Want to get past the Roberts Court and restore Congressional oversight? First try looking outside the box

What will it take to find a Democratic politician or leader who can see outside the box? Nothing could be more important than restoring Congressional powers of oversight and investigation. Yet, suing the Trump Administration in the thoroughly GOP-suborned courts is futile. Traditional and Constitutional Congressional oversight prerogatives that go back two centuries are now flouted in repeated White House moonings of every check or balance. 

But what’s fascinating — opening a gaping window of opportunity — is how the courts have rationalized all this. This may get a little dry. But it is of paramount importance.

In order to evade going on record re: the merits of any case, or openly declaring void 250 years of Congressional oversight power, John Roberts and his comrades have abetted this executive putsch by narrowly ruling against plaintiffs (like House Democrats) on the basis of “standing.” Or else they declare these issues “non-justiciable” — matters that courts inherently cannot act upon because that would infringe upon “the prerogatives of another independent branch.”

(Some background: Court Rules Congress Cannot Sue to Force Executive Branch Officials to Testify.)

Now think about that… as not a single Democratic politician, or independent scholar, consultant or pundit seems to have done. Roberts and his co-conspirators have in fact painted themselves into a corner! One that could be exploited in a spectacular judo-move, leading to demolition of their entire attempted putsch.

Both here and in Polemical Judo I have made clear there is a way for Congressional Democrats to SIDESTEP the courts! This method is bold, but totally justified under the Roberts Doctrine, a judo flip that would totally work. There is no conceivable way it would not work! And if any of you know anyone who might know someone… I could explain it it two minutes.

== What's that secret sauce solution, Brin? ==

Yeah, I know, I'm being mysterious. One of you wrote in that I must be talking about how Congress has always had - though seldom used - the right to send Capitol Police or US Marshals or the Sergeant at Arms to demand documents and appearance at hearings. They can even arrest and jail those who refuse Congressional subpoenas.  And yes, that is the answer offered in almost every discussion...

... immediately eliciting images of William Barr's appointed Praetorians pulling pistolas, with gun battles subsequently raging across Washington DC, to the tune of Vladmiric laughter echoing across the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. 

So let's be clear. That absurdly garish scenario is NOT what I am talking about! Not at all. Not even remotely. 

Reiterating: there is no guarantee that sending out armed marshals will work... and that's certainly why Pelosi, Schiff and Nadler have not tried it, yet. But I guarantee my method will work. It's relatively risk free and - again, I repeat - It ... will... work. Because it cannot not work.

So why don't I lay it out, right now? 

Well, although secrecy isn't essential, the method would benefit - first time - from some element of surprise. So I'll not detail it here... though it's right there in POLEMICAL JUDO, nested among a hundred other potentially useful suggestions. And hence I am confident that no one on the other side will ever read closely enough to find it.

== Abandon clichés and embrace the officers defending us ==

Military leaders believe climate change seriously threatens U.S. national security. They contend it is stirring up chaos and conflict abroad, endangering coastal bases and stressing soldiers and equipment, which undermines military readiness. But rather than debating the causes of climate change or assigning blame, they focus on how warming undermines security, and on practical steps to slow its advance and minimize damage. The Navy is concerned about twelve(!) new Russian bases ringing the Arctic… as well as the generally anti-scientific and delusional attitudes that propel denialism.

All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change, by Michael T. Klare explores in depth this added reason why the maligned “deep state” US military Officer Corps is fast realizing that one of our parties has been suborned.

== Bern-ing bridges? ==

Two additional opinions on Bernie, both sympathetic but from opposite perspectives. In The New York Times, David Leonhardt writes: Faced with the potential of either large gains or historic losses, progressives would be wise to stop believing only what they want to believe. Don’t cherry-pick polls to claim that most Americans actually favor a ban on private insurance. Don’t imagine that millions of heretofore silent progressive supporters will materialize on Election Day. In the 2018 midterms, Sanders-style candidates lost swing districts, while candidates demonstrating respect to swing voters won again and again….Beating Trump in November will be even harder. And uncomfortable compromises will make it more likely.

And again and again, confront your splitter friends with these challenges!

From The Atlantic: The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President.

Now we know why Lisa Murkowski voted to acquit Donald Trump – and it’s not pretty.

