Bring On The New Year…

   

Yeah, I know, the jpeg jokes just write themselves. And, are really not all that funny.

 

Neither is this:

    

 

15 minute video. I screen-scraped the first 1:45 of the audio transcript.

We are taught that wars start with a gunshot. An assassination in Sarajevo, a surprise attack on a harbor, a tank crossing a border. But financial history tells a different story. It tells us that the gunshot is merely the final act of a tragedy that was written years earlier in the ledgers of central banks and the balance sheets of failing empires. 

War in its truest sense does not begin on the battlefield. It begins when the money stops working. It begins when a nation US debt becomes so crushing that the only way to erase it is to destroy the creditor. It begins when the global trade system fractures and it becomes cheaper to seize resources by force than to buy them on the open market. It begins when the illusion of prosperity collapses and leaders need a common enemy to save themselves from their own angry citizens.

We are standing on the precipice of such a moment. The year is [now] 2026. The global economy is sitting on a $300 trillion debt bomb. The United States is borrowing $1 trillion every hundred days just to keep the lights on. China is facing a deflationary collapse that threatens the legitimacy of its regime, and trust in the global reserve currency, the US dollar, is fracturing. Economists call this a structural convergence. Historians have a simpler name for it. They call it the pre-war era. 

In 1914, the global financial system broke and the world went to war. In 1939, the trade system broke and the world went to war. Now, the indicators are flashing red again. Welcome to the financial coin historian. Today we are not just analyzing a recession. We are investigating the terrifying possibility that the financial crisis of 2026 will be the trigger for World War III. We will show you the mathematical inevitability of the debt cycle. We will expose the war economy that is already being built in the shadows. And we will explain why when the check finally comes due, the price will be paid not in gold, but in blood. This is the story of the war that the bankers built…

I don't yet buy all of the argument, and I wonder whether the text was AI-written rather than by a human historian with requisite Cred. We do in fact face a number of potential national and global large-scale adversities. And with people in charge like "War Secretary" Pete Hegseth, one would rationally be forgiven for elevated angst. (And then, there's Pete's boss, now abstrusely/overtly threatening to invade Iran. 3 a.m. Jan 2, Truth Social, "We're locked and loaded and ready to go.") 

Cosplayer-in-Chief

Short of WWIII, might we "merely" experience The AI Bubble in 2026, given the recursive, circular, Enron-Worldcom-esqe revenue laundering increasingly hiding largely in plain sight these days?  

FINANCIAL ALCHEMY UPDATE

 

 

Stealing The Future, 'eh?

 

Andrew Ross Sorkin?

 

UPDATE 

From WIRED

What aviation would be good at—moving people from one place to another, much more quickly than was possible with cars, trains, or horses—was clear enough early on. This is what elevates AI bubbledom to another level: The promise of AI, to investors, is nearly infinite. It’s beyond uncertain. It’s unknowable. And we should note that AI arrived after much of a decade of near-zero interest rate policy that led Silicon Valley investors to place bets on companies with little to speak of when it came to business models, but boasting big narratives. Uber, the poster child startup of the era, founded in 2009, did not post a profitable year until 2023. And the AI narrative is ‘Uber for X’ on hallucinogenic steroids. Different parts of the AI story, whether it’s, say, ‘AI will cure cancer’ or ‘AI will automate all jobs’, appeal to investors and partners of every stripe, making it uniquely powerful in its bubble-inflating capacities. And so dangerous to the economy.

It’s worth reiterating that two of the closest analogs AI seems to have in tech bubble history are aviation and broadcast radio. Both were wrapped in high degrees of uncertainty and both were hyped with incredibly powerful coordinating narratives. Both were seized on by pure play companies seeking to capitalize on the new game-changing tech, and both were accessible to the retail investors of the day. Both helped inflate a bubble so big that when it burst, in 1929, it left us with the Great Depression...

Read/listen to all of it. 

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 ]

_________

  

"When you need the job done right,

bring in the women."

  

 

A long-favorite riff of mine, that post title.

OK, I finished Barb McQuade's book the other day and have now plowed well into Kara Swisher's killer read. This stuff could not be more timely. I present below for your convenient edification one extended cite from each. You hardly need my take; these formidable women (like all of the many I cite here) are eloquent, logical, and clear (and more). Both of these books are must-reads.

