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Sunday, March 17, 2024

Let Us Prey

U.S. "Christian Nationalists" are making plans for us.
   

The Project 2025 BC folks have some “competition.”
 
 Get a load of this crew.

Below,
the entirety of their website.
THE VISION
We foresee a nation building great projects of civic and cultural renaissance. A society with strong leadership committed to family and culture. A society that nurtures, rather than rejects, virtue. A society that seeks the good and the beautiful, and abjures ideology.

We are raising accountable leaders to help build thriving communities of free citizens, who will reclaim a humane vision of society while rebuilding the frontier-conquering spirit of America. A new thing for a new day, informed by the wisdom of the past but facing the future.

A brotherhood of faith and solidarity.

The past is sealed. The future is open. As the great men of the West bequeathed their deeds to us, so must we leave a legacy for our children. Through associations bound by a common vision, we strengthen the ties that bind us together as Americans and free men. The works raised by our hands to this end will last long after we are buried.

CIVILIZATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT AS A SHARED GOAL

A man is no longer encouraged to fly to the stars, to tame the wilderness, to plant the seeds that his children will inherit. Rather, those who rule today spit on such ambitions; they corrupt the sinews of America. They have alienated men from family, community, and God. We counter and conquer this poison, rebuilding a society where a man can find genuine fulfilment, true to his nature and calling, rejoicing in virtue and vitality.

THE MARK

The mark and its seal evoke the goals of the Society and signify what binds the members of the Society.

CHRISTIANITY
The mark evokes two versions of the Cross used in early Christianity: Saint Peter’s Cross and the Anchor Cross. The former is a symbol of faithful humility; the latter of stability and hope—both within a Trinitarian framework, and rejecting Modernist philosophies and heresies.

AUTHORITY AND THE EXERCISE OF POWER
The mark is both sword and shield, the first the traditional symbol of temporal authority, the second a symbol of defense of the weak, the widow and the orphan, and of all those under sustained attack by the powers of the current age.

RENAISSANCE
The mark looks backward, but it also looks forward and upward. A new America, for a new age, informed by the wisdom of the old—the future Renaissance. The goal of the Society is renewal, returning to success, heedless of nostalgia. The mark shows a supported reaching for the sky, demanding of us that we excel in the works of Man, under the eyes of God.

A word on joining the effort.

Membership in the Society, which is organized primarily around local groups overseen by a national superstructure, is by invitation only.
That's it. No contact links, nothing else. Below, a couple of media sources have unearthred some rather jiggy internal documentation:
SOCIETY FOR AMERICAN CIVIC RENEWAL

Mission Statement - Internal
Our aim is to build and maintain a robust network of capable men who can reverse our society's decline and return us to the successful path off which America has strayed.

We acknowledge our intellectual, political, and social inheritance, of both America's founding and of Christendom. We are un-hyphenated Americans and we believe in a particular Christianity that is not blurred by modernist philosophies. We ambitiously point to an ideal based on that dual inheritance. We are willing to act decisively to secure permanently, as much as anything is permanent, the political and social dominance of that ideal.

To that end, our organization seeks to recruit men of good character whose loyalties are grounded in strong virtue, correct religion, the moral life, and piety toward their forebears. Most of all, we seek those who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm. Our conviction is that a brotherhood of these men will form the backbone of a renewed American regime that will reflect the past while facing, and vigorously shaping, the future.

Mission Statement - Public
America is in a state of crisis. Decadence and corruption abound, from the streets of West Hollywood to the board rooms of Wall Street, and in many unnamed and unknown places in between. "Citizenship" has little meaning in the morass of social dysfunction and unaccountability that has become our republic. ''Virtue" has become a term of derision rather than an achievable ideal.

Our aim is to provide the framework, and the resources, for a way forward for ordinary citizens to reclaim a humane vision of society. Community, virtue, wisdom, strength, and solidarity are our watchwords. We seek a vigorous civic renewal that will reflect the past while facing the future.

Objectives
1: Identify and provide formation for local elites who are today largely outside formal power structures but who are capable of exercising authority and who are aligned with our goal of complete civic renewal. We believe in intellectual and spiritual development, but our formation is aimed at concrete temporal achievements, not furthering intellectual discussion.

2: Actively assist local elites to build-out and maintain fraternal networks which will advance both the members of those networks and our collective goals, in all areas of life. Such advancement will include direct preferential treatment for members, especially in business.

3: Coordinate allied fraternal networks, in business and other organizational areas, to achieve our goals in activities to which a political awareness can be brought, but has not traditionally been brought by those wishing to defend our values. These include hiring and promotion; award of contracts; internal policies and procedures; and leadership succession.

4: Defend fraternal networks, our own and allies, against attacks by those opposed to civic renewal, and strongly deter such attacks.

5: Collect, curate and document a list of potential appointees and hires for an aligned future regime. These may be the same men described in Objective 1, but need not be necessarily. More likely, they would be next generation-not founding participants, but those who joined as the project of civic renewal grows deep roots. That is, men who "grow up in the system."
________________

SOCIETY FOR AMERICAN CIVIC RENEWAL

WORKING MEMBERSHIP AND RECRUITING GUIDE FOR CHAPTER LEADERSHIP

I.MEMBERSHIP CRITERIA


Membership in SACR is predicated on political alignment and faithfulness to the Christian religion, combined with virtue and with any of community influence, capability, or wealth. Once a prospective member passes the minimal bar of alignment and Trinitarian identity, he should demonstrably embody the virtuous practice of our faith and possess the qualities that will ensure his ability to contribute meaningfully to our project. Each quality is explained further below; they are in no particular order, and should not be considered exhaustive.

Alignment: To be aligned is to acknowledge "our political and social inheritance, of both America's founding and of Christendom," which entails deference to and acceptance of the wisdom of our American and European Christian forebears in the political realm, a traditional understanding of patriarchal leadership in the household, and an acceptance of traditional Natural Law in ethics more broadly.

Virtue: Evidence of long-lasting relationships; restraint and self-denial; household management; leadership and orderliness; and courage in speaking against the injustices of our age.

Faithfulness: Submission to the authority and standards of behavior of a particular Trinitarian Christian body; adherence to traditional Christian sexual ethics; taking ownership as head of the household in terms of leading regular prayer and spiritual reading and reflection; involvement in parish/church ministries; regular tithing.

