Politics of Science...of Hypocrisy... and Transparency

 Several off-angle political threads, this time. Simultaneously partisan yet contrary, ornery and proudly free of the stupid “left-right axis.” Stay tuned next time, though, for an important one -- the Wager Challenge.

== Start with science ==

Now is the time to begin a hard push for the 2012 candidates to participate in a debate on science and technology matters, during the coming electoral season.  Make this an issue!  Shoe that you (you-personally) consider this to be a vital matter, and not just for the presidential candidates!

The one thing that will correlate with future U.S. success, more than any other, will be whether we become - once again - a scientifically-oriented, ambitiously pragmatic, problem solving nation.

Seriously, can you picture America being led by a science ignoramus? (Please, no obvious comments about recent history!)

If we get enough ground swell for this science debate to happen, we might see it every election, and scare the ignorami off entirely.  Please do check out the Science Debate site and actually sign-on. Press the issue.

See also: Unscientific America: Denying Science at Our Peril

== Shake that Etch-a-Sketch! ==  

Sure enough, as expected, the day after poll figures showed him gaining in Pennsylvania -  his last big primary to clinch the GOP nomination - Mitt Romney began his much-expected scurry-to-the-center. "We're Republicans and Democrats in this campaign, but we're all connected with one destiny for America...” and “We have a president who I think is a nice guy, but he spent too much time at Harvard, perhaps, or maybe just not enough time working in the real world."

Not exactly the red meat he was tossing to the party’s hard core, till very recently.  (Also, as the LA Times pondered: It is a potentially self-defeating line of attack: Romney spent four years at Harvard, receiving a law degree and an MBA; Obama spent three years there, graduating from the law school. Also, three of Romney's five sons attended Harvard Business School.)

Heck, while we’re at it... will the real Mitt Romney please stand up?  A funky funny video mash.

More intellectually diverting... see the "Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney," a very clever political spoof by a writer who has clearly consumed WAY too many pop-sci articles about quantum mechanics!  I especially liked the “principle uncertainty principle.”  Just when you think he must run out of QM parallels, he tunnels thru to more.

== If only we were still like this ==

“Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability; instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.”
-- Alexis de Tocqueville, writing about the national character he observed in Democracy in America.  

In truth... millions of us still are like this!  It is the mentality of folks who like good science fiction.

== Ah Transparency ==

Robert Wright‘s column in The Atlantic ponders how the Zimmerman-Martin tragedy might have gone very differently, if both men wore Google Glasses, video recording their encounter to the Cloud.  Awareness that there are witnesses affects human behavior, and even if it didn’t, we’d know exactly what happened.  Wright ponders this cogently - citing my nonfiction book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to choose between Privacy and Freedom? - and goes on to ponder the downsides.  The potential that such records might be misused either by a Big Brother state or by hundreds of millions of nosy-oppressive “little brothers.”

He is correct to worry we are returning to the classic human condition that reigned in villages of old, wherein everybody knew everything about everybody else.  You might be safer from some kinds of random violence by strangers.  But those villages were also oppressed by the feudal lord and local harpy-gossips, who knew everything about you - and how to use it against you.

Our modern notions of anonymity and privacy stem in part from knowing how easily that cozy old village can turn sour.

Is this the kind of Global Village we’ll see, when everyone on Earth wears Augmented Reality Spectacles, or “specs”?  (As portrayed in my new novel Existence.)  Are we doomed by unstoppable omniscience technology to see ourselves trapped in spirals of ever-steepening, conformity-enforcing judgmentalism?

Not necessarily. in The Transparent Society I refer folks to the popular 1960s song Harper Valley PTA, which illustrates the inherent power of sousveillance, or looking back at the mighty.  There is already very strong evidence that it can let us have the good aspects of the village, and eliminate the bad in a true Positive Sum Game.  But only if the power of reciprocal accountability is true, and no mirage.

That is the critical matter before us.  The omni-vision provided by “specs” is coming, like it or not.  But we still have time to make this universal light truly empowering to average folk to protect their personal space and eccentricity, granting them one special capability, above all other godlike traits. The ability to be left alone.

== More on this. Reciprocality can be a bitch ==

What goes around comes around.  See how the landlord of an abortion clinic politely, but effectively, turned the tables on protesters who started targeting his 11 year old daughter.

A good example of reciprocality at work. Alas though, things keep getting worrisome.  I began writing The Transparent Society back in 1987, when I lived in Britain and witnessed the bare beginnings of the U.K.’s love affair with massive police surveillance.  Now that country is exporting the technologies to oppressive regimes around the world. Privacy International, which monitors the use of surveillance technology, claims equipment being exported includes devices known as "IMSI catchers" that masquerade as normal mobile phone masts and identify phone users and malware – software that can allow its operator to control a target's computer, while allowing the interception to remain undetected.