Remember my suggestion to call the Donald "Two Scoops?" Well, the Trumpsters may already have owned it. Unless, of course, that is actually satire. But would the Trumpsters actually know it was?

== My recommended method... used effectively 70 years ago ==

This brief, formally-polite letter from a State Department functionary to the raving-maniac Senator Joe McCarthy is stunningly pertinent glance into the past reveals how to nail liars with demands for specific evidence. This is what I call demand-a-wager. It doesn’t have to be about money, per se. But it must shame the liar publicly, for refusing to step up.

Washington, February 11, 1950—2 p.m.

“In view of your statement carried by the press that there are “57 card-carrying Communists” in the State Department,2 I respectfully request that you make these names public or submit them to the Department of State. It would seem to me that if you have this information, as a loyal American you owe it to your country to inform the officials responsible for any such characters existing in the government. As you know our employees have been checked and are being checked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the President’s loyalty program and if you have proof that there are card-carrying members of the Communist Party in this Department I assure you that they will not remain in this agency. I assume that you have given your information to the FBI. Therefore we will communicate with that agency immediately. Needless [Page 1380]to say, the thousands of loyal employees of this Department must not be placed under a cloud of suspicion and I should appreciate it if you will promptly publish the names of the departmental employees whom you say are members of the Communist Party.”

== And finally... theologically ==

What? His 4th Chief of Staff?  Fifth?

Luke 17.6 And the Lord answered: "If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you."

Funny how the "Chosen One" of Heaven can't even get a staff of competent people to obey him. So much for his faith.

The beauty - and insights - of science

The “ten biggest science stories of the decade?”  Well there’s the Higgs. And HIV can be prevented. And Ebola vaccines. And imbeciles brought back measles and blocked extinction for polio. 

How about synthetic biology - building life forms from scratch? Does anyone recall 20 years ago when religious fundamentalists called that a red line, usurping the Creator’s powers and drawing likely revenge? Okay, score one for the fundies, because they inflicted that revenge - politically-driven lobotomization - upon our nerdy civilization.  Boy did they. 

But gravitational waves are my top. Kip Thorne was a leader in that and another top ten item, his perfect prediction of what an active black hole would look like. Good decade, Kip!

One for the prediction registry. In my 1989 novel EARTH, a plot current hinges on the fact that the most plentiful mineral in the planet’s mantle is Perovskite. When gravity laser beams (another increasingly plausible Brin-vention!) crisscross those regions, lining up quasi-crystal domains, it leads to a… well… major, unexpected plot development. At the time, I knew perovskites offered some higher temperature superconductors. But apparently uses are taking off! Including the possibility of Spray-On Solar Cells. 

If it happens, it could be as much a game changer as LED light bulbs… or if we save civilization form science hating moron-cultists. We need game-changers.

Speaking of crystals, do you still doubt overlap between the natural and machine worlds? Look at these astonishing microscope images of snowflakes… as if constructed out of metal on a lathe and drill press. 

For an array of stunning beauty: see a collection of some of the best, award-winning science photographs of the year - and the stories behind them. Plus one hundred of the best space photographs of the year - from professionals and amateurs, with glorious images of aurora, meteors, eclipses and galaxies.

Yet.... Heinlein predicted this: Recently, “The Ohio House on Wednesday passed the ‘Student Religious Liberties Act.’ Under the law, students can’t be penalized if their work is scientifically wrong as long as the reasoning is because of their religious beliefs.” Further: “Every Republican in the House supported the bill. It now moves to the Republican-controlled Senate.”  

Yes, science fiction grand master Robert Heinlein predicted this. And you liberals need to re-admit him into the circle, and Berry Goldwater and every crewcut and hairbun former military officer who stands up for fact-civilization in red & purple districts. We will only beat this insanity with a broad coalition of people who believe that facts are things. Once facts become a basis for disproof, yet again, then racism and oligarchy and environmental denialism and all the rest will collapse organically. Not just because they are immoral, but also because they are... wrong.

Oh, and astronomers identified a trio of faraway galaxies that seem to be radiating some of the earliest light ever observed, dating  to approximately 680 million years after the Big Bang (roughly 5% of the universe's current age of 13.8 billion years) and appears to be surrounded by three overlapping bubbles of plasma — meaning these pioneering galaxies may have been caught in the act of reionizing their corner of the universe and bringing the cosmic dark ages to an end.

