The Donclave

Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

 

Finished this one. A great, timely,sobering read. I'll just leave you with this excerpt:

...The way Kurzweil and his fellow singularitarians talk about the technology to come makes it seem like they’re playing a video game like Civilization, where there is a technology tree laid out in front of them clearly, and humanity (or indeed any intelligent species) is just working its way through that preexisting tree. But technology isn’t on rails, barreling down a set course beyond anyone’s control. Moore’s law isn’t a law of nature; it was a decision. That decision was made by the executives running the computer industry, and holding to that decision required (and still requires) careful planning, along with enormous amounts of money, materials, and human attention. The laws of physics and other sciences set boundaries on the possible range of technology, but the actual technologies that humanity develops within those boundaries are determined by choices and social pressures. Yet Kurzweil, and others of his ilk, frequently discuss technology as if it’s an implacable, inhuman force with its own desires, running down a path that has absolutely nothing to do with the collective choices of humanity. This is present throughout Kurzweil’s claims about the Singularity: we will have nanotechnology, we will saturate the universe with our intelligence, rather than we may or we could choose to.

This rhetoric of inevitability serves several convenient purposes. For the people developing their ideas into technology, such rhetoric offers absolution for any unpleasant and unforeseen consequences of their inventions, because they were only uncovering the already extant course of technology, rather than steering it themselves. When there’s no room for human agency, there’s no room for moral responsibility either. And if the future of technology really is on rails, then much can be revealed simply by careful examination of the purportedly inevitable route—a route that leads straight to the vision of the Singularity. This offers the promise of not only accurately predicting the future (and the sense of control that comes with), but also (and more importantly) endless life in a future filled with the transcendence and control that characterize the ideology of technological salvation. With the end of nature and the advent of a universe that is simply one enormous, artificial computer—where we live in still-more-artificial worlds generated by those computers—the promise of control is total, especially for those who know how to control computers. This is a fantasy of a world where the single most important thing, the thing that literally determines all aspects of reality, is computer programming. All of humanity, running on a computer, until the end of time.

Let’s take a moment to consider what this would be like. Presumably, there would be a simulated world, something like the real world—that is to say, something like our own. Human minds would want at least a simulacrum of nature, and providing one to the uploaded minds running on the machine would be easy enough with all that memory and processing power. There would be none of the inhuman originality of nature, but there would be an attempt at re-creating it, to create a pleasant environment for the uploaded people to live in. All of this is fantasy, of course, but when asked to describe what life would be like for uploaded people after the Singularity, this is the kind of answer that Kurzweil and others give. They describe what sounds for all the world like a high-definition metaverse that you can’t actually leave, a permanent virtual reality that shares some of the basic features of our own real world, or a real world destroyed and reshaped to more closely resemble an immersive computer game. To the singularitarians, the largest and most crucial difference, the one they keep coming back to in their descriptions, is the end of death. Kurzweil’s work is just the latest entry in the annals of the oldest fantasy of humanity. Even if personal immortality were possible through technological means, ultimately cosmology would place limits on the duration of physical structures, but Kurzweil doesn’t accept those limits either. He called overcoming cosmological forces the “goal of the Singularity,” and this is indeed the point of the entire enterprise. The destruction of nature is secondary. The objective is to tame the universe, to make it into a padded playground. Paving over every paradise is just the side effect of building the universal parking lot, where nothing bad can ever happen again. Nobody would age, nobody would get sick, and—perhaps above all else—nobody’s dad would die.

“We collected everything my father had written—now, he died when I was 22, so he’s been dead for more than 50 years—and we fed that into a large language model,” Kurzweil said in 2024. “And then you could talk to him, you’d say something, you then go through everything he ever had written, and find the best answer that he actually wrote to that question. And it actually was a lot like talking to him. You could ask him what he liked about music—he was a musician. He actually liked Brahms the best. And it was very much like talking to him.” In a 2023 Rolling Stone profile—following up on the one fourteen years earlier—Kurzweil revealed some of the content of that conversation: “[Kurzweil] asked his ‘Dad Bot,’ as he puts it, what he loves most about music (‘The connection to human feelings’), his gardening (‘It’s the kind of work that never ends’), and his anxieties (‘Often nightmarish’). ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ he finally typed to his Dad Bot. ‘Love,’ his Dad Bot replied.” These responses look like the kind of thing one would expect from a generic version of ChatGPT, rather than a conversation between a professional musician and his adult son. But Kurzweil is sanguine that his “Dad Bot” will improve too. “I think as we get further on, we can actually do that more and more responsively, and more and more that really would match that person and actually emulate the way he would move and so on, [and his] tone of voice,” he says. “Computers are going to make things even better. I mean, just the kind of things you can do now with a large language model didn’t exist two years ago.”

Kurzweil’s attempt to resurrect his father feels poignantly deluded. It’s also a striking illustration of how Kurzweil’s confidence in the increasing power of technology—according to his strict schedule—is accompanied by his Panglossian insistence that more technology, especially computer technology, is always an improvement. He certainly thinks that technological dangers exist—nuclear weapons, for one, as well as certain applications of nanotechnology—but he thinks the solution is to build more technology that detects and counters those dangers. “Yes, there are dangers, but the computers will also be more intelligent to avoid kinds of dangers,” he says. And as for the superintelligent post-Singularity computers themselves, he’s confident that they’ll treat us well, whether or not we merge with them. “I would expect the intelligence that arises from the Singularity to have great respect for their biological heritage,” he writes.

This mirrors Kurzweil’s obvious respect and love for his late father. But not all children feel that way about their parents. Despite Kurzweil’s many questionable claims, this one—the idea that a superintelligent AGI will treat humans with respect—is easily the most contentious among his intellectual successors today. Eliezer Yudkowsky and his followers agree with Kurzweil that, surely, something is at hand. But rather than the Singularity, they fear a rougher beast is slouching toward us, with exponential speed.

Becker, Adam. More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (pp. 87-90). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

The Science Magazine review that alerted me to the book.

'Powerful, intelligent, rich people with poor ideas can be terribly dangerous indeed. That is why this is a serious issue rather than a “quirky tour of wacky ideas.” We must rightfully protest: Who has appointed these deranged individuals to be the stewards of mankind?'

Elon Musk, anyone?

Riveting book, this one. I've moved on to his prior book.

 

UPDATE

 

apropos of Elon. On deck.

 

Click

UPDATE2

 

More titles of topical interest.

 

 

Stay tuned,,,

Let Us Prey

Follow-up on "The First Buddy"

I finished Faiz's excellent, disturbing book on Elon Musk. Supremely curious in this time of hyper-aggressive Trumpian mass deportations is the following:

 

 

Below, the original WaPo lengthy reporting headline. I seriously doubt that they'd libel the wealthiest man on the planet.

