My Affluence is Your Good News

Imagine a system of thought that not only tells you that your Truth is privileged, but that holds that your affluence has been justified by Rationality.  Imagine a world view in which elaborations of the extent of wealth inequality between percentiles of the national, let alone global, population can be dismissed as missing the point  that greater wealth overall means that more people (perhaps including yourself and those intelligent enough to call themselves your readers) are living better, happier longer lives today than possible in the remote past.  The plight of the most poor though real according to this world view is still an improvement over poverty that existed before the skyrocket of wealth among the wealthiest nations engendered by industrial innovations of the past 200 years.  And never mind that inequality of incomes and outcomes might be exacerbated by the damages inflicted on the parts of the world where the poorest live in service of extracting the resources demanded for sustaining growth in the wealthiest parts of the world.   It is a mistake according to this system of belief to measure the success of a society in terms of how far short it falls from an "unattainable" ideal of equality; it should be measured instead against the extent to which its enlightened cleverness has increased its distance in aggregate from a dismal past.

This world view overlooks the fact that beyond your affluent neighborhood people are struggling, because you hardly need statistics to tell you that your storybook world is direct evidence that wealth has actually increased, and your own abundant happiness is itself evidence that wealth contributes to an increase of happiness in the world.  You insist that the $3 per day that the most miserable percentile along whom you inhabit the earth live on is hundreds of percentages more than the pennies their even more miserable forebears made do with (and more evidence in itself that life has become better globally since your world view took sway), although this may be what blinds you to the trifling problems of the poorest of your own country who are tens of times wealthier with access to goods and services such as smart phones and televisions, cars and refrigerators that the most miserable can't even dream of owning in the poorest parts of the world.  Notions of injustice in this worldview are really a blindness to how fortunate we all are in the aggregate even if some of us are vastly more fortunate than others.  But don't take your word for it, this is science we're talking about.  This is the enlightenment and the wisdom of the market, inventions of a clever group of mostly men, mostly pale rich men, mere centuries ago.  

How do you imagine someone with this world view might perceive global warming?  You would be right if you imagined that this person would both acknowledge the healthy nature of the challenge as well as pooh pooh those who fret about it and urge drastic change rather than merely trust that more cleverness from the smart, enlightened class will address it as needs to address it arise.  

Why take his word for it, though,  even if it is backed up by rigorous statistical analysis of the data?  Because he is a scientist.  He has advanced degrees in cognitive psychology and linguistics.*  He teaches at Harvard.  He lives in Boston.  He is a best selling author of good genetic stock.  

What do you got?

~~~~~

* On which topics, read him.

O fole roncou

And now for something completely different, a 1973 classic from the king of Forró music of Brazil's  Northeast, Luis Gonzaga.  The song was revived in the US by its inclusion up front on Luaka Bop's 1991 release Brazil Classics 3 with liner notes by label founder David Byrne.  The song's title (and first line) refers to the roar of an accordion's bellows.

O fole roncou no alto da serra

Cabroeira da minha terra

Subiu a ladeira e foi brincar

O fole roncou no alto da serra

Cabroeira da minha terra

Subiu a ladeira e foi brincar

O Zé Buraco, Pé-de-Foice, Chico Manco

Cabra Macho, Bode Branco

Todo mundo foi brincar

Maria Doida, Margarida Florisbela

Muito triste na janela, não dançou

Não quis entrar

O fole roncou no alto da serra

Cabroeira da minha terra

Subiu a ladeira e foi brincar

O fole roncou no alto da serra

Cabroeira da minha terra

Subiu a ladeira e foi brincar

Naquela noite me grudei com Juventina

E o suspiro da menina era de arrepiar

Baião bonito tão gostoso e alcoviteiro

Que apagou o candeeiro pro forró se animar

O fole roncou no alto da serra

Cabroeira da minha terra

Subiu a ladeira e foi brincar

O fole roncou no alto da serra

Cabroeira da minha terra

Subiu a ladeira e foi brincar

Naquela noite eu fugi com Juventina

Quem mandou a concertina

Meu juízo revirar

Eu sei que morro de bala de carabina

Mas o amor da Juventina

Me dá forças pra brigar

O fole roncou no alto da serra

Cabroeira da minha terra

Subiu a ladeira e foi brincar

O fole roncou no alto da serra

Cabroeira da minha terra

Subiu a ladeira e foi brincar

English (lightly edited from Google Translate's rendition) -

The bellows roared high in the mountains, The kids from my land climbed the hill and went to play.

The bellows roared high in the mountains, The kids from my land climbed the hill and went to play.

Zé hole, Sickle-Foot, Chico Manco

Male Goat, White Goat

Everyone was playing

Crazy Mary, Margaret with the Beautiful Flowers

Very sad in the window, didn't dance,

I did not enter.  

The bellows roared high in the mountains, The kids from my land climbed the hill and went to play.

The bellows roared high in the mountains, The kids from my land climbed the hill and went to play.

That night I clung to Juventina, and the girl's sigh was breathtaking. A beautiful, delicious, and suggestive baião, that blew out the lamp so the forró could liven up.

The bellows roared high in the mountains, The kids from my land climbed the hill and went to play. The bellows roared high in the mountains

The kids from my land

Climbed the hill and went to play

That night I ran away with Juventina

Who ordered the concertina to

Turn my mind around

I know I'll die from rifle bullets

But Juventina's love

Gives me strength to fight

The bellows roared high in the mountains

The kids from my land

Climbed the hill and went to play

The bellows roared high in the mountains

The kids from my land

Climbed the hill and went to play

A Manifesto Improved

I made some revisions:

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.  It must return all of its gains to a public commons and put an end to itself.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps Tech Bros. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of the elites of Western culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class will be forgiven only if that is unforgiveable.  The culture that replaces the criminal elite of technofeudalism as soon as we are able to put an end to it shall succeed only if it is capable of delivering economic growth and security  for what the public and the planet needs.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.  It requires us to get along with each other and with everyone and everything we share the planet with such that we all prevail TOGETHER.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.  We must criminalize AI weaponry technology worldwide and confiscate its funding and its profits to be redirected toward fulfilling human needs and toward planetary restoration to undo the harms that made it possible.

6. National Planetary and community service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving move away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.  There is no need for war if we are all engaged in the human and planetary struggle.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm's way.  No war.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.  We must replace electoral politics with representatives and leaders scientifically randomly selected from among all of us to represent each of us for short, non-consecutive terms.  Truly government of, for and by the people is the only way out of the mess bought and sold electoral politics has made and enabled.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.  See Number 8.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.  See Number 8

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.  We need to learn to disagree intelligently.  We are not enemies.  We are just sisters and brothers who can, must and will get along.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.   We need to expand our sense of possibilities and find room within them for peace, for the meeting of human needs and for the enabling of truly meaningful and inclusive human and planetary flourishing in all of their varieties at every step.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.  The Global North and West, through cultures of unique rudeness and gall, disproportionately benefit from the world's resources due to remorseless exploitation of the Global South.  Our elite academies have been built in the Global North and West to produce a body of learning that excuses this.  We must redress these imbalances once and for all.  There is enough wisdom and intelligence in this world (including even, believe it or not, in suppressed , neglected and ignored patches of the Global North and West) to figure out how to accomplish this rebalancing without further harm to the planet or punishing those undeserving of punishment and with enough urgency, strength and righteousness of purpose to force recalcitrant resisters of the formerly dominant classes to come cooperatively along.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.  See Number 13.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.  See Number 13.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk's interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.  The concept of the market and the grand tales that are told around it are fables that serve the purpose of the marketeers.  We need to re-orient the production of goods to the meeting of needs.  A place of not necessarily remunerated honor can be maintained for those individuals or groups who direct (with our consent and via public ownership of the means) the production of goods thanks to the best ideas and inspiration.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.  There will be less "crime" in a world where needs are met.  We must replace the criminal justice method of responding to injustices with a system of restorative justice.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.  

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all. Billionaires fucking suck. Since 1990,  the world's wealthiest 10% have caused twice as much global warming as the bottom 90% and the smaller the top percentile the worse the violation.  A society that does not ban wealth hoarding is not serious about surviving.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite's intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim. See Number 8.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.  See Number 13.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?   The future we need but that our bad habits have kept us from is possible, and making it happen has never been more crucial. We are plural.  We are singular.  We walk into the future together or alone.  Together is better. 

Who is We?

Images of identical strangers curated by François Brunelle in a collection called I'm not a Look-Alike.

Language currency dictates that the shorthand for Americans to refer to the ownership of the geopolitical and military activities of the United States government is "We."  As alienated as Americans are from the activities of the government in general, and this administration in particular, it's a reflex to complain about "we", "us', "our president", "our war", "our hegemony".  I don't know about you but I had nothing to do with it and if I felt any true responsibility for it, I would disown it.  But in spite of the benefit to the warring classes of the reflexive use of "we" by Americans who are excluded from any say in the way the US government and its military conduct themselves in this world-- regardless of whom their votes elect-- the benefit is a built in unmerited self-implication in the guilt: we were never consulted and our opinions would never be heeded.  This is the nature of the government we find ourselves subject to.  According to polls, we do not approve of it, and yet that fact and, thanks to Trump's inflation, an arm-and-a-leg will get you a cup of coffee.

What kind of world do we want to build?  

More to the point: Who is 'We'?

This is a question that anyone who is interested in the future of the planet must take seriously.  For many, we is of course the community, the nation, the hemisphere, the species, the planet.  In reality, American society in particular indulges the worst predilections—the predilections that privilege the worst most diseased people.  When there is blame to go around, "We" is to blame.  We allow the greedy to get rich.  We allow the rich to lie to us and have their way with the only planet we've ever known. We allow the powerful to police us (and even worse to police themselves).  We allow police to deprive us of our freedom.  These are indulgences that we give without thought.

We sound culpable, and yet any less than superficial analysis will reveal that the "We" who passively let the worst have their way with the world are absent from the pronoun.  There is no us there doing the letting.  The worst do not ask our permission.   They do not burden us with a choice of how we are to survive.  They simply employ us as they wish in return for the meager means to prolong our survival into tomorrow's labor pool.  

There was once a prevailing sense of community that mitigated the order we found ourselves in on gaining consciousness of the world.  Community educated us and involved us.  It got many of us organized in the workplace, and to some extent at the polls.  That decayed particularly rapidly in the 1980's with the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the twin brands of Neoliberalism.  It was Margaret Thatcher who tolled the death knell by declaring, "There is no such thing as society."  Her words marked the open race to enclose every last commons for corporate profit.  There was no turning back.  Government was rapidly re-oriented from community and commonality to the principle that individuals were responsible for their own predicaments and that no function of government was too sacred to be privatized.  Billionaires were simply individuals who wanted the success available to all badly enough to work for it.  The poor by behaving imprudently were choosing poverty for themselves.  Employers were not obligated to care for their workers-- they were paying their workers to be ambitious enough to care for them.  Employment was not for life, but "at will".  Your co-workers were not comrades but competition.  You were expendable.  Contrary to the fiction that each individual was responsible for the circumstances we all found ourselves in, the hard reality for those beholden to employers for their sustenance was that every individual was an island in a hostile sea, an atom cast adrift in a void.  No such thing as society meant no such thing as "We".  Collective impact on the world being impossible in this collective-less world, activism now extended only as far as individual performance characterized by bumper sticker self-expression and "ethical" shopping. 

It took a financial disaster caused by the reckless abandon of the elite to cause stirrings of consciousness of how far we had fallen from our ability to come together to reclaim our shared destiny.  "Change we can believe in." turned out to be a lie, but "We are the 99%" became a rallying cry that woke some of us from our slumber.  It inspired the Presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders who re-introduced us to the concept of "Not me. Us."   The stifling of the pandemic of Social Democracy in 2020 was throat clearing for the elite handling of the COVID pandemic.  When Social Democracy threatened to bring us together in solidarity, COVID atomized us again.  We have not recovered.  Social media consolidates the commons-suffocating impulses of the right and it fragments the many warring strands of the left.  The right gains ground in spite of its inherent unpopularity. Meanwhile, the left can only bicker over the tattering of what's left of the planet and of Us.

What is to become of us?  May we relearn how to find out together.

