About Ideology (Including Yours.) And roots in Romanticism.

First some announcements: 

1. On my other - more formal - blog, I ask "Does government-funded science play a role in stimulating innovation?"  There I refute rising incantations that science, productivity and inventiveness would all do so much better if we revert them all back to the whim of plutocrat lords. (Yeah, that worked great for the 6000 years of stagnant feudalism!) with guest appearances by Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, Adam Smith and... Jonas Salk.

2. Want the perfect gift for that professor or student of Anthropology or Paleontology? 

3. Appearances (see the regularly updated schedule):

        - Nov 7 my new play  - The Escape - will premiere at the Caltech Atheneum.

        - Nov 9 I speak at the Future In Review (FiRe) Conference in Palos Verdes, before flying to Tucson for the Tus-Con sci fi convention.

        - April 8 - two Texas events for the April 8 eclipse - more later

And now... having a little trouble with your clogged dogmas? Let's have a look and see if we can get things flowing again!  I'll start by quoting an exceptionally sapient article.

== Ideology as a refuge from practical problem solving ==

“Because an ideology “looks upon all factuality as fabricated,” it “no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood.”

— From Arresting Our ‘Flight From Reality by Roger Berkowitz

I recommend you visit this linked essay which continues:

“In 1949, when Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) went to Germany as part of the New York-based Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, she was struck by the way the Germans showed an “at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.” This “escape from reality,” as Arendt named it, meant that the reality of the Holocaust and the death factories was spoken of as a hypothetical. And when the truth of the Holocaust was admitted, it was diminished: “The Germans did only what others are capable of doing.”

“The Germans, at times, simply denied the facts of what had happened. One woman told Arendt that the “Russians had begun the war with an attack on Danzig.” What Arendt encountered was a “kind of gentleman’s agreement by which everyone has a right to his ignorance under the pretext that everyone has a right to his opinion.” The underlying assumption for such a right is the “tacit assumption that opinions really do not matter.” Opinions are just that, mere opinions. And facts, once they are reduced to opinions, also don’t matter. Taken together, this led to a “flight from reality.”

“The focus of Arendt’s lifelong engagement with the human flight from reality was her encounter with ideologies, specifically Nazism and Bolshevism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism and other texts (especially her essay, On the Nature of Totalitarianism), Arendt defines an ideology as a system that seeks to explain “all the mysteries of life and the world” according to one idea.”

…” As ideologies, both Nazism and Bolshevism insist on explaining the events of the world according to theories “without further concurrence with actual experience.” The result, Arendt argues, is that such ideologies bring about an “arrogant emancipation from reality.” …”The modern lie is ideological in that it rejects all contrary evidence and all inconvenient facts. It involves, as Arendt writes, the “mass manipulation of fact and opinion” toward the totalizing end of “rewriting history” and the present to fit one idea.”

*

Do have a look at Roger’s article in Quillette, because the first half is so perfectly on target - diagnosing the same flaw in human nature that I often point-to -- our propensity for self-satisfying delusion, (a flaw that is also a taproot to our greatest gifts, like art and love).  

Ideologies, especially, can be mass delusions that are ecstatically masturbatory, simplifying all of those who disagree into mistakes, to be corrected with erasure.

I concur, while adding that another (or overlapping) common element is romanticism. Nazism, Stalinism, the American Confederacy (in all eight of its manifestations) were all romantic movements. (Mark Twain blamed the Civil War on the novels of Sir Walter Scott!) 

SF is not innocent! We see many common romantic features in the works of Tolkien and George Lucas and George R.R. Martin and Frank Herbert, wherein innately superior beings are portrayed as elegantly admirable (and pretty) while opposing orcs or robots or clone soldiers or masked storm troopers or hovering Harkonnens can be mowed down without qualm, as none of them have faces or mothers. 

(More seductively subtle, the gifted, eloquent and deeply anti-enlightenment O.S. Card relentlessly pushes romantic notions of rule-by-demigod, in place of decadent democracy.)

