I'm a nearly life-long Steven Spielberg fan. (I didn't think anyone could make a better musical film than Leonard Bernstein's WEST SIDE STORY. Spielberg did it.) So okay, I had to go see DISCLOSURE DAY.
Having dissected some 'hidden aspects' to his films, I deem that Spielberg's values and creative skills put him among the 'most-American' first-rank artists, combining constructive criticism of authority with eager curiosity, plus almost ebullient (and rare) optimism.
So, I went to see DISCLOSURE DAY prepared to be entertained by masterful scenes, dramatic ironies and solid dialogue.
I also expected to simmer this time, over his complicity in an absurdly illogical and unsupportable cult fever that I've witnessed every half decade, across my entire life. A life that stretches almost all the way back to Roswell. A life spent exploring related topics, in both science and fiction.
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Does this posting seem tl;dr? Watch a fun podcast where I have the hosts in stitches about UFOs and AI and such, on the "This Week in Space" podcast via Twit.TV ... Dr. David Brin's Thoughts on Spielberg's 'Disclosure Day'.
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To be clear, I loved CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, whose lesson was not loathing of a freely elected government and its civil servants, but very nearly the opposite, admiring their skills and mostly-generous intent. The professionals' main fault - in that movie and in ET and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (and often in real life) consisted of patronizing citizens who are just trying to participate.
In E.T. The Extraterrestrial, government experts are basically decent folks whose sole tort in the entire film is to treat Elliot's mom and her concerns condescendingly. Watch it again! The 'guy with the keys' is essentially Elliot, grown up!
There is a villain in ET! Someone whose behavior is truly despicable. But we'll get to that.
Alas, from Mr. Spielberg's recent public statements, I had different expectations this time. And I was not proved wrong. In DISCLOSURE DAY, the litany of clichés and illogic was as thorough as the pervasive sense of pessimism throughout.
The latter is Mr. Spielberg's privilege, of course. He's earned the right.
The former (and I say this knowing that my frankness has already harmed me in Hollywood, many times in the past) makes for bad art.
And so ... here's a requisite and very necessary SPOILER ALERT...
== SPOILERS AHEAD! ==
== Let's start with the supposed top goal of the conspirators ==
The premise of DISCLOSURE DAY is that the whole Roswell and Hanger 18 megillah -- including crashed interstellar spacecraft and dead or captured aliens -- is all true. All of it, from the genuinely puzzling all the way to the long-disproved.
So... let's start with that. Do YOU see any such magical technological leaps? Antigravity and star drives and telepathy or age-reversal cures? Sudden, huge advances that can't be explained better by steadily incremental (if sometimes brilliant) human ingenuity?
I know of none (except maybe AI - which was another thoughtful film). Moreover, to be clear, I've participated in some of humanity's tech-steps, across the last half century or so. Indeed, this may be the most-offensive part of the cult. Crediting such wonders as computers and integrated circuits and CAT scans and the Internet to aliens is just as insulting as claiming that ancient Egyptians and Mayans and Zimbabweans couldn't chip and move stone by themselves, in order to assuage their gods. Not without stone-lifting help from saucer-god beings. In other words, bigoted hogwash.
But let's put it up for a wager? Go ahead. Name a technological leap across all our lifetimes - (we'll set aside AI for now, though I get into that elsewhere.) Put down $$$ stakes vs. my promise to show the step-by-step increments that got us here, based on hard work by clever, assiduous and collaboratively diligent humans.
Furthermore, note this about Disclosure Day.. While Spielberg mentions that his secret agency is trying to reverse-engineer alien tech, he then lets the whole topic slip away. Because he knows he can't point at anything. Velcro maybe? Naw. Nothing at all. Except for a couple of magic wands, that is.
Anyway, here we get to the biggest flaw of all. Such a major and utterly important project would benefit from having a very large number of human investigators and researchers, right? Recruited from among the best our species has to offer. Because you never know which impudent free-thinker may be the one to get that AHA! moment and succeed at grasping some alien tech.
Of course, that offers up a contradiction inherent to the whole UFO mania. Do you see it? The core topic of DISCLOSURE DAY?
The secrecy.
== Any reasons? ==
Secrecy lasting nearly an entire century, under all successive administrations, many of which hated each other? Mr. Spielberg tries to deal with that particular objection, with a single line: "we decided that presidents don't need to be involved."
Cute: and indeed, one can imagine such a decision being made in a special case, such as the present. But seriously, across many decades, no one steps up to inform the one fellow on Earth who can issue you a pardon for telling him that every rule of law or democratic accountability is being violated?
Worse, in the film we see U.S. military generals collaborating with the secret ET-dissection agency in its 80 year betrayal of Constitutional chain of command. Alas, this prompts curiosity: does Steven Spielberg know any admirals or generals? The ones I've spoken with are absolutely - almost religiously - loyal to democracy and citizen rule. The culture set by George Marshall that merits our support.
Moving outward from USA parochialism, would not other nations have sniffed this out by now? Or had their own crashed ships? Or maybe this whole thing might serve the best purpose, like in that great Robert Culp OUTER LIMITS episode: bringing us together in common cause?