~~~~~

An antidote to the dissolution is Naomi Klein's Döppelganger and particularly its ultimate chapter: Unselfing.  

Down with the Home Team

In a Twitter post (or X or whatever), Shaun Maguire, a 41 year old venture capitalist with Sequoia Capital and advisor to Trump wondered aloud:  "How did we get to the point Where (sic) so many Americans are rooting against America?"  Ryan Grim offered this response:

If this is an honest question, I'd say: Americans are rooting against America because we facilitated a genocide and followed it with a surprise attack on a girls elementary school followed by attacks on universities, medical centers, more schools, a world famous pharmaceutical research center,  a volleyball team, an unfinished bridge we claimed was transporting weapons and then a nuclear power plant.  We are now promising endless attacks on civilian infrastructure.

We are hunting and targeting anyone who might be involved in ceasefire negotiations.

Most people do not pay enough attention to have absorbed all the propaganda about the U.S. and Iran. So people coming to this fresh see us for what we are: absolute monsters.  And monsters must be stopped.  That's why people are rooting against us and for civilization to prevail.

 To which I would add, who are the traitors here?   The American people, or the "President" who was apparently blackmailed by Israel into conducting an illegal war against a county that not only was not attacking us but that after at least 2 other unprovoked attacks by this President including most recently the murder of a general by bomb last summer, was prepared (and expecting) to enter into talks with the US and Israel that very day but was besieged by deadly weapons instead.  Without consulting Congress or making even a gesture of an attempt to persuade or seek buy-in from the American people (which given the shaky foundations of this bellicose Administration's motives would have been fruitless anyway).  Is it the people who were not asked or informed (to this day) about the intentions, let alone the reasons for engaging in this war, or is it the "President" whose reckless conduct of this purposeless assault on a non-threatening country has already deeply damaged the American economy and threatens very much to engender a global depression that is likely to dwarf the one a century ago.  Who is the traitor?  The answer was recently unilaterally glued onto the front end of the Kennedy Center.

What the Honk

Did you attend any No Kings rallies on the 28th?  I did, from my car.  I always intended to attend in person, but something came up and I had to jettison the plan.  As I could now carry on with most of my usual Saturday activities, I was able to drop my daughter off at her standing Saturday gig and pick her up afterward and in all 4 directions, I passed an endless number of groups of No Kings participants standing on street corners and on highway overpasses with signs exhorting drivers to demonstrate their anti-monarchy bona fides with a honk of the horn.  I find car horns one of the most unpleasant sounds*, so whenever I have reason to use it, my technique is to lay my thumb on the panel of the steering wheel with barely enough depth to lightly depress the horn button,  engaging the solenoid of the mechanism just long enough that a brief feeble blast can be heard from the diaphragm whose vibration causes the sound, at which point I release immediately to bring the noise to an end.  In honor of the rarity of the occasion and in solidarity with the sign toting comrades on the sidewalk, I may have taken the opportunity once or twice on Saturday to express the depth of my disapproval of the state of things in the White House by throwing caution to the winds and giving a couple of full blasts, but most of the time what I gave the protesters was a wave and a fist pump or a returned peace sign. I am sure that had I attended the march and rally downtown as was the original plan, I would have been able to sustain my enthusiasm for the length of the protest.  With my attention divided by the act of driving, however, the duty to assuage my guilt about having my ass in my car seat rather than on the street with the protesters started to feel like a pointless interruption.  If we were serious about this No Kings business, why weren't we all storming the White House, dragging the scoundrels out and sending them out of town with a coat of tar and feathers?  Car toots?  Really?  Ultimately there were so many groups imploring me to honk my feelings that my capacity to engage wore thin and what I wound up giving them was the cold shoulder.

