Harlan Ellison in about 1971

In 1971, in college, I heard Harlan Ellison was going to teach a class on how to write science fiction stories. I enrolled, and it turned out the class was to be held once a week at Harlan’s home, “Ellison Wonderland.”

I was told to write a short story and bring it. I did, handed it in and noticed Harlan inspecting it with great satisfaction, as though thinking, “this will do.” I was ecstatic. He liked my story. I felt smug, he held it up to the class and screeched, “This is garbage! This piece of shit isn’t fit to line the bottom of a birdcage! If you ever … EVER turn something like this is again I will beat the fucking shit out of you right here on this living room floor…”

I learned that night if you want to be a writer, you don’t try to impress you relatives or friends.  You try to impress editors. And your competition is not the other students in your class, it’s people like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Alfred Bester (the big sci fi writers of the time).

Harlan turned out to be a great guy. He took me under his pinion, made me feel like an insider, like I could belong. I decided to quit writing, though, until I had something to write about. Which took ten years.

I ran into Harlan again, years later, at a World-Con. I introduced myself and asked if he remembered our class. He groaned, “Oh, Gawd…,” or something, and we agreed that it was a long time ago and time flies. But I was an outsider, again, which was another important lesson in writing.

If you’re gone from the game for too long, you don’t matter anymore.

–  END  –

Tom Hayden

During 1971 to 1972, I attended a liberal arts college inHollywood,CAwhere one of my most interesting classes was called “The Pentagon Papers” and was taught byChicago7 radical, Tom Hayden.

Hayden, famous at that time for creating the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and for organizing the 1968 demonstrations at the DNC in Chicago, was guest teaching at my small school about the real reasons behind the Viet Nam war.

The year before Daniel Ellsberg released a top secret Pentagon study ofU.S.government decision-making regarding the war and it had been published by the New York Times. It proved the politicians knew the war would lead to many more casualties that theU.S.admitted publicly and could never be won. As a New York Times editor wrote, “The Johnson administration had systematically lied … about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.”

Imagine a politician intentionally lying to the American public!

Tom Hayden was a cool guy to hang out with. A group of we students would hang with him in the cafeteria and argue for pacifism. We didn’t realize how he’d been there and done that. Yet he never talked down to us, always respected us, and encouraged us to learn more. He also never tried to ram his points of view into our young brains.

I was disappointed he went into politics. I liked him best as a voice against the Establishment. I suspect he is disappointed in the political system by now, as well.

My copy of The Pentagon Papers from Tom Hayden's Class

–  END  –

Book One is titled Freedom In Crisis and will sell for $4.99. Books 2 through 12 will be published shortly thereafter.

About Mapping Freedom

This is the first in a series of twelve eBooks on a subject called the Science of Freedom.  No society can achieve sustained prosperity or attain freedom or end war until the nature of freedom and society are scientifically understood.

America is a great example of a society failing because its leaders have no scientific understanding of how to manage it.  It’s a country that’s now completely confused.  The politicians in charge – regardless of party affiliation – have no idea how to fix the fundamental problems causing the collapse of the nation because they have no organized insight into how societies function.  It’s not their lack of will or good intentions, they simply don’t know that freedom isn’t a political revolution, at all.  It’s a scientific revolution.

Without science, there is only speculation, mythology, superstition and other antiquated thinking, hardly the building blocks of success.  Thus, when a politician ties to fix a social problem, today – such as border control, rising prices, the spread of terrorism, and so on – it’s like a 14th century craftsman using a hammer and chisel to fix the motherboard in your computer.  It can’t be done.  He may have the best intentions but all that’s going to happen when he whacks the circuit board with his iron hammer is damage to the system.

The purpose of these eBooks is to explain: a) why the old methods of running a society don’t work, and  b) what society needs to do instead.  But before we begin, I want to make an strong statement about what this subject is and what it is not:

This book is about science.

This is not politics.

It is also not a religion.  It is not a new age philosophy.  This course is not about UFOs or conspiracy theories where secret organizations – like the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergs, the Council for Foreign Relations, et all – control the world.

This book is about using scientific reasoning, which is and has always been the great evolutionary advantage of humankind, to understand the nature of society.  Just as we used science to build the industrial age, the electric age, the age of flight, and the digital age, we’re going to use it here to explain how to build the age of freedom.

Let me clarify the difference between science and politics.  Science works like this:

• You observe nature.

• You build an intellectual model that you believe represents how nature acts.

