Do Sci Fi attitudes reflect our times?

Nearly two thirds (65 percent) of Americans think that President Obama would be a better leader than Mitt Romney if an alien invasion were to happen.  Hm, well, yes… and?  So?  A survey for National Geographic finds extraterrestrial visits not that crazy an idea to most Americans. Thirty-six percent of Americans think aliens have visited Earth, and almost 80 percent believe the government has kept information about UFOs a secret from the public.

Sigh. Mr. Sci Fi and aliens here… and I am in the 12% who say “not!”  But that hasn’t stopped me from issuing taunts at alien lurkers.  Which you can laugh at (aloud!) in Existence.

Is this a sign of the times — correlated with attitudes toward science?

For Congress now speaks a full grade level lower than it did in 2005. Falling from grade 11.5 to 10.6. Using the Flesch-Kincaid test that gives your kids the “reads at a 10th grade level” score, the Sunlight Foundation has measured the vocabulary used in Congressional speeches over the years and found that the level has dropped suddenly. For both parties, but particularly amongst Republican Congressmen, particularly amongst the newest batch, such as Rand Paul (3rd worst, speaks at an 8th grade level.) Indeed the entire worst ten are Republicans (eight of those are freshmen.) And the more conservative they are, the worse their speech (dropping by three full grades from center to fringe.) Interestingly, amongst Democrats with less than 10 years in Congress, the trend is similar, those closest to the political centre have the most complex speech, while those further to the left drop by about a grade. But for Democrats in Congress for more than 10 years, the trend is sharply reversed. Are candidates dumbing down their speech, or are parties dumbing down their candidates?

And North Carolina legislators want to stop planners from using the state’s own science panel’s prediction of sea level rise (about 1m by 2100, fairly conservative). Alack! There is one potential salvation from this madness.  For the insurance companies to make clear that, in 20 years, they plan to go after all the doofuses who delayed prudent measures by squelching the reasonable advice of the scientists who actually knew what they were talking about.

Part of the hysterical incantation that “government is never good” comes from folks who actually believe we would have had jets, rockets, telecom, weather forecasting, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, the Internet, or countless other things, without the advanced R&D that we, as citizens, agreed to pay for because the benefits and ROI lay beyond any plausible Return on Investment horizon of major corporations.  (And if we – as a people – had drawn only a small “businesslike” 5% royalty on those things, all red ink in the budget would today be erased.)  HALF of economic growth in the last 60 years is attributed to Science and Technology.  And here is just one of many documents making that point.

Hence, the War on Science… and on all other intellectual or knowledge castes is a lot more than just politics.  It is a stab at the very heart of any chance for your grandchildrens’ prosperity.  Think about it.  (But then, people who come here are already thinkers.  You already HAVE thought about it. So I’m wasting breath.)

==Politics & Economics for 2012==

What is Bain Capital?? Co-founded by Mitt Romney in 1984, Bain would buy a company and increase its short-term earnings through firing workers and shuttering plants in order to borrow enormous amounts of money. The borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends, however, those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts. When they couldn’t, that meant plant closures, more layoffs, bankruptcies, and in many cases, the end of the business. Yet these bankruptcies still meant huge profits for Bain’s investors. Furthermore, Bain continued to collect management fees even as companies failed.  As the New York Post reported, during his 15 years as head of Bain, Romney “made fortunes by bankrupting five profitable businesses that ended up firing thousands of workers.”

Our Wall Street friends are offshoring even their own subordinates’ jobs…

David Cameron held his first meeting with Francois Hollande and threatened to veto the new French president’s plan for a European tax on financial transactions. The Prime Minister made clear he will block any French move that would harm the (banker-financiers) of the City of London. Many of you have seen how firmly I support the transaction fee which – at 0.1% – would scarcely be noticed by humans like you or me, but shift power away from a few brokerage houses doing High Frequency Trading (HFT) which inflates bubbles, creates wild speculative swings, dashes in to rob buyers and sellers of the “price difference” they count on… and may (as I explain elsewhere) lead to the “Calamity of Skynet.”  I have lived in both London and Paris. I know the quirks of their inhabitants.  In this case, the London quirks add up to — wrong!

