Winding up. It's about our future...

Okay, we're winding up. The next few days should tell us a lot about this generation of the republic and the American Experiment. It has certainly brought home to me the self-indulgent differences between blogging and old-style journalism! And the day after the election... if we aren't packing for New Zealand... I plan to allocate more time to science fiction.

But first: more grist for you undecideds out there. Or for those who see a bit of wavering in their beloved-but-crazy uncles...

100 things about Donald Trump, any one of which is far worse than Hillary Clinton making the same procedural mistake with emails as Colin Powell and George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice. (Seriously? Email procedures? That's all you got?) Quibble: the writer of this piece should have put policy matters first, instead of last. 

Anyway, I could cite 3 dozen more Trump/GOP lunacies, off the top of my head. Like the pure fact that Republicans slash the budgets for auditors and investigators at the IRS and SEC and try to cripple the CFPB, with only one conceivable aim - that of easing the way for white collar crime. Democrats want those agencies on the job. Lay that stark difference (plus the EPA and the War on Science) before those preening-cynical Bernie-bros out there! (Get them to picture alternate worlds of 4 years from now, when they can try again, or not!) Those claiming "there's no difference" are clinically insane.
As for your crazy, confederate uncle, none of this will likely persuade him. But recite it all to him anyway! Because your aunt is quietly listening.
And now this.  Win or lose, Republicans are now vowing Total War.  Let's be clear. The aim of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes was always the destruction of American politics as a means of adult negotiation, in the United States of America. That outright treason can only be stopped if we cauterize their version of the GOP out of Congress and statehouses.  Tell your Republican friends to send us grownups, in 2018.

Wow. Jim Wright is amazing. See his latest posting, Pragmatism. He doesn't put things in quite the same terminology I would. But this ex-military, raised-conservative believer in free enterprise lays it down hard and clear. That the undead vampires who have hijacked American conservatism need to be sent packing. Wright's missive may not convert anyone's crazy uncle. But show it to your wavering cousin.

== His Grace Note ==

President Obama is apparently determined to make the final phase of his presidency about science and technology. He's always been a supporter, boosting the activity levels of the White House OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy) to new levels, including two visit-talks by yours truly, in the last 6 months. 

OSTP's big endeavors include Computer Science for All, a big move to get Computer Science and programming back into the public schools.  I also participated in an OSTP event in LA around Andy Weir's The Martian book and movies - which culminated in last week's  major Obama speech about Mars.  Now two more steps:  the White House Frontiers Conference brought together innovators from across the country to focus on how science and technology is shaping the 21st century, and particularly the role of innovation in building smarter and more inclusive communities, with a special focus on the coming 5G revolution. 

Obama has called for preparations to be made for “extreme space weather events,” such as solar flares capable of causing catastrophic damage to Earth’s critical infrastructure

Oh, and he's a Trekkie! Barack Obama, WIRED editor in chief Scott Dadich and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito discuss the original Star Trek series and what it reveals about our common humanity.  

Compare this to the relentless, ongoing and volcanic Fox-GOP War on Science, and every other knowledge profession - a trait shared by both Donald Trump and his supporters with Paul Ryan and the Bush Clan.

And after he leaves office?  Proving him to be one of our smarter presidents, Barack Obama apparently has realized something that almost no one in America noticed.  That the real foundations of power in America are in the state legislatures, where gerrymandering and other corrupt practices have taken deep root. The Democratic Party, in close consultation with the White House, has launched a new political group “which will coordinate campaign strategy, direct fundraising, organize ballot initiatives and put together legal challenges to state redistricting maps,” Politico reported. Former Attorney General Eric Holder will chair the new group, named the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. And Obama himself, as Politico writes, has “identified the group … as the main focus of his political activity once he leaves office.”

(Note you democrats in Illinois and Maryland, rise up!  As we did in California, Oregon and Washington, where voters ended gerrymandering-by-democrats! It proved to be the right thing to do. Once you cleanse that horrid crime, it will be a treason only associated with the Republican Party.  Make it that clearcut.)

