Celine opens the Paris Summer Olympics.

She just left the world in awestruck tears of relief and gratitude.

   

_________

  

Childless Cat Ladies

J.D. Vance to Tucker Carlson:

“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless Cat Ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they have made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too, & it’s just a basic fact—you look, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

Years before he was selected as Donald Trump's running mate, Vance gave an interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson in July 2021. During the conversation, Vance said the U.S. was being run, under Democratic leadership, by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. "

"It's just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children," Vance, 39, told Carlson. And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?"

Vance went on to say that those who "actually have kids" are "the people who have a more direct stake in the future of this country."

That Vance, who has three children with wife Usha Chilukuri Vance, called out three "childless" Democrats by name is particularly noteworthy — in part, because it's not true. One of them, Harris, became a stepmom to her husband Doug Emhoff's two children in August 2014. Now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Harris has for years spoken openly about her close relationship with her stepchildren, who refer to her as "Momala."

Buttigieg, meanwhile, now the Secretary of Transportation, does have children: twins he adopted with husband Chasten in September 2021, just weeks after Vance's interview aired.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, does not have children. But as critics of Vance's comments have weighed in: so what?

Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani chided Vance for his comments in a post on X, writing, “As a childless cat lady I have a huge stake in America and am not miserable but thanks for your concern, Vance.”

Former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, who ran for the presidency against Trump in 2016, wrote sarcastically: “What a normal, relatable guy who certainly doesn’t hate women having freedoms.”?…[ People Magazine ]

_________

  

President Biden stands aside from his re-election campaign.

Endorses Vice President Harris to succeed him. 

  

   

Donald Trump, you must now agree to a Presidential debate with your new POTUS candidate rival, without delay. Failure to do so will speak a Library of Congress worth of hardbound volumes—that of a crass bully unwilling to face the forensic vaporization this woman of color will surely inflict on you in live view of a national and global audience.

____

ERRATA ON TRUMP POIGNANCY

Click

JULY 22 UPDATE

 

I just made a donation to Kamala Harris for President.

Patriotic GOP strategist Rick Wilson and Project Lincoln are unreservedly in.

MUSICAL ERRATUM

 

 

A BRIEF ASIDE

My citations and excerpts custom and its rationale.
In addition to my numerous subscribed and episodically perused online periodicals, I read 2-3 books per week, and have done so for decades. On this blog (along with several others of mine), I often post "lengthy" excerpts (though far less in length than you'd see in the typical Amazon "Look Inside" preview). My readers deserve to hear directly from the authors in full salient topical contexts, with MY opinions significantly subordinated. Per "Fair Use" law—[1] I have never done ANY of this for money; nor do I solicit or receive freebie "reviewer copies," [2] I am consistently scrupulous to provide author / publisher / seller links, and I routinely apprise authors of my activities in support of their efforts.

to wit:

 

Just published.

All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of an autocratic state. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. The army and the police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the twenty-first century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote another’s—as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America.

This is not to say that there is some secret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor is our conflict with them a black-and-white, binary contest, a “Cold War 2.0.” Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, monarchists, nationalists, and theocrats. Their regimes have different historical roots, different goals, different aesthetics. Chinese communism and Russian nationalism differ not only from each other but from Venezuela’s Bolivarian socialism, North Korea’s Juche, or the Shia radicalism of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All of them differ from the Arab monarchies and others—Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Vietnam—which mostly don’t seek to undermine the democratic world. They also differ from the softer autocracies and hybrid democracies, sometimes called illiberal democracies—Turkey, Singapore, India, the Philippines, Hungary—which sometimes align with the democratic world and sometimes don’t. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc.

Instead of ideas, the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to push back against all forms of transparency or accountability, and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them…

Applebaum, Anne. Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (pp. 1-3). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Could scarcely be more timely. Anne Applebaum is the Real Deal.

 

More to come... 

_________

  

The incoming Trump47 Secretary of Retribution

via The New Republic

Conservative political activist Ivan Raiklin claims to have assembled a “Deep State target list” that includes high-ranking Democrats and Republicans, U.S. Capitol Police officers, officials at the FBI and other intelligence agencies, witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trials, and journalists at The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and other news outlets. Their supposed crime? Being Trump’s political enemies. And Raiklin views himself as justice incarnate.

During one podcast appearance earlier this year, Raiklin said his nickname was the “deep state marauder, a.k.a. the mauler.” Raiklin’s plan for what to do with his list isn’t nearly as gruesome, but it is still terrifying. He intends to enlist right-wing sheriffs to carry out mass arrests, and in May, he declared his intention to arrange “livestreamed swatting raids.”