 

Given that Elon and his DOGE bros have gained more than 3 months of pretty much unmonitored access to large swaths of federal data across a breadth of agencies, one would hardly be surprised to learn that his fake U.S. "student visa" details have by now conveniently hit "the bit bucket."

PALO ALTO, Calif. [WaPo, Updated October 27, 2024]— Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Musk in recent months has amplified the Republican presidential candidate’s claims that “open borders” and undocumented immigrants are destroying America, broadcasting those views to more than 200 million followers on the site formerly known as Twitter, which Musk bought in 2022 and later renamed X.

What Musk has not publicly disclosed is that he did not have the legal right to work while building the company that became Zip2, which sold for about $300 million in 1999. It was Musk’s steppingstone to Tesla and the other ventures that have made him the world’s wealthiest person — and arguably America’s most successful immigrant.

Musk and his brother, Kimbal, have often described their immigrant journey in romantic terms, as a time of personal austerity, undeterred ambition and a willingness to flout conventions. Musk arrived in Palo Alto in 1995 for a graduate degree program at Stanford University but never enrolled in courses, working instead on his start-up.

Leaving school left Musk without a legal basis to remain in the United States, according to legal experts... 

The Dystopian Duo of Donald "I-Now-Run-The-World" Trump and Elon "Alexander-the-Great-Reincarnate" Musk are nothing less than The WWE Bruise Brothers of democracy. Minimally.

 

They both regard themselves as Visionary Geniuses, irascibly tolerating the rest of us and our outdated, ineffective socioeconomic norms.

___

 

While I really like Hubris Maximus and recommend it without reservation (acutely timely), I confess to being a bit perplexed and disappointed by the author's failing to cite Kara Swisher.

 

to wit:

The world’s richest man and most famous living tech entrepreneur had to be fucking kidding. But Elon Musk was not joking when he emailed me on October 17, 2022, with the subject line: “You’re an asshole.”

Just a week earlier, Musk had been friendly toward me, as was typical. In fact, he’d asked me for my thoughts about Twitter, the beleaguered service he was forced to buy after pretending that an ironclad contract was not made of iron. And despite engaging in the business equivalent of a toddler tantrum after agreeing to overpay for the company without contingencies, Musk had won the prize. Well, to be more accurate, the booby prize. While hugely popular and addictive to politicians, the media, and promiscuous id-brains like Musk, Twitter had long been the little tech engine that couldn’t.

What was so weird about Musk labeling me “an asshole” was that—unlike many critics—I had taken a fair wait-and-see attitude about his purchase of Twitter. I had covered many deals that had some element of bullshit introduced in the midst of the battle, such as Microsoft’s failed attempt to buy Yahoo, and this seemed no different. Musk filed a lawsuit in Delaware’s Court of Chancery to challenge the deal he’d agreed to, but just before his deposition, he balked. In the end, Musk had to fork over $44 billion for Twitter and no amount of rage tweeting was going to change that.

So, it’s true: I welcomed Musk’s takeover. I’d covered Twitter since it debuted in 2006, and for most of its history it had been a woefully underperforming business. A lot of the blame for this falls on the bony shoulders of cofounder Jack Dorsey. At the time of Musk’s offer, Dorsey was a part-time CEO whose attention was divided by his work at the innovative payments company Square (later called Block). A genuine visionary, Dorsey had started to foist his personal habits on his employees, like opening a company meeting with a community meditation. He also decided that he was so smart he could run two companies at once. Narrator: He could not run two companies at once.

While heads nodded publicly about how amazing he was to pull it off, privately most people decried his tone-deaf arrogance to me. I agreed. Typically, one or both businesses suffered, and only tech CEOs of a certain type considered themselves so important as to be irreplaceable. But, as my grandmother correctly noted, the graveyards are full of once-busy people.

And whistling past the cemetery is where Twitter always seemed to be, barely making it as a business, with its stock mainly hovering around its IPO offering. Still, it had created a splash well beyond its small size. Despite a tiny $5 billion in annual revenue, Twitter’s influence was often compared to Meta’s, which pulled in $116 billion in 2022. Twitter dominated the zeitgeist, populated by a coterie of celebrities, politicians, and media heavyweights all vying to be the dunk master of the platform. That title, eventually, went hands down to @realDonaldTrump, who used Twitter as a megaphone to become the world’s biggest troll.

But the real story of Twitter was not in the noisy heat it generated, but in colder and harder math. The premise of Twitter was dead simple: A registered user logs in via the Internet or a mobile phone and answers the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or fewer. It was immediately clear when I signed on in 2007 that its lightweight design and newsy bent would soon make it the buzziest product in Silicon Valley. It was also the glitchiest. Its revenue, user growth, and most important of all, stock price all remained in the doldrums. The basic product remained stuck, too. Early Twitter looked an awful lot like current Twitter, where doubling the number of allowed characters counted as innovation. These drags combined with a persistent drama among its founders meant the company never realized its potential. Actually, it was a minor miracle that the bird stayed aloft. While Twitter had received acquisition interest over the years, negotiations always ended in tears once potential buyers realized the company was a hot mess from both a tech and product perspective...

Swisher, Kara. Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (Ch 13, pp. 215-217). (Function). Kindle Edition

I began citing Faiz's book on Elon a couple of posts ago.

 

Lots more shortly. Stay tuned.

 

MAYDAY UPDATE

 

Too much going on. Elon Musk-Donald Trump summary: They each regard themselves as Existential Visionary Genius Leaders exempt from any sort of frictional process norms that bind us lesser mortals (up to and inclusive of law).

Per Elon et al:

Recall "Effective Altruism," anyone?

100 days of malignant delusions

Click here.

  

Recall how Trump promised unequivocally to end Russia's war against Urkaine within 24 hours of his inauguration. Hour 2,400 has arrived. Peace between Ukraine and Russia has not as of this posting.

Exoplanetary life?

K2-18b?

 

Interesting, in light of my recent prior readings on astrophysics and exobiology. Also timely given a new book I was just made aware of. Elon Musk:

 

A sobering read.

 

One potentially existentially dangerous guy. Let's begin with the end in mind:

AFTERWORD

Back in the mid-1990s, Elon Musk was a start-up founder in his twenties, working illegally under a student visa to bring a phone book–style directory online with his company, Zip2. One day, Derek Proudian, a partner with one of the start-up’s key investors, stopped by Zip2’s Cambridge Avenue offices to grab lunch with its precocious founder, who’d already blown away his eventual financial backers with his unrelenting drive to be successful, Proudian recalled to me nearly thirty years later.

Walking to lunch that afternoon, Proudian was preoccupied with the company’s priorities: bringing in engineers to scale the product, conducting a search for a chief executive, capitalizing on what he thought might be a $10 billion industry.

