Towards a Superior Form of Social Inequality

The poor of this world are not like the poor of olden times. It is time the poor of this world leave the poor of olden times in a state of horrific demise.

All the most usable and pertinent information for one's survival and even betterment are online now. The poor of the third world have cellphones, and the homeless of the industrialized world often have cellphones or at least online access at libraries. So with that we can say nearly all the Earth's human inhabitants have access to the global knowledge base.

In 1992...

In 1992 I was working in stealth mode for an environmental advocacy organization. I was privy to knowledge of cancerous and birth defects causing industries, including their locations and statistics of the disease effects locally. 

As a strategist in war or politics one must always be capable of seeing what is, not just what ought to be. I saw in 1992 that disease causing industries where two things: 1) an integral part of the material culture we as humans depended on 2) they were not evenly distributed across all the environment. Of those I saw Number 2 "not evenly distributed across all the environment" as the more tractable...as a container of possible solutions.

The solution was simple -move away from the problem. The solution relied on two things: access to information (e.g. where are the industries that pollute disease causing output) and mobility. 

In 1994 I did move away...from a region setting records in obesity and cancer to a region with those diseases far more rare. I was poor, and yet managed to save myself by simple use of information and mobility. 

This is the moral imperative to the poor...vote with your mind and your feet. Save yourselves...not your birthplace...not your "hood"...and not all life. 

Migrate to areas with smarter, healthier people and call these new neighbors brothers and sisters. 

Differentiate from the poor of olden times.

Help humans diverge into two distinct species of the ignorant and diseased versus the informed and healthy. That kind of evolutionary trend is the moral imperative of the pragmatist. 

Be well.

The demise of the polar bear part of a grand success story

Polar bears and grizzly bears hybridization seems to be increasing, and an obvious contribution to this increase is global warming.

This may be sad in the demise of the polar bear, but philosophically I don't see it as a negative. As a believer in evolution, I accept it equally in the present and future tense, not just in the past tense. Trying to preserve the biosphere in its current configuration is a fool's errand, and the perfect goal of NGO and political careerists who can make money perpetually piloting the public policy ship to a land that does not exist.

Many are comfortable with the knowledge of geological and life era's in which mass extinctions and new species came along, and then not comfortable with industrialization doing the same. I am comfortable with the planet's morphing due to industrialization. The Earth without an Anthropocene Era (the result of industrialization) is a failed planet. I will say that again, a planet that does not evolve to industrialization is a planet undeserving of respect, a dead end planet. Now on to creating a Dyson Sphere, since an unindustrialized solar system is a backward, dead end place worthy of conquest by superior life forms far away.

References:

1. Bears: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly%E2%80%93polar_bear_hybrid
2. Anthropocene: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene
3. Dyson Sphere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

Hannibal Chau for President in 2016: He'll Get Us What We Need.

I'M A MORAL BLIND OPPORTUNIST, AND I VOTE
HANNIBAL CHAU FOR PRESIDENT 2016
HE'LL GET US WHAT WE NEED

The Hannibal Chau character in Pacific Rim (official site) -played by award winning actor and likable-one-of-a-kind-ugly-face Ron Perlman- is a brilliant mutation of the long arc of Shanghai/Hong Kong archetypical solo operator businessmen who have no limit to lying, stealing or murdering in the pursuit of commerce and trade. History of Shanghai People love these pathological freebooters [freebooter def: noun. a person who pillages and plunders, especially a pirate.], Disney has even made a series of movies with lovable pillagers and plunderers for kids. Why not appease the populist impulse and have a freebooter as President of United States?

Imagine Ron Perlman in Hannibal Chau modus operandi guiding this great nation of hilariously incompatible 50 states into the middle of the first half of the 21st Century. Imagine the deals done behind closed doors, imagine the selling of flood prone land to foreign investors, imagine Machiavelli being a mandatory assignment before entering 7th grade, imagine a society in which social mobility between the stations of prostitute and preacher became fluid and full duplex. Imagine.

I wonder if you can.

US foreign policy could become reset to nation ignoring rather than nation building. Our citizens should be traveling all over the world as tourists, business-people and students; but our government should not be.

Of course there will be times when the US will need to interact with the world. What doesn't seem to work is the schizophrenic combination of drone bombing and orphanage/school construction the US does in lands where terrorists are grown. We send signals that are confusing, or worse, we send signals that we are self-defeating and delusional. We should send signals that make our enemies nervous, full of a sense of dread. 

The job of making people nervous is best left to a nefarious character such as Hannibal Chau. Our country has given principled men and women a chance to guide the affairs of State to our detriment as America's attempts at good have been chewed up in the meat-grinder of multi-cultural interpretation and spat out as bad. It's time we made an earnest attempt at being bad.

