The Way the Future Blogs

Stanislaw Lem

The late great Stanislaw Lem has such a towering reputation for social criticism that we forget that, for most of his career, he had to be extraordinarily careful about how he used it. If he got too comical about the wrong people, his career could easily have come to a quick end in the gulag.

All the same, he couldn’t help himself. In the 1940s, while Lem was still a medical student, he found Josef Stalin too tempting a target to ignore and wrote a satirical opera about (says the “Feedback” columnist in the 18 December 2008 issue of New Scientist) a Soviet secret policeman and the “superhumanly intelligent and inhumanly smiling Josef Stalin.” Then, having written it, he did what any sensible person of that time and place would do. He hid it where it would never be found.

Only that was then. But this is now, and now it has been found — at last, after sixty years of dogged searching. Which American publisher is going to be the first one to translate it into English and publish it for me to read?

Vincent Bugliosi, who put Charles Manson away, is probably the world’s most successful prosecuting attorney. He knows all about bringing a charge of murder and getting a conviction, and in this book he argues that George W. Bush, along with Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice and perhaps other members of the Bush administration are guilty of the crimes of murder and conspiracy to commit murder under the laws of the U.S.A. He describes how he could prosecute them if he had standing to bring an action, and points out that any district attorney in any state or county from which any soldier was shipped to Iraq and was killed there does have standing. Moreover, any one of them can bring an action at any time since there is no statute of limitations on murder.

Now, do you think there is any chance that any one of these sworn law enforcers will actually issue an arrest warrant and have the cops haul one or more of these malefactors in for the customary fingerprinting, mug shots and residence in a cell?

I don’t. And that makes me wonder what kind of a country we’re living in.

Vocabulary question: When your weird Uncle Mortimer left you all that money, the tax people who work for your other uncle — for Uncle Sam, that is — took part of it back. What is the name of the tax that gave them the right to do that?

Answer: It’s called an “inheritance tax.” If you said “estate tax” you would also be right. However, if you said “death tax,” you would not only be wrong but you would have fallen (I learned from reading the 21 May issue of the New York Times Magazine) for one of the sneaky tricks of a man named Frank Luntz who works for the Republican Party (and other right-wing bodies). What does Luntz do for them? He thinks up emotionally loaded names for things that they want people to have an emotional reaction to.

Take for instance President Obama’s health-care program. That’s a perfectly descriptive name for a specific plan, but it’s not how Luntz wants you to think of it. He prefers that you call it “a Washington takeover.”

That’s not one of his most ingenious creations, because it’s based on an outright lie: there’s no “takeover” in the President’s plan. The consumer keeps all his freedom of choice. He simply has more options to choose from.

But actually Luntz can get people to change how they feel — and vote — without even having to lie. Do the oil companies to want to make voters feel more kindly about despoiling an environment? Don’t call it “drilling for oil” any more. Call it just “energy exploration.”

If you want to see how this relabeling works in action, just turn on the Fox news channel for a while, or listen to a panel of Republican senators discussing world events.

If there was one program that every single human being alive would benefit from, it is the identification and control of N.E.O.s — Near Earth Objects — which is to say some wandering asteroid or comet core that sets its sights on this nice planet we live on. The thing is that if one turned up in our telescopes now, say one the size of the Chicxulub one that did the dinosaurs in, there’s nothing much we could do about it beyond waving “bye bye.”

This is not to say that we can do nothing at all. Au contraire. It’s just that we have no capacity to do anything about it right now. In the future, assuming we started preparing for action now, we could do a hell of a lot — starting, say, with a systematic scan of N.E.O.s to identify which are threats (this has already begun, and in fact has routinely picked out the ones that come closest to Earth — although, annoyingly, it hasn’t identified most of them until they have already passed us by. This is not a situation that is useful to us). But if we achieved earlier identification, why then, we could even design and build a fleet of space tugs to change the orbits of threatening N.E.O.s from collision to miss.

These are not trivial chores. Put them together just that far and you’ve already run up a total bill that probably exceeds the tab for the total present world space program, by how much I don’t know.

But that’s only the beginning. If we successfully carried out such a program, it might save us from an abrupt extinction. But here we’re only talking about something that would wipe out a majority of life on the planet itself. What about something smaller, say a Tunguska collision that would wipe out a single city? The actual Tunguska Event (on June 30, 1908) didn’t wipe out a city. It didn’t wipe out anything but a few thousand acres of uninhabited Siberian forest, because that’s where it chanced to land.

It didn’t have to be that harmless . Since the location of such an impact point is essentially random, it could just as easily have landed on Times Square, which would have meant the instant annihilation of the entire city of New York.

Does that make you think of anything, well, scary? Because it does me. And I’m fairly sure that there are a lot of people in this world who would consider it greatly interesting, to use your space tug, in a different manner.

