Category Archives: Important Ideas

My 2019 Scifi Novel Coming True in the South China Sea?

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Created February 7, 2021

Let’s hope not. PANDEMONIUM: LIVE TO ALL DEVICES depicts one of the downside scenarios. It’s our job to steer into one of the upside scenarios.

My career-long friend Norm Hecht just sent me this news story about China creating new laws making it legal for her to fire on foreign vessels in waters where ownership is disputed. And then sending Chinese Coast Guard ships close to what Japan considers a couple of its islands, earlier today February 6, 2021.

Here’s an excerpt from my fictional story, intended to anticipate some of what is really bound to happen, based on how the chips are stacked:

When the Chinese president awoke the next day, he announced to the world, on television and handhelds, the exact GPS coordinates of the South China Sea as defined by China, “which has always been the property of China, and for too long we have been taken advantage of.” He told the world that non‐Chinese ships would need to go around this piece of sea or be boarded and inspected, on threat of lethal force. “If a war erupts in that location, China will limit itself to these GPS coordinates and not escalate the fighting to outside that war zone.”

* * *

President Snike did not hesitate to send a pweet deriding that announcement. “If China wants a rumble in their neighborhood, we’re up for it,” he wrote. Separately he ordered two more carrier groups to move toward the area. In the fleet with the George Washington steaming into the South China Sea, all were at battle stations.

The Marxist superpowers from 1945 onward made it a practice to test the resolve of each new US president by seeing what they could get away with. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the test the world remembers best.

Unlike my fictional US president Norfal Snike, our real President Joe Biden will undoubtedly take a firm stand without raising the temperature.

As I’ve written before, the best diplomacy nowadays would be to spell out the scenario options and agree on the ones closest to win/win that we can get.

We’re all in this together, and we all have to unite against the forces that threaten us all equally, pandemics, environment, hatred, greed, unemployment, inequality, injustice, debt…

And as we learn to work together to overcome the common threats, we can join together to take advantage of the common opportunities, including a better life for all, technology, space travel, human potential, and the scientific quest for true enlightenment – knowing everything there is to know about reality. Including materialist science, but not limited by its assumptions, e.g. that consciousness could not exist without matter.

But first, much closer at hand, we have to put away the old ways, substituting better ways to do international diplomacy and everything else.

We really don’t have much choice.

We can do it.

Best to all,

Bill

 

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village. Here is the link to my latest post.

What Is Fairness Among Nations?

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Created February 2nd, 2021

Part of why Russia and China are perpetually mad at us is that we have continuously called them out for doing things we don’t approve of. We have identified the cause of what we see as their bad behavior as being the fact that they are not democracies in the sense of free speech, etc. There is of course a goodly degree of truth to that; however, even if they were to do their best to mimic our kind of democracy, their root cultures going back thousands of years might still interpret democracy in a more top-down way than our ideals ask for.

And of course, the envious nations we have lectured in the past revel in how we have been self-exposed to be just as low as they were when we criticized them!

Let’s look at Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping and put ourselves in their shoes. What would you do if you ran Russia or China? How would you play their hand? Leave aside what you have read or heard about the two people in those shoes, look at it only from the point of view of the position, of the responsibility you have.

At the end of WWII the USA had half the world market economically, was the only nation on Earth with atomic weapons, and was actively helping other nations to rebuild. Russia and China had been allies in that war but very soon after it was over it became clear that there was now a new strife, a war of ideologies. The USA was clear and outspoken in favor of democracy, liberty, equality, justice for all, and against Communism. America had been against Communism long before WWII. So on the gameboard of RISK the two largest Marxist nations and the US were on a collision course. That was 76 years ago.

Over those 76 years the US has shaken its right forefinger at those two proud nations and its leaders almost ever day of every year one way or another. It’s one of the ongoing themes covered by the news.

Then mirabile dictu! By some nasty miracle those damn Americans had been right all along about Capitalism. That sort of sets you up, if you are one of those two world leaders, to have a chip on your shoulder about those damn yankees, certain of whose main ways had been so proven to be right, one just had to eat humble pie, give up and join in with them as capitalists.