Raiklin reportedly claims that if he went public with all of the so-called evidence he collected on Trump’s enemies in the deep state, it would be probable cause to arrest those high-ranking officials and journalists on his list.

Those arrests would be carried out by “constitutional sheriffs,” specifically a right-wing anti-government group called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. Those sheriffs would then deputize the 75,000 veterans Raiklin claims were dismissed from the military for refusing to comply with Covid-19 vaccine mandates, forming a rogue army intent on revenge…

Former Sheriff Richard Mack, who leads the Constitutional Sheriffs group, told Raw Story that he had severed ties with Raiklin in early June and did not approve of his rhetoric. “Quite frankly, he talks about that list of 350 people—I’m sure they can afford lawyers,” said Mack. “It reeks of lawsuits, and it doesn’t follow due process.”

Raiklin has also emailed sheriffs’ offices across the country hoping to enlist them to his cause. Not one has signed on, according to Raw Story.

Recall how Donald Trump has repeatedly promised his MAGA fans "retribution." This dude is a real piece of work.

 

GOP CONVENTION ERRATUM

 

 

I.Just.Can't.Do.Any.More...

 

I'd intended to stay up and her JD Vance's VP nomination speech. Decided it would be pointless. 

OTHER NEWS...

My latest issue of Science Magazine.

 

JULY 18TH GOP CONVENTION PRIME TIME CONCLUSION

 

In the wake of a sorry parade of MAGA D-list celebs—including Hulk Hogan, Dana White, Kid Rock, Tucker Carlson, Lee Greenwood—Donald Trump came out and babbled on for 93 minutes. Same litany. The less said about it the better.

One charming erratum: Son Eric Trump spoke to introduce his Dad, and claimed that his father "built the New York skyline."

 

Right. Sure.

 

Also, one musical performer was bumped from the final evening performance schedule after the Heiitage Foundation President learned of his religious beliefs.

 

Kid Rock was much more fitting.

BACK ON TASKS

I finished Frank Bruni's important book The Age of Grievance, and, in addition to several others still in play, I'm back onto the compelling book The AI Mirror.

 

If the image of AI as an imminent destroyer or supplanter of human dominance and supremacy were only a looking-glass fantasy—a flight of misplaced imagination, serving as a creative template adapted by generations of science fiction writers, then perhaps we could just enjoy it for its imagined possibilities. iRobot is a thrill! The Terminator is a lot of fun. The Matrix is a gas. Ex Machina is spellbinding. Westworld is mind-blowing (often literally—minds get blown open quite a lot)!

But in fact, the looking-glass illusion these entertaining fictions reflect is being leveraged today by billionaires, lobbyists, and powerful AI companies to directly influence and reshape public policy, scientific research priorities, venture capital investment, and philanthropic giving. It is being placed in service of movements to defer action on real and imminent existential threats—from climate change and ocean acidification to global pandemics and food insecurity—in favor of lavish funding for research on long-term AGI risk, which these powerful interests now claim outstrips all other dangers. The new tech-centered movement of longtermism, which grew out of an earlier movement called effective altruism, has put forth in many powerful academic, policy, and media circles the idea that AGI presents an incalculably greater threat than even climate change. Many longtermists now argue that the most prudent use of philanthropy and public resources for long-term human benefit is to invest more heavily in AGI risk and AI safety research. Yet it is not the safety of living humans today, or even the next generation, that drives longtermists.

Longtermist arguments often go as follows: because AGI in the far future could theoretically kill or immiserate even more living humans than are alive on the planet now, preventing future AGI from doing this is a more rational use of resources than funding clean energy tech, food security, or public health today. Related claims made by some longtermists include the idea that saving the future requires directing even more of today’s resources toward the wealthy in the Global North, rather than sending aid to the most impoverished countries in the Global South, since wealthy people in already disproportionately wealthy regions are better positioned to use their resources to fight these “existential” risks from AGI.

Longtermism is rooted in utilitarian ethics, a brand of moral theory that has long driven effective altruists to the contemporary work of philosopher Peter Singer. Utilitarianism, from its foundation in the nineteenth-century writings of philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to the AI-inflected writings of today’s longtermists, has always held that our first and highest moral duty is not to root out injustice, or cultivate virtue, or protect human rights and the planet, but rather to maximize the sum total of happiness that will be enjoyed in the future.