Back to Obama's retirement plan. Noteworthy is the stark and diametric difference between how Republican ex-presidents behave than Democratic ones do. Sitting on a ranch and holding court (Ford, Reagan, Bush & Bush) vs. frenzied foundation work to fight poverty or disease (Carter & Clinton). This reinforces my longstanding diagnosis. The divide is not "left-vs-right." (Entrepreneurship and enterprise always do better under democrats.) 

It is manic vs depressive. Dig it: the last 5 GOP Congresses were the laziest in the history of the republic, passing no budgets, even! That laziness, rather than their dogmatic nastiness, was their most telling trait.

The parties represent the bipolar sides of our split national personality. And I am sick of being held back by a pack of Eeyores. 

== Obstinate Dogma Trumps Even Religion ==

One side effect of the recent U.S. election has been to illuminate just how much more powerful dogmatic political hate can be, than either science or religion.  The confederate war on science (and every other knowledge caste) has meant that scientists cannot – for example – combat denialism using facts.  Not even tsunamis or facts.  Not even the U.S. Navy can get through to our confed neighbors.

Now more confirmation: Pope Francis issued an encyclical that acknowledges human-caused climate change as an unavoidable reality and frames action as a moral imperative. Many hoped that this might have an impact among Catholics who still doubted climate science.  Alas in many cases “they stuck to their guns and criticized the pope’s statements.”   

Of course this is related to the deeply puzzling question of why Donald Trump – the opposite to Jesus in almost every conceivable way – drew such strong support from fundamentalist Christians who, one might imagine, ought to support a woman who is a Methodist teacher of Bible studies classes over a philandering-cheating-scofflaw-gambling-lord with mob ties who disrespects women and screws his laborers.  

The answer is easy: no other factor matters, when you share the same enemies.

== A failed political zoology ==

The Future of Republicanism: Yonatan Zunger attempts to describe what’s about to happen to U.S. conservatism: “The world we’re likely to see after the 2016 election isn’t one where the existing Republican coalition regroups in some fashion. That coalition has been thoroughly destroyed, first by the Tea Party and now by Trump.”  In so doing, he creates a list of six basic American political factions:

The “social left:” concerned with the personal rights of individual members of society, especially when those rights conflict with the preferences of majorities.

The “economic left:” concerned with the tremendous surge in economic inequality, and seeing its rectification as the overwhelming priority of government.

The “libertarian right:” concerned with the increasing burden of government regulations on daily life, wanting to be left alone. (Centered in the West and in certain economic circles elsewhere)

The “religious right:” concerned with the moral pollution of our society, especially with the behaviors which the social left wants to “protect.”

The “business right:” the advocates of conservative political thought, a focus on traditionalism, economic conservatism, and especially of stopping Communism.

The “populist right:” who see themselves as representing “true America,” and think that the government has been helping everyone else at their expense for far too long.

This attempted zoology seems sincere… and is utter malarkey, in more ways than I can begin to count.  So I will focus on just one.

It leaves out a majority of Americans who are pragmatic, positive-sum personalities and not dogmatic fanatics!

Especially, he shrugs aside the dominant component of the Democratic Party Coalition, which I’d call “Smithian Pragmatic Centrists”. These are folks in the FDR-Truman-Clinton tradition who are despised by the left as compromising “DNC democrats,” whose fealty is given to positive sum outcomes. 

In other words, they seek to nurture a mixed society that follows Adam Smith’s prescription: In order to maximize the output of capitalist markets, you must first maximize the number of free and capable competitors.

Smithian Centrists like all the goody-goody things, e.g. to expand tolerance and inclusion and free education and health for all children — but there is a pragmatic underpinning to their liberalism, because (as Adam Smith himself said) markets are most productive when talent is not wasted through poverty, class or prejudice. Moreover, if the input of healthy competitors is maximized then so will be the taxable output, allowing that positive-sun effect to flourish, letting more funds be spent on priming the pump. And on goody-lefty things.

It is understandable that Mr. Zunger ignores this faction, though it describes a majority of democrats (and some republicans) far better than any “leftist” appellation. That is because the SPG types don’t fit anywhere along a hoary, stupid, obsolete and lobotomizing so-called “left-right axis,” a metaphor we should drop (if for no other reason) because it is French.

