Americans - and Canadians and many others in the Enlightenment Experiment nations - are still capable of negotiation, seeking practical solutions and adapting their tactics to changing conditions and new arguments. In fact, most 'leftist' politicians - like AOC, Bernie, Liz, Stacey etc. - seem deeply committed to maintaining a practical coalition. Having learned from disasters in 80, 88, 94, 2000, 2010 and 2016, they dicker hard with Biden/Pelosi, then back them up to the hilt.

So, why is it so hard for that pragmatic majority to get things done?

Alas, romantic symbolism junkies on the far-left and entire-right have been incited into roars of rage that give them inherent advantages in elections, especially when cheats like gerrymandering ensure many districts are dominated by the enflamed.

Note: by coincidence, in the latest update from Noema Magazine, Nathan Gardels also comments insightfully about how symbolism and incantations are dominating polemic in a world that's desperate for reasoned/negotiations by pragmatic leaders.

== Two Big Minds who miss the point ==

 You might drop in on an interesting podcast interview of Steven Pinker along with the "worst American," George F. Will. Both brilliant fellows make interesting points. 

G. F. Will smoothly and articulately foists desperate incantations to support the notion that he did not spend his entire adult life serving as a court apologia-issuer for crushing the Enlightenment under restored feudalism. His verbal agility is always awesome to behold, as is his despicable rationalization.

Pinker ably communicates how special our Enlightenment is - one of just a few such experiments ever tried, now under siege by a worldwide oligarchic cabal.

Alas, when he lists enlightenment's failed adversaries, Pinker mysteriously ignores the one and only form of 'government' that dominated 99% of our ancestors across 6000 years... oligarchic feudal lordship. ("Despotism" does not cover it; in people's minds they envision garish Orwellian standouts like Stalin or Hitler, and not the vast sweep of normal feudal governance, from Gilgamesh to Louis XIV to Lord Fahrquar.) Which is puzzling, since just saying the "f-word" allows perfect refutation to Will's claim that he and fellow conservatives are 'classic liberals.'

If you want a definition that spans the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries, then hearken to the First Liberal, Adam Smith. 

Liberalism might best be defined as removing the impediments to individuals competing or cooperating fairly, free of cheating by those with unfair advantages or power, impeded only by three things:

- the balanced rights of others

- the blatant common good, and 

- accountability to the future.

Those things can be and have been redefined by each generation, especially as we expanded our definitions of inclusion - who gets to stand and speak freely in the assembly or forum - broadening that sovereignty from feudalism's 0.001% to the 20% of Pericles and Jefferson... 

... then to the 35% of Jackson and then Lincoln's emancipation of ownership over one's own body... followed by suffrage, civil rights and today's empowerment of so many smaller, long-oppressed castes. That expansion of inclusion and citizenship - the Great American Project - has been a grinding, too-slow process! 

But in no other society has it proceeded as quickly or with such inexorable-if-incremental momentum. And no definition of 'liberalism' that excludes such vital work is anything but lying hypocrisy.

It is in such a context of 6000 years - and even the Fermi Paradox - that brilliant defenders of enlightenment, like Steven Pinker, fail to make the issues truly clear, alas. Indeed, do you see anyone out there trying to set our current dilemmas in the context of millennia?

As for George F. Will's endless incantatory efforts to rationalize that today's conservatism is somehow "liberal," in anything like those terms - or his ongoing calumny that openly accountable civil servants are anywhere near the threat to liberal enlightenment posed by a cartel of boyars, murder sheiks, mafiosi, casino moguls, both open and "ex" commissars and inheritance brats - well, that would be hilarious...

...if it weren't cosmically traitorous to everything he claims to believe in. Everything that gave him... everything.  

And hence why this supernova of ingratitude and sellout rationalization is the very Worst American.

== Hammer this! Keynesian stimulus works and Supply Side does not. Wager it! ==

Hand-wringing over inflation can't mask what the few residually sane conservatives can see plainly, that Demand-Side works and Supply Side is an utter failure. 