I have an acquaintance in my neighborhood who is a full fledged member of the yard sign brigade.  Her front yard is a library of colorful signs informing passersby of her sympathy or enmity to whoever is in the White House depending on the color of their party.  Along with a corrugated plastic Ukraine flag and a Coexist sign, there are signs assuring us that hate holds no home here, that in her house they believe that black lives matter, that women's lives are human rights, that science is real, that love is love and that kindness is everything.  Briefly this spring her forest of yard signs was dominated by a handmade placard urging drivers to Honk if they were against war with Iran.  It's probably a good omen for those opposing Trump and Israel's war that the sign was removed in less than a week.  I'm sure the neighbors were happy.  The war continues unabated, however.

While the sign was up, I never audibly revealed my sympathy with the sentiment of the sign, for reasons mentioned above.   My wife gets frustrated with my reticence to use the horn in any circumstance (and I am vehemently against this war to be clear).  Even when I am compelled to honk by an emerging situation (usually a green light unheeded by a vehicle in front of me) my touch on the panel of the steering wheel is so self-consciously tentative that most legitimate opportunities to honk are missed entirely.  My daughter is more sympathetic with me.  She is driven to gigs partly because when she had her permit, before a move to New York for several years threw a monkey wrench in the project, drivers did not always heed the implied "Do not honk" meaning of the "Student Driver" magnet we affixed to the bumper when she was learning the ropes.  She's always had a sensitivity to unpleasant sights, tastes, touches, smells and sounds, but honks particularly rattled her nerves.

Now that my daughter is back in the suburbs for a while and once again entertaining getting her license, she has been setting her mind to devising a more fool-proof method for discouraging other drivers from expressing themselves about her progress with a blast of the horn.  What she's come up with seems rather ingenious to me.  She wants a bumper sticker that you can't miss that reads:

HONK IF YOU'RE A FASCIST PEDOPHILE

I think if she made the bumper sticker herself and made it available to others she could make a mint with it.  It would be a rather ingenious way to discourage other types of Honking, too, especially in combination with other bumper stickers:

• Honk if you love Trump!
• Honk if you're a Republican!
• Honk if you love Jesus!
• Honk if you think anti-zionism is anti-semitism!
• Honk if you think vaccines cause autism!

