Chapter Two, In Which I Reveal My Genius to the World

It's been over two years since I posted anything to my blog.

Not that there has been a shortage of ideas; it's more the case that fully articulating all of them can be very time-consuming, and so one must "prioritize" one's efforts, and articulate fully only those ideas that one deems most important.

Further, "publishing", or using a blog, has never really seemed as important to me as articulating things purely for my own benefit -- as opposed to disseminating my genius for the benefit of other readers.

But as I have benefited by reading the blogs of others, upon some reflection it does seem that I have been somewhat selfish in that regard, perhaps even foolish, to deprive the world of that genius.

So, today seems as good a day as any to reveal my genius to the world, and declare myself to be the expert and authority that I have always known myself to be, all along.

With those preliminaries out of the way, we may now move on to the ideas themselves.



It's difficult not to think about politics these days, as there are so many folks spouting extreme views, and the more extreme the view, the louder they spout. People can become so emotional about their most-dearly-held beliefs that even heinous acts like murder become conscionable to them, at the expense of the rest of us in the society who are not murderers.

And what a range of beliefs are held!

It's not too hard, even for an amateur "political scientist", to foresee such political "storms" as loom on the horizon from time to time. These storms typically strike during policy-shifts, or when a recalcitrant incumbent refuses to shift policy. The political "tides", if you will, move this way and that, either to our delight or to our dismay.

Far too often policy is changed willy-nilly by the least-informed ideologues, resulting in the most violent storms. [E.g., "Let's make up an excuse to invade Iraq. Saddam dissed my Daddy." OMFG! What a storm that created!] Just as often, those already in power, once they get there, refuse to change policy, even when presented with cogent arguments why they ought to do so.

Even a child can anticipate that the policy-shifts will result in either a drag on our society, or a boon to it.

There are those, too, who don't mind placing a drag on society, if it somehow benefits them personally. They will lie, cheat, steal, and even murder to get power, or to retain it, for to them the notion of the "greater good" is just a fairy-tale. They euphemistically call this "enlightened self-interest", but the only question these people ever really want to ask is, "What's in it for me?"

Now, these metaphors -- power, storms, tides -- bring to mind science. Not "political science" as we now know it, but "hard" science: theories of earth science, electricity and meteorology.

When Ben Franklin saw an electrical storm heading his way, he grabbed his kite and his key, and rushed out to investigate the enormous power of electricity. How he did this without being electrocuted, we'll never know, but it led to the invention of the lightning rod. [Ironically, poorly-implemented lightning rods probably caused as many fires as correctly-implemented ones prevented, but hey, you've got to start somewhere.] Once indoors again, he played with his Leyden jars. [So called because they were "laden" with electricity?]

The theory of electricity is of course well-understood nowadays, but then it was in its infancy.





Not until Edison and Tesla and Marconi came along did the show really get moving.

Now, if Edison had gotten his way, we'd all be using direct current, and there would be a power station, a seat of power, every six blocks. That would have been pretty good for Edison, but not so much for the rest of us. Thank heavens that Tesla came along to develop alternating current!

When we see a political storm on the horizon, we are in a position much like Franklin's vis-a-vis the electrical storm. We know that there is a lot of power there, mysterious power, in the storm, but we have utterly no idea how to control it or modify it, and in fact are likely to be killed if we try!

This is because the scientific theory of politics is in its infancy.

What's needed are axioms, derivations, and proofs, so that folks -- at least those folks whose beliefs don't override logic -- will be able to understand the policy changes that science would promote.

We've all heard of the "levers" of government, and political "machines" but these ideas came from a bygone time, an era of steam-driven wristwatches, and brick-in-a-shoebox computing. [The first computers were built entirely of bricks and shoeboxes. A shoebox with a brick in it represented a one, and and empty shoebox represented a zero. Needless to say, computing was backbreaking effort in those days!]

With that in mind, we invent the science of politicity [pawl-uh-TISS-it-ee] and postulate that one of the fundamental particles of politicity is the electoron. [Rhymes with "moron", almost.]

We might then, for example, observe that in the theory of politicity,

• Electorons move from a positive poll to a negative poll.

This may be thought of as flow, but as many experts will tell you, that notion results from early attempts to model the phenomenon, and sometimes electorons just sit there becoming more and more negative.

As political debate becomes highly charged, we have the opportunity to study current events in an effort to increase our understanding of the science of politicity.

Now we already do have Washington, D.C., where power is, it seems, generated or at least displayed, by a mysterious force known as "lobbyists" which act on the seats of power there) and it should be obvious even to the most casual observer that this "solution", like Edison's, is clunky at best, and in serious need of an upgrade.



At its worst, political power misused can be a colossal drag on the entire world, setting back society further and further, due usually to some sort of war-profiteering that benefits only the old-boy network. The cowboy philosopher Will Rogers remarked (in the 1920s!) that every time the Republicans got one of their fellas in the White House, it was: "Now, boys, my head is turned; just get it while you can."








Of course the biggest problem here is ignorance, of both the inadvertent variety, and the willful variety. (There is ignorance-in-the-rough, which can be forgiven, and then there is cultivated ignorance, which can't.)
Knowledge can defeat ignorance, but those who know, know that they are in for a heckuva fight.

So, it seems that we really need now is for a Tesla, a scientific and political dynamo, to arise from among us and flesh out the theory that will enable us to plant our feet firmly on the ground and start using, instead of politics as usual in Washington, D.C., policy in... (yup)... Washington, A.C.

[You can learn more about Franklin, Edison, Tesla, and Rogers by using Google, or better yet, by visiting your local library, since anyone can put anything on the web, and not all of it is true.]