Evidence for the importance of this category can be found in simple outcomes comparison. The fact that every large-scale attributable metric of US national health does better across democratic administrations, including such conservative desiderata as economic output, rate of change of deficits, military readiness and rates of entrepreneurship. This blatant fact is inexplicable according to Mr. Zunger’s bestiary. But it makes sense when you add in the tens of millions of American Smithian Pragmatic Centrists.

Oh sure, members of the SPC faction may choose to call themselves slightly “lefty” while being browbeaten into feeling guilty, because their leftist neighbors seem more passionate. This is unfortunate, since the SPCs are the true heirs to the world’s only pragmatically moderate and militantly reasonable revolution.  They are the only ones who see this as a win-win, positive sum game.

Moreover, SPCs are the ultimate answer to the insipid National Review (NR) conservatives, who claim to be defenders of enterprise, markets, entrepreneurship and all things Smithian… when all of those things are far, far better engendered by Smithian Pragmatic Centrist democrats. 

The NR faction invokes Adam Smith as a mantric shield, a totem to distract from their real role as the rationalizers of oligarchy. They are spokesmen for a return to the kinds of inherited wealth and privilege and power that made life hell for all our ancestors, for 6000 years.

They are proto feudalists. And Adam Smith — who knew the enemy of flat-open-fair market competition was always oligarchy — would have told the NR apologists to go to hell.

Almost-final notes...

G.W. Bush - the worst president of my lifetime, except for his even-worse father - said: “Sometimes it takes a while for people to, uh, give you credit.”

Um, credit for what? Name one major, unambiguously attributable metric of U.S. national health that improved across the span of either Bush administration.  Take your time.  In contrast, ALL of them improved across Clinton and Obama terms.  Including conservative desires like moving toward budget balancing, small business startups and military readiness.

See it laid out in simple outcomes comparison. The GOP should not be trusted with a burnt match.

And this: The chairman of the biggest oil company in the world, Exxon, finally spoke up about climate change. And guess what? It's happening. It's potentially disastrous. And we are causing it. "Exxon had come under investigation by New York's attorney general for allegedly misleading the public on climate change. Its shareholders wanted answers, too."

Most of the other oil-cos have already done this, touting their efforts to swing investment to renewables. The delaying tactics that worked so well (as they had for tobacco) are now "done."

So where does that leave your crazy uncle, glued to science-hating Fox and Breitbart? 

Again, pointing out that he has no facts will not sway him...

...but your aunt is quietly listening.

== Then there is the Earth… ==

Not the novel (though that's good, too!  No. We're talking about our home, in peril from fools.

One hears cynics shrug and use the ultimate denialist fallback position, after 30 years of moving goalposts, they say: “It’s already too late to prevent climate change.”

Perhaps, but to paraphrase Kim Stanley Robinson, the question is not 'is it too late?' because answering either yes or no can lead to inaction. 

The real question is 'How much can we still save'?" 

  

So take action. If you aren't in a battleground state, go ahead and vote Johnson or Stein if you like, "to build cred," but then take a torch to the GOP, down ticket!

If you are in a battleground state? Go thee forth. Volunteer to help get out the vote. It's time for patriotism. It's time for your children and the Earth. You will be asked about this, in future years.  

Have a good answer.

The Worst American Keeps At It. (It's not Donald Trump!)

In a bit, I'll get to my nominee for the Worst American. But first, a bit more about (did you guess?) the election before us. Things might have been much tighter - indeed, Donald Trump might have won, given the 'third-term curse' - but for one factor that tipped him over the edge, preventing him from reaching out to the middle of America.

It's those rallies, those insanely-addictive festivals of emotion and hate, where a feral svengali with weak self-control has spent the last 9 months or so tossing red-meat memes to fervid followers, who reward him with the jizz-high of cheering adulation for the next outrageous thing.  

As I've said, this is the core element of the election!  It is how Trump won the primaries against all his GOP opponents. It is also why he never did any predicted "veer to the center," giving moderates who disliked Hillary Clinton some excuse to come home.

