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The trust fund held by America's Social Security Administration is projected to be depleted sometime in 2032.  People are speaking of this as if it is a crisis which requires immediate action if we wish to prevent a catastrophe.

The truth is that there is not now, and there never has been from the beginning, a genuine reserve fund which the SSA can dip into to continue paying benefits when outlays exceed inflows, as has been the case since 2010.  In the past, there were many years when inflows exceeded outflows, but the excess has always been spent by the Treasury as part of the general budget and replaced by paper issued to the SSA by the Treasury.  

It's all smoke and mirrors, and the paper held by the SSA has no value.  The only purpose it serves is to pave the way for the Treasury to provide the needed funds to pay benefits.  The Treasury has to raise new funds to pay the benefits whether there is a phony trust fund or not, and the only crisis is that in 2032 the scheme will need a new set of smoke and mirrors.

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Protestant Christianity split into many different sects following the big split with the Roman Catholic Church, with the salutary result that oppression by religious authorities, while still a problem within many localities, is far more difficult to achieve on a global stage.  

Similarly, following the collapse of the regime in Soviet Russia in 1991, the quasi-religious movement of Marxianity has begun splitting in different sects, with a similar salutary result in regard to carrying out oppressive agendas.

This essay focuses on efforts by those in America who call themselves "Democratic Socialists" of "Social Democrats" to distance themselves from the horrors perpetrated by 20th century Marxian dictatorial regimes, even going so far as to renounce allegiance to Marx himself, even as they continue to employ Marxian framing.

It ought to  be an educational experience to watch the schemes of this sect fail and lead to unintentional consequences, in spite of the good intentions of supporters.  Good intentions combined with coercion is an extremely unsophisticated strategy.

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Slime mold has been a subject of discussion on the podcast since Season 1.  Senior contributing editor Prego de Nada originally used slime mold, aka physarum, as an example of spontaneous emergent order in nature, with the purpose of demonstrating that what looks like design can, and frequently does occur without any designer.  Prego then penned an essay in Season 5 to talk about the results of ongoing research.

The world-shaking conclusion of the investigation, the evidence that sent everyone back to square one, is that physarum exhibits cognition without a brain that is capable of symbolic representation.  Cognitive scientists until recently believed that symbolic representation was a necessary ingredient to the mix.

Jellyfish are likewise interesting to cognitive scientists, because they also exhibit cognition, and also do not possess any structure that functions as a brain, although jellyfish do have a neuronal net and are multicellular organisms that accomplish cognition in a somewhat different manner from slime mold.

The episode concludes with a discussion of the relationship between cognition and consciousness, what consciousness might be in a fundamental sense, and the fascinating ongoing debate among cognitive scientists, as new evidence continuously comes to light.

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Science journalist Ronald Bailey, who is also a trained economist, continues his career of debunking predictions of impending doom, which he began in his 1993 Book "Ecoscam", which demonstrated that predictions in the 1972 publication "The Limits to Growth", published by the Club of Rome, turned out to be spectacularly wrong.  In "The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century", he examines further spectacularly wrong predictions still being pushed by the pessimism-industrial complex, such as worries about an exploding population, when in fact population is not actually exploding; projections showing us running out of resources and farmland; projections about worsening pollution in a world where pollution is actually diminishing; and about climate change, which everyone understands is a problem that must be dealt with, but which is not an impending catastrophe which requires immediate and massive directed collective action.  He predicted in 2015 electricity produced by clean energy would soon be cheaper than energy produced with fossil fuels without any need for regulatory intervention, and eleven years later this prediction too has been fulfilled.  Critical responses to his work have been feeble and unconvincing, and he opines that advocates of deus ex machina intervention are driven not by genuine concerns but by a hangover of medievalist intelligent design thinking and the desire to be the deus.  It's high time to shift the Overton Window decisively in the direction of greater optimism, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the current "mainstream" of thought is in truth a stagnant intellectual backwater.

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Contributing editor Slainte na Zdorovya submits an essay on the much-discussed and widely applicable Dunning-Kruger effect, focusing on its relevance to the theme of evolutionary thinking that is the theme of this podcast.  David Dunning and his protege Justing Kruger published the results of a study they conducted in 1999 at Cornell University titled "Unskilled and Unaware of It".

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Playing and having fun is a widely observed  phenomenon amongst many of Earth's creatures.  Why did it evolve? Why do some creatures play and others do not?  Contributing editor Prego de Nada has looked into this phenomenon and has penned this essay.

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A review of the 16 podcast essays, and one interview, from Season 5.  Hopefully you will find some of the short descriptions in the recap sufficiently interesting so that you will listen to them in their entirety.

Have a look at the recently published book by friend of the podcast Eric Moon, titled "Cultivating the Sociome:  Governance Without Governors", now available on Amazon.  

cultivatingthesociome.com

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If you have bought a recent model automobile, you have undoubtedly noticed that you do not have the option of steering the car without some "help" from robot-assisted lane tracking.  There is no setting that allows you to steer your car without at least some tugging on the steering wheel by the robot.

The reason for the ubiquity of the technology is a mandate by regulators in the EU, which effectively mandates it for the rest of the world.  Listen to find out why they did it.

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In a first for the Fascinating! series, we present an interview.

The interviewee is Cary Gray, an up-and-coming young Earthling friend of mine.  Cary is first and foremost a poet, and that is his passion.  He has had an adventurous past, from doing long-distance touring on a purpose-built unicycle of his own design, to living for three months in a giant redwood in the Santa Cruz Mountains.  Cary will soon be starting his own podcast, tentatively titled "The Poetic Experience".  I for one look forward to seeing where his imagination will take him next.

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Frederic Bastiat was an economist and essayist who lived and wrote in France in the early 1800's.  He came to prominence at the age of 43 because of his satirical takedown of producers who were arguing for tariffs and other protectionist measures in trade with England, pointing out that the true effect of protectionism is mostly to transfer money from domestic consumers to domestic producers.  His career took off and he went on to write about broader issues in law and economics, arguing that the only legitimate role of government is the protection of life, liberty and property.  He was working on his magnum opus, Economic Harmony, unfinished at the time of his death at age 49, in which he was arguing that harmony would naturally emerge under a laissez faire system, and that efforts by government to plan and regulate led to conflict.