Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Canada is full of surprises, and Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com gets me informed:

Justin Trudeau may be Prime Minister of Canada and run the country, but under the parliamentary system the country inherited from Great Britain, the Queen is the head of state and the Governor General is her representative, her boots on the ground. And as of September, those boots will be filled by Julie Payette.

Well. So the Governor General is the real power, although probably not exercised frequently. And then about Payette:

Julie Payette wanted to be an astronaut when there were no women in the corps, so she studied engineering and then got a Masters in computer engineering. She was one of four Canadian astronauts chosen among 5,330 applicants in 1992, and went into space twice.

Oh, she is also an accomplished musician who plays the piano and has sung with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. She speaks six languages and is a terrific athlete, and has 27 honorary degrees. She has 1300 hours of flight time, has 311 hours in space and is a deep-sea diving suit operator.

I feel … inadequate.

Big yellow eyes with touches of red. Jaundice? Liver failure while on a bender?

That first one was without the flash.

As ever, my Arts Editor has upgraded my poor efforts.

“Donald Trump Struck a Righteous Blow against Universalism,” David French, National Review.

A curiously fluffy piece, with little real substance. And I could even sympathize with the most basic point: democracy requires a certain soil, although I suspect David and I would disagree on the composition. For me, the embrace of democracy requires a dissatisfaction with the status quo, much as we see with the American Revolution and subsequent formation of the Confederacy (no, not that one) and then the Federal system, and the recognition of the adherence to justice in order to satisfy the citizenry; that the fragmented form embraced in colonial America was considered an ideal speaks to the disaster of theocratic monarchies.

For all that the Trump Administration is amazingly rich fodder for our national corps of comedians, the intelligence community is becoming very concerned about the damage being done to one of the most important features of the Washington bureaucracy – its dedication to truth rather than ideology. On Lawfare, Elizabeth McElvein reviews national attitudes towards various Trump-related controversies and discovers a disturbing polarization, as in this example:

One of the most anticipated episodes in the series of Russia-related investigations was the testimony of former FBI Director James Comey before the Senate Intelligence Committee at the beginning of last month. With the testimony billed as a “political Super Bowl,” Americans’ acutely partisan assessment of the proceedings is to be expected: a Quinnipiac University poll found that a slim majority (54 percent) of Americans believe that President Trump fired former FBI Director Comey to disrupt the FBI’s investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This figure includes 89 percent of Democrats, 55 percent of independents, and just 13 percent of Republicans. By contrast, 39 percent of Americans believe that President Trump fired Director Comey because he had lost confidence in Comey’s ability to lead the FBI well. Support for this position breaks along similarly partisan lines, including a whopping 79 percent of Republicans, 38 percent of Independents and just six percent of Democrats.

Though unsurprising, the intensely partisan nature of the investigations is a source of legitimate concern, especially insofar as it degrades Congressional capacity to conduct meaningful, impartial oversight of the intelligence community. In a recent op-ed, Dan Glickman, the former Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, expresses concern that “for the first time … unhealthy partisan divisions by some are seriously impacting the independence and objectivity of the work of the House Intelligence Committee.”

Elizabeth’s concern?

One obvious explanation for these findings is that President Trump has repeatedly cast aspersions on intelligence community findings related the to Russia. At a news conference just yesterday, he responded to a yes-or-no question about Russian interference in the 2016 election by suggesting that “nobody really knows” if Russia was solely responsible. The president’s refusal to affirm the intelligence community’s findings pushes that analysis toward the realm of political subjectivity. These data might also reflect Americans’ distrust of institutional authority more broadly—a tendency that pollster Guy Molyneux characterizes as one of the “least appreciated” characteristics of the American electorate, and which, he writes, Trump was remarkably adept at exploiting over the course of his presidential campaign.

Elsewhere on Lawfare, Joshua Rovner wrote eloquently about the adverse short- and long-term consequence of the politicization of intelligence community analysis, concluding that for members of the intelligence community “any hope of playing a productive role in the policy process rests on the belief that policymakers [Democrats and Republicans] will value the community’s input without automatically suspecting its motives.” The politicization of fact-based analysis should be of utmost concern to those who value the institutional legitimacy of the intelligence community and of fact-based policy prescription and analysis in the national security sphere.

