Bringing back feudalism -- is libertarianism an unwitting tool?

== Those helping feudalism return - unwittingly ==

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

==  Those seeking feudalism KNOWINGLY ==

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

== So what is to be done? ==

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                    Politics for the Twenty-first Century

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                        Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidBrin

Signs of change in the air

Will the consequences of human-generated climate change be worse than expected?  That is the dire forecast according to an article, Why Global Warming Will be Far Worse, Far Sooner, than Forecasts Predict, covering several ways that the IPCC reports have been -- if anything -- too conservative by far.  

Interestingly, this insight is being circulated by 
many of the folks whom I call "awakened conservatives" (ACs), who oppose the recent plunge of the Republican Party into bottomless hatred of science. (As evidenced by the ongoing howler-antics of all GOP members of the U.S. House Science Committee, and by their recent blocking of the creation of a harmless-inspiring-unpaid post of "U.S. Science Laureate." Said one of them - “It would give scientists an opportunity to pontificate, and we’re opposed to it.” Yes, he actually said that.)

This should be a matter for internal struggle and redemption within conservatism, whose principles ought to be in no way compatible with a War on Science. Lifelong conservatives such as Gregory Benford and Jerry Pournelle fear that conservatism in general will suffer an irrecoverable blow to its reputation, if 99% of scientists and nearly all the evidence prove to be right and civilization starts suffering from devastating climate shifts.  If Rupert Murdoch's hidden purpose had been to undermine a sound, fiscally prudent conservatism, by associating with with anti-science mania, he could not have done a better job.

== Science forges on ==

Changes on a larger scale....The interstellar winds streaming through our solar system have switched directions over the last forty years, flowing from a different direction than previously observed. This may give astronomers insight into the dynamics and structure of the galaxy and interstellar clouds.

This year's solar maximum is shaping up to be the weakest in 100 years and the next one could be even more quiescent.  "It's the smallest maximum we've seen in the Space Age." About every 11 years, the sun goes through a cycle defined by an increasing and then decreasing number of sunspots. Solar Cycle 24 has been underway since 2011 and its peak was expected in 2013, but there have been fewer sunspots observed this year compared with the maximums of the last several cycles. A small Cycle 24 also fits in with a 100-year pattern of building and waning solar cycles. Scientists don't know exactly what causes this trend, but there were weak solar cycles in the beginning of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Physicists to test if universe is a computer simulation. Are there signatures that we could detect?

So cool. JPL aimed the Curiosity rover's MAST camera at the sun just in time to catch the moon Phobos performing an annular solar eclipse. (The only kind on Mars; but still it's terrific.)

NuSTAR, NASA's black hole hunter, catches its first ten supermassive black holes.

==Uplift and Evolutionary Changes==

Did long lives -- and the advent of grandparents  --  make humans human? An article in Slate takes a look at the stunning changes that occurred in the Upper Paleolithic 30,000 years ago, when a significant fraction of humans began living past thirty years. A revolution that (by the way) is discussed in Existence.

Animals have to be really smart to survive in the rapidly changing world humans have wrought upon them. And in fact, a new study from the University of Minnesota found, some species appear to be evolving bigger brains to keep up.  University of Minnesota biologist, Emilie C. Snell-Rood, offers evidence suggesting that humans may indeed be driving evolution. As we alter the places where animals live, we may be fueling the evolution of larger animal brains.  They predicted - and found -- that urban populations would show greater cranial capacity than rural populations -- and that cranial capacity would increase over time in urban populations.

Related to my recent scientific articles in the volume PATHOLOGICAL ALTRUISM… A Brazilian stroke victim can't stop helping others after developing pathological generosity. Related to my short story, The Giving Plague (free on Kindle).

A comprehensive compendium lists mutational processes that drive tumor development in 30 of the most common cancer types.

A major cause of sickness among people already hospitalized? Malnutrition! Giving nutritional supplements was shown to decrease hospitalization length by 21%. A simple procedure could save billions of lives, reports Kurzweil's Accelerating Intelligence.

Animals with GEARS!  I'm getting lots of emails comparing this to my g'Kek creatures in BRIGHTNESS REEF. But of course Keith Laumer in RETIEF'S WAR showed us a world where most life used wheels and gears but in nature such things are very rare above bacteria. But this little critter has a cool partial gear arrangement!