Musk was thinking bigger. “It’s going to be global,” he said, in Proudian’s recollection. Zip2 was “going to be the biggest company ever.” “Well, maybe it’ll be the biggest company ever,” Proudian said. “Right now, we’re focused on the Yellow Pages. We’re not getting a whole lot of traction with these small businesses.”

Musk’s mind was elsewhere.

“I have bigger visions,” he said.

Proudian tried to interject, hoping to redirect the conversation.

“No—you don’t understand,” Musk cut in. “I’m the reincarnation of the spirit of Alexander the Great.”

What?

Proudian had to bring him back to earth. “What if you swing for the fences and you strike out?”

“I’ve got the samurai spirit,” Musk declared. “I’d rather commit seppuku than fail.”

That day, Musk saw the roadblock as a peer’s limited thinking, his realism. Today, his thinking seems to suggest, incompetence at the federal level—the abandonment of meritocracy, in favor of mediocrity—is the obstacle between him and his ultimate goal.

The presidential campaign of 2024 was a Musk gamble of galactic proportions, perhaps the only pivot that could have landed him with responsibility bigger than his business empire could afford him. By the time of the election, Musk had become convinced that this new foe stood in the way of his ambition to propel humanity to Mars, the same pursuit that motivated his bet on his massive pay package from Tesla, that had evidently driven his acquisition of Twitter in his effort to defeat the “woke mind virus,” the one that represented SpaceX’s north star.

“Unless we stop the slow strangulation by overregulation happening in America, we will never become a multiplanetary civilization,” he said, before adding, “Unless something is done about strangulation by overregulation, humanity will never reach Mars.”

And when the dust settled, Musk had sided with the winning party and become “first buddy” to the incoming president.

At the time of this writing in December 2024, Elon Musk appears to have secured the power necessary to challenge the bureaucrats and oppressive regulations that have been holding him back. In appointing Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump administration appears to have given him the opportunity to reshape the government while perhaps putting Musk’s own ambitions for autonomous vehicles on a glide path. And while there are questions about how much authority Musk’s quasi-agency will actually have, his influence on Trump—after pouring more than $275 million toward seeing him and other Republicans elected through a super-PAC, the America PAC—is clear.

Days before the official announcement of the role, Musk had elevated a call for “defanging” agencies that had investigated him and his businesses, including the SEC and FTC. Now he had the blessing of the most powerful person in the world, who outlined a vision to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies,” and believes he has a mandate to carry it out.

Musk’s entrance into politics—and governance—is a predictable outcome. At any time in Musk’s history, given the scale of the gambles he has made with his fortune and power, he has variously seemed to be utterly in command or on the verge of total destruction. But one thing remains: he is inevitable.

However, now that he has reached a new plateau of power, the stakes have shifted. He is no longer limited to recklessly gambling with one of his companies’ bottom lines, or the livelihoods of his workers. He is poised to apply his existential thinking to our society as a whole, exerting his influence on the foundational rules and regulations—such as norms around conflicts of interest—that hold us together. Protecting those conventions and the order they are intended to bring is hardly Musk’s concern—as evidenced by the chapters of this book—especially if upholding them results in the continuation of the slow march to humanity’s destruction that he believes has already begun.

Musk and his acolytes have made clear that they are comfortable with imposing a short-term “hardship” on Americans, including an economic and market downturn, in pursuit of their ultimate goal. One of Musk’s closest allies said the DOGE would require a “collective sacrifice.”

That only leaves the question—to what end? What is the collective sacrifice for, if not Musk’s clearly stated goal of putting humans on Mars? And what has Musk done for the public at large to earn that kind of loyalty from the millions he is asking to take the plunge with him? Some may argue that his business achievements merit that sort of leap of faith, but it is an immense amount of power to give someone who is unaccountable to the public, by any measure.

And what if this publicly stated goal—the noble ambition to extend the reach of humanity—masked another worry?

Going into the election, Musk had seemed to sense danger. He felt he had everything on the line. Musk made no secret of how he saw the stakes—both for the country and for himself personally.

“I view this election as a turning point, like a fork in the road of destiny that is incredibly important. You know I’ve not been politically active until this election,” he told podcaster Joe Rogan. “And the reason I’ve been politically active this election is because I think if we don’t elect Trump, I think we will lose democracy in this country. We will lose the two-party system,” Musk said, while explaining his unfounded theory that the Democrats in power were “importing vast numbers of” undocumented migrants into swing states as part of an elaborate conspiracy to hold the Electoral College in perpetuity.

But as with all his political activism, Musk cheekily hinted he had a personal stake as well.

“If he loses, man, you’re fucked, dude,” Tucker Carlson told him during an October 2024 interview.

“If he loses, I’m fucked,” Musk agreed. “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be? Will I see my children? I don’t know.”

It was meant to be a light-hearted moment, but it hinted at what Musk felt he had on the line. At the time, Musk’s companies—and in certain cases, Musk himself—faced scrutiny from the Department of Justice, the SEC, the FTC, federal transportation regulators, and the Federal Communications Commission, just to name a few, and his PAC’s unconventional methods of voter outreach were raising some early eyebrows as well.

But as he often did, he was projecting those personal worries onto humanity itself, suggesting that the endless labyrinth of regulatory intervention stifled human potential as a whole, by slow-rolling and interfering with matters that were ultimately existential.

Indeed, “survival,” as we laid out in the introduction, “is the organism’s ultimate value, the ‘final goal or end to which all [its] lesser goals are the means,’ and the standard of all its other values: ‘that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil,’” according to the     , outlining a core tenet of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

When Musk declared himself Alexander the Great around thirty-odd years ago, it felt like a one-off from a brash founder like any other in Silicon Valley. But as the election loomed, Proudian, one of the first Silicon Valley power brokers to recognize Musk’s spirit but also his stubbornness, suddenly thought: “Oh, shit,” he told me.

Now he had begun to see his experiences with Elon Musk through a new lens. Strange outbursts and spontaneous, one-off utterances—that he had brushed off as hubris or the brashness of maladjusted youth—started to take on a new meaning.

“I thought the market forces would control Elon,” Proudian said, adding later that he “didn’t take it that seriously when he was a twenty-three-year-old entrepreneur who didn’t have two nickels to rub together.

“I am really concerned because I know how smart this guy is and I know how much money he has and I know how ruthless he is and it’s playing out in front of my eyes.”

We should all heed that concern. It’s unfashionable to admit now—but Musk’s record of firings and his zealous deletion of once-normal business principles has emanated far beyond his business empire.

So many who have worked closely with Musk have emerged with the same sort of impression as Proudian, as Hubris Maximus demonstrates time and again: that Musk, however misguided he may be at times, is unyielding.