____

BARB, "CH 10: THE WAY FORWARD"

I was visiting Ireland in the spring of 2018, when the country was considering a referendum that would end the nation’s prohibition on abortion. In a country with an official Catholic faith, I imagined that the debate would be raging with the passion of a blood feud. Instead, I was surprised to find that advocates on both sides of the issue stood on street corners, passing out literature and politely engaging passersby who expressed interest in learning more about the issue. To this day, I still keep on my desk a button that says “Tá,” Irish Gaelic for “yes”—the choice that would change the law to permit abortion and the side that ultimately prevailed in the election by an overwhelming margin. Irish feminist Ailbhe Smyth observed that the country was able to conduct the vote without becoming split. She attributed that success to “creating an empathetic framework of discourse so that people are not at each other’s throats.”

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

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

Overcoming Fear

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

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

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

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

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

Demanding Leaders Who Speak the Truth

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

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

We the People

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

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

Lasting Peace among Ourselves

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

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

This model is not a fantasy. It was at work in Ireland in 2018. It has worked in our own history. As president, Abraham Lincoln understood the need to welcome fellow citizens back into the fold, even after a bloody civil war. As the war ended, he delivered his second inaugural address, which ended with a plea for reconciliation:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Respecting each other means telling each other the truth. While we can never rid politics of spin and advocacy, we can insist on facts and refuse to perpetuate assertions we know to be lies simply to make a buck or somehow get ahead. Allowing public leaders, media, businesses, and institutions to propagate falsehoods assaults the integrity of our democracy. If we want to protect our rights from tyrants and con men, we must fight disinformation as unpatriotic, a betrayal of the American people. We must denounce as traitors the liars who use members of the public as their unsuspecting political pawns. To love America is to love the truth. We must make truth in democracy our national purpose.

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

McQuade, Barbara. Attack from Within (pp. 308-315). Seven Stories Press. Kindle Edition.

BURN, KARA, BURN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello, Elon. It’s me.

Swisher, Kara. Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (pp. 208-214). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. 

See my Dec 2016 "TrumpleThinSkin" post, just fer grins.

It is to my indelible, wistful regret that I never got to meet Kara back when I was posing as a Silicon Valley Health IT Startup Photojournalist while doing my actual QIO gig. She rocks!

 

Personal note: Kara, your recounting of the loss of your Dad... Sister, there are no words.

_____

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

So, Nikki Haley has reportedly dropped out ot the MAGA Party Primary race, eh? How long before her husband changes his name to Heidi? (arf, arf) Word is that Mitch is changing his name to Coco Chow. (arf, arf)

 

UPDATE

 

Interesting Substack piece:

Trump super fans are impossible to argue with because they don’t actually believe in logic
The far-right worldview is incomprehensible until you realize that devotees believe truth flows from authority rather than reality

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

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

“All attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective,” David McIntosh wrote...

The essay continues:

The roots of authoritarian morality extend deep into human history. Many ancient civilizations operated under theocratic or monarchic systems where rulers were seen as divinely appointed or even incarnations of deity. These systems established a precedent where the ruler’s will was equated with moral rightness, a moral order centered around authority and obedience...

Y'know, maybe I need to cash in on this stuff. Couple of minutes in Photoshop for starters...

 

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

Our Father,

In Mar-a-lago,

Hallowed be Thy Game...

 

LET US PREY

 

'eh? "2 Corinthians walk in to a bar..."

 

[And, yeah, I know, it's not really funny.]

 

BACK TO REALITY: SISTERS IN LAW PODCAST

 

_______

 

PERSON...WOMAN…MAN…CAMERA…TV

The Best Words.

"Facts are work. They require study; they require curiosity; they require patience; they require humility."

"Democracy requires the same."—Megan Garber

 

Dr. Reaven

I have a gut, Donald Trump announced in 2018, “and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” The president’s gut would go on to inform him that climate change is partisan propaganda; that COVID-19 might be cured through the injection of bleach; that any election that fails to produce a Trump victory must be rigged. Trump gut-trusted the nation into political crisis. His first term emphasized the fragility of American democracy. A second would threaten the foundation of that democracy: the public’s willingness to accept that reality is a shared resource...