On NPR I listened to an interview with Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, about his new book The Road to Freedom, which is clearly a take-off from Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.  Now, I started out hostile, since I consider the AEI to be one of the core nexi that gave us neoconservatism and almost every rationalization for the monstrous hijacking of American Conservatism, turning it into a force that has done indescribable harm to America and the Western Enlightenment Experiment.

Those of you who know me can attest that I parse this denunciation not from any “leftist” position, but as an acolyte of Adam Smith and a believer in the proved creative power of fair and vigorous human competition.  As Smith declared – and as 6000 years of history have shown – the worst enemy of markets, freedom, and (yes) capitalism has always been monopolistic oligarchy.  The very force that pays AEI’s bills and bribes its boffins to concoct a rationalizations for a return of feudalism. And yet…

And yet, listening to Brooks, I got a sense of a rather reasonable fellow!  An intelligent person who believes in nuance and even something anathema on today’s right — the possibility of negotiation and mixed/pragmatic/innovative solutions to modern problems.  Fr example, he takes the attitude that government should be working to prepare us for a world of climate change, whether or not the worst fears prove valid.

How much of his stance is feigned?  Perhaps as part of an effort to keep despairing smart-conservatives from bolting the GOP, as nearly all the formerly republican scientists, teachers, journalists, economists, medical doctors and others already have?  Or else, is he the real deal?  An archetype for the dreamt-of return of the Goldwater-Buckley conservative?  That nearly extinct species who spoke with gentility and calm willingness to negotiate with their neighbors? How I miss em.

While defending sanity on Saturday — bring along (decent and smart) Capitalism

Folks may be curious how I can avow to be a libertarian (albeit a heretical one who despises Ayn Rand) and an admirer of Adam Smith… while urging everybody in sight to attend the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rallies, this coming Saturday and to “think blue” on election day.

For starters, because contradictions don’t bother “Contrary Brin”… in fact, they’re part of the fun in life! Also because most are illusory contradictions.  (Have you actually read Adam Smith? Today he’d be a democrat.  It’s clear on almost every page.)

One commonly-used crutch that I’ve long denounced is the hoary-stupid so-called“left-right political axis” — a monstrous metaphor that lobotomizes all who use it. It should be abandoned because it’s puerile, misleading, illogical… and because it’s French! (;-)

Seriously, if you’d like to probe everything from several dozen fresh perspectives,that I guarantee you’ve never thought of before, then have a look at this essay series I wrote for a group that wants to transform libertarianism from a fringe-of-flakes into a real force for pragmatic freedom in American life.  I wish them luck! (Though I won’t hold my breath.)

Will the comedians rescue us? To those of you heading for the Stewart-Colbert rallies, October 30 in DC… thank you, heroes! And if you cannot attend the main event in Washington? Then find a satellite rally at www.rallymao.com !

Is American Civilization in a steep decline? So you’d think from dyspeptic ads running on Fox.  But for a broader perspective, historian and diplomat Joseph Nye gives us the 30,000-foot (TED-talk) view of the shifts in power between China and the US, and the global implications as economic, political and “soft” power shifts and moves around the globe.

Me? I am appalled that 99% of American are unaware of what we have accomplished.  And how simple it would be for the United States to remain the rich and influential and respected leader of the world.

=== The Road We’ve Traveled ===

Let’s start with a basic fact that is too-seldom discussed. Nearly all of world development, since WWII,  has been financed by American purchasing power … us buying countless trillions of $ worth of crap we never needed.  US consumer purchases — uplift via Wal*Mart — has lifted more people out of poverty than all the “aid” given by all nations, across all of time.

If we set aside (temporarily) concerns about labor practices, corruption and eco-side-effects, the creation of a nascent world middle class has been one of the greatest achievements of Pax Americana, fully on a par with toppling Hitler and staunching the fever that was communism. By one light, our trade deficits have been sacred and noble things.

