Why I Don't Watch the News Much

If you read enough history, ancient, medieval, or modern, you can start to get better sense of patterns in human behavior, good and bad. Being a pessimist, I tend to watch for signs of civilization's decline. Examples from history (the Roman Republic, pre-Revolutionary France, Czarist Russia, or Weimar Germany) will produce the following list:

• Political instability or "resolution" of civil political matters through violence
• Currency instability/devaluation
• Public calls for a single leader and an end to parliamentary process as too inefficient
• "Winner take all" political contests, followed by a "purging" (firing, not Stalinesque) of civil service appointees felt to be too close to the other political party/previous administration
• Concentration of the political spoils system
• Infrastructure failures
• Inability to control the border
• Unwillingness by elites to support basic tenets/values of the majority society (e.g. free speech, private property)
• Increasing "rights" to a broader range of "citizens"
• Mob rule/rule by public passions/rule by plebecite/referendum
• Federally funded bread and circuses
• Outlandish crimes/behavior
• Anarcho-tyranny
• Decline in general manners and civility in political and private behavior
• Loss in actual skills/technological capabilities
• Increase in the numbers of political "crimes" (e.g. suppression of political free speech by subtle or blatant force)
• Concentration of wealth among politically connected individuals/groups
• Politicization of "the legions"

I posited this list of trends to Lin and the Down Under Defense Expert (DUDE). Lin's comments:

I took a course at my alma mater...studying the Roman Republic. Each one of the points that you raised can be related to some degree to them. I’ll offer some (hopefully) insights later. Imagine this worst case(?) scenario. O-buma’s popularity skyrockets and he becomes an FDR...Haven’t we already entered a dark age?

  

The DUDE thought he'd forwarded that list to me (ha! possibly--it's more a sampling of trends from my various reading adventures). His additional comments included:

More apropos are Marx’ Ten Conditions necessary for Communism [Comments in brackets belong to the DUDE]:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. [There were no telephones in those days. Communication in this case refers to roads and especially to bridges, tunnels, etc.]
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. [Mao and his gang did a great job of putting waste-lands into production. Nothing grew, but it was “in production.”]
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. [Children’s factory labour in some other form is OK, however.] Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c. [So, kids get free education in things like how to work in a factory…]

This also follows from a discussion I had with Doc (who's coming at the problem from the left rather than the right), who suggested that great disparities of wealth actually will precipitate a workers' revolt...which might be the Marxist point of view, but which he strongly stated he does not WANT to see happen. In the business/economic world, there are things that can be done at the stockholder level by tying businesses and executives' income to concrete improvements to employee welfare. By treating workers better now--more flexible leave policies, more freedom to work from home, more flexible work hours, better access to health care or child care, more access to educational opportunities, etc.--companies beneft in the long run. Workers that are treated well actually are more productive and loyal, but somehow the work-60-hours-a-week-with-little-reward approach to business seems to prevail. Throw in a crumbling educational system, crushing taxes, and crumbling family structure because both parents are working and you've got a recipe for long-term decline.

So if you accept the premise that our civilization is in decline, how do you fix it? Not a clue. With any luck, though, the internet will at least allow more people access to more tools and information to fix things incrementally.

Potpourri XLVIII

Jeez, get off the net for a couple days, and all sorts of stuff backs up my inbox...

Checking the books...tip o' the fedora to Lin, for forwarding an alternate way to ensure accountability in your local government schools: don't ask to see the budget, ask to see the check register.

Another from Lin: an editorial by David Brooks on the Obama administration's ongoing takeover of the private sector.

This message/link from Scott is perfect as is:

This http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/107459-0/ is from Pravda, and talks about America’s descent into Marxism. They ought to know.

The Herpa DC-3 got stuck in the "Illinois gumbo" (mud) on its tour around America.

The Singularity really IS near: a robotic scientist makes the first independent contribution to science.

Where's the outrage? The President goes out on a fundraising trip--never cheap, no matter if he goes by car, train, or plane--and the taxpayers are helping him jack up the budget deficit and the President's carbon footprint.

Speaking of the President, a reporter fan got unruly when the Secret Service wouldn't let her get close enough to hand him a letter.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy appoints a global warming skeptic to a key government environmental post. Signs of sanity in Le France.