330 328 days to election day...

 

Dr. Reaven's admonition has been indelibly burned in my neurons ever since he first voiced it in class. Then I was blessed to get to apply the principles beginning in January 1986 when I began a 5 1/2 yr tenure in a forensic-level environmental radiation lab in Oak Ridge developing computer systems and riding herd on bench-level statistical quality control measures (pdf). My first "day gig," beginning at age 39 (a late bloomer).

"Facts?" "Evidence?" Again, "define 'evidence'"

 

Also again, is there a "science" of "anti-science thinking?" Hmmm... see "Denialism." And, define "science," for that matter. Oh, yeah, must not forget about "Disinformation." Here, and here.

 

"JUST THE FACTS?" WHY SHOULD WE EVEN CARE?

 

Recently got back to—and finished—this book after my Liz Cheney digression..

 

 

apropos of "getting stuff right" (those facts, and the arguments they comprise). Cutting to the chase:

The balance of existential risk
What might end the human species altogether? These days, unfortunately, there are plenty of different scenarios to consider. The science of existential risk, which studies extinction-level events, tends to narrow the range down to four major areas of ultimate danger. The first is nuclear weapons, which retain the capacity to wipe us out many times over. Since the end of the Cold War – at least until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the risk of a global nuclear conflagration appeared to have diminished. But there are still more than 10,000 nuclear warheads around the globe, quite a few of whose whereabouts are unknown. Only two have ever been deployed, and none for more than seventy-five years. But it seems almost inevitable that at some point, someone, somewhere, will let loose another one.

The second area of risk is climate change. That continued heating of the planet due to carbon emissions will cause serious long-term harm to the human and the natural worlds is increasingly hard to dispute. However, truly cataclysmic climate change is something else again. That would occur only if runaway effects took place, driven by unanticipated feedback loops within the global ecosystem, such that the rate of warming became far worse than might presently be anticipated – not two or even three degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but maybe six, eight or ten. At that point human life, no matter what steps we might take to mitigate the effects of what we had done to the planet, would become impossible. Finding another world on which to live might be the only option. This scenario remains unlikely, but climate science is pretty uncertain around the edges when it comes to worst-case outcomes. No one knows for sure.

Biological disaster is the next great danger. Martin Rees, the cosmologist who helped to launch the existential risk movement, believes this is currently where the biggest threat lies. The growing human capacity to experiment with our genetic make-up, coupled with a continuing appetite to develop new forms of biological weaponry, makes the possibility of what Rees calls ‘bioterror or bio-error’ wiping out a significant part of the human race a real one. The Covid pandemic, which may or may not have been an example of bio-error (depending on whether you believe it started in a wet market or a research lab), was just a taster of what might happen. As our ability to interfere with nature marches on apace, our ability to regulate the consequences struggles to keep up. It’s hard to build a nuclear bomb in your bedroom but tinkering with a biotech sample is a lot easier. Anything could happen.

Finally, there are the killer robots, or more straightforwardly the possibility that artificial general intelligence might render us irrelevant. When intelligent machines become smarter than we are, and especially if they acquire the capacity to decide on their own enhancement and replication, humanity may lose its centrality to the order of the world, at which point we will be as vulnerable as every other natural creature on the planet. We are at present rendering innumerable species extinct by our own indifference to their fate. What’s to say that AI technology won’t do the same to us? Even before then, while we are busily constructing machines with superhuman capabilities, we risk building some that escape our control altogether. These machines would not have to be supremely intelligent to destroy us, just relentless, and pervasive: dead behind the eyes and with no off-switch. As I said at the start of this book, it is perhaps the quintessential twenty-first-century nightmare.

