Transparency, Privacy and Surveillance in a new era

Surviving Surveillance: My co-editor of the Chasing Shadows anthology - Stephen W. Potts - has written a "5 books" contribution to the Tor web site, taking you on a tour of (almost) half a dozen great science fictional portrayals of surveillance. 

 Of course our new anthology, Chasing Shadows, takes it a step farther, with two dozen stories and essays portraying how citizens might answer elite eyes... with light of their own. See an excellent review from Locus Online. (We'll be signing copies in San Diego on January 27, at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore.) A rich compilation of thoughtful contributions by Robert Silverberg, Vernor Vinge, Bruce Sterling, Ramez Naam, Cat Rambo, Brenda Cooper, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and more!

== Eyes... and ears ... everywhere ==

Yipe. A morning show was doing a story where a young girl ordered a dollhouse and four pounds of cookies by talking to "Alexa", the Amazon home-AI-thing. One of the hosts said something like "I love how this little girl says, 'Alexa ordered me a dollhouse' "... at which point viewers starting ringing in to complain that the host's own comment caused their Alexas to try to order dollhouses....  Danger, Will Robinson!

One of you pointed out a scifi-ish implication: “That is thriller material. How about an action/suspense novel in which ISIS performs some outrageous act on video that is sure to be replayed on TV sets around the world." Embedded in the sound is an Arabic (or maybe Russian?) phrase which means "Alexa, shut down the power grid," or "Alexa, bomb Alberta." And assuming a TV is playing in the right location.”

Big banks are terrified of a Kenyan decade old experiment called M-Pesa in which people can save money and spend it via text messages on their mobile phones.  Now a study has shown it’s more than about just convenience and agility.  Users of M-Pesa have a substantially greater chance of rising out of poverty.

The dichotomy of “security versus freedom” becomes stark, whenever the public feels nervous over threats like terrorism. Earnest defenders of civil liberties, like this one from the Columbia Journalism Review - How not to report on the encryption debate - pose our choice in stark terms, portraying our Professional Protector Caste as eager to demolish our last protections against the all-seeing state. Especially the protection of encryption. For the most part, this is (so far) absolute bull.

Edward Snowden as Socrates: this article in the Los Angeles Review of Books by Ruth Starkman, cited the Bard conference where I spoke and Snowden Skyped in.. 

“Thus far, Mr. Snowden, now residing with temporary asylum in an undisclosed location in Russia, has spoken via satellite to students at Harvard University, Stanford University, Princeton University, University of Iowa, Bard College, and universities abroad such as Simon Fraser and Glasgow. Next appearances in 2015–2016 will be at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine.  

At the Bard College conference “Why Privacy Matters,” hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center in 2015, students cheered wildly when Snowden’s image appeared on the screen. Snowden demurred, “I wasn’t expecting that.” 

Or was he?  

“Snowden, meanwhile, speaks with an affectingly earnest modesty and seems to understand his potential to influence college youth." I won't hold that against him. Still, keep it in mind.

== trying… again and again… ==

An online discussion among a dozen information age professionals finally got me throwing up my hands and trying yet again to explain the obvious:

Real privacy has never depended on hiding, rather upon our ability to deter voyeurs and meddlers. But in order to deter interference or excess nosiness by others, we must catch them at it! 

That means making transparency nearly universal (say, stoping at the curtilage barrier of the home). Empowering average folks to see is more important to those seeking to protect privacy, than to those violating it. Privacy violators are going to get such powers, anyway.

What stuns me is how blatantly obvious this is, from real life.  In The Transparent Society I give the Restaurant Example.  One restaurant offers "privacy" with paper screens between each booth.  The other is open plan - all clients visible to each other.  Where would you have a personal-private conversation?

At the one where anyone could stand on the other side of the screen, listening?  Where some eavesdropper might punch a small hole for a camera? Or at the diner where people sit in the open, where brief glances around can assure you no one is leaning in and listening?  Next time you dine at a restaurant, notice that you make such checks, several times, unconsciously enforcing your privacy. Because YOU can see.

You will see earlier in the thread where I talk about how this depends on a certain type of culture and how our children are making that culture as we speak.  Transparency will not protect privacy in a culture that does not value it! 

