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Arthur Clarke's Four Laws of Prediction

Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following four "laws" of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
4. For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.

Science & Technology: Students - America vs The World
(via James Fallows Article in The Atlantic) - Mar. 2010

"..The other major issue is our failure to attract the best students into science and technology in North America. At my university, the best students in biology almost invariably want to go to medical school (or in our case vet school). Very few are attracted to the rigors of starting a research career- the long hours, the low pay for many years and the uncertainty of getting a good job in the end. It is hard to blame them- my own son is an example as he is medical school after always thinking that he would go into research. I won't go into all of the issues here, but as noted earlier when most of the best students come from elsewhere and they either do not come any more or don't stay after training- well then you have a problem."

Public Capacity and Public Trust

Can we reverse the vicious circle of frustrated citizens denying state government adequate resources -- and then resenting the lack of state services?

From: The American Prospect - Dianne Stewart and Michael Lipsky | February 1, 2010

"For 30 years we have witnessed a downward spiral of eroding public trust in government. While the federal government deals with the most momentous issues -- national security, health reform, global climate change -- state government has borne the brunt of a self-deepening tax revolt.

The fiscal noose imposed by tax and spending caps, now exacerbated by the recession, undermines states' ability to raise necessary revenues. The process erodes state governments' basic capacity to operate effectively -- which further destroys public trust. This vicious circle diminishes the willingness of Americans to entrust government at any level with tackling challenges that call for decisive action or for planning and investment in the future.

As revenue collections decline due to the recession, states raise taxes or cut services to balance budgets. In hard times, reductions in public services are not only cruel but counterproductive -- in a recession the economy requires not less but more public spending.

In the current crisis, government agencies cope by reducing staff, cutting hours of operation, closing local offices, increasing hurdles for service eligibility, and raising standards for what constitutes emergencies worthy of intervention. As they decimate university systems, health-care programs, public-education funding, and other essential services, the agencies reinforce the belief that states are incompetent.

The federal stimulus program enacted last year helped the states but made up only 30 percent to 40 percent of their budget shortfalls. A second round of federal support is far from certain. As this special report demonstrates, without further federal assistance, the prospect for the states is grim.

***

For the most part, states are where policies become visible and people experience public programs directly. Frontline public services forge popular expectations of government. For example, state actions will determine the success of national health-care reform and will influence public opinion on the legitimacy of federal efforts to restore economic prosperity.

Yet few Americans grasp what state governments do, how they contribute to our country's well-being, and how our federal system actually works. For instance, we educate our children through local governments required to meet state standards and aided with state and federal funds. If they attend college, most Americans receive higher education through state colleges and universities, which are financed with state funds; these costs are often supplemented through federal grants and student aid. Many of the critical programs that provide for people in need, particularly in hard times -- Medicaid for low-income and disabled people, unemployment insurance, and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program -- are state partnerships with the federal government.

Many might be surprised that the work force of state and local governments exceeds federal employment. At the last census (2002), 12.1 million people worked for the federal government, including military personnel and post-office workers, but 15.6 million worked for state and local governments.

As our research at De¯mos reveals, too many people now see government only as polarized politics or as an undifferentiated, ineffective bureaucracy. The public has lost touch with the ways the quality of life of communities depends on government. People have lost track of government's role in long-term planning and as steward of schools, roads, police services, and other essential public facilities. Constructive responses to the fiscal crisis, if they are to emerge, will require reconstituting an understanding of the critical role of government and support for the public purposes it embodies.

The fiscal troubles of the states are unfolding in the context of a deeply embedded public distrust of government that has been engendered over decades by individuals actively hostile to government and by organizations that promote a small government, low-tax ideology. This past year the backlash against the bailout of financial institutions, the rejection of a public option in health-care reform, and the emergence of passionate "tea party" protests all bore witness to this distrust. At the state level, the manifestations were rampant. In the midst of the worst state fiscal crisis in decades, some state governors even found it politically expedient to refuse emergency federal-assistance funds in perverse appeals to anti-government sentiment.

