Reason, ruin, republic

Traveling through the states in May 2015 in an aging campervan exposed us to many sides of America. Many generous, gracious and open minded people. But the dark side of America is never far; billboards pleading for money to send needy American children to hospital, warnings to stay out of certain parts of town after dark, an immigration paramilitary running check stops well north of the Rio Grande, the mad mad world of the right wing AM radio.

Of all the visitors to the US, Canadians have an advantage. With just a few gentle corrections to how we pronounce some words (out and about!) and a dash of self restraint in the use of others (no way, eh?) we can quite easily pass in America as Americans. Vaguely Vermont, or is it the West coast?

And it gets better. To them we are just fellow Americans but there is this one odd thing. They just can’t seem to pin us down; which post is our political horse hitched to? Canadians can actually see the disorientation happening. It results from the missing code words, inflections and body language that Yanks use to transmit their ideological allegiances.  Canadian English, when spoken in America is almost void of these subtle social clues. We might as well be wearing lab coats. On the surface we seem to be American, probably from some blue state. But underneath is a winter whiteout. Can’t tell if we are pro Obama or not, born-again or libertarian, drive a Porsche or a pickup, went to Berkeley or Talladega, support the NRA or ALCU (and on and on and on!). We are stone cold, no emissions, clear as ice.

Much to their credit, and unlike their portrayal in the cowboy movies, the Yanks typically assume the best of a stranger and proceed over a beer or coffee to tell you anything you might care to ask about their lives. Thus a traveling Canadian with an open ear has a ticket to theater America, the biggest show on earth. And the first thing an observant Canadian learns is that our social landscapes – in Canada and in America – are as different as Saskatoon and Palm Springs, Dallas and Winnipeg, Ottawa and Albany.

We differ in how we see the role of government, community, church and social services – especially medicare, how we recognize our armed forces, relate to our flag, understand our history of settlement, regard our natives, envision our role in the world, see the environment, appreciate our constitution and (importantly) we differ in how we laugh at ourselves – outside of Holywood and NYC, American’s don’t. We even differ in our belief of god – almost twice as many Americans per capita claim to believe in god as Canadians.

But before I go any further let me be clear. I am not standing on my high horse decrying American failures from the lofty vantage of Canadian superiority. Canada can be smug and liberal and socially experimental exactly because America is the one that got the shit on its shoes.

Canada’s existence is based on two critical realities; 1) American military might defends our massive borders from the invaders and 2) because ever since the Loyalists ran north to Canada in 1776 from the Yankee revolution, the very basis for being a Canadian is that we are “not American”.

Yes its true. Not only do the Yanks provide the safe haven for this massive and underpopulated geographical anomaly to pompously declare its nationhood to the world; perhaps more to the point, the Yanks generously also provide us with our single greatest raison d’etre for WANTING to be Canadian. Or as they say up here, “hey, we’re not American eh!”

But we are not thankless ingrates. We know we have it good. Every time the Yankees stumble we look on protectively, even apologetically. Our fortunes are deeply entwined. Geography and history make it so.

So here we are, sitting pretty with our shit free shoes enjoying the good life. Not to be inconsequential, do we have a station in the role of our neighbor Mister Colossus?  If so, what can we possibly offer aside from the chastity of our natural resources which we long ago surrendered? Well, interestingly, history has already worked this out too. For insights in our role in the mind of America can be seen in the their stereotype of us.

American joke. Q: How do you get 30 Canadians out of a swimming pool?  A: “Will everyone please leave the pool”.

Our relationship has been 200 years in the making. As America suffered one trauma after another and we sat at the end of the long telegraph and rail lines in our frozen wilderness, listening in and occasionally helping out so formed our relationship and friendship with the Yanks. And that now our tumultuous neighbor has become an empire (big shot eh!) they still sees us as the friendly guy next door that can be counted on if the power goes out and the basement floods.  The stereotypical Canadian.

Canada is the scion of America. The wealthy son of a wealthy family who took a lofty world view and aspired to the higher moral ground of such men as Stephen Lewis. Respected because we dared occasionally to put integrity ahead of politics as when we refused to participate in Desert Storm. Our role included a dash of verve and vision – like the metrics and medicare – and Americans honored that about Canada.

quoth the Canadians, not no more,

give us Harper and Rob Ford 

Alberta oil, thats the rule!