But in a culture that believes in diversity, eccentricity, personal autonomy and MYOB*, then transparency is harsh on the voyeurs.  Transparency can protect privacy and I know this for one reason...

...because it already has.  It is the only thing that ever has.

But this is pointless.  I have learned across 20 years that the most obvious things are utterly opaque when people get a firmly righteous idea in their heads. Like the notion that we can benefit by outlawing information flows. And thus, our finest, most-well-intentioned paladins for freedom and privacy all reflexively assume the solution is: "everybody hide!"

See Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. Surveillance State. 

== Another way ==

Advertising has paid the freight for the Internet for far too long and the debilitating effects of this over-reliance have metastasized, becoming cancerous to an informed society.  Professional news sources have languished while click-bait social media troll sites prosper by spreading lies or exaggerations. Even at best, secondary re-packagers of news steal income from the mainline journalists who actually go to sources and seek the stories.

The key to solving this is offering professional news media another way to make a buck from their product - investigative reporting.  Millions of folks like you and me would gladly pay a nickel or a dime for a good New York Times story that we read, start to finish. That would add up! And make great economic sense, cutting out the middle-men and letting us pay value for value. It is called Micropayments... and it has been tried dozens of times, failing because the same mistakes are repeated, over and over again.

It happens that the mistakes are obvious, once you focus on them. Micropayments can be made to work, at last, allowing us a simple way to get (and support) value while brushing aside the era when advertising controlled everything we see and hear.

Finally... Cory Doctorow offers praise of Mr. Robot as a Hollywood portrayal of hackers and hacking that has a solid basis in the real world of hackers and hacking.

=======

*  MYOB = Mind Your Own Business.

Those who admire Nazi "competence." (Bet you know some)

 == Nazi-obsessed nincompoops ==

There are dozens of reasons why men and women of the ‘Greatest Generation’ – those who endured a Depression, crushed Hitler, contained communism, built a spectacular economy, went to the Moon, then started overcoming 6000 years of bad habits like racism, sexism and all that… all while taxing the rich, with strong unions and admiring Franklin Roosevelt -- would deem “patriotic” Republicans as anything but. Certainly not the sense of seeking the long-term benefit of a healthy and revolutionary republic.   

It isn’t just the ceaseless whining, or the anti-science, anti-fact "carnage" ravings. Or their sucking up to oligarchy.  No. Probably the biggest thing that would strike the Greatest Generation as appalling is the way spoiled “macho” American males of our time offer perverted, “grudging respect” to the Nazi regime that our parents and grandparents fought so hard to overcome.

Let’s be clear. In conversations I have found little reason to call this reflex racist, per se. Sure, I’d guess maybe a third of that community are steeped in it. But most of them rave their Nazi-Confederate admiration for a completely different reason.

Just as every Fox reporter says: “Putin may be evil, but boy I wish we had a strong leader like him!”… these guys can be relied upon to open their Nazi-kvells with a similar clause about the 1940s German war machine: 

“Oh sure, they were evil. But boy were they competent! They made great weapons, had super generals, and they sure could fight.”

Those Panzer and Tiger tanks were wow! And the V2 rocket! And that ME 262 jet fighter! And the Bismarck was amazing! And look how that blitzkrieg tactic plowed through the stunned Brits & frogs! 

And while we’re at it, let’s rave about the Confederacy! Sure, slavery was bad, but oh how old Bobby Lee and Nathan Bedford Forest ran rings around Union generals! yeehaw.

One moron tried this crap on the wrong guy, down in one of my Google+ comment threads.  It steamed me so much, I quick-typed a response.  And – well – you know me. I hate to waste a shoot-down on just one jerk. So this is for the rest of you out there who follow that cult, and those who want ammo to oppose it:

== A message for Nazi-admiring loons ==

“I see you buy into one of the most blatant symptoms of a mass psychosis -- a macho religion that portrays the Nazis as superior in some ways, even if regrettably murderous. That mythology lets you portray this as some kind of spectrum or tradeoff, implying that sometimes a guy’s gotta be a bit evil to win.

“Bull. That’s just you justifying yourself, in retrospect, for the nerds and little guys you bullied, back in school. I don’t have time to shred your entire, insipid cult, but here are just a few items:

“First, the Bismark is stunningly over-rated. It had such a poor steering system that one miserable torpedo hit far from the rudder made them sitting ducks. Instead of quickly restoring function, as U.S. Navy mechanics would have done -- (rescuing savaged vessels like the Yorktown, in stunning time -- the Reichsmarine repair crews only made things worse.