In each case (nuclear, climate, bio, AI), what we are facing is the coming together of relatively unchanging human nature – we remain a curious, creative, easily distracted, ultimately vulnerable species – with the rapidly accelerating possibilities of technological havoc. To anyone who remains confident that history is still pointing in the right direction – including all the rational optimists who insist that life is getting better and humans more responsible – the pessimists point out that what have changed are the potential consequences of our residual carelessness. For almost all of human history our mistakes couldn’t prove wholly fatal to us. We might do the most terrible things, but our destructive power was constrained by the limits on our technical capacity. Now, those limits are falling away. In that sense, it doesn’t matter if things are improving, or even if we are. So long as we are not infallible, one slip-up could cost us everything. An extinction-level event only has to happen once. And we are certainly not infallible – we are still human.

There is, however, another way to look at this. A lot of the rhetoric around existential risk emphasises the randomness of the dangers we face in an increasingly networked, interconnected, accessible world. The slip-up could come from anywhere – the lone terrorist, the mad scientist, the corrosive malware, the mutant virus. Science-fiction dystopias – from Planet of the Apes to Twelve Monkeys – home in on the possibility of these calamitous mishaps, in large part because they are much easier to narrate … Yet in truth, the bigger risk by far seems to be neither rogue individuals, nor rogue technology, nor rogue monkeys – it is artificial persons gone wrong.

Of the four areas of danger, three are largely in the hands of states and corporations. A terrorist could detonate a nuclear warhead – it is perhaps still more likely that the nuclear taboo will be broken by a lone actor than by a state – but a species-ending conflagration could occur only if states joined in. Runaway climate change is not something that any rogue individual could engineer – if it happens, it would be because the biggest polluters on the planet were unable to restrain themselves. These are all corporate agents of one form or another – just a hundred companies are responsible for 71 per cent of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. The worst of bioterror or bio-error is likely to originate with the state funding of scientific research, even if it might end with something inadvertently escaping from a government lab. Species-ending experiments are what artificial persons contemplate; after all, it is not their species...

Runciman, David. The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs (pp. 254-257). Liveright. Kindle Edition.

David gets my latest "Best-Place to Hide a $100 Bill From Donald Trump" award. Another 10-11 hour read. Worth every minute.

 

Once more: Take it From The Top.

INTRODUCTION
STATES, CORPORATIONS, ROBOTS
Imagine a world of superhuman machines, built in our image and designed to make our lives go better. Imagine that these machines turn out to be vastly more powerful than we are. It’s not only that we can’t do what they do; we can’t really understand how they do it either. Still, we come to rely on them. They are there to serve our interests, offering us convenience, efficiency, flexibility, security and lots of spare time. Imagine that it all works. As a result of our inventions, we become longer lived, richer, better educated, healthier, and perhaps happier too (though that remains up for debate). We enjoy lives that would be unrecognisable to people born just a couple of generations earlier. The human condition is transformed.

Yet we know – surely, we know? – that there are enormous risks in becoming so dependent on these artificial versions of ourselves. They are superhuman but they are also fundamentally inhuman. They lack the essence of what makes us who we are. Call it a conscience. Call it a heart. Call it a soul. The potential power of these machines in the service of conscienceless, heartless, soulless human beings, of whom there are still plenty, is frightening. But more frightening still is the possibility that these machines will start taking decisions for themselves. They are meant to serve us, but they also have the capacity to destroy us. What if their power were to be turned against their creators? We might have ended up building the agents of our own obsolescence.

This is a very twenty-first-century story, and perhaps the quintessential twenty-first-century nightmare. On the cusp of the AI revolution, we are now constructing machines capable of doing things that leave us exhilarated, baffled or terrified... Runciman (pp. 1-2)

A ton to ponder in this eloquent book. Below, great companion video interview, UnHerd's Flo Read with Nick Bostrom.

 

 

UPDATE

 

A final David Runciman Handover cite:

Changing demographics will also mean increasing demand for lifelong educational services. The traditional view of education as a preparation for the world of work makes little sense any more. ‘Birth, school, work, death’ was never much of a life prospectus, but now, with the gap between the first and the last growing all the time, the relationship between the second and the third is getting more tenuous. It is far from clear that the modern mantra has the order the right way round. Why try to cram in the education before people start working? Why not educate them along the way, as they adapt to the shifting demands of an ever-changing workplace? And if education is no longer simply a preparation for something that ceases with old age, why stop educating them at all…

