David Hartwell, a true original - and who are "forgotten" great SF authors?

David G. Hartwell passed on suddenly, at age 74, after a tragic fall caused unstoppable cerebral bleeding. One of the greatest editors in literature, not just science fiction, he staunchly and effectively promoted the genre of boldness and exploration. 

I've known very few members of our species with the breadth and depth of mind and heart that this unique person brought to our planet, interested in absolutely everything, and completely unabashed. He was - in every positive sense - a leading citizen of our commonwealth of wonder.

David's tenure as head of Timescape Books was a golden era in Science Fiction.  His annual best-of series kept alive a spirited side to the genre, at a time when many others pushed dolorous tales of omphaloskepsis, ennui and despair.  With his wife - Kathryn Cramer - David collated The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF and, more recently, The Hard SF Renaissance, volumes now taught widely in universities, standing up for the value of a literature focused on exploring processes of change, as well as tomorrow's undiscovered realm.

Hartwell was nominated for the Hugo Award forty-one times, nineteen in the category of Best Professional Editor and Best Editor Long Form, winning in 2006, 2008 and 2009, and twenty-two times as editor/publisher of The New York Review of Science Fiction. Hartwell was a Senior Editor at Tor Books, where he worked for over thirty years. "David Hartwell restored our faith in the power of science fiction," writes Charlie Jane Anders in a tribute on io9.

Often a visitor to our California home, here he is snapped visiting me and Professor Roger Berkowitz during my recent visiting position at Bard College. David and I had been working closely with Stephen Potts on an anthology of essays and stories about what civilization may become, when filled with transparency and light. Coincidentally given David's green light this very week - Chasing Shadows: Visions of our Coming Transparent World - may be one of his final books. 

How I'd rather have collaborated many times more!

As a guardedly contingent agnostic, I acknowledge some images of deity that might be worthy of respect. In which case, I'd ask - call it pray - that David be given his choice of next-worlds, from among those he helped introduce to millions of living minds. Pondering that is one way I take a bit of solace.

An unusual fellow who designed his own life path. An original and almost the hardest working editor I ever knew, excluding only my Dad -- a fatherly role he played for many rising authors. 

Above all, farewell my friend.

== Forgotten Science Fiction authors? ==

A fun little conversation-starter? On Quora I was asked to name "forgotten" Sci Fi authors.  Other respondents were citing Roger Zelazny, L. Sprague de Camp, Ursula Le Guin, Lester del Rey, A.E. VanVogt, Fritz Lieber, Clifford Simak, Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon. Well, of course Zelazny and Farmer and Ursula and those others should never be forgotten.  But would any reasonably well-read person say they are?  Or Walter Miller or Iain Banks?  No, not yet on any such list!  And I hope never.

 For my own answer I dug deeper. From Robert Sheckley and Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr.), William Tenn and the zany-brilliant Avram Davidson -- among the greatest of all short story writers -- all the way to lamented classics like John Boyd's "The Last Starship From Earth."  

If you like adventure, then H. Beam Piper and William Burkett. Andre Norton!!! Richard C. Meredith!! Keith Laumer, Erik Frank Russell and Christopher Anvil and Gordon Dickson. Frederick Brown. Bob Shaw. 

Thoughtful explorers: Philip Wylie. Charles Sheffield. James Blish! Murray Leinster and John Varley. Anthony Boucher. And likewise the marvelously unique-voiced R. A. Lafferty and Cordwainer Smith. Panshen and Pangborn and Biggle and Kuttner, Wolfe and Gunn. Zenna Henderson and Randall Garrett. Jack Vance for plausible fantasy (and Marian Zimmer Bradley and Michael Moorcock - though never quite my cuppatea). Lest we forget Weinbaum, White and Stewart. And Hal Clement for the really sciencey-sciencey stuff, long before The Martian.

Oh, there are bigger names who we should keep refreshing so any danger of faulty memory is swiftly canceled. Fred Pohl is not forgotten but he was the greatest true-idea-explorer SF author and Poul Anderson was the best, purest storyteller. (Just sayin'.) Bob Silverberg could rouse any soul, as does Nan Kress. And Joanna Russ slapped us awake, as did Harlan Ellison and Chip Delany and Thomas Disch and Fritz Leiber. A.E. Van Vogt was (philosophically) the L. Ron Hubbard of Sci Fi authors who could write - still I liked the Rull series (just beware of his Cardian tendency to worship demigods). Phil Dick will keep getting movies, so no worries there.  And dear Anne McCaffrey will get her dragons onscreen. So let's get back to names that are in danger.

