Michael Crichton vindicated

Flying is the safest way to travel.

The U.S. environment is cleaner than it's been in more than 100 years, and if we look only at where humans live, it's probably the cleanest it has ever been in the history of America.

The biggest problem with education is parents and their children and no amount of money or education reform can fix that.

Smoking is not as dangerous as you believe.

A strong community that promotes and supports individual engagement is the most effective means of reducing crime.

Political bosses use polls and surveys to control voter turnout.

Driving behavior is the biggest single reason for vehicular accidents. With that, in many places speed limits are taken as advisory because local law enforcement has stopped trying to enforce speed limits; they set up speed traps as sources of revenue, not as deterents.

Stories that No One Knows But Which Are True Nonetheless:

1) Large-scale conversion to Christianity in China is underway. But particularly since it is mostly conversion to brands of evangelical and pentecostal Protestantism with strong links to their equivalents here in the US, the MSM won't touch it. They will ignore it until, given a continuation of present trends, we wake up one morning circa 2030 and realize a) China is up to 33% Christian and b) China's closest ties to North America are in and through places like Colorado Springs and Nashville rather than New York or Los Angeles.

2) Most of the increased rate of infertility in the US is due to complications from greater numbers of sexual partners over the course of a woman's life than from environmental factors or higher age of first attempts at pregnancy. E.g., cumulative fallopian scarring from "minor" STDs is an utterly taboo subject to discuss.

3) The arguments for decentralizing and privatizing security and military activities are now beginning to outweigh the arguments against.

4) The deep, systematic confusion between reality and entertainment. When net-enabled VR (or even RSS feeds directly to the brain) gets going as reality rather than hype, addiction will be a major plague. Of course, Ray Bradbury predicted that in "Farenheit 451" but don't expect media conglomerates to self-criticize what they expect to be a major profit stream for them.

There is a far greater number of people doing good things in the world than there are people doing bad things. Perhaps even just one channel dedicated to the good things people do - every day, biographies of young men and women doing good things for people, being caught doing random acts of kindness for complete strangers.

The Man From K Street:

1) conversion to Christianity in China

Good catch and let me add to that the number of Asian students at elite Colleges and Universities in the US who are involved in Campus Christian missions.

I suspect, but don't know, that "Traditionalism" is more influential in high places in Britain, and perhaps Europe, than Americans or many of the residents themselves realize. Prince Charles, for example, has Traditionalist leanings.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/06/09/do0910.xml

http://www.johnreilly.info/atmw.htm

The high degree of mental retardation among America's young, the actual *inability* of large numbers of children to learn. Linked to lead poisoning? Maybe from cheap Chinese imports?

1. Multitasking, whether at work or home, is inefficient and makes you stupid. One study has shown that continuous distractions from emailing, text messaging, web surfing, television and phone calls causes twice as large a drop in IQ as marijuana smoking.

There is a wonderful article on this by Christine Rosen in the current issue of The New Atlantis, but for the most part the media prefers to keep telling us the fib that "interactive" and "multimedia" activities build brain power rather than reduce it.

2. Related to item 1: The "epidemic" of attention deficit disorder among children is fast spreading among adults, especially young adults. It's sole cause is the home environment that fails to build habits of concentration at a early age. This is simply a species of mental weakness, and the career prospects of most of those who have it are not good.

3. Technology is largely useless in education at the lower grade levels. Schools that boast of computers in every classroom are wasting taxpayer or tuition dollars.

4. There is no such thing as "educational television." Staring into space is better for the mind of a child than even the best television program. By constantly presenting images that change faster than the human eye can even track them, TV inhibits focus. There is some evidence that it inhibits brain development in young children for the same reason. In short, television literally makes you stupid, just like multitasking does.

Genuine friendship is disappearing, especially among married men, often replaced with "networking." A growing number of men now focus entirely on their work and their families.

True.

Sigh.

The Man From K Street
2) Most of the increased rate of infertility in the US is due to complications from greater numbers of sexual partners over the course of a woman's life than from environmental factors or higher age of first attempts at pregnancy. E.g., cumulative fallopian scarring from "minor" STDs is an utterly taboo subject to discuss.

Uh, no. Infertility by age group is holding steady in women, and possibly even decreased somewhat. From 1965 to 1988 it decreased from 11% to 8%! Interesting effect of the 'free love' movement and these STDs that are supported to be reducing fertility.

No, it's male infertility that's increasing, that and the fact that women are having children later in life. There are some STDs that effect male sperm production, like chlamydia, but statistically those should be mere background noise.

3) The arguments for decentralizing and privatizing security and military activities are now beginning to outweigh the arguments against.

And these arguments are?

Oh, and as for the original question. I have some things that actually are true and should be talked about more. (As opposed to many of the things here which are, frankly, guesses and personal anecdotes generalized to social trends.)

The fact that the media had 'military experts' that were on the payroll of the Pentagon, and has yet to talk about this in any way, shape, or form. This is, in a way, a double failure of the media.

Because of monopoly cable and telephony companies, we behind the entire rest of the first world in internet connectivity.

Thanks to our invention of a 'health insurance industry', our health care industry has fallen into possibly non-repairable pieces. Not only is this not mentioned by the media, but every single politician, even the ones asserting they which to fix the health care industry, include in their plans the health insurance industry as part of the solution. This is because they have all been essentially bribed by campaign contributions. (Note, before people get all political on me, I didn't say a thing about how to fix health care. But insurance companies are almost the entire problem in the first place, and hence not likely to be any part of the solution.)

