Altruism, Optimism and Worries...Many Thought-Snacks!

It's the (Not the) End of the World Cruise! Come with us to sea and celebrate the world Not coming to an end during the "Mayan Millennium" winter solstice in 2012 with parties, special guests & speakers, including astronaut Steve Hawley, Authors David Brin and Robert Sawyer, plus several renowned scientists.  Featuring snorkeling, a costume party, fascinating talks, and a visit to the Mayan Tulum ruins on Dec. 21, 2012. During the week that some think will be the world’s last, join us on a more enlightened, and enlightening, week-long cruise in the beautiful Caribbean.  (Also, what better place to be, either way?) Don’t be... left behind!

And fer gosh-dern sakes, don’t have the singularity without us, while we’re away!

“A relentless addiction to indignation may be one of the chief drivers of obstinate dogmatism and possibly the ultimate propellant behind the current culture war." The New York Times previews a groundbreaking scientific-medical tome -- PATHOLOGICAL ALTRUISM (edited by Barbara Oakley) -- about ways that one of humanity's highest traits can sometimes go terribly wrong. (I wrote two of the papers, but don't worry: most of the contributing doctors and researchers are actually qualified!) A fascinating topic.  And long past-due for serious attention. (See also my short story, The Giving Plague!)

Our family has been renting DVD episodes of Morgan Freeman's science show "Through The Wormhole" to share with our youngest. We've all been enjoying it immensely. Highly enlightening about the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, origins, alien life etc. Without doubt one of the best sci-shows of recent years and well worth your attention.  Of course, it could have used a few physicist-scifi-authors.  Or even one.  But I'll take the good stuff however I can get it!

Haven’t had enough yet of the rambunctious optimism of Steven Pinker? A recommended eye-opener for people who have let dour romantics of right or left talk them into pessimism.  We can understand the right’s disgust with the present and future - it’s psychological. And the far-left has always been hypocritical about progress... demanding it but denying that it ever happened.  Alas there is no excuse for actual moderate liberals to swallow such hooey! Real progress HAS happened and that is the reason to demand more.  See this talk from Pinker.


Check out Pinker's latest book, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. And more Pinker! Use it against the dogmatic grouches in your life. This is the real issue dividing us.

So, if things are better, why are grinches yammering at us that it’s all downhill? Forget the Second Depression. That’s not it. Nor even the fact that self-centered boomers are feeling old (yes that too.)  Here’s a cartoon from  Sci- ənce! that will make you both laugh aloud and sob -- the War on Science takes a new turn.

So?  Fight back with facts that will knock the Know-Nothings on their behinds! (More on this next time.)

For example, see an important review of the early history of inoculation and vaccination in America, describing how Washington ordered compulsory smallpox inoculation of the Continental Army in 1777 and thus saved the Revolution. Shows a clear-eyed view of how very traditional Michele Bachman is.

Way back in the days of the original “tea parties” there were also ninnies screaming against health measures that made life better for everybody. (Y'know who the most popular man in America was, in 1959? Jonas Salk! Have we gone dumber?)

== And Interesting Items ==

China and Singapore join forces to create a new eco-city on former wasteland. An inspiring undertaking that may enrich us all and teach new ways.  And look at it this way. Your purchases at WalMart helped to make this happen!

The science behind Nobel Prize in Physics explained simply.

Dang!  Read about Elon's Falcon Heavy booster. This article may lean heavily on the positive slant.  Still, I have a lot of confidence in this bona fide American genius.

Hold it... hold it... Recent research indicates: "It turned out that the worse you had to pee, the better you did on tests of self control and even deferred gratification. When you have to pee, you are more patient rather than less! In fact, further studies showed that just being told about needing to pee, increased the participants need to pee AND increased their self control...."

And now... Bacterium transforms ammonium, an ingredient in urine, into hydrazine, rocket fuel. Apparently NASA lost interest when they realized it would be hard to generate large quantities of hydrazine. I guess they had trouble with deferred gratification. (Get it?)

Fascinating graphic showing the 7000 spacecraft launched into orbit or beyond, by country and by year – with color-coded proportions for military, government, commercial and amateur. Note the substantial, recent increase in commercial launches... as well as a rising age of amateurs!

== Is this why some folks can parrot ignoramus political party lines with a straight face? ==

People who are better at memory, and especially telling the difference between true memories and imagined ones, seem to have a better-developed fold at the front of the brain called the paracingulate sulcus (PCS). This brain variation is present in roughly half of the normal population. It’s one of the last structural folds to develop before birth, so it varies greatly in size between individuals in the healthy population. Researchers discovered that adults whose MRI scans indicated an absence of the PCS were significantly less accurate on memory tasks than people with a prominent PCS on at least one side of the brain.  If verified, a stunning and important finding.

Seriously, we need to speak up for the renaissance. Here’s a way, from Smithsonian Magazine Online:

“Let’s explain what it is about science that satisfies us, how science improves our world and why it’s better than superstition. To that end, I’m starting a new series here on Surprising Science: Why I Like Science. In coming months, I’ll ask scientists, writers, musicians and others to weigh in on the topic. And I’m also asking you, the readers, why you like science. Send a 200- to 500-word essay to WhyILikeScience@gmail.com; They’ll publish the best.”

I plan to participate!

== Predictions hit ==

Someone log this on my registry of “hits”? Rezwan Ferdaus is accused of planning to use three remote control airplanes measuring up to 80 inches, packed with five pounds of explosives in each, to hit the Pentagon and blow the Capitol dome to "smithereens." 

Anyone remember this passage from my novella “The Smartest Mob”? (It will also be part of my new novel EXISTENCE.) “Exceptional numbers of toy airplanes were purchased in the Carolinas, this month, suggesting that a swarm attack may be in the making, just like the O’Hare Incident...”

 Oh, I don’t know if I should mention this, since it might cause evil ones to choose a different target. But y’know all those movies that show the Capitol dome exploding into little white plaster bits? Well it won’t ever ever happen, even with a nearby nuke! Reason? The dome is made of IRON! It may go flying and rolling across the countryside. But it ain’t giving no smash-up satisfaction. What would Ferdhaus have actually accomplished? The tap might have made it ring... like a liberty bell.

== Marvelous Miscellany ==

Fascinating. Fountains of life found at the bottom of the Dead Sea. First scientific dive into the dead sea, finding astonishing life in the lowest place on Earth, where salinity is 6X the ocean and fresh water springs under the sea make the equivalent of “smokers.”

Want to see the real reason why the big CellCos don’t want to adopt my idea for peer-to-peer text passing, even though they could charge for it and it would make the nation 50% more resilient against disaster?  Free texts pose threat to carrier.

“More than two trillion text messages are sent each year in the United States, generating more than $20 billion in revenue for the wireless industry. Verizon Wireless alone generates as much as $7 billion a year in revenue from texting, or about 12 percent of the total.... At 20 cents and 160 characters per message, wireless customers are paying roughly $1,500 to send a megabyte of text traffic over the cell network. By comparison, the cost to send that same amount of data using a $25-a-month, two-gigabyte data plan works out to 1.25 cents.”