Find that boggling?  Compare Japan and Europe in 1945 to now. Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Malaysia, Brazil… and today, as we speak, even in a recession, we are lifting the economies of China AND India… at the same time.

But how have we afforded to do this?  Every decade, dour pundits predicted that calamity would result, but it never happened…. that is, till now.

The reason is simple.  HALF of all GDP growth – since WWII – occurred because ofscientific and technological advances. Jets, satellites, pharmaceuticals, copiers, computers, the Internet… you name it.  We dealt with IP theft by creating new patents faster than others could steal them!

This is why the right’s endless rants against both science and labor unions are monstrously stupid and self-defeating.  The solution is not to drive working Americans into penury.  Nor is it to hate the smart people who kept us dining on the ‘golden eggs’ of new discoveries and inventions. These were the folks who kept the rising tide that lifted all boats, and allowed the US to stay ahead, and able to pay for it all.

But today we are seeing the result of the Bushite War Against Science.  Ronald Reagan shifted R&D from Carter’s energy program (which would have taken us off of the Middle-East oil teat, by now) and onto frantic overdrive in developing things we prayed that we would never use!  But, even still, at least in those days, Republicans liked technology!  And some science.

Reagan’s version of the War on Science was mild. He funded some research and listened to OSTA, now and then.  In contrast to the neoconservatives, who trashed the OTSA as their very first order of business, I miss Reagan, terribly.  At least he would negotiate.  He called liberals foolish.  He had no truck with labeling his fellow citizens as satanic beings.

The dawn of the 21st century saw the first US leadership that directly and deliberately undermined the basic source of our power and strength, as well as the health of the Middle Class.  The font from which we took IN so much wealth that we were able to uplift the world, through trade.

Can we believe this? Whether this parsimonious explanation is true — that it was done deliberately — or else the preposterous story that is believed by nearly everybody — that such a perfect record of harm to the United States was wreakedunintentionally, out of staggeringly uniform and manic stupidity — either way, the harm has been grievous. And it is ongoing.

The relentless campaign of propaganda that manifests on Fox News and in the Tea Party Movement has one common them… Hatred of All Smartypants.  Fuming, smoking spite toward America’s “creative minority” –

– the same minority of smart folks that the great historian Arnold Toynbee once called the core to any great nation’s success.  The same segment of society that Rush Limbaugh recently spewed venom toward, in openly-declared hatred and in extremely clear, general terms.

Let us be plain.  They want us to cook the goose that laid all those golden eggs.  And serve it to a conniving oligarchy that is almost as profoundly short-sighted and stupid as it thinks itself smart.

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An afterthought… preventing this realization is probably the reason that many of the puppeteers have inflicted on us the treason of subsidized culture war.  By deliberately fostering populist, know-nothing confederate hatred of urban/science/blue America and a million other distractions, they get enough political clout to prevent any populist reaction against aristocratism in Congress.

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And finally… I repeat it everywhere.  Liberals, get off your butts and RECLAIM THE FIRST LIBERAL!  Adam Smith. The theoretician who despised conniving oligarchs far more than any other enemy of competitive enterprise.

Read Smith!  Don’t take the word of doofus right wingers who proclaim that Smith wanted “laissez-faire” to run roughshod over the poor.  In fact, in his fervent support for public education, social mobility, transparency, open competition and the creation of power centers that can hold the oligarchy in check, Smith provides a litany of neocon-demolishing quotations!

Moreover, by reclaiming Adam Smith, we:

1- emphasize liberalism’s roots in pushing social justice, not just because it is “nice” but because it is totally pragmatic to maximize the number of capable, competitors!

2- anti-monopoly sentiment is fizzing, just below the surface.  Harness it!

3- It is political jiu jitsu!  BE the party of enterprise!  It is about time that competitive markets got a champion, after the Republican Party has spent a generation demolishing them.