Some have lost sleep in connection with Musk’s hubris; others have lost their lives believing in his company’s promise. Whatever the harm in connection to something bigger, it matters greatly. People have lost their lives believing in his technological promises; others have seen their lives upended or careers destroyed; still others have faced potential financial ruin from believing in him.

Whether Musk’s latest forays into the political realm ultimately achieve their stated goals, or his relationship with the Trump administration deteriorates at some point along the way, he has consistently shown a taste for opportunist behavior and a disregard for limiting collateral damage in the pursuit of his goals, and the stakes have never been higher.

Even if DOGE is a big success—by his own standards—history has shown that he’s unlikely to be satisfied; the pattern shows he’ll continue to seek more power and responsibility, to go all-in on the next moon shot. And if it isn’t, and his “samurai spirit” calls him to commit seppuku rather than admit failure, he very well might take a lot of us with him next, before dusting himself off and trying again.

Siddiqui, Faiz. Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk (pp. 264-268). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Let that simmer just a bit.  See also my citations of recent works on astrophysics and exxbiology, "The Edge of Chaos."

 

apropos.

 

OK, LET'S BACK UP ABOUT A HALF CENTURY

 

In 1976 Cheryl and I were living in Homewood, Alabama (B'ham area). I read a fascinating book I'd checked out of the Homewood Public Library. It has subsequently gone "out of print." But, you can still find random hardcopies via Amazon 3rd party sellers. Got a copy.

 

 

Wonderful reading.

 

 

I transcribed some excerpts via voice input on my iPad.

Chapter 1, Where Speculation Begins, pp 7-9

One of these days, our descendants, near or distant, are going to find life in some form on other planets, either in the solar system, in other parts of our galaxy, or in other galaxies.

The very fact that life has arisen on our earth is evidence enough that it must exist in other parts of the universe, for the elements of which the entire universe is composed are remarkably uniform. If some of these elements have combined in ways that produce life here in our solar system, they must, by the laws of chance and probability, have combined in an analogous ways elsewhere. Even in our galaxy, there must be some thousands of other planets, sustaining life, in some form, and all the forces of reason would suggest that it cannot be otherwise in other galaxies.

What miracles of chance and combinations of chances made it possible for life to evolve here on earth?

For life to arise on any planet, certain factors have to be present in certain combinations. The solar system of which the planet is part must have formed in a way that some or one of its evolving planets takes shape at a suitable distance from the blazing inferno of its central sun – neither so near that its surface temperatures inhibit life by intense heat, nor so far that life cannot arise because of insufficient solar radiation. The masses into which the swirling gases originally solidify must be within the range that permits a force of gravity, sufficient to hold and retain an atmosphere, since without a protective atmosphere, solar radiation would be too intense for life forms to be sustained, even if all the other elements of life were present.

The chance that these two factors alone – distance from the center, and the degree of mass that governs gravity occur together in just the right circumstance, puts a preliminary limitation on the possibility for life. Even after this has occurred, there must be a further series of chances following and working upon chances – and again interlocking with other chance happenings – so that atmosphere, water, rocks, and some soil come into being in states that conform a basis for the evolution of life. Of course there is a possibility, remote as it seems, that some form of life might arise on a lightless planet. should that planet be capable of generating heat of its own within a life sustaining range.

The information we have been able to gather from our own solar system suggests that ours is the only planet around our sun that sustained life. It could be that other suns, even thousands or tens of thousands of other suns, sustain no life at all on the planets that circle them. Given the myriad suns in our galaxy and the multiple myriads in the universe, it is impossible to believe that chances similar to those that occurred on earth have not also occurred on many other planets.

Once these miraculous chances have come about, however, the prerequisites for life are rather minimal: An element capable of forming self-replicating chains, like carbon, and another capable of combustion, like oxygen these, together with hydrogen and nitrogen, form and matrix that may merge with other elements to create all the varied, complex, and wonderful forms of life on earth – from amoeba and bacteria to plants and spiders and fishes and man.

What shapes may life have taken in other worlds? Have they developed into intelligent creatures, and, if they have, what sort of intelligences have evolved? Have other kinds of life developed high orders of intelligence capable of developing technologies, and, if so, what sort of technology has arisen from their special kinds of being? Shall we ever be able to communicate with these beings, if they exist, in any meaningful way?

One thing is certain: we have no reason to assume that evolutionary forces on other planets will produce forms or intelligence that are the same as ours, even though the basic raw materials must be similar. Whatever chance factors combined to produce any form of life, infinitely more, must combine to produce an advanced form.

Genetic inheritance is only a beginning. Two offspring of the same parents by chance born in different environments will produce eventual descendants so markedly different that after many generations, it will hardly be possible to realize that the ancestors of each line had parents in common.

The variables of habitat, the chance of availability of mates, natural selection, and sexual selection among the offspring will all have combined and recombined to produce members of the same species as buried as a pygmy, a Watusi, a Swede, a Chinese, or a magnesian, and eventually to divide into species, such as man, apes, and monkeys have separately descended from the same stem.

Our own earth provides an illustration of the almost incredible number of living forms that can possibly be derived from a single celled organisms that were once the triumph of evolution on our planet. All the species now extinct, and all those still flourishing form only apart of the total possibilities, for who knows how many new species will yet take shape?

Ch 11, Beyond Human Intelligence, pp 212-217

Intelligence begins with the sensitivity of a single cell, and by a process of biological accumulation and selection, transmitted genetically, reaches a current culmination in the complexity of the human brain. In the same way, the first chipped flint, by a process of cultural accumulation of knowledge passed on verbally and subjected to the selection of experience, reaches a current combination in spacecraft, cyclotron, and satellite relayed television. At the same time, the natural and necessary playfulness of the young mammalian as it explores its environment and learns how to live in it, overtime, and also by a cultural process of imitation, memory, and the transmission of knowledge and skills from generation to generation, reaches another apotheosis in the high cultures and great arts.

For the comparatively weak creature who must cope with an environment and rise to any situation or perish, the resources of mental equipment are applied first to the most urgent exigencies. The earliest application of intelligence is devoted to devising tools as weapons; those that follow aid the amenities of life; finally, religion, philosophy, and the arts make their appearance.

The kind of tools that are made will depend on the material that happens to be available, be they leaves, branches, stones, clay, or the presents or absence of minerals. Thus an interaction exists between the environment and creatures that affects the development of tools and cultures, as well as of census and intelligence.