Want to see the latest salvo, fired by those who want society to go back to feudalism?  Conservatives are arming up for their war on public universities, trying to de-fund them, destroy them, and replace them with for-profit colleges. Seriously, it is even a slogan.  “Defund public universities.” If this is what conservatism has become, then we know what that whirring sound is: the spinning in Barry Goldwater's grave.

== The Good News on U.S. Energy Independence ==

Not only has the United States reduced oil imports from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries by more than 20 percent in the last three years, it has become a net exporter of refined petroleum products like gasoline for the first time since the Truman presidency. The natural gas industry, which less than a decade ago feared running out of domestic gas, is suddenly dealing with a glut so vast that import facilities are applying for licenses to export gas to Europe and Asia. ...  This surge is hardly without consequences!  But the turnaround may buy time to move to more sustainable energy sources.  And it may prove a factor in this year’s U.S. elections.

== Next time... the Wager Challenge! ==

I plan to offer a silver bullet for Culture War.  Oh, it won't solve our current political insanity, but it should offer sensible, fact-oriented folks like you and me a way to corner those loonies of the far-left and the entire-right who have transformed political discourse in the United States from a matter of pragmatic negotiation into outright Civil War.  Maybe even a way to get some of them to shut the &$!# up.

Come back next time for the Wager Challenge!

Unscientific America -- Denying Science at Our Peril

Increasingly, scientific consensus is failing to influence public policy. Facts, statistics and data appear insufficient to change highly politicized minds... and science has started scrutinizing why.

Alas now, this topic inevitably devolves down to our screwy American politics. And while (as I avow repeatedly) every political wing has its anti-science flakes, growing mountains of evidence suggest that one wing has gone especially frenzied in an anti-scientific snit. Or else (as that wing contends) science itself has become corrupted, top to bottom, rendering "evidence" suspect or moot. Let's examine both possibilities.

Chris Mooney, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, has a new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Don't Believe in Science, in which he describes how firmly some of our neighbors - even moderately well-educated ones - now cling to aphorisms, assertions and just-so stories in order to clutch a politically motivated view - or mis-view - of scientific data.  Misinformation persists – and propagates – about the dangers of vaccinations, the hazards of nuclear energy, the credibility of creation vs. evolution, and the preponderance of data supporting global warming. In case after politically-redolent case, we find that evidence has a limited power to persuade on hot button issues where deep emotions are involved.

I agree with Mooney that this delusion-conviction effect has done grievous harm to our once-scientific and rational nation. And anyone would have to be deaf, blind, and in hysterical denial not to see these trends operating, in tsunami proportions, among our Republican neighbors.

Still, let’s be fair. There are cases of conviction-delusion on the left, as well. Just look at some fantastically illogical purist stances over the nature-vs-nurture argument, in which leftists hew to absolutist positions based entirely on what is politically correct and dogmatically convenient, never bothering to notice that they claim human behaviors are completely uncontrolled by biology... except when they are completely controlled by biology.

No amount of evidence can alter the way fervent believers want the world to be. Another example, the tense alliance between liberals and leftists  crumbles over issues like the careful restart of nuclear energy, something the liberals are now willing to cautiously resume.

The key difference is not whether such delusionally subjective-selective perception occurs on both political extremes - it does. No, what should matter to us all is how thoroughly the reflexive-denialists on one side control an entire movement, political party and power complex.... and ran the entire country... off a cliff. Meanwhile, the subjectivity junkies on the other side are marginalized (if loud.)

Mooney describes in detail how bad it is - that millions of our neighbors deem facts to be malleably ignorable. Though soundly refuted by scientific studies, angry parents continue to believe their children acquired autism through vaccinations: "Where do they get their 'science' from? From the Internet, celebrities, other frantic-angry parents, and a few non-mainstream researchers and doctors who continue to challenge the scientific consensus, all of which forms a self-reinforcing echo chamber of misinformation," writes Mooney, noting that for every five hours of cable news, just one minute is devoted to science. In 2009, 15 year old U.S. students ranked 17th out of 34 developed countries in science. A firm foundation in science is fundamental to modern citizenship as well as our ability to innovate and succeed in a global economy.