Cool! On November 9-10, 2011, Explore Mars, Inc. will be presenting the Women and Mars Conference at the Jack Morton Auditorium at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.  Topics to be discussed at the conference include, “Why are so many women involved in Mars exploration?” and “How can ‘Mars women’ help to advance STEM education for young women and reach non-traditional audiences?” Go get em, gals.  Lead us.

Arguing With Your Crazy Uncle About Climate Change

Forget "left-versus-right." Or even arguments over taxes. The centerpiece of our current Phase Three of the American Civil War is the all-out campaign to discredit science.

Elsewhere I show that the War on Science is part of a much wider effort to destroy public trust in every "smartypants caste" -- from school teachers, journalists, medical doctors and attorneys to professors, civil servants and skilled labor. (Name a center of intellect that's exempt!) But nowhere is it more relentless than by savaging the one group in society that's unarguably among the smartest and best educated.

It's having the intended effects. Chew on this. Thirty years ago, in the era of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, 40% of U.S. scientists were Republicans. Today that fraction has plummeted to around 6%.  Can you blame them?

Why is this happening? I go into it elsewhere -- the underlying motive for a campaign that will leave only one elite standing. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that everybody has this thing backward.  Scientists are not being undermined in order to argue against Human Generated Climate Change (HGCC). Rather, the whole HGCC imbroglio serves as a central rallying point in the campaign against science.

== The latest salvo  ==

Trust the once-credible -- now murdochian -- mouthpiece called the Wall Street Journal to publish a sophistry-drenched festival of talking points. Five Truths about Climate Change by Robert Bryce.

Yep, call it "truth."  The Far Left spent years devaluing that once-proud word on a hundred university campuses, in their own version of a War on Science. Now the Entire Right -- not just the far-fringe -- completes the devaluation of "truth" down to Orwellian levels.  Take this sampler from Bryce.

"The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein's theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth's atmosphere."

Urk!  Gurggle (*strangling sounds*) -- I must let someone else answer this.  This cartoon from Sci- ənce! will make you both laugh and sob for your civilization.

==  How can you help win this phase? ==

Trapped between the Far Left's own distaste for science and the Entire Right's lemming charge, lured by Rupert Murdoch over the cliffs of insanity, what are  all the pragmatic-moderate liberals ... plus those rare but admirable and deeply appreciated awakened paleo-conservatives and Smithian libertarians to do?

Why, what he have to do is fight this phase of the American Civil War, of course!  The "blue" forces were slow to rouse in the other phases, too, but finally got it together to rescue the Great American Experiment. Are we made of lesser stuff?

This fight won't be with muskets or civil rights marches, but by patiently prying open the skulls of our crazy uncles and neighbors out there who swallowed the anti-future, anti-progress, anti-science hype recreating the Know Nothing movement of the 1830s.  It is going to take all of us -- working on the smartest and most salvageable of these fever-racked neighbors, one by one. Getting them to calm down and re-join civilization.

It won't be easy! Rupert's fox-machinery supplies endless talking-point incantations to stoke trog fury. Go prepared.  Here's a pair of sites to arm you.

==  How to answer your crazy uncle re: Climate Change ==

1) I offer my own  handy guide to engage intelligent people who only half swallowed koolaid.  Smart guys who proclaim they aren't climate science "deniers"...  but "skeptics" instead. See Distinguishing Climate Deniers and Skeptics.

In fact, this distinction is very real! Moreover, science benefits from critical questioning by genuine Skeptics!

Still, given the pervasive villainy of fox-propelled denialism, a burden of proof falls on those who claim to be above the fray and not Rupert's hand puppets.  My article reveals half a dozen essential (if a bit intellectual) ways to test the claim. And if they pass? Then prove your own adaptability and lack of dogma! Engage and argue with such people, like adults.

2) Alas, most of those marching in Rupert's Lemming Army don't make such fine distinctions.  They're fine with anti-science denialism and my intellectual points will be meaningless.  But if you think your crazy uncle has a -- somewhere buried deep inside -- the remnant of an honest "paleocon" conservative, then your role -- your duty! -- is to gather stamina and wear him down, for the sake of civilization.

Each ostrich conservative who lifts his head is a victory for America. Worth hosannas and paeans of joy. When enough of them get angry at the real villians - the monsters who hijacked conservatism - we'll get back a conservatism folks can sanely argue with. Negotiate with. You can help, one crazy uncle at a time.

This site offers: simple rebuttals to denier talking points — with links to the full climate science. It's extended, exhausting and somewhat repetitious. Print it before your next crazy-uncle encounter.
But of course... I found some gaps!  So I went ahead and wrote a few more. Add these to the printout.

== Some additional rebuttals to Denialist talking points: ==

1. Practical minded people don't listen to Climate  Change chicken-littles:

The US Navy is spending a lot of time, money and effort planning for an ice-free Arctic.  The Russians are too, setting up sub-oceanic mining claims and outposts and reassigning a whole division of special forces.  Are the Russians and the US Navy and the Canadians and Norwegians all doing this for nothing? Because they are fools and chicken-littles?

2.  Climate scientists are clueless:

The supposedly stupid climate scientists are in many cases the very same people who improved the Weather Forecast from a 4 hour joke (remember those days?) to a ten day projection so useful that you plan vacations around it.  Sure, climate is more difficult, but it uses the same equations and same modeling systems. If they proved titanically competent in one area, don't they deserve some benefit of the doubt in a closely related field?  Perhaps more than TV shills who work for coal czars and Saudi princes?

But of course Glenn Beck knows more than they do.

3. Scientists just follow the herd:

Top scientists are the most competitive human beings of all time.  Put three in a room and there's blood on the floor. Below them, "young guns" are constantly looking for some giant to topple or "wrong corner" of  current theory to shine light into and make a reputation.  If you believe the meek, herd-following nerd image, enjoy!  It clearly makes you feel better to express superiority over people who are smarter and know a lot more than you do.  But... it... is... a... lie.

4. Scientists are pushing climate change for grant money:

Really? They'd lie for a $50,000 grant? All of them? Even the vast majority who have no such grants and work in other (related) fields?  Or who have grants that are secure forever due to their wondrously successful work in weather forecasting? Vastly more is spent on weather than climate: these tenured guys have no "skin" in Climate Change... yet they all believe it.

Oh, but Beck says they are all sucking up to the money gushers in Big Environmentalism. (Do you ever actually listen to your own words?)

How about the major prizes and grants offered by coal companies and petro moguls, for anti-Climate Change "research"?  Huge offers, often much bigger than those petty little grants from EPA, NASA, NOAA or private foundations.  Why don't those coal-co offers draw serious, top-rank climate scholars, if they are all such money grubbers?

And how does it feel parroting the exact same lines as the Tobacco Industry pushed, when they cried "the jury is still out" about the health effects of smoking, and Tobacco shills claimed that anti-smoking scientists were all in it to become millionaires off grants from the Heart Association? Have you no memory? No shame?