I go into all this in Vivid Tomorrows. And while I have earned most of my income by penning tales that have strong romantic elements, I write such passages at night, when the wind rustles tree branches and I feel the thrumming echoes of the caves. But I also say romanticism has no business - after 6000 years of calamities - getting involved in the daytime pursuits of politics, policy, science, justice and negotiation based on pragmatically verifiable facts.

== Hatred of Modernity ==

Alas, the 2nd half of Roger's essay dives into a completely separate Arendt obsession, her dyspeptic growl at modernity and science which I deem easily refuted.  For example, it was not ‘reconciliation’ that defeated Nazis, or Leninist romantics or the many phases of confederatism. 

What's been our great strength? It was a spirit of courage to face that ‘loneliness’ in alliance with different and varied others, whose very differences contribute to a healthy and wholesome tribe/nation/humanity.

We are not all so terrified, all the time, that we must clutch demonizing ideologies. There are other emotions, like fortitude, patience, curiosity and humor. And yes, an appreciation of facts and willingness to change our contingent models of the world (despite Plato’s yammers about the hopelessness of that wondrous pursuit.)

Despite my respect for Hannah Arendt, I feel no compulsion to heed in the slightest either Nietzsche or Hegel, whose incantation spells I particularly detest. Where I disagree foremost is over the outright dismissal of human provability. 

Like Roger Berkowitz, I do not take seriously the pathetic immortality fetishists or those nutters who think they can promote themselves - via miraculous technology - to godhood. But unlike him, I recognize that we stand on the shoulders of generations who struggled to make us better than them…

… and we are better!  Each generation of Americans - for example - has struggled over demands that we expand our horizons of inclusion, beyond the horizons that were new to our parents. And slowly - (far TOO grindingly slowly) - we have done so, each generation. And science, disproving ten thousand pat and comfy folk assumptions, played a major role in that!

Indeed, if we do keep improving, our wiser heirs will almost certainly realize that we've only shown how very much farther there is to go.

== Civilizational Competition? ==

Western nations and allies, e.g. Japan and S Korea ("W+") are actually doing very well, overflowing with creativity, invention, science, productivity and the sort of moral rediscovery that has engendered a very active younger generation, fizzing with criticism and eagerness to save the world... traits that were squelched across those 6000 feudal/futile years. Traits that are utterly repressed in 'civilizational" rivals like China, Russia, radical Islam, etc.

Let's be clear. Only those nations with habits of self-critical error discovery have been at all active at addressing potentially existential problems, like the environment, or justice, or rule of law. It is either W+ habits of error-discovery or extinction. Period. I stand ready to show that in any arena, from debate to wager.

There is one reason for cultural anomie by Western+ citizenries. That cause is the most aggressive propaganda campaign the world has ever seen, cleverly leveraging the reflex toward criticism that's been trained into W+ citizenries, igniting healthy Suspicion of Authority into paranoia toward their own institutions.

In Europe and the U.S. this campaign has been augmented by cynically evil despots herding millions of victims to EU and U.S. borders as refugees, successfully sparking rightward 'populist' political reactions.

There is no 'civilizational' bullshit. One imperative - and just one - unites China, Russia, radical Islam, etc. into common cause. That unifying drive - propelled by male reproductive strategies a billion years old - is to re-establish the feudal pyramids of power that dominated 99% of human societies for 60 centuries or much more.  

Squint and you can see it in all enemies of the W+... justifying pyramids of power. Some base it on religion, or tradition, or romanticism, or 'civilization rivalry.' But that is decoration.

The worldwide oligarchic putsch unites all enemies of the W+ Enlightenment Experiment (W+EE) for one reason: because the W+EE will likely succeed within the next 20 years at inculcating critical habits in ALL world youth! And when that happens, a return to feudal pyramids will be impossible, no matter how much money you have or political foes you defenestrate.  

This may be their last chance. And they are pulling out the stops.

Liberal societies will not co-exist with any of that. As happened to Athens and Florence, liberalism will be crushed, burned, the atoms incinerated and dropped (this time) into the sun... and the experiment will never be allowed, again.

Or else, what will happen is what the cabals fear most. We may decide to save the world and the future despite them. By growing up.