==Miscellaneous==

Mass hysteria  is blamed for the symptoms shared by teenage girls that helped stoke the Salem Witch Trials.  In fact, it happens more often than you might think. An article in The Atlantic, What Witchcraft is Facebook? suggests there are signs that social media can make these events worse.

Adam Spencer on Why I Fell in Love with Monster Primes: an inspiring TED talk by a handsome fellow who has an enthralling riff on BIG prime numbers.

The poetry of James Clerk Maxwell (really!)  

And finally, Japanese ingenuity changes plastic into oil.  This video is in Japanese with subtitles.  I could use more facts and details. I would wager that the process is more difficult than he makes it out to be… but still. Watch and be inspired to help make it so.

The Right to Record Police

Last year I touted the most important civil liberties event (so far) in the 21st Century, when top U.S. courts (Glik v. Cunniffe) ruled that citizens have an absolute right to record their interactions with police in public places, and the Obama Administration issued a declaration supporting this ruling as "settled law."  I went on to say that the matter would continue to be at issue, at the level of the streets, with many cameras and cell phones "accidentally" broken… until that phase of resistance ends the way it must, with more bystander-cams catching -- then deterring -- the breaking of cameras. And of course all of it was portrayed in both fiction and nonfiction 25 years ago.

Moreover, the mighty will keep coming up with chess moves, some motivated by nascent tyrannical impulses but also by the best of (blinkered) intentions. For example, what good will your recording do, if you cannot transmit it away from your current location, for safekeeping?  

Heed this: Police can now switch off iPhone cameras and wi-fi: "Apple has recently patented a piece of technology that would allow the authorities and police to block data transmission, including video and photos, whenever they like. All they need to do is decide that a public gathering or venue is deemed “sensitive” and needs to be protected from externalities…. Apple has patented the means to transmit an encoded signal to all wireless gadgets, commanding them to disable recording functions."

Before you react with unalloyed paranoia and loathing, do consider the rationalization. Understand that the Professional Protector Caste has very good reasons to fear what bad guys can do with cell phones during a crisis, triggering bombs, for instance, or reporting where first responders have clustered.  The ostensible reasons are real. But so are our reasons for finding this worrisome. And as usual, there are win-win solutions that no one mentions. Could you come up with some?  I sure can.

Only, now comes the next step.  We should not have to aggressively shove cameras in the faces of cops, to let them know an age of accountability is here. Moving a step closer to a more Transparent Society -- federal Judge Shira Scheindlin prescribed an important experiment, when she found the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk methods unconstitutional. “The City’s highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner,” the judge concluded. To rein in this practice, she ordered “a trial program requiring the use of body-worn cameras in one precinct per borough, a community-based joint remedial process to be conducted by a court-appointed facilitator, and the appointment of an independent monitor to ensure that the NYPD’s conduct of stops and frisks is carried out in accordance with the Constitution.”

For solid justification of this right to record: Take another look at the Sixth Amendment: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial duty…and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor…" I call this the Transparency Amendment -- for the real bulwark of freedoms the passive "right to remain silent" but the assertive right to "compel testimony" on our behalf, even from reluctant witnesses. The logical extension of this is a universal ability to record our interactions with authority. 

==Experiments in Transparency==

Watched Cops are Polite Cops: Reason Magazine ran a pretty good discussion of this experiment in transparency and accountability.  Implications are explored… though the author seems unaware of recent rulings giving citizens a universal right to look-and-record back.

And California governor Jerry Brown has just signed a bill requiring that companies inform consumers when their data has leaked or been hacked.  Social Security numbers, addresses, personal details and passwords have all been pried loose or spilled with regularity, and seldom have the hundreds of thousands of exposed people been told.  Now at least you must be... and we'll all see how incredibly often this happens.  And you are surprised?  And you expect that any system humans design will be totally reliable?  Or reliable at all?  Again, there are alternatives.  Transparency -- catching those who would use our information against us -- is a measure that will work with technological change.  This bill is a welcome step in that direction.