More to the point, if you are so sure about this slander - that all the scientists backing Climate Change are grubbing for grants - HOW ABOUT OFFERING IT AS A BET?  Wagers are on the table.  Free money, if you're sure! Follow the money, prove this and collect the bets. Only a coward would refuse. (Hint: when offered wagers, these folks always, always run away. Try it and watch them scurry for cover!)

5. Accepting the advice of 97% of the people who know about the climate would ruin the economy.

Wrong.  Accepting HGCC would only open us to finally arguing over the BEST methods to ease greenhouse warming.

Admitting that something needs to be done would not pre-judge the argument over what to do. It will just start that argument!  Many tools would be on the table and economic repercussions would certainly be a factor in negotiations and tradeoffs. We all want to keep the lights on.

Given a choice, we'd all prefer the solutions that kept a vibrant economy.

Stop portraying scientists - and those who respect science - as unreasonable people.  Stop portraying them as people like yourself.

6. Solving Climate Change would veer us in directions we shouldn't go.

Exactly the opposite of true. Most of the methods for reducing greenhouse gas emissions involve increasing our energy efficiency and stimulating new forms of energy.  In other words, exactly the same things we ought to be doing anyway! (TWODA)

Even if HGCC proved to be an utter myth, it would still be worthwhile to bend major efforts toward efficiency and new energy, if only to wean ourselves off dependence upon foreign oil and filthy coal.  An accomplishment that George W. Bush swore would be his top priority... and that he sabotaged at every turn. (Hmm... look at his family friends and guess why.)

Indeed, follow the money behind climate change denialism.  It leads directly to... foreign oil princes and big, filthy coal. Congrats. You are in good company.

7. The Earth isn't that delicate:

In many ways the planet is resilient. But here's a fact that you will hear nowhere else, though as an astronomer I'll vouch for it:

Our planet skates along the very inner edge of the sun's "Goldilocks Zone" (GZ).  The sun has been getting warmer gradually for 4 billion years. (This has NOTHING to do with the rate of warming re climate change. A separate, slow but inexorable shift over hundreds of millions of years.)  Now the inner edge of the GZ is right upon us.  That means we must expel almost all of the heat we get from the sun as infrared rays and cannot afford even the trace amounts of greenhouse gas increase that humans have caused.  It sounds unfair, and maybe it is, but them's the facts.

7. In the 1970s scientists were predicting an Ice Age.

An outright lie. There were a couple of very tentative papers, that's it.  But this lie is dealt with in the big list of rebuttals that I cite above. So why do I bring it up now?

Because of a big, popular movie that illustrates just how widely people were already talking about HGCC, even in the 1970s. Proving that science never swerved. Go watch Soylent Green.

8. I don't care, I hate science:

Yep, that is the fall-back refrain. Hatred of  people who know stuff.  Not just science, but also teachers, diplomats, journalists, lawyers, professors, medical doctors, civil servants, skilled union labor... you name a caste of knowledge and professional intellect -- of knowing stuff - and it's under attack.  Most vigorously by the foxed right (making Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley spin in their graves) but also by the loony far-left.

Pragmatic-moderate problem solving and negotiation were great American virtues. Culture War is betrayal.  Treason. And the chief purpose of denialism.

Again. Scientists aren't being dissed in order to detract from the theory of climate change.  Climate change denialism is being pushed in order to help know-nothing-ism win the War on Science. 

If our generation fails this test - if you refuse to do your part by rescuing some salvageable conservative, luring him or her back to the version of conservatism professed by real men like Buckley - then welcome to the Dark Ages.

==See also: Distinguishing Climate "Skeptics" and Climate "Deniers"

and The Real Struggle Behind Climate Change: A War on Expertise

People Who Don't "Get" Transparency or Positive Sum Games

A recent research paper resurrects the idea of "security by obscurity." A notion I've been fighting for decades. (e.g. in The Transparent Society: Will Technology force us to choose between privacy and freedom?).

 The basic idea is that you will better thrive by hiding information from your foes/competitors/rivals, even if this accelerates an arms race of obscurity and spying, creating a secular trend toward ever-reduced transparency.

Now, I want to talk about a special case in which my objection - still strong in principle - is softened by pragmatic arguments.

In Gaming Security through Obscurity, Dusko Pavlovic contends that you can improve system security by making it hard to find out how the system works. This concept is familiar to computer programmers:  Alex Armstrong explains, "Your code can be disassembled and decompiled and in many cases, a well written program is much easier to reverse engineer. The solution generally adopted is not to write a bad program but to use "obfuscation" as a final step. That is, take a good clear program and perform a range of syntactic transformations on it to make it a mess that is so much more difficult to read and therefore to reverse engineer."


In cryptography, Kerckhoff's Principle says that a system should be secure even if everything is known about it, formulated by Claude Shannon as "The enemy knows the system."  This stands in contrast to  security by obscurity. (Thanks to xkcd for the cartoon!) The recent paper by Dusko Pavlovic suggests that security is a game of incomplete information and the more you can do to keep your opponent in the dark, the better.

Now there's a lot of misleading discussion, so, if you are expecting "Mr. Transparency" be all up in arms over this, you are mistaken.  What is at issue here is fundamentally the question of the ZERO SUM GAME.

(First, look up the concept of zero-sum and positive sum or win-win games.  It is probably the most vital idea you could possibly own in your head and being able to tell these things apart should be a pass-fail requirement for citizenship.)

Most human beings used to live pretty much zero-sum existences. If you wanted to get ahead in the world, you needed to win points by causing your enemy to lose. This applied when it came to mate-seeking, food-seeking, heck at almost any level. Tribes and societies formed in order to eke a small surplus that might go to positive-sum activities like irrigation and libraries, but the pyramid-shaped, inheritance-based oligarchies that ruled them made sure there were winners above and losers below. And when it came to human inventiveness, clever craft workers knew -- if you discover a better way to do something, keep it secret or you'll lose every advantage.

(Why do you think the Baghdad Battery, the Antikythera Device, and the wondrous steam engines of Heron all vanished, to be forgotten and lost to progress?)

The Enlightenment's core discovery was the positive-sum game... ways that democracy, markets and science can "float all boats," so that even those who aren't top-winners can still see things get better, overall, year after year -- leading to the diamond-shaped social structure we discussed in an earlier post (last week), with a vibrant and creative middle class outnumbering the poor.

This dream did not come true by emphasizing cooperation alone, though cooperation is an ingredient.  Just as important is competition, nature's great locus of innovation and the driver of evolution. But it has to be regulated and carefully tuned. If competition results in a new oligarchy, you get right back to the pyramid again, with topmost cheaters restoring zero-sum thinking and squelching new competitors! And everybody loses.  Look at 6000 years of history, fer gosh sakes.

One of the most ingenious "regulations" -- supported by Adam Smith and Ben Franklin etc, -- was the notion of intellectual property or IP.  Patents and copyrights were never intended to mean "I own that idea!"  That is absurd mystical crap. No, intellectual property was born entirely as a pragmatic tweak, offering creative people a subsidy in order to draw them into openly sharing their discoveries... so that others might use and improve them and we get the virtuous cycle of positive-sum improvements, ever-accelerating knowledge, skill and wealth.