Bringing back feudalism -- is libertarianism an unwitting tool?

== Those helping feudalism return - unwittingly ==

R.J. Eskow - on Salon - offers "11 Questions to see if Libertarians are Hypocrites."  And yes, most of Eskow's posers certainly do set up some stark and thought-provoking contradictions - even hypocrisies - in the oft-touted positions held by many who today use the "L-word" to describe themselves. The article is well-worth reading and it does skewer especially those who bow in obeisance to Ayn Rand, the patron saint of resentful ingrates who want desperately to blame society for being  under-achievers. And yet…

…and yet Eskow wound up inciting the contrarian in me, with his blatant straw-manning -- setting up the reader to assume that all "libertarians" are lapel-grabbing, solipsistic randians.  Moreover, indeed, he tells flagrant untruths even about randians. Elsewhere I have dissected the Cult of Ayn far more carefully, actually looking carefully at her messages on many levels. Eskow wants only a caricature and a punching bag.

He ignores, for example the randians' admission that government should retain a monopoly on force and should be involved also in the enforcement of all contracts, not just copyright. Not entire-anarchism, indeed, it retains what's necessary for the ultimate randian outcome -- a return to feudalism -- to have real teeth. Eskow should know his enemy better.

(Note that I use Eskow's method of asking questions in what I hope is a much more neutral and thorough way, in my Questionnaire on Ideology, that encourages folks to re-examine many of their own underlying assumptions; take it if you dare!")

In fact, Eskow ignores other strands to libertarianism that include the erudite versions of William F. Buckley and Friedrich Hayek, who denounced the randian obsession with demigods as a guaranteed route to feudalism.  Hayek, in particular, extolled a level playing field that maximizes the number of competitors and avoids a narrow ruling-owner caste. Indeed, there are some versions of libertarianism that I consider to be entirely justified  -- the moderate versions offered to us by authors who range from Kurt Vonnegut to Adam Smith, from Robert Heinlein to Ray Bradbury...

...a version under which one is willing to negotiate and see a successful State that does good and useful things by general consensus and assent, but always with an emphasis on doing useful things that wind up empowering the individual to go his or her own, creative way. In other words, judging state actions (even skeptically) by a standard that is high, but allows us to work together on some valuable things that help us to then grow as we choose.

I could go on and on about that aspect of things; but instead I will simply offer a link to a far more cogent appraisal of this important thread of human political discourse, one that - alas - has been hijacked by oversimplifying fools who wind up parroting fox-fed nostrums and serve as tools for the very oligarchy that aims to tear down every remnant of freedom. (See: Maps, Models and Visions of Tomorrow.)

Indeed, the name you'll never hear randians mention… and alas the same holds true of the oversimplifying straw-manner Eskow… is Adam Smith, whose version of libertarianism adults still look to, from time to time.  A version that admires and promotes individualism and the stunning power of human competition, but also recognizes that competitive-creative markets and democracy and science only achieve their wondrous positive sum games when carefully regulated… the way soccer or football must be, lest the strongest just form one team and stomp every potential rival flat and then gouge out their eyes… which is exactly what winner-owner-oligarch-lords did in every human culture for 6000 years.  Till Adam Smith came along and described how to get the good outcomes without the bad.

The stealing of Adam Smith's movement by fanatics and cynically manipulative oligarchs is not just a tragedy for the right, and for market capitalism.  It is tragic for civilization.

==  Those seeking feudalism KNOWINGLY ==

Here is the fundamental political fact of our times, amid phase three of the American Civil War.  The gulf between the richest 1% of the USA and the rest of the country got to its widest level in history last year.

The top 1% of earners in the U.S. pulled in 19.3% of total household income in 2012, which is their biggest slice of total income in more than 100 years, according to a an analysis by economists at the University of California.

Also, the top 1% of earnings posted 86% real income growth between 1993 and 2000. Meanwhile, the real income growth of the bottom 99% of earnings rose 6.6%.

