Fun Times to Witness Firsthand

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The United States started out as a group of small settlements along the Atlantic coast of North America.  Within 150 years these seedlings had spread to become the basis of the most powerful, most productive nation ever to exist.  By 1900 it had become a continental power that had harnessed great scientific and technological innovations to become a world power.  By 2000 it was the global hegemon, with no other nation even daring to pretend parity with the United States of America.

Twenty-five years later this country is much diminished.  And almost none of the change has to do with military might or technological capability.  We still have wonder weapons and a nuclear arsenal.  We have the most advanced information technology systems including the latest innovations in artificial intelligence and data acquisition.

What we have lost is our identity.  The Left has been on a campaign to destroy the myth of America for the last seventy years and I think they’ve been almost wholly successful.  Because it is this myth that provided us with the power that allowed us to perform all the miracles we have seen over the last century and more of our civilizational highpoint.  I’ll arbitrarily assign 1900 as the zenith of American civilization.  This convenient date, more or less, starts the “American Century” and the first decade was Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency.  I would say this was when American morale was at its highest point.  We were respected and envied around the world and our self-regard was very high.  And at the same time, we were still a very self-reliant place.  People were expected to support themselves and government had no place in micro-managing our lives and finances.  From our point of view there was no government safety net and poverty was only one economic panic away.  But Americans depended on themselves to survive.

And this was doable.  America truly was the land of opportunity.  Everywhere you looked there were great ventures building bridges, railroads, telephone systems, electrical infrastructure; all the systems needed for a modern civilization.  There was work to do for anyone willing to do it.  And we considered ourselves a moral people.  We had police and courts that made sure that everyone lived according to the laws that each state enforced.  And every man could be judged by a jury of his peers.  It wasn’t perfect but it seemed like a reasonably fair system.  And we had representative government.  We got to vote for our presidents and congressional representatives.  Well, not women.  We were still sane back then and kept them in the home.  That madness was still twenty years in the future.  Funny how that innovation seems to track with the end of American greatness.  Oh well.

And most importantly, we hadn’t gotten involved in a European War at all up to that point.  Sure we slapped their hands if they interfered in the Western Hemisphere; Monroe Doctrine and all that.  But we were smart enough not to stick our noses into European quagmires.  We left that to the British.

But now?  Well, we’re mired in conflicts all over the Middle East and even Ukraine.  We rattle our sabers at China, Russia and Iran constantly.  We meddle in the elections of half the planet, spending clandestine money to rig elections and decide what cultural values we will permit “democracies” to have.

And we’ve allowed the education of our children to undermine the belief in the fairness and morality of American laws and institutions that have stood us in good stead for over two hundred years.  These educators and politicians have labeled our society racist, sexist, bigoted and immoral.  And worse still, a whole generation has been brainwashed into believing it’s true.

They’ve also empowered the leading corporations to outsource almost all the manufacturing jobs that formerly supported a thriving middle class to foreign shores where labor prices are impossibly low.  This has single-handedly dropped the United States into the second tier of nations economically.  And it has devastated the morale of the whole country.  And now the Left has tried to finish off the middle class by flooding the country with tens of millions of third-world refugees to compete for the few jobs that are left at the lowest wage imaginable.

So where do we go from here?  If we looked for examples we have Rome.  A great and proud people expanded under the leadership of wise rulers but then allowed foreign wars to turn their Republic into an Empire.  And that Empire turned its back on the small farmers who had been the backbone of the Republic and turned to slave labor to enrich the senatorial class and changed the army into a profession with  no pretense of an end to the forever wars.

That looks very much like what we are seeing planned by the Left, only on a global scale.  Now Trump is trying to reverse the picture.  He is taking steps to deal with each of the problems; wars, outsourced manufacturing, global corporations, hordes of illegal immigrants and culture war.  And we’re even seeing some small progress from his efforts.

But can he turn it around?  When the Gracchi Brothers or Julius Caesar took the side of the plebians in Rome they were assassinated and the Empire rolled on.  So we’ve never seen this trend from Republic to Empire reversed.  Of course I’d like it to be so.  The ends of Republics aren’t fun times to witness firsthand.

Cleaning Out the Augean Stables

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When John Kennedy was assassinated in November, 1963, I was six years old.  I think I was in kindergarten at the time.  I remember the day because the nuns were all crying.  So, there hasn’t been a day in my life that I can remember that I wasn’t aware of Kennedy’s assassination.  And after the initial shock wore off my family members, it receded into my mind until his brother was assassinated a few years later.  At that point, talk about conspiracies finally became loud enough and I was old enough to have it impinge on my thoughts.

But I wasn’t receptive to these ideas.  I just believed what the official version stated.  Lone gunmen were responsible and that was all there was to it.

I was watching a podcast that had a JFK conspiracy advocate on.  After the initial obvious question (“Is there a smoking gun in the new document dump?”) was answered with a, “Whoa, whoa!  I’m on page 3 of 60,000,” the expert explained that what he’s looking for isn’t a smoking gun but rather a pattern of facts that steers the explanation toward one of the likelier causes.