Some younger ones who are fading from prominence way too soon. Octavia Butler is safely ensconced in university lit classes.  Alas, the same cannot be said for Linda Nagata, Joan Sloncziewski, Catherine Asaro, Lisa Goldstein, K.W. Jeter, Donald Kingsbury, Lee Killough. ... but if we start down this road we will be up all night and I refer you below, to what will be a lively tsunami of suggestions by others, in the comments thread.

But oh, is it possible some young 'uns don't know Alfred Bester and John Brunner? Really?  They scared the bejezus out of every other living SF author, for a decade each. Gotta watch out for them killer "B's".

Late adds: Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers. And yes, my list was anglophobic. Sorry.  Look up Tetsu Yano. For starters.  Another all-nighter, but suggestions welcome.

One of you chimed in with Burgess, Goulart, Chandler, Budrys & Ballard. Simak & Knight. Forehead smack! Another of you: Alan E. Nourse, Brian Aldiss, Olaf Stapledon, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, James Inglis, Fred Hoyle. Absolutely! Except… James Inglis? Let me chime in Kate Wilhelm, Ben Bova and Charles L. Harness.

Dang there's bunches of us sci fi authors, after all. Will the youngest of you put me on such a list, someday?

== Elsewhere in Science Fiction  ==

Is Science Fiction emerging from the ghetto? In recent years, Harpers, The New Yorker and Atlantic – who used to cyclically do loathsome hit-pieces against SF, frantically libeling our field every few years – have instead run laudatory and friendly appraisals, as a new generation, less prissy and more open to a universe of ideas, appears to be stepping up, taking over the New York salons.  

And now – on NPR’s site – Jason Sheehan reviews Harlan Ellison’s latest short story collection, Can & Can'tankerous, calling Harlan: 

“…America's weird uncle. He's the angry, elderly cousin at the table — the one who, for weeks before dinner, everyone asks about. Is he coming this year? Is Harlan gonna be there?  They ask because they're worried; Harlan is always starting something. But they'd also be sad if he wasn't there.” 

How interesting. Not science fiction's weird uncle but America's. Perhaps, indeed, we are rounding a corner.

Press and culture attention is swinging to Hard SF as in this NPR piece:  "It is very well documented that people who work for NASA have been inspired by science fiction," says Calla Cofield of Space.com. "And there's always a back-and-forth, you know, between science fiction and reality. All of this is about dreaming about what's going on off the surface of the Earth."

And science fiction appeared on President Obama's vacation reading list...with a novel that I highly recommend, The Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, translated brilliantly by Ken Liu.  (With my name conveniently right there - if appropriately in small letters (!) - on the cover.)

== And Finally... ==

Explore the history of Science Fiction with the just-released Science Fiction Trading Cards, from Walter Day, featuring authors such as H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Aldous Huxley, Samuel Delaney, Nancy Kress, and Gregory Benford.

Oh, and Ariel Waldman's fun new book -  What's It Like in Space? Stories from Astronauts Who've Been There  - features 60 short vignettes by astronauts (past & present) about weird, unusual, embarrassing, funny and awe-inspiring moments in space.

The value of pessimists… the necessity of optimists

I have long maintained that the greatest blessing and curse of humanity has been our near infinite capacity for delusion.  To firmly believe things that are illogical or improbable, or even decisively disproved by blatant facts.  This gift is what empowers great art -- and we fiction authors have learned to weave ornate incantations, catering to a public need to believe (temporarily) in imaginary events. 

Alas, the downside of this talent is obvious.  We are terrible at perceiving and appraising our own delusional mistakes – witness the almost unalloyed litany of horrid statecraft perpetrated by kings, lords and priests, when their delusions could go unquestioned and unaccountable.

We’ve found a partial solution.  Criticism is the only known antidote to error. If you are blind to some mistakes, others may not be, and they will often be delighted to point out those errors of yours, without charge! (Will you listen: even gritting your teeth?)