"Oh, and the Bismark had such lousy fire direction systems that obsolete Swordfish biplanes sent by the Ark Royal managed to carry out all their attacks without even one of them being shot down. Not one. A single Japanese or American destroyer would have made flinders of the entire squadron before they ever came into range.

“Sure, the HMS Hood was destroyed by a lucky shot from the Bismarck, when arrogant Brits ignored their own safety rules. Only dig what’s fundamental, fellah. The Bismarck and Tirpitz were commerce raiders and convoy destroyers – that destroyed zero commerce. Aside from the non-strategic asset of the Hood, they accomplished nothing. Failure is a kinda-big detriment to the whole “at least they were competent” thing.

“Oh! But then there’s the endless, blah blah adoration of German Wehrmacht tanks! Only you guys are crazy. Sure Panzers and Tigers were impressive machines…and each one used four times as many handcrafted parts as a T34, letting the Russians out-produce them in floods.

“By the way, the much maligned Sherman that you twerps dismiss was by far the best tank of WWII at a tank's main job, which is infantry support. Easy to make and trivial to maintain in the field, with unmatched visibility, it was by far the best infantry support tank in existence and swarmed in great numbers alongside troops, protecting them and protected by them. In other words, it did exactly what it was competently designed to do, and take the word of Gen. George Patton on that.

“Generally, Shermans did not try to duel Tigers – a false, strawman comparison posed by Nazi-lovers. We had other weapons for that. Great big 90mm, then 105mm (M7) and later 155mm (M12) equipped tank destroyer/mobile artillery that could be mass produced, ten for every tiger. Yet they killed tigers one for one on the battlefield. Less romantic than tanks and hence, idiots completely ignore them.

“Yes, the V2 was impressive, and it cost more in money and resources than 100 fighter planes, the lack of which left Germany torched. Oh, and many failed because the slave laborers sabotaged them. Many others overshot because of tricks by British Intelligence

“As for the ME 262, sure it was impressive. The Brits had a fighter deploying to face it. But that proved unnecessary. Our P51s simply waited for a 262 to burn out its fuel. We then just followed them back to base and shredded them landing... and the base, as well.”

Late note: One of you in comments added: "The British victory in the Battle of Britain was a result of British technological advancements and knowing how to use these advancements effectively as part of an organised defence system. This was also the case for the Allied success in the Battle of Atlantic." 

Yep, from radar and acoustics to sonar systems below and centimeter radars above, that the U boats never even suspected, allowing planes to catch them surfaced at night, to Ultra code decipherment, to proximity fuses, to electronic mine sweepers... every Nazi "competence" could be matched by dozens on the allied side... once the allies made one simple decision. To stop being gullible.

I could go on and on.  But why bother? Nothing will penetrate your vile habit of admiring evil movements, just because they seem (to you) to be “strong.”  

== This cult has to go ==

That dashed-off set of answers to one idiot won’t end the treasonous cult of Nazi-admiring dopes who murmur: “sure, they were evil but….”

There is no ‘but!’ The Nazis were schmucks who drove out every decent scientist and many fine engineers from what had been the leading scientific nation, before Hitler. Scientists who strengthened our side and helped make us unbeatable. Just as the Fox-Koch-Trump madness is driving all the scientists and other fact-users out of today’s loony-mutant version of American conservatism.

Oh, but what about those blazing German victories early in the war? I have long held that we live in the universe where Nazis got every break handed to them, from Stalin killing all his generals to the French refusing to form an armored division, to Chamberlain believing everything that Putin… er, um, someone else… told him. And yes, the same applies to the American Civil War, when initial Union stupidity – not Southern brilliance -- gave the Confederacy victories.

Only now, another ingredient to the puzzle has surfaced! See a new book Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich about the Germans' secret weapon that helped them win early battles... and that ensured they'd grow so crazed, by a few years later, that they became complete dolts on the battlefield. Norman Ohler documents how that regime, and Hitler himself, were very likely stoned most of the time on Pervetin, essentially crystal meth, which enabled them (at first) to send armies dashing through places like the Ardennes, because German soldiers went up to ten days at a stretch without sleep.

