Now *that's* how you do science.

The Second Kind of Impossible by Paul J. Steinhardt.
A Nerds who Read Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

I have a longstanding complaint about science education.

When I was learning physics as an undergraduate, and during the first year or so of graduate school, the lectures only covered what, for lack of a better term, could be called settled science (Yeah, I get that some of you object to that term. But keep reading and it will be clear what I mean.) One didn't get a sense of how messy the actual sausage-making was—the false starts, the incomplete information, the unpredictable flashes of insight, the dead ends, the egos, the politics, the waits for time on the equipment, the perennial funding crises—students saw very little of this until they were well into graduate school and began their thesis research. Yes, there were undergraduate research projects, but they weren’t quite the same.

Perhaps it has to be this way. Most sciences require considerable grounding in the basics before students are ready to do productive work. But the flipside is that they don't get a sense of what the day to day pursuit of science is actually like until they have committed five or six years to it.

The general public has a similarly warped view of science, thanks to a failure to understand this paradox: that even though science eventually gets to a fair level of certainty, there’s a great deal of uncertainty and questioning along the way. We see this when non-scientists weigh in on the global warming debate. One side focuses only on the holy "certainty" of the end result, and refuses to question anything. The other side focuses only on the questioning, and refuses to believe anything. Neither really understands how science works.

Which is why I thought The Second Kind of Impossible is such a wonderful book. Written by Paul J. Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, this “extraordinary quest for a new form of matter,” tells a true story of science discovery, in all its glorious chaos.

The book takes its title from a conversation the author had with legendary physicist Richard Feynman in the early 1970s. Steinhardt, a Cal Tech undergraduate at that time, was presenting a formula for the motion of a Super Ball. The equation predicted that if the ball were dropped with just the right spin, it would bounce of the floor at a nearly horizontal angle.

“That’s impossible!” Feynman declared.

Steinhardt produced a Super Ball and dropped it with the required spin. In spite of Feynman’s skepticism, it behaved exactly as predicted. Quod erat demonstrandum.

The incident launched Steinhardt on a lifetime of thinking about the word impossible. “I had learned early on to pay close attention whenever an idea is dismissed as ‘impossible,’” he writes.

Most of the time, scientists are referring to something that is truly out of the question, like violating the conservation of energy or creating a perpetual motion machine. It never makes sense to pursue those kinds of ideas. But sometimes, an idea is judged to be “impossible” based on assumptions that could be violated under certain circumstances that have never been considered before. I call that the second kind of impossible. If one can expose the underlying assumptions and find a long-overlooked loophole, the second kind of impossible is a potential gold mine that can offer a scientist the rare opportunity, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to make a transformational discovery.

Steinhardt would hear that word “impossible” from Feynman again, and once again it was the second kind of impossible. The year was 1985 and Steinhardt, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had travelled back to his old alma mater to present his theory of quasi-periodic crystals, or “quasicrystals” for short. This previously unknown form of matter demonstrated symmetries that were, well, impossible, according to the laws of crystallography developed in the 18th and 19th centuries by René Just Haüy and Auguste Bravais. It is the story of quasi-crystals that Steinhardt sets out to tell in his book.

The book is divided into three parts, each with its unique character. The first, “Making the Impossible Possible,” tells the story of how a computer model of a rapidly cooled solid showed the symmetry of an icosahedron—the shape of a Dungeons and Dragons die, something “impossible” under the Haüy and Bravais laws. This set Steinhardt and his graduate student Dov Levine on the path that would eventually lead to a theoretical model of quasicrystals. Simultaneously, Dan Shechtman, of the Technion in Israel, discovered an actual, manmade quasicrystal. “Making the Impossible Possible” is the most scientifically challenging part of the book, with many diagrams of crystal structures, diffraction patterns, and Penrose tiles.

It only took about five years to develop the theory of quasicrystals, discover them in a laboratory, and get them accepted by the scientific community. But Steinhardt wanted to take the investigation one step further. He wanted to find quasicrystals in nature. And that would take another thirty years.

The second part of the book, “The Quest Begins,” reads more like a detective or a spy novel than a scientific text. In it, Steinhardt tells the story of a quasicrystal that was found in the collection of the University of Florence’s Natural History Museum. Steinhardt, somewhat prematurely, submitted a paper to the journal Science claiming it was naturally-occurring. When subsequently, objections are raised, he must race against the clock on an international quest to find the origin of the Florence crystal before the publication date, or face the agonizing decision of whether to withdraw the paper.