The greatest advantage of a free and open society is not the pleasure of liberty (though that’s great). It is the high proportion of disastrous blunders that we manage to catch, in time, that led to our unprecedented ratio of success to failure. Science fiction plays a role, through “self-preventing prophecies,” like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which girded millions to fight against the worst possible failure modes. But other professions do their bit, as well.  

Especially Journalism. Yes, much-maligned (sometimes deservedly) journalism.  One of the 'expert castes' currently under attack in the War-Aganst-All-Spartypants. Individually they are as flawed as any of us. But a profession that lives by asking questions... are you sure you want to dismiss them, across the board?)

== Do warnings bring action? ==

In his book “Lights Out,” Ted Koppel reveals that a major cyberattack on America’s power grid is not only possible but likely, that it would be devastating, and that the United States is shockingly unprepared. Imagine a continental blackout lasting not days, but weeks or months. Koppel maintains that a well-designed attack on just one of the nation’s three electric power grids could cripple much of our infrastructure. 

Let me add that terrorism isn’t the only way it can happen. A “Carrington Event” – a massive solar flare like one that fried telegraph systems in the 1850s – could have devastating effects upon our grid and unlinked electronics in the home, (possibly even zapping the rooftop solar systems that are our last bulwark against darkness, unless we learn how to buffer them well). 

Moreover, the 1850s event was apparently not as bad as they come. Studies of carbon isotope anomalies in tree rings suggest that the Sun occasionally belches prodigiously, giving our planet truly major electrical shocks. And note that I have not even discussed another threat – EMP or electromagnetic pulse – that some enemy might use to accomplish the same end.

Surely more attention should be paid to these dangers.  And I regularly consult about such threats with “agencies” who have come to appreciate the unfettered darkside imaginings of science fiction authors.  You want potential failure modes?  Ones not yet on anyone’s horizon? I got ‘em.

And yet, how to reconcile that with the rampant accusations that “Brin is an optimist”?  Easy.  Unlike the certifiably insane cynical grouches all around us, I am able to notice the clear fact that things are (still tentatively) very very good for us, right now.  That our ancestors – including the Greatest Generation so extolled by the Right – would have laughed in the faces of today’s dolor-merchants and their dismal mewlings.  Nor is the mad-right the only locus of grumpy ingrates. Civil libertarians who decry the rising surveillance state are justified (!) and useful… until they neglect to ask – “So, how did we get the present day peak of freedom that I so-worry we’re about to lose?”

Asking that one, simple question empowers us to see a simple truth.  That we did not get here by cowering and hiding.

In fact when we open our eyes to positive trends, we discover they are easily as big as any list of negatives.  From Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined to Peter Diamandis’s Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, some of the smartest people alive are pointing out the good news… and how much more there may be, if just a few game-changing breakthroughs line up.

Even in the blogosphere, where the cynical curled lip and playground bully sneer assail any hint of positivity, a few have spoken up, as in this piece listing “11 Reasons Why 2015 Was a Great Year For Humanity.” Wherein the writer, Angus Hervey, opines that: “We are living through the most astonishing period of human progress in history. And nobody’s telling us about it.”   

Indeed, he could have made it a clean dozen reasons, by mentioning something I’ve been saying for the last month or so… that 2015 was by far humanity’s best year in the exploration and understanding of space, the cosmos and our place in the universe.

And the ease of self-deception...

Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind, by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower asserts an answer to one of the great questions of biology; why so many species, ranging from dolphins and chimps to corvids (ravens) and parrots, sea lions and elephants, and prairie dogs, all cluster close to each other under what I’ve called theglass ceiling of sapience,” displaying similar, basic capabilities at tool-use, proto-language and self-awareness. Varki and Brower propose that there is a lethal zone, just a little higher, wherein creatures become fully aware of their inevitable death. Any species who rise into this zone lose fitness because individuals become obsessed with their own mortality, to the detriment of all other considerations, like reproduction.

Under this hypothesis — clearly influenced by the mid-20th Century Freudian “thanatos” complex — humanity burst beyond the glass ceiling by counter-balancing any thanatos obsession with another exceptional skill, that of denial.  Self-distraction, using various mental tricks to ignore — for the most part — the glaring prospect of personal doom.