Both parties have "stimulated the economy" to the tune of about $10 trillions, across the last half century, with starkly different outcomes. GOP Supply Side "stimulus" (gushers of largesse into the open maws of the rentier-caste) never once had remotely the predicted benefits.

 In contrast, responsibly executed Demand Side Keynesian interventions - of roughly the same size - have had palpable effects upon the economy, in predicted directions.

Money velocity, employment, inflation, consumer spending AND savings, plus investment in production and R&D have all responded in the intended directions. 

Let me reiterate that last point to you conservatives. Now, at last, manufacturing businesses are again pouring investment into productive capacity! Which SS was supposed to get them doing... and never did.

Demand side isn't all honey! Deficits do rise, though generally so do tax revenues. California is pouring cash again into the state's Rainy Day Fund and will send rebates to taxpayers again, soon.

Is it possible for Keyensian stimulus to overshoot? Sure! The left-fringe incantations called "MMT" constitute an insane cult, though so far also a marginal one without power. Yes, if MMT's Frankenstein version of Keynesianism ever took hold, I'd expect overshoot. But unlike the GOP, liberals are not dominated by their nutty fringe. (See the first part of this missive, about the only clade of pragmatists that remain in US political life.)

Still, let's reiterate. Keynesianism simply works, especially when managed by rational folks like Jerry Brown, Bill Clinton, and Gavin Newsom, ALL of whom used surpluses and good times to pay down debt.

In contrast, the Supply Side cult* never had a single positive outcome of any kind.

Not one predicted benefit ever happened. Ever and at all. Even once. (As Adam Smith himself clearly predicted, the rich generally do NOT act the way SS-cultists said they will.)  I have put up standing wager offers on that for years now and SS apologists always run away or change the subject. They know their cult incantations are wearing thin.

And yes, I also offer wager stakes over which party is more 'fiscally responsible.' 

The crux: No Republican is in any position to gripe about red ink. For any member of that party of symbol-obsessed, incantation-chanting wastrels to lecture us - ever - about fiscal responsibility or debt - in any way - is the most outrageous hypocrisy...

... one almost as stunning as liberals' inability ever to point that out.

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* Stop calling it "trickle down"!  I know that sounds oh-so clever to you. But that is YOUR side's term and they just shrug it off, ascribing it to 'jealousy."

 Go to their terminology and demand direct wagers whether Supply Side ever delivered on its promised benefits - after $10 trillions in red ink - on even one single promised outcome!

Betting for - or against our future

Amid yammerings about a "national divorce" and a new-secession*, the sane majority on the Union side of this phase of the 250 year American Civil War is having great difficulty penetrating past Kremlin-basement propaganda to persuade bewitched neighbors to rejoin a Great Experiment in rational thinking, facts and justice.

Some smart folks are trying to figure out why it’s so hard. The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic, by linguistics genius George Lakoff (author of Don't Think of An Elephant) and Elisabeth Wehling is one such effort.

“Voters cast their ballots for what they believe is right, for the things that make moral sense. Yet Democrats have too often failed to use language linking their moral values with their policies. The Little Blue Book demonstrates how to make that connection clearly and forcefully, with hands-on advice for discussing the most pressing issues of our time: the economy, health care, women’s issues, energy and environmental policy, education, food policy, and more.”

My respect for Lakoff is boundless and I quote or cite him frequently in Polemical Judo. But this advice (above) is myopic and self-referential. This approach will only nibble at the edges of the MAGA movement, whose insulated Nuremberg rallies are all about chanted incantations of outrage-at-fantasies, and not appeals to values. (See an example of how deep down the rabbit hole these cult circle-jerks have gone, with almost every paragraph telling – or based upon – an outright lie.)

 If you actually want to chip or chop away at that mad cult, then you are better off using methods I offer in Polemical Judo. 

Where we agree is that the effort is worthwhile! First, because if we can peel just 100,000 more wakened Americans away from today's mad, re-ignited Confederacy, it could collapse their fragile demographics in scores of gerrymandered GOP districts. But also because these are your neighbors and countrymen/women/x, and they deserve your ministry. 