Along the way we meet many colorful characters, such as Luca Bindi, head of the Department of Mineralogy at the Florence museum. Bindi has an amazing intuition for which crystals are most worthy of study, and an uncanny knack for unexpectedly pulling victory out of the jaws of defeat, earning for himself the title as L’Uomo dei Miracoli—the Miracle Man. Not everyone Steinhardt runs across is so helpful however. For example, Steinhardt claims that Leonid Razin, who had been director of Russia’s Platinum Institute during the old Evil Empire days, demands a hefty bribe before he would say anything—and his old ties to the KGB may just still be lethal.

In one passage, about presenting the project to Ed Stolper, geologist at CalTech, Steinhardt really gives us a sense of the difference between how science appears when you study it in the classroom, and how it appears when you're in the middle of it, and in particular, the human element. It was a high stakes meeting. Stolper carried a lot of weight with some of the senior members of Steinhardt’s "red team"—who would probably bail in the face of a negative review from him.

My pent-up anxiety was slowly melting away as I listened to Ed. It is always hard for me to explain to my university students how difficult it is for a scientist, even an established scientist such as myself, to challenge conventional wisdom. Everything always appears to be simple to others in retrospect. They lose sight of the fact that making scientific progress is always a struggle that requires a great deal of personal endurance. There is a huge amount of peer pressure to conform. For example, after Luca and I suggested that our sample of metallic aluminum might be of natural origin, which was generally thought to be impossible at the time, we were subjected to more than a year of skepticism and withering criticism from certain experts, including our own colleagues on the red team. It had not been easy. The negative comments were sometimes so harsh that the two of us were left dispirited. But work is a great coping mechanism. We kept plowing ahead, incrementally gathering additional evidence to test our thesis. After fourteen months of hard work, it was greatly satisfying for me to hear Ed validate our efforts.

After a series of twists and turns, Steinhardt eventually learns that the Florence sample came from a remote region of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The third part of the book “Kamchatka or Bust” is an adventure story, as Steinhardt and his team travel there to obtain more samples, in the hopes of learning just how nature managed to create such an unusual substance, and whether it was formed deep in the bowels of the earth, or fell from the skies in a meteorite. As they travel across the tundra and up into the mountains in their two “Behemoths”—vehicles that resemble a trailer atop of tank treads—they encounter desolate but beautiful landscapes, fierce hordes of mosquitoes, deadly Kamchatka brown bears, spectacular rainbows, blinding storms, one case of hypothermia, heaps of fresh salmon and caviar, and gallons of vodka.

Now that's how you do science.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Amazon.com

The Meh-dalorian

The Mandalorian, Episodes 1 and 2.
A Nerds who Read TV Review by Michael Isenberg.

It’s hard to warm to a guy with a mask on. So much of our brains are wired for recognizing and responding to faces, that when we don’t get one, it’s difficult to make an emotional connection (with the possible exception of fear).

So if you’re going to have a main character who never takes his mask off, as is the case for the Mandalorian, then he better have something to compensate. Give him some memorable lines to say or some awesome superpowers. Or both at the same time. Remember when Darth Vader force choked that one guy and said, "Apology accepted?" That was bad-ass. Sadly, with the Mandalorian, all we get is blah-ass.

Disney's space western, The Manalorian, premiered this week to launch their new streaming channel, “Disney Plus.” Pedro Pascal plays the title character. The series is definitely set in the Star Wars universe, and fans will see much that is familiar: Boba Fett armor, bizarre CGI creatures, the Force, stormtroopers. Although, since this takes place after the events of Return of the Jedi, the stormtroopers have seen better days.

The first episode is rather paint-by-numbers, the sort of formulaic thing an unimaginative writer would come up with. We first see the protagonist bring in a run-of-the-mill suspect. There’s a bit of action, but mainly the sequence exists to establish who the Mandalorian is—a bounty hunter. Then he meets with the boss guy to get his main assignment, a higher value target. After a stop with the equipment guy to get his armor upgraded, it’s off to the desolate planet Arvala-7 for the mission to begin in earnest. It was a great formula when James Bond started it, almost sixty years ago, but it’s been done.

Given that it’s the first episode of a series, rather than a movie, there’s one more element to the formula. It has to end with a cliffhanger, in order to hook the viewers so they'll watch the second episode. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say much about the cliffhanger. Just that if you’ve seen The Clone Wars, you’ve seen it already.

Episode 2 is the Mandalorian’s effort to get off Arvala-7 with his bounty. He is hindered by a Crawling Fortress full of Jawas who stripped his ship while he was off doing Episode 1 things. Now he’s stuck there unless he gets the parts back. There’s one twist toward the middle, which you will see coming a mile away. There are some beautiful desert landscapes as the Mandalorian makes his way across Arvala-7, and also a fair amount of action. I like action scenes—I rarely want to watch a show that doesn’t have some. But they’re no substitute for being invested in the main character.