One or more of:

Influence: To be influential in this context is to possess the ability to make a mark primarily on culture and social discourse but also in politics and business. The positions here can range from equity ownership in productive enterprises to positions of influence in cultural, religious and intellectual institutions.

Capability: This entails high capability in skills useful for our organization and the businesses it will be affiliated with (e.g., any skill conducive to the technical work of productive entrepreneurship; lawfare; cybersecurity).

Wealth: This is measured in terms of overall financial attainment as well as ultimately, willingness to put such resources to use in our cause.

Levels of membership:

We conceive of Chapter membership as consisting of multiple levels: "Junior" membership and regular membership, which will be furrher split into "associate" and "full" membership, roughly corresponding to level of professional and personal experience and abilities as well as demonstrated level of commitment 1-0 our objectives.

Junior Membership
: Junior Members will be younger (20s to early 30s) men who demonstrate the qualities above, but in nascent form. Dues will be at a reduced rate, and they will not be included, generally in national discussions.

Regular Membership
: Regular Members will be men of all ages who demonstrate the qualities above in a matured and accomplished form. Dues will be slightly higher, and they will be included at varying levels in national discussions and have access to information at the national and inter-chapter level. A further distinction should be made between "associate" and "full" Members.

Associate Membership
: The primary distinction between Junior Members and Regular Associate Members will be age (though this is not determinative, and some Associate Members may be younger), experience and accomplishments.

Full Membership: Full Membership is reserved for those with significant skin in the game with respect to our mission and objectives and demo111strated commitment over time.

National leadership is reserved for those members the national Board deem appropriate to include in national planning, strategy and operations. In most cases these will be Full Members.

All members are obligated to pay dues timely, attend at least twelve gatherings per year, and to adhere to the Rules for Gatherings noted below.

II. MEMBERSHIP VETTING


The process of vetting begins with the passive knowledge of or pre-existing relationships with prospects among members.

The above membership criteria should be distributed among Chapter members so they can internalize it and be on the lookout for prospects.
Once identified, a prospect should be discussed with Chapter leadership with the following knowledge:
  • Denominational affiliation
  • Profession
  • Marital status
  • Brief description of fitness for membership based on above criteria
If Chapter leadership deems the prospect worthy of consideration, the prospect should be invited to a Chapter event, where the Rules for Gatherings for all attendees are explained and agreed to in advance.

At the gathering, the following are some suggested prompts for discussion with the prospect to gauge alignment and fit:
  • What are your thoughts on the Republican Party?
  • What are your thoughts on "Christian Nationalism"?
  • Comment on the Trump presidency and what it entails for the future.
  • Describe the dynamic of your household in terms of your role and that of your wife.
____________________

SOCIETY FOR AMERICAN CIVIC RENEWAL

PRAYERS FOR CHAPTER EVENTS


In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit we call upon the help of God to establish, empower, and guide us in our mission of civic renewal. May God unite us in this mission as Joshua’s men when they defeated the mighty walls of Jericho as Nehemiah’s men who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, as Saint Constantine's men when they conquered in the sign of the Cross. May the light of Christendom be restored in our homeland and may America not fall to those who hate God. May God establish our civil authorities as his ministers of justice and may we and our sons never partake from the table-scraps of the enemies of God but rely forever on God's generous providence. Through our loyal cooperation and perseverance under God, may he develop in us all necessary shrewdness and strength, and may our sons live to see the commonplace grateful reception in our homeland of God's gifts: of human nature, sanctified marriage and children and grandchildren, and the renewal of all good and proper earthly labors, especially those of the patriarch and statesman. May God show his mercy upon America and bless us as we entrust our lives and mission to God in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.

Short Prayer - Regular Meetings

As we gather this evening/ we call upon the help of God to establish, empower, and guide us in our mission of civic renewal. Through our loyal cooperation and perseverance under God, may he develop in us all necessary shrewdness and strength, and may our sons live to see the commonplace grateful reception in our homeland of the natural law, Christian truth, and all good and proper earthly labors, especially those of the patriarch and statesman. May God show his mercy upon America and bless us as we entrust our lives and mission to God in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ Amen.
YEAH. AND, IT GETS EVEN BETTER

Shocking Online Manifesto Reveals Project 2025’S Link To A Coordinated ‘Christian Nationalism Project’
The Statement on Christian Nationalism” seeks to implement a Scripture-based system of government whereby Christ-ordained “civil magistrates” exercise authority over the American public.

Draft Authors: James Silberman, Dusty Deevers.
Contributing Editors: William Wolfe, Joel Webbon, Jeff Wright, Cory Anderson.


DEFINITION
CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM is a set of governing principles rooted in Scripture’s teaching that Christ rules as supreme Lord and King of all creation, who has ordained civil magistrates with delegated authority to be under Him, over the people, to order their ordained jurisdiction by punishing evil and promoting good for His own glory and the common good of the nation.

INTRODUCTION
Christian Nationalism is primarily concerned with the righteous rule of civil authorities, not spiritual matters pertaining to salvation. The desire for a Christian nation is not a distraction from the Gospel but rather an effort to faithfully apply all of Scripture to all of life, including the public square. As such, Christian Nationalism is not just for civil authorities, just as submitting to Christ’s Lordship is not just for civil authorities but for all people. After the Lord Jesus declared His sovereign authority (Matthew 28:18), He gave the Great Commission and commanded His followers, empowered by His everlasting presence, to make disciples of “all nations”  and to baptize them and “teach them to obey all that I have commanded” (Matthew 28:19-20). Our Lord did not exclude all civil authorities from the command to submit to His authority and display allegiance to Him…
___________

Article I: The Source of Truth
WE AFFIRM that the Bible is God’s Word, breathed out by Him as the only sufficient, certain, inerrant, infallible, necessary, and final authority for all saving knowledge, faith (what we must believe), and obedience (how we must live). We affirm that the light of nature in man and God’s works in creation and providence reveal God’s power and nature, leaving civil authorities without excuse for failing to govern justly as His servants, yet this knowledge is insufficient for repentance unto life in salvation. All truth claims and ethical standards must be tested by God’s final Word, which is Scripture alone. We affirm that the Bible is clear in all essential matters.

WE DENY that true beliefs, good character, or good conduct can be dictated by any authority other than God’s revelation.