And here, there is a lot of information that tells us more about what was going on between JFK and his intelligence agencies.  And none of it makes the CIA look less guilty.  The CIA had been following Oswald around for the four years before the assassination and they knew exactly where he lived and worked and how close he would be to Kennedy that day.  And there has never been a doubt that Jack Ruby was a mob-controlled stooge who did what he was told.  And there is no doubt that the CIA had connections to the mob and that the mob hated the Kennedys.  And JFK had been talking to some of the top staff in his administration about busting up the CIA for what happened in Cuba.  This “conspiracy theorist” doesn’t come right out and say that the CIA had Kennedy killed.  But that’s what he’s pointing to.

Somehow that still shocks me.  Now, looking at what happened to Trump last year in Pennsylvania should make it seem obvious that the Deep State is completely ruthless and unconcerned with consequences.  But as intellectually simple as that situation is to see, it’s still horrifying to me.  Sure, I’ve known for decades now that our government isn’t the white hat good guys that I thought they were when I was younger.  Iraq taught me that politicians of both parties use Americans as pawns whenever it’s convenient.  We have psychopaths running many of our agencies.  Just look at the FBI and the Justice Department.  Guilt and innocence are the least important aspects of people they target for “justice.”

But the shock tells me that probably the most important work Donald Trump can do before he retires to Mar a Lago in three and half years is to empty out the CIA and the FBI.  I think of these two agencies as threats a hundred times more dangerous to this country than China and Russia combined.  We have a very expensive and on balance, formidable military machine.  Even after eighty years, the nuclear deterrence of our arsenal is still potent.  I don’t think the benefits we gain from the intelligence and judgement of these intelligence agencies compensate us for the malice and deception that they seem to display as their defining characteristics.  They are a threat to the elected leaders of this country and they represent a potent force preventing the very information which our leaders need from reaching them.  Instead of facts they provide a narrative that is convenient for their interests but often is confusing and destructive.  I wish Donald Trump all the best luck in tackling these rogue agencies.  And I hope he breaks them permanently.

Well, that’s what I thought about today.

To Serve Man.  We Need a New Cookbook

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All this Heinlein stuff has me thinking about science fiction.  And that’s fine by me.  The current political theater between the Trump administration and the various judges trying to block his orders isn’t something I want to provide a blow-by-blow description of.  Either Trump figures out a way around these obstacles or he fails.  Either way I’ll wait till I can see the outcome.

But science fiction is interesting to me.  From my way of looking at it, science fiction is the dominant form of storytelling in American society and has been for well over a century.  Now this isn’t what literary types believe.  But genre fiction is the dominant form of fiction in this country and science fiction is what fueled the imaginations of young people for most of the twentieth century and still does even in these times of moral rot in the arts.

So, this gives me a chance to talk about my ideas about where science fiction should and will go.  And I think the current direction of technological progress will provide the impetus for where the stories will go.  Currently I don’t think space travel and advances in biology are the topics that garner our attention.  Not to say those things won’t continue to interest people.  But currently the real impact of technology on our lives is artificial intelligence.  But more than just how far AI will go in replacing humans in various aspects of commerce is what this will do to our society.  And more specifically how will humans push back on the people running industry who don’t see this as a problem or at least don’t see it as a problem for them.

Because let’s be clear.  Automation of all kinds has been changing our world for hundreds of years.  An iron foundry displaces ten thousand village blacksmiths.  An automobile factory and a gas station in every village eliminates the need for train stations across the country and all the people who worked on them.  Every innovation in technology displaces the human beings who supported the previous version of “how things are done.”  But this latest innovation wants to replace the most important attribute of a human being; his ability to think.  His ability to create intellectual property.

And that’s a revolution.  And I think, that’s what science fiction will want to talk about.  Of course it’s been talking about that for decades.  On the hackiest level, that’s what the Terminator movies are all about.  The machines are going to get rid of us.  So are the Matrix movies.

But I think more nuanced portrayals of how AI will affect humanity and how humanity can affect the roll out of AI are what is needed and what will be interesting to people.  Now far be it from me to denigrate the fine work that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Keanu Reeves have done to enlighten the human population to their imminent danger at the hands of sentient machines.  I know that I’m always on the lookout for Austrian bodybuilders sporting gatling guns or déjà vu black cats crossing my path.

But what seems to me to be needed is a way to make AI healthy.  Currently, everything about our on-line existence is harmful to us.  It’s some combination of anti-social, irritating and stultifying.  It’s making our lives worse.  And that doesn’t seem to be accidental.  It seems to be a feature of the algorithm.  It almost seems like an anesthetic meant to keep us groggy and confused.

I think science fiction should be focused on rethinking how this ultimate technology has to be forced to work for the benefit of humans instead of as a rat poison to finish us off.  So that’s what I think.