William Jennings Bryan  told a gathering of businessmen in 1915 that “my Department is your department; the ambassadors, the ministers, the consuls are all yours; it is their business to look after your interests and to guard your rights,” they were enunciating the soul of American foreign policy, as was the much-lauded Wise Man George Kennan when he wrote in a post-World War II State Department policy planning document: “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population … In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity … To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives … We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.” 

Pretty bad. Here is a sample of factlets from surveys and studies conducted in the past twenty years. Seventy percent of Americans believe in the existence of angels. Fifty percent believe that the earth has been visited by UFOs; in another poll, 70 percent believed that the U.S. government is covering up the presence of space aliens on earth. Forty percent did not know whom the U.S. fought in World War II. Forty percent could not locate Japan on a world map. Fifteen percent could not locate the United States on a world map. Sixty percent of Americans have not read a book since leaving school. Only 6 percent now read even one book a year. According to a very familiar statistic that nonetheless cannot be repeated too often, the average American’s day includes six minutes playing sports, five minutes reading books, one minute making music, 30 seconds attending a play or concert, 25 seconds making or viewing art, and four hours watching television.

Among high-school seniors surveyed in the late 1990s, 50 percent had not heard of the Cold War. Sixty percent could not say how the United States came into existence. Fifty percent did not know in which century the Civil War occurred. Sixty percent could name each of the Three Stooges but not the three branches of the U.S. government. Sixty percent could not comprehend an editorial in a national or local newspaper.

How Bad Is It? – (New Inquiry – May 26, 2012)
'During the last third of the twentieth century,” according to Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, 'all forms of social capital fell off precipitously.” Tens of thousands of community groups – church social and charitable groups, union halls, civic clubs, bridge clubs, and yes, bowling leagues - disappeared; by Putnam’s estimate, one-third of our social infrastructure vanished in these years. Frequency of having friends to dinner dropped by 45%; card parties declined 50%; Americans’ declared readiness to make new friends declined by 30%. Belief that most other people could be trusted dropped from 77% to 37%. Over a five-year period in the 1990s, reported incidents of aggressive driving rose by 50% - admittedly an odd, but probably not an insignificant, indicator of declining social capital. In Spenglerian fashion, Morris Berman (author of Why America Failed(2011)), seeks the source of our civilization’s decline in its innermost principle, its animating Geist. What he finds at the bottom of our culture’s soul is -- hustling; or, to use its respectable academic sobriquet, possessive individualism. (Editor’s note: Going well beyond statistics, this essay is worth the reader’s time.)

We Will Rue Stuxnet’s Cavalier Deployment – (Financial Times – June 6, 2012)
An arms race in cyberspace is a distinct reality. The existence of the Flame malware shocked computer security specialists. The fact that Flame has been going about its business for several years without anybody having noticed it means that millions of dollars must have been invested in creating the virus to ensure it remained undetected. In a second development, three days after the news about Flame, the White House revealed that the US had been behind the development and deployment of Flame’s most notorious predecessor, Stuxnet, which targeted Natanz, Iran’s uranium enrichment facility. The American admission will act as a starting gun: countries around the world can now argue that it is legitimate to use malware pre-emptively against their enemies. The pre-emptive act against Iran sets an ugly precedent. There is no legal framework restraining intelligence agencies or the military from investing in and then testing these weapons. The implications are grave. Recently, for example, Bavarian police unwittingly allowed some specialist surveillance software to slip on to the web. The program was so intrusive that Germany’s highest court had deemed it unconstitutional. It was almost immediately spotted and copied by Europe’s oldest hacking group, the Chaos Computer Club, a relatively benign organization. But there is no knowing who else has picked up the software or even started using it. See also: Germany has confirmed that its military maintains an operational cyberwarfare unit with offensive capabilities. Prof. Dr. Wolff Heintschel von Heinegg, a professor of law at European University Viadrina Frankfurt in Germany, said that “the armed forces of many nations are probably building up an offensive cyber capability. The only difference is that Germany and (also recently) the Obama administration in the US are publicly talking about it.” He added that “cyber-espionage activities are not prohibited by codes of international law but only national criminal laws.” 

Will Our Kids Be a Different Species? – (TED – June, 2012)
Throughout human evolution, multiple versions of humans co-existed. Could we be mid-upgrade now? In this TED talk, Juan Enriquez sweeps across time and space to bring us to the present moment—and shows how technology is revealing evidence that suggests rapid evolution may be under way. Juan Enriquez thinks and writes about profound changes that genomics will bring in business, technology, and society. His TED Book,Homo Evolutis, explores those changes. Enriquez was the founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, has published widely on topics from the technical (global nucleotide data flow) to the sociological (gene research and national competitiveness), and was a member of Celera Genomics founder Craig Venter's marine-based team to collect genetic data from the world's oceans.

Fundamental change occurs most often in one of two ways: as a "fatal discontinuity," a sudden catastrophic event that is potentially world changing, or as a persistent, gradual trend. Global catastrophes include volcanic eruptions, viral pandemics, wars, and large-scale terrorist attacks; trends are demographic, environmental, economic, and political shifts that unfold over time. 

 The whole principle of academic freedom rests on the idea that knowledge is best advanced by allowing ideas to blossom and to be shared without restriction. In this way, good ideas can be validated and retained and bad ideas or conjectures can be scrutinized and eventually excluded.