Just look up the phrase: “All Heaven rejoices when…”

But sure, this Little Blue Book is welcome for an entirely different reason. Not to convert MAGAs, but because it could help to maintain the Union coalition! By emphasizing shared values and goals, we might assist Bernie and AOC and Stacey and Liz and DNC Chair Jaime Harrison in their hardest task...

...which is riding herd on the least reliable and most self-indulgent-flakey members of our coalition, preventing a pompously-preening, indignantly impractical far-left from betraying the cause, the way they did, reliably and predictably -- with devastating effects -- in 1980, in 88, in 94, in 2000, in 2010 and again in 2016. 

== Ministering to our neighbors… before the McVeigh Tsunami can build ==

But let's consider just one of my suggested methods... I've been testing it for years and found it to be stunningly, dazzlingly effective. A fact almost as surprising as the near-utter refusal of any Democratic or neutral politician or pundit or citizen to try it, even experimentally!

In Polemical Judo and elsewhere, I’ve pushed hard the notion – proved again and again – that you can corner political fanatics with wagers.  Or rather, by demanding they back up their incantations, their magical chants and rationalizations with cold, hard cash. 

 At one level, it always works. In fact, it is the only thing that ever works with MAGAs. I go into this elsewhere. 

Of course I am not the only one saying this in a general sense. Take the Long Bets site offered by the Long Now Foundation and Stewart Brand and Kevil Kelly, that has for a decade mediated longer term wagers over arguments that can be settled – among adults – by the passage of time. (In an earlier blog I described Kevin’s failure to collect from a famous non-adult!)

Here’s another. A standing offer of (as of 2018) $100,000 of stakes for wagers over climate change that (surprise?) has had no serious takers among the cowardly blowhard denialists. 

“For the fourth year in a row, I am offering a $25,000 climate bet to anyone who thinks he or she is smarter than a climate scientist. The “definition of insanity” meme is as absurd as it is overused. But in fact I don’t expect different results this time. I predict more of the same: 

1. Lack of courage by deniers and conspiracy cranks to accept the bet.

2. Hand-wringing, insults, and excuses by bloggers.

3. Another new global climatological temperature record.

“Most deniers know full well that global warming is real, that it is caused by humans, and that it will continue. Why take a personal risk with actual money when it is easier and less expensive just to continue denying, blogging, and harassing scientists?” 

I hope this endeavor is still active.  I've found that the Confederate 'movement' is driven in large part by a desperate, overcompensating need to express pushy masculinity and that nothing terrifies those preeners more than being challenged to actually step up "like a man" and back up their blowhard assertions with pre-escrowed major wager stakes!

Alas, I also offer a side bet. We’ll get to 2024 without a single pundit or Democratic politician or – (best case) – scientifically-inclined zillionaire realizing how potent – if properly executed – this method could be. 

== Pertinent aside about conspiracy theories ==

As for vast conspiracies, David Robert Grimes has demonstrated that the likelihood of a leak is proportional to the number in on the conspiracy and the passage of time. He approaches the question mathematically here: On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs. It's quite a read. 

But I have an entire chapter dissecting conspiracy theories in ways you never saw before... and it's (you guessed it) in Polemical Judo.

And finally.

== Back to George F. Will… the “worst American.” ==

I admit to polemical excess when I called GFW "The Worst American." My standards were particular... 

That he is clearly not a stupid or misled person, but rather one who is both brilliant and well-trained in the skeptical arts. Moreover, he is fully aware that nearly all of human history was a cesspit of malgovernance by owner-cheater-lords and their inheritance brats... and that delusionally non-sapient oligarchy has been tried endlessly and found valueless, compared to the rare, vivid, fecund, creative and vastly more-just Periclean experiments.

Erudite and educated, he knows well that Marxism was halted in its tracks not by Republican-Confederatism, or by Wall Street scions, but by the Rooseveltean social contract, accomplishing what Marx never imagined possible -- inviting the working class into the bourgeoisie and their most-vigorous children into the best schools and marriages. That experiment has by far the best track record, under any criterion of human success. Including success at generating flat-fair-creative competition and reducing the wastage of talent that Adam Smith despised, above all else.