I have little of insight to add, but it’s worth reiterating that a political world which believes everything is politics is headed for disaster – for both them and us. Suppose the political view dictated the belief that the North Koreans would rollover if attacked, despite intelligence reports to the contrary – and so, to solve this outstanding problem, we rolled a division of Marines onto the beach at Majon. And, in retaliation, they delivered a nuclear weapon right into Seoul.

Or Los Angeles.

The role of non-partisan institutions operating in the political environment is absolutely vital, whether it’s the NSA or the Congressional Budget Office. It’s completely OK to question whether an institution is actually non-partisan, but only with strong evidence in hand.

Not the vapid lipping off of a power-hungry politico.

Elizabeth has ample reason for concern – as should we all.

Recent reports that a chunk of the Antarctic ice shelf Larsen C has broken of are common, resulting in an iceberg twice the size of Luxembourg. But in this report from the European Space Agency (ESA), I found this chunk interesting:

The loss of such a large piece is of interest because ice shelves along the peninsula play an important role in ‘buttressing’ glaciers that feed ice seaward, effectively slowing their flow.

Previous events further north on the Larsen A and B shelves, captured by ESA’s ERS and Envisat satellites, indicate that when a large portion of an ice shelf is lost, the flow of glaciers behind can accelerate, contributing to sea-level rise.

Which naturally leads to the question, How fast! How fast! Does Miami go under next week?

Equally seriously, does this affect the Emperor penguins, the stars of this documentary? And don’t confuse that documentary with this video.

Andray Abrahamian on 38 North explores the option of a travel ban in response to the murder of Otto Warmbier, and comes out somewhat against it:

More importantly, tourism has had a real impact on the class of people we need to connect with the most in the long term: middle and upper middle-class residents of Pyongyang. There has been a profound change in social attitudes among the community of citizens that are authorized to deal with foreigners in Pyongyang. In the past decade, there has been increased curiosity, cosmopolitanism, and open-mindedness among members of this group. In addition, these people have friends and friends of friends who also experience the outside world more, mostly through commercial ties with China. These people may not be able to change the country overnight, but they are its most important constituency for change, and in the long run, will become even more important.

Finally, tourism has been an extremely useful source of information for the community of Korea watchers. Tourists often identify and provide valuable insights into social and economic changes in a way that wasn’t possible before. Cutting off this source of information would be a loss for Korea analysts.

Tourism hasn’t been the engine for change that some hoped it might be, perhaps unrealistically, when North Korean officials began talking it up in the mid-1990s. But it is not without its benefits. Thus, any decision to try to curtail US or other tourism to North Korea should not be taken lightly. It would be a satisfying and justifiable moral rebuke and may somewhat reduce leverage that Pyongyang occasionally exploits in its relationship with the United States. It could also prevent the next Otto Warmbier from making a minor mistake that ends up being costly beyond words. However, it would also make people in an isolated place a little less connected to the outside world and harder to understand. Like so much when it comes to North Korea, every option has downsides.

I suppose this could be considered part of the strategic patience option pursued by the Obama Administration, giving the regime an opportunity to change while applying pressure that attempts to shape that change. Will the Trump Administration understand that? Will they still feel that the murder of Warmbier requires some sort of action that is more than giving North Korea the middle finger on Twitter?

And that metaphor spurs another thought. The Trump Administration’s loss of prestige has made the North Korean situation more dangerous because it’s more difficult to guess how the Kim regime monarchy will react to an insult from a country with a depressed prestige level, especially when the North Koreans Kim may perceive the North Korean prestige greatly enhanced due to their advancements in missile, nuclear, and computer technology. But I’m not sure who’s in greater danger – the United States or North Korea.