Article II: Orthodox Christian Faith
WE AFFIRM that nations are commanded to honor God by officially affirming the orthodox Christian faith as historically and universally defined and affirmed in the creeds (e.g., Apostle’s Creed, Nicene Creed, Athanasian Creed). We affirm that many denominational confessions articulate the orthodox Christian faith. We affirm that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, revealed in Scripture alone, to the glory of God alone.

Article III: The Standard of Justice

WE AFFIRM that God’s Word is authoritative on everything to which it speaks, and we affirm that God’s Word speaks abundantly regarding the nature and importance of civil government and justice. We affirm that God's moral law is enduring and binding on all people throughout all time, including civil authorities and nations, and that it is summarily comprehended in the Ten Commandments. We further affirm that every political thought must be taken captive to the obedience of Christ. We affirm that Christ will judge every civil authority according to their conformity to His command.

WE DENY that there is any objective standard by which to discern justice from injustice outside of God’s revelation, written on the heart and most perfectly revealed in Scripture. We deny that faithful civil authorities may rule autonomously from the rule of Christ. We deny that God approves of Christians embracing any political ideology or position prohibited by Scripture.

Article IV: The Definition of a Nation
WE AFFIRM that a nation is not merely an idea, abstract principle, or ideology but tangibly defined by a particular body of people in a particular place. We affirm that a particular people are necessarily bound together by a shared culture, customs, history, and lineage while sharing common interests, virtues, languages, and worship. We affirm, in regards to “place” that a nation is definitively set by both its borders and times physically defined by God (Acts 17:26). Thus, we affirm that nations should rightly maintain autonomous government of their people and place, with the necessary rights and duties to (1) prioritize the security of its people by maintaining its borders, providing for its common defense, and repelling invasions from without and insurrections from within; (2) promote the prosperity of its citizens; and, (3) enforce justice.

WE DENY that a nation should cede its sovereignty to international bodies that may subvert the will of the national interest for a global order. We deny any efforts to establish a “one world” governmental system before the return of Christ, as such efforts are a reenactment of the Tower of Babel. We further deny that sovereign nations must only be composed of mono-ethnic populations to be united under God. Therefore, as Christian Nationalists, we utterly repudiate sinful ethnic partiality in all its various forms.

Article V: The Nature of Christ’s Lordship and Kingdom
WE AFFIRM that in addition to possessing the titles of Savior, Messiah, and many others, Jesus, the Son of God, Who is truly God, is also the King of all earthly kings, the Lord of all earthly lords, and the Lawmaker for all earthly lawmakers. He is the possessor of all authority in heaven and on earth. We affirm that as God, Jesus Christ is preeminent over all creation, sovereignly rules over all things visible and invisible in heaven, earth, and hell, and ordains all things according to the counsel of His perfect will for the good of those in Him. We affirm that in His mediatorial rule, Christ rules by His Spirit and Word through the saints in their earthly authority. We also affirm that as sovereign King of kings, Christ has commanded all civil authorities, Christian and non-Christian alike, to execute His will on the earth to orient humankind toward Himself through the moral law. We affirm that Christ alone, through the blood of His cross, grants repentance and forgiveness of sins to reconcile sinners to His Father.
 
WE DENY any theology which would seek to segregate sacred aspects of life, where God’s Word is authoritative, and supposedly secular aspects of life, where the Christian must operate by a standard other than God’s Word. We deny any theology which claims that bringing God’s Word into the civil sphere is unwise, unfruitful, sinful, or anything other than fitting and required. We deny that Jesus’ kingship and lordship are merely heavenly or that His Word is only authoritative over confessing Christians. We deny that, solely by virtue of their claims to authority or the claims of those who support them, any human or group of humans who claim to be civil authorities are, in actuality, recognized by God to be civil authorities...

OK, you get the idea. Upon reconsideration, I took out the rest. A waste of bandwidth. They ramble on through more than s dozen more "Articles" asserting patriarchal Christian biblical authority over every detail of American life.

Props to Jennifer Cohn, Bucks County Beacon.
_____
 
STILL TO COME...
Pretty much the same schtick, perhaps a tad less snarlingly aggressive.

Among other things, these folks want to outlaw IVF.
To IVF critics … an embryo is just a very young person. “The only real difference between those frozen embryos and me sitting here having this conversation with you is time,” Katy Faust, the president of the anti-abortion nonprofit Them Before Us, told me. “If you believe that children have a right to life, and that life begins at conception, then ‘Big Fertility’ as an industry is responsible for more child deaths than the abortion industry.” Faust’s organization argues from a “children’s rights” perspective, meaning it also believes that IVF is wrong, in part, because it allows single women and homosexual couples to have babies, which deprives children of having both a mother and a father.

This leads to the other major criticism of IVF: that the process itself is so unnatural that it devalues sex and treats children as a commodity. The argument to which many religious Americans subscribe is that having children is a “cooperative act among husband, wife, and God himself,” John M. Haas, a former president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, has written. “Children, in the final analysis, should be begotten not made.”…
Full article here.

LET US PREY
 

Yeah, right. Mr. Piety.
 
Random note: I'm a "small-a" atheist, which simply means "without theology," nothing more. A fully-recovered Episcopalian, subsequently a dilettante UU, and a stable, long-time secular Zen Sympathizer. I find anthropomorphic / speciocentric wishful-thinking stuff of nil interest. There's too much of exigent importance to reflect and act upon.

UPDATE
   
Christian Nationalism is Both Smear and Savior to Many Christians
By Paul A. Djupe, Denison University


All it took was some imprecise language from a Politico reporter to fire up the outrage machine. If it means that the rights and liberties of the Constitution were granted by God, then “Christian nationalism” is a smear applied to the broadest swath of the population that simply associates democracy with godliness…

It seems clear that many Christian nationalists do not like being labeled as such even as they see Christian nationalism as a substantive idea that they agree with for restoring Christians to societal dominance. The elite ploy, of course, has been to try and delegitimize opponents who are accurately labeling them. And they use accusations that opponents are trying to take away their rights by calling them Christian nationalists to feed the Christian persecution complex that has been so successful at mobilizing supporters. The fact that those feigning outrage are actually supporters is unlikely to stop them.
Fine piece. Read all of it
_________
 

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

In fewer than eight months,

the arc of history may well take a sharp, adverse turn away from any rational notion of civilized justice.


