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!

Fatal flaws of our enlightenment?

I post this heading out the door to speak tonight at the California Democratic Party Convention, in San Diego. And yes, they even invite registered Republicans, when they have important ideas to share. Or at least vital questions. For example....

Is our Great Experiment in danger of coming to an end? Certainly, the world seems filled with forces pushing for Government of the people, by the people, for the people to perish from the Earth.

Ezra Klein summarizes the book: “How Democracies Die,” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Klein’s appraisal is cogent and very important reading in its own right. I urge you to find time for it, even if (like me) you lack time for the source material. As you might guess, I agree that Donald Trump is “not the disease” but a symptom, top-to-bottom. Here’s an excerpt:

‘“2017 was the best year for conservatives in the 30 years that I’ve been here,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week. “The best year on all fronts. And a lot of people were shocked because we didn’t know what we were getting with Donald Trump.”

"‘The best year on all fronts.' Think about that for a moment. If you want to know why congressional Republicans are opening an assault on the FBI in order to protect Trump, it can be found in that comment. This was a year in which Trump undermined the press, fired the director of the FBI, cozied up to Russia, baselessly alleged he was wiretapped, threatened to jail his political opponents, publicly humiliated his attorney general for recusing himself from an investigation, repeatedly claimed massive voter fraud against him, appointed a raft of unqualified and occasionally ridiculous candidates to key positions, mishandled the aftermath of the Puerto Rico hurricane, and threatened to use antitrust and libel laws against his enemies.

‘And yet McConnell surveyed the tax cuts he passed and the regulations he repealed and called this not a mixed year for his political movement, not a good year for his political movement, but the best year he’d ever seen.’

I also agree that we face an existential moment in our experiment in Democracy. Every generation of Americans have experienced attempts by the oligarchs of that era to suborn our institutions and laws and cheat, in order to restore the standard human pattern of feudalism. These attempts correlate with phases of our recurring Civil War. 

But never before has a large share of the wealth elite chosen to foster open war against every single knowledge or fact-using profession, from science, teaching, medicine and journalism to the "deep state" FBI, intel agencies and military officer corps. This time it is all-or-nothing. Perhaps because the gnome families behind this putsch know that the Enlightenment Experiment is on the verge of its greatest-ever successes.

Klein – and the authors of  “How Democracies Die” do suffer, however, from myopia. They give examples like 1930s Germany and more-recent Venezuela, for how democracies can fail amid whimpers, or else cheers of either right wing or left-wing populism. But this ignores the failure modes that ended earlier trial-runs, such as Periclean Athens and the Florentine Republic.

The lesson overall is that experiments in flat-open-fair -- or diamond-shaped --civilizations always result in spectacular creativity, fecundity, error-correction, science, art and unleashing of talent... but they are also unstable. Beset by oligarchic attacks and by cyclical waves of citizen immaturity-impulsiveness, they have always -- in the past -- succumbed and collapsed back into classic, pyramidal hierarchies of power. That, certainly, is the lesson -- to give up on any hope of wise democracy -- being pushed in confederate media and by world despots, allied in the cause of bringing down the West. 

It is the preaching of despair and demigod worship conveyed within science fiction by authors like Orson Scott Card. And by cyclical history buffs of both the mad far-left and the treasonous entire-right. 

Only... isn't 250 years a record for such an experiment to last? And, having restored it and re-invigorated it many times -- e.g. during the "Greatest Generation" -- can't we confidently imagine doing it again?

== Lift the banner of the Union ==

Even more biting – for those of you who weren’t angry and riled-up enough – is this essay in The Atlantic - Boycott the Republican Party, by Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes -- asserting that the only way to save American Conservatism… and possibly the Republican Party … is to burn their political power to the ground, so that perhaps a phoenix of adult-sane conservatism can rise from the ashes. “The rule of law is a threshold value in American politics, and a party that endangers this value disqualifies itself, period.” 

Of course the gnomes and their servant-shills wage war against all fact-using professions because those are the “elites” who stand in the way of return to aristocratic rule by… well, imbeciles, of course. Because exactly what do these people think will happen when they make enemies of all the folks who know stuff and can invent and build everything from lasers to nukes to genetic codes to AI? How, exactly, is this supposed to work out for you?

