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| There's no way out of this, Donald. And, no, AG Bondi, grand jury transcripts will not suffice. Thank you for your attention to this matter! |
The very possibility of common sense, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed in The Human Condition, requires the existence of a common world, a shared reality, “the presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear.” Already in the 1950s, Arendt foresaw how “conditions of radical isolation, where nobody can any longer agree with anybody else,” could reduce people to fully private beings, “deprived of seeing and hearing others, of being seen and heard by them.” Such was the case in circumstances of political tyranny, she observed, but also with “the unnatural conformism of mass society,” where each individual is “imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experience.”
Conditions of collective life in the contemporary United States bear out Arendt’s grim warning, as I’ve tried to show in this book. Walls at home and on the road, shielding the body from exposure and the mind from uncomfortable ideas: these are symptoms of an atomizing politics of fear and suspicion, yielding circumstances of isolation and neglect rather than the safety and security they promise. But security itself can be imagined and pursued otherwise if anchored in a sense of common fate, as the writer and organizer Astra Taylor suggests in The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart. “The simple recognition of our mutual vulnerability—of the fact that we all need and deserve care throughout our lives—has potentially revolutionary implications,” Taylor writes. “Indignation at the way insecurity is fostered and exploited under capitalism can help strengthen existing movements and galvanize new ones, coalescing powerful coalitions with the capacity to expand and fight for collective forms of security based on compassion and concern instead of desperation and fear.”
The walls that divide are difficult and real. But they do have the tendency to crack and fissure … Work with others to chip away at those cracks, and another side can come into view. You can begin to imagine a shared and encompassing world once again, maybe even begin to rebuild that world in unlikely company. “It’s about meeting people where they’re at,” as Anusha Singh put it. “You don’t want to drive them away.”
CONCLUSION
LIFE BETWEEN THE LINES
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Boundaries are ubiquitous and essential in human cultural life. But they don’t always have to take the shape of walls. Organizer and facilitator Prentis Hemphill has reflected on the interpersonal and psychological dimensions of this distinction. One can set boundaries as a way to care for oneself and others, pursue healthy relationships, and navigate the vulnerability that such relationships will bring. Walls, on the other hand, represent a refusal to relate altogether. Walls take “the risk of connection to be too high to engage,” Hemphill writes; “they have a way of keeping you captive when they were once designed to keep you safe.”
The argument may seem metaphorical when extended to social and national life at a larger scale. But as we’ve seen throughout this book, the politics of national borders and social boundaries often tack between reality and metaphor, the physical and the psychological. “The defense that walls establish against siege works the fantasy of impermeability into a psychic politics in which the enemy is figured as raiding, invading, coming to take or plunder what is rightfully the nation’s own—its safety, security, peaceful or prosperous way of life, its jobs, its wealth, its First World privilege,” Wendy Brown notes.3 We need ways of imagining our collective existence that resist this hard logic of division, that don’t fall back on a hard and inflexible line between life inside and the world outside…
Pandian, Anand. Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down (pp. 213-216). (Function). Kindle Edition.