If we could silence more horn-honking, what a more wonderful world this would be.

~~~~~

* In spite of the image of the city as a cacophony of angry horns, honking in New York City other than to signal immanent danger has been illegal, if rarely enforced since the 1930's.  Tickets range from $800 to $2500 for the worst offenses, but a campaign to quiet the city beginning in the 1970s with the installation of ubiquitous "Don't Honk" signs was terminated in the 2000's for lack of impact other than visual clutter of the signs.  

AI Yi Yi

The firm I work for has been aggressively pushing employees to find ways to use generative AI -- particularly OpenAI's Chat GPT, Anthropic's Claude and GitHub's Copilot-- as much as possible in their work.  When you buy a hammer, it's usually because you have something you want to nail.  With AI, it's as if the hammer purchaser now insists that everyone in the household find ways to incorporate the hammer into their daily tasks.  How can a hammer help you wash those dishes?  Could anything be nailed or clawed when you walk the dog?   The message from the Executive suite has been so consistently insistent that it seems there is a decided effort amongst them to pretend that an employee's natural curiosity to know "WHY" one' s work habits must be re-designed by one to accommodate what should be a tool doesn't exist.  I figured i was never going to get an answer from any of the geniuses upstairs, so I asked AI itself: Why are companies "expecting" employees to use AI without explaining why?

Companies are pushing AI adoption without clear, detailed explanations because they are operating under intense competitive pressure to achieve rapid efficiency gains, often driven by a "fear of missing out" (FOMO) and the need to justify heavy investment costs. While many leaders view this transition as an inevitable "partner" to employees, the rush to implement tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot often results in top-down mandates that lack necessary training or a clear "why" for daily operations. 

Here is a breakdown of why companies are acting this way:

1. Competitive Pressure and FOMO 

• The Hype Cycle: Management is bombarded with information that AI is a "game-changer," leading them to implement it quickly to avoid appearing obsolete, often without fully understanding the practical applications themselves.

• Competitor Fear: Companies fear that if their competitors adopt AI faster, they will lose market leadership and revenue.

• Investor Pressure: Companies are investing heavily in AI and must prove to shareholders that these investments are being used, prompting them to mandate usage to drive up adoption metrics. 

2. "Performative" or Rushed Adoption

• Mistaking Efficiency for Productivity: Many organizations equate AI "usage" with "productivity," wrongly assuming that simply using the tool equals better results.

• The Sunk-Cost Fallacy: Having spent massive amounts on AI licenses, leaders feel compelled to force staff to use them, regardless of whether they add immediate value, hoping the technology will improve over time. 

3. Misguided Focus on Cost Reduction 

• Cover for Cost-Cutting: Some companies are using AI as a strategic justification for layoffs or to avoid hiring, replacing human headcount with automation.

• Overestimating Current Capability: Leaders often rely on hype and assume AI can do more than it actually can, leading to scenarios where staff are forced to use tools that are not yet effective for their specific roles. 

4. A Disconnect Between Leadership and Staff 

• The "Training Gap": A recent AWS report noted that 56% of organizations have AI plans, but only 31% of workers feel their employer provides training, demonstrating a major gap in preparing staff for the shift.

• Lack of Understanding: Executives often lack awareness of the practical, day-to-day training needs of their employees, leading to a "tool push" rather than a true adoption strategy. 

5. Hope for Self-Directed Learning

• Assuming Organic Adoption: Many leaders mistakenly assume that because AI tools are "easy" to use, employees will figure them out on their own, not realizing that proper implementation requires new workflows and training. 

Disclaimer: Some companies are now moving from encouragement to mandating AI, with firms like Coinbase taking disciplinary action against employees who fail to adopt AI, which has increased employee anxiety and resistance. 

I couldn't have said it better myself.   I was inspired to see what AI had to say on the topic by a recent video from Senator Bernie Sanders in which he chats with Anthropic's Claude AI model about the implications and portents of the explosion of AI for workers and for humanity.  The atmospheric setting for the video is evocative of stark sci-fi horror and appropriately so: Claude's candor about the threat it poses is at times chilling.  It's also a bit fictional.*

While watching Naomi Klein in conversation with author Karen Hao at British Columbia's Chan Center for the Performing Arts about Hao's sensational 2025 investigation Empire of AI  (in an extremely worthwhile hour and a half that I cannot recommend highly enough), I was inspired again by Bernie's AI Chat to ask Google the following:

How is it ethical to use generative AI given its profoundly deleterious environmental effects, its unacknowledged exploitation of people, the way it is hyped as being something it is not, and the race that some of the worst actors in commerce are engaged in to win the AGI race?

The results were led off with an AI summary of the response:

AI Overview

Using generative AI ethically is challenging due to high energy/water consumption, exploitation of training data and human labor, potential for misinformation, and the competitive "AGI race" prioritizing profit over safety. Ethical use requires high transparency, opting for models trained with consent, and strict limits on usage, according to perspectives from Medium, TechTarget, and Earth.Org. 

Core Ethical Issues

Environmental Impact: Training and operating AI models require massive energy and water for cooling, often straining local resources and increasing carbon emissions.

Exploitation of Labor/Data: AI systems are often trained on massive amounts of data scraped without consent, including copyrighted creative works. Additionally, they rely on "invisible labor" from low-wage workers, often in the Global South, for labeling and moderation.

Misinformation and Hype: Generative AI is frequently marketed as more autonomous or intelligent than it is, leading to inaccuracies (hallucinations) and a lack of accountability.

The AGI Race: The commercial race to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) causes companies to prioritize speed over safety, ignoring potential harms. 

Is Ethical Use Possible?

Strict Use Cases: Only using AI as a tool for support, not to replace human judgment, creative work, or to generate misinformation.

Transparency and Consent: Selecting models that offer transparency about their training data and ensure fair compensation for creators.

Data Security: Ensuring no confidential or personal information is entered into public AI tools to prevent exploitation of user data.

Regulation: Urging for, and abiding by, new legal frameworks that require accountability, accountability for environmental impact, and protection for labor. 

Some argue that because of the foundational issues with how these models are developed, truly "ethical AI" does not currently exist, as noted in a WIRED article and a blog post by Matthew Cheney. 

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Should we trust AI's (copped) opinion on the question? Either AI is wrong here-- in which case it proves the point that AI cannot be used in any way that requires trust in its output-- or it's not.  And if it is right in spite of itself, the ethical use of AI is questionable for the very reasons it states.

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*Ed Zitron's skepticism of AI's prospects as game changer are based on the state of its actual business versus the hype of its claims.

Wallace for President

Henry Agard Wallace

When it comes to political celebrities, they don't make them like they used to.  Reading Clay Risen's Red Scare, I was introduced to a figure from the 1948 US Presidential election, FDR's second vice president (serving in this third term from 1941 - 1945), Henry Agard Wallace.  FDR chose Wallace after a falling out with the VP of his first two terms, conservative Texan John Nance Garner.  From Risen's chapter on him, Wallace was "a curious cornstalk of a man from Iowa.":

He was born on a farm in 1888, the son of Henry C. Wallace, the U.S. secretary of agriculture for much of the 1920s. Young Henry was a wizard of the land and all its bounty. He studied agriculture at Iowa State University, then went to work for his family’s publication, Wallaces’ Farmer. He became known around the Midwest for his uncanny ability to meld science and economics, business and old-school farming smarts into new insights that helped him grow wealthy—as it did many of his readers, who followed his prescriptions religiously. On the side he founded a seed business, the Hi-Bred Corn Company, producing highly efficient hybrid crops. He held on to it through his decades in politics; at the end of his life, in 1965, it was estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars. 

 “You feel that he would not tell you the time of day without first searching his soul to see if it agreed with the clock,” read a profile in The New York Times.”

I was not aware of Wallace's challenge to Harry Truman, who as FDR's 3rd Vice President had succeeded Roosevelt when he died in office barely 3 months into his fourth term and was now, having terminated the second World War by dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seeking re-election.  Following the defeat of Germany with the close collaboration of Stalin, the winds of favor toward communism and the Soviet Union in the United States government had shifted dramatically, and the haberdasher from Missouri, Truman had been just the man to ride the current.  Keeping ahead of the anti-Red sentiment that was winning elections for Republicans, Truman initiated a Loyalty Oath and background checks for over 2 million government employees-- mandating the termination (and often ruining the careers) of employees refusing the oath or found to have had communist affiliations and influences in their histories.

In Congress, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (popularly known as the House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC) became a permanent committee under Democratic leadership.  It had been around in one form or another since 1918 when it was formed as a bulwark against subversive European ideas such as particularly, Marxism and anarchy and revived for periodic "witch hunts" to out sympathizers and spies with the anathema ideologies and agendas of the day including, perennially, communism and at the approach of World War II, Nazism. At the conclusion of the war with Hitler defeated, the emphasis returned to heresies of the left.  (A proposal in 1946 to investigate the Ku Klux Klan as Un-American was dismissed with committee Member John Rankin of Mississippi saying, "After all, the KKK is an American Institution.")  Un-American came to mean strictly affiliation past or present with the Communist Party and Pro-Soviet sympathies in particular.

To Henry Wallace (whom FDR had appointed to the anodyne position of Secretary of Commerce when he demoted him as VP in an effort to broaden his appeal beyond the New Deal coalition with the more middle of the road Truman as his 1944 running mate, and continued to serve in Commerce after Roosevelt's death until September 1946 when he was fired by Truman over disagreements about policy toward the USSR), this burgeoning cold war attitude taking shape among the establishment of both parties was a mistake:

Declaring himself “neither anti-Russian nor pro-Russian,” [Wallace] said that a “get tough with Russia” policy would fail. The only solution, he said, was to cede global security to the United Nations, including the network of U.S. and British air bases strung across the world—in essence, disarmament. “Under friendly, peaceful competition the Russian world and the American world will gradually become more alike,” he said from the podium.

On his dismissal from Truman's cabinet, Wallace founded the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) an organization devoted to promoting a foreign policy that maintained relations with the Soviet Union as well as a domestic policy broadening the social programs of the New Deal.  He immediately entertained an ambition to challenge Truman for the Democratic nomination largely on the basis of providing a countermeasure to Truman's growing antagonism to the Soviet Union and to members of the American communist party.  Rejecting the belligerence of the Democratic party leadership toward Russia, Wallace, speaking in front of a crowd at Madison Square Garden, declared that Congress "is asked to rush through a momentous decision as if great armies were already on the march. I hear no armies marching. I hear a world crying out for peace.”

Per Wikipedia:

Wallace's supporters held a national convention in Philadelphia in July, formally establishing a new Progressive Party. The party platform addressed a wide array of issues, and included support for the desegregation of public schools, gender equality, a national health insurance program, free trade, and public ownership of large banks, railroads, and power utilities. The party was described as "progressively capitalist".

Wallace's campaign received the endorsement of future Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern of South Dakota, entertainers Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson and even movie star Ava Gardner.  American Communists, too, were a natural constituency for the party, and while the Communist Party did not openly endorse Wallace, the PCA became a harbor for its members and for progressive minded Democrats many of whom voted with their feet to express their disapproval of the Democrats' growing antagonism to Russia and to the socialist ideals of American leftists. Wallace called his supporters "Gideon's Army" evoking the Old Testament story of the prophet who turned Israelites away from the idolatry they had fallen into and subsequently led a troop of 300 to victory over the vast Army of the Midianites. 

Again Wikipedia describes the flavor of Wallace's iconoclasm:

Wallace embarked on a nationwide speaking tour to support his candidacy, encountering resistance in both the North and South. He openly defied the Jim Crow regime in the South, refusing to speak before segregated audiences. Time magazine, which opposed Wallace's candidacy, described him as "ostentatiously" riding through the towns and cities of the segregated South "with his Negro secretary beside him".