Peter Singer is widely admired for his vigorous defense of animal liberation on the grounds of their capacity to suffer, which subtracts from their happiness. He is less well known for his claims (still bitterly recalled by many disability activists) that it is ethical to kill so-called “defective infants” whose potential for future happiness he sees as severely compromised. What longtermists and effective altruists have in common with Singer is the utilitarian view that morality is a happiness optimization problem, a matter of running the numbers. Conveniently for AI enthusiasts, that makes morality just the sort of thing that computers and computer scientists are supposed to be good at!

For a virtue ethicist like me, there are profound dangers and moral errors in any view of morality that separates it from humane feeling, relational bonds, and social context, reducing it to a mere computation of net happiness units. As longtermist Eliezer Yudkowsky readily admits, this kind of fundamentalist utilitarianism licenses one to turn off moral feeling and just “shut up and multiply” happiness sums, even if the action dictated by the calculation feels deeply wrong or shocks the conscience. Some longtermists at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) have used such license to entertain hypotheticals in which the welfare of billions of today’s suffering humans is dispassionately sacrificed for the potential to create far larger numbers of happy “digital people” in virtual worlds of the distant future. Others work out longtermist defenses of a related utilitarian view known as the Repugnant Conclusion: the proposal that given the option, it would be better to choose a world packed with people who all suffer so greatly that their lives are “barely worth living” than to choose a far more modest population of ten billion people who can all flourish.

These types of scenarios are often seen as compelling rebuttals to utilitarian logic. When taken instead as plausible moral obligations for humans, such scenarios are, as the philosopher and fierce critic of utilitarianism Bernard Williams famously said, the result of having “one thought too many.” Ideas like this did not dominate the early philanthropic thinking of effective altruists. From donating surplus personal wealth to the purchase of mosquito nets and other high-impact aid for the global poor, to investing in public health and climate resilience, much of what effective altruists initially tried to do is aligned with commonsense moral obligations to present and future generations. Even as the effective altruism movement merged with the more speculative AI fantasies of longtermism, many remained committed to fighting the existential threats already here: climate change, biohazards, and nuclear holocaust. As observed by a critic quoted in a 2022 profile on effective altruist and longtermist William MacAskill in The New Yorker, “If you read things that [effective altruists] are saying, they sound a lot crazier than what they’re actually doing.” If the more speculative AGI visions of longtermists were just intellectual side hustles for bored Oxford philosophers and Silicon Valley investors, we might think them harmless.

But today, longtermism is the language of moral thought spoken in a growing number of the wealthiest and most powerful political and industrial circles. Billionaires like Jaan Tallinn and Peter Thiel have been described as avid supporters, while Elon Musk, funder of the Future of Humanity Institute, has cited MacAskill as “a close match for my philosophy.” FHI Senior Research Fellow Toby Ord notes in his bio that he has advised “the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister’s Office, Cabinet Office, and Government Office for Science.” Ord was quoted to the UN General Assembly in a 2021 speech on climate by former British PM Boris Johnson. Nor do longtermists only seek influence in conservative political circles. FTX crypto founder and longtermist Sam Bankman-Fried was celebrated as a “megadonor” in US Democratic circles before being jailed on fraud charges, while longtermists in the UK formed a group called Labour for the Long Term to influence the Labour Party. Political influence is a core part of longtermist strategy. A 2022 position paper by Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute outlined their political case for institutional longtermism, the view that far-future considerations should dominate public policy and even our choice of political institutions, in contrast with longtermism as a personal philosophy for setting one’s own philanthropic priorities….

Vallor, Shannon. The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (pp. 76-80). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

"Effective Altruism?" See also here.

"Longtermist arguments often go as follows: because AGI in the far future could theoretically kill or immiserate even more living humans than are alive on the planet now, preventing future AGI from doing this is a more rational use of resources than funding clean energy tech, food security, or public health today. Related claims made by some longtermists include the idea that saving the future requires directing even more of today’s resources toward the wealthy in the Global North, rather than sending aid to the most impoverished countries in the Global South, since wealthy people in already disproportionately wealthy regions are better positioned to use their resources to fight these “existential” risks from AGI."

My TwitterX reaction.

 

 

All apropos of my abiding core concerns.

 

 Stay tuned.

_________

  

Project 2025 RNC convention update

 

WED RNC CONVENTION NOTE

Moments Are Fleeting

Well, that didn’t last long.

After Saturday’s assassination attempt, Donald Trump signaled that he would focus on unifying the country at the Republican National Convention. He told a Washington Examiner reporter that he had scrapped a speech focused on attacking Biden’s policies in favor of taking the chance to “bring the country together.” “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United,” he wrote on Truth Social the morning after the shooting. And a person close to Trump told The Washington Post on Sunday that the RNC’s planners “want speakers to dial it down, not dial it up.” But that quickly proved impossible for a party that has spent years marinating in grievance.