Alas, my response (admittedly without yet reading the book) is that Freudian and meta-Freudian  models are artifacts of a time when we had a much less clear understanding of the workings of evolution.   In this case, we have a just-so story of creatures becoming so terminally obsessed with mortality that they neglect their offspring. Tasty... but...

Refutation is simple.  Those who find a way to prioritize their progeny higher than scrabbling for an extra few months… those are the ones who will pass on genes, including for the trait of such prioritization.  Indeed, nature is filled with examples of courageous mothers and dads who do exactly that. All that is needed is for parenthood to be an addictive high — and those channels are already present in every species that abides near the glass ceiling. Oxytocin, endorphins, dopamine levels, all reward parental care with overwhelming ferocity. At which point the thanatos distraction will have a potent rival, one far more correlated with fitness and success at the game of genetic procreation.  In other words, sorry. I’m not buying it.

There are other, more plausible, hypotheses for why humanity shattered the glass ceiling by orders of magnitude.  In nature, whenever a trait experiences rapid runaway, the first culprit to appraise would be sexual selection.  In my neoteny paper I posit a rare two-way cycle of sexual selection, in which female and male humans engaged in fierce judgementalism toward each other, demanding ever-inflating sets of exaggerated traits, foremost of which was intelligence.

Jumping to the other end… In Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Eliezer Yudkowsky explains the science underlying human irrationality with a mix of fables, argumentative essays, and personal vignettes.  A decision theorist and researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Yudkowsky is also author of the popular amateur novel Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. 

== And Alack ==

Word arrives here about the recent or imminent passing of the great science fiction editor, David Hartwell.  I am bummed and will have more to say about this soon.

A Tsunami of Science Fiction Shows

== A multitude of new shows ==

Turning from the (almost always) ridiculous to the (very often) sublime, CBS plans to release a new Star Trek television series  in 2017. 

The new television series is not related to the upcoming feature film “Star Trek Beyond,” which is scheduled to be distributed by Paramount Pictures in summer 2016.  Which is fine. I don’t mind the reboot started by J.J. Abrams as much as some do -- it's fun-fluff that offers little depth -- but it should be clearly demarcated (I know how) as an offshoot parallel world from the main line of this spectacularly successful mythic universe. 

J.J. Abrams will also produce Westworld, an HBO series based on Michael Crichton's 1973 movie about a futuristic Old West amusement park (with robotic cowboys), starring Yul Brynner. 

But that’s just one drop in a veritable tidal wave of new, televised science fiction coming up.  

From Jonathan Nolan’s planned epic version of Isaac Asimov's Foundation to the vivid Expanse series, based on the James S. Corey series of novels.  From Fred Pohl’s Gateway all the way to three different productions of John Scalzi tales, including (possibly) an adaptation of Redshirts. 

As a fellow at UCSD's Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, I am thrilled to see plans for Arthur C. Clarke's  concluding tale 3001 to reach the screen… 

…along with optioned stories by China Mieville, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, Anne Leckie, Dan Simmons and Ian McDonald and a timely remake of Brave New World, plus a TV series based on H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

See this site for a full listing of twenty-three SF projects in the works.  And no, not all of them will make it. Still, we had better hope that some of them (at least) are big hits, so that this trend will be more than a mere flash in the pan.  

Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” is already out on Amazon. Released in December was a miniseries based on Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" -- (an earnest and sincere effort, if bloated and ultimately kind of tedious. I know exactly how it could have been much better, alas.)  See more below...

Then there is the panoply of already running shows, like the under-rated “Extant” and “Humans,” “Minority Report,” “Limitless,” “Defiance,” the amazing “Person of Interest,” and the new dystopian "Colony," (And possibly a dozen more.)

Sometime fellow at the Clarke Center and by revered bro Kim Stanley Robinson has signed for Red Mars to be a miniseries. Ten episodes, with Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski in charge.

Yipe, who is funding all of this… aliens? Is our explosion of dramas evidence that we’ve been secretly contacted – subsidized to broadcast amazing-lurid-naïve dreams about what’s going on, out there? 