Kevin Drum wrote a post summarizing the various groups who are against doing anything about climate change, and while I think he skips over a couple of the more important psychological-religious reasons, I did enjoy this new viewpoint:

This is amateur economics, but listen anyway. We’ve had periodic recessions for the entire history of our country, but median earnings rose anyway. They took a small hit during recessions, and then rose more during the subsequent expansions. In 1973 that stopped happening. There are lots of reasons for this, but I think oil is a big and underappreciated one. It has made the global economy far less stable than in the past, and ordinary workers generally don’t do well in an unstable world.

So that’s another reason to take decarbonization seriously: it would return us to a more stable global economy, which would most likely be good for workers. Shed no tears for the rich, though. They’d do fine. They just wouldn’t gobble up nearly the entire value of economic growth. And in return, for surprisingly little pain, we all get a world that’s safer, more habitable, and economically more stable. What’s not to like?

The point that fossil fuels are an international commodity, and solar, while coming nearly 9 light minutes from the Sun, is really a local resource, is a point that had escaped my attention – and is worth some consideration.

For all the hubbub about there being more jobs in alternative energy industries than in fossil fuels, I have to wonder if this is apples to oranges – or apples to elephants. After all, energy extraction is an ongoing process, requiring labor, everything from manning the oil rigs to running the refineries to scouting for more. Is the extraction effort in the alternate energy industries as labor intensive? Is the labor numbers being cited expected to have some staying power, or are we seeing an installation hump and soon they’ll fall off? The couple of popular citations I’ve seen have that taste of, well, amateurism. That is, they may look good today, but wait a couple of days – or couple of years – and they may have changed drastically.

While watching Colbert tonight, I flashed on a scene from, I believe, the movie Minority Report (2002), a Tom Cruise movie in which he plays a futuristic cop whose prime mechanism for finding criminals is a group of three psychics who predict who will commit the next murder; it’s Cruise’s responsibility to find the soon-to-be criminal before the crime is committed, and arrest him or her for contemplating such an action.

In Cruise’s character’s backstory is the element that his own young son was kidnapped years earlier, and never found. Cruise hasn’t given up hope, and near the end of the movie he’s led to a hotel room where he finds a bed covered with photographs of his son on the last day he ever saw him.

This is supposed to manipulate him into killing the man who has rented the room and soon returns. However, as a cop with many years of experience, he knows that evidence is often scant and hard to see.

This looks wrong, he may have whispered. Or perhaps it was something else. I haven’t seen Minority Report in a while.

And perhaps this is what bothers me the most about Donald Trump, Jr.’s dump of his email into Twitter yesterday. Not only does it appear to be madness and ignorance on a grand scale, it’s a fucking avalanche of evidence. It’s as if he painted himself with glow in the dark rocket fuel and lit himself on fire. All eyes are on him.

So what are we all missing here? Mr. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, are you distracted by this as well? Or do you see a ball in the air that I, at least, seem to be missing?

I’ve written once or twice about bell curves before, mostly with regard to taxes, but today it occurred to me there’s another application of the bell curve as to a favorite topic, political activity:

Party loyalty and how it plots to efficient government^[1].

I’d like to suggest that one terminus of the bell curve, and hence in the realm of inefficiency, would be the random actors. These are folks who have never learned how to work as a team, how to sacrifice for the team, nor how to contribute to a team. Not only are they deadweight, but they’re destructive. In point of fact, they are not good Party members, and no doubt would not be welcome in any party.

The other terminus of the bell curve, and thus also inefficient, would be the opposite of the random actors in the sense of extreme loyalty. These are folks who, when the pedal hits the metal, they can be counted on to vote the “right” way. They obey party discipline. The Party is all.

And it’s this utter loyalty which betrays them and their country, because this is predicated on a leadership made up of good people. When it’s not, there is no fire ladder, no escape route – dissent, meaning refusing to vote as dictated, leads to expulsion – and the barren lands, for many.

This was brought to mind by Steve Benen’s remark today on Maddowblog:

But many observers keep waiting for the moment at which the bow breaks. There’s an apparent expectation that there’s a cumulative effect to Trump’s troubles, and at a certain, undermined point, congressional Republicans will feel compelled to pull their support and put his presidency in peril.