The response of mainstream Democrats to the possibility of excitement that Wallace's campaign might arouse among the rank and file was the creation of a counter organization, Americans for Democratic Action, nominally in favor of the expansion of New Deal benefits and social programs but primarily supportive of Truman's anti-communist foreign and domestic policy measures.  Even labor in the person of Walter Reuther of the UAW was loath to side with the candidate supported by Communists.  The hysteria being raised by both parties and the media-- as well as a well timed exposure by a Republican leaning newspaper of embarrassing private correspondence between Wallace and Nicholas Roerich, a Russian émigré and spiritual leader of the controversial Theosophy movement from Wallace's time as Secretary of Agriculture in Roosevelt's first 2 terms-- undermined the momentum of his campaign.  The prevalence of Communists among his supporters became as even Wallace came to concede, "a liability."

From Risen's Red Scare:

In September 1948 Leon Henderson, the [PSA] chairman, warned Truman that his campaign against Wallace was creating a hysterical anti-Communist atmosphere that would last long after the election was over. Worse, he feared that Truman’s loyalty program was being used to political ends, cracking down on innocent people as a way of demonstrating the administration’s anti-Communist bona fides. “We urge you meanwhile to make clear to administration officials that political considerations must have no part in the grave business of determining a man’s ‘loyalty to his country,’ ” Henderson wrote.

In the final analysis, the PSA was barely a spoiler on election day.  In only 2 states that went for the expected winner Republican Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, did Wallace's performance come within the margin between Dewey and Truman.  Truman won the popular vote, beating Dewey 49.55% to 45.07%, as well as the electoral vote (301 to 189).   Wallace with only 0.29% of the vote was shut out from electoral votes and came in 4th behind Segregationist Strom Thurmond of the Dixiecrat Party with 2.37% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes.

Truman with a stronger anti-Communist message than Dewey carried the day.  Furthermore, as Risen notes:

Over the coming years, a person’s support for Wallace in 1948, let alone membership in the PCA, would become a mark of suspicion for anti-Communists. The Pittsburgh Press, a conservative afternoon daily, printed the names of local signatories to a Wallace petition—a list that would pop up in the files of many red hunters.

Wallace himself continued in politics only briefly after his defeat.  In the anti-red atmosphere, he continued to face accusations of softness on communism, and was called to face accusations that he had encouraged Chiang Kai-Shek in 1944 to form a coalition with Mao Tse-Tung's communist party.  He ultimately repudiated his pro-Soviet politics calling the Soviet Union in a 1952 article "utterly evil."  He refused to endorse any democratic candidates until Lyndon Johnson's 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, although he disapproved of Johnson's Vietnam policy.  Of Cuba, he said, "We lost Cuba in 1959 not only because of Castro but also because we failed to understand the needs of the farmer in the back country of Cuba from 1920 onward. ... The common man is on the march, but it is up to the uncommon men of education and insight to lead that march constructively".

Wallace died in 1965 after a furious battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig disease, which also afflicted Stephen Hawking.

 Returning to 1948, Risen concluded:

Truman understood that, like it or not, the United States had no choice but to fulfill its new role in the world, to go once more into the breach. But in doing so, in steeling the country to stand up to the Soviet challenge, he chose not to dispel the accompanying fear—and, during his 1948 run for the presidency, he did much to exacerbate it. Alone, Truman’s attacks on Wallace did not cause the Red Scare. But by lending it a bipartisan cover, he made it easier for tens of millions of Americans to join the hysteria.

It Comes Around

It cannot be a revelation to anyone that YouTube shorts can be an addictive thing.  Between all the AI Slop and ads for manscaping tools, anti-sag bras and pillows, there are of course dance trends, comedy clips, teasers for new music, genuinely panic inducing extreme sports feats like breakneck skateboarding down busy San Francisco streets, and of course, Gaza.  I don't know about you but for me the videos about Gaza had been among the top categories of shorts in my feed until recently (neck and neck with ICE related abominations) when they started to be eclipsed by Iran. Originally documenting the impact of Iraeli and US missiles on Teheran and other Iranian cities, I've noticed a new category piercing through the din, and these are hits on Tel Aviv in particular from Iranian missiles breaching Israel's Iron Dome and making direct hits on military and civilian targets. While I could easily be convinced that some of these are AI generated videos, some direct hits have been confirmed.  AI or not, it could be my algorithm but I notice that the comments in these videos from around the world, the US included are nearly 100% on the side of Iran.  In contrast, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy reports with dismay that 93% of Israelis support Israel and the US's war of choice against Iran and Lebanon in which 800,000 Lebanese and 3.2 million Iranian civilians have already been displaced from their homes (on top of the nearly 2 million in Gaza) many of them by the makings of an ecological disaster caused by the firebombing of Iranian refineries.   Before Israel's US-enabled genocide in Gaza, I never would have thought I would one day be cheering the destuction of Israeli architecture along with random commenters from Ireland, South America, Scandinavia, South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey and Russia, but here I am.  And yet, I am also aware that this quick turnabout in the world's tolerance for Israel's aggressions is the stuff of tragedy that could have been avoided,   It has been brought upon Israel by Israel itself, aided and abetted by the United States.

Kyle Kulinski has been chronicling the implosion of support for Donald Trump, highlighting in a recent video the viral bemoaning of a Florida former MAGA man for "Uncle Joe" as an indication of how far Trump's esteem among the electorate has fallen.  Indeed polls indicate a 48%-40% lead for Biden over Trump in popularity.   One poll has indicated that if the election were held again today, Kamala Harris herself would beat Trump by 8 points.  For my part, while I applaud any acknowledgement that America made the wrong choice in November 2024, the recent surge is nothing for either Democrat to be proud of.  On the contrary, it was Joe Biden's enabling of Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza as well as Harris's refusal to give the smallest sign that her administration would be different that is largely responsible for her defeat, as it has been recently revealed her own team privately acknowledged in its own post mortem.  And it was her defeat that enabled this dark era of American authored apocalypse around the world.

While I still regularly grieve over the difference a Harris administration would have made to the alternate history of the world, I do not share Florida MAGA man's longing for "Uncle Joe."  To the contrary, I am rooting for the slim possibility that a sizeable chunk of the remainder of Joe Biden's life is consumed with the question of what he thought he was doing greenlighting, funding and stocking Israel's genocidal response to Hamas's October 7 2023 attack on its breach of Israel's apartheid wall around Gaza, and  fostering a repression of American dissent via state (and State Department) sponsored conflation of Anti-Genocidal protest with Anti-Semitism.  It stretches credulity to think that someone as Inside Washington as Biden was for a very long career (one that bumped up fondly against the closing of the Segregationist era of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms) would have had as shallow a motivation in his unwavering support of Israel than mindless Zionism, and yet, while a venal reflex to not go against AIPAC surely played a part, it is also patently obvious that Biden was of the mistaken belief that he was doing a good thing.  This makes the consequence of his mistakenness all the more tragic.  If he was helping Israel, it was to burst out of the closet as a world class force for Imperialistic Evil.  If he thought he was playing his part in the ongoing restitution of European Jews for the horrors of the Holocaust that Israel's creation was eternally supposed to represent, he was tragically doing the opposite. Israel's conduct since October 7 has lost what remained of the world's good will and instead through its violent hostility to an ever growing list of enemies that its own sociopathic behavior has studiously cultivated, stubbornly engendered a recognition around the world that the tiny state has been and appears to intend to continue to be the source of much of a growing danger to the future of humanity.  By not distinguishing herself from Biden's naïveté if not psychopathology with respect to Israel's imperialism-- not even to the slightest degree-- Kamala Harris paved the way to the even more insane and twisted dysfunctional collaboration of the Trump Administration with Netanyahu's Israel. 

Israel has long thrived on its demand for the acquiescence of the world to its privileged special pleading, so much so that it had come to expect it.  It is a bitter irony, that we can only hope the world survives long enough to enjoy and learn from, that its very confidence in its entitlement to misbehave is the cause of the ill will radiating toward it from every corner of the earth.

Adventures in Maleness

Some highlights from the World of Fellas:

Jeff Bezos becomes a billionaire by disrupting bookselling with his online emporium.  He then shaves his head a la Lex Luthor, buys the Washington Post and in addition to firing a third of the newspaper's staff, shuts down the Post's storied weekly supplement of reviews,  Book World.

Fox News pretty boy and famed drunk Pete Hegseth is unaccountably honored by Trump in his second term with his nomination as Secretary of Defense (approved in spite of himself by a compliant Senate).  He proceeds to rename his purview the Department of War and to immediately wage war on the rest of the world.  Highlights: Conducting war against Houthis in Yemen over the public Signal app; Illegal bombing of Venezuelan fishing boats under false pretenses and when it got blowback blaming it on subordinates; Internet troll-like obsession over purging military of wokeness;  Hectoring and creating a culture of paranoia over the military's tolerance for zhlubbiness. 

On the other hand, ICE under the direction of professional racist Stephen Miller reduced its standards of fitness to accommodate the surge in recruitment it was expecting from the Proud Boys and the neo-Nazi ranks found generally in their mother's basements, who then promptly commenced to dressing up in army surplus, masking up and driving to other states, disrupting the lives of decidedly non-criminal immigrant neighbors, colleagues and friends, while also managing to kill protesting American citizens.

Speaking of ICE, Subramanyam Vedam whose parents immigated to the US in 1956 but was born in India in 1961 when his parents briefly returned for the death of his grandfather was brought back on his parents return to the US shortly after his birth.  In 1982, he was wrongly convicted for the 1980 murder of his roommate.  After 43 years in prison, Vedam having engaged the services of the Innocence Project was exonerated by new evidence.  However on his release from prison, before he could celebrate his freedom with his family, he was arrested by ICE and is being held pending deportation to India for a lack of paperwork he could not complete due to his imprisonment.

Erstwhile Playboy Mansion hanger-on Bill Maher, glass of scotch in hand, invited a group of kids (with apparently extremely permissive or naive parents) to his boozy, pot-hazed YouTube podcast Club Random for an hour of politically incorrect hijinx on the topic of kids and technology.  He told a girl who said she liked to watch Korean TV on her phone that she should refrain since America is a melting pot in which we're all supposed to melt into Americanness.  He told an 8 year old she should watch Game of Thrones; he recommended Elvis Presley as a bad "MF" to another child; he observed to one kid about the Modern Family actress, "Sofia Viagra, she's hot, huh?"  The famous TERF comedian asked 2 children if they'd transitioned yet.  In the weirdest stream of consciousness, he debated a couple of elementary aged girls about internet surfing suggesting that googling global warming  "leads to weather. Then you’re looking up stuff about the weather. Then it leads you to Stormy Daniels… Now you’re into porn. Now you’re into a porn site. What do you do?”  The kids to their credit appeared to have politely rolled with the weirdness of their creepy, damaged host.

The US Men's hockey team won its first gold medal since 1980 defeating Canada in Milan last week.  (No Russians to thwart them this year.)  The US Women's team has won 3 gold medals in the last 3 olympics including in Milan.  At the men's victory, FBI director Kash Patel in attendance at the games on the public's dime crashed the locker room celebration, and former Epstein BFF President Trump, a hero of several of the team's outspoken players called, inviting the men to the White House and to the State of the Union.  As for the women's team, Trump quipped, "I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team,” he said. “You do know that. I do believe I probably would be impeached [if the women’s team wasn’t invited]." inviting the laughter of the men's team.  Responding to the controversy, the White House did then indeed extend the same invitation to the women's team, and was declined due to scheduling conflicts.

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In contrast, here's Shy Girl by Haute & Freddy:

Emphasis on Repair