George Will knows all this... 

...as he knows that the current counter-putsch by world oligarchy has one paramount aim -- to restore the default human condition of deeply-stupid inherited privilege. And hence, Karl Marx is now risen from his deserved dustbin-sepulchre, to shamble once again across every university campus around the world. That feat of resurrection is arguably the only enduring accomplishment of Supply Side 'economics.'

He knows all this. Therefore, alas, it is with open eyes and by deliberate choice that George F. Will spent decades concocting polysyllabic incantations on behalf of an oligarchic world-cabal that he knew, full-well, aims for utter destruction of the civilization and experiment to which GFW owes everything. 

And so, when he saw, at last, what he had wrought, his ensuing denunciations of Confederate/Putinist/Salafist/Scudderite/Trumpite troglodytism and treason were decades late and a 1780 dollar short... and nothing at all like what we need from him, even now.

Is he waiting to see any residual glimmers of sanity flicker on the gone-mad U.S. right? I am sure he will spy some and leap upon them, issuing joyful incantations of "both-sides-ism." And thus evade his one chance at redemption. Alas.

======

* Re: the "national divorce" crap out there... well, I told-you-so. For years now. 

Bill Maher offers a palliative of "toning down the hate a notch." Though he also admits there's no way that

return-to-dialogue will be done by the 25% of the country that's in a hate-drenched psychotic break. I agree

that his prescription would normally be wise, except that it's not how confederates work. Any offer to

"reason together" will be viewed as weakness...

...unless it is couched as strength. And I have repeatedly told you all how to simultaneously offer reasoned discourse

while projecting strength.

"Come, let us check the factual basis for your mad assertions, before panels of senior retired military officers...

with cash money riding on the outcome."

THAT is how you can offer a reasoned, evidence-based negotiation over facts... but in a way that makes you look strong

and confident and that exposes the confederate or oligarch-shill as a yammering blowhard. And a coward, because he will

run away. They always do. And that is always, always and always and always...

...shaming themselves in front of others. And that is a victory. Not the kind we'd like. But the one that we can get.

Oh, one last thing. Maher said that Reds "have all the guns." Wrong. They have MORE guns. But in fact they have

fewer actual trigger fingers. And Maher seems not to know that liberals and minorities have been quietly buying

since 2001. So no. A hot Phase Nine will not be a slam-dunk for reds. Especially after they have spat in the faces

of every single US profession that actually knows stuff. Seriously, guys. How is that supposed to go for you?

Oh, final note: You think Texas can scoop up its marbles and gerrymander-ignore the majority of Texans

and go its own way? Oh, we may allow it! After Dallas-Austin-SA-Houston corridor gets their own secession

plebescite FROM Texas. And the entire Rio Grande basin. Sure. Sell us beef and oil... and watch how quickly

we make those commodities obsolete without your science-hating drag at our ankles. And then, we'll welcome

back counties that wake up and vote and beg to return. Same holds for every sessesh state. It's the deal that's

ACTUALLY plausible. Come on and step up fellahs. And till then, let's bet. No? I thought not.

What will - what won't happen?

"The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now. But now they're setting records. They're at a record level." - Donald Trump, to Reuters, quoted on msn.com.

This will be a weekend catch-all that offers up a lot of interesting items - some worrisome and some hopeful - that share a common theme... the future that's barreling toward us.  It was start non-political... then get more so. Because that's where the battle for our children is taking place.

First... some links to how and where you can hear my best blather about the coming era.

== Brin-sights ==

Just posted from the Fire 2017 conference: What is AI Telling Us? An interview about the future with Google’s Joseph Smarr and David Brin.

Posted by GigaOm: Voices in AI: A conversation between David Brin and Byron Reese, discussing intelligence, consciousness, Moore's Law and the likelihood of a near-future crisis in AI - specifically the first AI empathy crisis.

And another, from The Planetary Society Radio: AI, Space and Humanity's Future: A Conversation with David Brin, Emily Lakdawalla, Bruce Betts and Mat Kaplan. 

And now some gosh-wow non political stuff...