== Rewarding whistle-blowing henchmen? ==

Some great ideas need to gel a bit, before getting attention.  Take my 20-year old (and relentlessly-futilely pushed all that time) idea for a series of whistleblower incentives to help shine light on bad things. From my “Eye of the Needle” or EON list of great projects for billionaires. The "Henchman's Prize" is one of my personal favorites - a million dollars plus a new identity for whoever blows the whistle - with full evidence - on the 'worst' concealed plot or scheme that year!  How could this not shine light on something heinous every year? I suspect nothing could more cost-efficiently help poor nations curb corrupt kleptocracies, converting to diamond-shaped patterns... or help developed nations maintain their healthy accountability systems.  See: The Transparent Society.)

Now some attention is being paid to a simplistic version that would only apply to one  -- and not the most worrisome – variety of henchmen-turned-whistleblowers. “A series of prizes for government employees who risk their livelihoods to shed light on U.S. government abuse might be one way to provide an incentive for more whistleblowing. It needn’t just be one big prize. Think about a foundation that might give out multiple prizes, at all levels of government. Yes, it would need to be pretty well funded.”

Um…. Duh? There are dozens of other necessary traits that this proposal would need, that the article seems to have left out, like ways to liability-shelter the prize-givers, how to ensure the system contains no political or national biases and spreads the love around… and so on.

Above all, we need a set of sliding scales to work from, recognizing that not every henchman who betrays his bosses is an unalloyed hero.  For example, while some leaks have been moderately bracing and debate-stimulating (Edward Snowden), others have been hugely over-rated in importance/consequence (WikiLeaks), and only few of the recent spills (e.g. Swiss banking secrecy) have risen to the level that I would call true whistle-blowing of actual illegality.  Sorry not to be following the romantic rush to call every leaker a "hero"! But it just doesn't work that way, and a mature sliding scale really is needed.

Make no mistake!  We need to encourage a secular trend toward a more open world!  But let's keep a sense of proportion along the way, or the whole whistleblower approach will never gell into its true potential.

A final note on this: want a whistle blower who has made vastly more real difference than Julian Assange?  Swiss bank leaker Hervé Falciani says "he faces constant risk and worries about his safety. The French government has provided three bodyguards.

“I am weak and alone,” Mr. Falciani said, as three round-the-clock bodyguards provided by the French government looked on with hard stares. The protection was needed, he insisted, because he faces constant risk as the sole key to decipher the encrypted data — five CD-ROMs containing a list of nearly 130,000 account holders that may be the biggest leak ever in the secretive world of Swiss banking.  He is in high demand these days, having cast himself as a crusader against the murky world of Swiss banking and money laundering. Once dismissed by many European authorities, he and other whistle-blowers are now being courted as the region’s governments struggle to fill their coffers and to stem a populist uprising against tax evasion and corruption.”

Dig it. We need light sent in all directions. And the aim is not to so cripple government that it ceases to be our tool, capable of shining light at other, cryptic elites.

== The encryption mythology: busted again ==

When I first started writing The Transparent Society, attending EFF and Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) and gatherings of hackers, I tried to understand the incredible transcendentalist faith that so many in the community were devoting to encryption, portraying it as a panacea for all privacy concerns and the sure route to protecting all freedom against would be oppressors.  I am technically trained and grasped all of their arguments... only then I asked:

"Have you studied Bakunin?  or any of the other anarchists or other rebels against tyrannical systems, across 6000 years?  Lenin? Machiavelli? Mao? The Gestapo's tactics in the ongoing cat-vs-mouse game that is played for keeps by rebels against secret police?  Can you list the two dozen or so general types of methods used by the Czar's forces, or the KGB?"  Not one of them had read even a scintilla of background on a subject that (they claimed) fascinated them!  Not one.

Nor could they show how strong encryption of their internet access, from email to IP addresses to physical location, would thwart more than four or five of the ancient methods.  Nor how they could ever be sure that the encryption was actually working, in a world where the powers that be can create false internet IDs as easily as you can and create personas that build cred as fast as you do.  Indeed, would you bet your house that even a majority of the personas on Anonymous aren't NSA fronts?  Really?

Now comes this word: "The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents."