In my novel Existence, I portray a much smarter aristocracy trying to forge a deal, instead, with the “boffin elites.” But, of course, just like the inventor-entrepreneur billionaires like Musk, Bezos, and Gates, the fact-folks will likely have no part of such treason.

See (below) how great new candidates are rising from the "fact communities" -- from science and from the military officer corps. But first...

== An alternative view… called “optimism” ==

Let's swing to a different tome that Bill Gates has gone all-out about, calling Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, by Steven Pinker, “My new favorite book of all time.”  

Enlightenment Now is the follow-up to Steven Pinker’s groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Nature, which angered both the far-left and the entire-mad-right by showing how especially violence - but also other metrics of progress - have improved everywhere that the overall progressive agenda has taken hold. Here, Prof Pinker presents the big picture of human progress: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.

Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? “Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.” - review in Kurzweil News.

== And optimism mixed with paranoia? ==

Edward Snowden pushing a new privacy-sousveillance tech called “Haven” that lets folks with cell-phones to apply transparency at the powerful while protected against being discovered. The good news: this Haven thing is open source, offering some small hope that it might not turn into a snake that bites the user. Maybe. The bad news? This is really vague!  For example, only at the very beginning of the video, when Snowden says “spare android phone,” do we get a hint that this is not an app for your regular pocket-robot, but rather something you can use your old phone for, outside of the tightly controlled “networks.”

Also, philosophically, while I am a big believer in sousveillance and deem this likely to be helpful, especially in states and regions where power oppresses, it is nevertheless based upon an assumption and desire to counter asymmetries of transparency with your own asymmetries of transparency.  That is a dangerous game and not what I personally have fought for. Moreover, it's a game that’s unlikely the little guy will ever win for very long. Still, I hope some of you will join this Haven community and report back, from time to time.  I’d rather it were tried, than not.

== Fact people volunteers ==

Many of you recall my  essay calling for a "Year of Colonels". Well, Conor Lamb is everything (it seems) that I asked for, when I said we must run sane, pro-science and fact, purple ex-officers in every red district in America. Every State Assembly seat. Every State Senate, City Council and dogcatcher position.  This 33 year old retired Marine officer, federal prosecutor and devout Catholic has a chance to win a special election vs the GOP candidate (who's proclaiming "I'm more Trump than Trump!") in a solid-red district in Pennsylvania, where the former Republican rep had to resign... caught ordering his mistress to get an abortion.

If that means liberals in all those places will then have to negotiate with sane, decent, calm, science-respecting, rights-progressive, environmentally-responsible -- but temperamentally conservative crewcut types who sometimes go hunting -- instead of confronting today's insane, fact-hating traitor-shills of Rupert Murdoch... then live with that!

American conservatism won't die, but it can be shaken out of its current, nightmare fever or jibbering lunacy. Each of us must find one "ostrich" who might be wakened, and make him or her our mission.

A broad front... a Big Tent... and the intelligence to run the right people in each district... that's how the Union will win this phase (number 8) of the American Civil War against a risen Confederacy that's absolutely (as always) treason.

And here's a Mississippi biochemist who's also showing that fact folks can fight back.  

Step back from your suicidal putsch, oligarchs! If you succeed in bringing down the enlightenment experiment and "government by the people," you will reap ashes. We fact people know how to make and do stuff. As Bruce Banner put it:

"You won't like us when we're angry."

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

A while ago I offered up an in-depth exploration of the mythic system of modern science fiction, as illustrated in James Cameron's epic film Avatar, exposing how a very healthy reflex (cultural self-criticism) all-too often sours into something much less wholesome -- a mythology that western civilization is not improvable.  That our society's inherent vileness merits only self-loathing and despair.

Ironically, some of the most sincere voices in film and fiction, who push messages of progress, are instead undermining it by encouraging cynical gloom. Take my esteemed colleague in the craft of creating worlds, Charles Stross, whose popular blog is often on target when it comes to listing phenomena that push against any hope for continuing our Western Democratic Scientific Enlightenment. The failure modes that he lists are daunting and mostly very real... and tell only half the story...  

The other half -- how we got the freedom and other goodies that are in peril, in the first place -- almost never comes up, nor the many, many countervailing forces that we might use - as our ancestors used them - to keep the Enlightenment Experiment going.

Why this obsession with downer news? Well, for one thing, dire warnings are more useful than polyanna-pangloss-happy ravings! If I must choose - zero-sum - between extremes, then please do have the cynics come sit next to me! 