Yesterday was a reminder that this point almost certainly doesn’t exist. Most GOP lawmakers are quite comfortable with the idea of Trump and his team facing no consequences for their actions.

Their loyalty makes them ineffective in the interests of the Nation.

So how about the center of the curve? That’s where the Party members can dissent in a productive manner. By dissenting, by contributing ideas and evaluations and judgments, they improve the Party in a Nation-friendly manner.

Just like H₂O, O₂, taxes, and many other things, both too little and too much loyalty is a bad thing.

¹By efficient I do not refer to financial efficiency, but rather to government which fulfills its putative duties, such as being responsive to citizens’ needs, law enforcement, regulation, and the like, in an appropriate manner.

There are many ways for a campaign to behave when faced with ethical questions. The quagmire enveloping the Trump Administration due to its behavior during the campaign is indicative of what happens when you’re ethically challenged. But how about other examples? Lawfare‘s Quinta Jurecic, in the midst of analyzing how badly the Trump’s defensive wall is crumbling, provides this contrasing example from the Gore campaign of 2000, which I don’t recall reading about before:

How unusual is it? On September 14, 2000, former congressman Tom Downey, a close advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, received an anonymous package in the mail containing a videotape of George W. Bush practicing for the upcoming presidential debates and more than 120 pages of planned debate strategies. Downey and his lawyer contacted the FBI and handed the cache over that very day, and Gore campaign officials then immediately reached out to the Associated Press to provide a timeline of the events. The Gore campaign had no hint of who had sent the materials—nothing indicated the involvement of a foreign power; indeed, the package was eventually traced to a low-level employee at a media firm. But the materials were on their face likely provided to the Gore campaign as part of an attempt to damage Gore’s opponent, and that was enough to prompt a call to authorities.

The rightness of the Gore officials’ course of action is in no way diminished by the fact that, as suggested at the time, they were probably in part motivated by the desire to avoid the accusations of ill-gotten advantage that had rocked the Reagan administration. A couple years after the fact, it had been revealed that the Reagan campaign had obtained secret briefing materials on then-President Jimmy Carter’s debate strategy in the run-up to the 1980 election; those revelations in turn triggered long-running congressional and Justice Department investigations. Those investigations—which eventually ended in a whimper—raised questions about whether and what kind of crime had been committed, but note that the Justice Department concluded at the time that there was ”no criminal intent of any kind” and “no criminal wrongdoing” committed in connection with the transfer of the materials. This scandal too did not involve any indication of involvement by a hostile foreign power or its intelligence services.

Contrast with the most recent travails of Trump, Jr. Or, for that matter, the Bush Administration’s insistence of WMDs in Iraq – which turned out to be untrue, but permitted the execution of a War which should not have been pursued.

Steve Benen sees the continual crisis that is the Trump Administration progressing to the next step – where it’s everyone for themselves. I suppose we’ll see if he has that right over the next month or so.

Normative:

Establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard or norm, especially of behaviour.
‘negative sanctions to enforce normative behaviour’
[Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in “How to stay pro-tech when social media can eat young lives,” Pat Kane, NewScientist (1 July 2017):

One might have a romantic notion – the agenda-setting SF novels of Cory Doctorow come to mind – that the kids from the wrong side of the tracks would be the ones who demanded something different, less managed, more edgy, from their communication platforms. (Freitas’s students are clearly attending prestigious universities, where pressures to succeed keeps things normative.)

IN this off-again, on-again feature, this entry may be a bit of a stretch. From Alison Frankel, for the want of a comma, I’m left uncertain as to whether Chief Justice Roberts has one heck of an oddball duty … or not:

On June 30, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts disclosed an intriguing tidbit about how he reads briefs to hundreds of federal judges and appellate lawyers gathered at a federal judicial conference in Pennsylvania.

And is it for their bed-time?

Time for my spa treatment!