A painfully hilarious read. Andrew Marantz is an Old Soul of a writer at the age of 39. I’m having an interesting reaction. I have not been feeling well lately (Parkinson’s getting worse). Curiously, this book is making me feel better physically. OK, back to reading. More to come. Stay tuned.


I finally finished this book. Kindle Reader pegs it at 15 hours, 2 minutes. Lotta book here, lotta fine writing. This is the first post in which I've cited all my my excerpts using the Kindle Reader #Kindlequotes functionality. I would click-drag-highlight sections as I was going through the book and save them iteratively as jpegs.
 
This book is a 2019 release. Things don't appear to be getting materially better in the aggregate with respect to ill-will / bad faith polarizing mis/disinformation. See some of my priors posts citing "disinformation."

I came to the author via one of his recent New Yorker articles.

...A camp of techno-optimists rebuffs A.I. doomerism with old-fashioned libertarian boomerism, insisting that all the hand-wringing about existential risk is a kind of mass hysteria. They call themselves “effective accelerationists,” or e/accs (pronounced “e-acks”), and they believe A.I. will usher in a utopian future—interstellar travel, the end of disease—as long as the worriers get out of the way. On social media, they troll doomsayers as “decels,” “psyops,” “basically terrorists,” or, worst of all, “regulation-loving bureaucrats.” “We must steal the fire of intelligence from the gods [and] use it to propel humanity towards the stars,” a leading e/acc recently tweeted. (And then there are the normies, based anywhere other than the Bay Area or the Internet, who have mostly tuned out the debate, attributing it to sci-fi fume-huffing or corporate hot air.)...
_________
 


Monday, March 11, 2024

primus inter pares?

Can SCOTUS summarily and unilaterally revise the U.S. Constitution?
  

   
The answer appears to be "yes" these days.
There’s more than one way to skin a Constitution. Here are two: a court might base a decision on the original intention, meaning, and public understanding, the “history and tradition,” of a constitutional provision, or it might base a decision on a consideration of the consequences. Ordinarily, a judge might apply both these and other methods, but a strict originalist might argue that the jurisprudence of originalism is fundamentally opposed to the jurisprudence of consequentialism—that it’s best to heed the past and damn the consequences. During oral arguments at the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, for instance, Justice Samuel Alito asked about origins (“Can it be said that the right to abortion is deeply rooted in the history and traditions of the American people?”), and Justice Sonia Sotomayor inquired after consequences (“When does the life of a woman and putting her at risk enter the calculus?”). Alito wrote the majority opinion, declaring that no right to an abortion can be found in the Constitution’s history and tradition, and that therefore “the Fourteenth Amendment does not protect the right to an abortion.” Sotomayor joined a dissent that denounced “the majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences” of its decision.

This term, the tables turned. In Trump v. Anderson, the Court agreed to review a decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to strike the former President’s name from that state’s Republican primary ballot. That court had found that Donald Trump, owing to his role in the events of January 6th, had been disqualified under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits people who have sworn an oath to the Constitution and then engaged in an insurrection against it from holding office. Maine and Illinois also determined that Trump had disqualified himself.

There are strong arguments against disqualifying Trump, but none involve the historical record: the evidence of history supported affirming the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision. (I and the historians David Blight, Drew Gilpin Faust, and John Fabian Witt made this argument in an amicus brief.) During oral arguments, Justice Sotomayor asked about origins: “History proves a lot to me.” Justice Alito worried about outcomes: “The consequences of what the Colorado Supreme Court did, some people claim, would be quite severe.” So did Chief Justice John Roberts, who asked Jason Murray, the lawyer representing Colorado voters, what he’d do with what “would seem to me to be plain consequences of your position?” Alito asked Murray “to grapple with what some people have seen as the consequences of the argument that you’re advancing.” Posing one hypothetical after another, Alito asked, “Then what would we do?”…

If the Court is now interested in consequentialist arguments, here’s one: in the past quarter century, more than three hundred thousand American children have experienced armed civilians attacking their schools. Last year, there were six hundred and fifty-six mass shootings in the United States. Four out of five murders and more than half of all suicides in this country involve a gun. Gun ownership is rising, and so is political violence. For nearly a century, beginning with the earliest public-opinion surveys, Americans have consistently supported safety measures and curbs on gun ownership. Since 2008, the Court has thwarted them…
Stay tuned. apropos, See my March 5th post on the topic.

PER CURIOUS PER CURIAM. Did SCOTUS just summarily amend the Constitution, via 5 votes?

I refer us all back to Article V. It specifies but two methods of amending. Inclusive.
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
See also "The Shadow Docket.
_________
 

Academy Awards Night 2024


I have so much to be grateful for. Knowing that there is zero chance of ever tuning in to The Oscars and seeing Donald Trump sitting at one of the tables ranks right up at the top.

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Pentagon Valley? Moving fast and breaking “things” (including human non-combatants)?

What could possibly go wrong? Not wholly a forward-looking speculation, it turns out.
  

This
jumped in my face today. Been lying there on the coffee table for a couple of days. Finally got around to it. Totally coheres with the Kara Swisher stuff of my prior post.
Three months before Hamas attacked Israel, Ronen Bar, the director of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, announced that his agency had developed its own generative artificial intelligence platform—similar to ChatGPT—and that the technology had been incorporated quite naturally into the agency’s “interdiction machine,” assisting in decision-making “like a partner at the table, a co-pilot.” As the Israeli news site Tech12 explained in a preview of his speech.
The system knows everything about [the terrorist]: where he went, who his friends are, who his family is, what keeps him busy, what he said and what he published. Using artificial intelligence, the system analyzes behavior, predicts risks, raises alerts.
Nevertheless, Hamas’s devastating attack on October 7 caught Shin Bet and the rest of Israel’s multibillion-dollar defense system entirely by surprise. The intelligence disaster was even more striking considering Hamas carried out much of its preparations in plain sight, including practice assaults on mock-ups of the border fence and Israeli settlements—activities that were openly reported. Hamas-led militant groups even posted videos of their training online. Israelis living close to the border observed and publicized these exercises with mounting alarm, but were ignored in favor of intelligence bureaucracies’ analyses and, by extension, the software that had informed them. Israeli conscripts, mostly young women, monitoring developments through the ubiquitous surveillance cameras along the Gaza border, composed and presented a detailed report on Hamas’s preparations to breach the fence and take hostages, only to have their findings dismissed as “an imaginary scenario.” The Israeli intelligence apparatus had for more than a year been in possession of a Hamas document that detailed the group’s plan for an attack.