Public-opinion polling confirms that trust in state government is related to its ongoing capacity to manage state affairs. According to the Gallup organization, in the 1990s, about two-thirds of Americans had at least a fair degree of confidence in their state's ability to handle state problems. By the downturn of 2003, the last time states cut services drastically, this figure dipped to barely half. In 2009, public trust fell again, as all but two states experienced significant budget shortfalls

***

This cycle of public distrust and government contraction can be broken. At stake is the viability of all levels of government in a time when effective and adequately resourced public structures are as crucial as ever. Over the last five years, De¯mos has sponsored research and engaged with state partners in extensive field work across the country to develop strategies to break this cycle. This work suggests several steps that can begin to create a more constructive climate.

First, elected and appointed officials, as well as prominent civic and nonprofit leaders, need to promote a positive view of the mission and purpose of the public sector and offer a vision of the government to which we should aspire. For example, in his speech to Congress on health-insurance reform, President Barack Obama modeled a balanced approach that recognized government's necessary role: "Our predecessors understood ... that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited." At every opportunity, we must make visible the essential roles that government is uniquely positioned to fulfill and which cannot be adequately undertaken by individuals or by private institutions.

Second, leaders can help citizens understand public systems and structures and the taxes that support them as necessary means to achieve the common good. Years of conservative rhetoric have ingrained in our national psyche the idea that the public good is best served by the dogged pursuit of private interest and that taxes merely deprive individuals and companies of their own money. While campaigning successfully to be governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick turned an opponent's demand to "give back" taxpayers' money into an appeal to people's innate sense of community. "It is their money," he declared during a debate, "but it's also their broken road. And it's their overcrowded school. It's their broken neighborhood and broken neighbor. ... It's not this idea that people earn what they earn and have no responsibility for the Commonwealth. We have a responsibility, in addition to personal responsibility, to take charge of shared responsibility."

Third, in seeking public support for government initiatives, we can rekindle Americans' sense of citizenship and community. As a practical matter, this approach broadens the constituency for the initiative. In Wisconsin, advocates canvassing for a local tax measure realized in the midst of their campaign that they were not making headway and switched tactics to talk with voters about quality of life and the need to come together for the good of their community. In winning a surprising victory, they attributed success to the increased receptivity of voters to this new approach. Similar stories are told by leaders in other states, including those in Massachusetts and North Carolina.

Finally, it's possible to cultivate public confidence that government can be a mechanism for pragmatic problem-solving to achieve a secure and prosperous future. Our research indicates that when this image is evoked, Americans are much more likely to have a constructive view of government and are more inclined to support specific progressive policies. Candidates and organizations whose policy goals require state revenues and depend upon effective government action should offer an aspirational picture of how adequately funded and competently managed public systems can serve people's needs.

The state fiscal crisis is the front line of this struggle. State governments, no less than the banking system, are too important to fail. States' ability to weather the fiscal storms, while also cultivating support for their public missions and the revenues necessary to fund them, will either help redeem the case for the role of government -- or further undermine support for the public sector.

The paranoid style in American politics

Excerpts from Harper's Magazine Article - Nov. 1964 - By Richard Hofstadter

"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing.

I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country–that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life.

But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective.

Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms–he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (”Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated–if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman–sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons–later, Negroes and Jews–have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

Renegades and Pedants

A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. In some part, the special authority accorded the renegade derives from the obsession with secrecy so characteristics of such movements: the renegade is the man or woman who has been in the Arcanum, and brings forth with him or her the final verification of suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a skeptical world. But I think there is a deeper eschatological significance that attaches to the person of the renegade: in the spiritual wrestling match between good and evil which is the paranoid’s archetypal model of the world, the renegade is living proof that all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He brings with him the promise of redemption and victory.

A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivable pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted.

The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent–in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies.