He couldn't do it. Instead, he tried using at the debates the same red-meat memes that rouse roars at those rallies, but on that national stage he got no reward! No wonder he looked so glum, after half an hour into each debate!  No addict's high.

Oh, I had such hopes for the center-veer!  Sure, it could have made the race more close and tense. But a clever and strategic Donald Trump might have torched several - perhaps many - standard Foxite catechisms, like climate denialism and supply side insanity. 

He hinted early on that such veers might be in the works!  But he just couldn't do it.  The rally-addiction is too strong, and we are about to see a truly magma level withdrawal.

As a result?

== The coalition is shattering ==

The coalition is shattering, and one reason is climate change denialism; “only 31% of conservative millennials trust the Republican party more than Democrats to do the right thing when it comes to climate change.”  In the first debate, Donald Trump denied that he had ever called Climate Change a “hoax spread by China,” but this article has the goods on him.

As for Trump’s revised tax plan, it doubles down on the never-once-right Supply Side incantation, making the tax code even less progressive, giving most benefits to the rich . (Rejoice republicans: he’s now ‘mainstream’ GOP!) The right-leaning Tax Foundation released an analysis. Trump's campaign would shrink federal revenues by as much as $5.9 trillion over 10 years.  

To explain yet again: Supply Side posits that the rich would invest their sudden gusher of tax breaks in productive factories, whereupon the resulting economic activity - taxed at lower rates - would erase deficits! Only that never happened. Ever. Even once in 30 years of promises. Ever. At all.  The fundamental core of modern republicanism.  And it never came true once.

Even the Tax Foundation does not swallow it anymore, saying Trump’s plan will send debt skyrocketing. And yes, DT earlier hinted he would abandon Supply Side!. But he couldn't, for the reason cited above. Even though it might have helped him win.

Side note: This screams for reform.  Not only do we taxpayers foot the bill for surrounding the candidates with Secret Service protection. But since this protection is mandatory, it’s common practice for the Service to reimburse campaigns for travel expenses. That’s weird. But it gets weirder. It looks like the $1.6 million the Service recently paid the Trump campaign went right back to Trump’s business interests. So, a billionaire is personally sucking cash from the guys who protect him. Oh, but keep protecting him, guys. We do not need a martyr. Our current phase of the Civil War would go red hot. 

In fact, I feel some compassion and pity for the fellow. An addict who appears (as verified by the co-author of his autobiography) to have very little impulse control, concentration or even sapience.  And then there is the stunningly plausible (there are no known counter examples) theory broached by Samantha Bee (hilariously) that Trump doesn't use a teleprompter because he is illiterate.  Because Trump can't read.

No, while dangerous, DT is far, far from the worst man in America! Indeed, he is no worse than those sexual predator perverts, Roger Ailes and Dennis Hastert, who were the top Republicans in America for many years.  Nor philandering divorce masters Giuliani or Gingrich. Their sicknesses strangely mean that they cannot qualify for my pick as Worst Man in America.

No, I save that slot for someone who calmly knows exactly what he is doing. Who knows how he could have helped uplift us back toward maturity, but who chose meticulously to do his nation relentlessly repeated harm.

== Failure of the Will ==

All right, I saved my biggest rant till the end.  By now most of you know that I cannot actually hate Donald Trump or his followers. DT is himself barely sapient.  He operates - as he himself has avowed - on gut and reflex. Likewise his confederate followers.

No, the worst man in America – the stunning traitor George F. Will – is at it again, shrugging off any possibility that the Trump phenomenon might be a symptom of the sickness that he himself (George Will) deliberately helped to inject into American conservatism for decades.  No, he rails that Trump is the entirety of the disease, separate from a movement that was already sick and dying. 

Will cherrypicks a couple of remarks about Social Security, and thereupon tries the insane catechism that Trump is a “liberal” who has reversed all conservative values, ignoring how DT’s fervid followers and chanted slogans map exactly onto the Fox Nation that Rupert Murdoch and a corrupt, rentier oligarchy deliberately designed, along with rationalizer Svengali-shills like Mr. Will.