The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959) is a “curses! my ancestor sucked!” movie, as the male members of a family pay for the savagery of one of their ancestors. So, too, do the instruments of death menacing them, an Amazonian savage and a man out of time with a secret to hide – and an internal compulsion to obey.

Unfortunately, this mystery has little grounding in reality, even those ties which are important. Thus, men collapse in terror at the mere sight of the guy with curare, rather than fight-fight-fight, that bamboo knife so easily cuts off heads from bodies, and, quite frankly, the professor’s daughter can’t act her way out of a paper bag.

Which is all too bad, because there’s some elements to a really creepy movie present. Perhaps, with a little work, they could have gone somewhere with this.

For example, the Amazonian savage has been reconstituted with a body that is mostly curare. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? He is eventually destroyed by being pushed into a fire, where he explodes. Handy, dandy, not even a mess.

And no cost, either.

See, that’s a key missing part of this movie. He’s made of curare, but so what? But what if his destruction had required some sort of sacrifice, or even gambit, from the good guys? Perhaps the cop has to depend on the professor’s daughter to administer a curative potion to him after he wrestles the savage into the fire, and then maybe the other bad guy grabs her …

Move, counter-move, potential sacrifice. Not only does this increase the tension in the story, it also makes it more interesting in that we see how potential prices are part of the calculations as the demise of the enemy is calculated.

That would have been fun. But you won’t find it in this slacking movie.

Modicum:

a small portion :  a limited quantity : had only a modicum of mathematical skills [Merriam-Webster]

Just a word of which I was not precisely aware.

I don’t keep a good eye on the various NASA sites, and for that I apologize, as they are inspirational and remind you there’s more to this Universe than some pack of idiots in Washington, or the sick friend who you’re worrying about. So, in that tradition, here’s a latest picture of Jupiter from NASA‘s Juno probe:

Yep, that’s on purpose.

Was she so awful?

A movie in the category of The Lost City of Z (2016) is a little harder to evaluate than most because, as a biography, the story is dictated by the actual events of history. In this case, this is the story of British Army officer Percy Fawcett, dispatched to Bolivia to map the border between Bolivia and Brazil by following a river. At its source, he finds advanced pottery and other signs of an unknown civilization.

Several years later, having returned to his family, he gives a presentation at the Royal Geographic Society on the subject, and proposes a return investigation. Along with his former traveling companions, a Shackleton companion also makes the trip. Another two or three years are spent in travel, only to have the companion become a nuisance and a burden; he is eventually sent back on a horse with an injury. Only after his departure do they find he sabotaged the expedition, although why he’d do such a thing is a little mysterious. The damage is done, and they fail to make it to the head of the river. They return to England, and soon their erstwhile companion shows up, full of brimfire for being abused and abandoned; the dispute is invigorating.

World War I then intervenes, and Fawcett spends several years serving in France, eventually being severely injured by chlorine gas. Upon his recovery, however, the war is finished, and his son persuades him to make one more trip up the river in search of that civilization. They disappear into the forest, and once the letters stop, there is only one more communication received, a wordless message indicating only that success has been achieved. Nothing more is ever heard from them.

Why? Why go the second and third times? Because adventure calls? Because they enjoy risking death by disease or snakebite or hostile natives? Each trip takes several years, and the movie portrays him as deeply attached to his wife in an enlightened relationship – so why virtually abandon the family? One may infer that today’s society would be quite unlike that of the naughts of the 2oth century, but a little work on the motivations of men & women back then would have made the story more engaging.

Those frustrations aside, it’s a technically competent movie, and sometimes the tableaus can be breathtaking, as when they discover an opera in full blast in the middle of the jungle. But the central question of why, why, why? distracts too much from an otherwise fine movie.

Insouciant:

free from concern, worry, or anxiety; carefree; nonchalant. [Dictionary.com]

My Arts Editor often remarks that the many rabbits in our yard have become quite insouciant due to the passing of three of our cats, and the aging of the two survivors.

… then, according to this article in NewScientist (1 July 2017), eat termite-processed mud.