Europe's most expensive hotel opens. Wow. Here's the official site if you'd like to see more. Again, wow.

My Google Alerts returned a lot of articles on Ares I-X and ISDC this week. That's good, since I didn't attend most of the sessions. Got to keep up somehow. And away we go:

• Kennedy Space Center Director Cabana thinks the Ares I-X launch "has a good chance" of launching in September.
• Spaceflight Now discussed the impending turnover of Launch Complex 39B to Ares.
• Jeff Greason, CEO of XCOR Aerospace, spoke at the International Space Development Conference about the need for the media and the general public to "chill out" about flight tests, including Ares I-X. Tests are there to find problems and learn how to fix them.
• Rand Simberg's Transterrestrial Musings covered ISDC.
• Web feature from NASA.gov on modal tests for Ares I-X.
• Universe Today posted a NASA-developed Ares I-X image (Media Fusion, in point of fact).
• This is an article from last year, but it provides an overview of the Ares I-X manufacturing done on Ares I-X at Glenn Research Center in Ohio.

What has NASA done for the environment lately? Check this out:

NASA SATELLITE DETECTS RED GLOW TO MAP GLOBAL OCEAN PLANT HEALTH

WASHINGTON -- Researchers have conducted the first global analysis of the health and productivity of ocean plants using a unique signal detected by NASA's Aqua satellite.

Ocean scientists can now remotely measure the amount of fluorescent red light emitted by phytoplankton and assess how efficiently these microscopic plants turn sunlight and nutrients into food through photosynthesis. Researchers also can study how changes in the global environment alter these processes at the center of the ocean food web.

Single-celled phytoplankton fuel nearly all ocean ecosystems, serving as the most basic food source for marine animals. Phytoplankton account for half of all photosynthetic activity on Earth and play a key role in the balance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The health of these marine plants affects the amount of carbon dioxide the ocean can absorb from the atmosphere and how the ocean responds to a changing climate.

"This is the first direct measurement of the health of the phytoplankton in the ocean," said Michael Behrenfeld, a biologist who specializes in marine plants at Oregon State University. "We have an important new tool for observing changes in phytoplankton every week, all over the planet."

All plants absorb energy from the sun, typically more than they can consume through photosynthesis. A small fraction of this extra energy is re-emitted as fluorescent light in red wavelengths.

Using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite, scientists have now observed "red-light fluorescence" over the open ocean. MODIS is the first instrument to observe this signal on a global scale.

"The amount of fluorescent light emitted is not constant; it changes with the health of the plant life in the ocean," said Behrenfeld.

Scientists previously used satellite sensors to track the amount of plant life in the ocean by measuring the amount and distribution of chlorophyll.

"Chlorophyll gives us a picture of how much phytoplankton is present," said co-author Scott Doney, a marine chemist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass. "Fluorescence provides insight into how well they are functioning in the ecosystem."

With this new measurement, the scientists discovered large areas of the Indian Ocean where phytoplankton were under stress from iron deficiency. They were surprised to see large portions of the ocean "light up" seasonally as phytoplankton responded to a lack of iron in their diet. The amount of fluorescence increases when phytoplankton have too little iron, a nutrient in seawater. Iron reaches the sea surface on winds blowing dust from deserts and other arid areas, and from upwelling currents.

The research team detected new regions of the ocean affected by iron deposition and depletion. In the fall and winter and especially the summer, significant southwesterly winds over the Indian Ocean stir up ocean currents and bring more nutrients up from the depths for the phytoplankton to feed on. At the same time, the amount of iron-rich dust delivered by winds is reduced.

Climate change could mean stronger winds pick up more dust and blow it to the sea, or less intense winds leave waters dust-free. Some regions will become drier and others wetter, changing the regions where dusty soils accumulate and get swept up into the air. Phytoplankton will reflect and react to these global changes.

"On time-scales of weeks to months, we can use this data to track plankton responses to iron inputs from dust storms and the transport of iron-rich water from islands and continents," Doney said. "Over years to decades, we also can detect long-term trends in climate change and other human perturbations to the ocean."