== Reflecting on science and beauty ==

I love the web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. This particular one is fun and cool, especially if you compare it to a work I detest -- Walt Whitman’s smugly-vile and zero-sum poem “When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”

… or to this passage by Richard Feynman who – along with being one of the most brilliant physicists – was also a noted painter and one of the greatest bongos-players of all time. (And who I saw wearing his Nobel like a 1970s guru pendant with a hole drilled through it, at a Caltech dance.):

“I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. 

"First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. 

"I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”

It doesn’t, except in the desperate perception of zero-sum fools.

On another occasion: “Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

Except not much methane, even less ammonia, and a lot more hydrogen. But then, I am a picky sci-fi poet.

Finally... combining science and creativity, watch the winners of this year's Dance Your Ph.D. contest, with inspiring entries from chemistry, biology, and physics.

A way to bypass the Roberts Court and get every document. Turn their evasion tricks to our advantage.

Will any Democratic politician or leader ever see outside the box? Today's topic is the core constitutional crisis - far more urgent than Impeachment - in which Republican-appointed judges are canceling the very notion of Congressional oversight and Presidential accountability.

"A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia ruled at the end of February that it lacked the power to order former White House counsel Donald McGahn to testify before the House Judiciary Committee.... The majority, made up of two Republican appointees, ruled that this was not the sort of dispute that federal courts were authorized to resolve: Congress and the White House should negotiate." It appears that centuries of precedent count for less than GOP fears that hearings might reveal an ocean of turpitude.

Standard methods for dealing with executive misbehavior — e.g. Congressional investigations — have been stymied by unprecedented stonewalling. Traditional, Constitutionally explicit oversight prerogatives that go back two centuries are now flouted as the White House moons every check or balance. Moreover, we’ve learned it’s futile to sue the Trump Administration in GOP-suborned courts.

Only what’s fascinating — opening a huge window of opportunity — is how the Roberts Court has rationalized abetting this executive putsch. There’s a potentially powerful silver lining, one that’s amazing.

First, I am not the only one suggesting that House Democrats bypass the courts. In this article, Josh Chafetz, a professor of law at Cornell Law School, asserts that Congress already has tools and powers. And he is right that, in theory: 

"For one thing, it can arrest people who refuse to testify and hold them until their contempt is purged (that is, until they comply with the subpoena). Although neither house of Congress has used this power in decades, it used to frequently, and there’s no reason that it could not be revived, given the political will. For another thing, it can use its power of the purse and prohibit the expenditure of funds on, say, the White House Counsel’s Office, until McGahn comes around. Of course, the Senate might refuse to go along with such an appropriations rider, or the president might threaten to veto the appropriations bill containing it."

While I respect Professor Chafetz - and he is aiming in positive directions - alas, he just doesn't get it. Schiff & Nadler do not have to send Capitol Police out to do gun battles with the Secret Service or William Barr's praetorian guards on the streets of Washington. There is a better way, and it will work - simply work - without the slightest drama.

== Can you follow this logic? ==

Okay, now pay attention.

In order to evade going on record regarding the merits of any case, or openly declaring void 250 years of Congressional oversight power, Chief Justice John Roberts and his Republican majority have instead repeatedly ruled against plaintiffs on the narrow basis of “standing,” nitpicking some technicality that renders - say - House Democrats ‘unqualified’ to file concerning subpoena enforcement, or emoluments or demands for documents.

 Or else - and now we get to the really creative part - they declare these issues “non-justiciable” matters that courts inherently cannot act upon, because doing so would infringe upon “the prerogatives of another independent branch.” (It's how they managed to leave in place cheats like gerrymandering, despite rising citizen abhorrence of the crime.) This consistent squirm excuse is accompanied with chiding admonitions for Congress and the Executive to “settle it among yourselves...” 

...with the convenient outcome that this always benefits Trumpian faits accompli.

== Turning their trick into a trap! ==

Now think about that… as not a single Democratic politician, or independent scholar, consultant or pundit seems to have done.

In fact, Roberts and his co-conspirators have painted themselves into a corner! One in which the advantage would veer to Congressional oversight committees. Further, having stepped away, Roberts will be unable to step back in, to interfere when that stone wall collapses.