The richest Americans haven't claimed this large of a slice of total wealth since 1927, when the group claimed 18.7%. Just before the Great Crash and Great Depression... so much for the notion that Oligarchy assures prosperity and good management.  In contrast, the flattest American society -- just after FDR -- featured the longest boom, the most vigorous startup entrepreneurship, the fastest-rising middle class... and all of it with labor unions and high marginal tax rates.

The penultimate irony?  That the ones complaining about this are called "anti-capitalists" when the fair and productive-creative, entrepreneurial capitalism prescribed by Adam Smith is the top VICTIM of wealth and income inequality. Across 6000 years of human history, the enemy of open markets and freedom was always owner-oligarchy. The blame for this can be spread widely! Those liberals who ignore the "first liberal" Adam Smith are almost as foolish as the dullard right wingers who are helping to restore feudalism.

The greatest irony?  The people who are bringing all of this about claim to adore the "Greatest Generation" - our parents and grandparents who overcame the Depression and crushed Hitler and contained communism and started a hugely successful worldwide boom under protection of the American Pax... and got us to the moon and invented so many cool things that we got rich enough to go on a buying spree that made every export driven nation prosperous.

Funny thing.  That Greatest Generation adored Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the flat-but-dynamically entrepreneurial society that he and they built together.  Oh, but they were the fools and Rupert Murdoch knows so... so much better.

== So what is to be done? ==

Left-wingers who blame "capitalism" for our recent messes should replace the word with "cheaters."  At risk of belaboring a point that must be reiterated because people keep blinking past it: I consider healthy "Smithian" capitalism to be one of the top five VICTIMS of the malignantly incompetent rule of the recent US GOP.  There are no outcome metrics of national health under which the Republican Party's tenure in command did not wreak harm on the people of the United States, especially upon the middle class, upon human civilization and upon healthy capitalism… and the spinning ghosts of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley.

So let's try some simple reforms.  Fierce measures to stop interlocking directorships and the circle-jerk of 5000 golf buddies appointing each other onto each others' boards, then voting each other staggering "wages" -  it is a criminal conspiracy that not only has stolen billions but runs diametrically opposite to the entire notion of competitive enterprise.

1- If capitalism works, then these high CEO wages should be attracting brilliant talent from elsewhere, till demand meets supply and the wages fall. They are in effect calling themselves irreplaceable "mutant geniuses" like NBA basketball players... only with this blatant rub. The top NBA players are fiercely measured by statistics!  The mutant-good CEOs are only "good" by the flimsiest of arm-waving by… their pals.

2- Critics of socialism cite Hayek and proclaim that, no matter how smart a set of top-down allocators are, they will be foolish simply because their numbers are few.  Now it happens that I agree! History does show that narrow castes of "allocators" do inevitably perform poorly. (The Chinese have done well... so far... but at spectacular environmental cost and corruption. And we know the inevitable end-game.)

So, how are 5,000 conniving, back-room-dealing, circle-jerking, self-interested golf buddies intrinsically better allocators than say 500,000 skilled, educated, closely-watched and reciprocally competitive civil servants?  Both groups suffer from delusional in-group-think.  But the smaller clade - more secretive, self-serving, inward-looking and uncriticized - is inherently more likely to fail.  Claiming that they are better allocators because they are "private" and secretively collusive is just religious litany, refuted by 6000 years of horrific oligarchic rule.

We deserve and should demand a return to a capitalism that is more about creative-new goods and services than manipulation of imaginary financial "assets." Colluding cartels, like the caste of 5,000 CEO-director golf buddies must be broken up.  If you are a senior officer of a company, you should be disallowed to sit on any boards, anywhere, for anything. And anti-trust laws that served our parents well should resume being enforced.

The same goes double for an even worse cartel of cheaters... the casrtel of "seated members" of stock and commodities and equities exchanges like the NYSE and NASDAQ.  These blatant conspiratorial clubs violate every conceivable standard of fairness and competition, charging commissions to you and me while freely engaging in hundreds of billions of Hight Frequency Trading actions themselves, at zero friction or cost. In this electronic era there is no reason any of us should have to use such intermediaries to sell shares to others. The scam is a lamprey-vampire drain on the economy that should be reformed or eliminated. (And mind you, HFT is an existential threat to civilization, in its own right.)