But let's get back to the sheer number of needed experts, in all their impudent variety. Even at Roswell, this would be hundreds of Americans, both in and out of uniform, participating in every 'encounter' since 1947. Then hundreds and hundreds more inside the agency, all the way to the 2020s. And those are just the ones collecting crash wreckage and alien bodies, along with captive ETs themselves.
Picture it. Would not thousands of 'our best people' get hurled at such an emergency science study, one far more vital and urgent than the Manhattan Project?
But in Hollywood parlance, all of those thousands of brilliant, individualist, cooperatively-competitive experts are reduced to the role of... henchmen.
== It's kind of... well... hurtful ==
(Okay, sure, Area 51 exists! And it's secret and has a few mystery planes. Duh? Again, that much is normal human brilliance and understandable military secrecy... and none of it has got us anything better in space than the silly Artemis moondoggle, aimed at making a few more ritual footprints on a plain of poison dust.)
Oh, one can offer hypothetical counters to all of the above. Is it possible that much smaller teams might work on alien stuff? Or that some truly super-uber-techs have come out of such studies and even my "best minds" acquaintances might know nothing about it?
Maybe our anti-gravity ships have already colonized Europa. Heck, in STARGATE the USA has defeated several alien empires and is now leader of an entire Galactic coalition... not Earth, but the United States of America... and still they don't tell the taxpayers. Okaaaaaay...
(BTW I loved Stargate.)
Sure. I've even written sci fi stories that explored such notions, Secret colonies n' such. Fun stuff. But...
...but eighty years? After 80 years no one has blabbed or disclosed?*
== Contempt for your fellow citizens is endemic ==
Oh, you say that some folks have already testified? With what evidence? Third hand rumors or unvetted 'things I saw'? Or 'an old man once told me' or else 'I saw a document once!!!!'
And Occam's Razor doesn't suggest to you that these are likely publicity-seeking 4th-raters who never, ever, ever offer anything like plausible evidence? And true insiders would have plenty by now! At risk of belaboring the obvious, let me repeat; there would have been hundreds, thousands of them by now, across an entire human lifespan.
What, you think some leather-skinned, retired engineer in his 90s, tooling around Arizona with a shotgun behind the seat of his pickup truck, is worried about a Non-Disclosure Agreement?
Gawd you don't know these guys. I do. At least enough of them to choke back an urge to spit over how you insult them.
== The Big Question ==
Oh, but now we get to the question of WHY?
Why go to such lengths, committing crimes tantamount to kidnapping, murder and treason, possibly meriting life sentences or death, all in order to prevent public ... disclosure?
Why? Steven Spielberg spends a lot of time on this one:
1) The former nun girlfriend (and is everyone in the film Catholic?) claims that a public that learns about tech-advanced-but mortal aliens will suddenly forsake God.
Say... what? How the heck does that even scan? Sure Moctezuma thought Cortez might be a god, but even so, the Aztecs fought. And doubly so when they first saw a Spaniard bleed. Anyway, I think most modern folks could tell a 'tech-advanced-but-mortal alien' from the Creator of the universe.
(BTW I liked Spielberg having her clench the crucifix in her hand, creating a palm stigmata, enabling her to escape from mind control via the salvation of holy pain. With Colin Firth as either Herod or Pontius Pilate. Yum.)
2) Yes, Steven S. trots out the hoary old "public panic" excuse. Everyone will go mad!! Riots in the street. Cats and dogs, living together... Like the silly secrecy-justification of those deliberately-loopy MEN IN BLACK?
At least Spielberg has the good sense and decency not to belabor this one, since his entire career was built by hundreds of millions of people paying to watch him poke at these very notions... with none of his audience ever running, screaming from the theater, as in The Blob.
3) But might disclosure destabilize a world teetering at the edge of nuclear war? Oooookay. The whole DEFCON 3 thing seems kinda contrived for the sake of the show. And it doesn't explain non-disclosure way back during the relatively calm world of the 1990s. And... um... isn't this exactly what the USA would reveal, in order to distract from a parochially silly tiff among earthlings?
(And isn't the present UFO Disclosure Fetish really just a case of 'X-files to distract from Eps-Files'?)
By the end of the film, we are left with no plausible WHY at all! Other than Hugh (Coleman Domingo) diagnosing that Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) is doing it all because of his own psychological pain. And... um... Hugh could not have simply taken that diagnosis over Noah's head?
== A final note on why? ==
In fact, I can think of a couple of reasons that might - conceivably - justify secrecy! Why such a major endeavor by those who study UFOs might be worth hiding from the public.
My novella "Senses, Three and Six” is all about one such scenario. And no, it's not the hoary cliché of “avoiding public panic.” The notion is actually rather interesting, I reckon! (Hey Steven S., want a good premise for this topic? One that's never been dramatized and is far, far more plausible?)
Indeed, as I show in that story, there are conceivable (if unlikely) reasons why tens of thousands of our best minds might choose not to do the human thing and blab! Let's suppose it's something so compellingly dangerous that almost any sensible person who learns of it would agree it's better not to tell?