Anyone shocked (shocked!) by this never read The Transparent Society.  Nor even a sliver of human history.  Cowering from power does not work! The only thing that has a chance to work - while we still have some political leverage - is light. Torrents of light, aggressively applied to ALL centers of power, and not just government. (Indeed, govt is one of our principal methods for shining light onto other power centers!)  Light that need not blind our civil servants, or even deny them short term tactical secrecy, to do their jobs.

But light of accountability, nonetheless, to remind the watch dog that it is a dog and not a wolf.

Postscript: Pro-publica offers an apologia that cogently discusses their reasons for revealing the NSA's decryption program.

==A step toward "Smart Mobs"?==

The Internet Response League seeks to call gamers to civic duty. IRL’s first project is to develop a plug-in for World of Warcraft that will notify gamers in the virtual world when real-world disasters break out and ask for help. Gamers would be asked to tag data and other simple but brain-labor-intensive tasks.  Dang, it's took long enough. See my story "The Smartest Mob" for where this might all lead.

Five myths about the NSA... by a guy who should know.  For example: " The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act forbids the NSA from targeting U.S. citizens or legal residents without an order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court." Ah, but the rub is the secret/potemkin nature of that FISA "court" which could be redesigned to contain adversarial processes by ombundsmen who are vetted, but chosen by us, to act on our behalf.  Oh… and fix the darned inspectors general!  There are dozens of measures that could help restore our confidence, without crippling the Protector Caste from doing their jobs.

Alas, instead, after the New York Times exposed the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program in 2005, Congress amended the law to weaken the court’s oversight. "Rather than individual warrants, the court can now approve vast, dragnet-style warrants, or orders, as they’re called. For example, the first document released by the Guardian was a top-secret order from the court requiring Verizon to hand over the daily telephone records of all its customers, including local calls."

What might be going on without supervision? Who can know?  One of the more lurid accusations going around is that the NSA and/or other agencies are already engaged in wholesale blackmail of public officials and/or aristocrats or other major figures... exactly as I warned both publicly and in fiction.  I am not yet ready to credit this rumor as anywhere near 50% likely... we still have too many sincere members of the Professional Protector Caste (PPC) who at least tell themselves they are working for democracy's good... and something like this could only be rationalized by terminally delusional or even evil men. Still, the temptation is there.  It is a failure mode that will flower into full stench, if not now then someday, so long as we fail to develop means of full accountability, while still letting the PPC do their main jobs.

But there are places where folks actually seem to get it!  The Right to Know Act of 2013: California wants companies to disclose everything they know about you.   (Someone report in on rumors that the big database Company Axcion is taking a bold move toward getting YOU involved in managing your own information.)

== More Transparency News ==

A new browser-widget called "Balancer" takes a corrective measure that I long ago predicted, in EARTH -- by offering the user a wide variety of perspectives on important issues, and not only those that the user happens to agree-with.  Balancer keeps track of the political leanings of your surfing history – and suggests ways to even out your habits. Alas, if you deem this a valuable service, you are already one of those who needs it least.

Ever heard of IPv6?  It is ready to go, allowing the Internet to address vastly, vastly more sites and devices.  Says Internet pioneer Vint Cerf: "My concern is that the (current) address space is 32-bits. It can only support 4.3bn terminations. We thought it would be enough in 1973, but as of 2011 the original internet space is exhausted." So why has the internet not migrated to IPv6 given that in 1998 the IETF adopted the 128-bit internet address space to expand from 4.3bn to 340 trillion trillion trillion devices? IPv6 is not pervasive, he says. While IPv6 software is installed on operating systems and routers Cerf says: "The ISPs have been reluctant to turn it on. This is a constant debate because IPv6 is the only way to expand the address space."

Vint goes on to discuss many of the challenges facing the Internet, on the 40th Anniversary of his invention -- with Robert Kahn -- of the TCP/IP packet-based network protocol.

In other news...Facebook will no longer allow you to opt out of their Facial Recognition Database -- as long as you have posted a profile picture.

And... this interesting article introduces (to me, at least) the term of elite panic, a state where regular citizens behave cooperatively while elites (government, business, religious leaders, et.al.) lose their collective cool to paranoia. It describes - alas - a great deal of our recent past.  Indeed, back when I decrypted the Tytler Calumny, I realized that the people often behave far more wisely that the elites who tell themselves how smart they are.