There are dozens of other possible reforms, especially Lawrence Lessig's proposals to get the tsunamis of money out of politics and my own judo approaches to getting around gerrymandering.  

But above all we need to minister to our libertarian cousins, calmly drawing them away from Mad Murray and Alienation Ayn, getting them to realise that capitalism is not being helped by the rising oligarchs. It is being killed by them. Libertarians should re-enlist in the League of Adam Smith, and help restore the system to health, lest socialism rise again.  As it surely will, if this goes on. 

Follow-up: The economy, Past, Present and Future 

                    Politics for the Twenty-first Century

== The central battleground - the War on Science ==

In The New York Times, Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, offers a moving missive, Welcome to the Age of Denial, about  how his long career never prepared him for a 21st Century in which so many of his fellow citizens are actively hostile to science.  He winds up agreeing with my own conclusion, that his is not normal give and take, but something akin to civil war, and that pro-science part of our civilization must take on the responsibility of militancy against waves of roomy-cynical nostalgia… and not all of it from the mad right.

And... because this is the central battle field of culture war...

== Blues and Greens - waking up and getting active ==

Next Step in Climate Change Activism, a Cross Country March! Six months from now, 1,000 people will set out from Los Angeles to walk 2,980 miles across America to Washington, DC, on the Great March for Climate Action.  The march will inspire and motivate average people to pressure political and business leaders to act now to address the climate crisis. The GMCA will be the largest coast-to-coast march in U.S. history.

As we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom we are reminded that all movements must reach a moment of critical mass, when the call for change becomes powerful enough to shift public policy. We believe the size and scope of the Great March for Climate Action will be a vital next step. The March will start in Los Angeles on March 1, 2014, reach Phoenix in early April, Denver in early June, Omaha in late July, Chicago in early September, Pittsburgh in October and Washington DC on November 1. Marchers will walk 14-15 miles per day and camp in a mobile green village which will demonstrate sustainable technologies to feed and provide support services for the marchers.

Hey, we can only accomplish so much bywrangling at sites like this one, at the extreme intellectual end of things. There comes a point (as the French aristocrats learned after their dismal greed and obstinacy) when this goes down to the countryside.  To the streets.

-- David Brin: Website: http://www.davidbrin.com

                        Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidBrin

Wonders and Disburbances Part 2: From Science to Politics

== A qualified defense of reason ==

(Continuing from Part 1)

Some have been discussing a grouchy missive by the brilliant linguistic philosopher George Lakoff -- specifically Lakoff's latest dismissal of reason as a tool of enlightenment decision making. It provokes me to respond.

Lakoff is completely right that so-called logical reasoning is extremely faulty because it fails to take into account human nature. For example, our biased perceptions were faulted by Plato, the father of the socratic tradition... though Plato went on to claim that such systems can fully compensate, by self-correcting for bad perceptions. One of the great ironies in the history of thought - since our human talent for delusion easily extends to the misleading incantations of "logic."

Also, recent advances in neuroscience seem to be supporting the cynics. As Lakoff points out, our brains seem wired for bias, which reasoning generally serves only to rationalize. We process new “facts” offered by our opponents through parts of the brain associated by emotion, rather than logic.  To see how bad it gets, just look at yourself, by taking my infamous “Questionnaire Regarding Politics, Ideology and Human Destiny.”

On the other hand, I must quibble --

Lakoff asserts that logic and reason are fundamental underpinnings of the Enlightenment Experiment.  And I will confess that they started out that way, and still are vital components of the non-Anglic (e.g. Franco-German) wing of the Enlightenment.

But the Anglo-American wing long ago demoted reason to second-tier status.  It is still important, as an ideal to be yearned-for. But primary position was given - by Locke, Smith, Franklin, and Madison to something else: Reciprocal Accountability.

Knowing how good human beings are delusion and at rationalization, the sages of the Enlightenment's pragmatic wing chose to emphasize adversarial processes, in markets, democracy, justice and science. Competitive criticism and reward systems, based on actual outcomes and repeatable tests were supposed to overcome the biases that the Founders knew to be inherent in human nature.

