The Way the Future Blogs

  Roberto de Mattei

Italian scientists probably weren’t surprised when they saw in the bookstores a new work entitled Evolutionism: the Decline of a Hypothesis. Italy does have a fairly substantial Creationist movement, and the statements the book made were pretty close to Creationist doctrine: Dinosaurs didn’t go extinct until 40,000 years ago, what scientists take to be fossil strata are only high-water marks from Noah’s Deluge, etc.

But if they recognized the name given as the book’s author the case became stranger. His name was Roberto de Mattei, also known as the person occupying the second highest office, after only the president, of Italy’s National Research Council, the principal source of funding for scientific research anywhere in the country. Not only that but it began to look as though the Council had even helped to underwrite the cost of publishing the book.

Well, the Italian public is pretty used to scandals, although they usually involve sex or money. Maybe it’s time for a little variety.

Jack Williamson, center, outside Nycon 1, the first Worldcon.
The worshipful fanboy at the left is me.
 

I did by chance run into Jack Williamson, briefly, at the first-ever Worldcon in 1939, which was in the same summer as New York’s first World’s Fair — and which Donald Wollheim had proposed we New York fans should use as the opportunity to convene a World Science Fiction Convention in the hope that it would attract some foreign fans who would be coming to our city for the Fair anyway. Mark the fact that the original idea had come from a Futurian.

But in the remorseless fan warfare of the period the other guys had more votes than we did, so they took it away from us, and the reason that first actual contact was “briefly” is that seven of us, me included, were unfairly ejected from the actual meeting. “Unfairly” because we were thrown out for something we hadn’t done. Dave Kyle had done it, and he was allowed to stay. As it happened, I then spent the time of the con in the bar next door, where most of the writers wound up anyway, but Jack didn’t happen to be one of them.

However, we Futurians were nothing if not resourceful. On the spot, we created a meeting of our own for the next day and invited all those attending the actual con to come to ours as well. On such short notice the only hall we could secure for our meeting was in remote Brooklyn. A fair number of the fans present managed to get there, but only one of the actual writers.

That one writer, though, was the always adventurous Jack Williamson.

Since he was clearly the star of our meeting I wasn’t lucky enough to have much one-on-one time with him, but we all had a free and easy several hours of chatting, and I think most of those present were glad they had come — although if they had known in advance that the hall we had secured, the only one we could get on short notice, was primarily the headquarters of the local Communist Party, there might have been some qualms.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

Jack the Wonderful Williamson: Part 1, Part 3

Political columnists are saying that Americans have a new plan for dealing with the Taliban in Afghanistan. That is, they’re trying to bribe the Talib to become our allies instead of our enemies.

For those who wonder if this is a good idea I recommend a look at the cover of the Aug. 9 Time magazine. What it shows is a (formerly) pretty 18-year-old Afghani woman whose husband’s family were so abusive that she ran away. The Taliban does not grant this kind of freedom of choice to any persons who are unfortunate enough to possess a vagina, so, to teach her a lesson, they ordered her ears and nose to be cut off.

These people are pond scum. If not people like them, who are we fighting against?

Oil slick around Mississippi Barrier Islands (NASA E0-1 Satellite photo).

 
Years ago, in collaboration with Isaac Asimov, I wrote a book on the environment called Our Angry Earth. It wasn’t particularly successful. I have to admit that it wasn’t quite as good a book as I could have wished, either. Isaac got sick almost at the very moment we agreed to do it, and so he wasn’t able to do anywhere near as much of the writing as I had expected — to the detriment of the book.

But there were several parts of the book that were all mine and had always been intended to be so. One of those was the section that demonstrated that many of the problems associated with pollution and environmental damage were simply a matter of bad bookkeeping.

For example. Between 1947 and 1977, General Electric dumped some 1.3 million pounds of extremely toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), waste products from the manufacture of electronic devices in two of its factories, into the upper reaches of the Hudson River. GE did this because, although safe disposal of the PCBs was quite possible, it would have added significantly to the manufacturing cost of the devices. Dumping the PCBs in the river cost General Electric little more than the charge for trucking them to the river’s edge.

This is not to say that there were no costs involved in the dumping. There were many costs, and some of them were quite high. The pollution of the river made its fish inedible, causing the cash loss of a commercial fishing industry. The restrictions on even sport fishing meant that fewer vacationers spent their summers there, to the loss of tourism. The health of people living nearby was compromised, at an incalculable cost. Real estate prices dropped as the area lost some of its attractiveness. Put them all together and there were real costs amounting to millions of dollars for the dumping. All those costs, though, were what accountants call “externals.”

That means that they were costs that General Electric didn’t have to pay, because the bills went directly to the rest of the world..

Proper accounting procedures, on the other hand, would have immediately tacked them onto the manufacturing costs — thus making it better business to dispose responsibly of the pollutants.