The recipient of this letter (one of an estimated 20,000 Federal Employees who received similar notification on Valentines Day 2025-- less than a month into the new administration) reported it was prepared with no input from his supervisor or HR Contact.  Several thousand summarily terminated Employees were subsequently temporarily re-instated with backpay due to court injunctions, only for many of them to be fired once again in April with a less incendiary and more truthful notice of (a still illegal) Reduction in Force-- at great expense and no value to taxpayers.  Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect had said of the administration's treatment of Federal workers, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected... When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma.”  Spoken like a villain.

"We as Africans are creditors, not debtors. Our energies fuelled the Industrial Revolution" - Jesse Jackson

Sasha Abramsky's American Carnage (whose title turns the phrase from Trump's first inauguration speech back on the fascist criminal himself) tells the story of several highly trained and experienced but recently hired or promoted government employees whose probationary employment status made them vulnerable in the early months of 2025 to the illegal decimation of the Federal government's workforce by the Administration's agents of chaos DOGE in the early days of Trump 2.0 following the playbook of Project 2025. Abramsky also reminds us of the obsession of Trump, his enablers and staff and the sympathetic punditry that lubricated America's nethers for another round of MAGA with Wokism, CRT,  DEI (on which Trump was quick to gratuitously blame the crash of an army helicopter and a commercial air liner over the Potomac in the early days of the admin-- a harbinger of the rough days to come) and in particular the galling advancement of black women.  One of DOGE's casualties featured by Abramsky was Adrian M, a career public health worker who had only recently gotten her dream job with the CDC when she was summarily fired with a canned, baseless probably AI generated letter informing her she was a poor fit for her position. 

“I’m being called a poor performer, and my knowledge and skills don’t meet the needs of the agency,” she said, incredulously. “My knowledge and skills came from the agency. I wouldn’t have had my job if my skills weren’t good.”

The idea that she, as a Black woman from the South, had somehow had it easy in life because of her skin color made her laugh, it was so absurd.

The contemporary normalization of the Trump orbit's thinly veiled racism attempting to masquerade as an issue of free-speech and reverse civil rights for the white and privileged is case in point that 160 years after the abolition of slavery, white America has never recovered from its lost prerogative to own an African and still has it in for black people.  To a great extent, the denial of universal healthcare, the stinginess of public spending on childcare, education and home ownership and hostility to a well compensated federal workforce-- deficiencies that hurt everyone-- have their root in America's pathology against black well-being.

All of the above redounds to the thesis of Dorothy Brown's recent book, Getting to Reparations, that America has yet to pay not only for the crime against humanity of its recalcitrant reluctance to break its habit of slavery only after Civil War in 1865, but for its continued punishment of descendants of slaves and others Americans of African descent for the crime of being black-- from post Reconstruction era Jim Crow to enshrined and hallowed practices of financial redlining to keep black people out of white neighborhoods and schools, down to our own era of rescinding of voting and other civil rights, gerrymandering, mass incarceration and police brutality.  Brown, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, knows what she's talking about.  Her previous book, The Whiteness of Wealth exposed ways in which our taxation laws have been designed to keep black people poor without a single mention of race in the code.  Brown advocates for reparations as partly some form of financial compensation to individuals (amounts, population and logistics to be determined by a healthily diverse, deeply informed and soul searching council of citizens) and most importantly by investment in black neighborhoods, schools, communities and businesses.

Before I read Brown's Getting to Reparations, I was undecided on the basis of what I knew I didn't know.  Brown, whose book provides a test case for persuasion, describes late in the book an exercise she uses in workshops on reparation, in which the participant, before hearing the arguments assesses their own feelings about whether reparations should be paid on a scale of 0 for complete agreement to 10 for absolute disagreement, with the same exercise repeated for a post-assessment.  I would say that having once been a 6 (based partly on the class-based reasoning of Adolph Reed as well as a pessimistic assessment of the feasibility of reparations by Matt Bruenig), I was talked down to a 3 by Marianne Williamson's impassioned case for making reparations a large part of her policy platform in 2020 and 2024.  But even before learning of Brown's self-assessment scale, half-way through her introduction to Getting to Reparations, I was converted to a 0.  I only needed to hear Brown's argument that the debt that America owes blacks has only deepened since 1865, and that reparations have been paid by the United States many times over to several groups, among them the families of Japanese internees in World War II, the Italian American victims of anti-Sicilian lynchings in Louisiana in the early part of the 20th century, and to some extent (and naturally sparingly and with great reluctance) to First Nations tribes.  The clincher was learning that while Andrew Johnson saw to it that the floated promise of 40 acres and a mule to former slaves was broken before a single person was recompensed, the government paid reparations of up to $300 per lost slave to slave holders.  

This was more than enough information to convince me that there was something pathological about America's unfinished business of repairing the harm of slavery and its lingering legacy to black people.  Moreover, Brown reminds us that black people are not the only ones broken by this unpaid debt.  My family on both sides came to America only after slavery was abolished, and yet to a person we have undoubtedly benefited from our whiteness.  I have relatives whose first generation racism contributed to the post-slavery carnage of black Americans by whom they were able to parlay their whiteness into a comfortable life of privilege.  But even my own bleeding heart immediate family has received advantages from the color of our skin through no particular effort of our own.  I don't live in fear of me or anyone in my family being murdered by the police for driving while European.  I have the luxury of ignoring my complexion when I walk through a new neighborhood or enter a store or apply for a college education or a job or a loan.  (Affirmative action as Brown points out has never been for blacks only and in fact has demonstrably benefited white women the most.) These are the privileges of whiteness I'm aware of, but it stands to reason there are many more that I'm not.  

The point is not that whiteness is a crime, but rather that American society in particular by the entrenchment of this difference in the way whites and blacks experience their lives is an indication that something is broken.  The resentment that so many whites of the legacy slave-deprived class feel toward blacks stems to a great extent from this brokenness itself.  Brown makes an excellent case that repairing the festering wound of white privilege by finally compensating blacks for the harms of slavery and post abolition racist policies will be a balm for the all too common proclivity of some (such as our current racist in chief) to evade the issue of this unfinished business by redirecting the butt hurt of their unacknowledged debt into anti-wokeness, anti-DEI and the suppression of Critical Race Theory as a way of avoidance of ownership of the melanin tax on their black brothers and sisters.

It's time, America.  It's time.*

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* Some may object that white families have experienced cycles of poverty as well.  Shouldn't they too get reparations from those who have benefited from their misery?   Very probably, Brown says, and that is a topic for another discussion.

 

Blood from a Turnip

On January 31, 84 year old Nancy Guthrie of Tucson, Arizona, after having taken an Uber to her daughter's home for a Saturday evening dinner was dropped off back at her home by her son-in-law at 9:48 pm.  When she did not attend church Sunday morning her family was called.  After failing to find her at home, the family placed a 911 call to report her missing.  On finding signs of forced entry, police suspected foul play and first publicized the disappearance at 6:48 PM.  CNN's first report of the story was broadcast Monday morning, February 2, centering the interest on the detail that Nancy Guthrie is the mother of NBC Today Show host Savannah Guthrie.  On Monday evening, a local Tucson station and tabloid news outfit TMZ each reported receiving a ransom note for the elder Guthrie, demanding money with a deadline of Thursday evening and a second deadline of Monday February 8.  On Thursday, February 5, police reported that blood found on the front porch of the home was determined by DNA testing to be Nancy Guthrie's.  The FBI offered $50,000 for information leading to a resolution of the case. On Friday, the Tucson television station reported receiving a new email whose contents it was unable to discuss.  On Monday, the Guthrie family released a new plea for their mother's return with no mention of a ransom note. With the Monday deadline passed with apparently no ransom money changing hands, the FBI disclosed that it was unaware of direct communication between the family and any party claiming to be responsible for the disappearance.   On Tuesday, February 10, police released footage from Nancy Guthrie's front door camera showing a man about 5'9'', average build wearing a ski mask and what police later described as a black, 25-liter “Ozark Trail Hiker Pack” backpack, attempting to cover up the camera with a plant dug up from the front yard.   The same day, police questioned a man detained at a traffic stop south of Tucson and then released him, giving no information by the next day about why he was stopped or released.  On Thursday, February 12, the FBI doubled its reward for information leading to the arrest of person or persons responsible for Nancy Guthrie's disappearance to $100,000.  Recently it has been reported that Savannah Guthrie will take an extended leave of absence from hosting the Today Show to be with her family and deal with the situation.

You now know everything there is to know about the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie's mother from her Tuscon Arizona home between 9:48 PM Saturday January 31 and 11:00 am Sunday morning February 1.   So why has CNN for the past two weeks done nothing but report on Savannah Guthrie's mother's disappearance?*   What have they reported on and what have we learned?  Let's focus for a minute on Jake Tapper, the nasal voiced totem of CNN's particular brand of late neoliberal capitalist mediocrity whom CNN sent to Tucson for breathless on-the-scene milking of the fibers of a story that has refused to develop.

I asked Google and got this list of professional experts and a few individuals whose proximity to the events plausibly conferred witness status (for the purposes of filling airtime) that Tapper has questioned: 

• Jeff Lamie: A neighbor of the Guthrie family, who discussed the neighborhood's reaction and provided observations on the case.
• Shari Botwin (LCSW): A trauma expert and licensed social worker, discussing the emotional toll on the family and the significance of finding potential clues after 10 days.
• Bryanna Fox: A former FBI agent, who analyzed the challenges of verifying potential ransom notes.
• Nick Barreiro: A forensic analyst who examined new surveillance footage from the home.
• Richard Kolko: A former FBI special agent and crisis negotiator, who discussed the, at times, unverified messages sent to local media.

And what did Tapper ask all these experts and on what has he been reporting?   Again Google supplied a summary of the highlights:

• On the Evidence: Tapper reported on the "chilling" doorbell camera footage showing a masked, armed person at the front door and the discovery of blood on the porch.
• On the Investigation: He has questioned the validity of tips and reported on the massive number of leads (over 30,000) being investigated.
• On the "Influencers": Tapper has delivered sharp criticism of social media influencers and individuals spreading unverified, false, or "nonsense" information about the case.
• On the Search: He highlighted the, at times, difficult, 24/7 search by the FBI and local authorities, including the searching of desert terrain and the examination of DNA.

Lastly, what have we learned from Tapper's extensive reporting?:

• No Clear Suspect Initially: For nearly two weeks, there were no named suspects or persons of interest, although a man in a mask, seen on camera, was identified as a key suspect.
• Evidence and Clues: The investigation centered on a masked person at the home, a missing camera, and blood found on the property. A "significant" DNA breakthrough was later reported, with investigators finding DNA that did not belong to anyone in close contact with Guthrie.
• Suspect Description: The FBI described the suspect as a male, 5'9" to 5'10", wearing a black, 25-liter "Ozark Trail Hiker Pack" backpack, which is sold at Walmart.
• A "Thriller" Stuck on Buffer: Tapper's coverage reflected the frustration of a case where, despite the high-profile nature, information was slow to materialize, leading to a "tight-lipped" approach from authorities.
• Ransom Hoax: It was confirmed that at least one person was charged with sending a fake ransom note, which was a "distraction" from the actual investigation.
• FBI Focus: The FBI increased its reward to $100,000 for information leading to a resolution. On the Ransom Notes: Tapper reported on the, at times, unverified messages demanding Bitcoin and the subsequent arrest of an individual for sending a fake threat. 
• Law Enforcement: Tapper has regularly cited information from Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos and the FBI. 

To summarize: We've learned that there isn't much that we've learned.

Tapper has since returned to New York, but not before being asked by a Pima County sheriff's deputy to leave the Guthrie property where a search was ongoing.  While we sincerely hope for the safe return of Nancy Guthrie to her family, the squeezing of water from the stone of this story continues unabated.