Nor is this the only step forward.  Take another harbinger of things to come. The Seattle Meshnet project creates a completely alternative “internet” with sparse but growing coverage thanks to radio links set up by local hackers. Meshnetters can talk to each other through a channel that they themselves control.  Each node in the mesh, consisting of a radio transceiver and a computer, relays messages from other parts of the network. If the data can't be passed by one route, the meshnet finds an alternative way through to its destination. Another meshnet in northeast Spain now has more than 21,000 wireless nodes, spanning much of Catalonia.

An alternative: Hyperboria is a virtual meshnet because it runs through the existing internet, but is purely peer-to-peer. This means people who use it exchange information with others directly over a completely encrypted connection, with nothing readable by any centralized servers.  Read up about this, but you are seeing only the tip of a big iceberg.

== And the miscellany corner ==

Accusing Google Glass users of being either "glassed-out" zombies or else deliberate "glassholes" -- take this fairly typical Atlantic-style grouchitudinism: "Rather than being ransacked by the undead set forth by vodou bokors, tomorrow's cities might be ravaged by the unabsent, set forth by the contemporary practitioners of dark and light magic -- companies like Google itself. Even so, whether undead or unabsent, the Infected or the Wearers, all zombies may share one thing in common: they build their armies by devouring human brains."  Wow. Somebody’s little luddite must have misplaced his binky.

Economist Robert Higgs has noted the existence of a “ratchet effect” related to the growth of state power: while a crisis may be invoked to justify the expansion of the state’s reach, curiously enough, there’s little or no contraction in state power after the crisis abates. People with power are loath to relinquish it. They can be expected to embrace any opportunity to acquire more power greedily, grasping it with both hands.

And finally, cop-blocking -- kind 'o inspiring... though be careful if you do this. Keep your sense of proportion and humor.

More on Transparency in the Modern World

The Comet of the Century?

Will ISON be the "comet of the century?"

My own doctoral work on small bodies of the solar system made me realize long ago that we've been "cheated" in a sense. On average, most human generations have had a chance to enjoy -- or more often be scared half to death by -- a truly impressive comet. Of course there's no such thing as being "overdue."  After many fizzles and false alarms -- from Kohoutek to Hale-Bopp -- it's wise to take new forecasts with a gain of salt. Still...

… make a note that December 2013 is likely to be the best month to see Comet ISON. Assuming it has survived its exceptionally close pass near the sun intact, the comet will be visible both in the evening sky after sunset and in the morning sky before sunrise. There is real potential, if it is sturdy enough.

Whether or not Ison lives up to its promise, there is another potential cometary extravaganza coming up. Rather than merely putting on a sky show for Earthbound observers, this one is expected to brush right alongside Mars!"NASA researchers had given Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) a 1-in-8,000 chance of striking the Red Planet in October 2014, but revised calculations now put the possibility of an impact at just 1 in 120,000."

Picture that. A comet blazing past the red planet closer than our moon orbits Earth. Possibly much closer. Oh, sure, there probably won't be a direct impact. (Though isn't there a part of you that wishes for a huge bang? And possibly the melting of vast swathes of permafrost? A preliminary test of terraforming methods?) Okay, that likely won't happen…

… but what these blithe, statistical reassurances leave out is the fact that comets are filthy things! They spew out volcanos of dust and gases (that's what makes the gaudy tails.) And therein lies a problem.  Because we have important space assets orbiting Mars!  The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Odyssey spacecraft are crucial to our current science programs, surveying both surface and atmospheric features, while helping NASA to keep tabs on the Curiosity and Opportunity mobile labs, down below.

So far, I have not heard a single worried peep out of JPL, but I expect they are working hard to figure out if those satellites will survive… and if they do, how to turn their eyes toward a super show.

== Death-free meat? ==

Even without sky-harbingers, we persevere! Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, has funded a 250,000-euro ($330,000) project to jump start an ancient dream of science fiction - illustrated in the fiction of Frederik Pohl, in particular - and one that might help save the planet... vat-grown meat. Acting in part because of his concern for animal welfare, Brin expressed high hopes for the technology. "We're trying to create the first cultured beef hamburger. From there I'm optimistic we can really scale by leaps and bounds," he said on a video.