I did like one of the other characters—the Ugnaught Kuiil, played by Nick Nolte. Something about this character just works. Not sure whether it's the grumpy frown, the gravelly voice, the gentle humor, or the Rocky the Flying Squirrel helmet and goggles. We’ve seen his species before—they were the pig-like creatures who were the worker bees of Cloud City in Empire. The ones who tried to melt down C-3PO. Kuiil came to such a barren planet as Arvala-7 in order to find independence as a vapor farmer. “I have worked a lifetime to finally be free of servitude.” And he has a great catchphrase, “I have spoken,” which he is able to pull off without sounding like a dick. Sadly, Episode 2 ends with the Mandalorian saying goodbye to him and flying off into space, so I’m not sure if he’s going to be back in future episodes.

The ending of Episode 2 wrapped everything up rather nicely—no cliffhanger to entice me to Episode 3. I’m undecided whether to cancel my subscription to Disney Plus when the free trial ends, or keep it to see more of The Mandalorian (Yeah, I know. There are other things on there. But that's a whole 'nother discussion). On the one hand, while not a great series so far, it’s not bad either. Kind of meh. Might be worth watching if there’s nothing else on. On the other hand, if I really want a space western, I could just re-watch Firefly.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Forbes, Screen Rants, fb.com/tarryk.

Dark Fate at the Box Office...

...and it’s a shame.

Terminator: Dark Fate
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.

Twenty-nine million dollars. That’s all Terminator: Dark Fate managed to pull in from the domestic box office during its opening last weekend. To put that in perspective, the movie is estimated to have cost $185 million to make. The poor reception is a shame, because it’s a pretty good movie. It wasn’t mind blowing or anything, it’s not going to rock your world. But it’s good solid entertainment with action, humor, and some heart.

Given that schools don’t teach the classics anymore, a quick review is in order. The original Terminator (1984) tells the story of Skynet, an Artificial Intelligence which sometime in the future—Judgment Day—achieves consciousness, launches the nukes, and then builds machines to exterminate what’s left of the human race. The humans, led by one John Connor, fight back, and after an epic war, with heavy losses, beat the machines. In a final Hail Mary pass, Skynet sends a Terminator robot (Arnold Schwarzenegger), back to the 1980s to kill Connor’s mother, Sarah (Linda Hamilton) before John is ever born. It fails. In the 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Skynet tries again, this time taking a crack at John himself. Not only do the heroes destroy the Terminator once again, they prevent Skynet from ever being created. The grim future is erased. Judgment Day never happens.

Or so they think. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), we learn “You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable.”

We also learn that sometime between Terminator 2 and Terminator 3, Sarah Connor died of leukemia.

Which brings us to Terminator: Dark Fate. It begins two years after the events of T2. Sarah and John are hanging out on a beach in Guatemala when a model T-800 Terminator appears without warning and kills the boy. It all happens so fast that Sarah doesn’t have a chance to protect him, as she had done all his life. As they go their separate ways in the wake of the murder, both Sarah and the T-800 are suddenly aimless, alone in the world, and stripped of their missions.

Fast forward two decades. Yet another Terminator arrives from the future (Gabriel Luna). It’s an advanced model, the Rev-9, with the capability to separate its liquid metal and solid components to act independently, which is kind of cool in a fight. Its mission is to kill factory worker Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), who presumably will have something to do with defeating the machines someday. But the Rev-9 is not the only visitor from the future: Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a cybernetically enhanced super soldier, has been sent back to protect Dani.

Needless to say, as Dani and Grace alternately fight and flight from the Rev-9, they eventually cross paths with Sarah Connor and the T-800 and we find out what they’ve been up to for the past twenty years. Sarah still totally kicks ass, and you got to admire the way Linda Hamilton—who is 63—pulls it off. Dark Fate is worth seeing just for that. According to her trainer, a year of intense workouts and strict low-carb dieting went into her preparation for the role.

As for the T-800, in order to avoid spoilers, I won’t reveal much about the arc of his character. Suffice to say, it is rather touching.

The T-800 is also the main source of humor in the movie, and the basic joke is that the robot says un-robotlike things. It works, as it did in T2. Remember “Hasta la vista, baby?” One of my few criticisms of the movie is that, since the T-800 joins the others rather late in the story, there is a decidedly grim lack of humor prior to that.

Dark Fate has been heavily criticized—some are calling it a franchise killer—but frankly I thought many of the criticisms are undeserved. I am at a loss to find anything that’s so terrible about this movie to account for the flop at the box office. It certainly doesn’t suffer from the sort of cringeworthy moments that made past franchise killers like Batman and Robin so painful to watch.