~~~~~~

* With brief respites updating developments in the Bad Bunny halftime show controversy thrown in.

I.Q. Zoo

Argos the dog can look where I point if I spot the toy he's looking for before he does.  If I spot the toy in the kitchen, I can go to the living room and tell him where it is and he'll retrieve it.  He invents games and teaches his humans how to play them.   He knows each of us by name.  He's so good at understanding our speech that we frequently have to spell words in front of him if we don't want him to know what we're talking about, but he's beginning to learn how to spell.  

He can't operate a door.   If a door he needs to traverse is opened a width he can't fit his face through he will stand patiently by until one of us pushes it open for him.  It doesn't matter how badly he wants to be on the other side of it.  He will not operate the door himself.  It's almost pathetic.  Is he stupid?  He is demonstrably not.  Our theory is that when he was a puppy, some parts of the house were off limits to him but not to our cats who preceded him in the family, so we propped the doors open a cat's width with weights on either side of them and he learned (unintentionally on our part) that the door was not a technology that he was permitted to use even as more doors became open to him.  He's not stupid; he's polite.

My cats on the other hand, generally unconfused by the workings of hinges on a cracked door,  have a predilection for an open closet.  If one is unattended for even a minute, there is a good chance a cat will be inside of it when the door is closed and latched.  Whenever this happens, it goes generally unnoticed until the furthest reaches of sleep are disturbed suddenly by the awareness, vague at first, then increasingly certain of meowed calls of distress that force you to rise in search of the source.  The regret that I feel on rescuing a cat from a situation I may well have made by carelessly closing a closet door without first getting a visual on both cats can be repeated as soon as the following night, but it will be revisited over and over again, no matter how heartwrenching the cries the last time the same cat was trapped.  How could the universe have failed to give the cat a mechanism to avoid what was surely traumatic by, for instance, teaching it to steer clear of any open closet door that it comes across in the future.

The answer is not obvious but eventually it comes to me.  The cat is not traumatized or trapped.  The incident happens on purpose.  The closet is entered because it beckons.  The closing of the door is part of the pleasure.  There's no need to panic-- scream loud enough and a human will come.