In fairness a rather weak – and misguidedly moralistic – attempted rebuttal of Ohler’s case is offered by The Guardian. 

This - by the way - sheds new light not only on the Wehrmacht’s Ardennes breakout but on the subsequent Miracle of Dunkirk, dramatized in a new film (Dunkirk) by director Christopher Nolan. Varied theories have been offered, for why the Nazis did not press a final attack, in order annihilate the cornered British Expeditionary Force. One hypothesis holds that Hitler didn’t want to humiliate the British, quasi-Aryans he wished to have as allies, a notion that’s not just preposterous but noxiously so. A better explanation attributes the miracle to frenetic heroism on the part of a dozen French divisions, who battled to help their BEF comrades (and some French) to escape. Only now, Blitzed offers the best theory of all. The forces of Guderian and Rommel were shagged! After more than a week without sleep, German soldiers had collapsed into a meth-crash. If ordered to attack, they’d have gone in like movie zombies, just as easy to kill.

Of course this is what happened on a larger scale to the Nazi regime and forces, as a whole. By 1945 they were like Hitler, palsied and fried, making dismal freshman mistakes of generalship and hallucinating whatever fables British Intelligence fed them. And yes, the parallels with today are so blatant I needn’t go any farther.

== Could they have won? ==

We’ve been enjoying Amazon’s dramatized extension of Philip K. Dick’s classic novel The Man In The High Castle, whose expanded canvas remains faithful to the original, while giving us several of the most memorable villains in television, since Breaking Bad.

Though not without some critique. New York artist John Powers riffs cogently and tellingly about this recent television sensation, as well as HBO’s Westworld. Powers makes some interesting points – e.g. that the producers of these shows ostensibly are anti-oppression and favor egalitarian impulses; but that they wind up partly undermining their own message with excess respect for the villains’ underlying message. 

“To believe in Westworld, you must believe in an off-screen world dominated by an economic elite that craves the freedoms and privileges of the wild-west, a future drenched in a nostalgia for 19th century Manifest Destiny. - that is a future drowning in 19th century inequality.”

Powers make fascinating points about the unsupportable levels of wealth inequality we are rapidly approaching – a situation that does not bide well for the very same aristocracy that is manipulating for it, hand over fist.

No, we are facing a long struggle ahead, folks, against the very same side of the human spirit that gave us the Nazis and the Confederacy and that lurks in some -- not all -- of the fantasy side of our science fiction genre. Romanticism is impervious to fact or disproof. It concocts incantations that glow by their own light, needing no footing in science or argument, negotiation or reason. This is why our current wave of American romanticism wages war on every knowledge profession or caste in the nation, against even the concept of verifiable -- or falsifiable -- fact.

For years I have said: "forget the hoary-stupid "left-right" metaphor. This is a return to the Civil War that periodically wracked the United States since 1778, and has burst forth at least eight times, since we broke away from England. 

Now all pretense is gone, as we see virtually every major federal department in Donald Trump's government will be led by someone from a former Confederate state.

It will not be easy to stand up for the Union, this round. But other generations of Americans stood, and so can we.  And it starts with simple things, like taking a stance of zero-tolerance toward insipid morons who speak of "grudging admiration" for movements that were not just vile, but also moronic.

"Sure they were evil, but..."

There is no but.

== Miscellany! ==

Between 1990 and 2013 (the last year for which there is good data), the number of people living in extreme poverty dropped by more than half, from 1.85 billion to 770 million. At the same time, child mortality has dropped by nearly half, while literacy, vaccinations and the number of people living in democracy have all increased. Resist the gloom merchants of both right and left!

There were an estimated of 20 million horses in March 1915 in the United States, at the point where motor vehicle just began taking jobs away from them. A USDA census in 1959 showed the horse population had dropped to 4.5 million. Numbers began to rebound somewhat, and by 1968 there were about 7 million horses, mostly used for riding. In 2005, there were about 9 million horses.

Sick of lame efforts to divide us according to rigid generational categories, like boomer, Genex, or Millennial? Sure, there are polemical uses… but some are starting a movement to call themselves “perennials.” Or members of a greater whole, spanning all ages. The most important thing - after all - is your state of mind.  And ability to walk to the fridge.