The mood on day one of the convention was, as John Hendrickson put it in The Atlantic today, “oddly serene.” But there were still signs of latent anger: When Trump walked out yesterday, after the opening prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, the delegates began chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!,” echoing Trump’s words after the attempted assassination.

Ron Johnson’s apparent speech mishap was an apt metaphor for the GOP’s inability to set a new tone: Instead of appealing to national unity, the senator from Wisconsin accused Democratic policies of being a “clear and present danger” to the country. Afterward, he blamed the teleprompter operator for not loading the new, more pacific speech he said he had intended to give.

As the night wore on, it became obvious that the problem wasn’t just the teleprompter. Impassioned speeches against Democrats’ policies are par for the course at the RNC, and such discourse is essential to our democracy. But yesterday’s agenda revealed something darker and angrier than policy disagreement. One featured speaker was North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, the state’s Republican nominee for governor, who declared just last week that “some folks need killing.” “It’s time for somebody to say it,” Robinson remarked in an appearance at a local church. “It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity.”…

And then there is Trump himself. Even as his team seemed to ask other Republicans to tone down their rhetoric, the former president continued to attack his critics in and out of the justice system on social media. The day after he was shot at, Trump was already relitigating his many grievances on Truth Social, and once again appeared to defame E. Jean Carroll, the woman he sexually assaulted.

As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts — The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME.

For a moment on Saturday, it felt as though we might start to see a gentler, more unifying Republican Party. But in politics, moments are fleeting, and as we were quickly reminded, Donald Trump is still Donald Trump—a man whose core message is incapable of bringing us all together again. [Charlie Sykes]

JD VANCE OOPSIE

 

Hillbilly Ishtar's people deleted this from his website after Trump chose him for VP. Too, late, bro'

 

Live with it, JD Dobbs. 

JUL 17TH EVENING UPDATE

During a campaign swing to Las Vegas, President Joe Biden was diagnosed with COVID-19, and is returning home to self-isolate. Rumors from the right and the left are swirling like mad.

_________

  

We are now fervently admonished to "dial back the rhetoric.”

Some of us, anyway.

   

OTHER NEWS LOST IN THE FRENZY

Trump-appointed federal Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the charges against him relating to the Mar a Lago stolen classified documents case.

 

NJ DEM SENATOR BOB MENENDEZ

 

Guilty on 16 felony counts of bribery-related charges invloving foreign officials. He remains defiant in the wake of the verdict. But, he will likely be heading to prison.

_________

   

Donald Trump shot at during rally in PA, grazed in right ear

Tha Age of Grievance

“Measuring misfortune is no strategy for living.”

 

Click

2, A Good Word Spoiled

Not all grievances are created equal. I want to say that again. I want to be clear. And not all expressions of grievance raise identical concerns. Some don’t raise any at all. There are wildly disproportionate outbursts, mildly disproportionate outbursts, and ones scaled defensibly and even commendably to their trigger. There is January 6, 2021, and there is everything else. Attempts by leaders on the right to minimize what happened that day and lump it together with protests on the left are as ludicrous as they are dangerous.

What’s more, the fruits of the grievances on the left don’t match the fruits of the grievances on the right, and for all the talk about how illiberal both camps have become, it’s the right that currently poses the much greater threat to the country, both in terms of its disregard for democratic institutions—for democracy itself—and the behavior it provokes, sanctions, and sometimes even glorifies. The foiled plot to kidnap and possibly assassinate a prominent elected official, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, was hatched by right-wing terrorists. It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, an enormously popular right-wing lawmaker, who’s infamous for statements such as one in a speech at a gala for the New York Young Republican Club in December 2022, when she made light of January 6 by saying, “I will tell you something. If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”

It’s Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, who lashed out at the federal bureaucracy and indulged the darkest fantasies about the dimensions and depravity of the “deep state” by saying that if elected president, he’d “start slitting throats on Day One.” It’s Kari Lake, the failed Republican candidate for governor of Arizona in 2022, who seemed to be emulating Greene (what a thought) when she reacted to Trump’s federal indictment for treating classified documents like a personal stamp collection in June 2023 by saying: “If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have to go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.”