Well aware of Israel’s intelligence methods, Hamas members fed their enemy the data that they wanted to hear, using informants they knew would report to the Israelis. They signaled that the ruling group inside Gaza was concentrating on improving the local economy by gaining access to the Israeli job market, and that Hamas had been deterred from action by Israel’s overwhelming military might. Such reports confirmed that Israel’s intelligence system had rigid assumptions of Hamas behavior, overlaid with a racial arrogance that considered Palestinians incapable of such a large-scale operation. AI, it turned out, knew everything about the terrorist except what he was thinking…
Imagine our surprise. It gets worse.
…[M]isplaced confidence was evidently not confined to Israeli intelligence. The November/December issue of Foreign Affairs not only carried a risibly ill-timed boast by national security adviser Jake Sullivan that “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza,” but also a paean to AI by Michèle Flournoy. Flournoy is a seasoned denizen of the military-industrial complex. The undersecretary of defense for policy under Barack Obama, she transitioned to, among other engagements, a lucrative founding leadership position with the defense consultancy WestExec Advisors. “Building bridges between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government is really, really important,” she told The American Prospect in 2020. Headlined ai is already at war, Flournoy’s Foreign Affairs article invoked the intelligence analysts who made “better judgments” thanks to AI’s help in analyzing information. “In the future, Americans can expect AI to change how the United States and its adversaries fight on the battlefield,” she wrote. “In short, AI has sparked a security revolution—one that is just starting to unfold.” This wondrous new technology, she asserted, would enable America not only to detect enemy threats, but also to maintain complex weapons systems and help estimate the cost of strategic decisions. Only a tortuous and hidebound Pentagon bureaucracy was holding it back.

Lamenting obstructive Pentagon bureaucrats is a trope of tech pitches, one that plays well in the media. tech start-ups try to sell a cautious pentagon on a.i. ran a headline in the New York Times last November over a glowing report on Shield AI, a money-losing drone company for which Flournoy has been an adviser…
And, it gets worse.
 

This shit makes me ill.
The belief that software can solve problems of human conflict has a long history in U.S. war-making. Beginning in the late Sixties, the Air Force deployed a vast array of sensors across the jungles of Southeast Asia, masking the Ho Chi Minh trail along which North Vietnam supplied its forces in the south. Devised by scientists advising the Pentagon, the operation, code-named Igloo White, and designed to detect human activity by the sounds of marching feet, the smell of ammonia from urine, or the electronic sparks of engine ignitions, relayed information to giant IBM computers housed in a secret base in Thailand. The machines were the most powerful then in existence; they processed the signals to pinpoint enemy supply columns otherwise invisible under the jungle canopy. The scheme, in operation from 1967 to 1972 at a cost of at least hundreds of millions a year, was a total failure. The Vietnamese swiftly devised means to counter it; just as Hamas would short-circuit Shin Bet algorithms by feeding the system false information, the Vietnamese also faked data, with buckets of urine hung in trees off the trail, or herds of livestock steered down unused byways, which were then dutifully processed by the humming computers as enemy movements. Meanwhile, North Vietnamese forces in the south were well supplied. In 1972, they launched a powerful offensive using hundreds of tanks that went entirely undetected by Igloo White. The operation was abandoned shortly thereafter…
No, hardly a forward-looking speculative concern.
 

 Move fast and kill people. Armed or not.

 
We'll leave things here for now. Andrew Cockburn:
I was curious about Palantir, whose stock indeed soared amid the 2023 AI frenzy. I had been told that the Israeli security sector’s AI systems might rely on Palantir’s technology. Furthermore, Shin Bet’s humiliating failure to predict the Hamas assault had not blunted the Israeli Defense Force’s appetite for the technology; the unceasing rain of bombs upon densely packed Gaza neighborhoods, according to a well-sourced report by Israeli reporter Yuval Abraham in +972 Magazine, was in fact partly controlled by an AI target-creation platform called the Gospel. The Gospel produces automatic recommendations for where to strike based on what the technology identifies as being connected with Hamas, such as the private home of a suspected rank-and-file member of the organization. It also calculates how many civilians, including women and children, would die in the process—which, as of this writing, amounted to at least twenty-two thousand people, some 70 percent of them women and children. One of Abraham’s intelligence sources termed the technology a “mass assassination factory.” Despite the high-tech gloss on the massacre, the result has been no different than the slaughter inflicted, with comparatively more primitive means, against Dresden and Tokyo during World War II.
My links column ongoing list of concerns.
Armed State Conflicts + Malign Technologies ... No surprises here.
 
CODA
 
An old 2002 beef of mine with the DARPA "Total Information Awareness" tech+surveilance+military thing. (uh, has link rot). And, yeah, I actually sent this to Admiral Poindexter. I have long been outa [bleeps] to give.
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Wednesday, March 6, 2024

"When you need the job done right,

bring in the women."
  
 
A long-favorite riff of mine, that post title.

OK, I finished Barb McQuade's book the other day and have now plowed well into Kara Swisher's killer read. This stuff could not be more timely. I present below for your convenient edification one extended cite from each. You hardly need my take; these formidable women (like all of the many I cite here) are eloquent, logical, and clear (and more). Both of these books are must-reads.
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BARB, "CH 10: THE WAY FORWARD"
I was visiting Ireland in the spring of 2018, when the country was considering a referendum that would end the nation’s prohibition on abortion. In a country with an official Catholic faith, I imagined that the debate would be raging with the passion of a blood feud. Instead, I was surprised to find that advocates on both sides of the issue stood on street corners, passing out literature and politely engaging passersby who expressed interest in learning more about the issue. To this day, I still keep on my desk a button that says “Tá,” Irish Gaelic for “yes”—the choice that would change the law to permit abortion and the side that ultimately prevailed in the election by an overwhelming margin. Irish feminist Ailbhe Smyth observed that the country was able to conduct the vote without becoming split. She attributed that success to “creating an empathetic framework of discourse so that people are not at each other’s throats.”