In ancient Egypt, for example, the presence of the papyrus plant led to the fabrication of ropes, mats, sandals, and eventually paper; the presence of flax made possible the eventual perfecting of supremely fine linens. In central America, the presence of lava led to cutting edge tools of obsidian. Once a cultural habit becomes established, however, it remains impossible to predict either the route it will follow or its ultimate outcome. Who could have told that the sweet-potato washing habit established among the members of the famous Japanese Macau colony, and the subsequent shifting of sand from the grain in the sea, would so accustomed these forest animals playing in the water that they would eventually begin to swim? And in the face of this unlikely outcome of a recently established behavior pattern, who would dare to predict to what the newfound ability to swim might lead?

Yet strangely enough—or perhaps, not so surprisingly, in view of the basic uniformity of mankind’s cerebral mechanisms—no matter where, geographically, nor when, over the entire span of human history, local cultures have developed into advanced civilization, we find that man’s greatest thoughts, as epitomized in the writings of philosophers, show remarkable similarity. Some views on the nature and value of knowledge, intellect, and intelligence propounded by the wise men of China, so distant from us in place in time, are stunning in their modernities and still current validity.

In the misty beginnings of China’s long, cultural history, Lao the, expanding his concept of Tao, the way (of nature and wise living), is reported to have insisted that knowledge is not virtue, and neither is it wisdom, for nothing is so far from it a sage as in “intellectual.“ The worst government would be one of philosophers, he has said to have averred, they botch every natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign of their in capacity for action!

At a later period the philosopher, Chuang the, who lived about 370 BC, showed the sophistication of thinking that we find difficult to credit to those in early times. He wrote that problems are due less to the nature of things than to the limits of our thought; that is not to be wondered at that the effort of our imprisoned brains to understand the cosmos of which they are such minute particles should end in contradiction.

He spoke of the limits of intellect; the attempt to explain the whole in terms of the part has become gigantic immodesty, forgivable only on the grounds of the amusement it has caused, for humor, like philosophy, is a view of the part in terms of the whole, and neither is possible without the other. The intellect, said Chuang tze, can never avail to understand, ultimate things, for any profound thing, such as the growth of a child. In order to understand the Tao, one must “sternly suppress one’s knowledge“: we have to suppress our theories and feel fact. Education is of no help towards such an understanding: submission in the flow of nature is all important.

And Wang Yang Ming, who lived from 1472 to 1528, practically summarized our present thesis when he wrote: “the mind itself is the embodiment of natural law. Is there anything in the universe that exists independent of mind? Is there any law apart from the mind?“

Experts feel certain that the human brain has not undergone any significant biological change since the time of the Neanderthals, as evidenced in the excavations at the Shandiar caves high in the mountains of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, built fires, cared for their sick, conducted funeral rights, and put flowers with the bodies of their dead. In the last 20 to 30,000 years, we know from archaeological findings of both historic and prehistoric periods, a high degree of intellectual accomplishment that has been formally present in all the branches of our species throughout his existence. The brief excerpts we have given of an ancient Chinese thought about thought would certainly seem to bear out this opinion.

There is, however, an outcome of the cumulative nature of culture that we must not overlook. Increasingly, as intelligence adapt a living creature to its environment by the use of artifacts, and through the cultural transmission of knowledge, the creature and the environment, modify each other at an exponential rate. Perfect adaptation, of the order of the ants for the termites, which has existed in a balance between being and have unchanged over hundreds of millions of years, is not possible for mankind. The rapidity of change in our cultural habitat, presents a perpetual and continuing stimulus to bodily and, above all, to mental adaptation, which of necessity increases the demands on the new brain to device accommodation, and then the process speeds both the rate of change and the need for new changes.

And so, although we recognize that we have been mistaken in thinking that the technological advances of western men might indicate new departures from the human brains’ capacities, yet we have also to recognize that the technology is rapidly creating a totally new environment for our species this new Environment may well ultimately affect our species future development; precisely this technology may prove to be the turning point through which, in negotiating it, we may find ourselves in a process of extinction as Homo sapiens and in a stage of transition toward homo neocorticus

There are, of course, far too many imponderables  Involved to feel confident in predicting the future course of our species. Among these are the course of technology itself, and how far from natural processes it can carry us before it becomes subject to its own limitations. There is the matter of human population density, and whether it will be adjusted by natural means or can be adapted to the biosphere that is our habitat by cultural or social means. There is the question of the medical preservation of the “unfit“ and whether we can remain viable at all as a species with the increasing maladaptive dilution of our gene pools. And there is the possibility that ecological interference may ultimately make mankind’s existence untenable.

Our evolutionary development may be reaching the end of a line for biological, if not for cultural reasons, but we ourselves are inclined to discount this. We believe subtle biological factors to be operating that are not yet clearly discernible, but which may be recognizable in retrospect. Another factor as simple and probable as the advent of another Ice Age, for instance, would effectively alter and recalibrate the balance between men and nature, and must also be kept in mind as a possibility.

We believe that the possibility, and even the likelihood remain for a true evolutionary progression in the anatomical and physiological configuration of the brain, much like the progression that occurred between apes and man. In that case, the departure would be just as radical, and it would have as a consequence new behavioral response patterns that at this point we cannot visualize and about which we can only speculate.

To assume that this new superintelligence would occupy itself with creating a new, weird, and wonderful technology is a naïve exercise in human fantasy. Ultimately technology exists to serve the greater comfort of individuals, and a superintelligence may well find other means of achieving this end. Thus, were such a superintelligence to be found in some other planetary systems, we might be confronted with something totally alien to our understanding, and even to our imagination…

'eh?

Rest in Peace, Sir

"I know it when I see it."

Obscenity.

      

 

 

UPDATE

 

420, the bio/neuroscience of Weed

Don't Bogart the roach clip.
  

 

A personal note.

 

Also, I did my grad thesis (pdf) on illicit drug testing.

An Open Letter Opposing White House Retaliatory Investigations

"We write with grave concern about the two presidential memoranda dated April 9, 2025, targeting Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, respectively — two former national security officials,who served the people of the United States. These executive actions represent a dangerous escalation in the abuse of presidential power: weaponizing federal agencies to carry out personalized retribution against named individuals.

Presidents of both parties have long respected the independence of federal law enforcement and refrained from using the power at their disposal to punish perceived enemies. Indeed, presidents have gone out of their way to avoid even the appearance of impropriety or influence. President Trump’s statements are a profoundly unconstitutional break with this tradition. He is explicitly targeting two Americans because they exercised their First Amendment rights and criticized him. That is a miscarriage of justice which these individuals, and other people and institutions vindictively singled out by him, will be unfairly forced to endure. The president of the United States must not direct federal authorities to investigate people with whom he disagrees.

This is not democratic governance. It is baseless retaliation—and it has no place in the United States of America. Across our history, there have been dark chapters where state power has been weaponized and dissent suppressed, including the crackdown during and after World War I, the Red Scare of the 1950s, and President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list.” These episodes are now seen as shameful deviations from the fundamental American principles of free expression and impartial justice. The April 9 presidential memoranda are an appalling rejection of those bedrock democratic values.