Let there be no mistake. That is one of many ways that regulated competition delivers on the promise of markets and Smithian capitalism, vastly and demonstrably far better than anything that ever resembled laissez faire or Randian cannibalism festivals.

Which brings us full circle to Pavlovic's paper and the storm of simple-minded misinterpretations that are going around.  As you'd expect, my initial reaction was "bullshit!" In The Transparent Society: Will Technology force us to choose between privacy and freedom? I show mountains of evidence that we're all better off in an increasingly open world. All of our positive-sum Enlightenment "arenas" -- Democracy, Markets, Science etc -- are healthy precisely in proportion to the degree that all participants know what's going on so they can make well-informed decisions and choose better products.

Even when it comes to security, we should all be aware of how the dream of Dwight Eisenhower finally came true, after Sputnik, when spy satellites flew around the globe taking pictures... and it did not trigger a third world war.  Rather, Ike's "Open Skies" helped to prevent war, to calm the arms race, to save us all.

Yet, I willingly accept the validity of Pavlovic's paper, in the limited context that he chooses. True, a positive sum game is nearly always better than a zero sum... or a sick negative sum game. And true security will only really happen for us all when the world is so awash in light that thieves and oppressors generally get caught and deterrence reigns. Transparency isn't a naive, utopian dream. It is empowerment of all, so that reciprocal accountability keeps the cycles virtuous. It is the Enlightenment's core.

But Pavlovic is describing a specialized case.  A situation in which things are already decidedly zero sum. In which your company knows that its competitors cheat. They steal IP and our Enlightenment civilization is all too often failing to do anything about it. As America and other western nations are failing miserably to protect western IP... the goose that lays the world's golden eggs.

Reciprocity has broken down and with IP no longer protected, innovators must fall back on the old ways. Concealment. Trade secrets. Squirreling away your tricks so the other guy won't get to copy them.

Overall, that is the world we're heading back toward, for a number of reasons.  Because certain countries and companies are rampant intellectual property thieves. Because Western leaders won't act to stop it. Because some western mystics and idiotic "legal scholars" actually believe that IP is based on principles of palpable ownership, and thus secrecy is somehow equivalent to patent declaration, instead of its diametric opposite!

And because life is still life. Even in the context of a positive-sum civilization, you and your company may find yourselves in a zero or negative sum situation, needing to protect -- with "obscurity" -- the code tricks that you feel you have a right to benefit from.

Let there be no doubt, the prescription is a nasty and ugly one. Deliberately flood your own code with so much spurious junk that a competitor will be rendered clueless and unable to reverse engineer it? This may be an effective short term tactic, but it will also result in -- well -- junk-filled code!  Harder for YOU to engineer and repair. Or to benefit from crowd-sourced improvements. Sluggish and inherently inefficient.

This is a different matter than slipping in Tattler Code...  segments that reveal if a competitor stole or copied from you. Even segments that go online and tattle when the code is run!  These are clever, legal, and involve transparency of a sort! A searing light of accountability that seems a lot like an immune system, at work.

I could go on. But swamped, so I'll leave it there. Except to add this:

Fight for a civilization that becomes more filled with light, wherein competition isn't cut-throat, but simply the way that people like you and me and Steve Jobs get the best out of ourselves! I push transparency as the most-frequently applicable medicine.  But even more important is to stay calm, and understand what we should defend.

And defend it.

==For more, see also: Consider Copyright

 and The Unlikeliness of a Zero Sum Society

====

My profile and collected links on xeeme.

Remember - I'll be holding an open house meet-up in New York City on Monday, October 17, at around 8:30pm at O'Reilly's, 21 W 35th St. (upstairs: byo-drinks.) An informal gathering of folks who love the future, sci fi or just lots of talk! (If you really like all those things, then check out the Singularity Summit in NYC. I'm speaking on October 16.

I'll also be the Guest of Contraflow, the New Orleans science fiction convention:November 4-6.  Join us if you're in the area!

Steve Jobs - American Genius

The Steve Jobs Experiment: Outcomes Report

Steve Jobs had a knack for seeing the adult in a child, the grownup product that an infant idea could grow up and become. Looking at the toy computers that hobbyists soldered in their 1970s garages, he envisioned people like you and me wanting vastly more capable versions on our desks.  Looking back, you'd think it was obvious... which is pretty much the whole point about Steve Jobs's genius.

For example, I wrote my first novel with a typewriter and edited using a pair of scissors. I cut-and-paste with lots of actual tape and glue. When I saw what an Apple II could accomplish, I bought one with a serial number in five digits and I've used its Apple successors ever since. They simply made life better.

The Xerox Corporation was a great American success story, but they never made this mental leap to thinking about people as customers -- thereupon ignoring the market for home-copiers. They also snubbed their own innovators in Palo Alto, who wanted to turn the computer screen into a landscape, using a "mouse" to simply point at what you wanted. Executives at Xerox viewed this as a toy. Steve Jobs took one look at those early concepts and thought: "that's how our ancestors' brains worked on the savannah and it's how to turn every human being into a computer-user."

Even people who prefer Windows should still thank Steve for saving these inventions. He gave them to us all.

Early Macintosh computers offered a little program called Hypercard. It came with a few simple demo games, meant to illustrate the notion of click-linking from page to page. This was one of Steve's worst marketing mistakes. He thought the concept of hypertext was so obvious, the world would see those little demos and run with it! But the same derisive sneers dismissed it as a "toy"... till Tim Berners-Lee invented the hypertext-based World Wide Web and it all became retroactively obvious.

By then, alas, Jobs wasn't in much of a position to insist, having been cast into the wilderness by his own company.

So he built Pixar... giving us TOY STORY and other delights.  Nearly all of Steve's financial wealth came from Pixar, not Apple. He sold all his Apple stock in the early 1990s. Kind of like Nicola Tesla refusing stock in alternating current. If he had kept that stock... or milked Apple later on, for huge compensation packages... Jobs could have been in the top tier of world's richest men, instead of a mere single digit billionaire.

Instead, his passion was to make all of us richer, in the sense of the true positive sum game, when capitalism works. When millions of lives get better because we got insanely good products that were worth many times what we paid for them and that helped us be more productive in our own ways.  Alas, if only all of capitalism worked that way, as it's supposed to.

Jobs never seemed as blatantly philanthropic as some -- we'll see how that turns out. And heaven forbid that most families or nations should be run in the imperial manner that, in some great companies like Apple, can get big things done, pursuing the virtue of exquisite product design above all else.

But those are minor cavils. What we ultimately see, in this bona fide American genius, is a light showing us the path out of America's troubles. Do what we're good at.  Innovate! Be thrilled by science and the infant technologies that may grow mighty tomorrow. Nurture the inner-tinkerer that all the world sees in us, and has ever since the nation's beginning. Defend intellectual property! But stimulate others so much that nobody resents it. Make money not by financial parasitism but delivering better goods and services. (Duh?)

Help us all to both compete and cooperate with each other better than ever before.