One way you could make an N.E.O. miss a city and instead fall into the sea (which raises its own problems of tsunamis and so on, but never mind that for now) is to fly up to it in your space tug and push it into a slightly different orbit.

No problem?

Well, not exactly no problem at all. There are certain quite problematical theoretical possibilities.

Suppose the pilot of your space tug was, well, Iranian. And suppose he was an enthusiastic believer in the rightness of his president’s views on Israel, and why wouldn’t it be just as easy to dump that N.E.O. right on top of, say, Tel Aviv?

Re-orbiting N.E.O.s, as we have described, might someday save us all from extinction. But another way to look at it is that it could become the deadliest weapon that this endlessly inventive species of ours has ever devised.

 
Still, we don’t really have to worry about that as a real possibility, do we?

I mean, the world’s astronauts and cosmonauts are all sane, calm human beings who would never allow themselves to be distracted from their duties by any other consideration. Trust me on this. The people in the International Space Station are not harmed in their duties by extraneous forces.

Still, if you’ve been troubled by these stories of discord on the space station that have been coming to us now and then, calm yourself. Yes, the Russians once stopped the Americans from using their toilets. The Americans then retaliated by ejecting Russians from the American gym. And measures involving food, water and even air were then threatened.

But all is well. Relax. Have a good night’s sleep.

  Dick Cheney

I was never a fan of Dick Cheney, but since he has been out of office he seems to have got even worse. Some of the things he says simply can’t be defended.

In just one example, he says that the blame for al Qaeda’s bloody and brutal destruction of the World Trade Center and the death of the thousands of people it murdered belongs to one man alone, namely Dick Clarke, because Clarke had the responsibility for warning President Bush in such matters and failed to do as he was sworn to do.

But that is not simply untrue, it is the opposite of true. On several occasions Clarke sent clear and unambiguous written warnings, one of them just days before the actual attack and they were ignored. That is a matter of public record.

So there are only two possibilities. Either Cheney is flat-out lying though aware that his lies can be proven on him, or he has simply lost touch with the real world.

Either way, whatever he says, he is not to be believed.

Lefty, the Cat

Turns out that cats, like people, have handedness. Females are more likely to be southpaws, males righties, but it can go either way. If you want to know the leanings of the Felis domestica in your house watch it the next time it has a one-paw job to do, like fishing something out of a jar,

 
You’re Never Too Poor to Swindle

The bloodsuckers are up and about and their specialty now is seeking out the people who are already in terrible financial shape, to whom they promise help. Which, of course, they don’t deliver, preferring to vacuum out and appropriate whatever crumbs of cash the impoverished may have left. (Bernie Madoff was a great villain, but at least he stole from the rich.) So I went back through my files and came up with “Financial traps are flourishing: Tough times have bred five costly come-ons” in the March ’09 Consumer Reports. So if you, or someone you know, has been hit with threats of foreclosure or evaporation of your 401K or the like, you should take a look at it.

I’ll give you just one example. If all your credit cards had been taken away and nobody would give you a new one, Continental Finance Classic MasterCard was more obliging. You probably don’t want its help, though. The maximum chargeable credit line was $300, and by the time the customer got the card $250 had already been taken out of your balance to pay for the account processing fee: $50, and annual membership fee, $200. The $50 of credit that was left you could use as you liked, bearing in mind that an account management fee would have had to be paid every month, with other fees coming due later. So beware!

So long, Fertile Crescent

The Fertile Crescent, which is the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, is the place in the Middle East where our planet’s civilizations were born. It was the home of the world’s greatest early cities — Sumer, Ur, Babylon and more — and it fed them from its rich and well watered soil; it is where many of the stories in the Bible took place and where they invented beer.

It is projected to become a full-fledged desert by the end of this century. There’s a brutal drought going on in the region, but the real enemy is dams — the big ones Turkey has erected along the Euphrates and the ones Iran has installed along the tributaries of the Tigris. Both countries have indicated they’ll go right on building them. Already some of the smaller rivers are running dry.

 
The Bush-Cheney Alumni Association

No, we didn’t make that up. It’s real. It’s what it says it is, an association of the people who were most closely connected with President Bush and Vice President Cheney over the last eight years, and its purpose, they say, is “dedicated to setting the record straight.”

Maybe so, but I can’t help thinking it’s more like getting their stories together so they’re all giving the same answers to the hard questions. Questions like: When you had the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden and all of Al Qaeda licked and running and it only took one more push to put them away for good, why did you pull the troops out to invade Iraq? And when you did go ahead and invade, why didn’t you immediately seize all the Iraqi explosives and weaponry instead of leaving them unguarded for the terrorists to steal and kill American soldiers with, as they’ve been doing ever since? And about forty other questions about the doings of the most wrong-headed administration this country has seen, ever.