== The world moves ahead ==

Dubai is planning to introduce self-driving octocopter taxis sooner than anyone anticipated, with  a maiden air taxi test flight with Volocopter back in Sept 2017 and a planned first commercial service launch with eHang this Summer. Futurist seer John Smart foresees mostly high-end customers, at first. “Using them will be expensive in the 2020’s, and it is my hope that we’ll see air deliveries for urgent goods first, but the most exciting application, multipassenger commuter drones, should start to get mass-affordable for daily use in the 2030s.”  John goes on to discuss noise abatement, flying ambulances, collision avoidance, safety airbogs/parachutes and many other aspects.

A very detailed and informative run-down of how our cities will soon utterly transform into an added dimension. (That is, till some terrorist uses these things to scare us into shutting it all down again, alas.)

One of our generation’s best SF writers – Brenda Cooper – is interviewed about “The Nexus of Digital, IT and Science Fiction in the Future of Work.”

But okay now. Ponder the fight for civilization.

== Will anyone stand up? ==

There are two possible paths for the wave of retiring GOP Congressfolk. Some are slinking in deserved ignominy. Others - moderates like this fellow - can't bring themselves to sink into Trumpist-Confederate swill enough to survive their coming primaries. Both kinds will cash in on rich K Street consultancies, of course. Ah, but can I dream that one would stand and fight for the dream of a sane, decent, fact-and-science-loving version of conservatism? Enduring fire from Fox for the sake of the nation?

These defectors could help save us by standing for one, core issue. Restoration of respect for facts. Helping establish a credible, nonpartisan fact-checking service. No other act would so effectively quell this madness. But I fantacize.There are glimmers that perhaps Mitt Romney's ceaseless efforts will pay off and sober, residually-sane Republicans might hold a Grand Conference, this summer. Perhaps aiming to achieve what Democrats did in their "Miracle of 1947." 

I'm on record as the first to predict this... though still at low odds, since all we've seen so far is callow cowardice.

== Back to the Will ==

Some have questioned my calling George F. Will “the worst American.” After all, isn’t this urbane, articulate Goldwater-Buckley disciple one of the leading voices on the U.S. right now denouncing Donald Trump and everything correlated with Trumpism? And haven’t I been asking for this very thing? For residually sane conservatives to get fed up - at long last - with the accelerating lobotomization and derangement of their movement? For such men and women to stand up, before there’s nothing left of adult American conservatism to save?

I have faith that there are several million such “ostrich republicans,” finally lifting their heads from the sand of denial. Conversations are fizzing across the nation, about holding a conclave of such adults - the way liberals once did, saving their movement in 1947. If it happens, the fragile confederate coalition will collapse and a new phoenix of sapient American conservatism might rise rapidly out of the smoldering sewer of Murdochism-Putinism, ready to sit at the grownups’ table, negotiating with both facts and goodwill about our future together.

Certainly, in his latest missive, Mr. Will calls for the Republican controlled Congress to pry control over nuclear weapons away from “the incontinent tweeting, rhetorical taunts and other evidence of the frivolity and instability of the 13th president of the nuclear era.” 

He has elsewhere tepidly called for an end to the Right’s open and all-out war on science, and every other fact-using profession. And tepid support is better than none, in our battle to stave off idiocracy.

So why my fury at the man?

Is it because he for decades aided and abetted the radicalization, the confederatization, the dumbing down of U.S. conservatism and paving the way for a return of feudalism? Sure, but Mr. Will wasn’t the only one making that satanic bargain, betraying the Founders, decency, truth and - yes - Adam Smith. So why single him out?

Because, out of all the rationalizers who helped re-ignite phase 8 of the American Civil War, George F. Will did it with fiercely acute intelligence, clear-eyed perception and eloquence. Any other rationalizer might claim: “I never realized!” But GFW cannot. He knew. He knew all along, and deliberately helped to make the hell about which he now whines.