So way cool… a compilation on Hollywood film-makers’ matte-artistry, doing believable backgrounds that supply settings for movies.

Okay… Razer’s Project Valerie is a laptop that deploys three… yes three… 17+ inch screens.

Keep your eyes open for a very interesting book by Phil Torres: “Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing An Introduction to Existential Risk Studies.”

This would make an excellent add-on to my popular essay -- Whose Rapture?  “Security experts should also keep an eye on 2039, since this year is the 1200th anniversary of the Mahdi’s occultation in the Twelver Shia tradition (which is a minority tradition, but dominant in countries like Iran). As the Islamic scholar David Cook conjectures, “the 1000-year anniversary of the Mahdi’s occultation was a time of enormous messianic disturbance that ultimately led to the emergence of the Bahai faith. ... [A]nd given the importance of the holy number 12 in Shiism, the twelfth century after the occultation could also become a locus of messianic aspirations.”

== Wisdom ==

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

― Maya Angelou

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”

― Maya Angelou

"Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words are the weapon of lawyers."

 — William Taylor of Arizona

The Worst American shares his pain with us.

I'll begin this final, pre-inauguration political post by revisiting a fellow whose current agony is supremely well-deserved. The monstrous supreme liar of the right, and treasonous worst man in America, is not some screeching troll or white supremacist, or richly-paid Murdochian TV-shill, nor even one of the conniving oligarchs who - obeying dullard, gene-programmed reflex - scheme (against their true self-interest) to restore 6000 years of insipid feudalism. Obeying unsapient, inherited drives, they at least have the excuse of delusion.

No, the worst American is a genteel-sounding intellectual who takes pains to come across as smooth and well-reasoned. One who can see, clear-eyed, the choice between either helping or wrecking the Great Enlightenment Experiment that has been led by our republic and that gave humanity its first real hope. A man who chose - like Plato - to use his erudition against our Periclean revolution.

Let's be clear, George F. Will tried hard to prevent Donald Trump from becoming the Republican nominee - or president - not for the sake of the nation, but in fear of the train wreck that now looms before American conservatism. No longer the party of Goldwater or Buckley, its plummeting average levels of education and IQ would cause any honest intellect deep misgivings. But then, Mr. Will was key to helping turn the GOP into the New Know Nothings, waging war not only upon science, but every fact-grounded profession in American life. Well, all but four, and shots have already been fired at two of the last-standing.
Case in point, this travesty of sophistry, condemning U.S. foreign policy, under Barack Obama: "Two seemingly unimpressed nations are Russia, which is dismembering a European nation (Ukraine), and China, which is shredding international law by turning the world’s most important waterway, the South China Sea, into militarized Chinese territory."

Standard GOP catechism, sure, Except, not even liberal journalists or pundits seem willing to ask: "how did Ukraine become a 'European nation'?"  

One of the charmingly obdurate traits of nearly all Americans is their inability to scan history. But not George Will. He knows that Ukraine was a reliable Russian satrapy or obedient client state until 2014, when popular uprisings and then free elections ousted Moscow's puppet, Yanukovich, in the worst disaster to Russian hegemonism since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That was the year Ukraine -- vast Ukraine -- became European.

Moreover, whom did Vladimir Putin and the Russian press openly blame for this calamity, bringing Europe within a few hundred kilometers of Moscow? Why, those machiavellian chessmaster-manipulators and insidious cold war fighters, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton! Just look at a map and view the last few years as V. Putin sees them. Read his actual (yes, actual) statements on the matter and vows of vengeance. His nibble-backs in Crimea and the Donbas, for which the U.S. rightwing kvells in admiration, are trifles, by comparison. 