Combating disinformation is a massive undertaking, and defeating it will require the kind of empathy I saw in Ireland. The Irish people were committed to preserving their national unity above all else. As I saw in Ireland, I do not expect us to find unity on the substance of issues—we will always have differences of opinion on issues such as criminal justice and government spending—but we must be united in the process of how we solve problems. The ability to solve any problem requires a shared understanding of facts and truth.

What is truth? Philosophers and religious scholars debate the meaning of the term. There are some truths that may be unknowable to the human mind, such as the meaning of life or whether intelligent beings exist elsewhere in the cosmos. But truth is different from fact. Facts can be verified, even if our perceptions of them may vary. The color of the traffic light at the time of a car accident is often a knowable fact. So is the number of votes a particular candidate received in an election. Finding facts requires investigation, discovery, documentation, and testing. Scientists find facts. Researchers find facts. Ordinary people find facts every day. Are we out of milk? Did Dad take the car? These are facts that are knowable. Our opinions about facts may vary: Is the coffee hot? Do we need to fill the gas tank? Reaching conclusions requires interpretation, and reasonable minds may disagree. What I deem “hot” may be different from the preferences of others; the fuel level at which I think a car requires a refill likely varies from the risk tolerance of others. We can tell the difference between opinion and facts. And while we are all free to form our own views, we must commit to debating them from a shared set of facts.

Overcoming Fear

How do we preserve our democracy when political opportunists are willing to grab power through lies instead of adhering to democratic norms? I think the answer lies in the same strategy basic to every relationship: we need to care more about maintaining the relationship than getting our way. In American government, that means needing to care more about ensuring democracy than about imposing our will.

In How Democracies Die, authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt examine not only the demise of democratic governments but the factors that permit them to survive. They conclude that democracies thrive when leaders abide by “unwritten democratic norms.” In America, these norms have been “mutual toleration” and “forbearance.” They define mutual toleration as the acceptance of the opposing party as a legitimate part of our political system. In the United States, political candidates engage in mutual toleration when they concede elections to the winning opponent. Forbearance is the use of restraint in exercising power. Presidents exercise forbearance when they refrain from using their veto power over measures enacted by other branches of government.

In American history, both parties have been guilty of failing to exercise forbearance at times. Legislatures engage in gerrymandering to create voting districts that will give advantages to their party. Both Republican and Democratic presidents have granted ill-advised pardons. But in recent years, the Republican Party seems to have abandoned forbearance, perhaps because its leaders see their political power dwindling. While losing the popular vote for the presidency in five of the six elections between 2000 and 2020, the GOP nonetheless managed to capture five of eight open seats on the Supreme Court during that same period, in part by violating norms. Senator Mitch McConnell was unabashedly duplicitous in holding a confirmation vote for President Trump’s nominee Amy Coney Barrett following the death of a sitting justice in an election year, after refusing to provide a hearing for President Obama’s nominee under similar circumstances.

And now, we have reached the point where some political opportunists have even sacrificed the democratic norm of mutual toleration, the acceptance of the legitimacy of political rivals. Is this the natural end of American democracy?

Sometimes democracies die. Perhaps ours has outlived its natural life. But the alternatives to democracy, as Churchill said, are inferior forms of government. Democracies protect the sovereign power of the people to choose who will serve and represent them. The people can hold leaders accountable and express their dissatisfaction by voting them out of office. Allowing decisions to be made in any way except by the will of the people risks creating preferences for one group of people over another, a far cry from the self-evident truth that all of us are created equal.

Demanding Leaders Who Speak the Truth

To preserve our democracy, we must commit to working together for the greater public good. That means choosing leaders who will reject the use of disinformation to achieve political gain. Democracy requires an informed electorate. While our pluralistic society will always contain differing opinions, we must start from common ground so that we may engage in meaningful debate and make decisions that are in the best interests of our country. The solutions suggested in the last chapter can help us reduce disinformation and blunt its impact, but defeating disinformation will require something more.

We have real problems to solve—climate change, persistent racial injustice, growing disparities in wealth distribution, a changing economy, public health challenges, global conflict, refugee crises, poverty, crime, cyber threats, and many more. To rise to the challenges we collectively face, we need leadership that can bring us together. Our abilities to solve problems have never been greater: Technology offers unimaginable advances in medicine, food distribution, and alternative energy. Distance learning presents opportunities for job retraining and access to higher education. Social media allow us to maintain relationships with family members and friends and to collaborate with people on the other side of the world. Certainly, we face significant challenges, but leaders who offer rational solutions give us our best chance to solve them. Navigating that world requires leaders who will bring out our best hopes rather than prey on our worst fears. As he took office during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appealed to people’s courage when he told them, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” assuring Americans that they could meet any threat that might come. At this moment, America needs leaders who can unite us to face our challenges with courage and optimism.

We the People

But leaders in a democracy, of course, are simply a reflection of the voters who elect them—all of us. In a time when we spend inordinate amounts of time and money on spectator sports, movies, and reality television shows, it can be argued that we get the leaders we deserve. In a democracy, a government of the people, we need responsible leadership not just from our elected officials but from our citizenry. We the people need to recognize that the use of disinformation as a weapon to exercise political power is a threat to democracy, and we must work to abolish it. We must use our voting power to insist on leaders who use facts to solve problems instead of lies to divide us. Voters must accept reasonable compromise from our leaders rather than demanding ideological purity at any cost. We can hold candidates and leaders accountable by refusing to elect or reelect those who knowingly perpetuate false claims and engage in deliberately divisive rhetoric. We should call out those who stand with any political party over country, who allow political ends to justify unscrupulous means. We should condemn leaders who glorify violence and bigotry. If we do not, we will be opening the door wider to greedy hucksters and power-hungry opportunists.

We must also exercise mutual tolerance and forbearance in our own lives. We need to do the work to verify facts needed to make informed decisions about significant societal issues, such as health crises and climate stabilization. We must avoid the temptation to go along with the con when our own side uses disinformation to advance its goals. We need to exercise restraint when we see a snarky comment online. Sharing, liking, and adding a mocking comment for cheap, fleeting laughs to “own” our opponents just exacerbate divisions and fuel disinformers.