Let me elaborate: while reason has clearly been revealed as faulty, in guiding us to useful conclusions, it still serves science crucially well, as a hypothesis generator! As a fertile source - like manure - of the assertions and wagers that then make the basis for subsequent science.

By far most of the assertions that are later subjected to Popperian falsification arise, either wholly or in part, through processes of abstract reasoning.  In other words, reason is a great truth-seeking tool when it is paired with other essential things... diversity, competition, reciprocal accountability, experimental testing,... and a cultural tradition of cheerful -- or at least grudging -- acceptance of the paramount value of evidence.

As Herbert Spencer once wryly quipped... 'there is nothing so tragic as a beautiful theory, disproved.'  Well, tragic, except in comparison to 10,000 years of wrong theories that were forced upon folks, by bullying.

Sure, all of these ingredients come hard, especially willingness to heed criticism. Only scientists are actually trained to use them systematically, and still they squirm!  We are at-root, genetically and at-heart immature cavemen.  And yet, we are cavemen who built a spectacular enlightenment civilization, more successful in every way - including gentle decency - than all others combined. We did it by learning and applying reason... and then (a crucial second step) by refusing to be bullied by it. By subjecting it to the superior authority of evidence.

== Science & Society ==

And now for a catch-all potpourri that is NOT political!

-- Climate Change & Civil War: Starting with data on conflicts that killed more than 25 people, as compiled by the Center for the Study of Civil War to include 175 countries and 234 civil wars in the last six decades or so, the researchers mapped out how many of these disputes occurred in years with an El Niño weather pattern. They found that the risks of civil war breaking out in a tropical country during an El Niño doubled. Then, running a comparative simulation in which such El Niño weather patterns did not occur, the researchers determined that the hotter, drier conditions helped stoke 48 civil wars that did not occur in the modeled El Nino-free world. "Even in this modern world, climate variability has an impact on the propensity of people to fight," says climate modeler Mark Cane of Columbia University. "When people get warmer than comfortable they get irritable and they are more prone to fight." (Late note: there has been a lot of blogging by folks pointing to contrary evidence and studies. So take this with salt.)

-- To resolve conflict, believe people can change. Negotiation often fails because each side believes their opponent is inflexible, according to researchers in Israel. Stand-offs, they say, can end if those involved ponder the possibility that their counterparts can adopt a flexible mindset.

-- Identity in the modern world: Across India, using fingerprint & iris scanners, workers are creating the world’s largest biometric database, a mind-boggling collection of 1.2 billion identities. One goal: to reduce corruption & economic inequality. 12-digit ID numbers will help build real citizenship in a society where identity has been historically linked with caste, kin & religion. Ah, one hopes it won’t just serve as a tool of top-down control

-- Picture a world where tools improve with use. It’s the premise of my way-fun novel, The Practice Effect. Our own world may not work that way, but Tarus Balog suggests that open source software can follow that pattern. Version 1.0 may be bare bones, then users add features, erase glitches, till it becomes robust. Creative transparency. I have such a project!

== Science Snippets ==

-- Gorgeous! See time-lapse videos—captured over the course of 14 years by the Hubble Space Telescope. Amazing to see vast phenomena changing across the years.

-- Looking back: Jupiter-Bound Spacecraft Sees Earth and Moon from Afar.

-- Vaccines are nearly entirely safe.  But don’t try telling that to the cultists. On second thought.  Do. Try.  And keep on trying.  Your efforts may be the vaccine they need to wake up from the fever.

-- Human Activity Is Officially Acknowledged to Cause Earthquakes.

-- The Big Bang Theory: A fan video of the Barenaked Ladies theme song:  Even if they get the "cycle" of bangs wrong... it's still way cool!

== Miscellaneous ==

-- “From The 'London Times' of 1904” is one of Mark Twain’s sort of halfway sojourns into science fiction.  Read about an imaginary device called a “telelectroscope,” which was essentially a telephone with a “moving picture” screen that, when connected to a network of telelectroscopes all around the world, created a worldwide system of information sharing.