Mr. Putin's only counter-move of equivalent magnitude was... getting Donald Trump. And yes, I admit that America is a bigger prize than the Donbas. Likewise, the U.S. Navy patrols the South China Sea with regularity, making clear that a 12-mile radius is all that China has won around each of its stunningly vulnerable, sitting-duck outposts, gained - temporarily - at incredible cost in both money and goodwill. This is something that symbolism obsessed conservatives never get. What matters is what's actual! No wonder they abolished the Office of Technology Assessment from Congress, banishing facts, as they recently tried to banish ethics. But George Will knows all this. I never called him a confederate dunce. He is one of the manipulators. Like the main character in Vonnegut's Mother Night, he is a Svengali in the cause of an oligarchic putsch whose aim is the permanent replacement of truth with truthiness. The confederacy has taken Washington. And though Mr. Will would have preferred other generals, he will now do his duty by his new caudillo and help to keep it. Oh, read Will's essay and notice the technique! Proclaim the absurd as a given! For example: "The fact that the world is more disorderly and less lawful than when Obama became president..." The staggering gall of such proclamations is the power of their counterfactual madness! One small example: when Obama entered office, not a single major U.S. Army or Marine unit was rated "fully combat ready" (FCR). Our reserve units had virtually been destroyed and America's reputation was around our ankles. Allies had dropped away from us like peeling skin.

Today? 100% of major U.S. active duty military units are FCR. The National Guard and reserves - devastated and ruined under Bush - are now repaired. Oh,but do show me any major, foreign-organized terror attacks on our homeland, during the "disorderly" Obama years. Show me one.
There are almost no major, attributable metrics of U.S. national health that did not improve (most of them a lot) across spans of the last two Democratic presidencies. And almost none that did not decline or plummet across both Bush Administrations, including even conservative desiderata like military readiness, stock valuations, entrepreneurship and yes, federal fiscal responsibility. A sane, fact-grounded person might be expected to notice this, which is why all fact-grounded professions have left the GOP, in droves. 

This is why the central obsession on today's right is not racism, or misogyny, or any of the other distractions. It is hatred of fact-grounded professions. Including especially journalism, the craft and high calling that Mr. Will betrays, daily. Am I the only observer who noticed that just one of the major GOP figures of the last 20 years was even mentioned at the recent Republican National Convention? Neither Bush Senior nor Junior, nor Cheney, nor the convicted felons Hastert and DeLay, nor Boehner, McConnell, McCain or Romney was referred-to, even in passing! Only the censured serial polygamist (though fascinating sci fi author) Newt Gingrich, whose revenge on the others was (I admit) delicious. 

Oh, such pride in your party's track record! Such validation for trusting this cult, again, with even a burnt match.

== Skewer the lies ==

Did you notice that the whole basis for Donald Trump's recent rejection of the Intelligence Community -- for citing Russian interference in US elections -- has been "these are the same folks who saw WMDs in Iraq!" Neglecting to mention that the WMD episode featured bullying of the IC by one outrageously immature Republican president, exactly as Trump himself is loudly threatening to do.

Elsewhere I show how one can compare GOP and Democratic presidents not by whether they wage war -- (all of them do, sometimes in error, though the mostly-beneficent American Pax has been worth fighting for) -- but how they wage it. I show how time and again, Democratic doctrine has been to listen to the generals and apply force as surgically as possible. That approach doesn't always go well! In Somalia, the scalpel was too small and thin, for example. But the bludgeon approach preferred by Republican presidents is a proved failure.

(Watch as the three generals DT has appointed provide surface cover for a wave of firings and forced retirements that will 'cleanse' - Erdogan-syle - both the Intelligence Community and the U.S. Military Officer Corps. Let us pray that the best of the three -- James Mattis -- will dig in his heels.)

Mr. Will can see all of this with utter clarity, and crafts his philippics accordingly. Oh, there are times when I almost sympathize with this devil. He is a gifted polemicist, as when he concludes: 

"Soon, foreign policy will be conducted by a man who, although in 2010 he said WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange deserves the death penalty, now seems to trust Assange on the subject of Russian hacking more than he trusts the consensus of the nation’s $53 billion civilian intelligence institutions. Time passes and, we are told, brings progress." All of it spot on. But then, that is how top level savanarolas operate. Every time Mr. Will criticizes Donald Trump, it will be accompanied by a "but..." that helps to staunch hemorrhages of sane conservatives to the other side. Oh, it's clear Mr. Will is currently in pain. Pain that he so richly deserves, for his endless, clever, deceitful treasons. He knows this will not go well for the Confederacy that he strove so hard to revive. And I nurse no guilt over the schaedenfreude I feel, for this evil man's agony.

== The Worst Man redux ==

Oh, but since I wrote the preceding passages -- setting them aside for other matters -- America's worst person continued his deliberate sabotage of reason. 