What a real franchise killer looks like

Some critics complain that the murder of John Connor at the beginning erases the events of Terminator 3. I don’t see the problem. Altering the timeline will do that (Albeit what’s harder to explain is how his death prevented his mother from dying of cancer).

Nor did it bother me that the T-800 has aged considerably—Arnold is 72 years old now. Since this model is built from living skin over a machine interior, it actually makes sense.

Some of my right-of-center friends have criticized what they see as the movie’s politics and are gleeful about its flop at the box office. “Get woke, grow broke,” read one Facebook post I saw. I sincerely doubt these critics have actually seen the movie. It’s not really a political film. Yes, it has some female action heroines. It’s even been called “vagina-centric.” But this series has always had female heroines—Linda Hamilton has been badass since the beginning. Well, at least since T2 anyway. It’s not like Hollywood is rewriting anyone’s childhood for the sake of political correctness. Nor does Dark Fate have that mean-spirited girls against the boys vibe that made Captain Marvel so awful.

There is one scene in an immigrant detention center, which of course references current events, but again, it’s not really political. Pitch Meeting pretty much captured the spirit of it:

Writer Guy: I want the next big set piece to take place inside of a detention facility along the US-Mexico border, you know, get some social commentary going on. Producer Guy: Oh, okay. So what’s the commentary? Writer Guy: It, uh, you know, wouldn’t it look cool if a Terminator ran through one of those things? Producer Guy: That does sound cool.

Well, it is a cool movie. Ignore the critics and the box office and go see it.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): CinemaBlend.com, Polygon.com, giphy.com

An Unambiguous Dystopia

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

Every once in a while at Nerds who Read, we like to look back at one of the classics.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed was first published in 1974, but it continues to have relevance in the twenty-first century. In fact, the Occupy Oakland demonstrators were so inspired by its vision of an anarcho-communist utopia, that they chose it as one of the book covers they used to decorate their “shields” during a 2013 protest.

But when Ms. Le Guin first conceived the story that became The Dispossessed, it was not intended as a utopia. It was a character study. She recounts its birth in her essay, “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” which appears in her 1979 collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Like her book The Left Hand of Darkness, she says,

the origin of my book The Dispossessed was equally clear, but it got very muddled before it ever became clear again. It too began with a person, seen much closer to, this time, and with intense vividness: a man, this time, a scientist, a physicist in fact I saw the face more clearly than usual, a thin face, large clear eyes, and large ears—these, I think, may have come from a childhood memory of Robert Oppenheimer as a young man. But more vivid than any visual detail was the personality, which was more attractive—attractive, I mean, as a flame to a moth. There, there he is, I have got to get there this time… My first effort to catch him was a short story. I should have known he was much too big for a short story. It’s a writer’s business to develop an infallible sense for the proper size and length of a work; the beauty of the novella and the novel is essentially architectural, the beauty of proportion. It was a really terrible story, one of the worst I have written in thirty years of malpractice. This scientist was escaping from a sort of prison-camp planet, a stellar Gulag, and he gets to the rich comfortable spoiled sister planet, and finally can’t stand it despite a love affair there, and so re-escapes and goes back to the Gulag, sadly but nobly. Nobly but feeblemindedly. Oh, it was a stupid story. All the metaphors were mixed. I hadn’t got anywhere near him. I’d missed him by so far, in fact, that I hadn’t damaged him at all. There he stood, quite untouched. Catch me if you can!” All right. All right, what’s-your-name. What is your name, by the way? Shevek, he told me promptly. All right, Shevek. So who are you? His answer was less certain this time. I think, he said, that I am a citizen of Utopia. Very well. That sounded reasonable. There was something so decent about him, he was so intelligent and yet so disarmingly naïve, the he might well come from a better place than this.

Thus Ms. Le Guin put the usual historical process in reverse. Real life communism begins with promises of utopia and ends with a Gulag. Ursula Le Guin began with a Gulag, and ends with promises of utopia. Such as it is.

The utopia is the planet of Anarres. Several hundred years earlier, a group of idealists had left its sister planet, Urras, to found a colony there. Since then, contact between the two planets was limited to a semi-annual supply ship and some radio contact reserved for the elite that wasn’t supposed to exist. Ms. Le Guin wanted to show how her utopia would unfold without outside interference.

The opening paragraphs are a rather ingenious depiction of a wall, which are well worth reading in their entirety:

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks and roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of a boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important that that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on. Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free. Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

We then meet Shevek. As in the original short story, he is “escaping,” boarding the supply ship to return to Urras, the first person ever to do so.

