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This is a reminder. Please point your browser to longgame.org to see all the newest stuff. This particular blog hasn’t been updated in some time, but over there, a ton more has been written.

Long Game is Relaunched

Just a heads’ up. If you’re still getting my posts from this feed, you need to update it.

Here is the official feedburner feed.

Be sure to check out the revised site at longgame.org as well. I’ve got a lot of plans to make it more of a research panel for looking at the issues I write about.

The choices we don’t have

We like to think that we’re masters of our own world, but we aren’t. So much is out of our control. It’s the main reason I’ve developed more of a bleeding heart.

Factors

No matter what the Randroids think, humans aren’t born with a tabula rasa. We enter this world with certain qualities bestowed upon us. Just a few of these are:

1. Genetics
2. Cultural heritage
3. Language
4. Geographic location
5. Access to emerging technologies

I am an English speaking (#3) 3rd generation(#2) American (#4) born to relatively healthy parents (#1) and have competence with computers (#5). I had no control over any of that.

Lucky ducks

This is not to belittle myself or my family, but just a matter of perspective. If we’re relatively safe, healthy, and free, it isn’t because of our innate goodness. We got kind of lucky.

And it’s not to say that we can’t make our lives better or worse depending upon our actions. But world is big and has a momentum of its own. Our options aren’t as wide-ranging as we think.

A Missing Island

Late last week, I came upon an AP article about how an island that India and Bangladesh have been fighting over has disappeared.

New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said.

“What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming,” said Hazra.

This story is a perfect combination of politics, geography, and climate change. In the years to come, we’ll be dealing with more issues like this. Humans just love the coast and, just as in past times, some of our coastal property will become less than pleasant.

Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation of 150 million people, is one of the countries worst-affected by global warming. Officials estimate 18 percent of Bangladesh’s coastal area will be underwater and 20 million people will be displaced if sea levels rise 1 meter (3.3 feet) by 2050 as projected by some climate models.

Health Care Reform: A Counterfactual

In all the smugness and anger surrounding the health care debate, it’s worth considering what might have happened if history were slightly different. All the talk of core American values and Battles Against Socialism is just standard media-baiting fare. The reality is that pressure to repair the American health insurance system has been building for years.

Under a President McCain

Under a President McCain, it would be a different assortment of white people signing a different bill. But the broad outlines would be the same.

I’m going to pretend McCain was elected in the last contest, but superimpose it over now. This is the broadest of overviews. The nuts and bolts of the health care debate still eludes my long-term memory, but I can imagine what the political puppet-show might have looked like.

Emboldened by a continuance of control over the White House , Republicans bill themselves as the party of solutions. McCain would present himself as bi-partisan and willing to compromise. Extreme right-wing resistance would lose its steam as more moderate elements seek a bill that reflects their values.

With regard to the provisions, it would be be weaker and probably not address the systemic problems we’re facing. Whatever benefits they can thrown at the elderly and toward their base, will be included. The Democrats would stubbornly negotiate for their concerns, but there would be a compromise of a fashion.

Then, as now, something will be seen as better than nothing. The difference, though, would be that both parties could claim credit.

In the worst case, if Republicans didn’t have the support that they needed, they’d pass it through reconciliation. The difference is that it would be uncontroversial.

Build Your Own Memories

What’s striking to me is that how we remember these events is strongly influenced by factors that have nothing to do with the thing itself and everything to do with how the thing feels. All this right-wing talk about protecting free market principles is a recurring lie.

When a Democrat lives in the White House, the same thing happens every time. Republicans have a jail-cell conversion, remember all that old stuff about limited governance, then start taking Libertarians onto news-talk shows. Then the seconds Republicans gain enough leverage to steer matters themselves, they get sudden and explosive amnesia.

Revisionist History

When I hear the term “revisionist history” in hushed, dangerous tones, I laugh to myself. All history is revisionist. Each generation – and each faction within that generation – has their own take on what came before. There is no font of pure history to hold a bucket under.

Admitting that simple fact would be an intellectually honest way to start the discussion of policy, but it would reveal too much about our uncomfortable selves. Instead, we opt for hallucination. It feels more comforting, doesn’t tax us terribly much, and leaves us confused at the changing present.

