After the blackout yesterday, enough Reps and Senators backed off that SOPA/PIPA might just be dead–notwithstanding the snarky reply I got from one of my Senators over the issue.

Now, the real problem: The lobbyists who are pushing this. Good lobbying is a good investment strategy, and always has been. Unlike most people, I don’t have a problem with that–in an open society, even businesspeople need to be able to put their case forward.

However, I do have a problem when lobbying crosses over into rent-seeking and protectionism and restraint of trade, as these two bills most assuredly did.

People tend to despair about having any effect on the machinery that drives rent-seeking on the part of companies who lobby–but just as elected officials can be voted out, so too can misbehaving companies. Consumer boycotts are one of THE most effective methods of activism in the world. Companies lobby to protect (or enhance) their bottom line, so showing them that their lobbying efforts are harming their bottom line can cause them to seriously reconsider.

To that end, you will find a list on this page of all the companies who put their money and PR engines behind SOPA/PROTECT-IP. Take a few minutes, pick a handful that you actually buy things from, and let them know that you’re not going to buy from them anymore unless/until they change their tune.

I’ve sent versions of the following letter to Monster Cable, Shure, Intel, and Dell. If you care about this stuff, it’s worth fifteen minutes for you to do the same. Please consider it.

I am a longtime customer who has had nothing but positive experiences with Shure and its products (I currently own 6 SM-58s and regularly recommend them to consulting clients), I am deeply disappointed to learn that your lobbying arm was an active supporter of SOPA and the PROTECT-IP acts. As an independent producer of albums, concert videos, and audiobooks I’ve had the pleasure of using Shure Microphones for the last ten years–your products, tough and durable with excellent shielding–have been my go-to for gigs in harsh environments and where EM bleed noise is worse. It’s also been my pleasure, as a studio consultant who helps design recording and PA installations throughout the country, to recommend your products to my customers regularly–in my experience, your vocal mics are the best in the game.

However, this legislation or subsequent legislation like it is such a fundamental threat to my business that I can no longer, in good conscience, support your company with my patronage. I hope that you reconsider your position on lobbying related to the Internet, as I would dearly love to be a customer again. Until then, I shall be recommending Audiotechnica and AKG vocal mics, as they come closest to the quality of your products.

Yours in regret and disgust
-Dan Sawyer
ArtisticWhispers Productions

For those of you following the SOPA/PIPA to-do, be warned: if you live in California, both of your Senators are flogging hard for this thing. Because of that, for these two characters I actually wrote a note rather than just calling, tweeting, or petitioning.

In case you want something to riff on, I’m hereby releasing my letter into the public domain, to remix as you see fit for the benefit of your Senators and Representatives:

Dear Senators Boxer and Feinstein,

As a writer and audio/video producer (with 8 novels, 20 short stories, 8 films, and 3 albums to my name), I have a vested interest in the enforceability of copyright. However, as one not attached to the large studios, none of the remedies in SOPA and PIPA will do me any good–instead, they will do me an immense amount of harm.

The lack of due process puts my livelihood at the mercy of larger businesses in my industry who may take offense to parody, or who may target my web provider due to the offending actions of other customers, or who may decide that their new high-concept film looks too much like one of my books or radio dramas, and that it’s easier and cheaper to shut me down rather than to negotiate a license fee from me.

More fundamentally, though, the future of the American economy depends on the openness of the Internet. Freedom of information and public discourse allowed science and technology to take root here to a greater extent than anywhere around the world in the 19th century; the Internet extends that cultural fundamental into the 21st century.

This bill, in seeking to protect big business, will cripple the economic and political power of the Internet to advance freedom, equality, opportunity, and human progress, both here and around the world. It will cripple the educational power of the Internet as well, cutting off millions from educational opportunities (such as free streaming college classes, Wikipedia, OpenCulture, and many more) that they would not otherwise be able to afford–all of which are legal under copyright law, all of which will be vulnerable to shutdown due to the lack of due process in PIPA.

The PIPA does not do what it claims, and has too much collateral damage to be worth the trouble. I urge you to reconsider your position, and vote against the bill.
Thank you
-J. Daniel Sawyer
Author and producer
ArtisticWhispers Productions

For background, please take 1 minute to watch the following Monty Python clip:

In the commentary on Life of Brian, John Cleese said that the depictions of the fractious, factiony Jewish Revolutionaries were a satire on the left wing activist groups of the 1970s. “They were so interested in ideological purity,” he said, “that they never accomplished anything.”

The last couple years have seen a lot of this kind of thing on the left and the right–the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are not as disparate as their rhetoric makes them seem. To speak in very broad terms, both of these movements are responses to the theft of trillions of dollars from the public and private purses by the collusion of regulators with industry.

The history behind this theft, though, are non-trivial and often subtle, and it’s going to take a lot more than slogans like “Taxed Enough Already” or “We are the 99%” to get anything done. For an in-depth analysis of how this all happened, and a discussion of some things (that are unpopular with all four of the most visible political parties) that can be done, I recommend taking a look at this analysis:

The trouble with both OWS and The Tea Party, in my view, is that these groups have both succumb to the Judean People’s Front syndrome: when faced with a crisis, they have both run home to their pet ideologies as the source of all wisdom, created an insular culture with a bunker mentality, and then started shouting loudly about those who disagree. The Tea Partiers are blaming the socialists for the bailouts and agitating for a radical repeal of taxes and regulations (without agitating for any substantive budget cuts that would make such a repeal feasible), the OWS folks are latching on to a caricatured version of anarcho-syndicalism (the philosophy of Noam Chomsky) or democratic socialism (i.e. European-style central planning and social safety net).

And while everyone is shouting at each other, something vital is being missed:

The Loyal Opposition
When two people disagree about the best course of action, but agree on the goal or on the problem, and both share a true concern for the matter at issue, you have the right ground for the formation of a Loyal Opposition.

This is a basic value of republican society (note the small “r”)–another name for it is pragmatism. Such a system works very well at enhancing liberty and prosperity, as it allows you to watch out for the corruption you find most intolerable, while trusting that the other parties will be watching out for corruption that might slip past your radar. It’s “I’ll watch your back, you watch mine.” The world, and especially politics and economics, is a complex place, and the loyal opposition is vital to the continuation of the Enlightenment civilization.

The trouble is, it’s more comfortable to be in an echo chamber where those who share your views congregate, even if they do not share your values. Jeffersonian Libertarians, for example, have very few values in common with theocrats–but they’re both populating the tea party. Progressive Liberals (i.e. those who believe in working for incremental progress toward the liberalization of society) have very few values in common with Marxists. But these coalitions persist because it is more comfortable to talk in terms of this years electoral policy proposals than it is to talk in terms of long-term goals and agendas.