Both here and in Polemical Judo I have made clear there is a way to accomplish that. For Congressional Democrats to sidestep suborned courts altogether! The method is bold, but totally justified under the Roberts Doctrine, a judo flip that would work.

In fact, there is no conceivable way it would *not* work!

And if any of you knows anyone who might know someone who can get the ear of Chairmen Schiff or Nadler… I could explain it in two minutes.

Oh, don’t ask me to explain it here. While the method does not depend utterly on surprise, an element of surprise could make its first use especially effective. So I’ll not blab except to someone with access.

Yes, sure, it’s already in my book. But there are so many notions there… more than 100 under-used or never-used tactics that could help in this fight… that I’m not worried about losing that first surprise. Anyone who reads Polemical Judo looking for it will find something else to get excited about, before chapter four.

Lethally infectious! Was this virus man-made in Wuhan? And even worse viral memes

Some added information about the disease now labeled SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19. 

First let's have some background. “Gain-of-Function” or GoF is a type of virus research in which experimenters augment a pathogen’s abilities to better understand infection processes. According to Strategic News Service, the NIH stopped funding for GoF studies in 2014^, given the danger, before lifting the pause under the new administration in 2017, and publishing guidelines to avoid creating dangerous pathogens. One GoF project already underway was a collaboration between the University of North Carolina and 15 researchers from various institutions, including  the Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology where they  have worked actively on bat coronaviruses. 

Yes, in Wuhan.

Now dig this: “The novel coronavirus is genomically most similar to  bat coronaviruses, excepting that “the receptor-binding domain of 2019-nCoV was closer to that of SARS-CoV.” In other words, somehow this bat virus acquired the binding surface traits that allowed SARS to attach to human cells. Now there are natural ways this can happen! Generally slowly and at low odds, and at first with low human-to-human spreading…

… but those odds can be augmented hugely — in a lab. SNS points out that virulent strains have escaped from Wuhan and Beijing labs before. Moreover, the Chinese government delayed access to the country by outside WHO and CDC teams for no stated reason.

Note also that the bat virus that SARS-CoV-2 is based upon is not endemic to the Wuhan area; it came from elsewhere and hence likely was not a natural infection at the Wuhan animal market.

As SNS summarizes: “If the PRC government insists that any concerns regarding manufactured pathogens are nonsense, it must back up those bold claims with transparent data, granting the WHO and the CDC full access, and it must cease any further obstructionism in the investigation.”

And now the other kind of viral disease, likely far more lethal to civilization.

== Infectious memes feed dictatorship ==

In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik reviews two books (including How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century) about how foolish it is to under-rate despots as merely cruel ogres. More often than not, there is canniness, a feral cunning and brilliance at manipulative use of language. And in many cases — Lenin, Mao, Stalin — a real proclivity for language and articulate writing.  In other cases, the cunning persuasiveness was more direct and visceral, via spoken words.

“Hitler was always unhappy with the slowness of reading and writing, compared with the vivid electricity of his rallies. Where the Marxist heritage - being theory-minded and principle-bound - involves the primacy of the text, right-wing despotism, being romantic and charismatic, is buoyed by the shared spell cast between an orator and his mob. One depends on a set of abstract rules; the other on a sequence of mutual bewitchments.”

And yes, I have said it for years. The deep underlayer of the confederacy - now trying for an 8th time to crush our American Enlightenment Experiment - is romanticism. 

Gopnik should have referred, at least in passing, to Hannah Arendt’s classic ruminations on despotism. But his first paragraph is noteworthy, even if that’s all you peruse. 

We are indeed, amid a rare glimmer of light across millennia of brutal darkness imposed by our worst (if Darwin-explicable) male drives. We must fight for this enlightenment experiment not just because the alternative has proved relentlessly stupid and cruel, but because our way is so vastly more productive of all things — science, art, wealth, and diversely accountable progress. 

Indeed, those traits are why today’s would be tyrants have only one way forward. Encouraging hatred of every single thing that makes us smart or good.

== Overlooking flaws ==

The evangelical community is riven apart over whether to condemn or to worship the most opposite-to-Jesus liar-narcissist-bully-traitor imaginable. What I’m looking for is how this falls out along denomination lines! Whether Methodists and Presbyterians align with Episcopalians Buttigieg and Biden...