It’s Trump himself whose response to the far-ranging, grave legal predicament that he brought upon himself went beyond any sort of rebellion and resistance that a Democrat of comparable stature in modern times had called for. He waged an unfettered verbal assault on the American government and issued an unqualified vow to demolish certain American institutions. As the indictments rolled in, as the civil trials in which he was a defendant commenced, and as his fury pinballed from one courtroom and judge to another, his language grew ever darker, ever more dangerous. He labeled the Department of Justice, the FBI, and other byways of the federal bureaucracy in general and the Biden administration in particular “a sick nest of people that needs to be cleaned out immediately,” “fanatics,” “fascists,” and “sinister forces” who were engaged in “vicious persecution.” No, no, make that “demented persecution.” He called Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, a “monster” and, on the first day of his civil trial on the fraud charges that she’d brought against him, publicly stated that people “ought to go after this attorney general.” That chilling directive belonged to a lengthening sequence of violent musings, including his insinuation that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s presidency, should be executed for treason and his recommendation, during a speech to California Republicans, that shoplifters be shot as they left stores. His remarks increasingly amounted to sputtering thesauruses of thuggery with which he seemed to be pledging bloody payback. As Andrew Coyne, a columnist for the Globe and Mail of Toronto, wrote: “This is not the reaction of a normal person. It is not even the reaction of a mob boss. It is the reaction of a Batman villain.”

And that was before Trump used the occasion of a Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire in November 2023 to say that if he won the presidency anew in 2024, he would “root out” what he referred to as “radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Challenged about the echoes of Nazism and fascism in that pledge, a Trump campaign spokesman defended it, exulting that the “sad, miserable existence” of its critics “will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” The tenor of that vow matched the totalitarian fantasies of Trump, his advisers, and his allies, who envisioned and made plans for a federal workforce meticulously stocked with Trump loyalists and an army of federal prosecutors intensely focused on Trump’s enemies.

What’s more, there’s no left-wing analogue to Fox News, no media enterprise of commensurate reach that consciously pursued a commercial strategy of lying to its viewers, as Fox did about one of the most consequential matters of all: who won a presidential election in the most powerful country on earth. That’s what led to the settlement with Dominion, a maker of voting machines and the butt of hour upon hour of Fox programming that aired baseless claims—claims that Fox’s hosts and executives knew to be laughable: that those machines were rigged to switch votes from Trump to Biden.

But it’s also true that on both sides of the political divide, there’s a quickness to grievance, a tendency among many people to identify themselves and interpret events in terms of past, current, and looming hurts. There’s a psychological and emotional impulse—a way of approaching and assessing the world—that transcends partisan affiliation. It’s not so much bipartisan as it is pan-partisan or supra-partisan, and it’s getting worse. It exiles nuance. It rejects the kind of triage that a checks-and-balances government, which can deal with only so much so quickly, must do, even as it lengthens the odds of that government being able to do anything at all. It places personal over public interest. It turbocharges conflict.

That was one of the saddest revelations of the coronavirus pandemic, which posed a threat so universal and dire that it should have put the usual animosities on ice. At the start, I naively thought—or, more accurately, hoped—that it would. As we confronted a previously unthinkable shutdown of life as we knew it and fumbled our way through remote work, contactless grocery shopping, virtual family get-togethers, and the whole surreal rest of it, I wondered whether the suspension of normalcy would include an abnormal (but welcome!) discovery of the kind of solidarity that the country had experienced for a brief period after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush suddenly had an approval rating north of 85 percent. (The intensely pitched debates about national security versus civil liberties and about the wisdom of invading Iraq came later.)

But much had changed in the nearly two decades between the shattering of the World Trade Center and the shuttering of all of New York City, and by 2020, national solidarity was a political yeti. Battle lines were quickly drawn. Rival camps promptly emerged: people who wanted to err on the side of epidemiological caution and those who felt that individual preference took precedence over any government edict, no matter how well intentioned, especially given how fledgling and fluid our understanding of the pandemic was; people who gave experts the benefit of the doubt and those who rebelled against what they saw as facile groupthink; people who instinctively admired Dr. Anthony Fauci and people who reflexively abhorred him; masking evangelists, some of whom muttered the wish that the virus would winnow the ranks of the reckless, and masking apostates, for whom all the shutting down and covering up was rank liberal opportunism…

Bruni, Frank. The Age of Grievance (pp. 13-17). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. 

So, I was randomly working away online yesterday when an Amazon book recommendation pinged into my inbox. Being long familiar with and a NY Times reader fan of Frank Bruni, I clicked.

About ten pages into the "look inside" preview. I'd seen enough. Notwithstanding that I already still have a good half-dozen fine books in play, this was/is too good to pass up. Download with 1 Click.