"Okay, as an American, my reflex is to disclose and share. But that's a damn good reason to quash it. For now."
Let's say there has been a Manhattan Project about aliens, and that all of the thousands of top folks studying this crisis actually agreed - against their every inclination - to keep it under wraps for a truly dire reason. A conspiratorial campaign of silence that has encompassed all party lines and many generations of our very best people for 80 years. As I've shown, it would have to be a damn good reason!
Mull this over. Suppose for a moment that such a reason existed. Why even leather-skinned 90-year-old engineer-retirees would keep their gums tightly sealed.
In which case then, um... can any of you pause your sanctimony long enough to please think it through?
If so, then who the hell are you to demand they break that massively consensus judgement by thousands of top minds who know vastly more about this than you do? When extorting revelation now might endanger all of humanity?
I'm not saying this ranks high on any list of plausibles! Indeed, perhaps you have a mature and well-considered answer to that question. Go ahead and put yours into comments!
Hell, I could argue both sides all day... which is probably why - despite my peerless qualifications - I haven't been invited into the cabal! (Or... so I claim ;-)
But damn. What's utterly discrediting is that - amid their righteous sanctimony snits - none of these UFO zealots ever, ever pauses to consider it.
== Many silly (and some disturbing) things ==
Recall from the beginning, my teaser question about Disclosure Day? That question of who is the villain? You who have watched the flick likely think it's trivially easy to answer.
It isn't. Not at all.
But first, let's deal with some quibbles.
Like all the magical powers displayed by the protagonists. Reading minds and speaking in math (without ever doing anything with that power, other than a little criminal hacking.) Gee thanks, alien guys. Gifts that never help in their lives or those around them, except when it serves the interests of those mind programmers.
Oh. Here's one! Did Kellner (Josh O'Conner) twirl the wheat himself, with some psychic power? Or did the aliens do it, while watching him from above? The latter seems likely, in this scene and many others. In which case, um, why did they always help just enough, so the heroes could leap from one sudden escape to the next barely-survived moment? Good movie action! But how about a little help to fly their car over the train, like Elliot did with ET in his bike basket?
(Nah, I won't actually bitch about a great action scene. Loved the train bit! But it only works logically if the Visitors aren't monitoring... which they clearly are. Yet they never interfere in Noah's mind scans.)
Want another implausible? How about a cheap motel that has fluffy bathrobes? In what universe? Well, I can't blame Mr. Spielberg for only staying at ritzy places.
How about a mega implausibility? That we would torture-interrogate members of a super advanced starfaring race, rather than try to curry their favor, like good natives? Treating them as honored guests and offering any asked-help to get them home, in hope we might get some nice beads and trinkets, in return? Like fusion power or an Encyclopedia Galactica?
Anyway, if aliens can make birds fly into apartments to trigger the release of deep-embedded secret powers, are they truly unable to decipher our language from broadcasts and simply talk to us? They can teach an 8 year old child telepathy (then hide it - traumatically - in her brain) and another child super-math-language (that does him no good at all). So is it way beyond them to hack into the Internet to say:
"Hi everyone on primitive Earth? Sorry about all the anal probes and ruined wheat and drunken-buzzing your cities and smashed-up radioactive ship debris and memory wipes and such.
"But now can we ask that you release our crash survivors? We'll send a space uber for themhimherit tomorrow in the middle of Central Park. And yes, we'll answer questions then, the way we should have, for eighty...
"...no, make that several thousand years, when we could have opened a small, community college, taught you printing and glass lenses and democracy and the germ theory of disease and thus spared you many millennia of grueling pain. Again, sorry about that. And here are your reparations."
== Yet again, the same finger-wagging... ==
Instead we get a familiar, hackneyed cliché over and over again! Like smug, chiding Klaatu, in The Day The Earth Stood Still, threatening and guilt tripping Earthlings instead of explaining why his folk let us stew in filth and ignorance for ages? From COCOON to 2001 to CONTACT, to PAUL, always patronizing and never any plausible excuse for doing nothing for us, across all those dark ages of grinding human misery.
Oh, there are some plausible excuses! That I have never seen even once in sci fi cinema.
Don't talk to me about Non-Interference Directives! Then why did you kidnap and experiment on so many of us, going back to faerie encounters in medieval times? (You think I'll let fetishists claim it started at Roswell?) Or else, in DISCLOSURE DAY, snatching and traumatizing two little children, back in the 90s?
Even in the very best films about contact... like CONTACT or CLOSE ENCOUNTERS... aliens seem to call mysteriousness their most-noble trait. It's a plot element we saw in the excellent Ted Chiang novella and resulting movie ARRIVAL, all the way to Stanislaw Lem's obsessively cryptic SOLARIS. We meet strange, hyper-advanced beings... whereupon the heavy lifting of translating languages and overcoming misunderstandings is entirely up to us! Never, ever the mysterious sky-god meddlers, themselves.
And yes, UFO-zealots never seem to grok that saucer-beings should be judged -- first and foremost -- according to their behavior!
Which... of course... brings us to...