Hack the Planet

Geoengineering is a new scientific buzzword. It’s large-scale tinkering with the ecosystem. Nobody wants to actually do it since… it sounds pretty scary. But concerns about man-made climate change are driving the effort.

Over at Wired Magazine, there’s an excerpt from the new book Hack the Planet by Eli Kintisch. It’s not long, but gets the basic point across well. The narrative goes:

Extending this common trope of American environmentalism to the question of climate engineering would be writer and climate activist Bill McKibben, who views geoengineering as the “junkie logic” of a culture addicted to technological solutions.

In The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, Brand wrote of humanity’s responsibility as Earth’s gardeners and caretakers, “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” Recently he updated his thinking. “Those were innocent times. New situation, new motto: ‘ We are as gods and have to get good at it.’”

The Illusion of Control

Buried in our feelings about this subject is the question of whether we have – and whether we should have – control.

Of course we can’t tame this planet. Not in the next few decades, when we might have to. We may have to try, but attempting to dictate how much solar energy strikes the planet is a dangerous endeavor, perhaps involving just as much chance as our current course. Being forced to geoengineer would be a dismal fate. It would be the solution we deserve, as a friend put it. One finds one’s ten-year-old son smoking a cigarette? Put him in the closet and make him smoke the whole pack.

Succumbing to the illusion of control would mean replacing one burden — navigating the dangers of today’s climate crisis, and overhauling the world’s energy system — with the much more risky burden of revolutionizing our relationship with the sky itself. The illusion of control — “Everthing’s okay, the scientists have fixed the problem” — could engender apathy at a time when we desperately need to stop pouring carbon dioxide into the sky. It could drive nations apart during a planetary emergency, when they most require unity. It might work in unexpected ways or not at all.

It’ll be interesting to see creativity emerge from this line of thinking, but it’s still a disquieting proposition.

Thanks to Discover Blogs for the pointer.

Democratic Accomplishment and Foreign Policy Attention

Since I like to take the long view of things, I don’t spend a lot of time looking at near-term presidential victories. But the weekend’s passage of a comprehensive health-care passage is not without implications. Since everyone else is busy loving or hating the president and the party in power, I’ll leave the rhetorical over-reaction to them. I’m more interested in what passage of the bill means for America’s foreign policy.

StratFor is on top of things with a great Geopolitical Diary entry entitled Obama’s Pending Foreign Policy Agenda (the link contains my highlights). Regardless of our collective feelings about healthcare reform, two things are clear.

1. The Democrats have proven they can actually govern in matters of domestic policy.
2. The Obama Administration can pay more attention to U.S. foreign policy commitments.

The Top Four

StratFor’s prediction for the top four foreign policy challenges (in the near term) is pretty straightforward and reasonable. The relevant excerpts follow (though reading the aforementioned article won’t take long and will give you much more perspective).

China: The recent tensions between the United States and China could possibly flare into a full-blown trade war in the coming months.

Iran: The country that had the most potential to draw the United States into yet another Middle East war during Obama’s first year in office is happy to watch from the sidelines as Israel struggles on the Iranian and Palestinian fronts vis-a-vis the United States.

Israel: The Tuesday meeting scheduled to take place in Washington between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will occur when American-Israeli relations are at one of the lowest points they have been in years, perhaps decades.

Russia: One country that has been delighted to read about the United States’ problems with China and Iran is Russia. It has seized the opportunity to operate in its near abroad and continue upon its mission of resurging into the former Soviet periphery.

Fast Paced, Slow-Motion Change

Pictured: The Future

What continues to fascinate me as I read articles like these is just how slowly the now seems to move. And while the now moves, what we call history is so punctuated. It’s hard for a contemporary American to think that our actions in the Middle East haven’t gone on for an eternity. But no matter how much history seems to move like sludge, there will come a time when we look back on our now and compress everything into a few internal, mental, descriptive sentences.

They will say nothing and yet seem to say everything to our deteriorating memories. Since I’ve started my little pro-am interest in geopolitics, I’ve begun to appreciate that the people behind the scenes are looking into the future in a way that defies our collective cultural definition of ten years as “a long time.”

Russia knows that U.S. commitments in the Middle East will not last much longer, and with the possibility of a more foreign policy-focused American president who can more actively resist Russian advances now on the table, Russia may see a need to speed up the course of events.