Do yourselves a serious favor. Read this book. In light of our most recent events, it could not be more timely. Beyond that, his writing style has me repeatedly, painfully laughing out loud. Dude, yer killin' me.

Peeps, didja all know that, if you are routinely successful at reining in your High Dudgeon Outrage Reflex, you are guilty of snooty Woke Liberal Grievance Able-ism.

ERRATUM

 

Anxiously awaitng.
 

And, I would be fine with this.

POST-PRESSER RECAP

OK, then. “Two cheers for uncertainty.“

More shortly...

 _________

  

Celine: “I Am”

 “You might think you have to give up, but you don’t. You don’t have to move a mountain, just keep moving...”

  

Amazon Prime documentary. 1 hr & 43 searing minutes of courageous candor. I am speechless.

Just wow... Stiff Person Syndrome?

   

Stay tuned. Cheryl and I lived in Las Vegas for 21 yeara. We are tight friends with a number of the musicians who staffed her Caesar's residency orchestra. For a number of years, I was the goto "20 feet from stardom" photographer. Never got to meet Celine. Hugs to you, sister.

 

Developing...

_________

   

Aftermath?

 

UPDATE

ANOTHER NEW BOOK JUMPS THE QUEUE

 

2. The Profits of Paranoia

For a nation that emerged from history’s most destructive war with an unconditional victory over fascism and a rapidly growing economy, the America of the early fifties was strangely demoralized and apprehensive. Having brushed aside fear itself to overcome the Depression and the Axis, Americans were unable to resist the panic over communism that enabled the rise of McCarthy and his cynical henchman Cohn. The McCarthyites hyped the Red Menace for their own political and personal advancement, encouraging a wave of hysteria that long outlasted the Wisconsin Republican’s meteoric career. Every day, Americans were warned that rising communism threatened their way of life, not only overseas but everywhere, from the schools and universities to the churches, the military, and even the movies.

Looking back, it’s not easy to determine how much of this political offensive was spurred by genuine concern over the Kremlin’s attempts to subvert democracies. Very often, it was advanced by far-right forces aiming to discredit liberals, labor unions, minority groups, intellectuals, and anyone identified with the Democratic Party—and never mind that those liberals were far more effective in opposing communism, both at home and abroad, than their right-wing critics. When McCarthy publicly slandered General George C. Marshall—whose aid and reconstruction program had played a critical role in brushing back Europe’s Stalinist parties—as an instrument of the “communist conspiracy,” the petty partisan motive was plain. McCarthy was trying to smear not just Marshall himself but his boss, President Harry S. Truman—a zealous anti-communist whose “loyalty” programs were an assault on First Amendment freedoms.

Many of the prominent Far Rightists who promoted mythical plots in the postwar years were the same figures whose isolationism and hatred of the New Deal had aligned them with pro-Axis seditionists before the war. McCarthyism’s authoritarian bullying damaged America’s reputation, while providing a convenient propaganda topic for the Kremlin. Such strategic considerations never troubled the Right when there was money to be made.

Confrontations between East and West played out on the global stage, but by the time McCarthy gave his Wheeling, West Virginia, speech warning of Red conspirators in government, the communist movement in the United States was moribund if not dead. By 1950, the tiny cadre of Russian spies in Washington were apprehended and facing prosecution. The Communist Party (CPUSA) had been decimated by federal prosecution of its leaders during the late forties, in a spasm of legal repression that sent dozens to prison and menaced hundreds more with potential prosecution under the Smith Act. And as the monumental crimes of Stalinism emerged, an intense disillusionment gripped party members and sympathizers. The remnant of a few thousand diehards posed no threat to anybody but themselves.

Yet once launched, conspiracy theories tend to fester and spread, without respect to reality, as we have seen in recent years—especially when their cultivation still sustains a profitable enterprise. Decades before social media turned conspiracy-mongering into an online industry, the impresarios of the Far Right found many ways to monetize the “communist conspiracy,” as they exaggerated its dimensions beyond absurdity.

These “professional anti-communists” pioneered the exploitation of “fake news” and disparaged traditional news sources, spreading stories that overstrained credulity. They found the niche audiences that not only believed their far-fetched warnings of imminent doom but would spend good money to hear the bad news. For well over a decade, nearly any speaker who inspired dread of the Red Dawn would draw a paying crowd, no matter how implausible the tale.