Its about the terrorism fool

Ask what side we’re on;

deniers and the neo-cons

Noblesse Oblige screw that lot

An SUV is what I got

These guys go home to their families at night

Source for the following: https://www.quora.com/

Since 1989 there have been multiple efforts to convince the public that measures to mitigate global warming are urgent, yet Gallup finds that, if anything, the public is becoming somewhat less concerned about it. Why is this?

 

Same reason it took 40 years to ban lead from paint and gasoline after the lead industry discovered it was highly toxic.

Same reason it took a similar length of time to turn the public against tobacco.

And that reason is massive, decades-long propaganda campaigns by the affected industries, whose managers and investors were able to dupe Americans–especially conservatives–into believing, in each case, that those evil big-government socialist liberals were trying to take away American Freedoms in order to impose a soul-destroying Nanny State.

Of course the real freedom being fought for was the freedom of the rich and powerful to prey upon the 99% who are weak and helpless compared to the resources the 1% can command.

Now–for over a decade, actually–the fossil fuel industry is doing the same thing, making the same smarmy “freedom” arguments, with the eager support of those who worship the rich, who indulge in the fantasy that great wealth is attainable by anyone who just works hard and keeps his nose clean. When in fact vertical mobility is dropping in the United States to below the level in other developed countries, as the game gets more and more rigged.

The fossil fuel industry’s secretive, billion-dollar propaganda campaign has been documented in a year-long project by Drexel University sociologist Robert J. Brulle:

>>“The climate change countermovement has had a real political and ecological impact on the failure of the world to act on the issue of global warming,” said Brulle. “Like a play on Broadway, the countermovement has stars in the spotlight – often prominent contrarian scientists or conservative politicians – but behind the stars is an organizational structure of directors, script writers and producers, in the form of conservative foundations. If you want to understand what’s driving this movement, you have to look at what’s going on behind the scenes.”

To uncover how the countermovement was built and maintained, Brulle developed a listing of 118 important climate denial organizations in the U.S. He then coded data on philanthropic funding for each organization, combining information from the Foundation Center with financial data submitted by organizations to the Internal Revenue Service.

The final sample for analysis consisted of 140 foundations making 5,299 grants totaling $558 million to 91 organizations from 2003 to 2010.<<

– See more at: Page on drexel.edu

Propaganda works best when it panders to people’s biases, to their innate tribalism, to their hopes and fears. And the fossil fuel industry does all of the above, expertly, using outfits like the Heartland Insitute, that established its reputation through its participation in the tobacco danger denial campaign.

Now it has extended to social media and comment threads of major publications, just as the Chinese and Russian governments do regularly (read any article about either country on The Economist or the New York Times and look at the tidal waves of comments by people who are obviously working for those governments–it’s almost comical).

The Guardian columnist George Monbiot has been observing this for decades:

“After I wrote about online astroturfing in December, I was contacted by a whistleblower. He was part of a commercial team employed to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them.

“Like the other members of the team, he posed as a disinterested member of the public. Or, to be more accurate, as a crowd of disinterested members of the public: he used 70 personas, both to avoid detection and to create the impression there was widespread support for his pro-corporate arguments.”

The need to protect the internet from ‘astroturfing’ grows ever more urgent | George Monbiot

So it’s no wonder that among the topics where the beliefs of the publix differ from those of scientists, there’s a 37 point spread in acceptance of global warming.

Public and Scientists’ Views on Science and Society

“Americans are less worried about climate change than the residents of  any other high-income country, as my colleague Megan Thee-Brennan wroteTuesday. When you look at the details of these polls, you see that American exceptionalism on the climate stems almost entirely from  Republicans. Democrats and independents don’t look so different from  people in Japan, Australia, Canada and across Europe.”

The New York Times

…which is why the steady “Southern-ification” of the GOP since Nixon implemented his Southern Strategy has caused the GOP to devolve from a political party into a tribe–spinning off most of its Eisenhower-style moderates, who are now Independents because they’d feel embarrassed and demeaned to be associated with what that party has become.