Different Kinds of Revolution
Broadly speaking (like everything in this post), there are two kinds of political revolution: The Populist, and the Coalitional.

Populist Revolution
Populism has always been the tool of the demagogue. The October Revolution, The Fascist Revolutions, The Cuban Revolution, and the other revolutions that darkened the 20th century were populist in nature. These are movements that start out of vague popular unrest, are backed by a lot of rage and irritation, and explode almost spontaneously on the scene. During the explosion phase, they grasp about, looking for a unifying voice, and that void gets filled by someone who can speak the right homilies–code phrases about class warfare, or about a Christian nation, or about a return to old-fashioned values, or about social justice. That someone is–very often–a demagogue: someone who is willing to say the popular thing and cloak themselves in the mantle of a humble savior, and who promises radical reform, redemption, or revolution. These movements are characterized by their pursuit of ideological purity, of utopian dreams, and of simple solutions that, while they sound appealing, do not stand up to rational scrutiny.

After all, it doesn’t follow that installing a revolutionary dictatorship will result in a better life for people who were suffering under the boot of a corrupt monarchy or corporate-controlled state (as happened in Russia and Cuba respectively). It doesn’t follow that returning to agrarian existence will make the country strong and morally pure and free from imperial oppression (as happened in China). It doesn’t follow that a return to Catholic morality will fix a crumbling infrastructure (as happened in Italy), or that embracing Protestant Lutheranism and Teutonic Identity Politics or exterminating the Jews will rescue a country’s looted economy (as happened in Germany).

Populist revolution is, and has always been, one of the two chief dangers faced by democracy (the other is popular apathy combined with a culture of fear, which invites aristocracy).

Coalitional Revolution
Coalitional Revolution happens when disparate interests with specific agendas team up around their few common goals. Because of the tenuous nature of the coalition, the aims of the Revolution look, necessarily, decidedly modest. “No taxation without representation” is a very, very thin goal, politically speaking, compared to “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”

There have only been a handful of coalitional revolutions in world history, and they are the only ones that have not lead, in short order, to dictatorship. Two that spring to mind are the Athenian Revolution and the American Revolution (though there have been several others).

To take the case most of us are most familiar with, let’s look at the American Revolution. This was a period where anarchists, antimonarchs, property barons, industrialists, free trade advocates, theocrats, farmers, merchants, and socialists banded together for a single common goal: to end British Rule in the Americas. They were able to do this because of an implicit (and sometimes explicit) agreement that those who fight get a seat at the table to form the new government. There was no common cause, there was no common leader, and the Constitutional convention was filled with people who would just as soon have seen each other dead (fun fact: there have been a handful shoot outs and duels between senators during congressional sessions).

How do you create a revolution out of that? Thomas Paine found a way, by writing a book called Common Sense and encouraging open debates to get people to think about the two issues they could all agree on: that foreign kings were obsolete, and that a people had the right to chose their own government.

The American Revolution was preceded by years of public education and debates, of long and boring discussions and arguments and fistfights (and sometimes gunfights). In all of this time, the one thing that was never in the cards (despite how some people agitated for it) was a grand unifying vision for the country that would result. It was the only way it could happen, in a landmass populated by colonies that were both urban and rural, both slave and free, theocratic and religiously liberal, separatist and cosmopolitan. The people who pushed the revolution realized that the only way to make meaningful change was to table the question of reforms until they were in the place to implement them.

And who can blame them? Patrick Henry wanted a theocracy. Madison wanted a secular state. Franklin wanted scientific socialism. Jefferson wanted anarcho-capitalism. The Baptists in New England wanted the Quakers in Pennsylvania burned, deported, or tried for heresy. Some wanted universal slavery–others wanted it abolished at the outset. The agendas were so diametrically opposed that the Revolution would never have happened had they not believed one another capable of honor–and had the strength to hold each other to the obligation to hash out compromises the hard way.

In school, we learned about the uncompromising men, heroes or villains–people like Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and Adams, but “uncompromising” is the one thing that they weren’t. Because when they sat down in Philadelphia, they did nothing but compromise. They did not trust each other with the power to take their property, their land, their freedom, or their labor if given a chance, so they hammered out a compromise that let each of them keep what they held most dear, without giving them the power to take those things from other people.

They found a kind of permanence in an ideal that Marx articulated eighty years later, but never understood: The Permanent Revolution.

Why It Blew Up in Oakland
Reading about a coalitional revolution, you might hear in it the echoes of the Civil Rights movement, and you’d be right. Martin Luther King was very well aware of the techniques of Coalitional Revolution, and during the 60s you could find, at many protests, tents for the sharing of ideas. Little universities, at which people shared reports from the front lines and (at least before 1969, when things started to fall apart) welcomed disagreement and discussion. There were people who were in the business of working out compromises–southern churchgoers side by side with Marxist Jews from New York, Republicans side by side with Democrats, disagreeing about the best policy framework while all agreeing that segregation, lynching, and systematic repression had to go.

But one of the camps in that movement DID lose: The Race Warriors. All across the country, there were people invested in the ideals of violent, populist revolution. They agitated for (and tried to create) a full-blown civil war around the subject of race.

For better or worse, a lot of those people still live in Oakland, and they have a cottage industry called professional agitation. It doesn’t take much effort to learn that crowds on the street can be turned violent very easily. In a group of ten thousand, you only need a few dozen people positioned in the right places to turn a peaceful protest into a riot–either by goading the protesters into misbehavior, or by attacking the cops directly, forcing the cops to push back and escalate. These few folks in Oakland and their brethren throughout the U.S. (and also members of various intelligence services, who have non-classified manuals on the technique) are very good at this kind of destabilizing work.

This is why New York might have had a few police skirmishes early on, but Oakland is the place where things went batshit crazy. Oakland is a city whose underlying social history (on both sides of the blue line) guarantees that, if a riot is going to become a war, Oakland is where it starts.

Street wars are one of the fertile germinating soils of populist revolution, and they are a very, very dangerous thing. So far, the OWS movement in New York seems to be holding their shit together in spite of repeated skirmishes–let’s hope they continue to do so, rather than letting misguided solidarity with Oakland push them into escalating (and let’s hope the vast majority of the Oakland protest keeps its cool heads even as the agitators try to work their dark magic).