In 1962, for instance, rumors quickly spread that Operation Water Moccasin, a military training operation run by the US Army in rural Georgia, was secretly a rehearsal for a United Nations plot to seize power in the US, spearheaded by “barefoot” African guerrillas. (The appeals to racial anxiety were never subtle.) The same nefarious scheme was also said to involve a huge contingent of Chinese Communist troops over the border in Mexico, where they eagerly awaited the signal to invade. Incredibly, the hysteria over this entirely fabricated scenario reached a crescendo across the South that forced the Pentagon to cancel the exercise entirely. A CBS News special investigation later found that panic over a UN takeover had begun when a radio evangelist started the rumor, which gained velocity after a far-right congressman from California, the aptly named James B. Utt, picked it up. By then, of course, the phony story had achieved its principal purpose: to intensify fear and alienation among the targeted audiences.

As a vocation, anti-communism had provided a substantial living and a measure of fame (or infamy) to a host of government informants, industrial consultants, writers, and public lecturers for many years, dating back to the first Red Scare that followed the Russian Revolution. But as the CPUSA declined, so did the prosecutions, congressional hearings, and other platforms that had sustained “experts” on communism, principally former party members who snitched on their ex-comrades. Opportunities in that once-flourishing field were evaporating by the early fifties. But a cohort of bold grifters with a fresh angle—“anti-communist education,” pitched to the suburban masses—was about to show up…

Conason, Joe. The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (pp. 25-27). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Among other things, goes to the topic of this book (cited here):

Yeah.

 

Also, how might Joe Conasson's work tie into our friends at "Project 2025?" Another huge grift?

 

More shortly...

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OK, time to get back to work

 

Unreal smarts, this young scholar.
 

   

My follow-on observation:

To use a DNA analogy, genomic diversity is “adaptive” precisely because–mixing my metaphors–“you can’t ever step in the same river twice.” apropos, see @brianklaas’s killer book “Flukes.” #LLM inbreeding is as maladaptive as genetic inbreeding. House of Windsor, anyone?

OK, I was not hip to her until reading a new Science Magazine review of her current book The AI Mirror. Bought her prior release as well (I have no life).

 

YOU GOTTA READ THIS BOOK

...[M]ost commercial AI systems today are powered by a machine learning model trained on a large body of data relevant to a specific task, then fine-tuned to optimize its performance on that task. 

 

This approach to AI has made rapid progress in widening machine capabilities, particularly in tasks using language, where we have the most data to train with. Indeed, since so many kinds of cognitive tasks are language-enabled, most experts now regard the term “Narrow AI” as outmoded, much like its predecessor label “Weak AI.” Very large language models, like OpenAI’s various iterations of GPT or Google DeepMind’s Gemini, can now do an impressively wide variety of things: answer questions, generate poems, lyrics, essays, or spreadsheets, even write and debug software code. Large image models can generate drawings, animations, synthetic photos or videos. While such models have a considerable speed advantage over human performance of these tasks, the quality and reliability of their outputs is often well below the peak of human ability. Still, some see evidence of progress toward AGI in their widening scope of action and the flexibility of a single base model to be fine-tuned for many new tasks. While a large language model (LLM) can’t solve a problem unless the solution is somehow embedded in the language data it is trained on, multimodal models trained on many types of data (text, image, audio, video, etc.) are expanding the performance range of AI models still further. 

 

Even if it no longer makes sense to call these tools “narrow” AI, they remain below the threshold of general intelligence—AGI. But it’s a mistake to explain that in terms of the problems they can’t yet solve. The true barrier to AGI is that AI tools today lack any lived experience, or even a coherent mental model, of what their data represent: the world beyond the bits stored on the server. This is why we can’t get even the largest AI models to reliably reflect the truth of that world in their outputs. The world is something they cannot access and, therefore, do not know. You might think there’s an easy fix: pair an AI model with a robot and let the robot’s camera and other sensors experience the world! But to an AI model, a robot’s inputs are just another data dump of ones and zeros, no different from image and sound files scraped from the Internet. These ones and zeros don’t organize themselves into the intelligent awareness of an open and continuous world. If they did, the field of intelligent robotics—including driverless cars, social robots, and robots in the service industry—would be progressing much faster. In 2015, fully automated cars and trucks were predicted to be everywhere by the 2020s. Yet in 2023, robotaxis piloted in San Francisco were still driving over firehoses, getting stuck in wet concrete, blocking intersections during busy festival traffic, violating basic rules of the road, obstructing emergency vehicles—even dragging a helpless pedestrian.4 It’s not just driving: the real-world performance of most twenty-first-century commercial robots has lagged well behind AI tools for solving language-based tasks. So, what’s the problem? 