And thus, if it were common practice to make enterprises pay for their externals, many of the problems relating to industrial pollution would simply disappear. (It is true, however, that the courts finally ordered GE to pay for a partial cleanup of the river. That didn’t heal all the damage done, but at least it was something, and it showed a dawning awareness that externals should not be neglected indefinitely.)

 
It is not only manufacturers that foist their external costs off on the public. The extractive industries, among others, are at least equally blameworthy if not more so. In the oil and coal industries we have only to look at the Gulf of Mexico to see what external costs British Petroleum has imposed on the nearby population. (It is true that President Obama is forcing them to pay billions of dollars in restitution, but it is impossible to make some of the losses whole. Even BP doesn’t have that much money.)

And, of course, the Gulf oil spill is only one, if so far the most severe, among many such disasters. Some of us will recall the Exxon Valdez back in 1989, but in fact there has been at least one major spill — “major” meaning at least tens of thousands, and all too often tens of millions, gallons of oil spilled — somewhere in the world almost every year.

Major oil spills in waterways, last five years, as supplied by Infoplease:

• 2010: BP, Deepwater Horizon, Gulf of Mexico
• 2010: Tanker Eagle Otome, Port Arthur, TX
• 2009: MV Pacific Adventurer, Queensland, Australia
• 2008: Barge, Mississippi River, New Orleans, LA
• 2007: Tanker Hebei Spirit, off coast of South Korea
• 2006: Calcasieu River LA, waste oil spill
• 2006: Israeli navy bombing Jieh coast power station
• 2006: Tanker sinks in deep water, still there leaking oil, Guimaras, Philippines
• 2005: 7 million gallons oil spilled during Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, LA

(Before that, the list is very long.)

All the same, it’s obvious that the costs of an oil well blowing out dwarf other oil spills. BP’s Deepwater Horizon’s oil spill — so far — is estimated at over 160 million gallons. The only other spill that came even close was the Ixtoc. of 1979, also in the Gulf of Mexico. That one spilled 140 million gallons over the three months before it got stopped — by drilling a relief well next to it And there too the party responsible for the disaster was an oil company, Mexico’s Pemex.

So much for oil. What about coal?

The coal companies are, if anything, perhaps a little more rapacious than the oil companies. In the United States, their main unmet external costs are floods, landsides, the conversion of beautiful mountain areas into open-pit mines … and dead miners.

And how do these giant companies get away with it?

The answer is simple: money. The officials you and I vote for to protect our interests are sometimes all too willing, for money, to sell their votes to the very people we most need protection against.. It’s not really a matter of party, either. The Republicans are traditionally a little more friendly to big business than the Democrats, yes. But there are some eight Democratic Senators who are known, for obvious reasons, as the Coal Democrats. And at least one commentator does not believe that in the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico there is a single legislative or judicial candidate of either party who has not received substantial money from Big Oil.

That’s the main other contribution I tried to make in Our Angry Earth. We individuals do not have anywhere enough muscle to deal with thee giant corporations. Only government can protect us from their worst excesses.

And what is the key to controlling government?

It’s called politics. If those among us who would like to see less corruption and misconduct among elected officials would get even a little bit involved there would be wonderful changes.

What do you have to do to get a little bit involved?

You give up Dancing with the Stars for one evening and go to the next League of Woman Voters-sponsored candidates’ debate scheduled in your neighborhood. (They’re listed in your local paper. If you can’t find one, call up the League yourself and ask them what they’ve got.

When you see a candidate you’d like to vote for, introduce yourself and ask if he needs a volunteer to stuff envelopes or the like now and then. Then, if later on, you decide you don’t like it, or don’t like the candidate, you can always just walk away. It’s a free country, after all.

And the more you do of that sort of thing, the more you help to keep it that way.

Those among us who don’t want to be active in politics because it’s a dirty game just help to make it dirtier.

U.S. Rep. Joe Barton

When we started this register of the offensively clownish behavior of so many of our most powerful legislators, the only claim to fame we knew of for the Texan Republican Joe Barton was that he was generally considered the most successful member of Senate or House of Representatives at collecting money from the oil companies. But then, on June 17th, the CEO of British Petroleum, Tony Hayward, was called to account for the BP disaster in the Gulf by high-ranking American Congressmen. Hayward explained that, although he was BP’s top executive, he really didn’t know anything about what his corporation had been doing in the Gulf. This drew scorn from most of the legislators, but when it came Barton’s turn he took a completely different tack.

His first words to Hayward were, “I apologize.” He went on to clarify his remarks by saying, “I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong is subject to some sort of political pressure that is — again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown. So I apologize.”

Not everyone could successfully untangle Barton’s syntax, but no one failed to understand that an American official was offering an apology to the man in charge of the company that had delivered the most damaging blow to American interests since the destruction of the World Trade Center. Suddenly Barton had no friends left. Even the leaders of his own party were demanding he retract his remarks, so the next day he apologized to the world for his apology to British Petroleum.