In this latest bit, George Will cites the "Sokal Hoax" to prove that the entire opposition to U.S. conservatism is just as crazy as (he now admits) conservatism has become. That is the narrative of today's right, hand crafted by Mr. George Will, along with Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and every other shill for returning us to feudalism.

"Yes, it's clear my side has gone insane... but... but... but democrats are just as bad!   
"Yeah, that's the ticket. Liberals are worse!"

Yes, the Sokal Hoax was and remains a delightfully on-target, hilarious entrapment and evisceration of the postmodernist fad pushed by far-left, science-hating, faux-intellectuals. In 1996, Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies -- "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" -- proposing that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. "At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist." 

The avid acceptance by far-lefty postmodernists of deliberately concocted drivel helped to severely discredit that noxious movement, whose emphasis on incantation, magical thinking, masturbatory indignation and hostility to science shares voluptuous commonalities with similar cults on the right. Except that George Will fails to note crucial facts:

1) The Sokal Affair revealed that science is ready and able to defend itself, quite capably. 

2) For all their many faults, the editors of Social Text owned up to their mistakes and instituted reforms, something that similar liars on the right never do, always doubling down on their incantations.

3) The far-left may contain some bilious haters of science (see Science Left Behind: Feel-good fallacies and the rise of the anti-scientific left by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell), but the entire American right today consists of science haters, waging war - indeed - on every knowledge profession in American life, from journalism, teaching, civil service, medicine, economics, diplomacy, law, etc. all the way to - recently - the United States military and intelligence officer corps.  

There is a world of difference between "far" and "entire"... as there is between "contains" and "consists." 

Mr. Will knows all of this. That fact -- his open-eyed and conscious choice to lie in service of monstrous treason -- has helped to bring America to this state, while driving both education and IQ levels in the deliberately-lobotomized Republican Party to historic lows. This has paid off well for Mr. Will and his neo-feudalist masters. Indeed, if we continue, and somehow survive, then the world of Idiocracy will erect statues to this horrid little man.

A political countdown

== Boundaries, borders and political miscellany ==

One of the hottest issues in the U.S. presidential campaign was Donald Trump’s pledge to build a wall with Mexico. Writing from Mexico City, Homero Aridjis and James Ramey offer a highly innovative proposal: Instead of Trump’s wall, they want to build a border of solar panels. “It would have a civilizing effect in a dangerous area,” they contend. “Since solar plants use security measures to keep intruders out, the solar border would serve as a de facto virtual fence, reducing porousness of the border while producing major economic, environmental and security benefits on both sides.”

The latest Wisconsin legislative map has been ruled illegally partisan. Please, get this to the Court before Donald can appoint Phil Robertson to the bench?  

One of the netizens of my blog community recently made a petition on Change.Org that I think some of you may find interesting: Statehood for Native American tribal lands administered by the Federal Government.

Petition Text:  “Native American peoples have historically been disenfranchised with the states where their reservations have been located. Even today, the more than 5 million Native Americans lack even modest representation in DC, often due to the machinations of the Red State governments surrounding them. I propose that all reservations lands that are administered by the Federal Government be designated as an American State, with 2 seats in the US Senate and an proportionate congressional delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives. This American State would not be contiguous, but neither is Michigan, Virginia nor Alaska. Designation of a state capital and congressional districts will be entirely up to them. Issues arising between residence in this State and the racial qualifications for tribal membership must be resolved in full accordance with the US Constitution.”

Huh!  I like the idea of giving all Native American reservations a collective statehood!  Kinda hard on New Mexico. Turns it into a smaller state that’s kind of lily white, so no gain for the dems!

How about this alternative idea. Let reservations across the U.S. declare themselves to be part of New Mexico or Dakota? You’d accomplish the same thing. In fact, W.E.B. DuBois once suggested a reverse Great Migration of African Americans to either Mississippi or South Carolina.  It would only take a few hundred thousand to turn either of them into a black republic. What a delicious thought... worth reviving?

Oh, in Existence you see much the same thing.  The Senators from both North & South Dakota are Native Americans… because so many whites moved out after the Yellowstone volcano burped.

== Twin pillars of a cult ==

Republicans are in a tight spot, since Obamacare was originally their own damned plan. 