 

Without losers, there is only entropy

Stage upon stage upon stage,
of ambitious anxious permutational fiddling
drawn out by an empty void of such collosal dimension
Its great nothingness being at the soal of all creation
until one thing pops up and twitches to life
and by definiton maddly multiplies
until it overcrowds and driven to mutation now competes
So without losers there can not be evolution, no life
only be entropy

 

Recently Read

Books I have recently read and recommend:

College (Un)Bound  by Jeffrey Selingo –

An interesting look at world of US post secondary education; how it has evolved in the last 40 years and how its compounded failings are about to be undone by the Internet. The short of it is that US colleges and universities have as educators lost their vision and have been drawn into the consumer vortex defined by malls and cruise ships. Their exclusive jurisdiction to grant credits has given them monopolistic agency which they have – from professors to chancellors – abused. But with the technology and delivery of “on line” courses just coming into maturity; and other social factors including a reluctance by parents and students to pay exorbitant tuition fees, a crisis may be brewing on US campuses.

At the Edge of Uncertainty by Michael Brooks –

10 chapters and each describes the leading edge of contemporary branch of science. This is a book that is hard to put down and at the same time hard to finish. The reach and ambition of contemporary science are unbelievable. It seems that  more than ever before that scientists are breaching the warnings of our deepest fears.

Example; today, in science labs, mostly by means of host animals (typically pigs) we are growing perfect human organs which will save thousands of people around the world waiting for transplants that may not otherwise come in time. Sounds pretty good. But that same technology will also let us grow a human brain in a pig or even graft parts of human brains into dogs so that they can talk. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Example 2;  scientists are aggressively advancing on the mysteries of the mind and self awareness and they are finding unequivocally that most living things have a degree of consciousness, that consciousness is a spectrum shared to a greater or lesser degree by all higher orders of animal life. Even a sparrow has flickering moments of self awareness while dogs, pigs and dolphins have have a very high level of consciousness. Pork is cheap largely because we treat the animals as if they were sacks of flower. That may have to change.

And there is much more. From AI (“the greatest existential threat to humanity today”, Stephen Hawkings) to god particles (destabilizing the big bang theory) to newly discovered cosmic objects (refusing to agree with the  sacrosanct cosmological principle)…

Breakpoint: Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else you Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain by Jeff Stibel

Spoiler alert: the web will implode because like an ant hill or a human brain it’s inherent architecture of nodes and connections can only scale so large before breaking down completely into chaos.

This book  draws on biology (of the brain) and entomology (mostly ants) for analogies on how and why the Internet will collapse. But its not a bad collapse, rather think of it as a maturation comparable to what happens to a human brain between childhood and maturity (it actually shrinks by an order of magnitude!).

Think of it as another important voice in the emerging scientific chorus on the meaning of intelligence. To paraphrase Franz Leibnitz (one of the main minds behind calculus): “The soul may be born when the machine is organized to receive it”. And that is exactly what is happening to the Internet. It is organizing around same principles of behavior that nature long ago discovered as a matter of evolution and survival – aka intelligence.

Super Intelligence by Nick Bostrom:

Warning; not an easy read, side effects may include depression and restless sleep. A profound consideration of how AI, whole brain emulation and other approaches may go “white light” on humanity.

One whole chapter is devoted to how an AI system, after recognizing itself and sufficiently securing its own safety may come out of the closet (as it were).

Almost every section in the book is bizarre, creepy and illuminating. Sometimes your are left in an epiphany state but wishing you had not understood that quite so well. The author is a brilliant writer. But as a philosopher he is a bit too facile with philosophical terminologies and concepts and can leave you trying to get air.

I came to the conclusion, upon finishing the book, that the Singularity is already here. It is announcing its arrival on the human stage with a book called Super Intelligence written under the pseudonym Nick Bostrom.

A short paper by the Nick Bostrom (whoever or whatever he is)  here.

The Road to Character by David Brooks:

 

Life at the Speed of Light by J. Craig Ventor

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter Diamandis

Sapient: A Brief History of HumanKind by Yuval Noah Harari

The Practicing Mind: Thomas Sterner