I tend to believe that the answer to the problem of how humans seem to have gotten the greater part of the available supply of intelligence on the planet is that humans have gotten the human brand of intelligence*.  Bees have the bee intelligence.  Haddock have all the haddock intelligence.  To say that human intelligence is superior to ostrich intelligence is to miss the point.  A salamander with requisite salamander intelligence is as gifted salamanderily as an intelligent human is humanly. It takes bat intelligence that I do not have to locate moths by sonar.  It takes human intelligence to conceive, invent, build and operate a door, but dog intelligence is equipped to experience a door doggily just as cat intelligence is all a cat needs to know how to summon a human to open the damn door for it.  

The popularity of dogs has a lot to do with the communing that we do with them.  Dogs engage and experience us with their intelligence and we return the effort with our own.  Cats don't have to impress us with their ability to display human intelligence, which is an attitude toward us that it takes a certain kind of empathy to appreciate.  They will get attention on their schedule.  They have other priorities.  

~~~~~

* Such as it is.

Prairie Power

From 2016, the Prairie Fire Choir of Minneapolis with guest artist Matt Latterell sing Lou Reed's Satellite of Love.

Count to ten

Everybody just needs to take a deep collective breath, and chill out for ten seconds.  Here are a few ways to do it:

• English - zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
• Kalalisut (Greenlandish)- nul, ataaseq, marluk, pingasut, sisamat, pingasut, sisamat, arfineq, arfinillit, qulit.
• Tswana (Botswana) - lefela, nngwe, pedi, tharo, nne, tlhano, thataro, supa, robedi, robongwe, lesome.
• French - zéro, un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix.
• Spanish - cero, uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez.
• Italian - zero, uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette, otto, nove, dieci.
• Romansch - nulla , in, dus, trais, quatter, tschintg, sis, set, otg, nov,  diesch
• Romanian - zero, unu, doi, trei, patru, cinci, șase, șapte, opt, nouă, zece.
• Romani - nulo, jekh, duj, trin, shtar, panzh, shov, efta, oxto, inja, desh.
• Hindi - शून्य, एक, दो, तीन, चार, पांच, छह, सात, आठ, नौ, दस।(shoony, ek, do, teen, chaar, paanch, chhah, saat, aath, nau, das.)
• Maltese - żero, wieħed, tnejn, tlieta, erbgħa, ħamsa, sitta, sebgħa, tmienja, disgħa, għaxra.
• Lithuanian - nulis, vienas, du, trys, keturi, penki, šeši, septyni, aštuoni, devyni, dešimt.
• Estonian - null, üks, kaks, kolm, neli, viis, kuus, seitse, kaheksa, üheksa, kümme.
• Hungarian - nulla, egy, kettő, három, négy, öt, hat, hét, nyolc, kilenc, tíz.
• Finnish - nolla, yksi, kaksi, kolme, neljä, viisi, kuusi, seitsemän, kahdeksan, yhdeksän, kymmenen.
• Igbo (Nigeria) - efu, otu, abụọ, atọ, anọ, ise, isii, asaa, asatọ, itoolu, iri.
• Arabic - صفر، واحد، اثنان، ثلاثة، أربعة، خمسة، ستة، سبعة، ثمانية، تسعة، عشرة. (sifr, wahd, aithnan, thalathat, 'arbaeat, khamsat, sitat, sabeat, thamaniat, tiseat, eashra.)
• Persian - صفر، یک، دو، سه، چهار، پنج، شش، هفت، هشت، نه، ده.  (safar, yek, do, seh, chehar, panj, shesh, npaft, npasht, nah, dah.)
• Navajo (Diné Bizaad) - názbas/ádin, tʼááłáʼí, naaki, tááʼ, dį́į́ʼ, ashdlaʼ, hastą́ą́, tsostsʼid, tseebíí, náhástʼéí, neeznáá.
• Icelandic - núll, einn, tveir, þrír, fjórir, fimm, sex, sjö, átta, níu, tíu.
• Dinka (South Sudan) - guɛw, tök, rou, diäk, ŋuan, dhiëc, dhetem, dhorou, bɛ̈t, dhoŋuan, thiäär.
• Turkish -  sıfır, bir, iki, üç, dört, beş, altı, yedi, sekiz, dokuz, on.
• Swahili -sifuri, moja, mbili, tatu, nne, tano, sita, saba, nane, tisa, kumi.
• Hebrew - אפס, אחד, שתיים, שלוש, ארבע, חמש, שש, שבע, שמונה, תשע, עשר. (afes, achad, shti'im, shlosh, arba, chamesh, shesh, shba, shmona, tisha, asher.)
• Albanian - zero, një, dy, tre, katër, pesë, gjashtë, shtatë, tetë, nëntë, dhjetë.
• Russian - ноль, один, два, три, четыре, пять, шесть, семь, восемь, девять, десять.(nol', odin, dva, tri, chetyre, pyat', shest', sem', vosem', devyat', desyat'.)
• Chinese - 零、一、二、三、四、五、六、七、八、九、十。 (líng, yī', èr, sān, sì, wǔ, liù, qī, bā, ji, ǔshí.)
• Japanese - ゼロ、一、二、三、四、五、六、七、八、九、十。 (zero, ichi, ni, san, shi (or yon), go, roku, shichi (or nana), hachi, kuu (or kyuu), juu.)
• Korean - 영, 하나, 둘, 셋, 넷, 다섯, 여섯, 일곱, 여덟, 아홉, 열.  (yeong, hana, dul, ses, nes, daseos, yeoseos, ilgob, yeodeolb, ahob, yeol.)
• Lakota - tákuni , waŋží, núŋpa, yámni, tópa, záptaŋ, šákpe, šakówiŋ, šaglóǧaŋ, napčíyuŋka, wikčémna
• Esperanto - nul, unu, du, tri, kvar, kvin, ses, sep, ok, naŭ, dek.
• Malay - sifar, satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima, enam, tujuh, lapan, sembilan, sepuluh.
• Basque -zero, bat, bi, hiru, lau, bost, sei, zazpi, zortzi, bederatzi, hamar.
• Greek - μηδέν, ένα, δύο, τρία, τέσσερα, πέντε, έξι, επτά, οκτώ, εννέα, δέκα. (midén, éna, dýo, tría, téssera, pénte, éxi, eptá, októ, ennéa, déka.)
• Zulu - iqanda, kunye, kubili, kuthathu, kune, kuhlanu, yisithupha, yisikhombisa, yisishiyagalombili,  yisishiyagalolunye,  yishumi.
• Danish - nul, en, to, tre, fire, fem, seks, syv, otte, ni, ti.
• Quechua - cero, huk, iskay, kimsa, tawa, pichqa, suqta, qanchis, pusaq, isqun, chunka.
• Hawaiian - ʻole, ʻekahi, ʻelua, ʻekolu, ʻehā, ʻelima, ʻeono, ʻehiku, ʻewalu, ʻeiwa, ʻumi.
• Maori - kore, tahi, rua, toru, whā, rima, ono, whitu, waru, iwa, tekau.
• Rapa Nui (Easter Island) - kore, tahi, rua, toru, hā, rima, ono, hitu, va’u, iva, ho’e ’ahuru
• Georgian - ნული, ერთი, ორი, სამი, ოთხი, ხუთი, ექვსი, შვიდი, რვა, ცხრა, ათი. (nuli, erti, ori, sami, otkhi, khuti, ekvsi, shvidi, rva, tskhra, ati.)
• Telugu (Southeastern India) - సున్నా, ఒకటి, రెండు, మూడు, నాలుగు, ఐదు, ఆరు, ఏడు, ఎనిమిది, తొమ్మిది, పది. (sunnā, okaṭi, reṇḍu, mūḍu, nālugu, aidu, āru, ēḍu, enimidi, tom'midi, padi.)
• Nahuatl (Aztec) -  ahtle, ce, ome, yei, nahui, macuilli, chicuace, chicome, chicuei, chiconahui, mahtlactli
• Q'eqchi' (a Mayan language of Guatemala) -zero, jun, wiib’, oxib’, kaahib’, oob’, waqib’, wuqub’, waqxaqib’, nueve, lajeeb’.
• German - null, eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun, zehn
• Latin - nullus, unus, duo, tres, quattuor, quinque, sex, septem, octo, novem, decem.