Traditional societies rest on an implicit contract between the human generations: the old teach the young and the young care for the old. In modern societies that exchange has grown increasingly strained, as more and more of teaching and care has been delegated to the state. Under modern employment conditions, however, there is still an implicit contract: working-age adults undertake the labour to generate the economic activity that allows the state to pay for the education of the young and the care of the old. But once work is collapsed into education and care, that arrangement no longer makes sense. The young could well be the ones teaching the old; the old could well be the ones working instead of the young. As a result, we may become less reliant on the state to manage the transfers between the generations. But we might have to become more reliant on the state to manage the machinery that makes all this possible in the first place…

This vision of the future does, however, envisage both states and corporations moving decisively away from their more recent strategy, which has been to franchise out economic activity to cheaper human labour around the world instead. That is where we had been heading for the past generation until a series of events, from the vote for Brexit and the election of Trump to the advent of Covid and the war in Ukraine, helped stop the inexorable march of globalisation in its tracks, though some of the pause had been happening anyway… Runciman, (pp. 243-245) 

Yeah. I find that quite intriguing. I am now almost 78, and joke about being "a life-long unlearner," notwithstanding being retired and physically "ailing" (the sucky Parkinson's). I continue to consume 2-3 books a week plus my numerous periodicals (and inveterate online info-surfing). I continue to post here just on the off-chance I might contribute some stuff of cognitive and moral utility. Never been about money or "branding." Myriad others have that covered. I've done relatively well across my life. Grateful for nearly everything.

Miss my girls. There are no words in that regard.

So, here I am. Grandpa ("Pop"), Great-Grandpa ("GGD"), washed-up old guitar player, now full Associate Member in the OCC ("Old Coots Club").

 

We continue to have much to yet tend to.

 

Facts.

Question: do enough of us still care about preserving U.S. democracy? There is worrisome credible evidence that a committed relatively small minority could extinguish democracy—rather quickly.

We now have 326 days until the 2024 national elections.

__________

 

333 days and counting down

If Trump wins.

   

A topical series by eminent writers at The Atlantic. As I post this today, there are 24 essays. I've read them all. Should they append the list with additonal pieces, I will update it.

 

David Frum on autocracy
Anne Applebaum on NATO
McKay Coppins on the loyalists
Caitlin Dickerson on immigration
Barton Gellman on the Justice Department
Sophie Gilbert on misogyny
Zoë Schlanger on climate
George Packer on journalism
Sarah Zhang on science
Franklin Foer on corruption
Michael Schuman on China
Adam Serwer on the courts
Juliette Kayyem on extremism
Elaine Godfrey on abortion
Megan Garber on disinformation
Clint Smith on history
Ronald Brownstein on partisanship
David A. Graham on normalization
Vann R. Newkirk II on civil rights
Spencer Kornhaber on freedom
Tom Nichols on the military
Helen Lewis on the left
Jennifer Senior on anxiety
Mark Leibovich on America’s character
____________

Evidence had been the prime, almost exclusive, focus of our hearings. Our report also had to avoid exaggeration; we wanted its every paragraph and section to be meticulously sourced and supported.—Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor, pg 355

Seriously?

I finished Liz Cheney's new book last night. Bracing, impressive, important. I share very little in common with her politically, but I pored over this 11 hour read with extreme care and came away with great new respect for her and her J6 Committee effort. "Meticulously sourced and supported." Mission accomplished. You should read this book. And, all of The Atlantic pieces cited and linked above. I've been a subscriber for decades. Their latest stuff is better than ever. Highly recommend  that you subscribe.

Trump must be lawfully held to account, and politically defeated in 2024. The incriminating evidence against him is dispositive (an assertion I don't make lightly).

For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future. It is blunted, perhaps, by a craving for the familiar. We all appreciate that the past includes many moments of severe instability, crisis, even radical revolutionary upheaval. We know that such things happened years or decades or centuries ago. We cannot believe they might happen tomorrow.

When Donald Trump is the subject, imagination falters further. Trump operates so far outside the normal bounds of human behavior—never mind normal political behavior—that it is difficult to accept what he may actually do, even when he declares his intentions openly. What’s more, we have experienced one Trump presidency already. We can take false comfort from that previous experience: We’ve lived through it once. American democracy survived. Maybe the danger is less than feared? —David Frum

Keepin' things classy, as always.