If so… then what am I, chopped liver? ;-)

== And finally... ==

Oh, one last note. Did you actually join in the like-frenzy for Mad Max: Fury Road?  Really?  I found it awful. Some of the fight scenes were okay, but fairly routine and... endless. The first three Mad Max flicks were notable for punctuating the action with some very interesting and provocative musings on what it takes to maintain a semblance of civilization. And the meaning of being a hero. When Beyond Thunderdome was not infuriating me, it was dazzling me with sharply-pangful poignancy or things I had not contemplated before.  I wanted to argue with Thunderdome. 

Look, I am willing to try to enjoy films that appeal to only part of me... e.g. the ten year old who loves cool visual fight scenes and gutsy women punching mean guys. And that part of me liked this flick... though the fight scenes palled as they stretched on and on and on...

But when a flick gives nothing to the rest of me?  Not an instant of thoughtfulness or interesting dialogue or attention to the Mad Mad tradition of discussing the meaning of civilization? Just Sauron-like demonics complete with red, glowing eyes and not a clue how all these people got either food or the gasoline they spent in tanker-loads. Seriously, another masked-hissing villain behaving in ways that would get any feudal lord swiftly killed by his own men, in any real world?  And you liked that? Feh.

Yes, yes, I am told it is significant in having "strong female characters." Say what? Sure, that's kind of true -- amid a giant, misogynist rape fantasy, wherein the spunky women still need a male hero when the chips are down. But okay, points for that. Still, might I ask, where the folks saying this have been for the last 30 years, since Sigourney's Ripley and Xena and all the Kick-Ass Ladies (KAL) who followed? Science fiction is the genre that embraced KALs first and most thoroughly, from Underworld to Stargate and Sanctuary and Serenity to Trek's Captain Kathryn Janeway to Storm and Mystique and Buffy! From Sarah Conner to Katniss to Lara Croft to Trinity and... oh please.  Make your own list and if you cannot reach fifty within 5 minutes then you've been a hermit.  

Be proud! Our genre is the leader. And MM:FR added nothing much.

Look, I am willing to try to enjoy films that appeal to only part of me... e.g. the ten year old who loves cool visual fight scenes and gutsy women punching mean guys. And that part of me liked this flick... though the fight scenes palled as they stretched on and on and on...

But when a flick gives NOTHING to the rest of me?  Not an instant of thoughtfulness or interesting dialogue or attention to the Mad Mad tradition of discussing the meaning of civilization?  Just idiots who have endless supplies of gasoline to burn?

Sorry,  This is a roadrunner cartoon.

In contrast, we rather enjoyed - despite ourselves - the amusing and very stylish - The Man From Uncle. A minor action flick, but with good/clever dialogue and real sensitivity to all the cliches in the genre, it tried (often successfully) to offer a different riff on those cliches.  Kinda cute.  Mostly harmless.

== addendum re: Childhood's End ==

Because some of you asked me to elaborate, let me explain how the Childhood's End miniseries -- while pretty good in many ways and faithful to the text -- could have been far, far better. 

Why, oh why, not have one of the kids actually TALK to an adult human? Offering a little solace and kindness? If they are incapable of any nostalgia or affection for their parents and birth-civilization, then they are not "graduating" to a higher level. In that case they are a blank slate, being absorbed by aliens whose aim is anything but to grow larger and wiser from human experience.

This kid - and by proxy representing all of them - could easily say:

"We still love you but we have to move on to things you won't understand. Though in a sense, isn't that the old story of parents bewildered by their brilliant kids? We're just moving faster and farther. Be happy for us! We'll take Beethoven and Van Gogh and all human arts and literature and stories with us! And we take with us your affection, which will warm us for challenges ahead. You prepared us for a great adventure! And we are grateful. HERE is how much you are loved..."

And the children touch nearby adults and all the adults in the world experience a moment of utter joy.

Then: "Goodbye." And they are gone.

That would have been faithful to Clarke... but also a deeper, better moment.

Conspiracies, Japan's "recession," voting fraud and other nonsense

This rather moving essay by an immigrant engineer tells of her shock - at first - over something rather simple.  She had seen American cars, houses and streets on TV and in films -- (along with hugely exaggerated violence).  But what stunned her most, apparently, was the reliability of infrastructure.  Like how smoothly citizens rely on the Postal Service, taking for granted and even maligning what she found miraculous. And libraries. And utilities and streets and all the gracious-relaxed assumptions that we hold, that stuff will just work.