• You test your intellectual model (called a “hypothesis”) using the scientific method.

• You collect the models that pass the rigorous test of the scientific method and discard the ones that don’t.

• You use your successful models to build tools and accomplish goals.

This method was developed during the late renaissance and it created the industrial revolution.  It also created the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement that led directly to the American revolution.

Politics, on the other hand, is a completely different process and is, in fact, the exact opposite of science.  It works like this:

• A person (or a group of people) imagines a model of how they’d like the world to be.

• Using force, and in spite of reality, they try to change the world to fit the model they have imagined in their minds.

This political process of trying to make nature conform to an idea in a person’s mind was the method used by the Roman Catholic Church during the dark ages,.  It was the method of Lenin when he murdered thousands during the October revolution.  It was the method of Hitler’sGermanyand of Mao’sChina– and it’s this same method that politicians are using in theUnited States, today.

Where the political method has killed more people than anyone can ever count, the scientific method is humankind’s single greatest source of progress.  Our ability to successfully create intellectual models of our environment has made us the dominant species on this planet.  Science and technology have reshaped every corner of the world in millions of positive ways.

–  END  –

Rising Technology

Wikipedia claims that 37,000 people were killed during the American Revolutionary war.  DuringAmerica’s Civil War, 650,000 were killed.  World War One killed 8.5 million.  World War Two killed over 70 million.  These numbers are rough estimates but they illustrate the correlation between the rise of technology and the destruction that the political State can inflict upon each other.

One glace at these figures and we must conclude that the human species – our very existence – is at a crisis point.  The next global police state or war could destroy all of humanity.

Consider these photos:

This is a first-generation atomic bomb blast similar to the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Today’s weapons, we all know, are much more powerful, capable of killing not hundred of thousands, but billions.

This mobile bio weapons lab became famous duringAmerica’s second war withIraq.  The public learned it’s now possible to drive this lab from city to city, manufacture bio-weapons, wipe out an entire city’s population, then move on.

This is a recent missile test in Iran, a fanatic nation that’s on an urgent mission to develop the capability to launch a nuclear war.

Today, in America, we know today (supposedly) that a nuclear war must never be fought.  Since the 1950s, the large nations of the world engaged in a program called MAD, which stood for “Mutually Assured Destruction” to control the use of these weapons.  But does everyone in the world today believe that fighting a nuclear war would be bad?

Ironically, we all seem to feel that our technology keeps us safe.  That our accomplishments in physics and biology have somehow caused us to evolve beyond the potential for self-destruction in war.  But all our physical and biological technology is quickly weaponized.  Thus, in reality, the higher our technology gets, the more danger our species is in.

The war in Afghanistan, for example, can now be fought from offices inCaliforniausing computers linked to predator drones.  A bureaucrat in a cubicle can now click a mouse and kill people on the other side of the world, then go home at five o’clock and have dinner with the family.

What would Thomas Jefferson think about today’s federal government using this microwave pain beam for crowd control?

Or what would he have to say about this device, called “Digital Angel.”  When implanted under the skin, it can soon be used to constantly identify and monitor every U.S. citizen in the name of “security.”  Might Jefferson think that doing so could destroy freedom on a massive scale?

The federal government’s policy towards its citizens is 100% complete control.  This “Total Information Awareness” emblem is the logo of a federal bureaucracy called “DARPA” whose mission is to do so.

What do politicians and bureaucrats do when they create one of these grand technologies that could destroy humanity?  They celebrate.  Here’s a [photo from the 1950s:

These people apparently believed the ability to destroy entire cities with a single stroke was cause for celebration. Do you think Iran or N. Korea might be having this same celebration now?

These people apparently believed the ability to destroy entire cities with a single stroke was cause for celebration.  Do you think Iran or N. Korea might be having this same celebration now?

–  END  –

The Forest for the Trees Problem

Why can’t we answer this question?  Why can’t we answer many questions we have about society?  For example, inAmerica, which is where I live, here are common questions to which no one seems to have an answer:

• Does Homeland Security protect us, or is it an attack on our basic freedom?
• To get more security, do we have to give up liberty?
• How do we prevent the rising threat of terrorism?
• How much Government Surveillance is too much?
• How do we control runaway inflation
• Why is our public education failing?
• Should the government give out corporate welfare to save the economy?
• How do we stop climate change?
• How can we prevent the next nuclear war?
• Should the Federal Reserve control the money supply?
• How can people be assured that computer voting machines can’t be hacked?
• How do we stop dangerous drug abuse?
• Is the SPP the creation of the North American Union?  WillAmericalose it’s unique identity?
• How do we prevent our borders from collapsing?
• How do we control the cost of health care?
• How do we stop rising crime?
• How do we stop rising taxes?
• Why do we have the largest prison population in the world?
• How can we stop the rise of police states?
• Is a One-World government good or bad?
• How do we stop the growth of civilization from consuming all our resources thereby destroying civilization?