...In a second term, Trump would combine his instincts for revenge and self-protection. He would seek not only to get even with an officer corps that he thinks betrayed him, but also to break the military as one of the few institutions able to constrain his attempts to act against the Constitution and the rule of law.

Publicly, trump presents himself as an unflinching advocate for the military, but this is a charade. He has no respect for military people or their devotion to duty. He loves the pomp and the parades and the salutes and the continual use of “sir,” but as retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, said in 2023, Trump “couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably” when he was in office. Privately, as Goldberg has reported, Trump has called American war dead “losers” and “suckers,” and has said that wounded warriors are disgusting and should be kept out of sight.

Trump instead prizes military people who serve his ego and support his antidemocratic instincts. He thinks highly of Flynn, for example, who had to resign after 22 days as national security adviser and is now the marquee attraction at various gatherings of Christian nationalists and conspiracy theorists around the country. In late 2020, angered by his election loss and what he saw as the disloyalty within the national-security community, Trump fired or forced out top Defense Department leaders and tried to replace them with people more like Flynn. The brazen actions that the 45th president took in his final, desperate weeks in office—however haphazard—illustrate the magnitude of the threat he may pose to the military if he is reelected.—Tom Nichols

Facts are work. They require study; they require curiosity; they require patience; they require humility. Democracy requires the same. The demands of both become greater in an information environment teeming with stories that are ever more suspect—a place where truth has plausible deniability. Trump will ease the burden, he suggests: You can outsource your mind to his gut. You would be foolish not to. Science lies to you. Hollywood lies to you. The media lie to you. Books lie to you. Courts lie to you. Teachers lie to you. Other people lie to you. Democracy lies to you. The only thing you can trust, in this dizzying world, is the inveterate liar who would never lie to you.

A good pitchman identifies a problem and sells a solution. A great one creates the problem to be solved. Trump, having lived his life as an endless ad, has mastered the art of problem-making. He churns out shock and amusement and outrage and absurdity with factory efficiency. He makes the world seem hard. And then he offers himself up as the person who will make America easy again.

This is how he has been so able to transform lies from liabilities into selling points. The falsehoods do not merely bend the truth. They obliterate it.—Megan Garber

“We are divided,” Stephen Colbert once observed, “between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.” He was speaking in 2005, as the character he played on his TV show at the time: a buffoon who shouted his way into political relevance. Back then, that line was still a joke.—Megan Garber

 

UPDATE:  "How Trump would build his loyalty-first Cabinet"

_____

 

TANGENT: ANTHROPOCENE, MEET THE ASSHOLOCENE

In the winter of 2020, on one of my aimless, frigid quarantine walks around my silent neighborhood, I remember being struck by a thought: did a medieval European peasant know that he was living through what is now widely known as the Dark Ages? Was there some moment when he leaned against his hoe in the fields, gazed up at the uncaring sky, and dimly perceived that he was unlucky enough to have been born into a bad century, perhaps even a bad millennium, too late for classical antiquity and too early for the Renaissance? I was sympathetic toward that notional peasant, because I was feeling the same way. The tide of history was overwhelming; I was minuscule, my life brought to a terrifying standstill by an airborne virus. I thought that if the humans who survived into the year 2500 looked back on my era, they would see it as cursed or benighted, the beginning of a downward slide.

Of course, that was before rioters broke into the Capitol on January 6th of 2021 to try to overturn the election of President Biden; before Russia invaded Ukraine; before artificial intelligence became both a public tool and an imminent societal threat; before a summer of climate-change-induced floods and fires ravaged cities around the world; and before, in October of this year, Hamas attacked Israel, prompting a catastrophic war in Gaza and destabilizing the global geopolitical order. Some have argued that the aggregate events of recent years call for a new label that we can apply to our chaotic historical moment, a term that we can use when we want to evoke the panicky incoherence of our lives of late. Such coinages usually happen in retrospect, but why not start now? Think of it as a universal excuse: It’s hard living through the _______, you know?—Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker

Yeah...

__________