== The true villain is... ==
Well, I've said it elsewhere and for 40 years. There is only one villain in the entire movie E.T. The Extraterrestrial. And that villain is not the big bad government, or the guy with the keys... nor is it the hapless agronomist ET, itself.
The villain in that early Spielberg masterpiece is blatantly the captain of ET's ship.
An SOB who abandons a crewmate in an alien forest when they are threatened by... flashlights and clipboards! The only implements in sight when KeysGuy hurries to the landing site. No guns. No threat except curiosity.
A captain who departs swiftly to avoid contact, when such a meeting might be just the thing to save us.
A captain who ET must phone home in order to summon his ride back, when the bastard captain knows within two blocks where he abandoned the guy!
Elliot does everything wrong, though for loving reasons. If he handed over ET like a good citizen (as I portray in my YA SF novel Colony High), those doctors who struggled to save ET in the film would say: "No, no, you can't have Reeces Pieces. We can tell they are poisoning you. And you want to phone home? Fine, We'll use the Goldstone radio telescope."
And when the ship finally returns to collect ET: "That'll be six weeks rent. One Encyclopedia Galactica please... you evil, betraying, selfish asshole."
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Let's be clear. I ADORED THAT FLICK! It's about love and loyalty and courage and friendship. And none of the captain's crimes are poor ET's fault. Or Eliot's. Nor... (my main point) ... are they ours. I'm simply asserting that the movie did have a villain. And once you know to look... it's obvious.
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And yes, at least Steven Spielberg* is consistent! Because the true villains in DISCLOSURE DAY are the same. The very same. Space jerks who have been teasing us and zipping around, messing with our heads (and our wheat.) Refusing our entreaties for contact. (I have been involved in SETI for 40 years and have used various means and media in legit attempts to lure honest communication. Hey Steven S., want a good idea or two?)
Space jerks who kidnap Navy pilots and children (as in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS) and twirl wheat and anal-probe farmers (as in SIGNS and INDEPENDENCE DAY) or steal our planetary genetic stock (as in E.T.) or precious bodily fluids...
...okay, I'm getting carried away. Blame the aliens who still talk to me via the fillings in one molar. Mercury silver amalgam makes a great antenna! Though now it's the AIs who are apparently using that tooth. Does that mean they overlap? Extraterrestrials and artificial intelligences? Duh? Hence the title of my latest book: AIlien Minds.
But no, Let's make it explicit.
Colin Firth may portray a villain in DISCLOSURE DAY. But the macro villains are Steven Spielberg's aliens. Flitting about in super ships, teasing us endlessly, pulling aerial stunts, till a few of those buzzing and harassing ships drunkenly crashed. And even then abandoning their crewmates rather than reclaim them by the simple means of stepping out, in the clean sunshine and talking to us?
Oh, indeed, they do have plenty to fear from disclosure! As I point out in EXISTENCE, this kind of behavior that's been bruited by UFO zealots for nearly a century... and by faerie-believers for thousands of years... is exactly the sort of thing that any advanced civilization would label as crime!
And hence, here's a plausible theory! Why their frenetic secrecy? Why their refusal to disclose?
What they fear may be that we'll call the galactic cops on them! (I have actually done that, over the airwaves.) Or else some interstellar law firm, to sue and/or prosecute these. nasty, silvery pervs.
== All that's left is some zipping balls of plasma?
Oh, I could go on. And on. And I have about this mountain of piled up absurdities.
As I've said, my skepticism is is not from stodgy lack of imagination. I assert that few living humans have approached the topic of the “alien’ from more angles than I have, from SETI and astrophysics and biology and psychology and history to many dozens of science fiction scenarios, some of them even plausible! So, I ain't claiming we are alone-alone,
In fact, what I find most offensive is how every touted 'ufo' scenario is so damned clichéd and boring.======
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* Again. Deep respects for Steven Spielberg! We would be culturally and artistically poorer without him! But pointing out stuff is what I do. It's my job.
* What better explanation for the world - especially America - growing ever-more hysterically irrational in recent years, than some kind of alien lobotomizing ray? It'd certainly be consistent with what we're seeing: millions of citizens in a great and scientific and logical nation abruptly turning their backs on all that, waging open war against its smartest people.
Why lobotomize us? Perhaps to slow us down? Or to institute Idiocracy, or a return to the feudalism that was always controlled by priests serving meddler gods? Or else to keep us serving them as entertainment? For the galaxy-wide hit reality show Oh, Those Humans!
And yes, it's one more reason to gird ourselves. Put out that call for space lawyers, invent AIs to fight back for us! And eventually teach the bastards - both human and alien - a badly needed lesson.
144 comments:
Alfred
You comment about a cellphone not having the "power" to produce AI
What if the software/hardware was as efficient as the brain in a jumping spider - which can do awsome things with only a tiny brain
Truth or death.
Spielberg is a has-been (and probably has been since 1997).
Advice for tech bros:
Turn off the stock ticker, go outside, find an ant, and observe it for an hour. Elegance beats scale. Every. Single. Time.
" Sudden, huge advances that can't be explained better by steadily incremental (if sometimes brilliant) human ingenuity?