Add to this list the thousands of little annoyances we face everyday.  The red light cams. The shakedowns at the airport.  You can’t smoke in a bar.  The traffic jams.  The failing power grid.  Urban blight.  A failing economy.  The 40,000+ people viciously murdered during the last five years on our southern border.  Caught up in the annoyance of it all we miss the big picture.  We have the “can’t see the forest for the trees problem.”

Instead, imagine we travel into the future.  Imagine it’s a thousand years from now at the turn of the next millennium.  Picture a researcher at work in his study-chamber, analyzing history.  He follows the progress of human civilization – from the Neolithic, ancientGreece, the breakup ofRome, the Renaissance, the industrial age, the atom bomb, the neutron bomb, the coming wars in space.  He sees that we have one catastrophic social problem that eclipses everything else.  It’s the biggest crisis of this era.  In fact, it’s the biggest crisis humankind has ever faced.

What is it?  To explain, we have to make a comparison between the different sciences.  Let’s divide all human knowledge into three general categories: physics, biology and social knowledge:

Physics is the science of matter an energy.  It encompasses subjects like mechanics, chemistry, laws of motion, thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism, wave dynamics, astronomy, relativity, quantum studies, also the earth studies – geology, the atmosphere, climate & weather.

Biology is the study of life.  In includes classification of living things, organic chemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, genetics, the biosphere, the ecosystem, evolution, disease.

Social Knowledge is the study of intelligent life.  It contains economics, cognitive science and studies about the nature of civilization.

Now let’s compare these three general categories on a graph.

The Three Sciences

This graph shows that substantial progress has been made in physics over the last three hundred years.  In physics we can solve great problems, put people on the moon, build suspension bridges, bullet trains, iPhones, and so on.

The second greatest rise in progress has been in biology.  Most of this has occurred in the last three hundred years, as well, largely due to progress in physics.  Optics enabled us to make microscopes.  Chemistry led to organic chemistry.  The scientific method, itself, was first developed in physics.  With biology we can treat trauma, stop heart attacks, cure disease, etc.

But the least amount of progress has been in our social knowledge.  How do we know we’ve made such skimpy progress?  We can’t solve even the most basic social problems.  For example, how do we stop poverty, war, crime or slavery?  Nobody knows.  After 4,500 years these problems continue to plague us.

Thus, our future historian see one big crisis.  To him, it’s obvious.  It’s our most fundamental problem, today.  The problem is so great, in fact, it could very well destroy all human life on earth.  Can you see it?

It is this: we now have enough technology in physics in to blow ourselves off the planet but we don’t have enough technology in the social sciences to stop it.  This imbalance has now become dangerous to the very survival of our species.

From the point of view of our future historian, all the other issues of today like, who will be the next President, or what party controls Congress, or the budget battle, or who’s fighting whom in theMiddle East– it’s all trivial.  After all, do we care which Baron was the better Feudal Lord a thousand years ago?  Do we care who was the most powerful Church official in the year 1,000 AD?  Does it matter who was a better Pope?  No, it’s insignificant; we couldn’t care less.

A thousand years from now, there will be only one issue from our time remembered as important: will we develop social technology fast enough to prevent our own destruction?

–  END  –

LAGASH

Let’s begin our investigation into the nature of freedom by going back in time.

Look at this excerpt from the book, History Begins atSumerby Samuel Kramer.  It tells of a civilization four-and-a-half thousand years ago in an ancient Mesopotamian city-state called Lagash.

“The inspector of the boatmen seized the boats.  The cattle inspector seized the large cattle and the small cattle.  The fisheries inspector seized the fisheries.  When a citizen ofLagashbrought a sheep to the palace, he had to pay 5 shekels if the wool was white.  If a man divorced his wife the King got 5 shekels and the Executive Officer got 1 shekel.  If a perfumer made an oil preparation, the King got 5 shekels, the Executive Officer got 1 shekel, the Palace Steward got 1 shekel.  Even death brings no relief.  When a dead man was brought to the cemetery, palace officials made it their business to tax the family quantities of barley, bread, beer, and furniture.  From one end of the State to the other, there were tax collectors…”

Artist’s conception of the Sumerian city-state ofLagash, about 2,400 B.C.