Oh, do read his missive about control over missiles! I’m glad that George F. Will is now using his eloquence against this phase of insanity and treason, even if I refuse to embrace him as a prodigal son. Indeed, elsewhere I’ve proposed the best way that Congress could protect us from a mad-president spasm… a method that is far simpler and more inherently effective than Will’s vague arm wavings. A method that’s immune from presidential vetoes and Fox diatribes, that would give our military professionals a place to go, if they are ever given a terrifying order.

My proposal. That could save us. Seriously.  

But sure, if he can help stir some cojones into the blood of McCain, Flake, Corker and that lot, so they’ll finally rise to their duty, then I’ll sign George F. Will’s pardon papers. Like in that movie "Inglorious Basterds."

But I’ll not shake his hand.

== By his fruits you shall know him… ==

That biblical saying suggests that we should heed actual facts, actual evidence, and take note when a leader – or a movement or a culture – always does badly by its people. And what's clear after 150 years is that the Confederacy… that angry twin welded to America’s hip… has an absolutely wretched record of governance. For example: “Massachusetts, Hawaii, Vermont, Utah and Connecticut rank as the five healthiest states, while West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi rank the least healthy in America's Health Rankings, according to the report by the United Health Foundation.”

If we subtract outliers like Utah and Detroit & Chicago, name a metric of moral and healthy living that is not worse in Red America, from teen sex, STD and pregnancy rates to obesity, dropouts, divorce and domestic violence, gambling and so on. Name... one... exception. Other than abortion which is a disagreement over fundamentals.

Along similar lines… “Why Inequality Predicts Homicide Rates Better ThanAny Other Variable  The surprising factors driving murder rates: income inequality and respect.” Another thought provoking article in Evonomics.

It has now been seven and a half years since Sean Hannity said waterboarding was not torture, so much so that he'd be willing to be waterboarded for charity.  Because, ya know, it's like a dunking booth. Keith Olbermann pounced at that time and offered $1000 for each second Hannity could tolerate it.

And now, we are awaiting the other shoe to drop from Hannity's Cohen-connection.  Good lord. What will it take for the Fox News Boycott to take off?  

And finally...

Another deduction that is disappearing is one for fees paid to agents, other outside managers or headhunters, who take a commission on a salary directly from an individual. Are... you... kidding me?  Creative people must be shown their place.

And then....  Confound the science... One of the best pieces of musical political satire I’ve seen in years! Moreover, it does what no one else seems capable of... going to the heart of the real problem -- the open and all-out war against our civilization's sapience -- in a way that makes you simultaneously laugh... and cry.

Perspectives and politics

Today is a roundup of some wider perspectives that've piled up.  After a couple of news blips:

1-  Jared Kushner was in Riyadh, consulting for a whole day with the Crown Prince, just days before the latter staged a major putsch, toppling every power rival in Saudi Arabia. No one in media seems to consider this as a precursor to the long-planned war vs. Iran. See how many forces want this, from the Saudis and Trump/Breitbart to Putin and even the Iranian mullahs, themselves.

Still, the image of an orthodox Jew dickering with the Saudi leader... might a silver lining to this be an Arab-Israeil rapprochement? I'll discuss all this in a future missive.

2- The Democrats' sweeps in Virginia, New Jersey, Washington State and elsewhere  show not only Trump's unpopularity and liberal vigor, but the vital importance of down-ticket races.  Finding candidates to take on "safe-seat" incumbents has paid off. Hence leave no office - state assembly or even dog catcher - uncontested in 2018. In an earlier three-part series I described how to do this.

== Wider Perspectives ==

Steven Pinker - the rascal who uses facts to defeat defeatism - points out that 2016 was not as bad as it seemed:  

“War deaths have risen since 2011 because of the Syrian civil war, but are a fraction of the levels of the 1950s through the early 1990s, when megadeath wars and genocides raged all over the world. Colombia’s peace deal marks the end of the last war in the Western Hemisphere, and the last remnant of the Cold War. Homicide rates in the world are falling, and the rate in United States is lower than at any time between 1966 and 2009. Outside of war zones, terrorist deaths are far lower than they were in the heyday of the Weathermen, IRA, and Red Brigades.”

He admits that: “Several awful things happened in the world’s democracies in 2016, and the election of a mercurial and ignorant president injects a troubling degree of uncertainty into international relations. 