But zero-sum is deeply stupid and self-defeating. As is stylish cynicism, over the long run. Diagnosing a disease is most effective when it is accompanied by a confident determination to take action. And that, in turn, requires some sense of the body's strengths, as well as its weaknesses.

In this new series, I plan to show how this same syndrome  pervades academia and popular punditry. The overall result has been a shattering of confidence in our ability to improve, giving comfort to those who see no reason to improve, at all.

== The worst sin: admitting good news == 

Among the most important books of our era is Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) which presents voluminous statistical and other evidence to show that the cynical catechisms of both left and right are specious. 

The crux: there is enough good news in human affairs to merit some cautious optimism. As overall per-capita rates of violence plummet, worldwide (though not in hellish trouble spots)… as poverty declines and ever-larger fractions of the world’s children bring school books back to homes with electricity, clean water and plentiful food… and as ever increasing numbers of girls feel empowered over their own lives… the real question boils down to: 

“Why is such good news anathema — even rage-inducing — among zealots at all ends of the political spectrum?”

To be clear, Pinker and his supporters have never said “there has been some progress — therefore let’s all relax.” 

But that is what so many hear. And that perception is, in its own right, deeply sick.

The fear on the left is that any admission of real progress will sap the intensity of our passion to save the world. The dread on the right is even more intense -- that Pinker’s statistics will show past liberal and progressive efforts were, in large measure, responsible for this tentatively good news. 

Now please, look over those two sentences again. Don't skim. They are blatantly true, and reveal stunning psychoses spanning our so-called political “spectrum.” In fact, both sides are functionally insane. Especially liberals, for not seeing the simple sales-pitch they could start using:

“You see? Progressivism works! We’re halfway there! Of course, if we don’t double down and fix the rest, all of our hard-won gains will be lost and we’ll all die! But Pinker’s statistics show it’s possible! So yay Pinker. And let’s embrace optimism. Step up, with confidence, spurn the gloomists and naysayers, and double down on progress!”

That is what a few pragmatist liberals (the only sane political bloc left in the U.S.) do say! But at the far-left (very different from “liberals”) -- even the possibility of an agenda based on confidence and optimism is utterly anathema. And thus, they play into the hands of the even-more-sick right.

== Attacking Pinker ==

Pinker’s statistics are hard to refute, so how do the paladins of pessimism respond? In this article by John Gray from The Guardian - Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war -  Mr. Gray argues with deceitful tricks and outright lies. 

He starts by pointing out that Enlightenment philosophers like Locke and Voltaire — while demanding freedom for the common man, and definitions of citizenship an order of magnitude more inclusive than before — also muttered some statements that seem racist or bigoted or sexist, to modern ears. How monstrously vile…

... by which I mean vile of Gray. In judging sages of the past, the rule must be “did they try hard to push our horizons of inclusion wider than the assumptions under which they had been raised?” If they fought to enlarge tolerance and opportunity beyond what men and women of their times took for granted, then yes, they were heroes of “enlightenment” and not hypocrites, as manipulative cynics like Mr. Gray would have you believe.  

But let’s elaborate on that point, since it seems difficult for many to grasp. Should Abraham Lincoln be “outed” for sharing some racial stereotypes of his own upbringing and era? Sure, look at them in cold light. But also take the word of Frederick Douglass who observed such inconsistencies up close, in the most dramatic case where an imperfect hero ultimately delivered the goods, however deep his imperfections:

“Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” 

                   -Frederick Douglass 

Am I too harsh on Mr. Gray, for his assertion that enlightenment thinkers should have made leaps to perfection, instead of pushing humanity and humanism forward by incremental stages? (Increments far greater than all the cynics, like Mr. Gray, have ever accomplished, combined?) 

No, if anything I am being gentle, especially after Gray's loathsome trickery was quintupled — when he tried to fob off onto the Enlightenment all blame for Hitler and Stalin!

“You would never know, from reading Pinker, that Nazi “scientific racism” was based in theories whose intellectual pedigree goes back to Enlightenment thinkers such as the prominent Victorian psychologist and eugenicist Francis Galton. Such links between Enlightenment thinking and 20th-century barbarism are, for Pinker, merely aberrations, distortions of a pristine teaching that is innocent of any crime: the atrocities that have been carried out in its name come from misinterpreting the true gospel, or its corruption by alien influences. The childish simplicity of this way of thinking is reminiscent of Christians who ask how a religion of love could possibly be involved in the Inquisition. In each case it is pointless to argue the point, since what is at stake is an article of faith.”

