Ongoing worries and concerns -- and some good trends

With the U.S. restoring itself as trusted leader of the West - also (at last) dealing with internal disasters like decayed infrastructure and inequality (fixes long delayed by the KGB-Foxites) - and especially as our protector castes no longer feel hampered at the top by Kremlin agents...

...we can now expect a series of desperation moves by those who have been waging all-but-open war against us for years, who know that a time of reckoning is coming. With oil prices up in ways that are sure to be temporary, Putin has a window, an opening, to take aggressive actions.

For example, we are seeing his puppet, Lukashenko, use Belarus to hurl innocent refugees at the borders of NATO, chortling as the west is caught between our compassionate laws and instincts, on the one hand, and the hard lesson taught by earlier waves -- that admitting great, bottomless tsunamis only winds up radicalizing European voters, triggering the backlash election of populist fascists who are just like Lukashenko and Putin and cozy up to them.  Short term, reflexive do-gooderism feels righteous but often does more long term harm than good.

Liberals are right to feel desperate discomfort from that irony! They are also fools to ignore what it means... that we cannot do everything at once. (We can help the poor of other nations both with aid and by pulling support from the local oligarchic oppressor classes that our own moguls propped-up, for a century.)

Now comes word that NATO has warned of Russian military buildups next to another victim-neighbor, Ukraine. Trump's betrayal of that brave country is now being corrected, though it will take time. This sets a clock ticking which may cause Vlad to rush his aggressor plans.

== And more evidence that this is war ==

Among ongoing worries and concerns... the mysterious Havana Syndrome: In late 2016, U.S. diplomats in Cuba experienced ongoing neurological symptoms, such as headaches, nausea and hearing loss, accompanied by a piercing, high-pitched sound. In the last five years, such symptoms have since been reported by more than 200 U.S. personnel in places as diverse as Bogota, Guangzhou, Vienna, and Hanoi. 

Is this due to foreign surveillance - or directed energy beams? The New York Times summarizes the range of possibilities: Is the Havana Syndrome an act of war - or mass hysteria? 

== Is transparency an answer to 6000 years of cheating? ==

The Pandora Papers are only #10 or so in a series of data spills that I predicted in The Transparent Society, that will - in agonizing fits and starts - strip away the shadows that aristocrats and oligarchs and kings and commissars have always used to cheat and maintain unfair power. This is why so many pools of oligarchy - from mafias, gambling moguls and "ex"-commissars to murder princes and "murdochs" straignt out of HG Wells - have joined together across the last two decades in a coalition - a putsch - to reinforce their influence and undermine the Enlightenment Experiment. 

Because if this counter trend continues, oligarchy - the great enemy of fair competition and enterprise and justice - might vanish forever.

This is why I feel one Great Treaty must prevail across all nations. (In Existence I refer to it as the Big Deal of the late 20s that forestalls revolution.) 

It would be a Transparent Ownership Treaty.

"If you own it, you must say, publicly: 'I own that!' 

"If not, then you don't." 

No shell corporations more than two deep and all must end in publicly named living persons, or governments, or accountable foundations. 

If this happened, then the world tax base might double, letting honest taxpayers get a rate cut. And the amount of abandoned property might erase all national debts.

== More attmpted, blatant cheats ==

And this....A Pentagon program that delegated management of a huge swath of the Internet to a Florida company in January -- just minutes before D. Trump left office -- has ended as mysteriously as it began, with the Defense Department this week retaking control of 175 million IP addresses.  At its peak, the company, Global Resource Systems, controlled almost 6 percent of a section of the Internet called IPv4. 

'The IP addresses had been under Pentagon control for decades but left unused, despite being potentially worth billions of dollars on the open market. Adding to the mystery, company registration records showed Global Resource Systems at the time was only a few months old, having been established in September 2020, and had no publicly reported federal contracts, no obvious public-facing website and no sign on the shared office space it listed as its physical address in Plantation, Fla.'

Store and use these things to do jiu jitsu on your favority conspiracy theory nut-uncle. Ask em to ask Q about that.

And...   From The Atlantic on the powerful effects of social media networks on democracy: "It's not Misinformation. It's Amplified Propaganda, "Perhaps the best word for this emergent bottom-up dynamic is... ampliganda, the shaping of perception through amplification," writes Renee DiResta.

Can we predict tomorrow's threats? The German Defense Ministry is using SF stories to predict future wars.  Their Project Cassandra has already successfully predicted conflict in Algeria. University researchers would use their expertise to help the German defense ministry predict the future. I participate in similar things in the U.S. each year.

== Possible solutions? ==

See the latest IBM Watson X-Prize winners strategizing how humans can work with AI to tackle future global challenges. 

Scientists are experimenting with methods of lowering temperatures in urban areas. In particular, Phoenix is painting its streets gray, to increase reflectivity and lower surface temperatures.

One scientist is testing metal-eating bacteria - extremophiles - that could clean up contaminants and environmental waste from the mining industry. A French company is using enzymes to recycle single-use plastics. 

And a new, more environmentally sound method for the extraction and separation of rare earth elements, which are critical for technologies used in smart phones and electric batteries. And combine this with ectraction of the raw stuff at geothermal energy plants. A win-win-win?

Climate TRACE is tracking global atmospheric carbon emissions in real time, offering greater transparency -- and accountability.

A new vaccine for malaria (with modest efficacy) may soon be approved by WHO for children.

Essential to food security, urban farming doesn't have to be horizontal. The 51-story Jian Mu Tower to be built in Shenzhen (pictured to the right) will contain offices, a supermarket and a large-scale farm capable of feeding up to 40,000 people per year.

The U.S. Postal Service is trying out paycheck cashing at some branches - which could change how millions now access money via evil check cashing 'services' and pay bills (often with large fees imposed). 

AOC has pushed one of my own longstanding proposals - that we re-establish the postal saving bank that cheat cabals tore down in the 1960s, that would give the poor at least minimal services and would help them to stop being poor.