... while it’s mostly Southern Baptists and correlated “independent ministries” who support Trump-Putin-Fox, the way similar sects supported the slaveholding plantation aristocracy.

“We’re all flawed humans and sinners,” they proclaim, shrugging off DT’s daily spasms of bile, hate, theft, abuse and schoolyard bullying, an excuse they never allowed for Clintons or Obamas, who – unlike all Trumps - attend church and can recite the Apostle’s Creed from memory. Theirs is a grudge that can never be quenched, despite 25 years searching in vain for substantial and verified sins by either the Clintons or Obamas.

Might one demand some contrition from the Russian mafia-oligarchs who used to be deemed satanic (deservedly so) when they oppressed and murdered and conspired against us as communists, but who now get a complete pass from our right-wingers because they claim to be  “Christian traditionalist”? The very same guys! Might our redders at least demand a surface show of penitence, before handing our country over to them, or denouncing our own “deep state” professionals who are blocking Putin’s perfect putsch?

Now news that the number of Southern Baptist and correlated ministers accused of sexual crimes is approaching 1000 and accelerating as victims come out. And 263 have been convicted. And leaders of the GOP party-of-turpitude lead dems in every category of sin, by far. It didn’t start with Trump. Look up Dennis Hastert. Look up the marriages of Newt Gingrich or recall who was the first divorced man in the White House. Or which states lead in teen sex, STDs, domestic violence, gambling and so on.

Demand wagers on all of the above! Watch how quickly the yattering moralists flee, just like those schoolyard bullies.

== The crux challenge to your decent conservative neighbors ==

When folks ask how anyone would support a thieving, treasonous, infantile, nasty, narcissistic playground bully who is the most opposite-to-Jesus human on the planet, you have only to picture who would deem those traits to be positive things.

The first two words – “thieving” & “treasonous” - are the ones of interest to “ex” communist KGB agents, Saudi murder-princes, carbon lords, gambling moguls, monopolists, Mafiosi and inheritance brats who think they can “control” this populist madness… the way Prussian barons thought they controlled Hitler. They think they can guide their blackmailed assets – Trump and the GOP - into “taxes and judges” while dismantling our sciences, alliances, rule-of-law and other enlightenment strengths, eliminating the “fact elites” that block their oligarchic power…

… all while still maintaining the modern systems that keep them rich and safe from genuine populist revolt. Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, their billions spent on propaganda encourage white working class “populist” resentment of fact elites and law, by portraying both as weaknesses. Ponder that. When we complain about all this – especially when offended by Trump – we are nerds on a playground, whimpering “that’s not fair!”

If any of you who recall what that jungle-feudal playground culture was like – way back in 8th grade – then you remember that whining “That’s not fair!” was mother’s milk for the bullies. They loved it! As today’s MAGA fools adore every single thing ol’ Two Scoops does to upset or enrage us. (George Lakoff laid all of this out more clearly than I can.) Take for example the quintessential bully moment that distilled everything loathsome about Trumpism, when he mocked the disabilities of a reporter, in order to deflect serious questions.

Any person possessed of minimal human decency would have then-and-there declared anathema such a wretched person along with all who cheered him. And yes, there are decent Americans who cringe at the meanness and fact-hating and stupidity and enabling of foreign despots. I reiterate, we must reach out to otherwise-conservative folks like military officers and citizens of Utah, who hate that shit!

Yet so many of them hug Fox, suckling straight from the flickering pixels, desperately swallowing the only rationalization that’s left: “Liberals are worse… liberals are worse… liberals are worse…”

We need to make clear that we are not seeking an extinction of American conservatism, but resurrection of earlier versions that admitted the primacy of decency, logic, empathy, courtesy and facts. That decent American conservatives throw off the movement’s lunatic, plutocrat and Muscovite and Salafist hijackers, before coming back to rejoin us at the negotiation table. We must promise to listen, if they’ll do that. But first they must end – decisively – their affiliation with evil and treason.

David Brin's 2020 Newsletter & Updates

Our first newsletter in three years has gone out! Here’s the web version. Lots to report and new books to enjoy!

First, alas, I must report that Escape From Kithrup - the awaited next chapter of the Uplift Saga isn’t ready! (By a fair amount, alack.) But meanwhile, here’s good stuff to (star)tide you over! Starting with...

