Posted on

Always headed here

With a president suffering from main character syndrome coupled with a steadily deteriorating mental state,  so much ‘seems’ to be going on that keeping up with it in whole much less in part can itself feel maddening.

Two days ago, he gives a televised exposition of just how adrift he is, boxed in by an ill-considered military fiasco and hand-picked, grossly incompetent and corrupt underlings. Ardent, patriotic citizens try to keep up but mostly what’s on offer is the unwillingness to describe a massive, practically unimaginable strategic defeat.

In pondering what are we still wondering about, some well-framed context about some things we already know clicks a light bulb in a closet blocked behind an old armoire. It’s not reassuring but it is forward, and perhaps desperately needed correction against meaningless reassurances:

For more than a century, the political and moral imagination in much of the Persian ecumene was shaped by an urgent quest for alternatives to the pitilessly exploitative regimes of capitalist imperialism. For Gandhi, a historical experience that began in the late nineteenth century in South Africa made him see fascism and imperialism as inevitable features of capitalist states overdependent on violence—disguised and softened at home, extreme and explicit abroad. It was the fate of a later observer like Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, the twentieth-century novelist and essayist, to endure, while still analyzing, the insidiousness of neoimperialism: economic modernization under Western auspices that condemned postcolonial states to perpetual underdevelopment.

Given the religion-capitalism pairing that has defined the very essence of the American experiment since its inception (ask any Republican candidate for any office), it’s fair to ask whether we’ve always been headed here. Not karmically, though there is that; but just as a natural effect of the causes as they have hatched. Every other country and alliance has already figured out that dependence on the US is toxic to their national interests, while we try to make sense of the nonsensical. It feels sped-up, fast-forwarded, still a bit out front of our ability to conceive, believe. He is referred to as the American id. Maybe that’s it and this is all of the accumulated skullduggery, laid bare.

But I did learn a new word.

Posted on

Of straits and traps

A mental ill patient in a straight jacket and strapped into a chair. Photograph after a wood engraving by E. Tritschler, 1908.

What if war isn’t viable? And rather than being merely hopeful or any nod to a peacenik Shangri-La at last, what would remain in the balance – TBD comme on dit – is somehow assuring that the entire globe doesn’t become a failed state. That we don’t default to a Hobbesian existence on a planetary scale – yes, very much including our bumblionaires who have so sagely guided marked the territory to this place. But as [this] war increasingly results in an escalation trap, can we must become dissuaded of ts benefits:

Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’ – not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran – but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily left or reversed.

The trap, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz and the broader Persian Gulf. The issue is that an enormous proportion of the world’s shipping, particularly energy (oil, liquid natural gas) and fertilizer components (urea) passes through this body of water. The Gulf is narrow along its whole length, extremely narrow in the Strait and bordered by Iran on its northern shore along its entire length. Iran can thus threaten the whole thing and can do so with cheap, easy to conceal, easy to manufacture systems.

…

So once the strait was closed, the United States could not leave until it was reopened, or at least there was some prospect of doing so.

The result is a fairly classic escalation trap: once the conflict starts, it is extremely costlyfor either side to ever back down, which ensures that the conflict continues long past it being in the interests of either party. Every day this war goes on make both the United States and Iran weaker, poorer and less secure but it is very hard for either side to back down because there are huge costs connected to being the party that backs down. So both sides ‘escalate to de-escalate’ (this phrase is generally as foolish as it sounds), intensifying the conflict in an effort to hit hard enough to force the other guy to blink first. But since neither party can back down unilaterally and survive politically, there’s practically no amount of pain that can force them to do so.

I’ve mentioned multiple times how the brakes on the carbon-based economy have been located – No! Not that way! – and the screeching we hear is actually the metal backing plate contacting the metal rotor, recommending immediate inspection and repair.

A dumb, so very dumb war presents this metaphor for appraisal.

Image via Wellcome Collection..

Posted on

Preventive Incantation

It doesn’t matter how one feels* about AI as a technological problem. It is much more of a financial problem, a threat similar to others that preceded it but special in its own special way. Purveyors already know the limits of the technology but dangle the potential profits as unlimited.