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What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and “selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands. Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it? They haven’t even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Files. No matter how much success we have had, securing the Border, deporting Criminals, fixing the Economy, Energy Dominance, a Safer World where Iran will not have Nuclear Weapons, it’s never enough for some people. We are about to achieve more in 6 months than any other Administration has achieved in over 100 years, and we have so much more to do. We are saving our Country and, MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, which will continue to be our complete PRIORITY. The Left is imploding! Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein. LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT! The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024 — That’s what she is looking into as AG, and much more. One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
We have all heard the phrase “hue and cry,” which most simply take to mean social clamor or indignant uproar over some public controversy. And, if ever there were a widespread, sustained, and vociferous modern “hue and cry,” the concern over and campaign against drug abuse ranks at the top, with many polls reporting sentiment ranking “drug abuse” as our number one social problem and “domestic threat.” A core question examined by this thesis is whether the “threats” posed by recreational intoxication and “addiction” are sufficiently grave as to overwhelm our law enforcement infrastructure and consequently justify abrogation of the privacy provisions of the Constitution through suspicionless drug testing programs. What of this contemporary “hue and cry” from a historico-jurisprudential perspective?According to William J. Cuddihy’s exhaustive 1990 Claremont College Ph.D. Dissertation Origins and Original Meaning of the Fourth Amendment (cited by Justice O’Conner in Vernonia v. Acton et ux) “hue and cry,” was much more than a mere colloquial expression in the European middle ages from which we trace our American jurisprudential heritage—it was a legal term of art, one we today would equate with vigilante mob “justice” and/or deputization of the private sector for the suppression and/or punishment of wrongdoing. The 1950’s “b-movie” image of angry villagers—pitchforks, clubs, axes, and torches held high—marching en masse on Baron Frankenstein’s castle to mete out a bit of harsh summary justice comes readily to mind. Such is indeed historically accurate; formally announcing a “Hue and Cry” obligated one’s fellow citizens to participate in the ensuing unbridled pursuit and searches of suspects. Cuddihy finds the earliest official references to Hue and Cry—clamorem et uthesium—in 13th century European legal documents.
Cuddihy’s work traces the development of social norms and codified legal restraints against excessive search and seizure doctrines from ancient times through the period of the American Revolution. He recounts in minute detail the evolution of practices involving civilian-led or assisted Hue and Cry episodes into general warrantless searches conducted by formal authority, codifications of unencumbered “general warrants,” and, finally, the English and colonial applications of “General Writs of Assistance”—which were in effect Hue and Cry gussied up in Parliamentary statute, the intent of which was the augmentation of the relatively meager resources of officialdom with the enforced assistance of the private sector... [Ch 4]
...The exact words of the Fourth Amendment germane to the argument of this thesis declare that “[T]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated...” The Amendment does not add a qualifier advising that “these strictures apply only to officials of the government,” though such is indeed the popular (and mistaken) interpretation. Even had we no access to the extensive documentation of the Framers’ intent with respect to the Fourth Amendment, we know from Cuddihy and a wealth of addditional scholarly sources what the words “secure in their persons” meant at the time of constitutional enactment. They meant that authority—any authority, whether law enforcement agents or proxies acting under color of the now-repudiated Writs of Assistance and private-sector Hue and Cry—could no longer search and seize indiscriminately. Both the “textual” and the “contextual” (original intent) historical/political meanings could not be more clear with respect to the paternity and applicability of the Fourth Amendment. The citizens of the nascent United States of America prized their liberty—and the personal privacy requisite for its effective functioning, privacy breachable only upon showing of sufficient and rational cause. [Ch 5]
As Cuddihy makes incontrovertibly clear in the more than 1,200 pages of his dissertation devoted to the 18th century colonial political and legal conditions, revolution, and codification of the Bill of Rights, it was the explicit intent of the victorious American revolutionists who framed our Constitution to enshrine in our Bill of Rights a clear condemnation and prohibition of arbitrary and excessive searches that had for centuries taken place under color of the Hue and Cry. [Ch 4]
DAN BONGINO HERE!By Alexandra Petri
I MUST GET OUT OF THIS TERRIBLE POSITION OF “DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE FBI” (where I am HELPLESS to see what’s really going on), so that I can get to the bottom of this Jeffrey Epstein situation! (Kash Patel can come with me if he wants.)
I have always felt that you get the most direct line to what the FBI is doing when you are as far away from the FBI as possible, ideally in some sort of podcast studio or BASEMENT with a BULLETIN BOARD that has a lot of RED THREAD on it—and KETTLEBELLS! (How I have missed my kettlebells!)…
I can’t think straight in the FBI. I have to wear a tie and a LONG-SLEEVE SHIRT and it makes me MISERABLE and CONFUSED! I get addled, like an egg.