“The important thing is that this isn’t just any mud, it’s termite-processed mud,” says team member Mrinalini Watsa at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Analysis showed that the mud can absorb cations – positively charged particles – so could mop up potentially toxic metal ones from other substances in the monkeys’ diet (Primates, doi.org/b82k).

“This was key,” says Adams. “A large part of a saki’s [a small primate] diet is seeds from unripe fruit, and these are packed with toxic chemicals.”

The region’s [Amazonian Peru] other major seed eaters – macaws and parrots – fly to clay-rich soils on riverside cliffs for stomach-calming intestinal mudbaths. Sakis have found a solution closer to their homes.

Next question: instinctual or cultural behavior?

Which is exactly what came to mind as I read Greg Fallis’ furiously satirical piece concerning gunners, the NRA, and gun manufacturers:

Wait, that’s not all! They are going to use their ex-president (you know, that Negro one? The one from Kenya, with the funny ears?) to “endorse the resistance”! That guy, he doesn’t even have a birth certificate thing, and they are going to use him for endorsing! Probably on an award show! Where he’ll be given an award for assassinating the real news to death! And an actor — or maybe even a singer — will give him the award!

Is that what you want? Do you want your children to grow up in a country where singers give awards to ex-presidents for assassinating real news? Then you’d better go out RIGHT NOW and buy as many guns as Jesus wants you to buy. If you think I’m kidding (I’m totally NOT kidding…would I kid about this?), just listen to what this extremely angry woman has to say.

I’ll omit the video. Given the reported scarcity of gun ammunition encountered during the Obama Administration as gun owners, frightened by the pronouncements on high of how they’d have to fight off rabid Democrats coming for their guns (for those with bad memories, it never even came close to happening – only the mass killings happened), bought all the ammo in site, it’s hard to see NRA members as anything but sheep.

Sheep armed with guns.

Oh, Gary Larson, we miss ye with a vengeance.

Battlefield weapons continue to edge towards the use of AI as controllers, since autonomous weapons may be necessary given how the recent rash of improvised drone weapons are being countered. Christian Borys comments on costs and defenses in NewScientist (1 July 2017, paywall):

Islamic State (ISIS) has deployed consumer drones carrying grenades in the battle for the Iraqi city of Mosul, creating the most daunting problem US Special Operations Command troops faced in Iraq during 2016, according to their commander Raymond Thomas.

Groups around the world are taking advantage of the increasing accessibility of drone technology to build and deploy them as weapons (see “Home-grown drones“). And it’s not hard to imagine them being used in an attack in the West; the bomber responsible for the May attack on a concert in Manchester used parts purchased locally and may have been trained in Libya. …

And now, according to Thomas ISIS is using drones in an “almost swarm level capability” – deploying multiple fliers to the battlefield that can act and move as one. …

On the battlefield, even basic drones are proving to be such a problem that militaries are going to absurd lengths to shoot them down. In March, the BBC reported that a US ally had used a $3 million “Patriot” missile to shoot down a $200 quadcopter drone.

That’s why the hunt is on for an alternative take-down method. One possibility is the Drone Defender produced by Battelle, a military contractor based in Ohio.

The device has a range of 400 metres and looks like a rifle with a radio mast for a barrel. It was first spotted on the battlefield in Iraq in 2016. It operates by shooting a directed radio pulse, disabling the operator’s control of the drone or disrupting its link to GPS satellites, causing it to fall out of the sky.

Which points to the attraction of building an autonomous weapon. The more it can operate on its own, the more attractive it’ll be to militaries around the world – and the closer to an AI it must become, with the attendant uncertainty which I believe will accompany such a development.

A dismal future.

President Trump’s decision to strike our membership with the Paris Climate Agreement was just one step of the United States’ withdrawal from our world-wide leadership position.  Given the distaste of the current occupants of the White House and majorities in Congress for, well, the study of reality, I suppose it’s unsurprising. It tastes like someone lost their nerve.