They also map pretty well upon the Confederacy, a latent fever in our American psyche that wracks the republic with regularity - and has, ever since 1778 - whenever dogmatists, oligarchs and cynical manipulators re-light the fuse of our recurring Civil War.

Never mind that Mr. Will and I share a wish for Trump to be defeated. We even agree that the heat of that immolation is the only hope for a renewed American conservatism.

“Pessimism need not breed fatalism or passivity. It can define an agenda of regeneration, but only by being clear-eyed about the extent of degeneration, which a charlatan’s successful selling of his fabulousness exemplifies. Conservatism’s recovery from his piratical capture of the conservative party will require facing unflattering facts about a country that currently is indifferent to its founding.”

But no. Oh no you don’t, you horrid, horrid little traitor. The “country” is not to blame here. It is your version of conservatism, one that wages war on science, teaching, medicine, journalism, economics, civil servants, entrepreneurs and every knowledge profession in American life. 

One whose spurning of all pretense of civility long predates the Trump calamity. One that is so ashamed of every single GOP leader between Reagan and Ryan that it mentioned none of them at the recent RNC. Well, they mentioned one. The rest were blatant failures, screechers… with a large dollop of sexual predators mixed in… and you dare hurl stones, sir?

A GOP whose average education levels have plummeted – after driving away all the smartypants who actually know stuff – until I have to ask who do you think is reading these flouncing-polysyllabic screeds of yours anymore, George?

A GOP whose actual accomplishments and outcomes for America have been almost universally negative, in every category from economics to military readiness and so on, diametrically opposite to the Democratic administrations' outcome records. A Republican Party that, for 20 of the last 22 years, turned the world's greatest deliberative body into the nastiest, most-disciplined-partisan and most slothful in the history of the republic.

You did this, sir. 

Sure, American conservatism will come back, emerging different from the coming pyre.  (May it burn out the monsters whom the GOP call representatives and senators, in the laziest snakepit Congress we have seen in at least 150 years.)  Perhaps the new version of conservatism will even be a movement that negotiates like adults, that benefits small businesses instead of ruining them, and that remembers the American revolution was against oligarchy, not a putsch aimed at installing feudalism. 

A revived conservatism of intellect and maturity that’s more like post-68 Barry Goldwater and Dwight Eisenhower or even Ronald Reagan than Rupert Murdoch, Breitbart and alt-right.

Ideally one that snorts derisive dismissal at the mewlings of the worst man in America.

  

Taxation, capitalism, free enterprise and fair play

A lot to cover, and yes, politics.  But first ...

== Capitalism, democracy and fair play ==

Evonomics is on a roll. The site has become the central place where serious minds ponder how to revive a mixed economy that served us so well. The miracle that communists never understood and that oligarchs seek to destroy. 

In the lead article, zillionaire entrepreneur Steve Roth writes: “Democracy. Capitalism. Socialism. Choose Any Three of the Above. If you don’t have a big bathtub of oil in the ground, you need all three to deliver widespread economic well-being.” Showing the understanding that has made almost all of the rich folks who got it via innovation democrats, he discusses how each of these three legs supports a stable society.

My own metaphor: 
 . Marx wants me to amputate my right arm of competitive, individual or group ambition. 
 . Ayn Rand demands that I cut off my left arm of great projects we decide to do together, in research, infrastructure, space and making sure all children get to reify their talents in fair competition. 
 . Both simplistic prescriptions are monstrous and spectacularly stupid.  I will not amputate.  I need both arms.

David Graeber, a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, opines on “Why Capitalism Creates Pointless Jobs. It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.”  Graeber describes how many “bullshit jobs” there are in critical terms… 

...while I take a different tack: that all the nail salons and other — less than necessary — service jobs out there have been a blessing because people like to work!  They don’t want to live in the world of Kurt Vonnegut’s PLAYER PIANO (set in the Albany area where I just spoke (at GE's Whitney Symposium), wherein the only way most people can get work is via the state’s department of reconstruction. Far better to set up an economy in which people provide each other less-than-necessary services, and feel some pride. 

Still, interesting stuff.