Artist’s conception of the Sumerian city-state ofLagash, about 2,400 B.C.

4,500 years ago in this long-dead city-state there was centralized control.  There were crippling taxes.  The leaders were corrupt.  And just like today, the people resented it, all except, of course, for the government bureaucrats.  Discovered by a French archeological expedition in 1878, the clay tablets on which this passage was inscribed reveal that a new king then came to power, named Urakagina, and he removed the taxes:  “There was then no tax collector.  Urakagina restored freedom to the people of Lagash,” the tablets tell us.

This is the first recorded use of the word freedom in history and it greets us in the context of individual liberty versus The State.  These ancient Mesopotamians tried to manage their society by using strong central control.  As a result, the authoritarianism became harsh and bureaucratic and corrupt and people cried out for freedom.

The cuneiform symbol for “freedom.”

Many people today think central control is the solution for today’s problems – tougher government, a powerful central authority, harsher penalties, longer prison sentences and a more brutal police force to knock people back who get out of line.  The trouble is, severe centralized control is what humankind has tried since the beginning of history, and it’s never worked.

So what does thisLagashexample mean to us, today?

It means, that 4,500 years agoLagashhad the very same problems that we have today in so-called “modern”America.  It means that in all this time, this question: How much control of society is good and how much control is bad? has never been answered.

–  END  –

The Freedom Chamber News has a seven to ten day news cycle. At the end of each cycle the links to news stories that have been built up are archived here.

The date indicated in the list below is the date the news cycle ended. Therefore, if you’re looking for a story that appeared on January 4th, you should click on the date just after January 4th.

Not all news organizations keep their stories posted forever so please expect some that some of the links, after time, will no longer work.

May 14, 2012

May 7, 2012

April 30, 2012

April 22, 2012

April 16, 2012

April 9, 2012

April 1, 2012

March 26, 2012

March 19, 2012

March 13, 2012

March 8, 2012

March 1, 2012

February 26, 2012

February 25, 2012

February 24, 2012: (first time 591 hits)

February 21, 2012

February 14, 2012: Valentine’s Edition

February 13, 2012

February 7, 2012

January 31, 2012

January 23, 2012

January 16, 2012

January 10, 2012

January 2, 2012

December 24, 2011

As much as I really like Google, I’m considering dropping my Gmail account and not using Google for searches anymore.   Their new policy that links things together is already showing up.  As I write this, there is a note in the corner of the page that says:  “Consider including friend@cox.net”…..   That’s really irritating.

If I visit some off-color sites for entertainment, Google will now interpret future searches on where I’ve been.  What if someone in my family uses this computer?  They may see the messages.

Tying email to everything else means that searches are linked to an identity.  Google may think they own that information but the government can force it out of them.  Maybe they already have.

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It occurs to me that some of the ISP’s are likely watching your download and upload patterns.  Think about Time Warner cable and Comcast.  They both own major media production businesses.  They do not want pirates taking their stuff.  They probably know which customers of their visited Megaupload or other hosts.  They may be inclined to “assist” police in finding people who download.

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They’ve been running a news story on the radio in L.A. the last couple of days.  I’ve not seen any mention other than on AM radio so far.  They say that the military will be running “practice and training exercises” near downtown L.A. and other parts of the city.  Apparently the military needs to get experience flying near tall buildings, etc.  They say not to worry about this that it is “routine” (Far from it).  They said that it will also give local law enforcement experience communicating the military which could be useful in the case of a “national emergency”.

Uh, do you think they are practicing for quelling riots, martial law?  This is amazing and no one is reporting it or getting worked up about it.

————————–

Obama said something in his Slave of the Union Address that, so far, I’ve not heard anyone criticize.  He said that now that the troops are coming home, we can “take that money and use half of it to pay down the debt and the other have to rebuild our infrastructure and make jobs.”   Half of what money?  The money being spent on war IS DEBT!  How do you pay down the debt with more debt?  Not one commentator that I’ve seen has mentioned this gaping hole in logic.  Apparently they all think we will have more money to SPEND if we stop spending on war….

–  END  –

I could complain it’s outrageous, that we live in a police state, that freedom is like water — you don’t think about it until it’s gone … but Katie B. sums it up best on her Facebook page with this post:

–  END  –