Becoming The Judean People’s Front (or not)
Without a non-partisan, unambitious slate of achievable objectives, Occupy and The Tea Party are both going to fail. So long as the members remain committed to utopian ideologies or uncompromising agendas, all they’ll achieve is sewing more and more discord and partisanship in a country that is already suffering from deep-rooted, demagogue-driven populist vitriol.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Tea Party, and Occupy, and most of mainstream America agree on the basic problem:
Government and industry (in this case, the financial industry) have colluded in such a way as to create massive opportunities for fraud and theft, and they then colluded to reward those who perpetrated the theft by protecting them from the consequences of their actions (and all this in a climate of grab-it-while-you-can budgetary policy).

That has to stop, and stopping it without ruining our economy or our environment or our stability as a civilization is a solvable, short term, practical goal.

But people from both camps, and from the vast silent majority, have to start narrowing their focus and talking to each other. We have to rediscover the loyal opposition.

The Real Value of Occupy and The Tea Party
Because of how easily they are gamed, subverted, and perverted, street protests and agitation are often a very, very ineffective tools of political change. They can be valuable though, and if a coalitionary revolution arises from them, they can be world-changers. The small goals that the coalition achieves sends ripple effects throughout the world (look at what’s already happening just with the small amount of liberalization brought about by Arab Spring).

Taking to the streets in useless demonstrations of emotion and unfocused frustration can, and often does, defuse those emotions, which can render the reform impulse impotent.

But for all these objections, both of these movements share something of real value even in their most useless and wasteful demonstrations:

The are reminding people of their civil rights, and of their importance. The right to peaceably assemble, the right to petition the government, the right to bear arms, the right to free speech–these are rights that are again unpopular among vast swaths of the population.

When the powers that be push back disproportionately, it reminds people that this is America, and the very rights to not be gassed and to not be provoked to riot by the cops that are supposed to prevent a riot, are sacred. And they have to be, if we want to continue to live in an open society where argument, and experimentation, and discourse are allowed.

Keeping those rights front and center shores up the ornery nature of the American public, and makes them less likely to accept dictatorial solutions.

Yesterday, I had occasion to visit an old friend–a conservative Rancher who’s occasionally been very active in Republican politics, who I hadn’t seen in close to five years.

After the normal catching up, talk turned to writing and ranching, new projects and old, when from nowhere came a question of the species I’d been dreading:

“I just don’t get what the deal is with these homos.”

In earlier years, I’d have dodged the issue–or, if I’d been in a surly mood, I’d have taken it as picking a fight. But this was neither an attempt to needle me or an attempt to be self-righteous. There was an edge of worry in his voice that made me think that there was a sincere question underneath. Maybe one of his foster kids was having a sexual identity crisis? Maybe one of his grandchildren? I didn’t know, and I still don’t, but there was something there that told me it was important.

So we talked, nearly for an hour. And the questions he asked are VERY instructive:

Basic, informational questions. Not question begging sneering, not homophobic hate mongering, just questions. It was a productive discussion, but eventually I had to ask why he was asking? This man from the World War 2 generation, who’s been a religious right activist for thirty years, said:

I just don’t get why it’s a big deal. It’s none of my business who has sex with who. It’s like the color of someone’s skin, or if they like football instead of baseball: it doesn’t mean anything. It’s none of my business.

— — — —

If this was just an isolated incident, I might not have commented on it, but it was the second incident this week that brought me up short. The other was from another longtime religious right affiliate, who said to me, almost incidentally:

“Actually, with the DNA exonerations, I’ve decided that our system is too broken. I’d like to see the death penalty done away with. ‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt’ is too low a burden of proof. There’s no excuse for executing an innocent person.”

— — — —

These two things, taken together with a lot of other things I’ve seen recently, constitute a big deal, because it shows up a place where liberals and libertarians are missing the boat in a way that could make a profound difference in our politics and our culture.

There are two kinds of so-called conservatism in this country. One of them champions self-reliance, individual responsibility, civil rights, personal initiative, the integrity of legal process, and civic engagement. It’s the kind of conservatism you hear in old radio dramas from Democrats like Jimmy Stewart, or Republicans like Barry Goldwater. To people like this, whether you’re a naturalized American or an immigrant, you’re a fellow traveler, and they’ve got no problem with you if you pull your weight. They don’t mind disapproving of some things about you (for example, your sexual preferences or your taste in movies), because they don’t think their disapproval should mean anything to you–after all, it doesn’t mean a thing to them if you disapprove of their religion or their taste in shoes.

The other kind is the reactionary conservative, and these are the folks getting the airplay. These are the theorcrats, the folks that are convinced that science is a covert attempt to drive out religion. These are the folks that never met a conspiracy theory they didn’t like, who think Kirk Cameron is a proper authority figure, who cheer like a mob when the state executes someone, and who are jolly well fine with torture because they figure the bastard must deserve it.

You see a lot more of the reactionaries these days, because they’re politically useful. They’re useful to right-wing strategists and commentators and demagogues, because they have a lot of energy, they make great spectacle, and they are motivated to get out and vote–and, more importantly, to spread fear among their friends who are conservatives of the first kind. There are folks–cynical folks with cameras and microphones, and sincere folks with pulpits–who are making a lot of money and gaining a lot of power spreading fear and disinformation to turn conservatives of the first type into conservatives of the second type.

There are also a lot of cynical folks with blogs and newspapers and elected office that are making a lot of money and gaining a lot of influence doing the same thing. They’re the ones you hear talking about “The Conservatives” as if they’re a monolithic block of groupthinky voters, interchangeable and equally groupthinky as “The Republicans.” These are the same folks who pioneered identity politics, who imagine that walking the euphemism treadmill can somehow change how people think, and who also run THEIR entire operation on fear.

What you’re seeing from the crowd at the Republican debates, what you’re seeing from Fox News, what you’re hearing the folks at AlterNet say about the conservatives in this country, what happens when the talking heads that come on the TV or the radio for a good screaming match? That’s all theater. It’s spectacle. It’s designed to make a political and monetary profit out of polarizing the country, draining away our ability to debate, and replacing it with a determination to beat the other guy.

The left wing’s hatred of the other is every bit as unreasoning as the right wing. The paranoia from both is infectious, and the factual foundation of their rhetoric is as flawed as it is poisonous. And it masks an underlying truth that most people (including me) often lose sight of:

The good guys can still win. The last ten years have given sane folks a lot more in common than the issues that they argue over. Ask a sane Republican or Democrat, or a sane independent (over 40% of voters now) about civil rights, and while you may get quibbles over particular policies, everyone agrees in principle that sexual orientation and skin color should be equally immaterial. Ask them about domestic policy, they’ll be upset about the bailouts and the insane spending spree and the partisan bickering.

