Reading Therapy for an Historic Election Year

Five candidates are competing to be nominated for President of the United States by the Democratic and Republican parties:

• Hillary Clinton - the Butcher of Benghazi
• Ted Cruz - rumored to be the Zodiac Killer
• Bernie Sanders - Stalin
• Donald Trump - Hitler
• John Kasich - former Fox News commentator

In these polarized times, our most noble ideals can blind us to the reality of the world around us, including real problems and common ground we share with our political rivals. So I strongly recommend reading at least one of the following three books that cut through the partisanship and black and white thinking that can overwhelm us as we fight for our different teams:

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (528 pages)

Jonathan Haidt explores the psychological foundations of morality, and discovers that western moral philosophy - including America's progressive and libertarian politics - has huge blind spots with respect to the essential role of social conventions like family, community, religion and patriotism in the maintenance of welfare and freedom. Also interesting if you've ever wondered why people in general have such a hard time actually living up to our moral values.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State (320 pages)

Micklethwait and Wooldridge from The Economist look at how the excesses of the welfare state in modern democracies have contributed to dysfunctional government. They show how emerging economies are turning away from our example and toward authoritarian inspirations like Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew. The book particularly focuses on American politics and how both Democrats and republicans hypocritically support programs which are both wasteful and increase inequality - not because of the influence of shadowy elites - but because the programs are popular.

Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy (304 pages)

Chris Hayes provides an alternative explanation for growing inequality in America. Like Micklethwait and Wooldridge, he examines and rejects the partisan and conspiracy theories. However, where they found the problem rooted in democracy run amok, Hayes shows that meritocracy - the American ideal since 1965 which strives for equal opportunities instead of equal outcomes - has actually made it harder to climb the ladder of success and allowed a new class of elites to emerge who are able to trade wealth, power and fame in spite of rules that are supposed to separate government, wall street and the media. 

Lies, Damned Lies and Carbon Dioxide

The US government says 2014 was the hottest year on record, and the fourth such record since 1997. Skeptics say global warming stopped 18 years ago. Who is full of it? The graph shows temperatures since 1950 with El Niños in red. (It does not include 2014, which was the warmest year yet, and not an El Niño.)

Both the government and skeptics are trying to mislead us.

Rubio gets it. Stewart struggles to keep up.

On Tuesday, Jon Stewart interviewed conservative senator Marco Rubio. This sketch from before the interview provides context for some of the banter that follows:

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/dic6af/florida-haters

Here's the interview:

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/extended-interviews/d7iye4/marco-rubio-extended-interview

Rubio is working on bills that aren't just bipartisan alternatives to liberal proposals that Jon Stewart tries to inject into the conversation (like free community college and raising the minimum wage.) Rubio has actually done some homework and found smarter ideas. Two examples:

Before Obamacare: the only constant is change

How was American health insurance changing before Obamacare?

According to the US Census Bureau, between 2005 and 2010, 18 million Americans stopped getting health insurance from a job. About a third of this was people switching to government insurance (mostly retirees.) Some of it was part of a longer trend of fewer insured dependents, but mostly it was because of people being unemployed for more than 6 months or not getting insurance from their new job.

Bro Tech

Back when people still thought the future was flying cars and moon bases, the word "high tech" was coined to describe cutting edge, advanced technology, with the implication that technology was progressing upward with significant steps.

Then "high tech" became a source of anxiety. As automation replaced factory workers, industry and government told people to learn new skills that would be needed by future jobs that would be created by new technology.

See for example this extraordinarily disingenuous and manipulative advertisement by a private college founded by a manufacturing company. In February of this year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued ITT Tech for predatory lending.

Teleportation: Version Control not Bandwidth Problem

NBC News has posted a very good article about a recent study which concluded that teleporting a human would take a quadrillion years. The original paper assumes we want to "recreate the human brain on a quantum level" and then transmit it with 30 GHz microwaves - in other words pretty much the way the transporters teleport people in Star Trek.

This is a good way to show that the fictional transporter is poorly engineered, but it is not how you would actually make a machine to teleport people.

Star Venom

Why are the heavens silent? Are we alone in the universe? Where is ET? Here's one possibility:

At some point around 5-10 billion years ago our galaxy was full of civilizations that traveled between the stars.

Each civilization would eventually disappear, perhaps driven to extinction by competition or perhaps evolved into something different. But they were always replaced by another civilization.

This pattern ended gradually. Over a period of 1-10 billion years, the number of new interstellar civilizations fell to zero. Intelligent life would evolve over and over again, and then disappear before spreading beyond the planet where the intelligence evolved.