Two volunteers who participated in the first public frying of hamburger grown in a lab said Monday that it had the texture of meat but was short of flavor because of the lack of fat. But this could be controlled by letting some of the stem cells develop into fat cells. Crucially, the testers said the burger has the "look, feel and taste like the real thing."

This technology, along with others like algafarming that sops in excess industrail CO2 and farm fertilizer runoff and crop plants that fix their own nitrogen, could make a huge difference to humanity's nutritional, ecological and karmic burdens, especially if the number of kilos of grain needed for a kilo of quality meat can be kept small, then our ecological (and karmic) burdens may ease a bit, just in time. (Raising animals for the table takes up about 70 percent of all agricultural land, and much  is turning into desert.) We need this.  Attaguy, Sergey.

== More space wonders! ==

Cosmography of the Local Universe, a film by Hélène Courtois is the best video display of our cosmos and our exact position in it to date. Fascinating and beautiful.  A universe before our eyes, that our ancestors never imagined.

While we're on the subject, here is an interesting case: the now-standard proposal that we are surrounded by "dark matter" is based largely on measurements of the dispersion of velocities of stars, clusters and small galaxies in orbit around larger galaxies. The added gravitational pull of dark matter would explain the higher velocities seen… but some iconoclast physicists in Israel have offered an alternative suggesting a slight non-linearity in Newtonian gravitation at very low force levels.  Why am I touting this? Because it is a perfect case of a "crackpot" - non-paradigm - theory that is given respectful treatment by mainstream physics. A counter example to the other crackpots we all know, who proclaim that their favorite alternative hypothesis is being crushed by lemming-like uniformity in all the ivory towers. Sorry fellows. Scientists are open to unusual ideas.  They just expect you to follow some of the regular rhythms and procedures that have worked so spectacularly well at sifting wheat from mountains of chaff. Approaching them with wrathful paranoia does not help.

Veddy eenterestink! By encouraging Google Glass users to behave and work like virtual ants, a new game called Swarm! is showing the tremendous potential for augmented reality to bring crowdsourcing to the next level — if not to humanity itself.  Hearkens to my smart mobs in Existence!

A map of the scientific universe: 865,000 research papers from the arXiv database color-coded by topic, centered around a core of high-energy physics.

== Quick Science Blips! ==

Elon's new hyper loop train. Details at last! 

Eeep. Exposure to light at night, especially the blue wavelengths of computer screens, tablets and smart phones appears to be correlated with depression.

Asteroid mining? Right and wrong reasons to invest.

Exhaled breath is a unique fingerprint.  Unique to each person. And you expect to evade this?

Graphene reveals new, revolutionary properties on a monthly basis.  Some of them appear to be stunning.

Hidden camera records journey of package through postal system.

 == More interesting science miscellany ==

ALIEN ENCOUNTERS on SCI (the Science Channel) was a fun, somewhat light "first contact scenario" show, augmented by Tru-Science interviews -- including some choice Brin-blather!   And now, by popular demand, they have been given the okay for another season... wherein I suspect I'll blather more...

Know any cynical college students? The Harmonic Hoodlums ("Yuck Tore Railroad") have a classic Youtube single "Making Decisions" that's funky, brazen, bohemian and deep.

A Fox News columnist (of all people!) lists six reasons why the Keystone XL Pipeline would be a disaster for the United States and not in the nation's interest. Given that the alternative would be to use the oil in North America (reducing prices) instead of exporting it, exactly why are lower middle class tea-partiers screeching to help moguls do this?

Shades of uplift: Changing the world one dog at a time?  In Existence my suggestion was to enlist the Helmsley Foundation, to which Leona left gobs of cash "for dogs."  How about applying some of that to making dogs smarter?

A muscle pill? A pharmaceutical that could make us all look like Mr. Universe? Yipe! You try it first, okay? (In fact, I've been quoted many times saying that we'll know the future has finally arrived when everyone wears spandex!)

As for them comets… well… keep watching the skies!  And let's keep heading out there...