But the good guys can only win if we stop taking our cues on how to view each other from the folks looking to divide and conquer. Since the 1970s, folks from Orange County and the deep south have been waging a civil war against folks from New England–using San Francisco and New York as proxy whipping boys. The Beltway Crowd and Hollywood have retaliated with more and more disgusting stereotypes of folks from “flyover states”–attacking their culture and their right to exist as people rather than arguing with them. It’s an old cycle, one that goes all the way back to before the Civil War.

Smug northern bullying and self-righteous southern crusading are creating a hell of a mess. But we proved in World War 2, and in the Internet Boom, and around Apollo, and at dozens of other times that the South and the North and the West (and the subcultural presences they have in almost every community) all have unique–and complimentary–cultural strengths.

Wherever you sit on the political spectrums, maybe it’s time to stop watching your enemies on the news, and start arguing with them over coffee. You might find you have a lot more values and dreams in common than you imagined possible.

In vino, veritas. Pliny the Elder nailed it: Wine tells the truth. It doesn’t make you do things so much as it lets you do things. You can learn a lot about yourself, and about your friends, by watching what happens when they’re well-buzzed.

National holidays can do the same thing to people–and not just because of the amount of alcohol people tend to consume given half an excuse. Like all things, love of one’s country can come in a lot of flavors. Soviet dissidents, for example, loved their country while hating its system–they loved its culture, its geography, its weather, the shared history in which their identity was rooted. Members of totalitarian systems, on the other hand, are trained to identify the system with the country, and to see non-conformity as so unpatriotic as to deserve death. Some people are patriotic about countries where they’ve never lived, so much so that they’ll move across the world to live in them, because they’ve fallen in love with the ideology, or the people, or the culture of that country. You can learn a lot about a person by watching the flavor of their patriotism.

Writing a political thriller series these last few years, I’ve carefully watched the political micro-climates around the world and studied how they relate to the version of love of country I carry around in my own psyche. Call it a love affair with the Jeffersonian vision of freedom: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

This year has been an amazing year around the world for the struggle against different forms of tyranny, and as an Americans it’s been more exciting than I can say to watch the most action-packed year of calculated struggles against tyranny since the late 80s and early 90s (it’s also more than a little embarrassing how little my home culture seems interested in carrying on their struggle on the home front, but that’s a topic for another time). It’s quite possible that the Arab Spring, the Iranian struggles, and the other protests and revolutions around the world will all come to bad ends in the same way that the revolutions of the twentieth century almost all ended in dictatorship, civil war, and genocide; still, I have a thin hope that some of the people who are laying down their lives–for reasons as simple as the next loaf of bread or as idealistic as bringing democracy and universal suffrage to cultures where such notions are without precedent–may have read history and learned from the missteps of the last hundred years.

Because of that, in celebration of the first revolution that actually worked (if imperfectly), I’ve dedicated Free Will (my new book about revolution) as follows:

This volume is dedicated to the men and women
Who sat in Tahrir
Who crossed the Wall in Berlin
Who fell at Tiananmen Square
Who bled in the streets of Tehran
Who lost their lives in Boston
And all those like them before and since.
To them we owe a debt we cannot repay
Save that we make their dream come true
For Everyone
Forever.

I’ll be seeing you soon, with the rest of the book. Have a safe weekend–and spend it however you want to. The ability to make that choice is a remarkable thing in the history of the world.

Bring on the leaves!

Culture
David Brin writes a graphic novel called “Tinkerers” about the maker culture, manufacturing, and the future of progress, and puts it online for public reading.

On the indie film front, here comes a new farm system that might take a couple years to become completely clogged: Amazon is launching a sort of on-line film festival that looks like a hybrid of Project Greenlight and what Sundance used to be. Worth keeping an eye on.

I’ve talked from time to time on Dealing In shows about the unique political history of the United States, and how that has directly contributed to our current culture wars. Here’s some news that dovetails with the discussions about the Civil War and Reconstruction — for some people, the Civil War never ended.

Sexuality
For some reason–maybe because both Down From Ten and And Then She Was Gone featured elements of the BDSM culture?–I’ve gotten a number of people recently asking me how people could possibly get pleasure from pain. I’ve never been a fan of Freudian explanations for this — they’re too much like just-so stories, and they rely on a theory of mind that’s now totally discredited. So, in the interests of science, here’s some interesting neurological research that bears on the question of how pleasure and pain relate in the brain.

Space Science
First ever exoplanet from outside our galaxy. Yes, Virginia, our galaxy does seem typical of this universe.

The Telegraph runs a story on being homesick from orbit, which contains some of the most gorgeous astronaut photography yet published.

Project M, the weridest space travel project to date. This is what you get when engineers get really pissed off — and it’s kinda cool, too.

TSA Security Theater
Like a lot of you, I’ve been seriously apalled by what’s been going on the last ten years with air travel. This week, the policy wonks might actually have gone too far by requiring a strip and/or grope search of everyone flying through one of about 68 airports around the country. So I’ve got three links to help you out if you have to travel by air thruogh any TSA occupuied airport.

First, for those of you who have to fly before this mess is resolved, at the bottom of this page is a list of the airports who currently have the new pornographic version of security theater scanners in place.

And if you’re looking for something you can do about it, check out this most creative (and potentially effective) response I’ve yet seen. November 24: opt out of the scanners, force a backlog of pat-downs, and wear kilts to really embarass the fondlers. Full details here.

Finally, a heartening tale of Citizen activism against the TSA

Internet Civil Liberties
For those of you who have been following COICA, the internet censorship bill, it’s been voted out of committee and onto the floor. There’s a big fight coming up on this one — if you’re a fan of social media, art and science on the net, or an author or content creator, this is your fight. Find details here.

Biology, Geology, and Energy Research
Life really is everywhere, and a new discovery makes the question of the origin of oil even more murky. Thomas Gold (and the Russian scientists he plagerized) might have been right after all. Time will tell.

Materials Science
Carbon is your friend, really. It’s at the heart of the current materials revolution that’s giving us both radical life extension and sustainable space travel. Today’s news? Ultra hard graphite, harder than diamonds, developed in a lab.

And then there’s the quantum supersolids–a holy grail of materials science–and the new evidence that they may actually exist http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19748-new-evidence-that-weird-quantum-supersolid-exists.html

And that materials revolution that you’ve been hearing about for years? It’s officially here. First molecular manufacturing tools are in the works.

Medical Science
They’ll fix you with a ray gun! Radio wave-based treatment for hypertension more effective than drug cocktails, and might prove permanent.

I saved this week’s coolest link for last. A new (and replicable) stem cell therapy can now reverse some of the symptoms of Autism. Check it out!

I’ll be at Seattle Steamcon II this weekend — hope to see you there!