Because all the convenient confusion can be difficult to parse, a cultural interpretation of the crisis requires urgent attention. And thanks to Short Attention Span Theater – the single, unwavering truism threading society together – it needs to be brief and concise. Enter The Great Crash, 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith into evidence:

…there is deep faith in the power of incantation. When the market fell many Wall Street citizens immediately sensed the real danger, which was that income and employment – prosperity in general – would be adversely affected. This had to be prevented. Preventive incantation required that as many important people as possible repeat as firmly as they could that it wouldn’t happen.  This they did. They explained how the stock market was merely the froth and that the real substance of economic life rested in production , employment, and spending, all of which would remain unaffected. No one knew for sure this was so. As an instrument of economic policy, incantation does not permit of minor doubts or scruples.

To the mighty extent that AI hype runs riot, our savvy age turns the power of incantation into cynicism verging on a new art form. Machine learning is so deeply ingrained into every sector that it simply must work and cannot fail, to coin a phrase. It must be powerful if important people are warning that it might take over.

Meanwhile, circularity: Tech giants investing in each other’s AI products and projects, driving valuation and demand for power, water, chips, and data centers, and inflating the perception of market consensus. We love the miasma of mortgage-backed securities in the morning.

Circularity > singularity.

Image: Screenshot from Bloomberg March 20, 2026

Posted on

War o’clock

reverse osmosis. Desalination. The pressure water molecules seep through the semi-permeable membrane.

Stumbled is the word you’re looking for.

Don’t be shy about calling the administration incompetent, early and often. In point of barely disputed facts, calling them inept is being generous. Again, I remain in awe of just how much Trump is determined to cut carbon emissions. Inspiring if it wasn’t so deadly stupid. Rather than an entertainment show, government is boring and highly complex. Hire accordingly.

Meanwhile and on the subject of incompetence, massive industrial build out coupled with an extended drought has ‘leaders’ on the Texas coast hoping for a hurricane:

The imminent depletion of water supplies in Corpus Christi threatens to cut off the flow of jet fuel to Texas airports and other oil exports from one of the nation’s largest petroleum ports, triggering potential shockwaves through energy markets in Texas and beyond.

Without significant rainfall, Corpus Christi is headed for a “water emergency” within months and total depletion of the system next year, according to the city’s website. “The impacts are going to be felt tremendously through the state, if not internationally,” said Sean Strawbridge, former CEO of the Port of Corpus Christi Authority, the nation’s top port for crude oil exports, in a 40-minute interview Thursday. “This should be no surprise to anybody. We were talking about this over a decade ago.”

If using municipal water supplies for refineries and industry sounds familiar, it should. Take note, data and detention center targets. Everyone will get pulled is already engaged in these conflicts, some may not realize it yet. We definitely need more Texas Tribunes. What happened to newspapers, anyway?

Image: diagram for how desalination process. Not pictured – waste produced.

Posted on

Artificial Everything

[Too] many conversations about encroaching technology and artificial everything – we should just call it that, as we have no real definition for intelligence, much less understand what it means – compel further examination. Let’s go in.

First off, let’s acknowledge a basic premise.

We’re edging along a process of abdicating our personal sovereignty by our own choosing. I can’t tell you not to install a front door camera and spy on your neighbors or not to let slopGPT be your therapist. But let’s at least acknowledge how much we submit to all of this voluntarily. It’s not the illusion of choice, but still actual choices that we make continually. All the while creeps a sort of helplessness about what is being done to us. It is imperative to maintain our wits at such a time – such as a time as may come, such a time as now.

It is necessary to demonstrate how modern imagination is captured – and defended. Among the multitude of familiar arguments on which to draw, public and private liberties, civic duty and overwhelming loss of self esteem among our fellow citizens compel a checklist on the rescue mission should one be required.

There is extraordinarily powerful hype and propaganda supporting the inevitability of artificial everything. The laziness of corporate media has made this so much easier; excellent at completing PR circles, not so very good or interested in explaining things, rewarded for the combination with diminished honor and loss of prestige. Though a quite visible slight of hand, effort to acknowledge this process reminds us that we remain far from powerless. The sheer vastness of all we’re not thinking about and discussing enough also require some work on our part, to investigate, to understand, but first just to care about. When we get to the place where this work is not optional – and hey, we like work. It’s one our fears about AE, that it will take work away from us –  we’ll be well on our way to better places. If you’re already there, congratulations. You’ve got plenty of work to do.

Image: Author photo of work on a wall.