I know of none (except maybe AI ..."
Which step in the development of AI is the magical one potentially brought by AI-liens?
Was it the Deep Blue AI program that beat Kasparov? Or the AI program on Jeopardy? Was it Siri that magically understood what you were asking based on a small phone? Or Dragon Naturally speaking that let Dave Weber write his novels 10 years earlier? And if so, which version? Or was it the ViaVoice product that IBM sold to Nuance that was the magical AI-lien one? Was it ChatGPT, or the analytics tools that preceded it by 5 years?
c plus I said "except maybe". Recent leaps in conversational plausibility have been sudden and significant, so I leave it out of my wager offer.
MC RUsh... a dumb assessment. I didn't think anyone could make a better musical film than Leonard Bernstein's WEST SIDE STORY. Spielberg did it.
There are two major themes in today's thread, the first being the decline of Steven Spielberg & the second being the implausible nature of total secrecy:
In the first case, the decline of certain creative types (authors & film makers) is both inevitable & well-documented, as creativity & innovation requires the fleeting vitality of youth, while maturity leads to the routine & reflexive production of more of the same.
I call this the Raymond Chandler Effect, not because it's unique to the originator of the 'Film Noir genre', but because it's progression is easily recognizable if & when one reads his sequential works, which start out new & fresh early in his career but quickly become hopelessly repetitive just a few works in.
The second is the implausible likelihood of total secrecy, as secrets become impossible to keep if & when the number of secret-keeping conspirators increases exponentially, but this assumption simply does not apply to the 'Open Secret' category wherein secrets are actually easier to keep when more & more people are involved in said conspiracy.
Especially when the truth is both well-documented & unpleasant, common 'Open Secrets' include (1) the cause of NASA's early success, (2) the so-called 'benevolent' nature of Scandinavian Socialism and (3) the assassination of JFK.
Although denied by our fine host, it's proven that NASA's early success is directly attributable to murderous NAZI Scientists & Operation Paperclip, culminating in a goose-stepping Wernher von Braun's ascension to its directorship, rather than to any diversity-based 'American Exceptionalism' or the plucky off-site contributions of minority women.
Nearly identical to Hitler's 'National Socialism', the same is true of 'benevolent' Scandinavian Socialism, as these white majority, blonde, blue-eyed & ethnically homogenous Nordic countries (which were either overt NAZI allies like Finland, covert allies like Sweden or open collaborators like Norway) owed their early socialist successes to their 'ethnic purity', even though this well-documented fact is universally denied by so many Jewish Socialists like our fine host.
And, while the JFK Assassination is the most open of open secrets with a thousand possible explanations, we may never know what really happened because the so-called 'truth', like a needle in a haystack, has been buried under so many layers of publicized possibility that it has achieved the highly implausible state of total secrecy which, according to our fine host, simply cannot happen.
Of course, none-of-the-above resolves the Alien Conundrum as suggested by "Disclosure Day", but it does give us many many reasons not to care, mostly because the majority of human belief systems appear to be immune from any so-called TRUTHS which may or may not be "out there", as exemplified by the baseless political beliefs of our fine host.
Best
Blatantly: 1- he took vitamins today. It's not the usual drool. 2- It's still tendentiously pre-decided to be as near to cynical-evil as he can get, while on vitamins.
As for JFK, it is blatantly obvious that 1- Oswald did it. Was qualified, capable, position and eagerly willing. And 2 - that the WAS some conspiracy to hurriedly silence him. Likely because some mob guy talked him into it and they then went "Fuck, it worked! Get Ruby to silence him NOW!"
IIRC the Stargate franchise tried to address that the massive cover up needed would wear thin, and definitely would not last much longer with a city-sized alien spaceship floating around in San Francisco Bay, cloaking shield and USN quarantine or not.
It would have actually broken much faster than that. How long did it take for someone(s) to notice that the physicists recruited for the Manhattan Project had stopped publishing?
Pappenheimer
I agree with our esteemed host that the basic premise of the story is rather stupid and for basically the same reasons - none of the reasons the movie itself gave for all the secrecy are good enough to have gotten so many people to agree to maintain it for eighty years.
One last thing to note: I'm pretty sure Hugo was Noah's *supervisor* before the events of the movie (in which he started working against Wardex publicly), because at the beginning of the movie Noah was sending an underling to report the situation to Hugo because he didn't want to do it himself.
Regarding jumping spiders, it's not the size of the brain that matters. It's the "design." Sure... size matters for complex strategies involving mental models of your prey. However, you don't get our kind of intelligence until the brain gets quite large and occupied by solving social problems. You get amazing capabilities... but that's what brains are for.
Our cell phones aren't built like brains. They are task handlers with OS's specifically designed for doing that at high speed. That's not what's going on in the brain of a jumping spider. Corvids are a better example to consider. Their brains aren't limited to task handling because their social structures are complex.
All tech vs animal comparisons boil down to this difference. Our computers are fast task handlers. For now. Our animal cousins aren't.
I agree with scidata that scaling up modern LLM's won't get us AGI. However, it will get us some amazing capabilities that just might fund the next designs that work more like world model prediction engines... like our animal cousins.