"Almost every aspect of the most innovative parts of the United States, from cutting-edge medical research to its technology scene, thrives on publicly funded infrastructure. The post office is struggling these days, in some ways because of how much people rely on the web to do much of what they used to turn to the post office for. But the Internet is a testament to infrastructure, too: It exists partly because the National Science Foundation funded much of the research that makes it possible. Even some of the Internet’s biggest companies, like Google, got a start from N.S.F.-funded research.  Infrastructure is often the least-appreciated part of what makes a country strong, and what makes innovation take flight. From my spot in line at the post office, I see a country that does both well; not a country that emphasizes one at the expense of the other."

You'd expect this to resonate with me.  It is there on the pages of The Postman, how most of us would not respond to a collapse of civilization the way masses are depicted doing, in Hollywood fluff.  (Especially the latest, wretchedly-stupid, Max Max flick.) Rather, as Rebecca Solnit shows in A Paradise Built in Hell, millions of us would have one priority we would put ahead of our own lives. 

On a more mundane level, I have spoken often of the "miracle of the four-way stop sign intersection" -- how just standing there (at least in California) leaves you in awe after a short while, at the stunning ability and courtesy and blithely unaware citizenship that 99% of drivers display, with scarcely a thought.

Civilization. Preserving it. Saving it and bringing it back. Confidently defending it from those who deny it's even possible.

Let's do that, this year.

==  Conspiracy Theories – the great uniter of crazed left and right ==

Both ends of the political spectrum feature righteously angry personalities who indulge in demonization that extends into conspiracy territory.  I've elsewhere dealt with left wing fantasies, like “Loose Change” mania about the 9/11 attacks. But I spend less time there because (1) a very small number of their paranoid ravings do have some basis in fact… and (2) because the far-wingnuts of the left have almost zero influence at national or state levels of the Democratic Party, and hence no access to state power.

In sharp contrast, the litany of stunning, schizo-level conspiracies credited on the American right, by majorities of GOP voters, as well as most candidates and media pundits, is simply appalling.  From “birthers” who have never come up with even a hypothesis why Ann Dunham would have traveled (without leaving a trace) to Kenya to give birth, while her parents conspired to put a false birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser….  

… to ACORN, Benghazi and Planned Parenthood… all the way back to Bircher screeches about flouridation, DDT and Dwight Eisenhower being an agent of the Kremlin.  This article – while one-sided – gives an excellent run-down on a frenzied history of what, alas, is often the conservative mainstream.  

Which I deem a tragedy!  Indeed, there are versions of American conservatism that very much belong at the negotiating table of U.S. political process, as we try to find ethical and practical ways to make a better society for all.  I know some conservatives who are right-on as often as anyone I know… except for their myopia on one issue. Despite having all withdrawn in disgust from the Republican Party, most refuse to admit just how crazy the undead elephant has become.  Not one of them has admitted the obvious -- that it is time for sane conservatives to stand up and loudly rebel against the hijackers of their movement.

This article is, as I said, somewhat biased. Its excoriation of NAFTA, for example, leaves out the way NAFTA has bootstrapped Mexico toward a rapidly enlarging urban middle class, which ought to be the number one U.S. foreign policy objective, for a myriad overwhelming reasons.   (And it is working, spectacularly as the Mexican middle class rises and net immigration to the US has turned negative.)

Strangely, the very worst rightwing nut-theories are left out… e.g. the long chain of pyrotechnic campaigns against science, from “cars don’t cause smog” and “tobacco is wholesome” and "marijuana makes you go kill your loved ones,"all the way to climate denialism. That reflex - to obey oligarchs seeking short term profit - has led and will lead directly to millions upon millions of deaths.  The GOP’s deliberate sabotaging of science R&D, including banishment of Congress's own Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), can only be explained either by insanity or else outright treason.

Read it.You’ll come away stunned and appalled… and better armed to deal with your crazy uncle.

== What's actually up with Japan? ==

A book by my colleague Scott Foster – Stealth Japan - "shatters the myth that Japan is a 'basket case' that has fallen hopelessly behind in the digital world of the 21st Century and makes a strong case that Japan may in fact have created the most successful economy and society in the world today."  