Indeed, the President’s actions not only evoke some of the worst moments in our history; they go even further. For a president to personally and publicly direct the levers of the federal government against publicly named citizens for political reasons sets a new and perilous precedent in our republic. It brings to mind the abuses of power that characterize authoritarian nations, not the United States. No matter one’s party or politics, every American should reject the notion that the awesome power of the presidency can be used to pursue individual vendettas. Behavior of this kind is more to be expected from a royal despot than the elected leader of a constitutional republic. This is the path of autocracy, not democracy.

For these reasons, we urge that the President immediately rescind these memoranda and that agency heads repudiate any order that undermines their oaths, politicizes their missions, or betrays the constitutional principles they are sworn to uphold.

These actions, if carried out, will leave a permanent stain on our institutions and erode our democracy. History will not forget who stood silent. We will not stand silent."

List of Signatories:

Amb. Norman Eisen (ret.), Executive Chair, State Democracy Defenders Fund
Christine Todd Whitman, Governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001 (R); Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the George W. Bush Administration from 2001 to 2003
Jeffrey Amestoy, Chief Justice (ret.) Vermont
Caroline Anderson
Alex Aronson
Les AuCoin, Representative of the 1st Congressional District of Oregon from 1975 to 1993 (D)
Chiraag Bains, Former Deputy Assistant to the President, Domestic Policy Council
Brian Baird, Representative of the 3rd Congressional District of Washington from 1999 to 2011 (D)
Marge Baker
Daniel Barkhuff, MD
Lavora Barnes
Ian Bassin, Executive Director and Co-Founder, Protect Democracy
Joseph Bean
Paul E. Begala, Counselor to the President from 1997 to 1999
Mark Begich, U.S. Senator for the State of Alaska from 2009 to 2015 (D)
Michael L. Belitzky, Alliance for American Leadership
Nate Bell, Representative of the 20th Arkansas House District from 2013 to 2017 (I)
John B. Bellinger III, Former Senior Associate Counsel to the President and Legal Adviser to the National Security Council
Matt Bennett, Co-Founder, Third Way
James Blanchard, Governor of Michigan from 1983 to 1991, Representative of the 18th Congressional District of Michigan from 1975 to 1983 (D)
Sidney Blumenthal
Reverend Glynden Bode
Roger Bolton, Formal Reagan and George H. W. Bush Administration Official
John Bonifaz, President, Free Speech For People
Kathy Boockvar, President, Athena Strategies; Former Pennsylvania Secretary of State
Noah Bookbinder, President, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
Spencer P. Boyer, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy
Barbara Boxer, U.S. Senator for the State of California from 1993 to 2017 (D)
Shellie Bressler, Senior Professional Staff Member for Global Health, Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2007 to 2013; House Foreign Affairs Committee from 2015 to 2019
William Brodhead, Representative of the 17th Congressional District of Michigan from 1975 to 1983 (D)
Rosa Brooks, Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law, Georgetown University; Former Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense
Steve Bullock, Former Governor of Montana (D)
Steve Bunnell, Former General Counsel, U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Lucy Caldwell, Political Strategist
Arne Carlson, Former Governor of Minnesota (R)
Davy Carter
Rod Chandler, Representative of the 8th Congressional District of Washington from 1983 to  1993 (R)
Linda Chavez
Jeff Chester, Executive Director, Center for Digital Democracy
Ty Cobb, Special Counsel to the President in the Trump Administration from 2017 to 2018; Former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland from 1981 to 1986
Barbara Comstock, Representative of the 10th Congressional District of Virginia from 2015 to 2019 (R)
George Conway, Board President, Society for the Rule of Law
Sam Coppersmith, Representative of the 1st Congressional District of Arizona from 1993 to 1995 (D)
Susan Corke, Executive Director, State Democracy Defenders Fund
Geoffrey Cowan
Eugene Craig III, Former Vice-Chair, Maryland Republican Party
Tom Daschle, Senator from South Dakota from 1987-2005 (D), Senate Majority and Minority Leader
Glyn Davies, U.S. Ambassador (ret.)
Mark de la Iglesia
Charles W. Dent, Representative of the 15th Congressional District of Pennsylvania from 2005 to 2018 (R)
Laura Dickinson, Lyle T. Alverson Professor of Law, The George Washington University
Murray Dickman, Primary Assistant to U.S. Attorney General from 1988 to 1991
Renee DiResta
Charles K. Djou, Representative of the 1st Congressional District of Hawaii from 2010 to 2011 (R)
Donna F. Edwards, Representative of the 4th Congressional District of Maryland from 2008 to 2017 (D)
Mickey Edwards, Representative of the 5th Congressional District of Oklahoma from 1977 to 1993 (R)
Marc Elias
Uriel Epshtein
Janice Feather
Praveen Fernandes, Vice President, Constitutional Accountability Center
Claire Finkelstein, Algernon Biddle Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania
Don Fox, Former General Counsel and Acting Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics
Emil H. Frankel, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, 2002-2005
Hannah Fried, Executive Director, All Voting is Local
Brian Frosh, Former Attorney General of Maryland
Mark Gallagher
Hon. Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D., Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (ret.)
David Gee
Jennifer Gee, Elder, Presbyterian Church (USA)
Richard Gephardt, Former Democratic Leader, U.S. House of Representatives
Stuart Gerson
Hon. Nancy Gertner (ret.)
Lisa Gilbert, Co-President, Public Citizen
John Giruado, Attorney Advisor, Office of Legal Counsel, Associate Deputy Secretary in the Reagan Administration
Michelle Glogovac, Founder & CEO, The MLG Collective®, Podcast Publicist & Author
Jerry Goldfeder, Director of Fordham Law School Voting Rights & Democracy Project
Brianne J. Gorod, Chief Counsel, Constitutional Accountability Center
Hon. Joshua Gotman, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense & Treasury
James Greenwood
Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO, Fair Fight Action
Ânne Gruner
Vanita Gupta, Former U.S. Department of Justice Official
Bill Hafker
Kathleen Hamill, Attorney
Kenneth Harbaugh, President, VALOR Media Network
Mark Harvey, Former Special Assistant to the President, National Security Council Staff
Jeff Hauser, Executive Director, Revolving Door Project
Michael Hayden, Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
Jeremy M. Helfgot, Principal, J.M. Helfgot Communications; Co-founder, West Coast Women Forward; Co founder, Blazing Desert Indivisible
Paul Hodes, Representative of the 2nd Congressional District of New Hampshire from 2007 to 2011 (D)
Joe Hoeffel, Representative of the 13th Congressional District of Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2005 (D)
Kate Helfrich
Jerry Huckaby, Representative of the 5th District of Louisiana from 1977 to 1993 (D)
Daniel Hunter, Choose Democracy
Joe Hunter, Former Congressional Chief of Staff
Bob Inglis, Representative of the 4th Congressional District of South Carolina from 1993 to 1999 and again from 2005 to 2011 (R)
Steve Israel, Representative of the 2nd and 3rd Congressional Districts of New York from 2001 to 2013 and 2013 to 2017 (D)
David Jolly, Representative of the 13th Congressional District of Florida from 2014 to 2017 (R)
Virginia Kase Solomón, President & CEO, Common Cause
Gary Kasparov
Peter Keisler, Acting Attorney General in the George W. Bush Administration in 2007
James Kelly, Deputy Assistant Secretary, International Trade Administration, 1984-1988
Bob Kerrey, Governor of Nebraska from 1983 to 1987 and Senator from 1989 to 2001 (D)
John Kingston, Former U.S. Senate Candidate; Candidate and Coalitions Chair, Forward Party
Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum
Peter H. Kostmayer, Representative of the 8th Congressional District of Pennsylvania from 1977 to 1981 and 1983 to 1993 (D)
William Kristol, Chief of Staff to the Vice President in the George H.W. Bush Administration from 1989 to 1993