 

A world is an open-ended, dynamic, and infinitely complex thing. A data set, even the entire corpus of the Internet, is not a world. It’s a flattened, selective digital record of measurements that humans have taken of the world at some point in the past. You can’t reconstitute the open, infinite, lived, and experienced world from any data set; yet data sets are all that any AI model has. You might say, “But surely this is true of the human brain as well! What more do we have than data streams from our eyes, ears, noses, and so on?” But your analog, biological brain remains a far more complex and efficient system than even the most powerful digital computer. In the words of theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, “Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.”5 It was built over hundreds of millions of years to give you something no AI system today has: an embodied, living awareness of the world you inhabit. This is why we ought to regard AI today as intelligent only in a metaphorical or loosely derived sense. Intelligence is a name for our cognitive abilities to skillfully cope with the world we awaken in each day.6 Intelligence in a being that has no world to experience is like sound in a vacuum. It’s impossible, because there’s no place for it to be. 

 

We humans do inhabit and experience a world, one rich with shared meaning and purpose, and, therefore, we can easily place the outputs of our latest AI tools within that context of meaning. We call these outputs “intelligent” because their form, extracted entirely from aggregated human data, unsurprisingly mirrors our own past performances of skilled coping with the world. They reflect back to us images of the very intelligence we have invested in them. Yet accuracy and reliability remain grand challenges for today’s AI tools, because it’s really hard to get a tool to care about the truth of the world when it doesn’t have one. Generative AI systems in particular have a habit of fabricating answers that are statistically plausible, but in fact patently false. If you ask ChatGPT to tell you about me and my career, it usually gets a lot right, but it just makes up the rest. When my host at a festival I was speaking at used ChatGPT to write my bio for the live audience, the tool listed in a confident tone a series of fictitious articles I haven’t written, named as my coauthors people that I’ve never met, and stated that I graduated from the University of California at Berkeley (I have never studied there). 

 

Importantly, these are not errors. Error implies some kind of failure or miscalculation. But these fabrications are exactly what ChatGPT is designed to do—produce outputs that are statistically plausible given the patterns of the input. It’s very plausible that someone who holds a distinguished professorial chair at a prestigious world university received her degree from another prestigious world university, like UC Berkeley. This fabrication is far more plausible, in fact, than the truth—which is that, due to harsh economic and family circumstances, after high school I attended a local community college in-between full-time work shifts, and later received my bachelor’s degree from a low-ranked (but dirt-cheap and good-quality) commuter university that offered night classes. When I was offered a PhD scholarship at age 25, I became a full-time student again after eight years in the workforce. I first set foot in a college dorm in my 40s, as a university professor. My story isn’t common. And that’s precisely why ChatGPT selected a more “fitting” story for me; quite literally, one that better “fit” the statistical curves of its data model for academic biographies. Later, we’ll consider the cost of relying on AI tools that smooth out the rough, jagged edges of all our lives in order to tell us more “fitting” stories about ourselves. 

 

These systems can perform computations on the world’s data far faster than we can, but they can’t understand it, because that requires the ability to conceive of more than mathematical structures and relationships within data. AI tools lack a “world model,” a commonsense grasp and flowing awareness of how the world works and fits together. That’s what we humans use to generalize and transfer knowledge across different environments or situations and to solve truly novel problems. AI solves problems too. Yet despite the common use of the term “artificial neural network” to describe the design of many AI models, they solve problems in a very different way than our brains do. AI tools don’t think, because they don’t need to. As this book explains, AI models use mathematical data structures to mimic the outputs of human intelligence—our acts of reasoning, speech, movement, sensing, and so on. They can do this without having the conscious thoughts, feelings, and intentions that drive our actions. Often, this is a benefit to us! It helps when a machine learning model’s computations solve a problem much faster than we could by thinking about it. It’s great when an AI tool finds a new, more efficient solution hidden somewhere in the math that you’d never look for. But your brain does much, much better than AI at coping with the countless problems the world throws at us every day, whose solutions aren’t mathematically predefined or encoded in data...

Vallor, Shannon. The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (pp. 22-26). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Dang. This old washed-up guitar player is majorly impressed.

I am briefly reminded of my June post "The Apple of my AI." Also, "The Coming Wave?"

 

Searching back through my blog turns up a lot of stuff under "Artificial Intelligence." Shannon would likely take issue with a lot of that stuff. 

 

One of my faves from a few years ago is "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence."

NEW TERM: "TECHNOMORAL"

Click

I like it.

Stay tuned. Tons to reflect upon here. Way more to come...

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