It is now perhaps more popularly known as “white guilt” day, the day when people who are culturally descended from those early settlers and the people they conquered go into reflexive spasms of regret over the conquest of a paradise uncorrupted by the sins of European so-called “civilization. It brought environmental catastrophe, plagues, wanton slavery, and ugliness hereto unseen on the face of the earth.

I’d suggest that both camps would be helped considerably by reading Columbus’s diaries and some primary sources from the intervening centuries (i.e. stuff written at the time, not later interpretations), but in my experience that would do very little to illuminate the discussion. More’s the pity–in a world where there are persistent social problems involving repression, slavery, genocide, and merchantilist cronyism, the jingoistic crowing on one hand and the paroxysms of masturbatory guilt on the other hand have the cumulative effect of cultural blindness.

So, for the record, and in the hopes of shedding a little light on a day which usually generates meaningless heat, here a few potentially relevant thoughts:

Every square inch of the globe has been taken and retaken in wars stretching back to the beginning of human settlement. Nobody is a native, with the possible exception of the Australian Aborigines (they are the one aboriginal people whose history I don’t know well enough to include in this group).

Slavery, rape, warfare, and genocide, are human universals–each has been practiced in some form everywhere, in all cultures, aboriginal and agrarian, primitive and technological, since the beginning of recorded time, with one exception: The post-enlightenment western world from the late nineteenth century onward. Although the debates over just war, women’s rights, slavery, property rights, and freedom have been popular among philosophers since the fourth century B.C.E., it is only in recent centuries in the Western World that they have been able to gain enough of a foothold to become (slowly, haltingly, and imperfectly) the dominant ideals of a civilization.
Pretending that the crimes of Europeans against aboriginal American nations are uniquely cruel, unprecedented, or a fight of warlike bullies against peaceful victims is ahistorical, dishonest, and racist both against the aboriginal peoples and the different peoples that settled the New World. Worse, it diminishes the continuing presence of these practices in our world in forms as brutal and wretched as any in history.

Europeans are not a unified racial or cultural group, and were not considered one in the US until the mid twentieth century. Many writers had to fight for the right to include Italian, German, and other non-English and non-French characters in their novels during the early decades of the twentieth century. In terms of colonial behavior, the conduct of the Portugese, the French, the English, and the Spanish were all radically different.
It’s no accident that England became the dominant world Empire for three centuries–they were the only power to allow dissent, encourage native education, and, in some measure, allow local native governments to retain a degree of autonomy, and it’s no accident that countries who have thrown off the English yolk still maintain peacable and very friendly relationships with the mother country. No other colonial power in world history has enjoyed this circumstance, and it exists because of the way the English treated their subjects–cruelly, sometimes despotically, but almost always better than the native governments they displaced. It is perhaps an irony of history that the practice of constitutional democracy and the contempt for feudalism and dictatorship spread across the world through the stepchildren of history’s most extensive imperial monarchy, but the historical fact remains:

The colonization of the new world by the people who did so, at the time they did it, allowed Enlightenment ideals to flourish far from the watchful eyes of Torquemada, Calvin, Luther, Elizabeth the First, and the other despotic dictators of the period who were heavily into thought control. In the New World (and nowhere else in history), the ferment of notions such as “The Brotherhood of Man,” “Human Rights,” “Civil Rights,” “Freedom of Thought,” “Freedom of Speech,” and “The Equality of Women” took hold. It spread first to Europe, and then over the next few centuries, to the entire world (which now, at least, pays them lip service). That ferment is directly responsible for the citizen-based governments now present in almost all former British colonies, which to this day represents a disproportionate segment of the non-oppressed people of the world.

To note these differences in imperial approach, and their effects, is not to justify the racism, sexual oppression, theft, and violence that accompanies even the most genteel of historical colonial expansion. It is good and appropriate to reflect, to be self-critical. The freedom and moral imperative to do so is, perhaps, the most important legacy of the Enlightenment. But doing so dishonestly, often in service of reactionary political thinking and uninformed by an understanding of history, is neither enlightened nor laudable; it is simply self-righteous bullying, which is ugly on everyone.

Finally, in keeping with the theme that seems to be emerging in this post, there’s one more thing worth pointing out: One of the basic notions underlying Enlightenment civilization is this: a person’s destiny is not predicated on their heritage. I am a writer. My father was a professor. His father was a rancher, then a laborer. His father was a dirt farmer. Four generations, five different careers. Many people on this continent are less than three generations away from slavery–one of them sits on the Supreme Court. In any other era, in any other civilization, my destiny, your destiny, and the destiny of almost everybody would have been prescribed by law based on the social position of our births. Today, though birth has a definite effect, no law binds us to the position we start in.

It is, therefore, immoral to identify a person as an oppressor because of her heritage, or as oppressed because of his heritage. Each person is responsible for his own conduct and destiny and (though the ideal still is very imperfectly practiced and should never be taken for granted) should not be judged based on the crimes–or lack thereof–of his ancestors.

So, by all means, let’s have the debate. Let’s talk about the unintentional bacteriological extermination of entire nations. Let’s talk about the breaking of treaties, of the deliberate biological warfare, of the eugenics laws, the thefts, the enslavements (by many names). Let’s talk about the innovations of government by the Iriquois–and by Solon of Athens, whose ideas were ignored until resurrected by James Madison. Let’s talk also about the Aztec sacrifices, the pre-Columbian continent-wide warfare, the warlike tribes of the southwest, the raiding parties (provoked and unprovoked), the rapes and child prostitution on both sides of the Indian wars. Let’s talk about the unintended consequence of the colonial conquest of the Americas: a world climate in which colonialism is all but impossible, where invasion of a peaceable nation often provokes a near-universal military response from the other nations of the world.

And do let it be a genuine debate. Let us eschew both jingoism and masturbatory guilt fantasies. Let us throw off the suffocating weight of sacrament–both the ashen sackcloth and the waving flag. Let us instead engage in an honest exchange of ideas for mutual enrichment, rather than a shouting match of competing, unenlightened, and blinkered moral paradigms.

The dictionary defines terrorism as “the systematic use of terror as a means of coercion”. In political terms, terrorism is is characterized by non-strategic but politically-motivated violence conducted against civilians. When used by an outside or revolutionary force, it is an attempt to destabilize or undermine a regime, culture, or system by eroding the trust that makes the system works. It can also be used by a sitting government against its political enemies, in which case it’s generally called “tyranny” or “totalitarianism” depending on the degree to which it is practiced.