By offshoring much of their production and paperwork, Japanese corporations have been able to effectively keep two sets of books. In one set, shown to the world, the nation has been in recession for two decades. Yet, Japanese citizens easily afford every toy and gadget, innovation continues and social unrest is nil. Read Scott’s fascinating revelations about Japan’s second set of books.

== Voter ID laws and other cheating ==

And now this: "A federal appeals court unanimously struck down a voter ID law in Texas, saying it violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act to discriminate against minority voters." 


Let's be clear.  I do not mind gradually ramping up voter ID requirements. The Left is wrong to oppose them in principle, over reasonable time. 
No, the test of sincerity is whether the state eases-in such laws and provides all the help voters need, in order to comply with a new, state-imposed burden. Have new voter-ID requirements been accompanied by state assistance for poor folks, women, minorities etc to get the needed ID?  Not only for voting but to help them in many other aspects of life?


The answer is... no.  Hypocritically, these states have funded ZERO $ to this.  Zero, in every single case. Not even token or figleaf efforts. 
 Funny how Republicans scream over government imposing new regulatory burdens on rich oligarchs and corperations. Goppers regularly demand appropriations for Compliance Assistance to corporations, yet fund not a penny to help poor Americans retain their vote.

This is hypocrisy of staggering dimensions. Failure to allocate compliance assistance proves their aim was never fair voting. Pure and simple, they are cheaters.  Gerrymandering cheating-lying cheaters.  See it explained here. As for Democrats?  Their inability to parse this and ever mention compliance assistance as the smoking gun? That failure, clearly, convicts them of a different sin.  

Stupidity.

== Obama the "feckless" ==

Yep, that's the latest buzz word.  Feckless. And cowardly.  Unable even to maintain the old "socialist" malarkey with a straight face, even on Fox, they have switched to calling a wimp the guy they earlier accused of being about to black-helicopter America with Leninist martial law.

Some memes only spread through repetition. The “Obama is a wimp compared to Putin” narrative is spewed so relentlessly by Fox & comrades that is has become as accepted as breathing, not only on the right but also on the left.  Against such a tsunami of repetitive incantation-propaganda, I can only reiterate: “To be clear, the Russians themselves are not as stupid as Fox commentators. They do not ignore the devastating setback in Ukraine." 

They deem that blow to have been a hugely aggressive and successful assault on Russian interests by Barack Obama to have been vastly, vastly more significant that Putin's subsequent nibble-back of Crimea. Putin and the Russian media relentlessly portray him as anything but the wimp he is depicted in right wing American press.  They view him as the "most aggressive and successful opponent they have faced, since Reagan.”

The incredible density of our media at failing to report this is so obtuse that Obama was forced - in his recent Stat of the Union Speech - to say what should never have been necessary for a president to say.  To be the one to remind his critics that this "feckless" commander in chief killed... Osama.... bin... Laden.

And our service men and women are dying at a rate one twentieth the average during either Bush Administration.  And the readiness levels of our military units are back at Clinton era levels -- near 100% -- instead of the ZERO percent for major marine and Army units that Clinton and Obama inherited from Bushes.  Sincere conservatives would notice this stuff.

To be clear, what did the GOP do, back when they controlled every single U.S. lever of power?  From 2001 through 2007, they had locks in the White House, Congress, the bureaucracy and the Courts. So what did they do with all that power?  Did they pass immigration or health reform? (Even versions based on conservative values?) Did they balance the budget or bring entitlements under control? (Deals were on the table and ready, but Fox shrugged them aside.) 

Did they even do a thing to make abortions harder to get? Or seal the borders? Or increase aid to Israel?  None of those things.  In fact, those Congresses are documented as the laziest in the history of the republic, meeting the fewest days, holding the fewest hearings, issuing the fewest subpoenas, passing the fewest bills… despite continuing rhetoric and anger, they did nothing to decrease the size of government.

Their only assertive efforts were (1) Bushite wars that bankrupted us and (2) tax favors for the super-rich. Then more, then more for oil and coal, then more for Wall Street.

Please.  If you are a sincere conservative or libertarian, you should be meeting and conspiring to rebel against the Murdochian-Saudi hijacking of your movements.  The rise of Trump and Cruz shows that the conservative masses know something is wrong with those oligarchs and their lies. But they are being given no alternative by real adults.