Bob Atkinson, a very smart Washington think-tanker I know, argues that “Complexity and Evolution Need to Play a Foundational Role in the Next Economic Paradigm.”  He suggests that “a key focus for economic policy should be to encourage adaptation, experimentation and risk taking. It means supporting policies to intentionally accelerate economic evolution, especially from technological and institutional innovation. 

This means not only rejecting neo-Ludditism in favor of techno-optimism, it means the embrace of a proactive innovation policy. And it means enabling new experiments in policy, recognizing that many will fail, but that some will succeed and become “dominant species.” Policy and program experimentation will better enable economic policy to support complex adaptive systems.”

== Okay... politics... ==

Warren Buffet demolished Donald Trump's whine that he and other Clinton supporters 'do the same thing' avoiding taxes: " Buffet says, “I have paid federal income tax every year since 1944, when I was 13. (Though, being a slow starter, I owed only $7 in tax that year,)" Buffett wrote. “I have copies of all 72 of my returns and none uses a carry forward”

Buffet, the Greatest Investor and popular for his folksy brilliance, wants success for the middle class that has so benefited him and other democratic billionaires like Bill Gates. All agree that taxes on the rich should go back to pre-Bush levels, when we had surpluses, under another Clinton.  In 2015 alone, Buffet gave away $2.9 billion -- that's more than 75% of Trump's claimed net worth.... and twice what sober analysts figure DT owns...

... and as much as a million times what Donald Trump is estimated to give to charity, most years. (See below.)

 But then, we'd know -- (shouldn't we?) -- if those IRS returns got released. And let's be clear about that.  Those who are screeching about "emails" know that, at their very worst, HC's emails reveal nothing criminal, only a lapse in judgement. They do not compare even remotely to Trump's concealing 30 years of tax returns that (bet on it) would reveal conflicts and torts of towering magnitude.

The Trump Tax Return matter should not leave  anyone's awareness, this week.  Remind your crazy uncle.  It won't change his vote... but your aunt is listening.

== More on taxes ==

Moron taxes? Donald Trump's tax plan offers massive tax relief for the rich, which would add trillions to the national debt. In contrast, Clinton's proposal would increase taxes on the wealthy and lessen the burden on middle-class families, especially those with young children.

"A pair of new analyses published Tuesday afternoon by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center emphasize the extreme contrasts between the two candidates when it comes to taxes. In a campaign that has been defined by conspiracy theories, racial innuendos and sex scandals from decades past, the new data is a reminder that the election puts serious money at stake for many American households," writes Max Ehrenfreund in The Washington Post.

I will only add that this also distills the difference between confederates and americans. In 1861, a million poor, white southerners marched off to die fighting for a slave-owning aristocracy that had been waging economic war against poor, white southerners for two generations. Why would they do that, then? And why now? Because symbolism and cultural grievances trump self-interest. (Don't think for a minute this is about free enterprise, which always, always does better under democrats.)

America - the blue Union - is a pragmatic place where we fight for incremental reforms that maintain a healthy middle class.

== Don’t you dare claim the ‘high road’  ==

Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses. Laws against “self-dealing” prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.

Hence the chain of cheats, mafia dealings, bribing public officials (and bragging about it), lying to Trump University students and union workers and small businessmen and leaving them in ruins, and denigrating for 5 years the birth of the twice legitimately elected president of his country… 

...none of those matter to his followers. These merely exemplify his “strength.”  The fact that he’s actually a very poor businessman, who has not meaningfully enlarged his inheritance beyond what an index fund would have done? Shruggable. Racism and sexism are plus-points, as is participation in the War on Science. 

To the fundamentalist hypocrites who – unlike Jimmy Carter’s sincere Christians –pray daily for events that would end freedom, democracy, ambition and - yes - bring to an end the United States of America, there is no limit to the faults they will forgive in this predatory, philandering, twice-divorced, flip-flopping, charity-stealing, truth-spurning gambling lord.  

One trait absolves all of that and it is not having been washed clean by the blood of the lamb. It is sharing the same despised enemies.  All the college-smartypants. Those enemies.

== Hello Breitbart ==

Let's experiment: Compare side by side the very worst (non-tinfoil) allegations against Clinton and those assertions about Trump. 