...and then how it inspires one sci fi reader to ponder “green SF.”

-- Speaking of Twain... ah boys will be boys.

-- Just watched the movie "Paul." From the trailers, I expected something like "Alf" - alien-as-male-jackass. So I watched it with just my 14 yr old son. We were pleasantly surprised! Sure, lots of immature jokes. But it was more subtle and well-written than expected. Way fun. And the story portrayed being a "Nebulon Award winning sci fi author" as the highlight of human existence! Well now... how can I complain or disagree? ;-)

-- Alyona Lompar has posted her Ukrainian translation of the first ten chapters of The Uplift War.

--  A cool short video about a woman who wakes up in prison and gets ahold of the gun from PORTAL.

-- Okay, slightly political: but this is important. It shows why those who benefit from “culture war” paint all sides as intransigent, unreasonable dogmatists.  See how I weighed in on this topic for 20 years, via my “questionnaire” that pokes at many of the assumptions that underlay ideology. Yes, even yours.

-- A new massively multiplayer game announced... one with real science and possibility... NASA's Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond. Set in the year 2035, you will embark on an adventure into space, Mars, the asteroid belt and the outer planets. You will uncover secrets about a threat to civilization as we know it. Here are some notes on the upcoming game:

•Real science, technology, engineering, mathematics and physics content is infused throughout the AMMB universe.

• Astronauts may pick from several character classes, including several types of Engineer, Physicists, and Pilots.

• AMMB is currently being developed using the Unreal Engine 3 platform.

• A playable beta is expected in December 2012.

• NASA sponsored the selection in the MMO competition, and Project Whitecard and WisdomTools comprise the winning team!

Hope it does well. It'd be nice to see some sci fi that celebrates our common adventure in civilization, instead of taking the cheap shots we keep seeing from both right and left.

Surveillance and Accountability

Taking it easy on the big socio-political stuff, this time. Prepare for cool bits of science, etc...with just a hint of provocation!

First, for a garrulous ramble that will take you from Pericles to Popper to Pluto - mostly focusing on transparency and accountability and re-learning the art of political pragmatism - here's a recent podcast interview I gave on Surprisingly Free about the future of freedom.  A couple of times I even pause to inhale!

==Surveillance and Accountability==

Through its new “Finder” program, the the intelligence community’s way-out research shop, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) says that it is looking for ways to geolocate (a fancy word for “locate” that implies having coordinates for a place) images by extracting data from the images themselves and using this to make guesses about where they were taken.

More and more digital cameras today don’t just take pictures but also capture what is called  — often referred to as data about data — that can include everything from when the picture was taken to what kind of camera was used to where the it was taken. This metadata, often stored in a format called , can be used by different programs to understand different aspects of the image — and also by intelligence analysts to understand different aspects of the user who took it, and the people who are in it. Like who they are, what they are doing, and where and when they did it.

Yep, it will be a real Big Brother world... unless WE get all these powers too.  In that case, vibrant participatory democracy and citizen action will ensure we can look back at the mighty.  They’ll still see more than we can.  But if we stay anywhere close, then we’ll stay free.  Side-benefit... our protectors shouldn’t mind!  A secular trend toward a more open world may inconvenience them in the short term. But their mission will be more likely, overall, to succeed.

For updates on this timely topic…see a collection of links at: The Transparent Society: Privacy and Accountability in an Age of Increasing Surveillance.

For those of you who enjoyed the vividly entertaining - if somewhat biased - “Rap War between Hayek and Keynes” - it has been taken to Fight of the Century: Part II of an ongoing and enlightening (if grossly oversimplifying) series.  In fact, I am a fan/critic of both of these geniuses, who made major contributions. My one quibble is that it says nothing about the FOLLOWERS of Hayek vs those of Keynes. Alas, those who proclaim Hayek tend to use him to justify things he never would have gone along with, like the fostering of a vast oligarchy-caste. Keynes, too, has some dogmatic followers. But most tend to be pragmatist meddlers who modify as facts come in. (e.g. Bill Clinton paying down debt during good times.) Alas, this is where the real struggle lies, not in the core ideas of two brilliant men.