Related post: Little Known Fun Facts

IQ, Do U?

Lewis Terman

Remember the Terman kids? The high-IQ teenagers Lewis Terman collected in the 1920s to follow through their adult lives to see whether getting high marks on the test (their average IQ was 150) really did mean intellectual success as a grownup? In the end, two of his candidates wound up as Nobel laureates, but they didn’t show up on his results. Terman had dropped them from his study. Their IQs weren’t high enough.

 
If It Hurts, Talk Dirty

Psychologist Richard Stephens (UK’s Keele University), working with volunteers, applied pain stimuli to them and told them their audible response would be recorded. He instructed some, randomly selected, to avoid bad language while the rest were permitted to let the censorable words rip. On analysis of the results, the foul-mouthed sufferers turned out to be able to handle pain better than the prissy ones.

 
‘Stocks That Win If the Health Protestors Win’

That was a headline on Fox for one of its financial-advice guys the other day — for which I have to say:

Thank you, Fox! You’ve finally come clean! As was true all along. those “spontaneous” demonstrations of screaming or bellowing demonstrators, which have made it just about impossible to have a meaningful public discussion — the ones that you and all the other right-wing wheeler-dealers have been so assiduously nursing along — have just one real purpose: to prevent the passing of laws that would threaten the exorbitant profits of the giant so-called “health” providers.

Related post: More Little Known Fun Facts

Walter Schneir

Admit it, you have no idea who Walter Schneir (who died of thyroid cancer at the age of 83 on 11 April) was. I’ll never forget him, though.

In 1965, along with his wife. Miriam, he had published a Doubleday book, Invitation to an Inquest, about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the New York couple who had been tried as spies who had given atomic-bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, convicted and executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing. The book, which argued that the Rosenbergs hadn’t received a fair trial and might well have been innocent of the charges, came to the attention of Long John Nebel, who ran an all-night radio talk show in New York.

He invited the Schneirs to appear on his show, along with Roy Cohn, the former McCarthy aide who had been involved in the Rosenberg prosecution, and me. (Why me? Because I was a pretty good talker and rarely turned John down when he asked … and because I loathed Roy Cohn for what he had done as Senator Joe McCarthy’s pit bull and couldn’t resist the chance to meet him in person. It was that sort of attitude that put me in front of John’s microphones dozens of times when I would have been better advised to stay home and get a good night’s sleep.)

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

After forty-odd years, the only clear memory I have of Cohn is as a very efficient killing machine. He never sat still and he never stopped talking.

The Schneirs had done an admirable job of collecting evidence that the Rosenbergs had not received a fair trial in many ways: The judge allowed the prosecution improper liberties; their defense attorney had no experience in that sort of case; witnesses changed their stories on crucial elements; worst of all, the case against Ethel Rosenberg in particular rested on the unsupported testimony of just one witness, her brother, David Greenglass. (Who much later confessed to writer Sam Roberts that he had given false testimony, as told in Roberts’ book The Brother.)

All those things and more the Schneirs said into Long John’s mikes, but how much the radio audience heard I cannot say. Cohn talked right over them, never stopping, never conceding a point. So a lot of people — everyone from Bertrand Russell and the Pope to Pablo Picasso — thought the Rosenberg trial was unfair? So what? Those people hadn’t been in the courtroom, and the verdict was in.

On the other hand (you might ask), what about me? I had been in that studio all the long night, listening to every word that had been said, and what did I think?

Why, I thought they were not guilty and should have been acquitted. And the other thing I thought was that they should have been shipped off to Moscow on the next plane to spend the rest of their lives there.
 

Sen. Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn

The thing about Julius Rosenberg was that he was a true believer. All the things he said to intimate friends that he thought were private (and that those friends then testified to as prosecution witnesses at the trial) and every defiant thing he had said to the court and to lawyers and reporters when the verdict was in showed it. He thought America was evil and the USSR was the hope of mankind. Given any chance to help them triumph over us, he would have been false to his core beliefs if he hadn’t seized it.

I didn’t actually think he had ever had such a chance, though. I didn’t think he knew enough to be able to steal any useful atomic secrets to betray. I thought he was all talk. And in that I was at least partly wrong.

When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, a lot of ultra-top-secret KGB documents fell into American hands and some of them do specifically name Julius Rosenberg as an agent of espionage for them. They don’t say that his spying was of any value. They don’t come anywhere close to saying that anything Rosenberg did was of the slightest use to any Russian arms designer. But it does show that, against the odds, Rosenberg did somehow make contact with the Russian spy network, and they took him at least seriously enough to record his availability.

And wonders will never cease.