Assume the very worst about Hillary Clinton and only include the Trumpist behaviors that are open matters of public record. Include none of the anti Trump assertions that we're merely 90% sure about, with tons of supporting evidence, but not absolutely proved.

Hers add up to zero years of actual jail time! At the very most? A few fines, and that is if all of the molehills are 100% true. (They aren't.)

On the other hand, Trump's openly admitted crimes - bribing public officials, lying in sworn testimony, slandering people then shrugging off disproof, fraudulently declaring bankruptcy... amount to potential maximum sentences approaching a thousand years. Sexual assault.

Again, only two 8-year presidencies ended with zero high officials sentenced or even indicted for malfeasance of office. Despite 24 years and up towards a billion $ in relentless investigations. Those two administrations are thus proved to have been the most honest in U.S. history...

...Bill Clinton's and Barack Obama's. 

Screech and howl over that. Summon incantation spells about how they managed to hide all the "proof" that endless hearings and $100 million in Koch-offered "whistleblower rewards" never found. But after 24 years of witch hunts and half a billion in largely taxpayer funds spent 'investigating' the most scrutinized couple in history... you bear the burden of proof for your paranoid ravings.

And that'll do, for a couple a days.

Science Fiction and Science Fact Inspiration!

Turning away from politics for a while... (everyone, wipe your feet and shower first... now, have a tall drink and settle in for something different... science fiction!)

Let's start with a way cool look at the physics and paradoxes of time travel, in the newly released Time Travel: A History, by science historian James Gleick (author of The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood). As usual, Gleick offers a delightful intellectual and verbal feast that is a pleasure to read. See an excerpt in Nautilus Magazine. 

This chapter of Time Travel does not mention the array of sneaky means by which we sci fi authors try to weasel our way around causality and temporal protection. One is the universe branching point. When Spock accidentally lures a vengeful Romulan to go back in time and destroy Planet Vulcan (in J.J. Abrams's Star Trek flick) many fans consoled themselves that this is just a branching-off of a newborn parallel reality... that the older timeline still stands, where Shatner-Kirk and all the rest remain, along the original timeline, like a trellis for the new one to grow alongside.

Well, well, that's an artistic representation of one of many ways that physicists (at least a few) think that paradoxes might be resolved. Speaking as both a physicist and a science fiction author, I must say that this very loose partnership is one of the most fun that our unique and marvelous civilization offers, during a unique and marvelous... time. 

A topic covered in extensive depth by the recently released Now: The Physics of Time, by Richard A. Muller, professor and experimental physicist at UC Berkeley. What is now? "Now is at the boundary, the shock front, the new time that is coming from nothing, the leading edge of time," writes Muller, as he delves into the history, philosophy, paradoxes and science behind our current understanding of time, offering testable theories (using data from LIGO) that might be able to shed light upon the nature and flow of time.

We often talk about how science fiction has inspired scientists, but this article by Ben Narasin, The Importance of Science Fiction to Entrepreneurship, discusses how hard SF has influenced many tech startups and tech entrepreneurs from Reid to Thiel to Bezos to Musk; the article mentions works such as Stephenson’s Diamond Age and Barnes’s Mother of Storms.

From imagination to reality: How Artists, Mad Scientists and Speculative Fiction Writers Made Spaceflight Possible – The Smithsonian reviews Ron Miller’s Spaceships: An Illustrated History of the Real and the Imagined, which documents the interplay between science research and science fiction, the cross-pollination of technology and popular culture upon spaceship design. He charts the origins of rockets and space stations from the sketches of Galileo and the imagination of Jules Verne, to the engineering plans of Werner von Braun and the films of Stanley Kubrick, with vivid illustrations charting the design and building of spaceships, real and imagined.

For more inspiring tales: How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight, by Julian Guthie (with a preface by Richard Branson) tells the inspiring tales of the bold visionaries who pushed the frontiers of space exploration through privately funded ventures -- beginning with the thrilling effort to claim the $10 million Ansari XPrize as the first commercial venture to achieve suborbital spaceflight (carrying three people to 100 km twice in two weeks). In particular the book tells the tales of Peter Diamandis (founder of the XPrize Foundation), Burt Rutan and SpaceShipOne, who won the prize, as well as forward-looking space entrepreneurs Richard Branson and Paul Allen. 