That’s it. That’s what terrorism is. Intimidation, harassment, or political wrangling isn’t terrorism. Expulsion for running afoul of academic standards isn’t “terrorization.” Civilians who die while caught in the crossfire of a war are not “victims of terror/terrorism.”

And, most importantly, soldiers and representatives of a military or political authority are not victims of terrorism. They’ve run afoul of another phenomenon that we have a perfectly good term for: they are casualties of guerrilla warfare.

Guerrilla war is war conducted by military irregulars against strategic and military targets. Oklahoma City Bombing? Conducted by a revolutionary against a government building housing paramilitary administration in revenge for earlier actions by that paramilitary organization — that’s guerrilla warfare. Ditto for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and the RPG attack on my friend’s tent during the Iraq war (don’t worry, he was outside watching a movie at the time).

Then there are a whole slew of things domestically that are neither terrorism or guerrilla war, but get called “terrorism” by pundits and public officials and radicals. A peaceful protest at a WTO event isn’t terrorism, it’s dissent. When that protest turns violent (as they frequently do) it’s not terrorism, it is either a riot (if it’s spontaneous escalation) or it’s a revolutionary attack that rides the line of guerrilla warfare but usually doesn’t qualify, as it’s not well organized enough. Columbine wasn’t terrorism, it was a killing spree (there was no political motive). Fort Hood still seems up in the air – it might have been a guerrilla attack with substantial collateral damage, or it might have been a killing spree (but it wasn’t terrorism by any classical definition).

These categorizations can sound pretty meaningless – or worse, callous – because they are all ways of saying “people got killed/hurt for no very good reason.” But they are important because they all point to fundamental moral issues about violence. When we don’t make such distinctions, we lose the ability to make ethical distinctions between necessary violence and gratuitous violence. This distinction makes the difference between murder, manslaughter, and self defense. It also makes the difference between police work and police brutality, between crime and treason, between warfare and war crimes, and between disagreement and terrorism.

And, of course, in the grey areas where the categories overlap, there is lots of room for exploring moral ambiguities through fiction.

To conclude, I quote the immortal words of George Carlin:
“Please pay attention to the language we’ve all agreed on.”

Scientific knowledge has progressed astoundingly fast since most of the current party political alliances were formed seventy years ago, and that pace has accelerated since the last medium-sized realignment thirty years ago. The lessons of history in that same period of time are also momentous – if anyone actually cares to look at them. And most don’t. This creates a problem.

I’ve had a lot of fun this election year tweaking my left-wing and right-wing friends by telling them I’m voting ‘No’ for President this year. “It’s the most important election of the last fifty years!” they tell me “You must participate.” They may be right – it could be a hugely important election, which is precisely why I’m not voting for either major party candidate of for either of the two big minor party candidates.

You see, I’m sick to the teeth of Democrats claiming the mantle of science while ignoring economics any time the findings of that discipline contradict the New Deal Keynsianism that infects the party. I’m sick of Republicans being in favor of “free markets” when they bail out failing businesses. I’m sick of both parties claiming that they are forward looking when their major alliances are built on late-1960s political expediency. I’m sick of the Libertarians pretending that anarchy and liberty can co-exist in a meaningful way, and I’m sick of the Greens claiming that opposing GMO crops and technological advance while embracing pseudo-Marxist economic policies are the key to an environmentally viable future.

In 1862, in his address before Congress, Abraham Lincoln called “Bullshit” on the way partisan politics were polarizing the north on the issues surrounding the Civil War. He said: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.” The same is true today. Thirty years ago, “left-winger” David Brin and “right-winger” Ronald Bailey could never be seen as allies, and yet now, while they have some minor quibbling disagreements on taxation policy and public research funding and other minor points here and there, both are in fundamental agreement on issues of science, technology, trade policy, environmental concerns, human morality, reproductive technology, and civil rights. The same kind of shift has occurred everywhere, as the facts of the world have shifted beneath the complacent, religious devotion of people to their political parties.

It used to be that you could marry theocrats to conservatives who loved traditional freedoms, because both were opposed to social change that seemed too rapid for the country to handle. That kind of alliance doesn’t work anymore, because the country has adapted to the rapid rate of change while preserving its heritage of individualism.

It used to be that you could bring Left-wing Malthusians together with humanist scientists over environmental concerns. But as science shows that the only way towards responsible environmental stewardship is technological innovation on a grand scale rather than a scaling back of industry, that alliance becomes just as inviable.

There is a political divide in America. But it’s not between the “left” and the “right.” It’s not even between the Keynsians and the Hayekians, although that argument will remain very important for decades to come. No, the divide is fundamentally between those who see humans as a legitimate part of the natural world and those who do not.

Those who do not see humans as a viable part of nature tend to see them instead as either a blight upon nature or the rulers of nature, but they agree that science and technology are fundamentally tools by which humans exercise dominion over nature. They may not agree on abortion, but they do agree about genetic engineering. They may not agree about tax policies, but they do agree that taxation should be a tool of social engineering. They may not agree on the ultimate destiny of humanity, but they do agree that a peaceful society must be fairly ideologically uniform. And, militarist or peacenik, they also tend towards cultural and economic isolationism.

Meanwhile, those who do see humans as a legitimate part of nature form a group that is generally favorable towards both technological advance and environmental stewardship. Favorable towards both a peaceful world and economic freedom. Opposed towards both the enforced repression of minorities and towards the prescriptive Newspeak that comes from the New Right and the New Left. And, militarist or peacenik, this group tends towards a policy of active international engagement on cultural and economic levels. This natural alliance might find internal division over issues such as gun rights, or minimum wage, but those differences are minor compared to the differences in parties of the past.

This political realignment has been in progress for some time now, and it may take quite a while for it to conclude. But personally, I’m sick of participating in a quadripolar political game that is fifty years out of step with the fundamental facts of the world. Since I live in California I have the luxury of my vote not counting no matter what I do, so this year I’m taking advantage of it to make my point.

Whichever way you vote, take time to consider the fundamentals of your political philosophy. Dig down below your policy positions, figure out what really matters to you. Examine your positions and values critically, and see if they really line up. See if they line up with the candidate you support. Don’t just vote out of habit.

As for me, this year I really am voting “No.” On everything.

This recent opinion piece on abortion illustrates the point nicely, although the language is very religious and the whole essay is shot-through with magical thinking. Even removing those magical elements, the view articulated there holds true even for many Republicans whose worldview is primarily secular (yes, they really do exist).

Of course, this view of abortion doesn’t just rest on religious authority, it claims to be rooted in a clear understanding of history and to take seriously the view that if we mess around with our biology we are playing God (a job we’re not qualified for). A zygote is a living organism that, if left alone, will develop into a human, therefore abortion ends a human life, therefore it must be murder, and any ethical gerymandering to the contrary can’t change that fundamental fact. Ditto for stem cell research, which destroys human embryos, or for hybrid experimental cloning, and for dozens of other biotech research techniques.