Lasting Peace among Ourselves

An essential way to begin to heal our divide is by offering olive branches to people with whom we disagree. We must see people with different views not just as our political opponents but as our fellow Americans. People who have been duped by constant lies, as we have seen, will be reluctant to change their minds. The way to persuade them of the facts is not by mocking their foolishness or judging their enabling behavior. According to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, those who have followed duplicitous leaders “may feel ashamed and unwilling to admit their errors in judgment unless they are approached with the right spirit of openness, at the right time.” In a polarized society, people can “dig their trenches deeper, or they can reach across the lines to stop a new cycle of destruction, knowing that solidarity, love, and dialogue” can conquer political demagogues. Taking this approach requires grace.

According to journalist Anand Giridharadas, author of The Persuaders, a book on political reconciliation, we must meet people where they are. If we want to win over the hearts and minds of our fellow Americans, we can’t insist that everyone share all of our views. “In a time of escalating and cynical right-wing attacks on so-called wokeness,” he writes, we should all work to make space for “the still waking.” While we may have strong commitments to certain values like fighting hate and respecting personal pronouns, we should express “gentleness toward people who haven’t got it all figured out, who are confused or even unsettled by the onrushing future.”

This model is not a fantasy. It was at work in Ireland in 2018. It has worked in our own history. As president, Abraham Lincoln understood the need to welcome fellow citizens back into the fold, even after a bloody civil war. As the war ended, he delivered his second inaugural address, which ended with a plea for reconciliation:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Respecting each other means telling each other the truth. While we can never rid politics of spin and advocacy, we can insist on facts and refuse to perpetuate assertions we know to be lies simply to make a buck or somehow get ahead. Allowing public leaders, media, businesses, and institutions to propagate falsehoods assaults the integrity of our democracy. If we want to protect our rights from tyrants and con men, we must fight disinformation as unpatriotic, a betrayal of the American people. We must denounce as traitors the liars who use members of the public as their unsuspecting political pawns. To love America is to love the truth. We must make truth in democracy our national purpose.

Only an unyielding commitment to the truth can save us from the fate that met Rosanne Boyland, Ashli Babbitt, and Brian Sicknick. We can best honor their memory, and the memories of the service members who have sacrificed their lives for our country, by working to save American democracy from death by disinformation.


McQuade, Barbara. Attack from Within (pp. 308-315). Seven Stories Press. Kindle Edition.
BURN, KARA, BURN
Social media sites were built and monetized on engagement, and nothing, as I pointed out often, fueled engagement like enragement. Zuckerberg kept yammering about “creating community,” while forgetting that nothing pulls a community together faster than hating on another community. Zuckerberg once called me late at night in early 2017, to get feedback on an essay he wrote with the riveting title “About Community Standards.” In one of its first sentences, he asked: “Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: Are we building the world we all want?” Zuckerberg mused on this subject for six thousand words, finally arriving at the conclusion: “There are many of us who stand for bringing people together and connecting the world. I hope we have the focus to take the long view and build the new social infrastructure to create the world we want for generations to come.”

I dubbed the essay, “The Mark Manifesto,” and while I thought it was in desperate need of a copy editor, I appreciated his incessant need to virtue signal for a better experience, even when it never seemed to happen. Yet, I was also astonished at his inability to anticipate just how badly things on his platform could go. I told Zuckerberg that I did not share his hopefulness of creating a constructive community. In fact, I was certain that Facebook was moving toward becoming a mecca for those intent on destruction.

In our interview in 2018, Zuckerberg remained painfully simplistic, as if all he really needed to know about free speech that he learned from CliffsNotes. “Freedom of speech and hate speech and offensive content. Where is the line, right?” he said. “And the reality is that different people are drawn to different places, we serve people in a lot of countries around the world, a lot of different opinions on that.” You can still make choices, I told a man who did not want to make choices, other than the choice of capitalism over community.

What Zuckerberg wanted most was to wash his hands of it. “You know, what I would really like to do is find a way to get our policies set in the way that reflects the values of the community, so I’m not the one making those decisions. Right?” he said. “I feel fundamentally uncomfortable sitting here in California at an office, making content policy decisions for people around the world. But things like, where is the line on hate speech? I mean, who chose me to be the person that [decided].”

Well, Mark, you did. And what he was saying in 2018 was disingenuous since the hands-off attitude was already deeply entrenched at Facebook. That much was clear in 2016, when a memo titled “The Ugly Truth” was leaked to BuzzFeed just days after the 2018 FTC settlement announcement. Written by Facebook vice president Andrew Bosworth, one of Zuckerberg’s tight circle of advisers, the memo addressed the thorny issue explicitly: “Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still, we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”

Reaction to the memo was very fast and very furious. Zuckerberg said Bosworth got it wrong and clarified that “We’ve never believed the ends justify the means.” He added: “We recognize that connecting people isn’t enough by itself. We also need to work to bring people closer together. We changed our whole mission and company focus to reflect this last year.” Bosworth himself backed away from his own memo, deleting it once it was leaked and insisting he only posed this terrible scenario and immoral conclusion to start a debate internally. His how-dare-you-question-me defense was painful to witness. “If we have to live in fear that even our bad ideas will be exposed then we won’t explore them or understand them as such,” he wrote in his 2018 memo about his 2016 memo. “We run a much greater risk of stumbling on them later.”

But stumble Facebook had and stumble they would continue to do. Many began to question what role the company played in the 2016 presidential election and whether the Russian government manipulated Facebook’s platform to help elect Donald Trump. While I do not believe it was the only venue for the malevolent players of that country, initially Facebook tried to act as if it had no part. When he was asked in 2016 about possible Russian interference via spreading misinformation, Zuckerberg’s original reaction was to pooh-pooh the very notion. “The idea that fake news on Facebook—of which, you know, it’s a very small amount of the content—influenced the election in any way, I think, is a pretty crazy idea,” he said in an interview with David Kirkpatrick at the Techonomy conference. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”

While Zuckerberg was right that many underestimated the appeal of Trump, to then pole-vault that into an argument that it was crazy to ascribe any impact from Facebook seemed disingenuous verging on ignorant. The kneejerk dismissal of the assertion as “crazy” made me wonder if the company had tried to gauge the extent of the problem at all. As famed management guru Peter Drucker said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

In fact, Russian attempts to interfere and impact the election on Facebook were ongoing and persistent, which was no surprise since it was the biggest platform. Facebook engineers had already detected suspicious Russian activity months before that. Years later, the Justice Department would act against more than a dozen Russians and three companies “for executing a scheme to subvert the 2016 election and support Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign,” according to the New York Times. “While the indictment does not accuse Facebook of any wrongdoing, it provided the first comprehensive account from the authorities of how critical the company’s platforms had been to the Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election,” the Times noted. “Facebook and Instagram were mentioned 41 times, while other technology that the Russians used was featured far less.”