Finally... some announcements: I'll be holding an open house meet-up in New York City on Monday, October 17, around 8:30 pm at O'Reilly's, 21 W 35th St.(upstairs: byo-drinks).  An informal gathering of folks who love the future, sci fi or just lots of talk! (If you really like all those things, then check out the Singularity Summit; I'm speaking on October 16.

I'll also be Author Guest of Contraflow, the New Orleans science fiction convention on November 4-6.

On Licensing Journalists

== Public protection or guild protection? ==

After its crushing defeat in the last election, Britain's Labour Party is heaping on bad ideas. The latest? To license journalists via a professional body that could ban or "strike off" those who are accused of malpractice from practicing journalism in the future.

A horrific notion. I agree with Cory Doctorow, who writes, "Given that "journalism" presently encompasses "publishing accounts of things you've seen using the Internet" and "taking pictures of stuff and tweeting them" and "blogging" and "commenting on news stories," this proposal is even more insane than the traditional "journalist licenses" practiced in totalitarian nations."

Helen Lewis-Hasteley of the New Statesman notes, “If we look at the countries around the world where the government keeps such a register, I bet they're not the ones you'd regard as shining beacons of democracy and enlightenment. Who would administer the register?”

Now, a reflex reaction to tighten media regulation in response to the Rupert Murdoch scandals is obvious. But the relevant issue is to:

(1) prosecute crimes and civil damages according to existing statutes and

(2) make damn sure these nefarious actions reflect on Mudoch & co's public image. This might mean tweaking #1 to ensure no gag orders or confidentiality can prevent #2.

In other words, no victims settling for damages from Rupert, on condition of silence. There is a compelling public interest that all such cases be transparent, so their outcomes can affect the public's trust in clear violators of that trust. Some minor law tweaks, there. But urgent.

But licensing journalists is just blatant "guild-tending"... the left wing equivalent of right-wing oligarchy. A travesty and anti-transparency. And what of bloggers...are they next?

==Society & Issues==

Studies appraise why IQ varies around the globe. Controlling for the effects of education, national wealth, temperature, and distance from sub-Saharan Africa, infectious disease emerged as the best predictor. children infected with intestinal worms have lower IQ later in life. Another study found that regions in Mexico that were the target of eradication programs had higher average IQ than those that were not. See my posting: The Flynn Effect: Are We Getting Smarter?

See a fascinating article -- Radical Thinking to Recreate and Reimagine Our Cities --  about several world cities that defied expectations and remade themselves in wonderfully positive ways.

Following up on my extensive posting-essay about “seasteading” - Jason Sussberg made a short film about the Seasteading Institute.  It reveals the characters driving the effort... and shows their mix of both solid and extremely airy thinking. (Alas, without interviewing a single skeptic or question-asker.) There is a strong part of me that sympathizes and roots for them!  And another, mature portion that knows what the world is about and where it’s headed. (Still, you'll see Seasteading portrayed vividly in EXISTENCE!)

Airport security may soon have a new way to check your ID: watching the way you walk. It seems footsteps are as unique as fingerprints, and can identify people with 99.8 per cent accuracy. "It probably is possible to use this in a real-world security application," says one researcher. Lesson? Hiding is futile. Our only path is sousveillance. Looking back.

After the Great San Diego Blackout, a few thoughts on potential future power failures: Everybody needs a fully corded and non-powered phone! The more old-fashioned the better. If it has a power cord, it won't do. One that plugs into just the wall jack. For more: read what I told the Defense Dept about readiness in a robust society! This from an Glenn Reynolds: “when we lost power yesterday along with the rest of San Diego County. The electric eye-activated toilets and urinals in the new buildings were all nonfunctional, whereas the older models (with actual handles) in place in the older buildings worked fine. Exclusively installing toilets or sinks that don’t function without electricity in new buildings just seems like a bad idea.”

== Engineering the Earth ==

The General Accounting Office issued a report on varied proposals for GEOENGINEERING, which, in today’s context, stands for methods that humanity might use to assertively lessen the effects of global warming. “ Climate engineering technologies do not now offer a viable response to climate change. Experts advocating research to develop and evaluate the technologies believe research might provide an insurance policy against worst case scenarios—but caution that the misuse could bring new risks.” See the report’s abstract.

I don't disagree with the GAO’s overall conclusion... No proposed geoengineering endeavor scored higher than a 3 out of 9. Research must continue, but zealots should not be empowered when potential side effects are huge.  One experiment that clearly should proceed on an intermediate scale is to create “white cities”... by whitening rooftops in a few warm climate metropolitan areas and see if the effects are positive. Few conceivable downsides.

My biggest complaint? There is one proposed geoengineering project that gets short-shrift in every single appraisal I have seen, and this GAO report is no different. It is the only method that would directly imitate a natural process that is already known to remove megatons of carbon from the air, every year. A natural process that has no negative side effects but dozens of positive ones -- like helping to feed the world.  That process is Ocean Fertilization.

Ocean fertilization involves adding micronutrients to the oceans to stimulate biological productivity, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, sequestering it as sediment in the deep ocean. This could also reverse a widespread decline in phytoplankton, the basis of oceanic food chains. Preliminary trials were highly localized, but indicated that the potential for iron-induced carbon sequestration may be lower than originally hoped – but this has not been systematically pursued.

Moreover, can anyone explain to me why the only ocean fertilization experiments were crude, blunt dumpings of powdered IRON? How does that emulate nature? Sure it's a critical bottleneck nutrient. Still, I've seen other proposals. Wave power one-way siphons to raise cool, nutrient rich bottom water above the thermocline. Or using wave power to drive bottom-stirrers, sending mud plumes rising just like happens off the great fisheries of Peru. (I described them in EARTH (1989). The energy profiles may or may not be efficient... we'll see... but no one can argue that those two don't emulate precisely the most healthy, wholesome and natural way that the Earth already pulls down megatons of CO2.

==Technology Updates==

One futuristic solution to our energy crisis? Shimizu, a Japanese company, proposes the LUNA RING, a belt of photovoltaic panels placed on the moon’s surface. To avoid launch costs, the solar panels would be constructed on moon, by remote-controlled robots, directly out of lunar soil (which is 23% silicon). Power will be beamed to receiving stations on Earth (220 terawatts annually). By treaty, any such project on the moon would belong to all nations. I know Dave Criswell who first offered this idea. If completed, the LUNA RING would represent the most grandiose engineering project in humanity's history. Not yet feasible, it requires some major breakthroughs. And, frankly, the math may not add up. But it's the kind of bold forward-looking thinking that at least stimulates the mind. It reminds us we're a bold race. A competing concept is Space Based Solar Power -- with panels placed in orbit around the earth.

A new version of Moore’s Law? Koomey’s Law states it’s energy efficiency of computers, not just processing power that doubles every 18 months. Particularly relevant as portable battery-powered portable devices fill our lives. (Brin's Corollary? CAMERAS get smaller/cheaper/faster/more numerous and mobile even faster than Moore's Law!)  What’s not keeping up?  Software.  Never has.  Maybe never will.

Exploiting a novel technique called phase discontinuity - etching gold nano-antennas onto silicon - researchers at Harvard have induced light rays to behave in a way that defies the centuries-old laws of reflection and refraction.  Read the sci fi of Wil McCarthy about "programmable matter".... this is a subset.