From here the book alternates between chapters about Shevek’s experiences on Urras, where he’s lionized as a celebrity, and chapters recounting his life story up to his momentous decision to leave Anarres and return to the mother planet.

Frankly I found it slow going. Ms. Le Guin was so focused on her character, that she didn’t give us much by way of plot. For most of the book, there just wasn’t any conflict with sufficiently high stakes to have me wondering what was going to happen next. Yes, there were hints that Shevek’s hosts on Urras had some hidden agenda, but these were only passing mentions. It wasn’t until about three-quarters of the way through, when Shevek set out to make his second escape, this time from Urras back to Anarres, that the pace picked up and I finally found myself drawn into the story.

On top of that, IMHO, Ms. Le Guin didn’t even succeed at what she set out to do in the first place, create a vivid character who was “attractive, I mean as a flame to a moth…too big for a short story.” I found Shevek to be a bit of a sad sack, a little boring, often passive, with an air of hopelessness about him. There was no flamey attraction at all.

But there is one aspect of the book that intrigued me (besides the opening passage), in a negative sort of way: the utopian aspect. Anarres is a society where all are equal, at least in theory. There is no private property—the absence of possessions gives the book its title. The needs of every citizen are met (sparsely) without requiring money or work. And yet they do work. “The ideal is people can work freely together, can choose to work together,” Ms. Le Guin explains in a 2015 interview. “That’s the anarchist ideal, such a lovely ideal…Make the work good enough and people will want to do it and do it together.”

Ms. Le Guin worked very hard on the utopian aspect of the book. “It took me years,” she wrote in the “Mrs. Brown” essay. “Reading and pondering and muddling, and much assistance from Engels, Marx, Godwin, Goldman, Goodman, and above all Shelley and Kropotkin, before I could begin to see where [Shevek] came from, and could see the landscape about him.” In an interview with Euan Monaghan, available on lithub.com she added, “I got fascinated. Portland used to have a hundred independent bookstores, and one of them was rather political, and in the back room, if he knew you, he would take you in to see his anarchist stuff.”

And yet, despite her hard work and schmoozing of bookstore owners, the Anarres utopia is a terrible place. The people barely survive at a subsistence level. Artificial heat and light are forbidden. Even on those rare occasions when there are resources available for them, it’s felt that such luxuries would undermine the virtue of poverty.

The so-called anarchy is not really without government. There’s a central agency that matches workers to available jobs. And when a road needs to be built, or a forest cleared, citizens are drafted, much like the corvée that reduced the medieval serf to slavery. The more perceptive Anarrans are well aware that their claim to have no government is a pretense, as Shevek’s friend Bedap admits at one point.

And yet the real power on Anarres is the amorphous pressure of public opinion. Those who are seen as not pulling their weight are ostracized, which is occasionally enforced by a barrage of rock-throwing. A similar fate awaits anyone with the effrontery to think for themselves. They’re cut off from the work that was supposed to be so fulfilling that they would do it without pay. Another of Shevek’s friends, Tirin, wrote an unpopular play and finds himself assigned to road work. As with dissenters in the Soviet Union, he ends up in a psychiatric hospital. Even Shevek, working at a university, is barred from teaching until he gives up the original research the powers-that-be find threatening. I cringed every time an Anarran described himself as "free."

Anarcho-communism is not freedom. Like all forms of communism, it is fundamentally flawed. To take material goods away from people who produced them, in order to redistribute them to people who didn't, is morally wrong. Without the need to work in order to survive, not to mention the delightful possibility of growing rich, there is little incentive for anyone to put in effort. Without the price mechanism of the market, even the most well-intentioned bureaucrats lack the information they need to balance supply and demand. The result is chronic shortages. And when there are no checks and balances on the power of the collective, the pressure to conform is a tyranny as soul-crushing as anything government can impose.

In The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin set out to create an ideal society, a utopian utopia, and judging from her various public statements, she was sincere about that. But the logic of anarcho-communism led her to its natural, grim conclusion instead. To her credit, Ms. Le Guin was too honest a writer to evade that logic. She never could escape from the Gulag that was the setting of her original short story.

Even Ms. Le Guin conceded, in her "Mrs. Brown essay" that Anarres was a utopia "of sorts." Some editions of The Dispossessed are subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia.” I don’t know if that was Ms. Le Guin’s decision or her publishers’. But I would go beyond that. Anarres is an unambiguous dystopia.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His dystopian novel, Full Asylum, shows what America will look like if it continues down the path of socialism. But since George Orwell and Ayn Rand already wrote the grim version of that story, Dr. Isenberg wrote a comedy. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Domingoyu.com.