James R. Kunder, Former Deputy Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Philip Lacovara, Counsel to the Special Prosecutor, Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office in the Nixon Administration from 1973 to 1974
Leonard Lance
David Lapan, Former Spokesman for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security
John LeBoutiller, Representative of the 6th Congressional District of New York from 1981 to 1983 (R)
James M. LeMunyon, Member, Virginia House of Delegates, 2010-2018
Marty Linsky, Former Assistant Republican Floor Leader, Massachusetts House of Representatives
Harry Litman, Former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General
Mike Lofgren
Sheree Lopez
Linda Lorelle, Co-Founder, Civil Dialogues
Charles D. Luckey
Sally Lyall
Joanna Lydgate, CEO, States United
R.J. Lyman, Citizen of the United States and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Mairin Macaluso, Senior Advisor, Leadership Now Project
Tom Malinowski, Representative of the 7th Congressional District of New Jersey from 2019 to 2023 (D)
Debrianna Mansini, Activist
Marjorie Margolies, Representative of the 13th Congressional District of Pennsylvania from 1993 to 1995 (D)
Rabbi Bonnie Margulis
Andrew G. McCabe, Former Deputy Director, FBIMary B. McCord, Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security
John McCormick
Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, CEO, RepresentUs
Lt. Col. Amy McGrath, United States Marine Corps (ret.)
John McKay, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington appointed by George W. Bush from 2001 to 2007
Brian P. McKeon, Former Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources
Hon. Donna McLean
Barbara McQuade, United States Attorney, Eastern District of Michigan, 2010-2017
John M. Mitnick, Former Associate Counsel to the President
Jeff Modisett, Former Indiana Attorney General; Former Assistant U.S. Attorney
Toby Moffett, Representative of the 6th Congressional District of Connecticut from 1975 to 1983 (D)
Larry Moore, Substack Creator, Democracy Forge
Mike Moore, Former Attorney General of Mississippi
Alberto Mora, Former General Counsel, Department of the Navy
Seth Moulton, Representative of the 6th Congressional District of Massachusetts from 2015 to present (D)
Virginia A. Mulberger, Former National Security Council Senior Director and Special Assistant to President George H. W. Bush
Tiffany Muller, President, End Citizens United
Lissa Muscatine, Presidential Speechwriter, Clinton Administration; Director of Speechwriting for the Secretary of State, Obama Administration
Elizabeth Neumann, Former DHS Assistant Secretary of Counterterrorism
Mario Nicolais, General Counsel, The Lincoln Project
Cheryl Niro, Past President, Illinois State Bar Association
Joseph Nye, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense
Sean O'Keefe, Professor, Syracuse University
Ted O'Meara, Former Chair, Maine Republican Party
Robert F. Orr, Former Justice, North Carolina Supreme Court (ret.)
Jan Peter Ozga
Richard Painter, Former Associate Counsel to the President and Chief White House Ethics Lawyer for President George W. Bush
Deval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts from 2007 to 2015 (D)
Jed Pauker, Co-Founding Board Member, Venice Resistance
Tony Payne, Former Executive Director, Maine GOP
Valerie Plame
John D. Podesta, Former White House Chief of Staff and Former Senior Advisor to the President
Michael PodhorzerJen Porter
Trevor Potter, Chairman and Commissioner of the Federal Election Commission from 1991 to 1995; General Counsel to John McCain’s Presidential Campaign from 2000 to 2008
Edward A Powell, Former Assistant Secretary for Management and Deputy Secretary (Acting) at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; CEO, USO World HQ; Defense Business Board
Kristopher Purcell, Former White House Aide in the George W. Bush Administration
Marc Racicot
Alan Charles Raul, Associate Counsel to the President in the Reagan Administration from 1986 to 1988
Reid Ribble, Representative of the 8th Congressional District of Wisconsin from 2015 to 2017. (R)
Kathleen Rice, Representative of the 4th Congressional District of New York from 2015 to 2023 (D)
Stephen Richer, Maricopa County Recorder from 2021 to 2025 (R)
Hon. Denver Riggleman, Representative of the 5th Congressional District of Virginia from 2019 to 2021 (R)
Robert Riley
Amb. John Ritch, Former U.S. Representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency
Bill Ritter, Governor of Colorado from 2007 to 2011 (D)
Miriam Rocah
Anthony Romero, Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union
Theodore Roosevelt IV
Paul Rosenzweig, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, Department of Homeland Security in the George W. Bush Administration from 2005 to 2009
Steve Russell, Representative of the 5th Congressional District of Oklahoma from 2015 to 2019 (R)
Mark Sanford, Governor of South Carolina from 2003 to 2011; Representative of the 1st Congressional District of South Carolina from 1995 to 2001 and again from 2013 to 2019 (R)
Anthony Scaramucci
Steven M. Schneebaum
Claudine Schneider, Representative of the 2nd Congressional District of Rhode Island from 1981-1991 (R)
Nancy Schulte
Kathleen Sebelius
Ricki Seidman, Former Senior Counselor to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
James M. Seif
Joe Sestak, Former Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy and U.S. Congressman (PA-07)
Tara Setmayer, Co-Founder, The Seneca Project
Rina Shah, Geopolitical Adviser & Former RNC Delegate
Robert B. Shanks, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, 1981-1985
Hon. Phil Sharp, Representative of the 10th and 2nd District of Indiana from 1975-1983 and 1983-1995 (D)
Kate Shaw
Christopher Shays, Representative of the 4th Congressional District of Connecticut from 1987 to 2009 (D)
Donald Sherman, Executive Director and Chief Counsel, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
Steve Silverman
David Skaggs, Representative of the 2nd Congressional District of Colorado from 1987 to 1999 (D)
Anne-Marie Slaughter, Professor Emerita, Princeton University
Fern Smith, Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California appointed by President Reagan from 1988 to 2005
Hon. Peter Smith
Craig Snyder, Former Chief of Staff to U.S. Senator Arlen Specter
Ilya Somin, Law Professor at George Mason University
Julia Spiegel
Richard Stengel, Former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy
Stuart Stevens
Robin Tallon, Representative of the 6th District of South Carolina from 1983 to 1993 (D)
Neera Tanden, President and CEO, Center for American Progress
Michael Teter, Attorney & Managing Director, The 65 Project
Jennifer Thomas & Emma Addams, Co-Executive Directors, Mormon Women for Ethical Government
James Tierney, Former Attorney General of Maine
Jeff Timmer, The Lincoln Project
Ann Toback, CEO, The Workers Circle
Carmen Torres
Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University
David Trott, Representative of the 11th Congressional District of Michigan from 2015 to 2019 (R)
Olivia Troye, Special Advisor, Homeland Security and Counterterrorism to Vice President Mike Pence, 2018-2020
F. Andrew Turley, Major General, USAF (ret.)
Susan W. Turnbull
Chris Vance, Former Chairman, Washington State Republican Party
Josh Venable, Former Chief of Staff, U.S. Department of Education
Alexander S. Vindman, Lt. Col., U.S. Army (ret.)
Michael Waldman, President, Brennan Center for Justice
Liz Wally
Joe Walsh
Matt Walton, 2015 Republican Nominee, 74th District of the Virginia House of Delegates
Austin Weatherford
Judge William H. Webster
Randi Weingarten
Ellen L. Weintraub, Commissioner, Federal Election Commission, 2002-2025
Wendy Weiser, Vice President for Democracy, Brennan Center for Justice
Robert Weissman, Co-President, Public Citizen
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Colonel, USA (ret.)
Gregory P. Wilson, Deputy Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of the Treasury, 1986-1989
Rick Wilson, The Lincoln Project
Jonathan M Winer, Former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and Special Envoy for Libya
Timothy Wirth, U.S. Senator for the State of Colorado from 1987 to 1993; Representative of the 8th Congressional District of Colorado from 1975 to 1987 (D)
Ann S. Womble
John Yarmuth, Former Chairman of the House Budget Committee, 3rd District of Kentucky from 2007-2023 (D)