The background of emnity doesn’t have to always be that way. It’s understandable that it’s where we find ourselves now. But no need to continue in the same manner. We have options. All sorts of options. Let’s evaluate all of them. Meanwhile, back to the game: you are Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping. How do you play the hand you’ve been dealt?

Leaving aside the chip on the shoulder, even if you were to start with a fresh slate, you need to grow your nation economically and technologically and assure a better life for as many of your citizens as possible. While of course yourself continuing to enjoy all the things you like best.

You don’t necessarily want war. War even in a limited war zone scenario is terribly costly. It could nowadays all too easily go all the way. The Trump years demonstrated that civilization is a tenth of an inch veneer you could almost scratch off with a fingernail.

You definitely don’t want any more insults from the Americans or anyone else. You want to be respected.

It would be far more convenient from a security standpoint to be able to control the fringes of your empire, although this is looking like the thing that could set off the tinderbox.

During the past 76 years part of the game is to see what you can get away with, to test each new US president. As I allow the reader to take control of these two world leaders in this mind experiment, the testing process is taking place around the South China Sea especially Taiwan (predicted in my 2019 anticipatory novel PANDEMONIUM: LIVE TO ALL DEVICES).

In Russia’s case that would include places like the Ukraine etc. where there are recent reasons to be mad at the Americans.

If you are now temporarily living through Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping, you are thinking about how do you balance your objectives of economic growth and consolidating your empires? If you can convince yourself to live with the geographic borders as they are for this decade anyway, you could focus on economic growth. If America stops talking down to you maybe the trade deals could be worked out that would blow the doors off the Russian economy. Allow technological development at the highest levels ever conceived. Possibly the former USSR states would clamor back to the closest ties with Russia ever.

Same story for China. If focus on improving domestic economies and happiness is allowed, by retracting game pawns from the borders, China is already predicted to becoming the next USA in terms of largest economy. By trade benefits China could then bloodlessly get the consolidation feeling it wants. Just a matter of patience.

This would point to a 20s of world boom and peace. My recommendation is that the USA starts from this thinking in reapproaching the other world leaders.

There is no question about the need for firmness and straight-out honesty about no more cyber and psychological cold war mischief. That is table stakes.

Beyond that and other military testing adventures going away, the US can pledge to stop telling them how to behave, while the US focuses instead on returning to be a good role model in terms of its own behavior, which comes down to a pledge of that kind by each of us Americans individually.

We can work out what is a win/win/win for all of us, and make that boom a reality.

Once the engine is running, no one will want to throw a shoe in the machinery, so the ultrasecret bad stuff will even be shut down then. No Russian or Chinese person of importance will want to risk being cancelled for having been caught in the cookie jar. Same goes for us and every country. Once we are in happy boom mode, the impetus to do negative things will evaporate.

But first we’ve got to get there.

To be clear, I’m recommending that:

(a) Daily we remember to always put ourself in the other person’s shoes before speaking or writing about, or to him or her.

(b) Our State Department take on this mantle of explicitly and forthrightly reframing the 76-years-old-time-to-go mindspace in all talks and communiques with the foreign leaders. Showing them our win/win/win scenario and promising to uphold it without sneaky tricks for as long as they do. And of course keeping our promises.

This means giving up the idea that we are destined to force the whole world to adopt the American system of democracy. Let them devise their own ways of living in their own countries. Help wherever we can anyone whom we feel is being given a raw deal but do so within the rules of conduct among sovereign nations. Offer economic and technological incentives where the opportunity arises that result in a higher quality of life everywhere and for everyone on Earth, especially once our own citizens are in their own homes and able to survive without fear, balancing care at home and abroad based on majority voting. No longer project that we know best and are better than everyone else. As much fun as it has been especially in novels since the OSS and Otto Skorzeny co-invented the modern paramilitary, we hope that we keep ours strong and make it stronger, but don’t have to use it aggressively as much in the coming boom times of world equilibrium and American Unity.

“The past was about domination. The future is about liberation.”

—Harvey Kraft, Digitalism

“You better free your mind instead.”