"But it’s vital to keep cool and identify specific dangers rather than being overcome by a vague apocalyptic gloom.”

Pinker adds: “More generally, the worldwide, decades-long current toward racial tolerance is too strong to be undone by one man. Public opinion polls in almost every country show steady declines in racial and religious prejudice­ — and more importantly for the future, that younger cohorts are less prejudiced than older ones. As my own cohort of baby boomers (who helped elect Trump) dies off and is replaced by millennials (who rejected him in droves), the world will become more tolerant.”

Yesterday I spoke to several classes at a nearby high school, and was impressed with the eye-contact, strong voices, confident attitudes and diversity. Though propaganda - especially Hollywood - has convinced them that the world is going straight into the toilet, when that's just not true. But back to Pinker.

He reiterates a distinction: “between complacent optimism, the feeling of a child waiting for presents, and conditional optimism, the feeling of a child who wants a treehouse and realizes that if he gets some wood and nails and persuades other kids to help him, he can build one. I am not complacently optimistic about the future; I am conditionally optimistic.”

Finally... Echoes of 2014: Margaret McMillan writes that we should fear one thing… a pattern that centuries begin their themes a decade and a half in. 

“I wish I could stop, but I find myself thinking of 1914. The world then had seemed so stable, so manageable…. That confidence was dangerous because it meant that people didn't take the warning signs seriously enough.”

See where I wrote about how the pattern of each of the last several centuries seems to have begun about a decade and a half in...and the election of Donald Trump, along with meme-war depredations by our enemies, appears to bear this out.  But which theme will prevail until 2115? The Putin-Saudi-Trumpist re-ignition of our civil war?  Or our sound and decisive rejection of this putsch, reclaiming pragmatic confidence?

== Semper Ubi Sub-Ubi ==

Universal basic income (UBI) is a concept that was pushed by - among others - Robert Heinlein in several of his novels. A century ago, JM Keynes predicted we would see so much automated production that the average work week would fall to twenty hours. He was a hundred years premature, but many harbingers suggest we’re verging on that era, at last. UBI could be a way to ensure that it happens with decency, keeping the spirit of an egalitarian civilization.  The snarl by cynics is that this is “welfare” encouraging a generation of lazy, demanding lotus-eaters, is a cliché that’s been tested in the last decade, when some experiments in the developing world have shown that giving raw cash to poor families can be more effective than closely supervised-paternalistic versions of aid. And almost none of the cash is used on fripperies.

Now such experiments are arriving in the US. Y-combinator is pursuing a UBI project. In a new blog post published on the company’s website this week, they reveal their plans to pick 3,000 individuals from two states at random to receive a monthly cash handout. 1,000 participants will receive $1,000 per month for a period up to five years, while the other 2,000 will receive $50 per month, serving as the control group.

== Free Speech ==

Who favors free and open speech? Who fought against the Fairness Doctrine and all the rebuttal rules requiring broadcasters to offer a few minutes of rebuttal each night?  

Rupert Murdoch howled over letting on-air anyone who might refute his hired gas-bags. At his urging -- and the radio hypnotists at Clear Channel - the GOP rescinded it, and Fox hollers at any hint of its return, knowing just 5 minutes per day of factual rebuttal would tear them open like a dim-witted matador.

Funny: the "fake news" mainstream doesn't fear a rebuttal rule. The UK still has one. The Murdochs are lobbying like hell to get rid of it.

== You’re kidding me, right? ==

I'm not always a fan, but Thomas Friedman; in the New York Times is very smart and he can be pointed: "Having just traveled to New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, China, Taiwan and now Hong Kong, I can say without an ounce of exaggeration that more than a few Asia-Pacific business and political leaders have taken President Trump's measure and concluded that - far from being a savvy negotiator - he's a sucker who's shrinking US influence in this region and helping make China great again.

"These investors, trade experts and government officials are still stunned by a... Trump's decision to tear up the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade deal ... without having read it or understanding its vast geo-economic implications. (Trump was so ignorant about TPP that when he was asked about it in a campaign debate in November 2015 he suggested that China was part of it, which it very much is not.)"