In fact, the “war on science” has ballooned long past any mere attack upon the credibility of researchers and professors.  It now manifests as a general “war on all knowledge castes” -- including teachers, economists, journalists, civil servants, medical doctors, skilled labor, judges, diplomats... everyone (in other words) who actually knows a lot. All are routinely attacked on you-know-which-murdochian-"news"-network.

Science itself is turning attention to this problem and things are not looking good.  According to one study (via Mooney): “The result was stunning and alarming. The standard view that knowing more science, or being better at mathematical reasoning, ought to make you more accepting of mainstream climate science simply crashed and burned.” It was found that conservatives who knew more tended to dig in their heels against new facts or budging their views, using what they already knew as bulwarks against changing their minds. But this did not hold for the other side. Educated liberals who were pre-disposed to be suspicious toward nuclear power nevertheless were adaptable when shown clear scientific data assuaging their fears. (I would love to see this experiment done on liberals re: nature-vs-nurture issues!)

Mooney concludes that even education fails to serve as “antidote to politically biased reasoning.”

Take a look at this excerpt of Mooney's latest book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality (due out in April). It shows that our current Culture War is not about left vs right at all.  It is about two very different sets of personalities and worldviews.

See also: The Case for a Scientific Nation

== It's not all bad news ==

Oh, heck, want a positive note? It may be possible to overcome this sickness, enflamed deliberately by Roger Ailes and his crew. Stanford Prof. James Fishkin and his colleagues ran an experiment in which a full spectrum of Californians were brought together and asked to soberly deliberate on state problems, negotiating a range of solutions. With their minds focused by sober responsibility, rabid partisans suddenly displayed flexibility, curiosity, willingness to learn and ... (yes even the Republicans)... a readiness to negotiate with their opposing neighbors, without calling them satanic.

Fishkin and his colleague, Bruce Ackerman, call for a new holiday for each Presidential election year, Deliberation Day (to supplement Presidents' Day) when "people throughout the country will meet in public spaces and engage in structured debates about issues..." to revitalize a spirit of open communication and negotiation in democracy.

== But the bad is still plenty bad ==

All too often politicians use bad science to justify their political agenda. Both right and left have favorite conspiracy theories about Global Climate Change (which I've discussed in Climate Skeptics and Climate Deniers). On global warming, Rick Santorum said, "I for one never bought the hoax."  But consider…which is more likely: A massive conspiracy involving 90% of scientists worldwide -- or oil companies spending vast sums to sway opinion, and influence public policy to protect their profits? Decide for yourself.

In any case, most of the methods for reducing greenhouse gas emissions involve increasing our energy efficiency and stimulating development of new forms of energy -- things we ought to be doing anyway to remain competitive and current in an ever-changing global economy.

Oh, please... you Brits over there... nail those guys who have done so much harm to America. Whose family name reminds one of the underground-dwelling cannibals of Wells's novel The Time Machine.

==Campaign Finance: Follow the Money==

Talking Points Memo

Compare numbers of campaign donations under $200 and those over $200 between Obama, Paul and Romney. Who has a broad range of support? Who is the populist candidate?  A fascinating comparison... especially when you add in super-pacs, whose average contributors (for Romney) have been in the $100,000 range.  Citizens United, anyone?

Do you think we’ve been exaggerating the degree that the super-uber-rich are buying influence in politics?  Just one small group of immensely wealthy GOP donors...almost all of whom attend twice-yearly secret meetings hosted by the billionaire Koch Brothers -- have already sent gushers of cash to Super-Pacs supporting Romney, Gingrich and even Ron Paul. We’re talking upwards of One Hundred Million Dollars... and it is only March.  Tell me... is there any red line that even your fox-crazy uncle must decide is intolerable?  Can we stop this?

WhoWhatWhy reports that that Saudi prince Walid bin Talal - Rupert Murdoch's top partner at Fox - has invested heavily in Twitter.  An event coinciding with Twitter's recent announcement that it would cooperate with censorship of any content deemed "illegal" in any country, whatsoever.  WhoWhatWhy can get a bit "over-eager" but these facts speak for themselves.

Iceland shows the way. If the European (and American) debt crises seem endless, with Big Banks the only relentless winners, then read up about Iceland, given up for dead after their foolish bankers (who called themselves “geniuses”) leveraged the country into tsunamis of red ink.  What this article doesn’t talk about is the “gender aspect”.  In effect,, the women of Iceland simply took over.  Grabbed the reins of politics and finance out of the hands of their “genius” husbands and sent them back to the fishing boats, where they belonged.

Following those rumors of a brokered GOP convention?  A lot of simmering talk about drafting... Jeb Bush.  This survey of Bush Family "coincidences" may be a little biased... but the facts do speak.