—The Beatles, Revolution

We can do it.

All my best,

Bill

We Can and Must Legislate Ethics

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Created January 28th, 2021

The U.S. Congress acts as if ethics issues ought to be dealt with only by means of establishing norms via “ethics pledges”. These are promises, not legally binding. Why would we want issues of ethics to be based on promises? Obviously, anyone whose ethics is awry is going to make false promises.

Ethics is not just underperforming its role in government, it’s everywhere.

The 600+ U.S. billionaires gaining $1.1 trillion during Covid is emblematic. In an ethical society, a day or two would go by and the parties involved would do the right thing.

That seems like a joke today. But that’s just because of how jaded and accepting we have all become as we slid down from civility to emotional anarchy.

United. The United States of America.

We ain’t gonna get back there without reset of ethics for all of us.

It’s so simple, we were told about being Good all the years of growing up, all we have to do now, is to be it.

In ancient Greece, there was a saying: “All the Hellenes (Greeks) know what is right, but only the Spartans do it.”

They knew 2000 years ago the right way to be, and they knew it could be achieved by a nation. The Spartans were living sinless lives to a degree which seemed impossible to the rest of the country.

If the Spartans could do it 2000 years ago without all the advances since then, we can do it now, and prove it in the next four years.

Ethics is the center of this storm.

Ethics is a branch of Philosophy.

It’s unfortunate that we’re not a philosophical society today here in the U.S. or in most other places, such as, for example, the ancient Jewish, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Iranian, Arab and Roman societies, or the society of the West as it was during the early Christian Era and during the Renaissance and its later scientific Enlightenment phase.

Philosophy dropped off the map in the 20th Century as the materialist wing of science essentially took over science. The great master physicists were all old school and open to the idea of God or the equivalent, but the mass of scientists, employed mostly by military and industry (not that there’s anything wrong with that), leaned all the way over to asserting the non-existence of God, and that made quite an impression in that Century, given as that science was the miracle-doer now. The mob always follows the miracles, as Jesus taught.

We need to bring philosophy back.

This is a piece of what is really needed which is to actually have a retraining of all of us.

We need videos and articles online and in all media which train us in philosophy, values, ethics. We must have foundations. Trying to teach ethics before teaching self-knowledge is trying to build a house starting from the second floor. We need more philosophical programming and content on television and online. Some can be funny, some can be fiction or docudrama, interview, interactive, reality news, let a thousand flowers bloom.

In the immediate short term, the congress should set a good example by first setting laws governing its own ethics, and then a law on citizen ethics. It cannot imperil the Constitution nor individual freedom, except insofar as psychological or physical harm must not be allowed one person to another. The laws as they stand allow bullying and worse. A lot of the insurrectionists are not being charged because “they weren’t bad enough”. Under a new Citizen Ethics Act they would all be charged.

America must decide where the lines ought righteously to be drawn.

The tide of new legislation needed should make congress happy and excited.

The best course to American success is to forget about party.

Let it exist in the background. Start each meeting with a fresh slate, no going in agenda. Learn, think, discuss, and reach consensus, then move on.

Congress is going to have to step up production. We are re-starting everything, without changing the Constitution. Without selling out the Founders, and Lincoln. But otherwise it’s a fresh start. That last movie was no good, don’t want any more of that, change the channel for good.

Filibusters are a great drag on production. Moving more slowly back to being a peaceful, cooperative, polite, friendly society is going to require a number of important new laws. The world is at stake. The world has never been so imperiled before. It would be mass insanity to tolerate delays in setting things straight because of last-movie’s party game.

Congress please produce the best laws possible but do not make unnecessary delays. Everyone is listening in and watching so we can all yell hurry up if we have to. When we hear the same thing said and no more new things being said, we are going to call an audible.

Thank you Congress!

Best to us all,

Bill

 

Follow my regular media blog, In Terms of ROI at Media Village. Here is the link to my latest post.

To the People of the World

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Created November 13, 2020

I am an American. I also consider myself a citizen of Earth, and a member of the Human Race club.

From my point of view, we have been spending too much time competing for political power to get done any of the immense things that we HAVE TO get done.