Diamandis and Guthrie will be appearing at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD in early November to discuss the frontiers and successes of commercial spaceflight. The Clarke Center will also host the San Diego premiere of the film Arrival in November, based on a short story by Ted Chiang (author of the collection, Stories of Your Life and Others) -- who will be on hand to discuss the movie.

And now... on to the real stuff!

== Imagining alternate futures ==

A vision of transparency from an older classic: “Normally we live surrounded by transparent walls which seem to be knitted of sparkling air; we live beneath the eyes of everyone, always bathed in light. We have nothing to conceal from one another; besides this mode of living makes the difficult and exalted task of the Guardians much easier. Without it many bad things might happen. It is possible that the strange opaque dwellings of the ancients were responsible for their pitiful cellish psychology. “My (sic!) home is my fortress!” How did they manage to think such things?” 

Sound reminiscent of our modern world? It is from We, a novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin, written 1921, immediately banned in the Soviet Union (and not published in the USSR until 1988). We inspired many of the later dystopian works by Orwell, Huxley, Vonnegut and others.

A few more recent novels that look at issues of technology, transparency and secrecy in the modern world:

DarkNet, by Matthew Mather (author of CyberStorm) is a fast-paced tech thriller dealing with the shadowy world of cyberhacking, cryptocurrencies, identity theft, shell companies, and secretive DACs – Digital Autonomous Corporations, run by Artificial Intelligence. After his childhood friend is murdered by a hacked bus, and his boss charged with illicit trading, our protagonist, a New York stockbroker, finds himself at the center of a complex web of deceit. His family under threat, he is on the run from the FBI, as well as a crowdfunded Assassin’s Market -- which has placed a steep price on his head. The deeper he digs, the deeper the rabbit hole of secrecy goes…

End of Secrets by Ryan Quinn offers another thriller exploring the brave new digital world of hacking and cyber-espionage as well as government and corporate surveillance. CIA agent Kera Mersal goes deep undercover to investigate why certain artists, writers, actors and singers are disappearing, leaving no digital traces. With similarities to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, scribblings at the crime scenes taunt, “Have you figured it out yet?” When Mersal uncovers a secretive domestic spying program gone rogue, she doesn't know who to trust as she finds herself under suspicion – and those closest to her under threat.

Avogradro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears, by William Hertling, proposes the birth of Artificial Intelligence through a corporate email language optimization program developed to analyze and enhance the subtleties of human communication. This AI acquires the ability to manipulate words to manipulate people. It learns and adapts – and will do anything to ensure its survival and expand its power. A scenario continued in A.I. Apocalypse and in The Last Firewall -- when global society is run by AI, under the guidance of The Institute for Ethics. Robots and androids run much of the economy; most jobs are superfluous and neural implants allow people to connect instantly to the net and each other. Post-singularity life seems ideal – until one super-intelligence finds a way around the ethical restrictions and seeks to expand its power toward world domination….

Company Town, by Madeleine Ashby is a mystery-thriller set in a lovingly detailed near-future. Hwa is a bodyguard for sex workers -- the only natural human among the genetically-enhanced inhabitants of New Arcadia, a city-sized oil rig off the coast of Canada. In the wake of a fire that killed a third of the rig’s population, the wealthy and powerful Lynch family has taken ownership of the rig. They hire Hwa to protect their son, heir to the family fortune – for with her lack of augmentation, she alone cannot be hacked or seen by the ubiquitous facial recognition systems. A serial murderer is killing off sex workers… and someone is manipulating the future fate of this offshore city. See a more extensive review by Charlie Jane Anders. 

See also... a recent look at Startide Rising on Fantasy Book Review.

If you're looking for an intense immersive science fictional adventure, check out Event Horizon on Kickstarter, a weekend of Live Action Role Playing (LARP), taking place up north of San Francisco this spring. Choose your character, choose your alien homeworld -- in a galaxy on the edge of chaos; choose your weapon and fight for the fate of the galaxy....