Why am I the only one mentioning this? All of their alternatives are variations on it.  Not surprisingly since Obama's Affordable Care Act was based upon the outline developed for Republicans by the Heritage Foundation, that was the GOP platform plank on health for a decade and then became “RomneyCare” in Massachusetts. 

Watch this clip of Rep. Brendan Boyle explaining the origins of Obamacare in the GOP's marketplace plan for healthcare.

So why did Obama present their own plan to them, in 2009. He did it in the sappy and forlorn hope that Republicans would actually negotiate, just that once, if offered their own… damn… plan.  

Instead, since Obama touched it, the plan suddenly had cooties. And was deemed satanic by all loyal dittohead Fox watchers! 

Only now, what to do? What, after 6 years screeching that Obamacare - which insured 20 million Americans and steeply lowered the rate of increase of health costs in America - was devil spawn, you still don't have a replacement ready?

 Expect extensive tweaking and cosmetic changes, especially in nomenclature! Lots of symbolic re-namings. And "health savings plans" that no one will buy. Oh, and a new law requiring drug companies to negotiate with Medicare on costs... something democrats have long advocated and that Republicans, by law, specifically forbade.

Later news seems to confirm all that. Paul Ryan’s plan and Trump’s are both looking like Obamacare with Obama’s name and wording scratched out and a couple of tweaks that could have been negotiated 6 years ago, if any Republicans once showed up at the negotiating table. See where I predicted this. 

To reiterate a core point about American political life: Democratic Congresses always negotiate with and compromise with Republican presidents, in order to get some business done. They yell and fight, but always pass budgets, usually based on the budget presented by the administration. 

In contrast, GOP Congresses (with the sole exception of 1995) never, ever negotiate with a democratic president, even over vital national needs. And only seldom do they even pass budgets.

See this pattern playing out again. As it will, especially, if the dems retake Congress in 2018, the Year of the Colonels.

== Cheaters redux ==

North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project. Of course the same thing applies to all but two red states. (In fairness, two blue states also do this wretched cheating.) They do this because if gerrymandering and other cheats fail, the entire neo-feudal design collapses. 

More on cheating: The U.S. is the only democracy in the world that allows its voting machines to be made – mostly unsupervised – by private, for-profit, partisan companies. "Companies that make political contributions as did Dominion, the remnants of Diebold that went out of business for worldwide fraud following the 2004 election, and Hart Intercivic. So we allow these private, for-profit partisan companies to count our vote, to set our databases with secret proprietary software that nobody can look at. It violates every principle of transparency. And the only person on a high level willing to talk about this is Jimmy Carter, who says to Der Spiegel that America has a dysfunctional democracy and that we don't meet minimum standards of transparency."

Apropos of voting machines: this article mentions ‪Black Box Voting the outfit that has probably done the most work to explore and educate about the shift to electronic voting. With a donation, you can download a PDF of the book: Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st century.

== And irksome cavils ==

Someone I know pointed out an interesting hypocrisy: those who would proclaim that human life begins at conception rage against morning-after pills - the simplest form of abortion... yet say nothing about fertilization clinics that create scores of fertilized embryos for every successful birth. Many are flushed.  Some are "stored" without any chance of ever being implanted... and are eventually flushed. Why no outrage?

Perhaps because it's often poor women who need abortions, and those who can afford to could always go to New York or California. But it's mostly rich women who use in vitro fertility clinics. 

Alas, it's likely even simpler than that. The abortion frenzy serves a political purpose, as a way to take the uber moral high-ground, based on a single, grand declaration that proclaims your enemies to be baby-killers. It allows fundies to get around the quandary they faced, called the Jesus Effect. (See my earlier posting: Abortion and the Jesus Effect.) For despite all of his other, beaded, bearded, socialist hippie and broadly democratic values, Jesus would have to be a Republican based on the one, simple issue of saving murdered babies. With that one declaration, they can then safely ignore everything else that Jesus stood for, and help elect a man who is his diametric opposite.

 This is not a stance that can bear much scrutiny.  So never scrutinize.

Oh, final rant-item: Even the CATO Institute, after decades whoring for the Kochs, seems to be gathering some guts, publishing articles like this one -- The Right has its own version of Political Correctness. It's just as stifling -- calling out conservatism for being just as wording and symbolism obsessed as their left-wing “PC bully” adversaries. 

“Just as?” Oh, much, much more so. Vastly more so. See here.