__________

 

Donald Trump is going completely CRAZY. Threatening and suing universities, media organizations, journalists, judges, prosecutors, non-profit organizations, law firms, etc.

"Let them hate,

so long as they fear."

 

...So as the second Trump administration careens from one failure to another, as unhappiness with the president rises, as events and reality refuse to bend to his will, he will become darker and crueler and more unstable. His advisers, all of whom are afraid to stand up to him, will enable him. And the MAGA movement, more cult-like than ever, more walled off from reality than ever, will stay with him until the end.

Leaders who have been worse—more ruthless and more skilled than Trump—have been stopped, and few nations have been blessed by a system of government as wise and resilient as what our Founders created. Many of our institutions are stronger than those in most other nations. So Trump is hardly invincible, and many millions of Americans will not give up without a fight. My hope and expectation is that they will prevail, that America will prevail, but it will come at quite a cost…

—Peter Wehner, "America's Mad King"

Also worth your time:

A Loophole That Would Swallow the Constitution
If Donald Trump can disappear people to El Salvador without due process, he can do anything.
By Jonathan Chait

Donald trump’s most frightening power grab was undertaken with an undertone of sinister jocularity. There was no column of tanks in the streets, no burning of the legislature. The president and his partner in despotism, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, were bantering amiably in the Oval Office in front of the press corps, mocking the American court system with evident delight.

Trump’s ploy is almost insultingly simple. He has seized the power to arrest any person and whisk them to Bukele’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, where they will be held indefinitely without trial. Once they are in Bukele’s custody, Trump can deny them the protections of American law. His administration has admitted that one such prisoner, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was sent to El Salvador in error, but insists that it has no recourse. Trump, who has threatened the territorial integrity of multiple hemispheric neighbors, now claims that requesting the return of a prisoner he paid El Salvador to take would violate that country’s sovereignty…

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT, April 17, 2025 (pdf)

…The Executive is inherently focused upon ends; the Judiciary much more so upon means. Ends are bestowed on the Executive by electoral outcomes. Means are entrusted to all of government, but most especially to the Judiciary by the Constitution itself.

The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?∗ And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” would lose its meaning….

The basic differences between the branches mandate a serious effort at mutual respect. The respect that courts must accord the Executive must be reciprocated by the Executive’s respect for the courts. Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the Executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate…

It is, as we have noted, all too possible to see in this case an incipient crisis, but it may present an opportunity as well. We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.

In sum, and for the reasons foregoing, we deny the motion for the stay pending appeal and the writ of mandamus in this case. It is so ordered.

Oopsie… 

Smackdown? Well, we'll see where that goes from here.

UPDATE:

REALLY SICK OF ALL THIS TRUMP STUFF THIS WEEK

 

Some new readings...

 

 

Came on to Becker via a Science Magazine Review. The Amazon blurb for More Everything Forever:

forThis "wild and utterly engaging narrative" (Melanie Mitchell) shows why Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—are about oligarchic power, not preparing for the future.

Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.  

In More Everything Forever, science journalist Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.  

More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are. 

Comes out April 22nd. I also had to go after heis earlier book.

 

apropoa of the new one:

Came to this via Substack.

Careless People: The Book Meta Doesn’t Want You to Read

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams could almost be one of Christopher Buckley’s Beltway satires. Like Thank You for Smoking or The White House Mess, the first-person protagonist takes the reader on a journey from dream job to absurd nightmare—each chapter an ironic critique of the powerful characters depicted. Except Wynn-Williams is real, and so are the truly awful people and events she describes. “…like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them,” she writes in the prologue.

The subtitle, A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism aptly describes this memoir, which begins with Wynn-Williams’s story of surviving a shark attack at the age of 13 in her native New Zealand and ends with her being escorted by security from the shark-infested headquarters at Facebook twenty-five years later. Hired in 2011 as the Manager of Global Public Policy, Wynn-Williams conveys her initial enthusiasm as a true believer in the power of Facebook to be a force for good and, on that basis, how she pitched the idea of a policy role for herself at a time when the leadership did not yet grasp why the company would need to build relationships with state leaders...
 

Stay tuned...