You can now hold your brain in the palm of your hand, with this portable brain scanner. For the first time, a scanner powered by a smartphone will let you monitor your neural signals on the go.  Quoth one bright commentator: “And, in the category of things that belong in the novel "Earth"...”


==Miscellaneous==

Finally got around to watching Limitless... one of the nifty crop of lower budget but highly intelligent science fiction films (e.g. Source Code) that managed to get produced in 2010, when the big studios were mostly churning out one remake and sequeal after another. I thought it was terrific! Snappy, crisply written, nicely textured and well-foreshadowed.  And just a bit optimistic... I liked that.  Oh, and note the hero is a sci fi author.  Been several of those lately. Maybe civilization is wising up!  (Oh, the screenwriter, Leslie Dixon, is a friend.  Proud of her.)

Do see an animated rendition of Tim Minchin's terrific Beat poem "Storm" about reality itself... and fighting back for enlightenment. Oh... see Minchin's other performances too.

Awesome anonymous paper sculptings!

Hmmm...Space Colony Earth claims to be planning the first interstellar mission form Earth, to travel beyond our solar system and contact alien civilizations. Their ship, Starship Ark intends to depart in 2017, to seek out strange new civilizations….. Nice clean dopey-dreamy fun. Or is this a promo for a game?

More on that Climate Denialist stuff soon. Meanwhile, remember, when some fool starts making crazy attacks on science, find the most SPECIFIC of his statements and then... demand that he put money on it!  Seriously.  Bets. Wagers. Like that doctor who offered $10,000 if Bachmann could find ONE child made retarded by the gardasil vaccine. One.

It needn't be so grand. Any amount will do.  Watch them backpedal and slide toward the door.  Cowards.

Re-Evaluating All We Know?

First an announcement: I’ll be speaking at the Singularity Summit in New York City October 15-16, along with Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, Stephen Wolfram, Michael Shermer, John Mauldin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Jason Silva and many others. My topic: “So you want to make gods. Now why should that bother anybody?”  

Our can-do, problem-solving zeal may save humanity and light up the galaxy. Yet, talk of “tech-transcendence” inspires some – and worries others. What can we learn from the past about our future? This will be a stupendous conference. Sign up to attend!

== Can Science Re-Evaluate? ==

The physics world is buzzing over the recent faster than light particle result from CERN - one of those science stories that gets a lot of public press. Apparently, some neutrinos emitted by the great accelerator in the Alps are showing up in an Italian detector a nanosecond or so earlier than relativity ought to allow.

If the result is verified it will prove a major milestone. Among possible explanations might be that super-energetic neutrinos are bumped (very briefly) out of the four dimensional "brane" we call spacetime. (Envision separated membranes like soap bubbles; one film is our universe.) Hauled back in by gravity (the only force that carries between branes), they re-enter our world a bit farther along their old trajectory. Enough (some suggest) to explain the apparent cheating of ol' Einstein. No, I ain't pulling your leg. There are brainy guys who ponder such stuff. And if this, or some other exotic explanation, pans out then we're in for interesting times!

But dig it, please -- extraordinary claims call for extraordinary (and reproducible) evidence. One of the great things about our civilization is we get to see scientists constantly checking, re-checking and poking at whatever Standard Model reigns in their field.  In my life, nearly all of these re-checks have resulted in only minor re-adjustments -- with the exception of the Dark Matter and Dark Energy findings. (Even if they are disproved, it will only be by something else stunning.) Others, like Cold Fusion, caused yearlong investigations and Re-Evaluations of All We Know (REAWK!) but with negative results.

I find it all healthy and look forward to seeing this very competitive truth-finding process apply to the new CERN "FTL" results.  Still, it worries me that many in the press and public take a very unhealthy attitude - that re-appraisal in a branch of science somehow means it had been "all wrong" before.  Some take it as revelation that science is waffling or poorly based... instead of proof of the very opposite.  Others yearn for an upset apple-cart! They see any sign of a re-proved Standard Model as evidence of stodginess or oppression by Old Professors Incapable of Seeing the New (OPISN).

To be clear, I have known plenty of OPISNs! But the incredibly competitive nature of science (Adam Smith would be proud) generally makes them targets of the next wave of bright young guns.

Look, given our heritage as a superstitious species that danced to incantations by campfires, it should be no surprise that many of our neighbors are emotionally out of tune with science, or don't see how its competitive process results in ever-improving models of the world. Models that keep getting better, even when some part of them is shown to have been incomplete, or even wrong. That is how they improve. (Duh?) The ultimate market.

It is only human to perceive a process that you do not understand and judge it by the way your own mind thinks.  But racism was also deeply human. And feudalism. So come. Start by repeating this aloud: "It can be fun to re-evaluate all that I know! Heck, I might even learn something."

There. Don't you feel more scientific already?  Now to make that same spirit work in politics....

Oh... while I'm at it... here’s another paradigm-changing update: Could Dark Energy and even Guth’s “inflation” be overly contrived theories for something more easily explained? By the existence of hyper-long gravitational waves -- left over from the Big Bang?  These might elucidate the recently discovered preferential direction in the cosmos - the so-called “axis of evil.” Plus the revelation that distant-most galaxies seem to be accelerating their velocity of recession from us (thus requiring dark energy to explain the hyper expansion).  The gravitational wave concept makes such cludges unnecessary. Maybe. This paper is certainly worth a read.

== Space Updates ==

Does our solar system exist inside a bubble? Astronomers say we're in a “local bubble” in the interstellar medium – perhaps a result of stellar explosions millions of years ago. (See my cosmological short story about... "Bubbles"!)

Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars -- what's called a circumbinary planet. The planet, depicted in foreground, was discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. (Nearly every article has compared it to Tatooine from Star Wars -- so I'll avoid that cliche! Oops too late.... dang Star Wars $%#$#$!)

Similarly cosmic! Anyone with a soul should find this breathtaking! Watch a Saturn fly-by video composed from high-resolution images from the Cassini Orbiter.

Scientists analyzing data from the Kepler spacecraft for exoplanets have encountered a problem: noisy stars! Before Kepler's launch, researchers had assumed that most Sun-like stars would be about as quiet as the Sun, with mild fluctuations in luminosity. Noise in the Kepler data is much larger - much of it variations in the stars themselves. Sunspots and magnetic activity are the most likely culprits – perhaps because about half of the sun-like stars in the Kepler field are younger than expected (Young stars spin faster, with more vigorous magnetic fields.) If this youthful bias is true of the entire Milky Way, it could alter our understanding of how stars are born and die.

Note also... if our sun is older than average, it might help explain the Fermi Paradox.

How would humans survive extended voyages in space? Five men cooped together over a year to simulate a Mars mission... apparently were going stir crazy! Yipe! (Well, look, several are Russian. Jeepers, did you ever read the book or watch the original film SOLARIS? All is explained.)

See the Solar System in action!  Stunning animation of planetary and satellite orbits – set to any date you choose.