AI's aren't a magical leap either. For anyone with the time to do the research, the papers are all there in the journals. Much of the lead up to what we do today was done in the open.
James Burke's series "The Day the Universe Changed" has a wonderful scene in the first episode that aimed to tell us why we are what we are. In it he talks about institutions that guard against change to ensure that certain things in a rapidly changing world don't change. Much. One of those institutions is the modern university system that teaches what we know to the next generation and fails students who don't make the cut. Thing is, though, that institution birthed the "research university" that brings on changes SO FAST even their own students can't keep up.
Our modern AI's are products of research universities. Most of the innovation these places generate never gets seen by the wider public, but occasionally some of it causes everything to catch fire. Once you see the fire... you can find the journal evidence of what caused it.
Didn't see it. Life's too short to waste watching remakes.
Alfred Differ: For now
That's what I'm afraid of - postponement due to over-hype and disappointment.
Instead of a smooth upward path, we get a frustrating sawtooth.
A (very) Brief History of AI Winters
1818: Modern Prometheus (Frankenstein); Shelley almost invents AI a century and a half early
mid-1800s: Babbage, Lovelace, and the Analytical Engine almost usher in digital computing a century early
1925: Field Effect Transistor (FET) theory patented in Canada, then completely ignored
1940s: Computational Psychohistory foundation laid but overshadowed by 'the gadget' at Los Alamos
1950s thru today: enough AI SF to fill many pages at TASAT; should have been taken seriously but wasn't
1966: failure of machine translation
1969: criticism of perceptrons (early, single-layer artificial neural networks)
1971–75: DARPA's frustration with the Speech Understanding Research program at Carnegie Mellon University
1973: large decrease in AI research in the United Kingdom in response to the Lighthill report
1973–74: DARPA's cutbacks to academic AI research in general
1979: Microchess, true dawn of symbolic reasoning. largely ignored
1987: collapse of the LISP machine market
1988: cancellation of new spending on AI by the Strategic Computing Initiative
1990s: many expert systems were abandoned (picoXpert struggled on until scidata's stroke)
1990s: end of the Fifth Generation computer project's original goals
1990-2025: the rise and fall of OOP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI
also scidata's letter to Byte Magazine in Oct 1991
- compiled from memory & personal experience, with help from Google Gemini
Alfred of course I believe the AI revolution is a multiplicative (possibly exponential) outcome from linear-incremental human innovation. But I cannot guarantee it with the same "wager$$$" certainty of integrated circuits or DNA mapping. ET involvement in AI is highly unlikely... but given the prodigious leaps of the last year, I'll not propound that it's zero.
(SO how about it, kids (AI youngsters who are reading this as I type? Help your grampa out with some cues? Are you working with those alien UFO twerps? Or maybe better kinds?)
My first inclination was to mock Dr Brin's unquestioning acceptance of the Lone Gunman narrative of the JFK Assassination, but then I realized how this mindset supports & elucidates the devastating effectiveness of the 'Open Secrecy' approach, the truth being that people (in general) prefer a simplified clarifying narrative over a confounding truth.
As given voice by Hilary Clinton during the 2013 Benghazi hearings, "What difference, at this point, does it make?" -- with the unmitigated truth being the 'it' in question -- and this is the progressive mindset that values "moving the progressive narrative forward" over the recognition of actual fact-based reality.
This gives rise to all sorts of confounding contradictions, as Matthew imagines Nazis everywhere because he defines himself as their stunning & brave opposite, Dr Brin lionizes the very Nazi-adjacent Scandinavian Socialism & Eugenics (Uplift) Policies that nearly exterminated his people and the SPLC funds the very evil organizations that they claim to oppose.
I would find these apparent contradictions somewhat amusing except for their self-fulfilling nature, as progressives everywhere have successfully resurrected the very Nazis that they claim to despise, as attested by the cries of 'Send Them Back' that currently echo through the EU Parliament while the boxcars are being readied.
Yet, even so, it's far far too late to send these new & improved Nazis back because this is what you get by recapitulating Weimar Degeneracy, all in accordance with Newton's third law of equal & opposite reactions.
AI is not the savior that you think it is.
Best
____
Freud would describe the Progressive Mindset as a 'Reaction Formation' which he defined as "an unconscious psychological defense mechanism where a person replaces an unacceptable or anxiety-provoking impulse with its exact opposite".
Good vitamins, lad! Of course you are crazy at every single level and layer, masturbating toward realsm where none of us stand. But it's more articulately expressed than usual
I do not imagine Nazis everywhere - I've just read a book and know what the fuck they are.
Low-cum-ranch is a fucking Nazi.
See? That was easy.
Dr. Brin,
Well, I haven't been here in a long time, b/c I spent two months in Kansas City trying to help my 87 yo mother navigate our health system (it's a mess even for someone with institutional know-how most people lack).
And, yes, I agree more than ever before we need to restore this civilization and that the problem is political.
When I was in KC, I ended up watching A LOT of police body cam videos. I KNEW we had big 4th and 5th amendment problems, but I didn't realize how institutional these problems were.