* The Ancient Ones: My very new novel - a light-hearted space comedy - will feed your under-nourished guffaw-neurons! Kindle and POD editions go live on the equinox (3/19/20). Star Trek meets Hokas & vampires. 

Is comedy hard? Groan and laugh at sample chapters, then pre-order! 

Demmies aren’t so bad. They mean well. Impulsive and exasperating, sure. Often brilliant, cheeky, moronic, volatile, always astonishing... did I mention exasperating? The Alliance of Worlds wouldn’t be the same without them. Some would prefer it!

With a lovely-fun cover by Patrick Farley!

== And more 'items' of interest! ==

* Veering from the comically absurd to the seriously insane, I skewer today’s crazy politics in Polemical Judo. Our current crisis needs fresh perspectives! 100+ tactics may help our struggle for civilization. Sample chapters here - then help fight for a better future.

* A Need for Heroes: a stand-alone story about courage - and saving the world, now on my website (Excerpted from Earth).

* Sundiver, my first novel, came back into our hands after 38 years. We made corrections, gave it a new cover and introduction. Now available as an ebook and paperback versions on Kindle/POD. But - Shout if you want that long-awaited, collectable hardcover! 

* All my short story collections - including The River of Time, and Otherness as well as Insistence of Vision - are back! (My best work.) We've also re-released Heart of the Comet ( my collaboration with Gregory Benford). 

* The video for Existence, by web artist Patrick Farley, is 3 minutes of sheer, chilling beauty. 

* In the recently released volume After Shock: Reflecting on 50 Years of Future Shock - a hundred futurists explore bold ideas about the human future; I have an essay debating the ideas of Yuval Harari. A volume with some Big Thinkers!

 * Chasing Shadows was called “the decade's best theme anthology.” Stories by Cat Rambo, Rob Sawyer, James Morrow and other masters — plus William Gibson & Damon Knight classics —  examine benefits and pitfalls of our coming transparent world. Co-edited by Stephen Potts.

== And we need you... yes, YOU! ==

Sci-fi-nerds save the world? Picture some weird event. Starships fulla inky squids. Trees walk or cyber-newborns talk! A commission (I’m on some) hurriedly advises governments. Might 80 years of thoughtful SF tales prove useful? With UCSD's Arthur Clarke Center, I set up TASAT - There’s a Story About That - to host discussion of wide-ranging what-if scenarios - and maybe someday save us all. Subscribe. Join the Group Mind! (Web-admin folks needed.) 


* Speeches and consulting: See over 300 NGOs, companies, activist groups and agencies I’ve consulted or given keynotes about a future that slams into us with wave after wave of onrushing change, both down here and in space.

* Cool watchables!
 

Brin on Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)  


Will humanity diversify?  


The plague of getting ‘mad as hell.’  


Shall we lift the Earth? 


“Project Neo.”  

Others range from SETI to ESP to colonizing the galaxy.

Want more? Find frequent news and views on the always-provocative Contrary Brin blog.

Or follow me on Twitter / FaceBook or Quora.

The David Brin website offers free stories, samples, favorite books, videos, nonfiction, ideas and more.

I may speak in your area. So check my calendar. This summer, I'll be in D.C. as well as in Seattle in July - for Westercon: The 73rd West Coast SF& F convention.) See you in the future!

Finally: Okay it's been a Sci-Fi'ish year, even Twilight Zonish! But there's hope for an ambitious future and worthy civilization. Make it so!

===

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Face-Recog is loose. Adapt to this new world (You can!)

For years - ever since The Transparent Society (1997) - I've urged awareness of how new vision technologies will expose our lives, as never before. On the very first page, I compare two cities where citizens are under equal amounts of light and observation… only in one city they are free and safe from oppression or harm, while City #2 has descended into Orwellian hell, without adding any extra surveillance. We are seeing these two cities take shape now, before our very eyes. What makes the difference?

In China, Russia and other state monoliths, light flows upward to those in power, as control then stretches its talons downward. That condition - normal in almost every society for 6000 years - could be our fate, if we make mistakes. But not yet. So far, the opposite trend is in the lead. Why?