Grrrr.  The number of calumnies in just those sentences is beyond count. And that wasn’t even the whole paragraph! 

Anyone who correlates Nazism and Stalinism - two fiercely repressive state religions and pyramidal-authoritarian despotisms - with anything other than a pair of frontal assaults by romanticism against the tolerant diversity of enlightenment empiricism, is either a supreme delusion-artist or an outright propagandist. The fact that actual scientists fled both the Nazi and the Communist hells as fact as they could, lending all their fiber to strengthening the democratic west, just might suggest that Germany and the USSR were using the term “scientific” as an incantation, far removed from the real thing. The very thing that their befuddled modern analogues -- romantics like Mr. Gray -- also confuse. 

Indeed, it was western science that utterly demolished the rationalizations used by those despotisms for their insane thuggery, as well as engendering the fecund creativity that allowed free citizenries to surge forward, leaving both fanatical religions in a cloud of dust.

In Nazism, Stalinism and subsequent ‘isms' we see howls of rage aimed directly at enlightenment. Those who currently denounce democratic decadence — ranging from ISIS to the rising plutocratic oligarchy's court apologists like Gray and Leo Strauss and Francis Fukayama — all rationalize that the experiment in citizen sovereignty is doomed to collapse from inherent contradictions, despite it having achieved — in two centuries — far more than all other social systems across all continents and 6000 years.  Combined.

 Hitler and Stalin openly declared contempt for our experiment and eagerness to end it, using methods rooted in the feudal satrapies that dominated human affairs across those 60 centuries. Trying to pin them on our enlightenment is an act of legerdemain so staggeringly dishonest as to win Mr. Gray a place in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

== Other calumnies ==

Likewise, Gray's notion that Enlightenment’s defenders deny the efficacy of the atom bomb at deterring war. Um? Of course deterrence played a role! But if this window of relative peace is to become permanent, we had better use it to make peace a habit. And despite your snarking, Mr. Gray, just talk to the millions of young people graduating from the world’s universities, every year, to see that altruism and empathy are spreading!  And that nearly all of your assertions are diametrically opposite to true.

Oh, but he goes on, and makes one actual, true statement: “If great powers have avoided direct armed conflict, they have fought one another in many proxy wars.”  

Yep!  Enlightenment is not a light switch.This is no fairy tale.  Justice and happy endings aren't guaranteed.  Martin Luther King Jr. did not promise the path would be linear, but an "arc" that will sweep toward justice only if most (not all) of us pull on it, like gravity.  

 Let me avow something that might (at first glance, please the mad Straussian neocons out there and upset goody-goody lefties, by admitting that some older, rougher tools were needed, in order to get us to these (tentatively) better days. Particularly a “pax” imperium — Pax Americana. And, like all such empires, PA made some awful, thuggish mistakes. Fewer than any other “pax” across 6000 years! PA presents history with a vastly better ratio of good deeds to bad, and Mr. Gray does not dare meet my offer of a wager over that. He knows I would own his house. 

But yes, we have stuff to atone-for.

Nevertheless, the defense umbrella of Pax Americana allowed half of Europe (and later all of it), much of Asia, and nearly all of the Western Hemisphere to spend the last 70 years allocating far, far lower fractions of their national wealth to armies and defense than any other peoples, across all of time. 

Please read again that last sentence and let it sink in. Across all of time, nations generally devoted half of their national wealth to war or defense, almost anywhere you look. Half. 

What was the average under Pax Americana? Two percent of GDP — that is how much the NATO countries are currently arguing over. A pittance that would be hilarious, if folks from any other era showed up to offer comment. 

The exception? The USA, which for a human lifespan has carried the more “normal” defense burden, protecting trade and general peace. And thereby empowered other nations to prosper. These aren’t just assertions. Refute them, if you can! (In the form, of a wager please: put real money on it.) You cannot.

Oh, but then, after dipping into a half-truth, Mr. Gray dives right back into full-lies. “While it is true that war has changed, it has not become less destructive.” 