Which is exactly the point. All things end. Then we grow older and count the wars we’ve lived through on increasingly numerous fingers. It’s a depressing reality. It’s a testimony not only to our sometimes ugly human nature, but also our inability to grasp when change is happening. It’s tortoise and hare stuff, only the tortoise hasn’t just gained on us, but crawled through our home and raided the kitchen before we even noticed.

Russia: One country that has been delighted to read about the United States’ problems with China and Iran is Russia. It has seized the opportunity to operate in its near abroad and continue upon its mission of resurging into the former Soviet periphery.

A Great Douglas Adams Find

I just made a really cool discovery on TED. It’s an old Douglas Adams lecture at the University of California in 2001. It was filmed shortly before he died. The video quality is lacking, but the talk itself is excellent – a 1.5 hour look at some stuff that interested him. He talks about primates, lizards, long-term history,  torrential rain, and thoughts on the beauty and diversity of life on Earth.

Things I learned from the talk

• Lemurs were once the dominant primate on the planet.
• New Zealand was spawned from gunk under the ocean and not a part of the pre-Australian land mass.
• Life is opportunistic.
• British people actually say the word “tarpaulin” instead of “tarp.”
• Douglas saw a 13-foot long Kimodo Dragon lizard (“fucking huge” is his technical term).
• There’s a flightless bird that doesn’t realize it can’t fly.
• You can just walk over to and pick up a blue-footed booby (bird) with no difficulty. They assume you’ll just put then back when you’re done.
• This is because, prior to man, there were no predators.
• Noise pollution is a big deal if you’re a blind fish that maneuvers via sonar in a river.
• You create your universe based on the sensory data that you take in.
• In a pinch, you can record underwater sounds using a condom stretched over a microphone.
• Acquiring a condom in Shanghai, when you can’t speak the language, is difficult. Also hilarious.
• There is mostly entirely nothing in the universe.
• For the first time, we know how valuable information is.
• Unlike every previous analytical tool, the computer puts things together. We can strain to see processes at work.
• Like the blue-footed booby, the human strategy that has worked up until now may not work for our future.
• Humans look for intention in all things.

I Miss That Guy

Listening to this talk only made me miss Douglas Adams even more. I’m a fan of a few authors, but he’s one that I appreciate more with time. This talk is a prime example. The subject isn’t relevant; he makes talks fun and interesting. He’s another ambassador of wonder at the world around us.

“I Know” vs. “I Don’t Know”

This cat is learning more than you will learn from cable news on any given day.

I’ve figured out another reason why I can’t stomach televised news. There’s something about the format and approach that says to me: “You didn’t know about X when this show began, but by the end of our show, you will know tons more about X.”

I take offense at implicit statements like that. You aren’t going to intuitively grasp foreign and domestic policy directives in 42 minutes. Worse, we’re often taken on an impromptu emotional therapy ride that has nothing to do with factual content.

I’m not just talking about Glenn Beck, either, although he is the best example. Even so, the most pedestrian of newscasts feature press-mold personalities brimming with over-earnestness. They sweep us up in hallucinated fictions that comprise “what we believe.” It’s not like we need newscasters; humans are adept at this by nature.

The point of the newscast is to hook you – to make you feel a bit helpless – and then to return you to “normal” by the end. This should not be confused with education.

Science Reporting

One of the many reasons that science reporting is less than adequate.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in science reporting. If you want to know why your right-leaning family is asking why you don’t think man-made climate change is a myth, look no further than the average science piece in the paper.

Beck and his ilk get a lot of mileage out of misrepresenting science, but he’s not a science reporter. I actually forgive him for having the critical reasoning skills of an uncooked Cornish game hen. His approach, and the heat of his arguments, can be traced to basic scientific illiteracy among the public.

We can get as angry as we want about what batshit crazy thing he said, but he is not responsible for decades of scientific ignorance. He’s a symptom, not the cause.

Robin Hansen published a great article about this basic failure back in February. In the post, he references a piece by Colin Macilwain:

There is a need for dedicated newspaper sections, radio and TV programmes, more akin to existing sports coverage, that can provide detailed, critical assessment of the scientific enterprise for people who really like science.  Reporters and editors could then engage with sets of findings and associated issues of real societal importance in the news pages, asking the hard questions about money, influence and human frailty that much of today’s science journalism sadly ignores.