At first blush, that seems to be a pretty solid rooting in biology – but it’s not. A true ethical grounding in biology has to contend with a few other facts that make the connections between point A and point B very tendentious.

The first problem is evolution: All life is made from the same stuff, and human life on a biological level is in no way distinctive. Human nature and human biology are subject to the same selective pressures as the rest of the biosphere, plus the internally imposed selective pressures of human culture. It’s not impossible to make a case for human exceptionalism (I’m a human exceptionalist myself), but it’s not axiomatic.

The second problem is embryology: only somewhere between 25% and 60% of all zygotes become viable pregnancies, and 8% of those that do fail to make it to term without any intervention. Not every conception results in a life – and most wouldn’t even if medical abortion were never discovered. George Carlin had it right: If life begins at conception, then every sexually active woman who’s had at least three periods is a serial killer.

The third problem is technology: Since the conception of a zygote creates a life, and if that life is seen to have value because it is a potential human being, then technology poses a new and frightening problem. A zygote has only a minority potential of surviving to birth – and so does a clone. Although cloning tech is still in its infancy, it is now possible to artificially split embryos in vitro, making every IVF procedure the potential ancestor of countless offspring in one generation. More importantly, it is now possible to take the genetic material from an adult skin cell and implant it in the nucleus of an ovum, throw a few hormonal switches, and have a viable zygote. With this the reality, every time I scratch my arm I’ve engaged in a holocaust of potential human beings.

The fourth problem is medical: We now know beyond any doubt that the seat of human consciousness is the central nervous system (i.e. the brain). You can argue about souls all you want – whether there is a ghost operating the machine or whether we are all machine – but the machine does not operate at all without a brain. Before the 22nd week of gestation, there isn’t enough of a brain there to operate the machine. Any ghost that may exist can’t have moved in yet. Citation.

These four problems are not the only problems with Republican attitudes towards biotech. There’s also the question of those who die from potentially curable diseases if research is suppressed – are their lives worth less than, or more than, the lives of potentially viable zygotes and blastocysts?

Banning pre-viability abortions, banning biotech procedures, or banning government funding of either will neither reduce the number of murders in the world, nor will it reduce eugenics. It will not further respect for human life – in fact, as demonstrated in the book Freakanomics, an abundance of unwanted children leads directly to an increase in violent crime and a lessening of the social value of human life. Therefore here, as with the Democratic equation of "mitigate global warming by reducing energy consumption," the policy prescriptions will not – and can never – achieve the aims they are meant to achieve. And yet right-wing Republicans and abortion, just like left-wing Democrats and global warming, the prescriptions themselves are a matter of doctrine, not of reason, and it’s a damn shame.

Join me for my concluding thoughts on the whole topic in Part 3

William James hit a lot closer to the truth when he spotted that Americans are a fundamentally religious bunch. We don’t usually like to think of ourselves that way – even most of us who are religious in a traditional sense tend to pride ourselves on being independent, pragmatic thinkers. We like science – we really do – but most of us don’t really know what science is, and this is where we get into trouble. Even our scientists often mistake ideology for science.

Looking at things through a scientific lens (that is, a perspective that is empirically grounded), one would expect political philosophy among scientfically-minded folk to change as the experience of history and the accumulation of knowldege schools us in the ways of the world. That doesn’t mean that all political opnion should converge on a common conclusion: It’s quite possible, through differences in priority order, for clear-thinking people to disagree on what particular actions should follow from a given and agreed-upon body of knowledge (and that kind of disagreement is healthy). However, this isn’t what happens in today’s America.

Douglas Adams nailed the way politically-minded folk tend to think in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, where a main character talks about a computer program that helps people make decisions. It doesn’t work forward from problem to solution, instead it allows the user to chose his desired solution (for example, owning a Porche when he can’t afford the payments) and then work backwards to the present situation, creating a bulletproof logical scenario that nobody can shoot down (not even the financing director at the Porche dealership). This is not goal-oriented thinking and planning, it’s maturbatory self-justification, and it’s pretty much de rigeur politics. Perhaps that’s just human nature – but here’s where it gets tragic and irritating.

The 21st century has seen the cementing of a very strange dynamic in American politics, whereby each side of the political discussion picks its own facts and tries to ignore the rest.

For example, if you don’t like second-hand smoke you’ve got a custom-made political movement already on your side. All you have to do to fight alongside them is pretend that studies showing an actual elevated disease risk through continued exposure over a long period of time actually mean that anyone anywhere who smells second-hand smoke is being poisoned. It’s really easy, all you have to do is ignore the single most basic law of biochemistry: The dosage makes the poison.

The same kind of dynamic goes for nuclear power, or carbon dioxide, or private property rights, or environmental regulation, or evolutionary theory, or lowering the drinking age. You can pick a side, and find a custom made political machine ready to spin reality in the direction you’re already sympathetic to.

This election year is a fun exercise in spotting this kind of thing, because we have one candidate (Obama) who’s deliberately positioning himself as the pro-science guy, in opposition to the Bush administration and the McCain candidacy. He supports NASA. He supports stem cells. He’s on record saying that he doesn’t think blastocysts are human beings. He even (in opposition to major blocks of his own party) supports Nuclear power. He positions himself as a pragmatic man who intends to implement real-world solutions, over/against the fuzzy thinking of his opponent.

On the other hand, we have another candidate (McCain), who has picked a running mate specifically to appeal to the rural romantic consitutency of the country. He talks about freedom and saving the economy, and he’s running with someone who speaks in tongues, thinks humanity begins at conception, and thinks the Earth was created in six days not-too-long-ago.

On the face of it, it seems like a pretty clear choice for anyone who cares about science. On one hand you have a guy who cares about going to Mars – on the other hand you have a guy who thinks a planetarium projector is an “overpriced overhead projector” akin to a futuristic SharpVision.

I wish it were that simple, but it’s not. The curious political alignment of the early 21st century has produced an environment where each party has become very good at spotting pseudoscience and antiscience bullshit in the other party, but can’t smell it in their own even when it’s shoved up their nose. Here are two examples, one from each party’s list of pet issues, to illustrate my point.

Democrats, for example, tend to assume a straight-line cause-and-effect relationship between the scientific fact “CO2 is a greenhouse gas, whose concentrations are rising rapidly, and this drove most of the climate change in the 20th century” and the policy conclusion “we must conserve energy in order to prevent as much damage to the bioshpere as possible.” But no such obvious relationship exists. You can make a case for such a relationship, but in order to do it you have to ignore another whole field of science: economics.