The Double Sufferer

The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering–a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies… systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture–it is no more than that–that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties.

In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest–perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands–are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed.

They see only the consequences of power–and this through distorting lenses–and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him–and in any case he resists enlightenment.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged
(by Frank Rich - N.Y. Times Op-Ed: Feb. 27th, 2010)

...the gradually coalescing Tea Party dogma had its Washington coming out party at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), across town from Capitol Hill. The most rapturously received speaker was Glen Beck, who likened the G.O.P. to an alcoholic in need of a 12-step program to recover from its “progressive-lite” collusion with federal government. Beck vilified an unnamed Republican whose favorite president was the progressive Theodore Roosevelt — that would be McCain — and ominously labeled progressivism a cancer that “must be cut out of the system.”

A co-sponsor of CPAC was the John Birch Society, another far-right organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation. Its views, which William F. Buckley Jr. decried in the 1960s as an “idiotic” and “irrational” threat to true conservatism, remain unchanged. At the conference’s conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz describes Paul’s followers as “conspiracy theorists, anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged.”

William Kristol dismissed the straw poll results as the youthful folly of Paul’s jejune college fans. William Bennett gingerly pooh-poohed Beck’s anti-G.O.P. diatribe. But in truth, most of the CPAC speakers, including presidential aspirants, were so eager to ingratiate themselves with this claque that they endorsed the Beck-Paul vision rather than, say, defend Bush, McCain or the party’s Congressional leadership. (It surely didn’t help Romney’s straw poll showing that he was the rare Bush defender.) And so — just one day after Stack crashed his plane into the Austin I.R.S. office — the heretofore milquetoast Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, told the audience to emulate Tiger Woods’s wife and “take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country.”

Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted “people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry — no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that “the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent revolution. The right has a different history. In the months before McVeigh’s mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho and Texas in Congress, publicly empathized with the conspiracy theories of the far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions.

In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied with Beck’s 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that “another civil war” may be in the offing. “I don’t see us being the ones to start it,” she told Barstow, “but I would give up my life for my country.”

Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin’s memorable final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention earlier this month: “I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help.”

Note: All this blather from the WingNuts makes me want to ask them: "You say you are willing to die for your country...but you never served in the U.S. Military where that is both a possibility and a traditional basis for citizenship...why did you not serve?"

Cyber War = Space War

By Kevin Coleman

Defense Tech: Feb. 2010

In a recent government survey of more than 100,000 people across the U.S., 40 percent reported no broadband or high-​​speed access to the Internet, while 30 percent said they have no Internet access at all. Satellite broadband delivery is seen to be a quick and economical solution to this problem.

While the satellite broadband market slowed in 2009 because of the poor economy, it still increased. The market continues to expand after U.S. regulators outlined the national broadband plan that allows satellite operators to use their radio spectrum for Internet traffic. That is why cyber security professionals are so concerned about the convergence of cyber space and space.

Its becoming increasingly evident that any future war between modern militaries would be both a space war and a cyber war, in fact, they would be one and the same. Russia, China, and the U.S. have all stated they don’t want a space war, but are all preparing for one if one occurs.

That sounds so familiar – oh wait a minute, didn’t Russia, China and the U.S. say the same thing about cyber war? Yes, they did. Satellites in geostationary orbits provide broadband connectivity to businesses and customers. Those satellites and their computer control ground stations present a viable target for offensive cyber actions. A hacker could disrupt or interfere with satellite control communications and could disrupt the delivery of broadband services. In the absence of such command signals, a satellite would malfunction.

Worldwide attention focused on China’s successful anti-​​satellite missile test. While military officials question the scale and progress of the Chinese anti-​​satellite program, one has to wonder if China has already tested their anti-​​satellite cyber weapon. Military leaders are all too aware of the convergence of space and cyber space. An increasing percentage of military operations occur in cyber space and are integrated with and dependent on communication satellite systems in outer space.