I need the reassuring air of my podcast studio (and my kettlebells, my most trusted sources!)
I need all of this (and, of course, Pam’s resignation) to understand what’s really happening here!
The Deputy Director’s chair at the FBI is probably the worst place or the second-worst place to find out what’s really going on. Kash and I are helpless! All the director and I can do is sit around and administer unwanted polygraphs to our resentful employees!
This is NOT the best use of my time. I should be doing REPS and GETTING TO THE BOTTOM OF THINGS and FILLING MY WHOLE T-SHIRT, LIKE SOMEONE POURED ME INTO IT AND FORGOT TO SAY “WHEN,” which I can’t do here!
As soon as I’m out of this stifling environment I will find those responsible, I’m sure. We need Dan Bongino on the case!
GET DAN BONGINO OUT OF THE FBI SO DAN BONGINO CAN FINALLY FIGURE OUT WHAT THE FBI IS HIDING FROM US!!
Can AI Help Us Conquer Fear?
In the era of AI media, what is most crucial to remember is that the enemy of fear, divisiveness, polarization, and hatred is empathy. Being able to see things from another’s frame of mind, to feel how they feel—that is empathy, and it’s what changes a dehumanized object from your out-groups into a human in your in-group.
AI needs to be helping us humans to develop empathy.
Because empathy is hard: it’s expensive; it’s far easier when safety and security are plentiful; and it’s affordable only to those with sufficient means.
We’re not talking just about sympathy. Sympathy is when you react to someone’s feelings and thoughts from your own perspective—for example, showing pity or offering soothing words or mannerisms. Empathy, in contrast, is when you share someone’s feelings and thoughts from their perspective.
Nor are we talking about knee-jerk unconscious reflexive affective empathy, like when you feel sad when someone cries. Or when you wince if you see someone trip and fall. Or when your heart swells up watching a sweet kid being happy to receive an award. (This kind of emotional empathy has been theorized to be related to what’s called mirror neurons.)
Rather, we’re talking about conscious cognitive empathy, where you truly take yourself out of your own in-group’s tribal mindset and instead put yourself in the head and heartspace of a culturally different out-group, of another tribe.
Conscious empathy requires carrying a heavy cognitive load, heavier than those who are struggling to feed themselves and their families can typically afford to do take on.
But just as with other cognitively expensive and difficult tasks—like the maps and contact books on my phone—AI can help us.
We can no longer afford the “us and them” mindset. “From me to we” is a cliché we need to take much more seriously. We need AI to help us to make the cognitively challenging shift toward empathy so that it becomes far more broadly accessible.
Human culture is heavily based on linguistic constructs: language shapes how we frame ideas, aspirations, concerns in ways that invoke either fear or trust or joy or anticipation or some other response and promote mindsets such as “abundance versus scarcity.”
My research pioneered global-scale online language translators, which spawned AIs such as Google and Microsoft and Yahoo Translate. But today our research program has been making an even more ambitious paradigm shift to advance from just language translation to cultural translation because in the AI era it is crucial that we develop AI to help humans with the cognitively difficult task of better understanding and relating to how out-group others frame things.
We need AI to be democratizing empathy rather than WMDs. We must stop AI-powered fearmongering from driving our civilizations headlong into mutually assured destruction. Even if all our many cultures don’t agree on everything, we need AI to help us with listening to each other, suspending our fear.
And we all need to be a part of this cultural shift. It takes a village.
Kai, De. Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future (pp. xiii-xv). (Function). Kindle Edition.
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| Douro River, Portugal, June 26th |
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| Guadalupe River, Texas, July 4th |
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| We flew into Lisbon. Two days later we bussed up to Porto, stopping to tour historical Coimbra. |
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| Downtown Lisbon |
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| Coimbra |
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| The Douro River. Going upriver toward Spain we traversed 5 locks, elevating to more than 500 feet above sea level. |
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| The Mateus Palace |
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| Coimbra |