By the way, although Barton was the chief beneficiary of BP’s scattering cash, he was by no means the only one. It has been said that there is hardly a judge or a legislator in the states around the Gulf of Mexico that hasn’t taken money from Big Oil — which perhaps explains something about how the oil companies got away with watering down government regulations and even, in the George W. Bush days, letting the oil companies rewrite them.

Alan Turing
 

The close of Pride Month seems an apt time to talk about Alan Turing, inventor of the famed Turing Test for identifying independent intelligence in computers, who worked for the British code breakers in World War II, and was one of the leading figures who successfully cracked the secret German messages, a feat which played a considerable part in the victory over Hitler.

Turing was, however, a homosexual. After the war, he was arrested and convicted of “gross indecency.” He was promised to be spared prison, provided he agreed to allow himself to be injected with estrogens to “cure” his condition. Turing made the deal, but two years later, he killed himself by eating a poisoned apple.

After a group of scientists launched a movement to expunge his conviction and honor his name in his home country of England last year, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a posthumous apology to Turing on behalf of the British government. Turing was already honored in much of the rest of the world; for example, in America, the Association for Computing Machinery has presented the Turing Award, the field’s top award, since 1966.

(This isn’t exactly the next installment in my memories of Isaac Asimov. It’s just additional detail on some points that I wanted to make quite clear. I’ll get to Part Next soon.)

 
When I wrote that Isaac and his family were “Russian Jews,” rather than just Russians, I thought of trying to explain why it was appropriate. It was a digression, though, and although I love to digress, I felt I was doing too much of it in that piece. The thing is, in Russia in the time Isaac was still there — I don’t know if it has changed since — Russian Jews, like all Russians, carried internal passports, and theirs invariably declared their Jewishness.

In the days when I was doing a lot of traveling, my best friend in the USSR was Professor Yuli Kagarlitski, a Moscow academic, theater expert and science-fiction fan, the author of the first (and, for a long time, the only) critical work on science fiction published there, Shto Eta Fantastika? (translation: What is Science Fiction?). He showed me his passport, and that’s how he was identified.

Yuli’s wife, and the mother of their son, Boris, was not Jewish, and therefore Yuli, with a certain amount of trouble, managed to get the baby’s passport issued to describe him simply as Russian, in order to make his life a little easier when he grew up. (In the event, Boris didn’t make it all that easy for himself. He got politically active as an opponent of the Soviet system and spent a couple of years in Lefortovo Prison as a result. (But when he got out, the world was changing, he ran for office and, with the help of my manual on the subject, Practical Politics, got elected to the Moscow city council (and how’s that for a digression?).))

But all that’s another story.

Anyway, being Jewish in the big cities was somewhat less troublesome than being Jewish out in the villages, as you know if you’ve ever seen Fiddler on the Roof (and if you haven’t, what’s the matter with you?). And the place where the Asimovs came from was somewhere in between.

* * *

While I’m on the subject of Jewishness, Isaac didn’t practice the religion, didn’t join many Jewish organizations and from time to time collected large tonnages of reproach for not helping to support Jewish causes. I remember one incident he mentioned, all but the name of the other person. (This is a pity, because the name is the point of the story. I’ll have to make one up — say, “Brewster Adamson.”). Anyway, old Brewster very publicly and harshly reproached Isaac for not joining more Jewish organizations and working for more Jewish goals, suggesting that Isaac owed other Jews an apology for turning away from the culture of his people,. Isaac got uncharacteristically angry and, also quite publicly, told the man that “Isaac Asimov” didn’t need to apologize to “Brewster Adamson” for turning his back on his Jewishness.

 
Related posts:

• Isaac
• Isaac, Part 2
• Isaac, Part 3
• Isaac, Part 4
• Isaac, Part 5

    Richard Shelby

Richard Shelby was first elected to the Senate as a Democrat,. Then, in the mid-term elections of 1994, the Republicans won back control of the Senate and Shelby changed his party affiliation to Republican, where it has been ever since.

Senator Shelby boasts that he is a watchful guardian of our country’s defense concerns who can be trusted with the care of them. Recently, however, he was mad at the federal government for some unannounced reason — gossip says it was because he had been denied two porkbarrel “set-asides” in a new bill — so he placed a “blanket hold” on all confirmations of new presidential appointments to federal office. This meant that, for about 70 functions of government, nothing could be done, since no one could be confirmed to do them.

This stopped progress on such defense-related activities as procuring new tanker planes for the Air Force and creating a big new intelligence facility. Because of the outcry that arose concerning this action Shelby quickly rescinded most, but not all, of the holds.

(We should bear in mind, though, that Senator Shelby isn’t the only clown here. There is no law, presidential directive or other enablement which gave Senator Shelby the single-handed power to “hold” back action on presidential appointments. It’s just a custom of the Senate’s. It’s quite likely that if any single Senator had spoken up to oppose it, it would have disappeared.)

All the same, by his act in capriciously and singlehandedly putting a stop to 70 of the functions of the U.S. government with one single blow, Senator Shelby has shown himself to be clown enough to have earned his listing as Senate Clown No. 1.