Robin asks why we got where we are:

First, we are far more suspicious of bids for dominance-status than for prestige-status.  We see politicians and businesses as threatening to dominate us and so we are eager to watch out for illicit power grabs.  In contrast, we see science, arts, literature, etc. as only awarding prestige, not power, and we are less worried about illicit prestige grabs.  We mainly care about prestigious stuff as ways to see who is more impressive, and a tricky “illicit” prestige grab is itself pretty impressive, so little harm done.

Matters of Perspective

The more distant a subject is from our personal experience, the less emotional attachment we have to it. One of the reasons we scream so loudly about politics is that politics affects everyone. It’s not a discussion about the particular merits of one model over another in the field of molecular biology. It’s far closer to us.

Which is especially why I find the “you’ll know lots after we’re done” approach so distasteful. Just because we’re personally affected by something doesn’t mean we’re educated about it.  That closeness quickly stands in the way of understanding precisely because we’re too close to make a reasoned analysis.

Even if we are educated about this or that issue, there’s still the chance that we’ll get it wrong. If you have letters following your name, the risks of hubris increase steadily. You could be like Keith Ablow, the MD that gives credibility to every foreign object flying out of Glenn Beck’s mouth:

“If I seem to say things with certainty, it comes from being able to register underlying truths that I feel very clearly about,” he says. “I don’t accept that these ideas have to be relegated to analysts’ couches or therapists’ basement offices. That’s the stuff of stigma.”

I agree, in the most general sense, with that statement. But someone who can field a stark answer immediately after learning of the existence of a complex problem isn’t telling us the whole story. I might get something of value out of it, but what’s your motivation? Are you sharing because you want to explore an issue, or hand-feed me a conclusion?

And where does this leave me? I don’t have an answer for that. I don’t have an MD and I’m not an expert, whatever that’s supposed to mean. I just know that my opinions won’t be perfectly resolved by the time the end credits run.

Scottish Tidal Power

On the alternative energy front, there’s interesting news from Northern Scotland, where a number of tidal energy platforms are finding investment. Even if you assume that current models of climate change are dead wrong (and I do not), there’s still the simple fact that finite resources run dry eventually. You innovate past them.

Whether oil (mostly) runs out in 200 or 500 years from now is quite irrelevant. It’s going to happen. Alternative energy sources are an opportunity to put our eggs in a few different basket. As I write this, I’m hip deep in the chapters on Nuclear energy in Stewart Brand’s newest book so this news was a well timed discovery.

Click this image to view The Guardian's interactive infographic about modern tidal power collection techniques.

The devices deployed will include the Pelamis “sea snake”, which uses the undulations of the sea surface to generate power, and the SeaGen tidal machine, which looks like an underwater wind turbine. In total, the machines will be able to produce up to 1.2GW of “green” energy, more than Dungeness B nuclear station in Kent.

The narrow sea channel has some of the most powerful currents and tidal surges in the world, with speeds up to 16 knots or 19mph recorded. The area also experiences some of the biggest waves in the UK.

Renewal Isn’t Just for Energy

Large-scale energy projects are often a gamble. You’ll read about them and then discover – years later – that they either failed to get funding, started late, or didn’t start at all. A surprising minority will end ahead of schedule.

In the case of alternative energy projects, the situation seems more temperamental. My read is that American efforts have yet to really begin. Even with the infusion of funds promised by Obama, our commitment to alternative sources is still pretty limp.

In another decade, that could change. America is restless and looks poised to crack and give way to the next chapter in the story of cultural renewal. Or we could panic some more. That’s been working really well.

If that doesn’t pan out, there’s always fusion, right? Oh, wait a minute….

The other alternative sources are limp wristed. Wind farms? Earthbound solar farms? They aren’t going to keep the core machinery of modern civilization chugging along.

Another Poor Sap from the Stupid Ages

My hope is that my grandchildren will look back on the world I inhabited and roll their eyes at how obviously wrong we were.

“Let me get this straight, Grandpa. You all were afraid of a little nuclear radiation, right? But you were dumping tons of cancerous carcinogens into the atmosphere daily? What was that all about?”

I won’t have an answer any better than this: It’s the force of inertia and its among the strongest forces in culture and politics.