I relentlessly urge folks to join NGOs like the ACLU and EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) - our paladins in opposing Big Brother. Alas, though, they waste fully half of their efforts in a futile belief they can safeguard freedom by blinding elites, something that has never been accomplished on any major scale across those 60 centuries. It is the other half of their efforts that actually accomplishes good things — stripping elites naked, so that we can look back at power. Answering surveillance with sousveillance.

Here’s the recent NPR podcast of "To the Point" featuring me and a brilliant, heroic and (in this one case) misguided ACLU attorney, in a debate over privacy matters and whether we should deal with a tsunami of new technologies by shouting “stop!”… or else by learning to surf.

== The counter-intuitive secret of our success ==

Now comes the latest example, in the news, from The New York Times:

“Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.”

Oh, there are dangers and reasons for hand-wringing: “The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”

Very real dangers! But the answer is not to scream for the technological tide to stay back. This new app only does what I predicted three years ago, when well-meaning privacy mavens strove to ban governments and Facebook from using face recognition. The genie - out of the bottle - would only go elsewhere.

The answer to Eric Goldman and others should be obvious. You prevent abuses - like those he describes - by ensuring stalkers and 'rogue' abusers will get caught! Is that so hard to imagine? Or what must be done, in order to catch the mighty - of government, wealth, criminality or tech-elites - if they abuse these new and inevitable powers? Is it truly, truly so hard?

Yes. Apparently it is. After 25 years talking till I am blue in the face, I will testify, it’s very hard. Nothing seems more counter intuitive than the exact tool - reciprocal accountability - that gave us the enlightenment and every tool and joy of freedom.

== From the ridiculous to the obstinate... ==

Now selling: bizarre-looking masks that are printed to resemble the face of the wearer underneath it. “The idea is to protect users from infection, while still allowing them to unlock their iPhones using FaceID — or be recognized by Big Brother facial recognition systems in public.” Oh, but what if you swap masks?

Alas, the wave of myopic foolishness continues. This one in the New York Times also misses the point, top to bottom. Read it. Then ask what all the whining and hand-wringing accomplished? Not addressed at all:

1. The writer only knows about the flaws in Face Recognition (FR) precisely because it is being done in the open and subject to rapid critical discovery of those flaws, which - by the way - are being addressed with stunning speed, because of that transparent discovery process.

2. Of course laws against such tech are utterly futile, since they only drive the tech underground, where flaws will not be discovered and where elites can use those techs, but we can't. As Heinlein said, "Privacy laws mostly make the spy bugs smaller." Whereas we can safeguard some privacy - an essential human want - by empowering folks to catch the voyeurs and peeping toms and even elites, in the act.

3. Banning FR "systems" is like banning buggy whips, because it won't be resident in isolated "systems" at all. The rate of tech advancement means we'll all have FR in apps and these well-meaning folks will have wasted their anti-Orwell energies screaming at the wrong targets.

4. Again, in all of human history, no restrictions on elite access to any type of information has ever been successfully blocked for more than a short time. Especially by a "law."  Show me one example. These guys are worried about important things! Big Brother. Asymetires of power. And their prescriptions of obscurity and hiding are always insane.

== Well meant plans need careful followup ==

An Obama program to create and sell cheap android phones for the poor has done a lot of good. But always be alert for predators and parasites who lurk near any good deed, eager for a chance to bite and suck. Over the years, preinstalled malware has been found on a raft of these low-cost Android phones from a variety of providers and manufacturers. 

In fact, subsidizing the development of super-cheap and reliable phones can be of tremendous strategic importance, beyond just helping the poor. Way back in 1991, before the modern cell era, I spoke at a couple of security agencies proposing a cheaper, better way to deal with brutal tyrants like Saddam Hussein. A “volks-radio” might be mass produced capable of basic peer-to-peer messaging or voice, and dropped en-masse into (say) Saddam’s Iraq. An act of war? What? Giving away free stuff is an act of war? Oh, there’d be a button that folks could use (or not) that would send messages to overhead satellites, if any Iraqi wanted to – say – tell the CIA something – say – about movements to Baathist officials. Only if they want to, of course…  Now squint and imagine the same principle applied to the new Starlink System….

In a more general sense, this is just one more way to apply the great advantage of the West… that we generally do well with increases in light flow and transparency around the world and nearly all of our deadly foes are lethally allergic to light.

Alas, I never imagined that paramount among those light-allergic enemies of the American Enlightenment Experiment would turn out to be the Republican Party.