But the world isn’t stopping in the face of American intransigence, and the latest sign that the world began accelerating away the moment we stepped off the podium comes from France, as reported by The Guardian:

France will end sales of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040 as part of an ambitious plan to meet its targets under the Paris climate accord, Emmanuel Macron’s government has announced. …

Nicolas Hulot, the country’s new ecology minister, said: “We are announcing an end to the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040.” Hulot added that the move was a “veritable revolution”.

Hulot insisted that the decision was a question of public health policy and “a way to fight against air pollution”. The veteran environmental campaigner was among several political newcomers to whom Macron gave top jobs in his government.

Pascal Canfin, the head of WWF France and a former Green politician who served in François Hollande’s government, said the new policy platform to counter climate change went further than previous administrations in France. “It places France among the leaders of climate action in the world,” he told France Inter radio.

As later noted, Norway is also moving in this direction, and similar noises are erupting across Europe and India. Seeing that car makers such as Ford and General Motors are global in nature, this will impact them, and hopefully they are preparing for it even now. But it’s important to note this is happening without American leadership. While it’s tempting to blame this on the GOP incompetence and provinciality in Washington, there is a second factor to consider:

The European nations have recovered from World War II and the Cold War.

For those unfamiliar with history^[1], World War II was physically and spiritually devastating for nearly all the European countries; one might argue that Sweden and Switzerland, avowed neutrals, escaped damage, but even they had their losses, intangible as they might have been. The rebuilding was more than physical, for in the cases of the Axis powers, entire governing structures had to be redesigned and implemented. The Allies, so sorely pressed, needed to query themselves as to their errors in the run-up to the War, and how to avoid repeating them. These are blows to efficiency, certainty, and national self-confidence.

Then the Cold War came on the heels of World War II, casting a foreboding backdrop on the events of the world as China’s warlord system collapsed and reformed into the image of the deadly Cultural Revolution.  The mutual menace of the Cold War and North Korea’s invasion of South Korea forced two countries, the Soviet Union and the United States, into the leadership positions of their sides, the former due to its aggressive nature, the latter because of its size, immense resources, and superior strength relative to its allies outside of the Communist world. The United States’ strength, due to its geographical isolation during World War II, made it the natural leader through the conflicts which have occurred since, as well as the responses to catastrophes, both real and hypothetical, during that time.

But now, I think, the United States has entered a period of exhaustion. The free enterprise system, whatever you may think of it, has increasingly brought change in its role as the purveyor of creative destruction, to borrow a libertarian term. That change is at odds with the temperament of much of America, those who have invested themselves in the old ways of doing things – in the old power structures, be they religious hierarchies, fossil fuel industries, or moral systems based on old assumptions. Even the stock exchanges of today do not resemble, in implementation, those of 20 years ago.

And in a country often described as one of the most religious, this is a problem, because religion does not teach change; religion teaches stasis. It speaks of eternal morality systems, not of improving and evolving morality systems. If the reader doubts it, consider the reaction to every attempt to improve our public morality since the beginning of the Republic. When Northern public opinion turned against slavery, did the slave-owners politely dispense with their slaves?

No. The forces of conservatism rallied and instigated a Civil War, calling upon Biblical references to justify their position that slavery is good.

Therefore, for those who have been taught and absorbed the ideas of the eternal and changeless, the changes brought by the Internet, science, and by those obsessed with selective justice, reek of something else: immorality is as good a word as I can imagine at the moment.  But depending on the issue, a multitude of negatively connoted words apply.

Scientists, seeing change in their data collections and worrying about its negative effects for current civilization, are disbelieved by those who have been taught that what we have done for 100 years has been good.

Gay marriage, unimaginable in the 1980s, is now permitted. In some states, a majority of the citizens even voted to allow it prior to the Supreme Court decision. Yet, from pulpit and podium, homosexuality has long been a target of those embodying “right” thinking.

Some industries depart, others arise. Where are the good old days, of working in the steel mills or descending into the coal mines? Even a black President came, who somehow survived constant rhetorical assault to resolve a host of problems.