When I first heard the disturbing “crazy” quote from Zuckerberg, I dialed up Sandberg, who was politically savvy. Sandberg had spent time in D.C., including working at the Treasury Department as Larry Summers’s chief of staff. It seemed like she would understand my concerns about possible foreign influence and the need to investigate before speaking. I was trying to catch a flight to John F. Kennedy Airport, so when we connected on the phone, I was unable to take notes. Still, I remember clearly that I unloaded on her about Zuckerberg making statements about important issues that might be inaccurate. There was no way, I said, without a proper and deep investigation, for anyone at Facebook to know the extent of the potential manipulation by those seeking to misinform for political gains. I added, if this turned out to be true, even in part, who would take responsibility for allowing it to happen? As someone deeply concerned about propaganda and its impact on our democracy, I was intense, especially when I added, “This is going to end very badly for Facebook.”

Sandberg, for her part, listened and then said in her silky-smoothest of voices some version of “Calm down, Kara. We’re handling it.” Well, they didn’t handle the propaganda. Not from the Russians. Not in Iran. And not in Sri Lanka, where a Buddhist mob attacked Muslims over false information spread on Facebook, prompting a government official to tell the New York Times in the most perfect of metaphors: “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind.” More like a hurricane. There have been deeply reported and detailed stories about the misinformation that flooded Facebook and the platform’s weak efforts to stop it, full of examples from across the world.

The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos put it best in a piece about the reckoning coming for Big Tech, most especially Facebook, writing, “Zuckerberg and Sandberg have attributed their mistakes to excessive optimism, a blindness to the darker applications of their service. But that explanation ignores their fixation on growth, and their unwillingness to heed warnings.” Bingo. Whether it was used to boost fears of Hillary Clinton or spread anti-vax nonsense, Facebook was a platform designed to create crisis and rage as the rubles rolled in. It was a system-wide problem and company execs continued to act as if it was easily fixable. If that were true, why didn’t they ever fix it? The truth is moderating the flood of information they facilitated was an impossible task.

What was particularly galling was that Facebook executives repeatedly made the argument that not many people were impacted, like it was a minor leak in its social network basement, and they might have mopped up the dampness while missing the large mold infestation. And when the mold flared up again, they would shift to saying their job was to just create tools and that they had no responsibility for what happened when people used those tools as weapons. Zuckerberg never seemed to deviate from this attitude, including in 2018 when I asked him if anyone at Facebook should have been fired for the Cambridge Analytica mess.

“Well, I think it’s a big issue. But look, I designed the platform, so if someone’s going to get fired for this, it should be me,” Zuckerberg said with a “mistakes happen” verbal shrug.

I naturally followed up. “But to be clear, you’re not going to fire yourself right now? Is that right?” I was not trolling him—I wanted to know what level of responsibility he felt for the unintended consequences of his creation.

It seemed to me that he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. “Not on this podcast right now. Do you really want me to fire myself right now? Just for the news?” he said. “I think we should do what’s going to be right for the community.” And what was right in his estimation, at least, was more Mark Zuckerberg since Facebook was born as and always would be a Mark Zuckerberg production. The rest of us would continue to pay the price for his education.

Into this mess and void, naturally, moved a master manipulator and chaos creator like Trump, whom Facebook and Zuckerberg would inevitably cozy up to, until he went too far on January 6, 2021. Trump—the greatest troll in social media, as I dubbed him—understood intuitively that much of his success would depend on connecting with his base, whether it was in person or, at scale, via social media. Which is why Trump—with a big assist from Facebook investor and board member Peter Thiel—summoned all the tech leaders, including Sandberg, to that gilded room at Trump Tower. He had needed and used the help of Silicon Valley to spread his propaganda. And now that Trump had squeaked out a win in three pivotal states, they needed him.

So, I didn’t even bother to dial up Sandberg either before or after that meeting, because she seemed long past listening and what was the point? I did call one person, though, whom I thought could make a difference.

Hello, Elon. It’s me.


Swisher, Kara. Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (pp. 208-214). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. 
See my Dec 2016 "TrumpleThinSkin" post, just fer grins.


It is to my indelible, wistful regret that I never got to meet Kara back when I was posing as a Silicon Valley Health IT Startup Photojournalist while doing my actual QIO gig. She rocks!
 
Personal note: Kara, your recounting of the loss of your Dad... Sister, there are no words.
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OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

So, Nikki Haley has reportedly dropped out ot the MAGA Party Primary race, eh? How long before her husband changes his name to Heidi? (arf, arf) Word is that Mitch is changing his name to Coco Chow. (arf, arf)
 
UPDATE
 
Interesting Substack piece:
Trump super fans are impossible to argue with because they don’t actually believe in logic
The far-right worldview is incomprehensible until you realize that devotees believe truth flows from authority rather than reality

Ever since Donald Trump emerged on the American political scene, many of his critics have sought tirelessly to raise many different arguments about his policies, rhetoric, and criminal actions to help his supporters see just what their unrequited loyalty is enabling. Occasionally, these efforts have yielded fruit, but overwhelmingly, they are unsuccessful.

Last September, the head of an anti-Trump Republican political action committee called Win It Back, formalized the despair of many critics in a memorandum summarizing what his group had learned after testing more than 40 different television ads on 12 in-person focus groups.

“All attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective,” David McIntosh wrote...
The essay continues:
The roots of authoritarian morality extend deep into human history. Many ancient civilizations operated under theocratic or monarchic systems where rulers were seen as divinely appointed or even incarnations of deity. These systems established a precedent where the ruler’s will was equated with moral rightness, a moral order centered around authority and obedience...
Y'know, maybe I need to cash in on this stuff. Couple of minutes in Photoshop for starters...
 

Hardly an original idea. Search "Make America Godly Again" on Amazon. The swag is voluminous.

Our Father,
In Mar-a-lago,
Hallowed be Thy Game...
 
LET US PREY
 
'eh? "2 Corinthians walk in to a bar..."
 
[And, yeah, I know, it's not really funny.]
 
BACK TO REALITY: SISTERS IN LAW PODCAST
 
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