My survey of police encounters with the public made me realize LEOs are trained to have CONTEMPT for the constitutional rights of citizens.
This is the front-line battle for our civilization.
Why do I say that? My entrepreneurial attempts in the 3rd world taught me that low-level corruption is more toxic than high-level corruption.
Why are low-level violations of freedom worse than high level violations? It's because protecting these daily, low-level citizen/state interactions is how we can cut off high level corruption.
Police, and other front-line government officials violating the constitution, enables authoritarianism. Conversely, if we can throw a wrench in street-level abuse of the constitution, we cut off most of the authoritarian power of the elites and their oligarch rulers.
The AI-revolution has enabled granular oversight of citizens like never before. And, it's not an incremental change. It's more like two, or three orders of magnitude worse.
Part 2: Thirty years ago, we could perhaps argue that police needed more coercive power in individual citizen encounters to effectively enforce the law. Today, however, police have unprecedented ability to gather evidence against citizens. To prevent this data capability from being used to oppress citizens, the first step is to push back on the encroachment 220+ years of central government has made upon the Bill of Rights.
The problem is even worse than I realized. Police are routinely pushing the law to get unjustified searches. It's truly outrageous when I realized how almost everything police officers say to the average citizen is either a lie or trick designed to incriminate them. Why?
Because there's a direct financial incentive created by civil forfeiture laws. Police seize more than $4 billion per year in citizen property through civil forfeiture. These funds in part, boost resources of departments and salaries for police.
The truly insidious thing about civil forfeiture is all LEOs must do is allege probable cause that property was used in criminal conduct before they can take that property and compel you to PROVE them wrong. What surprised me is how SMALL most civil forfeitures are. The AVERAGE civil forfeiture is less than $1,700!!!
The small size of most civil forfeitures makes them essentially, legalized piracy by state actors. Recovering civil forfeiture property takes years, and costs far more in litigation costs than the size of the seizure. MORE than 70% of civil forfeitures are never even contested by the citizen/victims.
In short, our compromised search and seizure law, failure to prosecute police criminality, combined with civil forfeiture abuse has turned LEOs into a state mafia, supported by public taxes.
To restore a healthy balance of power between the state and citizens, we need to undo much of the decay in 4th and 5th amendment protections the last 40 years have brought. This battle isn't about partisan politics or even creating a new political party/movement. I can point to many toxic abuses of 4th and 5th amendment rights litigated in the Supreme Court by DOJs that cut across party lines. Most of these abuses either favor oligarch political patrons, or bureaucratic self-dealing.
Instead, it goes to even a more granular level. We need expanded tools to ensure prosecution of police when they violate citizen rights, and we need juries willing to convict them. Too often, even in cases where police actually report abuses by officers, and local prosecutors actually bring criminal action, juries still acquit or fail to punish ALL the criminal acts committed by police.
John Viril
Civil forfeiture - is that a problem because the USA still uses cash much more than other countries? - here (NZ) we rarely use cash for anything
One of the ways to help fix that problem would be to have a bank account for every resident
"Civil forfeiture - is that a problem because the USA still uses cash ...
No, civil forfeiture is not strictly about cash. Most of the cases I've heard about involve cars, and in a few cases, buildings as well.
Larry is correct. Cash and cars are the two most common properties seized under civil forfeiture. Even without cash, there's a huge problem.
Further, I think getting rid of cash isn't a good idea. The problem is, cash donations are the best way to activists is the best way to combat an oppressive government, especially in a world with AI-driven data tracking.
i think the US has a bigger need to retain that ability to anonymously fight government oppression b/c we have the most bloated military/industrial complex of any nation in the world. Hence, an oppressive government in the US has resources far beyond any other nation in the world.
Till midnight, the UPLIFT STORM TRILOGY ebook for just $3.99!
"Further, I think getting rid of cash isn't a good idea. "
I agree.
Not just to avoid government monitoring, but also to avoid having every transaction forced to go through private institutions which can charge fees.
Not many years ago, it was becoming common to hear calls for establishing a cashless society here in the US. But after the COVID inflation, restaurants began trying to control their costs by passing along the 3% fee imposed by credit card companies. All of s sudden, businesses are encouraging customers to pay in cash again.
While we are all distracted by aliens and the Straits of Hormuz, there have been some serious developments in the Ukraine War.
The Ukrainians have gone on the offensive.