== Life, the Universe and Everything ==


How Life arose on Earth, and How a Singularity might bring it down. This Scientific American article reporting about a recent biological conference is worth reading from top to bottom. Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll opened the meeting by commenting that “The purpose of life is ... to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.” There  you go...

From another talk on the scaling of life: “An organism’s lifespan is proportional to the 1/4 power of its mass, its heart rate goes as the –1/4 power of its mass, so the total number of heart beats is independent of mass—a universal value of about a billion beats for all of us. Use them wisely.” (Except humans get three times that! We’re the Methuselahs of mammals. See my article "So You Want Immortality?")

An interesting and fair discussion of the possibility that dolphins have a sort of language and a sort of “intelligence.”  As a sort-of dolphinish guy, I actually have subtle and complex beliefs about this.  The folks I know who’ve worked with high cetaceans all tell me their impression: that the creatures seem to “wish they were smarter.” Subjective, but poignant and telling. (I’ll discuss dolphin “uplift” further in my next novel, EXISTENCE.)

== And a Few Updates ==

Being Human in the 21^st Century: Again I’ll be speaking at the Singularity Summit in New York City October 15-16, along with Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, Stephen Wolfram, Michael Shermer, John Mauldin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Jason Silva and many others. My topic: “So you want to make gods. Now why should that bother anybody?”  Come on, sign up!

Oh... I may announce an open fans-n-friends bar session in New York, stay tuned!

OTHER COMING EVENTS: 

I’ll be speaking at TEDx Brussells November 22: A Day in the Deep Future.

New Orleans! I'll be Author Guest of Honor at the Contraflow Science Fiction Convention the weekend of November 4-6.

Also attending the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego.

FANNISH ANNOUNCEMENTS:

One of my classic short stories “Bubbles” is in the latest issue of the fine online sci fi zine LIGHTSPEED!  And Harlan Ellison, my rambunctious pal, is doing an audio reading.  I’m honored.

A cool fan site showcasing my novels! Thanks to Susan O'Fearna.

And from the sublime to the ridiculous... or at least now for something completely different... David Brin playing the harmonica at the Reno World Science Fiction Convention (thanks to Lawrence Person.)

"Class War" and the Lessons of History

One aspect of our re-ignited American Civil War is getting a lot of air-play. It is so-called “class war.”

That's the tag-line ordered up by Roger Ailes. The notion: that any talk of returning to 1990s tax rates - way back when the U.S. was healthy. wealthy, vibrantly entrepreneurial and world-competitive, generating millionaires at the fastest pace in human history - is somehow akin to Robespierre chopping heads in the French Revolution's reign of terror.

That parallel is actually rather thought-provoking! Indeed, can you hang with me for a few minutes? After setting the stage with some American history, I want to get back to the way things got out of hand during that earlier 1793 class war in France.  There are some really interesting aspects I'll bet you never knew.

But in fact, "class war" has always been with us. If you ever actually sit down to read what people wrote in times past - for example Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, or even the Bible - then you know struggle and resentment between social castes was the normal state of human affairs for 6000 years, or much longer.  Seriously, randomly choose (or "roll-up") a decade and locale from across the last few millenia! Tell me who oppressed freedom and competitive markets in that time and place. I'll wait.

In fact, today's American perspective that there is no-such-thing as class - so blithely exploited by Fox - seems rather quirky and charmingly innocent.  Baby Boomers, especially, were raised under  unusual circumstances -- perhaps the only stretch of time in which a great nation experienced a (fairly) flat social order.

Now this calls for simplifying - so let's set aside the battles over racial and sexual equality, etc. - but squint with me here, for a minute.  It's fairly obvious that the period following the Second World War was (for white U.S. males) the least class-ridden of all time.  Disparities of wealth were at an all-time low and the middle class, flush with WWII savings, good wages and GI Bill-fostered competitiveness, experienced a generation of utter dominance over the American experience. A confident dominance that got woven into popular culture through TV and all other media.

= Pyramids and diamonds =

Instead of the classic human social pattern -- pyramid-shaped with a tiny, fierce nobility lording it over peasant multitudes -- ours was diamond-shaped with a well-off middle that actually outnumbered the poor! A miracle nobody in all the past ever foresaw. Except perhaps Smith. Certainly not Karl Marx! In fact, nothing so undermined the honey-seductive mantras of Marxism so much as the living example of the U.S. middle class. Which the whole world wanted to join.

And now the penultimate point (before getting back to 1793 France). Our post-WWII flattened-diamond pattern did not quash or undermine competitive capitalism!  Not at all. In fact, never before or since has there been such fecund, vigorous entrepreneurialism as during the flattest and most "level" social order the world ever saw.

Those who proclaim these two things - social flatness and vigorous market competitiveness - to be inherent opposites, in perpetual conflict, are simply fools or historical ignoramuses -- or outright liars. They are pushing the sick illogic of the zero sum game.  Indeed, Adam Smith himself contended, in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that a relatively flat social order -- combined with lots of opportunities for the poor to get education, so the total number of competitors is maximized -- can vastly increase the total number of people who get rich in the best way, by delivering innovative goods and services.

(Smith held less truck with inherited wealth or dividend-clipping "rents" - the kind of income with the very lowest tax rates, nowadays. In fact, Smith strongly implies that some kind of upper limit to the meaning of "rich" might be called for. But more on that another time.)

= A burden of proof on FDR-bashers =

The final pre-point I want to make here - before tooling off to France in 1789 - is more in the form of a question.  How did we get into a situation where Franklin Delano Roosevelt is portrayed as Satan incarnate?

Yes, yes.  I spend a lot of time around libertarians and I know that their current version is all about hating government.  No other agenda or priority.  See my earlier challenge (two postings back) daring libertarians and decent conservatives to consider taking on a positive goal instead of a purely negative one - fostering competitive enterprise and not just reflexively hating all civil servants, under all circumstances, all the time, while ignoring every other threat to freedom. That may by Ayn Rand, but it sure ain't Adam Smith.

If government is always and automatically evil, then yes, Franklin Roosevelt was the antichrist, because he sure expanded its reach.  If, on the other hand, you judge by outcomes... defeating Hitler, ending the Great Depression, starting the process of racial justice and - above all - engendering a society that both fostered vast amounts of competitive enterprise and kept the social order flat, then maybe we should consider cutting the man some slack.  (Wasn't he admired by the "greatest generation"?)  I'd like to see you -- or any ruler/leader across all of human time -- do better.

Sure, some of FDR's bureaucracy got cloying. Or else it got "captured" and stifled competition.  Democrats themselves axed many New Deal and Progressive agencies - the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Civil Aeronautics Board, for example, had to go!  Others needed trimming and so did the pre-1960 tax rates that JFK slashed.  Indeed, about half of the Reagan-era government prunings seem pretty much called for... a process culminating in the Clinton-Gingrich Welfare Reform, another time that the moderate-right had a strong point. And was listened-to.

But outcomes comparison is not kind to those who gutted Glass-Steagel and other bank regulations, opening the door to abuses that helped bring our Second Depression.  And since every single prediction ever made by Supply Side Economics proved wrong, well, we can understand why science and outcomes comparison are the Big Enemy, attacked by Fox 24 hours a day.  If facts are inconvenient, well, damn those who live and work with facts.