Posted on

The moral element

There are so many issues on which people can be or become confused about whether their choice stance is political, economic, or moral. The problem with the third in this sequence is that it makes the choice/stance much clearer on the first two than may be desirable or convenient.

Further, confusion about the rights of others that allows for a seeming choice where none exists creates space for degeneracy – bigotry, victimization, persecution, false equivalence – which turn into their own rationales for unfortunately familiar behavior. It’s sadly too easy to see why attacks on vulnerable people are wrong, so the convolution helps cover otherwise indefensible actions and positions, from anti-trans attacks all the way up to capitalism itself.

The fear that capitalism would be so much less forceful and thus successful with limits on its rapacious character is so embedded as to be dogma. It must always be fully unleashed to exist at all. We equate force with success, which inures to all the resulting destruction. Collateral damage hardly makes a dent as a concept anymore and it remains unclear whether that manifests from the inability to see outside of one’s own interests or the casual acceptance of casualties, whatever their nature. Either way, it’s quite the evolution. We have yet to grapple with the actual consequences of zero-sum, much less the reality that ‘externalities’ get less and less external the further on with this we go.

The concept of ‘easy solutions’ feeds misdirection from guardians of the status quo, no matter their futurist garb. Positive-sum deflates fascism and environmental catastrophe with great collaboration and distribution, and its tools sit idle, though ready. One of the new tricks taught by every old dog is that opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.

One need not be a philosopher or a socialist to recognize the moral character of our actions. No special training or knowledge is required, only courage.

Image: Symbol for the chemical element Beryllium; elements are amoral but Be is a divalent element that occurs naturally only in combination with other elements to form minerals. Just sayin’.

Posted on

On Popularism

The political strategy characterized by advising politicians, particularly Democrats, to prioritize policies with majority support supported by Wall Street while avoiding divisive, ideologically extreme, or unpopular issues, popularism consists of poll-driven, focused-grouped balderdash designed to resonate with existing public sentiment. While following polls is a bad approach, lefty or progressive stances that poll strongly are often not considered at all. Popularism is pseudo-analysis that elides clear public support for things like funding childcare and protecting immigrant communities, aka communities.
What are some leading issues? Are they popular? It’s an election year – let’s advise our candidates.
Over the past year, the White House has courted tech billionaires and gone out of its way to protect the AI industry’s agenda, fast-tracking permits for data centre construction and approving the sales of advanced chips to China while cracking down on states’ attempts to regulate chatbots … But across the US, citizens, clergy and elected officials in conservative communities are leading a grassroots rebellion against the rapid rollout of the technology.
Conclusion: not popular

And it was all too easy to be pessimistic about the prospects both for cooperation and for persuading voters to accept even modest future-oriented sacrifices.

Then came the renewable energy revolution. Solar and wind power have become cost-competitive with fossil fuels — they are, in particular, clearly cheaper than coal. Huge progress in batteries has rapidly reduced the problem of intermittency (the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow.) There’s now a clear path for a transition to an “electrotech” economy in which renewable-generated electricity heats our homes, powers our cars, and much more.

Conclusion: very pop– wait. It seems that the Trump administration has decided to block/rollback this transition that would benefit the planet, ensuring that the US will be left behind in global competition. Oh well.

ICE detention centers:

Communities across the country have been shocked to learn that DHS wants to use warehouses in their towns for detention space amid the ongoing immigration crackdown.

Conclusion: as popular as the plague. And speaking of…

The bipartisan American investment, which the Trump administration led, was absolutely key to containing a horrific global pandemic which could have been exponentially worse without the stunning accelerated development of mRNA vaccines — one of the great public health triumphs in modern history. But this miracle cure was only the beginning. The massive investment in mRNA opened doors to numerous other medical advances…

These mRNA advances would obviously benefit people in the United States, who would be much less likely to die of cancer, flu, pandemics, and a range of other illnesses.

Conclusion: popular, live-saving, beneficial across borders and populations. Unfortunately, also vulnerable to disinformation by cranks and malefactors willing to lie to enrich themselves and endanger others.

So even among this small variety of issues, clear policy preferences can be sorted. Public opinion has a role to play, and it’s especially important in the face of corporate media with thumbs on the scale, keeping unpopular issues and policies in a kind of eternal toggle state where the jury is still out. These should not be avoided. Look for candidates who run toward your preferences. Some might even already be there.