Dang. Just dang. Um, has he watched even one historical documentary, ever, of any kind? Notice that Gray does not even try to back this up.  He armwaves assertions. He is the Fox News of cynicism.

Is his screed without value? In fact, Mr. Gray raised many cavils and modern problems.  We do live in a world still wracked with awful conflicts. The USA can hardly preach a pure morality tale while we have the world’s highest incarceration rates. And the oligarchic putsch that has deliberately re-ignited the American Civil War — destroying politics as a means of negotiated problem solving — is an act of treason that threatens to eviscerate the nation’s heart, its ability to deal with a future of onrushing change.  These and a myriad other vexing challenges merit our determined attention and passionately militant response!

Only please dig this, Mr. Gray.  It is not your relentlessly deliberate cheating and lying that I find despicable, but your intensely evident aim to denounce and undermine our belief that problems can be solved. By denying that any of our past efforts ever have solved any.

It is the jibbering insanity of today’s Far-Left, which makes that extremum (not moderate liberals) almost 10% as crazy as today’s Entire-Right.

Yes, that crazy.

==


Continue to Part II: Is Conflict Necessary for Human Advancement?

Was 2012 the "best year in the history of the world"? (Plus puzzlers and potpourri)

Most of you know that I have a reputation for optimism.  I find that irritating since, in fact, I have a rather low opinion of humanity and of our dismal historical record. I know the odds are against us, especially in a galaxy that seems devoid of voices.  Still... I find today's fashion for universal cynicism - spanning from left to right - to be not only tedious and dull, but fantastically unhelpful.  The Enlightenment, the best thing that our species or planet ever did, thrives on a confident, can-do, problem solving spirit. Not the sick drug of pessimistic sanctimony.

I've long pointed to work done by Prof. Steven Pinker and others, showing that inter-human violence has fallen steeply (on average and per capita) every decade since the end of World War II.  Civilization's moral compass has swerved in powerfully positive ways. Although the campaign to rid ourselves of racism, sexism and other sicknesses is far from done, those ancient ills were taken for granted in most cultures but are now driven into ill repute. As the environmentalist author of EARTH, I feel we'll become good planetary managers as much by learning from what we've started doing well, as from self-flagellation.

So I had to pause and wonder why I was irked by an article in The Spectator (UK), blithely declaring that "2012 was the best year ever! Never in the history of the world has there been less hunger, less disease and more prosperity." It's not that any single thing the author wrote was wrong: the campaign to halve world poverty reached its goal seven years early, for example, in 2008, and no one said a thing. The list of good news is long, amazing and encouraging. The author is right to point out that gloom blinds us to hope.

Still, as a "contrarian" I find occasional outbursts of fizzy optimism just as grating as the much more common habit of grotesquely thoughtless grumpiness. The optimists are more-right and more-helpful, by far! Still, do read this article. He's completely right!  Yet the aroma of smug satisfaction is almost as bothersome to me as the overwhelming stench of  me-too cynicism rising from millions.  We have grownup work to do.  Both sides... grow up.

== Interesting Miscellany ==

The rest of this posting sweeps up a wide melange of miscellaneously enticing items: enjoy.

My friend Kevin Kelly offers a fascinating perspective on the meaning of General Transparency in the era of YouTube.  "Cameras are becoming ubiquitous, so as our collective recorded life expands, we'll accumulate thousands of videos showing people being struck by lightning. When we all wear tiny cameras all the time, then the most improbable accident, the most superlative achievement, the most extreme actions of anyone alive will be recorded and shared around the world in real time. Soon only the most extraordinary moments of our 6 billion citizens will fill our streams. So henceforth rather than be surrounded by ordinariness we'll float in extraordinariness."  And "Over time this extremism accumulates. When the improbable dominates the archive to the point that it seems as if the library contains ONLY the impossible, then these improbabilities don't feel as improbable."

See a review of Jared Diamond's new book:  The World Until Yesterday. The span and thrust are pretty clear -- it seems likely to be much less important a contribution than Guns, Germs and Steel or Collapse, at least on the grand level of sweeping ideas.

In portraying the wisdom -- and some systematic errors -- of tribal societies, Diamond comes down as he did in the disappointing final chapters of Collapse, deeply skeptical of modernity and its prospects for achieving respect-worthy civilization. He expresses nostalgia for the primitive that - while sometimes insightful and willing to perceive warts - can also, in some campus communities, turn into a fetish. Indeed, in EXISTENCE I portray him as an archetype for one variety of renunciationism -- a philosophy you'll be hearing more about as we head toward the mid-century crisis of choice -- whether our path will be forward or back.