And then arose, as we all know, the man who promises to bring back all the good times. Coal miners: we’ll use coal again. We’ll build a wall to keep out those bad immigrants who steal our jobs. We’ll reduce taxes and increase military spending because, by God, our military just sucks. Old, good jobs sound so great, and when they’re impossible, at least a finger can be pointed at something tangible. And military spending? That plays so well to those who remember the Cold War, the constant armament building, and how that brought money flooding into communities, and honor as well – contributing to the nation’s defense is always honorable, no?

As an agnostic, I find the roots of religion repugnant, but I do recognize that it brings a morality to the citizen which does not require the hard work of building a secular philosophy that compels what we call moral behavior. At its best, religion brings the simplicity of the Golden Rule to society; at its worst, it espouses a ridiculous theology resulting in the condemnation of millions of people for a multitude of dubious sins, thus hindering that same society. But the underlying teaching of stasis, of an eternal set of rules leading to Godly approval, is a dismaying facet of the institution of religion, for two reasons.

First, it leads to a brittle citizenry, a citizenry trained to expect stasis in a world of change, a training so strong that, when faced with contrary evidence, a howl of disbelief and scorn is raised, rather than the sober, mature reflection necessary for good decision making.

Second, when that brittleness snaps, the citizens tend to toss away all the rules, even as they continue their devotions. We saw this in the vote for our current President, a man of dubious public morality, who lied and lied and lied.  And the Christian nation approved him anyway because he promised a return to stasis, when times were good and they could bask in their Godly approval.

That generation, I fear, is too old to change. We may see another twenty years of GOP fumbling in governance, in combination with Democratic incompetence, before enough of its current base dies off to force it to change – or perish. Younger generations, for the most part not heavily invested in a holistic mythos venerated by this older generation, may not replenish the ranks of the GOP to any great extent, although many currently isolated in areas where conservative ideology and news organizations hold sway may be lured into the fold.

And the question will be whether or not we inadvertently  cause the destruction of the current civilization, or if the rest of the world can contain and ameliorate the damage while the exhausted generation dies off. In the latter case, I am thinking of car-makers forced to abandon fossil-fueled cars because the world outside of the United States has ceased demanding them, and as a response, manufacturers begin to phase them out even within the United States. But that is speculative and narrow; those same manufacturers, recognizing the climate change catastrophe approaching, may switch of their own accord. Some commerce actually employs strategic vision and recognizes the necessity of change.

The aphorism still holds true: change or die.

But, in the meantime, we should expect to see European and Chinese leadership taking over for the increasingly timid Americans. The simple denials of reality, the pursuit of false fantasies, are simply not acceptable in world leadership circles. So leadership returns across the ocean, most vividly to France and Germany, and China. And the United States regenerates, and relearns the lessons of fantasies.

¹As I become more decrepit with age, the temptation to shout Well, get educated about history! greatly increases.

In this case, from Carl Reiner to Justice Kennedy, in The New York Times:

I would like to start with congratulatory wishes on your forthcoming 81st birthday.

As someone who has almost a decade and a half on you, I can tell you this: It may well be that the best part of your career has just begun. As a nonagenarian who has just completed the most prolific, productive five years of my life, I feel it incumbent upon me to urge a hearty octogenarian such as yourself not to put your feet up on the ottoman just yet. You have important and fulfilling work ahead of you.

I am still aiming at making it to the year 2100.

In a sad finale to this vision of transportation, Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com reports that the Transit Elevated Bus appears to have simply been an illusion:

Source: Jalopnik

And now, it turns out, it’s a scam. According to the Financial Times,

On Sunday Chinese authorities said they had launched a probe into the company for alleged illegal fundraising through Huaying Kailai, an online financing platform founded by Mr Bai. [CEO of the Transit Elevated Bus Company]

He was one of 32 people working for Huaying Kailai arrested for using the bus to raise money illegally, after buying the rights to the bus from its inventor, probably the poor uneducated Song Youzhou. The authorities claim that this was not a vehicle for transporting people but for transporting money from investors to Mr. Bai.

A pity. Ambitious visions should be pursued by the obsessed. It keeps the unbalanced out of politics, if nothing else.