With regard to energy and environmental issues, small efforts by a few specific industries would be much much more useful than large efforts by individuals. Talk to me about compact florescent bulbs after businesses stop causing people to spend two hours idling in rush hour to get to work.

Cars are subsidized much more than mass transit. Gasoline would cause nearly three times as much if it wasn't subsidized, directly, indirectly, and with threat of violence back by military spending. And while gas taxes pay for our roads now, they sure as hell didn't pay for building the billions of dollars worth of roads we laid down to create the system, and it is manifestly stupid to expect mass transit to pay for the original capital investment at the very start. Yet for some reason mass transit has to 'make a profit' or we cut funding for it.

Coal causes cancer. Burning coal causes cancer to people nearby. Mining coal causes cancer in the miners. Mining coal causes cancer in random locations because of the atmospheric release of radon, making operating a coal plant, once you include the mining portion, somewhat more radioactive and much more cancer-causing than operating a nuclear power plant.

All police interrogations are not recorded, and various police departments actively resist voluntarily doing this, and resist laws requiring this, and there is absolutely no possible reason for this except that police want to be able to do things and not get called on them.

When purchasing a house, there is no one on your side, as everyone gets paid only if the sale goes through, except the home inspector, who is picked by the bank and is thus encouraged to find as few problems as possible so he will get hired again by that bank. There is no one with any incentive to point out that there is a granite quarry on the other side of the fence in your backyard (I have actually seen those houses.) or the lot next door is going to end up with the back of a gas station facing you or that your porch is untreated wood which will rot in six years or that the vaulted ceiling in the living room means you will not be able to get it warm in the winter without roasting in all other rooms. I've seen such crappy houses get built and sold.

These are all things people should know, and I've never heard the news media mention them.

The mainstream media ran us into war in Iraq by carrying water for the Bush Administration and its cronies, keeping strongly antiwar voices off the air, and refusing to contest the misleading drivel that was constantly coming from the White House and Capitol Hill.

gregorbo, thank you. I've read some Mcluhan on this, but never those texts. I'll hit Ong for sure.

If you know what your book is going to be called, let me know and I'll make a note on my to-read list.

The arguments for decentralizing and privatizing security and military activities are now beginning to outweigh the arguments against.

Al-Qaeda, Russian bot nets, Chinese hackers. It isn't as much an argument for decentralization as it is an argument against centralization. Small bands of actors will be able to inflict large damage without triggering inter-state conflict; countries that do not have decentralized security will be stuck with the same problem the U.S. has with Al-Qaeda: treat military attacks as a police action or be drawn into a war far larger that you want or need.

Al Gore never said he invented the internet, and nobody batted an eyelash at the interview until the RNC mocked him in a press release over a week later. Then, retroactively, jaws dropped across America.

Computational genomics has already made human differences nearly impossible to obfuscate

I'm not sure either, and it's a field quite close to mine. I think it means that he thinks it will prove the genetic determinisms he likes, and disprove the social and cultural anthropology that he doesn't.

Genomics is the study of genomes, long strings of chemicals (for example A, G, C, T) found in the nuclei of living cells. They encode the inherited physical properties of living organisms. The human genome is about 3 billon base pairs of these chemicals. Put together, they make a pattern that encodes our biological makup.

We have discovered what these actual patterns are in many kinds of organisms (mainly because of computers). However, this doesn't tell us squat until we know what these combinations and sequences mean. Enter "computational" genomics, the deciphering of biology from known genome sequences using computational analysis. We are slowly building massive biological datasets, leading to new biological discovery daily.

The reason for all the gnashing of teeth is that there is no single human genome. Nobody's genome is the same, and if a population has been breeding mostly among themselves for even less than a thousand years, you can see the genetic differences merely by comparing the genomes to each other, and project forward the physical consequences of those genetics. That is, you can eventually figure what genetics cause red hair or blue eyes, intelligence, emotional states, and whatnot. Then we can cross reference this against all the other bell curves datasets out there - say crime rates, IQ, divorce rates, whatever. This is valuable because if you have a particular race with a known skill set (West Africans at sprinting, Chinese at ping pong, Kalenjin at distance running, Jews at chess) you have hints at possible genes to look, and start building your databases accordingly.

This research cannot be stopped. First because it is too valuable to humanity, if only for genetically adverse reactions to drugs, inherited diseases, and whatnot. Secondly, it's too valuable to companies wanting to make money off it. Third, it's bigger than any one government. But we don't want to know the truth, so the knowledge is piling up in research institutes worldwide, rolling forward with little or no public knowledge, and most people have no idea how much is really known.

Jillian, I think it means that he thinks it will prove the genetic determinisms he likes, and disprove the social and cultural anthropology that he doesn't.

Do you realize you're pretty much confessing to zero intellectual honesty with comments like this? Clearly ideology is your game. Best of luck.

The extraordinarily high rate of C-section births and other medical intervention in births in the US.

When my wife was pregnant with our first, we read a bit about this. I don't remember the exact numbers, but the natural occurrence of a medical need requiring special intervention in birth is something like 4-5% worldwide. In most countries, especially Scandinavia, the actual rate of intervention is about that or a little higher. In the US it is 50% or higher. Yet, our rate of infant-death is worse than most other developed countries.

Reasons for it range from Americans wanting the convenience of "scheduling" a birth to a doctor's need to avoid litigation to successful sales jobs by pharmaceutical companies.

As a result, we all pay higher insurance premiums and baby and mother health suffers.