Still, I always recommend Jared Diamond's works. He is a major thinker and you will be broadened. Though it's rare to come across wisdom as fine as Jonas Salk's succinct: "Be a good ancestor."

=== Fun numeralogy and destiny ==

Interesting facts about 2013:
- first year with four distinct digits since 1987
- first since 1432 with four consecutive digits!

The secret bad day? January 13, 2014 could be viewed as the 13th day of the 13th month of the 13th year.

Oh but the biggest deal?  The Fourteenth Year.  You'll be hearing more about this from me.  The fact that the 20th Century "began" in all its character, in 1914… as the 19th Century began with Napolean's defeat in 1814.  It is a daunting trend to contemplate, if you let it really sink in.

Heck let's spread our sources wider from Jared Diamond and glance at another take that's relevant:  Joseph Tainter's (1990) book: The Collapse of Complex Societies contains Tainter's theory within the title. Tainter appears to take the view that the social complexity of major urban cultures creates the seeds of collapse through an inevitable process. Rising populations, over-used resources, growing stratification of classes, difficulties of allocation and management, all of these problems can be solved by innovation and determination. But unlike Toynbee, who sees ongoing renewal in a culture's "creative minority," Tainter says that this renewal process gets harder and harder to maintain, with ever diminishing rates of return.  In this dour view - somewhat of a cross between Marx and Spengler - Tainter seems to agree with Diamond that our sole hope for long term stability is to rein in ambition, to reduce complexity, even if that requires some degree of suppression...

If you've read my review of Collapse, you know how highly I think of Diamond's scholarly efforts to warn us of problems… and how little I think of his proposed solutions.

Me? When it comes to prescriptions, I'll go with Toynbee.  We need a vigorous society, not a cowardly one.  A culture that invests eagerly in its creative minority.

== Making a new world ==

So, is the "maker movement" going to rescue American manufacturing independence... and civilization in general, as some  tech-utopians not predict? (And as I depict in my graphic novel TINKERERS.)  Have a look at a very thoughtful essay in Technology Review that considers some factors that the tech-transcendentalists - in their zeal to believe - may have missed.

While we're on new worlds:  "Dio" is a new endeavor by Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, to do something I had been aiming at with my Holocene invention, empowering folks and businesses to create their own virtual worlds.  It looks pretty crude so far... and could definitely be vastly improved with my patents... but I'd be interested in what people think, who try it out.

Why Silicon Valley innovation has stalled. A fascinating article that uses a simple metaphor to show what's wrong with the current Startup-VC Mentality. "Unlike medical research, or for that matter microprocessor engineering, the current internet space is largely driven by people trying to make a fast buck as opposed to people working at the edge of the envelope." ... "People aren’t driving new technological innovations so much as they’re creating convenience models.... There’s nothing wrong with entrepreneurs seizing a business opportunity, but what is disconcerting is how this entire segment has convinced themselves that they are on the cutting edge of innovation and have all the answers. Using the medical analogy, the current environment in the internet space essentially tells people that they will make more money as a pre-med dropout opening clinics than as a serious researcher looking for a cure for cancer."

Tell me about it.  I have patented several dozen fundamental interaction modalities that would enhance online communications. But they do not fit the "massage what's familiar" mindset of those who have made billions milking the obvious and plucking the low-hanging fruit.

Ah but want good news? Sales of super-efficient and durable LED light bulbs are skyrocketing as prices fall, posing a new challenge for manufacturers. LED lights offer higher profit margins, but because they can last for decades, people will be buying fewer bulbs — of any sort. The Energy Information Administration estimates that total light bulb sales will fall by almost 40 percent by 2015, to just under a billion from 1.52 billion bulbs, and continue their decline to about 530 million by 2035, with LEDs making up a steadily increasing portion of the market. New versions even accept bluetooth commands to adjust color or output on demand.  (We've spent to LED our highest use areas and will shift each room as prices keep falling.  This is an ingredient in world-saving.

Do you tire of videos everybody says you HAVE to watch?  This kite-flying display -  Romancing the Wind - is spectacular... by a Canadian in his 80s. More sublime than you ever could have expected.