Posted on

Fascination with numbers

It’s no stretch to suggest that quantifying life as we know it not in terms of quality but economic growth leaves everyone a bit empty, a bit lesser for the experience, such as it is.

Numbers are fine, can be fun, even. Inspiring. Take Clairaut’s Theorem, as just one example. Among the heights of the Enlightenment – there were several – the eighteenth-century French mathematicians/philosophers Alexis Clairaut and Pierre Louis Maupertuis led an expedition to Lapland in the Arctic Circle (in the 1730’s) in order to measure a single degree of the median arc. The goal was to calculate the shape of the Earth, and validate whether Newton was correct in his Principia where he theorized it was an ellipsoid shape.

In disagreeing with Newton’s theory, Clairaut suggested not only that the Earth is of an oblate ellipsoid shape, but it is flattened more at the poles and is wider at the center. You can imagine the controversial this unleashed among scholars of the day, and Clairaut leaned in, full tilt. He courted the fight and published work in the 1740’s that promoted Clairaut’s Theorem, which connects the gravity at points on the surface of a rotating ellipsoid with the compression and the centrifugal force at the equator.

Under the assumption that the Earth was composed of concentric ellipsoidal shells of uniform density, Clairaut’s theorem could be applied to it, and allowed the ellipticity of the Earth to be calculated from surface measurements of gravity. This proved Sir Isaac Newton’s theory that the shape of the Earth was an oblate ellipsoid. In 1849 George Stokes showed that Clairaut’s result was true whatever the interior constitution or density of the Earth, provided the surface was a spheroid of equilibrium of small ellipticity. [wikipedia]

Provides interesting context to our jokey notion about “views differ on the shape of the Earth.” There’s an amazing book about all of this and more that centers on Madame Du Châtelet, erstwhile mistress of Voltaire who translated Newton’s Principia.

Fascination may be in the eye of the beholder. However, a focus on economic growth beyond the point where it may be healthy, productive, even possible, disassociates us from even the power of numbers themselves. Growth becomes its own ends and we, captive to the destruction its portends, stand idly by and make nervous jokes about issues long settled, amidst our intellectual withering and spiritual decay.

Image: [shiny)Detail of a painting by Lou Kregel.

Posted on

Kicking over the tipping point

Dignity, restraint and action in a time of constitutional crisis. It’s amazing but, like the Steven Wright  joke where he realizes someone has been following him from in front, the Republican Party is re-enforcing community by galvanizing communities against it. And that for which it stands:

Within hours of taking office on Jan. 17, Spanberger signed an executive order that rescinded Youngkin’s order mandating that state agencies contract with ICE, but that alone left the agreements intact. She went a step further this week by actually pulling the plug and ordering four state agencies, including the state police and the Department of Corrections, to end their 287(g) agreements, terminating their role as force multipliers for federal immigration authorities.

“Virginians deserve to have their state and local law enforcement resources devoted to the safety and security of their communities, not federal civil immigration enforcement,” the governor said in her order. These agreements “improperly cede accountability and discretion over Virginia law enforcement to the federal government.”

That’s the result of people pressure. Forces of civil democracy aka you, me, and all of us. One neat trick to turn many disinterested and distracted people into pissed off voters. I have always detested irony but I’m willing to let this one slip.

Governors and lieutenants, secretaries of state, state attorneys general have always been important statewide races. Now they are critical. Let’s elect good ones. Find one, be one.

Posted on

About once in every 20 years

The inimitable John Doe, and Exene.

Will revisit this but as a history nerd lad I was rather affected by John Locke and the whole right to revolution thing:

the common Question will be made, Who shall be Judge whether the Prince or Legislative act contrary to their Trust? This, perhaps, ill affected and factious Men may spread amongst the People, when the Prince only makes use of his due Prerogative. To this I reply, The People shall be Judge; for who shall be Judge whether his Trustee or Deputy acts well, and according to the Trust reposed in him, but he who deputes him, and must, by having deputed him have still a Power to discard him, when he fails in his Trust? If this be reasonable in particular Cases of private Men, why should it be otherwise in that of the greatest moment; where the Welfare of Millions is concerned, and also where the evil, if not prevented, is greater, and the Redress very difficult, dear, and dangerous?