Without getting too technical, economics is the study of the monetary, social, and political systems that result from human interaction in a given set of conditions. As with most social sciences it’s a contingent and contextual field, but the thing that sets it apart from most other “soft” sciences is its quantifiability. Economic phenomena can be measured, and based on the measurements falsifiable predictions can be made, and over time, a more coherent picture of how the economic world works has been built from earlier theories and ideologies that have been subjected to testing in real-world laboratories.

Energy conservation is a fun economic study, because there’s one thing that energy conservation always results in: net energy usage increases. That’s because as demand for energy for a particular application falls, due to more efficient technologies, the money and resources previously devoted to that task get freed up. When that happens, any or all of three things happens: money previously spent on a small number of energy-intensive activities gets spent on a larger number of less energy-intensive activitie. 2) task which used to be too expensive for a segment of the populationn (because they couldn’t afford the energy costs) become accessible, due to increases in efficiency and consequent lower costs of operation. 3) a short-term collective decline in demand results in a short term drop in energy prices, as supply exceeds demand on the market. Any of these three eventualities leads to a net increase in energy usage – all three operating together leads to large net increases in energy usage, even while the per-application energy usage and costs fall through the floor. If you’re an environmentally conscious person who wants to reduce greenhouse emmissions and pollution, you’re not going to achieve your goal through mandating more efficient technologies, or promoting a cap-and-trade carbon scheme, or encouraging energy conservation among the hoi polloi. Those measures will instead reliably lead to higher and higher levels of net energy consumption – both per capita and in aggregate.

Continued in Part 2

For those of you who haven’t stumbled upon this conference yet, here’ s a brief history:

The Beyond Belief Conferences started three years ago in response to the culture wars arising from the new era of jihad, the resurgence in American religiosity, the wars over science in school, and the so-called “New Atheist” movement. Meeting at the Salk Institute, a number of America’s (and Europe’s) top scientists joined in a three day interdisciplinary conference entitled Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, and the Future of Reason. At the conference, it became clear that the split between the antireligious and the generically secular scientists drove as deeply as does the cultural divide between fundamentalists and mainstream believers. However, one thing that seemed unanimous was that the future of the West depends upon a culture-wide renewal of scientific inquiry and thinking.

Year two’s conference was entitled Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 and focused upon the different kinds of relationships people have with science. It got really interesting as several speakers on economics presented their recent research and different attendees talked about the entrenchment of their own political biases and how it effects the way that they cope with different scientific disciplines.

This year, the conference is entitled Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark in honor of the late Carl Sagan’s final book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Specifically, the conference gets its focus this year from the following paragraph from the introduction to Demon-Haunted World:

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

Written in 1996, that quite seems remarkably prescient today – even if Sagan’s views on economics were outdated and somewhat simplistic (an argument for another time), the notion of a technocracy where only an elite knows anything about how the technology works, where the common person is swallowed in superstition, and where all dissent is centered around marginal (and, frankly, stupid) issues like “Should we post the Ten Commandments in our courthouses?” and “Did he have sex with that woman?” and “Why do I have to pay money to see a doctor?” is both chilling and familiar. After all, such issues do distract us from debating issues that might actually effect how we make account of ourselves in terms of preserving and furthering liberty and prosperity, intelligently engaging holy wars without and within, limiting nuclear proliferation, and creating alliances that decrease the incentives for warfare.

I can’t speak yet to how year three is, because I’m about to start watching them this afternoon as they become available on Google Video. However, there are a number of reasons why you should take the time to watch it (as well as the previous two conferences):

1) It is easy to think of the scientific community as an ivory tower free from the concerns of the real world. The truth is far more radical: scientific inquiry has advanced to the point where very few things that we discover fail to have a direct bearing on how day-to-day life unfolds. The reach of this phenomenon is astounding. It also gives the lie to postmodernist claims that scientific knowledge is a fictional construct designed to serve white male power structures.

2) If ever you’ve thought that “scientists say xxx” is a meaningful statement, you need to watch these conferences. These are the best and brightest minds in the English-speaking world, and they disagree violently on a number of important issues. As an exercise in critical thinking, watching the conferences is fabulous, as you sit through lectures, presentations, panel discussions, and sometimes shouting matches, you see how prone even the best among us is to the tug of ideologically-driven magical thinking, and how frightening integrating new discoveries can be. There is very little in the way of consensus science practiced here – the constant call from the audience is “show me the evidence.”

3) On the flip side, all of you who keep hearing about The Secret or What the Bleep Do We Know?or the “Intelligent Design” philosophy (no, it’s not a theory, by admission of its proponents at the Dover Trial – read the transcripts) and think that scientific controversy means that there’s support for your claims, you’d do well to give this a watch too. “Controversy” doesn’t mean “a theory in crisis” any more than “consensus” means “it is proven.” Reality is far subtler, and you won’t get a better baptism by fire than watching scientific conferences where such things are discussed.

4) The best reason I can think of to watch it: You’re curious. You want to learn about the world, but it’s too big and you don’t know where to start. Well, start here. These scientists are witty, intelligent folks, many of them have excellent senses of humor, and very little of what gets discussed is dry. And, dammit, it’s *fun.*

And on the topic of this year’s election, economic meltdown, and other things: as I look out over the blogosphere, I see a lot of party-line thinking. In a world as complicated as ours, under an Republican President AND a Democratic Congress with some of the worst records in history, party-line thinking doesn’t cut it. If you continue to go to your party and your partisan activist groups as your primary source of truth, you’re asking for trouble.

You know how the Intelligent Design folks say “teach the controversy?” Well, if you’re a curious person, or you’re a politically or socially active person, then you damn well better understand the controversies you care about – and that means reading the other guy’s newspapers and blogs. A climate skeptic? You’d better be reading RealClimate.org. A Global Warming believer? When was the last time you read ClimateAudit.org? A bioconservative or a transhumanist? Have you read Kurzweil, Bailey, Fukiyama, and the Report of The President’s Committee on Bioethics? Not every issue has two sides – and some issues have ten sides, but if you’re feeding your brain on only the stuff you find agreeable, you don’t have an informed opinion. So, if you’re of voting age and you have a pet issue, and you can’t articulate the controversy from an opposing point of view (in language that the opposition would find agreeable) then, frankly, you probably don’t understand the issues you care about well enough to vote on them, and we’d all be better off if you stayed home.

You want to be informed and involved? Well, then, have a Candle, and maybe it can help you get an Election. If not, you can still have a lot of fun with the Candle.