Danger 5 is the most creative comedy I've seen since Coupling. (Sort of WW2 in the 1960's with cheesy special effects).  Then go to hulu.com and watch the 2 episodes they have up. New ones added every Sunday.  "Team, your mission is to stop the flow of weapons into France and above all, Go Kill Hitler!"

Ooooh I am so so tempted by this... Father hires virtual hitman to assassinate deadbeat son in online video game. Get off! Go outside and throw a ball.

== More Marvelous Miscellany ==

A contemplation of Shakespeare and Galileo..both born in 1564 (450 years ago next year).Galileo supposedly the day Michaelangelo died.  And Newton born the year Galileo died.  Ah cue Rod Serling.

Kickstarter projects come in a wide range of ambitions.  Here is one at the high end. Motion capture maven Tracy McSheery is participating in a project to create an animated movie: Tower of the Dragon, with just $50,000 of startup funds. See" Features some cool freebies.

Here's a short film Tom Munnecke did a while back about Jonas Salk's "good ancestor theme."

Speaking of ancestors, the appropriately named CRACKED site has distilled why we do not need social status in society to be something that's inherited (as ruined 99% of human cultures.)  See: The 5 Most Hilariously Insane Rulers of All Time. Though poorly-written and historically flakey in spots, it is still tragically funny. Even if it leaves out the worst loony monarchs, by far. Try Victoria's grandsons "Nicky" and "Willy." Time travelers... skip Hitler and take out those two. If the Kaiser and Czar had had "accidents" in 1913, Adolph would've become a minor animation frame painter in Disney's 1930s Star Wars studio.

This is exactly what the Age of Amateurs should and will be about. A woman who is a professional hairdresser became fascinated with images of Roman and Greek women in complex tresses.  She recreated scores of them for an archaeological journal, proving that they had been real, held by needle and thread, rather than wigs. There was no guild opposition to her contribution, only enthusiastic help... as I have found when I published papers about Neoteny, anthropology, addiction and so on.

== And a final sweep of coolstuff ==

The British Interplanetary Society offers a lovely retrospective on pioneering space artists including the great Chesley Bonestall.

Zoom in and find yourself! A census dotmap of every person counted by the US & Canadian censuses.

Askimo TV is an interesting concept... a collation of pod video interviews with experts on a wide array of curiosity topics. What do you think of it?

ouch... The website "SSRI Stories: Antidepressant Nightmares" offers a sortable database of more than 4,800 newspaper articles, scientific journal reports, and TV news items linking antidepressant use to cases of extreme violence. Not taking sides.  Just so you know.

Petra Haden's amazing a capella renditions of movie scores... scroll down and play the whole thing!

Raspberry Pi is a palm-sized full computer - announced in 2012 (here among other places) selling for under $50 --  for a bare circuit board that runs free linux on a 700Mhz processor using an SD card instead of hard drive, but with two USB and one ethernet ports to let you link in your stuff. According to tech-biz guru Doug Hornig: "Interest ran so high in the first days that it stalled the sites of the shops selling the computers. Moreover, that demand has proven durable. Premier Farnell, one of the two authorized manufacturers of the product (RS Components is the other), announced in January that it has sold more than a half-million units. RS Components, which took 100,000 pre-orders on day one, is apparently selling them equally briskly, so it's likely that there are now a million of the devices out there."

A whole amateur maker trend is finding uses for the things and they have abounded with an app store and "Raspberry Jams" - meetups of enthusiasts.  Google is giving 15,000 to schools in the UK.  Competitors in the under $100 space to lookup: Mini X, Oval Elephant, Cubieboard, and Olimex.  Hornig adds: "It just might be that manufacturers of these microdevices are sowing the seeds for the next crop of young hackers (who will increasingly come from the developing world, as all of its nascent talents are released)."

My friend and Colleague Matt Pallamary has written some wonderful things.  Now it seems that this year’s production from Austin based aerialist group Sky Candy is based on Matt's novel Land Without Evil, which tells the tale of the physical and spiritual journey a Guarani Indian man undertakes in order to lead his people to a mythical place of peace.  Austin Public television also offers a cool peek at the performance.

Want to see the effects of Twitter on the dumbing down of people?  Go to Google and type in "How can u" and see their suggested continuations.  Then type in "How can an individual"  'nuff said.