== Miscellaneous! ==

The percentage of adolescents in the U.S. who have a driver's license, who have tried alcohol, who date, and who work for pay has plummeted since 1976, with the most precipitous decreases in the past decade. Teens have also reported a steady decline in sexual activity in recent decades, as the portion of high school students who have had sex fell from 54 percent in 1991 to 41 percent in 2015, according to Centers for Disease Control statistics.  “According to an evolutionary psychology theory that a person's "life strategy" slows down or speeds up depending on his or her surroundings, exposure to a "harsh and unpredictable" environment leads to faster development, while a more resource-rich and secure environment has the opposite effect, the study said."

Okay, put on your list of ways to help the Earth... limiting your subsidizing cow farts. One more reason to eat less beef. And to invest in these great new veggie-burgers they're developing. And vat-grown meat.

This fellow says we could cut methane from beef by 70% by adding 4% seaweed to their diet. He estimates that to farm enough seaweed to cover Australia's livestock, we'd need to establish roughly 6,000 hectares of seaweed farms, which isn't going to be easy to find. But let’s start a pilot study.

The good news? U.S. greenhouse gas production went down last year. Solar/wind have skyrocketed. And climate change is proved. And the denialist cult has been proved wrong about absolutely everything.

Oh. Peaktu San. The highest peak in Korea (and the alleged birthplace of Kim Jong Il in official state mythology) is also an active super-volcano, one which, if it erupted, would obliterate most of North Korea and China too. 

== Colorful Political Miscellany ==

Dang. Some of you thought I was a bit... fierce... in taking down that traitor-toady George F. Will. But I'm dry toast compared to Jim Wright. Go read his choice fury ... 

And yes, we will only end this phase of the American Civil War when several million residually sane American conservatives realize that enough is enough. That this is not the conservatism of Barry Goldwater – whose grave spinning now supplies most of the power to Arizona.  

So what will it take? Pence’s chief of staff floats ‘purge’ of anti-Trump Republicans to wealthy donors. Oh, please. Oh do this.  The moderate sane conservatives of America have been frozen in stunned disbelief and cowardly inaction for years, unable to do their duty – to America and to conservatism – and form a new party not defined by Rupert Murdoch. But this could do the trick.

Nothing signals Melania Trump’s effort at independence more than this. 

White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner has used both a private email account and an official email address to communicate with other government officials, his attorney says.  So… the very worst thing that Hillary Clinton was ever confirmed to have done wrong… is the very smallest piece of almost daily insane-malfeasance pouring from this White House. 

Disturbing insights into anomalous voting patterns.

Do you doubt there’s a lot going on that runs below what we see bandied about?  A third of rural whites, and 40 percent of rural white men, are resigned to believing that their children will grow up with a lower standard of living than they did, a far higher proportion than people who live in cities (23 percent) or suburbs (28 percent), a survey by the Pew Research Center found.   In addition to other problems, rural areas contend with drug and mental-health issues, poverty, and a lack of high-speed access to the internet. “This has become a cultural phenomenon. It’s not an educational phenomenon,” Fluharty said. Encouraging a rural student to go to college instead of doing the same work as the adults in a community, he said, is like “suggesting that that child should not do what I have done…” Among other insights: “Disdain toward rural people, which he called commonplace on campus, “is the last acceptable prejudice in America.” 

== Finally... ==

Conservatives continue push for probes of Clinton and her campaign. And it’s the theater that matters!  24 years and half a billion dollars spent seeking "smoking guns" on the Clintons, the most thoroughly probed humans in the history of our species. Every document scrutinized, every micro assistant grilled. The Kochs offered rewards for whistle blowers to rat out the "secret deals and travesties." And what did we wind up with? Nothing but 

(1) a husband fibbing about some 3rd base consensual-adult infidelity in a hallway, and 
(2) a cabinet secretary making the same mistake with emails as all of her predecessors and the Bushes all made.

Face it. Either the Clintons are decisively proved to be clean... or else the lynch mob that wasted all that time and money is beyond incompetent.