== Is your politics brain-predestined?==

No wonder some folks are waging a War on Science. ”Using data from MRI scans, researchers at the University College London found that self-described liberals have a larger anterior cingulate cortex--a gray matter of the brain associated with understanding complexity. Meanwhile, self-described conservatives are more likely to have a larger amygdala, an almond-shaped area that is associated with fear and anxiety.”  ... "It's very unlikely that actual political orientation is directly encoded in these brain regions." More work is needed to determine how these brain structures mediate the formation of political attitude."

Only now comes a more broad description of brain differences among political personality types, from Scientific American: The Ideology of No.  Share this one!

And finishing with a veer from the sublime (science) to the ridiculous... see a fascinating essay on Ayn Rand as the religious figure whose apostle-dad ruined his kids’ childhoods.  An interesting perspective on the most-distinctly Russian of all American gurus.

SMBC is a great online comic strip that often comments on scientific matters....but see especially this panel that makes you both laugh & think. Especially since I’m active in trying to talk foolish radio-exhibitionists out of exposing themselves (and us) compulsively to the cosmos.

==Addiction & Evolution ==

A vaccination against heroin addiction? Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues have created a vaccine cocktail that consists of a heroin-like hapten – a molecule that provokes the immune system – bound to a carrier protein and mixed with alum, an adjuvant that further stimulates the immune system. The vaccine trains the immune system to swarm heroin molecules with antibodies, as though the drug were an invasive organism, thereby sequestering the drug in the bloodstream before it can reach the brain.

Another group in Baltimore (NIDA) gave rodent addicts a drug that binds the CB-2 cannabinoid receptors in the brain, inhibiting dopamine activity and thereby blunting the cocaine high.
Mice who received the anti-cocaine drug pushed the cocaine lever less frequently and did not scurry around as much as their high peers.  Of course all of this relates to one of my ongoing interests... the general notion that addiction is a process that we got from evolution.

==Science in the News==

NASA's WISE mission found a 'Trojan' asteroidsharing Earth's orbit. We've used other "lagrange" positions (sunward and spaceward) for telescopes. But the trojan spots -60degrees ahead or behind- could hold valuable rocks, predictably accessible and sources of great wealth.

Are biologists ready to "make" life? By some measures, they have! Other steps - self-replicating and evolving molecules - seem to say we're getting very close to that 'Frankenstein' spark that separates inanimate from living. Fascinating article.

Recent films... No, I haven’t been to see the one with clever apes.  I suppose I’m missing a beat, by not publishing an article about Uplift and the dismal Hollywood reflex of despising science.  On the other hand, I recommend the film SOURCE CODE. Not bad for very low-budget sci fi. Science isn’t evil and the gimmicks make a little sense.

Deserving your support... A bipartisan political action committee called Ben Franklin’s List, aims to help engineers and scientists need to win office. Now, among the 435 members of the House include one physicist, 6 engineers, and 22 people with medical training. Shameful for an advanced civilization. (Did you know almost all the leaders of China started as engineers? Ponder that.) The "war on science" must stop.

And disturbing -- 20 million hectares of the best farmland in Africa have been sold by government out from under local farmers to companies from rich countries, notably China and Saudi Arabia to produce food for export back home.

Some of these visions of tomorrow are as bad as the sarcastically-cynical writer of the article yells... and I think people will not want to touch all those touch screens other people have been touching.  There are lots of other ways to do augmented reality.  Still. dive into the article and play the videos! (All right, #4  #2 and #1 are pretty dumb. But #5 and #3 have real content.)

A very beautiful short film -- winner of a competition restricted to six lines of dialog. Have a look!

And now a swerve into painful humor! See the annual Bulwer-Lyton contest for deliberately BAD WRITING!

Food/medicines/industry use beef/pork gelatin with some allergy & other probs. Now yeast with inserted human genes make better gelatin! "Human derived.". Is it vegetarian? Vegan? Cannibalism? Offer it to zombies or vampires? Oh, the commercials...