And then when somebody wins power, the other major party blocks getting anything done.

And the voters then seem to forget who actually tried to get something done, and who spent all their time blocking it.

This might not be worth discussing if everything was going to take care of itself because we are already in utopia.

However, there are not one but six tidal wave problems coming at us from all directions which all of us have to solve together, one way or another, with or without cooperating with each other, or we won’t be around anymore. They are also getting worse the longer we fool around. And we make each one of them worse by refusing to cooperate with each other.

  1. Pandemic
  2. American Schism
  3. World Debt
  4. Environment (and future pandemics if deforestation continues)
  5. International Envy
  6. Half of us might not find work (robotics)

We’ve seen from the pandemic that it doesn’t work as well when each State comes up with its own way of doing things. The bigger the problem, the more important wide scale cooperation is.

I recommend that the next time you read about any politician making a statement about anything other than one of these six problems, you ignore it, and let them know where you want them to refocus their attention.

Please let me know if my list is too short.

For manageability I grouped related challenges together, for example racial/ethnic/gender/all-inclusive equality is really at the core of problem #2.

“International Envy” groups together the threats from other nations, terrorist organizations, and all of the vendettas lingering from the distant and/or recent past.

It is easy to predict that we will be more efficient and faster about turning the tide on these threats the more we can work together.

I recommend the next time you read about any politician making a negative statement about anybody, you ignore it, and let them know where you want them to put their energies instead of this endless backbiting.

I recommend that you stop sending and mentioning in social media or in any venue “the backbiting channel” which has become the top-rated audience draw of all time. The computers will notice that and stop depending on it for the maximum audience draw that it has recently become.

I predict you will also, then, sleep better.

There are ways we can use our wonderful media to share constructive innovative ideas with one another. What we really need is for officials to start to practice the modes of creativity and to use each other’s ideas without caring about who gets the credit so much. I depict such media being used in a crisis similar to ours in a science fiction novel PANDEMONIUM: Live To All Devices (hope you will read the free sample available through the link).

Some time ago, two U.S. presidents and two dozen other well-known top US officials responded supportively to my idea that INDIVIDUALIZED EDUCATION can channel people into the specializations that perfectly match their inner purpose and skills, with corporations and work study programs meshing with the process from the earliest grades. Recently a friend in Germany told me that those ideas had taken hold over there.

Adults also need individualized education now if they are out of regular school but also out of regular work – or want to be in a different field.

We seem to have a ready workforce of life coaches who could be organized to help those out of school for whom life is not working out as joyfully as it could be if they were doing work that they loved. They would then be more likely to get into Flow state, where they could make more money, but even without the money would at least be doing what they were born to be good at.

Once totally successful, welfare and other transfer payments would dwindle to virtually nothingness. Individualized Education is the kind of work we ought to be doing in the 21st Century.

That’s only one innovative approach worth exploring and work on from both sides of the aisle together. There will be a panoply of exciting new ideas unleashed from the combination of crowdsourcing and a nonpartisan lens.

Let’s make political parties invisible for a while, can we?

When Japan was in the process of taking over China, with one city falling after the next, even more than US aid the ability of the Chinese Civil War combatants to temporarily unite was what pushed Japan off the mainland.

Can you imagine what will happen if we don’t stop it now and return to the normal we were used to for 200 years? We could be fighting WWIII in the streets and on the hills of America, first with each other, and then when other countries come over to help one side, it will be like the early days of America when Brits, French, Germans, and others were here fighting, except it’s more likely to be other superpowers and rogue nations. That’s the current direction we are pushing ourselves in by dividing the house so that it cannot stand.

Proof or not, the unbelievable intensity and extremity of it makes it hard to believe that a lot of it is not being caused by foreign powers.

Each of us can’t expect other people to take this advice while each of us keep dishing the dirt. We have to change ourselves first. Friends will read our silences or hear our remarks and understand that we have dropped out of the cycle of hate. The more of us do that, the more of them will do it, until there is no more them.

There never was a Them, it’s always been just US.

May The Center Hold,

God Bless America and each of you,

Bill

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