Existence dispenses a utilitarian, modern wisdom unavailable to our ancestors

Originally posted as review on Amazon.com here .

Just finished reading Existence by David Brin. Previously I had Anathem by Neal Stephenson as my favorite fiction for all time. Anathem was like a high quality grad course in classic philosophy, which is amazing for the price of one book. But Anathem's strength is its weakness: it is a work Plato could understand and even see as derivative, a creative extension to his work.

Existence, on the other hand, would merely wound Plato's ego, and he'd be lost most of the time while trying to read it. Existence is too hot with the new vistas of wisdom that have come about via Darwin and Einstein. Yes, I said that, wisdom has increased since the advent of Darwinism, and directly because of it.

Since the time of Einstein we've learned the cosmos is a violent, evolutionary place. Not the peaceful place Plato and subsequent Christian and Islamic traditions envisioned. Those traditions got it totally wrong, as to what is going on outside the Earth's atmosphere.

A word about 2001 A Space Odyssey. It has one simple thread and lesson. Humans became humans because we could fashion tools and more especially weapons. This worked till the nuclear bomb. Humans then go out into space, and the cosmos changes one of us into a star-child of peace. 2001 A Space Odyssey is a beautiful film and book, with a wrong, useless and dumb message: become peaceful like the cosmos.

Existence takes no pleasure in a violent and virulent Universe. The book offers that the only means of victory and peace is never ending curiosity, diversity, and transparency. Eternal intelligent, messy change via innovations that result in unintended consequences, disruption...and continued Existence.

There is immense contemplation of apocalypse in 'Existence', in a thread titled 'Pandora's Cornucopia', which methodically lists all the ways a civilization of sentient life (of any type in the whole universe) could epic fail to the point of extinction. This is one of the non-fantasy aspects of the book, it runs through the gamut of predictive models by John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi and other credible scientists. The book is a voluminous contemplation of species and civilization termination, with a positive outcome that is barely won with a lot of mental heavy-lifting and persistence.

Existence takes a firm stance on "humanity": humanity should be a collection of biological humans, intelligent machines, and resurrected Neanderthals. Any sentient entity that can follow the laws of humanity is worthy to be a citizen embolden with rights in the enterprise. The book includes a great deal about uploaded copies of humans into digital networks, with an ultimately positive portrayal of the experience. The uploaded copies even provide a great service to the rest of humanity that could not be achieved with their short-lived organic original selves. For what it's worth, I personally endorse this whole agenda.

Existence wholly condemns movements that want to turn back the clock on innovation, or even slow it down. The book makes a wise political connection that the super-rich have an alliance with movements that want to return to more primitive ways. In a collapse of industrial society the super-rich will be the mass land owners and slave owners in the resulting feudal order.

I'd like to indulge a little in my own thinking for a moment, keep in mind this maxim is not the work of David Brin, for all I know he may disagree with its tone or content. Taking the inclusive trans-humanism just mentioned (including humans, machines, Neanderthals) together with the condemnation of retrogression and technological renunciation, I believe resonates with my maxim "make the present and future world lethal to our ancestors, provided the result is a larger footprint of politically empowered sentient life."

A few particulars, not the core big message, that I loved in the book: Autistics and Neanderthals are very attuned to one another, and the descriptions of the Neanderthal children and teens are great. The segments with autistic dialogue are amazing, another language.

Existence has a clever structure, it is really two books. The first half, the first 400 pages, are entirely plausible visions of the near future. Plausible to the point of being truly useful for todays reader. Not just mind candy.

The second half of the book leaps forward several decades, and shifts tense plot lines into a different plot line. In this leap forward in years and plot line, the book becomes a little more fantasy than the first half, not so utilitarian of a read, but it does not become irrelevant. It does come up with a solution to the depressing message of the first half of the book. And the qualities of the solution are a good candidate for answering the Riddle of Existence.

Yes, I really said that: the book answers the Riddle of Existence. This book dispenses with wisdom in its most bona fide and potent form. A wisdom available to 21st century people. A wisdom not available to our ancestors.

Regarding the negative reviews on Amazon for this book: I can only see their perspective by acknowledging some plot lines simply terminate, functioning only as covering some idea which adds completeness to the book's grand thesis, but not the grand plot line. Maybe this is enough to remove the author from the gallery of greatest authors, and turn off some types of readers. Some negative reviewers mention many previously published novellas were integrated into the book, the author even admits as much in the afterword. For me the ideas, and the main cumulative idea, are extremely high in merit. The book has a non-artistic and utilitarian function offering an important grand message in today's smartest political/philosophical debates.

-Lance Miller March 17, 2013