= Okay, back to France =

All the shouts about "class war" bring to mind images of rabid Jacobin mobs in 1793 hauling brave nobles and gentlemen to the guillotine. But if Rupert & co. really want us pondering that image, we owe it to ourselves to leaf back just a few pages to 1789, when the revolution began as a much more moderate thing, inspired by events across the ocean, in America.

France was broke.  Louis XVI and his ministers were incompetents who deliberately squelched commerce with internal tariffs and policies that crushed innovation. The church owned much of the productive land, tax-free. So did the feudal aristocracy. Top merchants and corporations managed to wrangle exemptions too. After years of quagmire wars, poor tax revenue, bank collapses and mismanagement, Louis needed more money to stave off bankruptcy and save the country. So he summoned the Estates General.

That was the rough French equivalent of the British Parliament, but with much less authority.  In fact, it had last met in 1614. But Louis was desperate. What he needed was for the first and second "estates" -- the clergy and  nobles -- to vote themselves a temporary levy and join the third estate (the people) in paying their fair share.

That's how it all started.  The country's leader asking oligarchs and aristocrats to pay the same rates as common folk, for a while, especially since they already owned damn near everything.  The answer given by the dukes and bishops and marquiseseses?  Heck no! We're the ones keeping it all together. The managers and investors and owners and job-makers. The government can damn well keep its mitts out of our pockets. It's our money, not the state's.

Now you can see where I'm going with this. So I won't spell out what happened next. (Though a little reading might be in order?  After the last assignment, to learn what the founder of modern market-capitalism, Adam Smith actually said. I promise surprises!) 

And no, I am not predicting tumbrels rolling through American streets, with billionaires holding their chins high as rabid mobs taunt them on their way to chopping blocks! 

What I am telling you is that "class war" has a whole lot more to it than they are telling you with their blithe, two-word nostrums, over at Fox.  As Warren Buffett said: "my side - the rich - have been winning class war for some time, and it won't end well." 

= The American Difference =

Across the sea, in America, a different experiment was being tried. The aristocracy over here -- like Washington and Jefferson -- certainly enjoyed being rich, and wanted opportunities to stay that way! But they also knew the frontier virtue satiability -- the notion that getting rich is great! Economic success can both entice and propel innovation, hard work, enterprise, competitive creativity and philanthropy. But that (as Adam Smith proclaimed in the miracle year 1776) there comes a point where enough is enough... and sometimes even too much.

Hold onto your seat, because I'm about to tell you something about Washington and the others that you never knew... that they were "levellers."

The founders started by banning primogeniture, so no family fortune could sit and accumulate, undivided, as a lordly demesne at the pyramid's peak. Instead, they would get divided among the large numbers of children that folks had then -- an intentional act of "social engineering" and outright "levelling" and don't you for a moment think otherwise!  They also seized the assets of the Tory lords and even neutral absentees and distributed them to the masses. And they made homesteading easy, with laws that favored Yeoman citizens. (All right, some of the lands they seized belonged to native American tribes - I never called these guys perfect, just smart, with a goal of not repeating the historical mistakes they loathed. Sure, they proceeded to make others.)

Never heard of these "levelling" acts by the founders? Heck, even liberals have forgotten them. Or they've become used to simply ceding Washington and Adam Smith to the blustering right, without even putting up a fight.  Stupid-lame liberals.

The point is that we never had the kind of violent class war that erupted in France, because our elites were smart enough to avoid it! After the primogeniture and distribution and land grant tricks started to fade along with the frontier, we entered a dangerous Gilded Age when the pyramid shape began re-emerging and Marx rubbed his hands over the growing urban proletariat....

...but even among the titans of the 1890s, there were men who could see. "I would rather leave my son a curse than the almighty dollar," quoth Andrew Carnegie, who was the Warren Buffett of his day.  Even a jerk like Henry Ford realized the essence -- that he benefited from a rising middle class that could afford to buy his cars.  And our agile nation came up with moderate solutions like anti-trust laws and progressive tax rates, that staunched class war without ruining capitalist enterprise.  That kept the goose alive, to keep laying golden eggs.

I've already discussed FDR. But now you can see the context of it all!  It is the context of the positive sum game. (Look it up!) The notion that we can get all the benefits of an enterprise-market system -- using the allure of wealth to reward innovators and vigorous competition -- while somehow preventing the toxic side effect of wealth... the poison called oligarchy.  The same poison that ruined markets and freedom in every culture other than ours, in every other era than ours.

= A wake-up call =

So what now? Well, for one thing, it's time to rouse yourself from propaganda hypnosis.  History repeats itself. And the last thing that the New Oligarchs want you to do is study history.

After a full generation of innocence, since the Second World War, in which we took for granted some highly unusual circumstances, we seem now to be plunging back toward the norm for human societies. And you - yes, you - need to start asking questions:

-- like what degree of wealth disparity would you find discomforting?  Today, unlike 1945 or 1980 or 1999, the top 400 U.S. families own more than the the bottom 50% of Americans. Please, please, please pause a minute and picture that in your mind.  If you can somehow manage to shrug that off, is there some level of disparity that would worry you?

When it's 75%? Or when it's 90%? Admit that there is some level that would make even you call yourself (and your country) the victim of class war. A struggle that's gone on (with a recent, slight break) for 6000 years.

-- or ask what it means when Fox says the top families do pay a lot of money in taxes, despite paying at very low rates.  Can you do the simple algebra in your head, divide and put in an equal sign and draw the obvious conclusion?  If they pay vast amounts, even at tiny rates... doesn't that mean they are getting most of the money in the first place?  And that's supposedly a reason for you to... shrug?

-- or ask who is financing the propaganda that you watch? When simplistic tag lines are ordered up at Fox News by Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and Prince Waleed, and they are parroted within hours by every politician and talking head on the right, perhaps ask "is this the conservatism of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, any longer?" Ponder: what do these New Lords get out of teaching you to hate every American elite of science, intellect or skill, along with your own freely elected government... while demanding that you ignore the one elite that threatens everything we love?  Theirs?

-- for the first time in American history, we went to war - a decade-long quagmire in Asia - and the rich refused to help pay for it. Isn't patriotism an issue all the time, and not just when you (or Glenn Beck) pick or choose?

More important: doesn't this start sounding a whole lot like what the nobles did on the east side of the Atlantic in 1789... and not at all like the smarter elites did in the west?

-- is history really so boring to you that you find it completely irrelevant? So much so that you'll ignore the patterns of 6,000 years?  If so, wow, FDR sure did make a different world for Baby Boomers to ignorantly take for granted.

But the Gen-Xers and Gen-Y and Millennials won't.  As I foresaw in EARTH, they are waking up.

So don't fret, Boomers. Your children will rescue America.  Not with violent class war... what are we, French? But with the kind of tweaking we saw from Washington and Lincoln and Carnegie and Teddy Roosevelt and FDR. (Three of them Republicans.) The kind that restores that flattened diamond... while continuing the miracle of competitive markets and freedom.

David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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