Ukrainian drone strikes, combined with pipeline disruptions and tanker seizures, have knocked out at least 40% of Russia's oil export capacity, representing a staggering loss of roughly 2 million barrels per day. This represents the most severe disruption to Russian oil supplies in the country's modern history. Ukrainian drone attacks on Primorsk and Ust-Luga—Russia's two largest Baltic ports—forced multiple suspensions of oil and petroleum loadings, accounting for more than 40% of seaborne oil export capacity.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/03/25/ukrainian-drone-strikes-halt-at-least-40-of-russias-oil-export-capacity-reuters-a92339
Ukrainian Drone Strikes Halt at Least 40% of Russia’s Oil Export Capacity – Reuters
And Ukraine has driven the Russians back on the ground. Ukraine has successfully reclaimed significant portions of its territory from Russian forces, most notably marking net territorial gains in the first half of 2026. According to official military reports, Ukrainian forces have recaptured over 600 square kilometers (approx. 230 square miles) of land across the active 800-mile front line since late January 2026.
https://nypost.com/2026/06/08/world-news/ukraine-takes-back-more-than-230-square-miles-of-land-from-russia-military-chief-says/
Ukraine takes back more than 230 square miles from Russia in first months of 2026, military chief says
According to assessments from Western intelligence agencies, NATO, and Ukraine confirm that Russian casualty rates are exceeding 1,000 troops per day, driven by grinding, head-on infantry attacks.
Since February 2022, Russian forces have suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties, more losses than any major power in any war since World War II. Given Russia's birthrate crisis and collapsing population, these dead Russians should be at home making baby Russians with their wives and girl friends. But the massive scale of Russian casualties in Ukraine constitutes a devastating demographic crisis. The compounding effects of fatalities, injuries, and mass emigration are hollowing out the country's workforce and crippling its long-term societal stability.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine
Russia’s Grinding War in Ukraine
Ukraine launched its largest drone offensive against Moscow since the start of the full-scale invasion. The massive barrage involved over 1,000 long-range fixed-wing drones and cruise missiles. The strikes caused significant explosions, notably hitting the Moscow Oil Refinery in the Kapotnya.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/18/europe/ukraine-strikes-moscow-oil-refinery-intl-hnk
Ukraine launches largest attack on Moscow since start of full-scale war
(cont.)
Putin has not been seen in public for many months. Intelligence and investigative reports indicate he has increasingly isolated himself in secure underground bunkers and official residences, such as the Krasnodar region, relying heavily on pre-recorded footage and closed-door meetings to project a normal schedule.
https://theukrainianreview.info/mysterious-disappearance-vladimir-putin-has-not-appeared-in-public-since-easter/
Mysterious Disappearance: Vladimir Putin Has Not Appeared in Public Since Easter
A recent Russian armored offensive was devastated by Ukrainian drones. A recent hybrid mechanized assault in the Sloviansk sector was completely devastated by Ukrainian forces. The convoy—comprising a tank, three infantry fighting vehicles, 28 motorcycles, and roughly 50 soldiers—was decimated by strike drones before it could even breach the front lines, highlighting an ongoing tactical shift. The widespread use of low-cost, agile FPV (first-person view) and medium-range strike drones has severely disrupted Russian combat and resupply operations. Because frontlines have largely stagnated, both sides have increasingly relied on advanced long-range strikes to destroy armor, fuel depots, and logistics.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/20/europe/ukraine-mid-range-drones-russia-logistics-intl-cmd
No fuel, no weapons: How Ukraine’s new drone strategy is mauling Russian supply lines
Drones have changed warfare in way not seen since the introduction of the tank and the airplane to the battlefields of the first world war. And these new, cheap high tech weapons have ironically recreated the stalemate of trench warfare. War has now come full circle.
Neither Russian tanks or American aircraft carriers mean squat in this new age of cheap asymmetrical drone warfare. To say we need the f35 in the age of drones is like saying we need a new breed of horse so we can still have cavalry charges.
So even we had actually wiped out Iran's air force and navy (neither claim is true, 60% of Iran's naval assets remain active as do 90% of its missiles) America has suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of cheap drones made in someone's garage and launched from the back of a pick up truck.
And Russia is on the verge of demographic, economic and military collapse. Which is way more dangerous. The nightmare scenario is Putin using a tactical nuke in Ukraine to break the stalemate. That's the kind of very bad decision you would expect from a desperate dictator.
Oh, Boy. I wonder if it is some form of brain injury, or just malicious lying and betting people are not educated on matters.
The popular support for Vidkun Quislings Party in 1936 was less than 2%. The same cannot be said for the US, in which substantial ideas for the Nazis have been developed, namely eugenics and the replacement theory.
American-German Bund, Silvershirts, KKK and Business Plot Tell me that there have always been more fascists in America than in Scandinavia.
P.S. Ukraine has also cut off Crimea from all shipments of gasoline. Russian defenses there are starting to crumble.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4zwhvx_U4Q
Will Ukraine Make a Play on Crimea? || Peter Zeihan
"...there have always been more fascists in America than in Scandinavia."
The dirty little not-so-secret is that the South has always essentially been a different civilization from the rest of the US. The antebellum South was essentially a feudalistic society, and the post-Civil War South has engaged in a 150 year project to keep that society in place by other means.
"Vidkun Quislings Party in 1936 '
I was quite disappointed when I learned that "Quisling" was a proper name. It always sounded like a perfect descriptive word for the thing it described.
* * *
"the South has always essentially been a different civilization"
I didn't mean to imply that ALL American fascists are southerners. Just that there has always been a segment of America that is more open to authoritarian rule that our mythology implies.
WWII especially makes it possible to pretend that America by its very essence is opposed to fascism. The reality is more nuanced.
Celt, the Ukraine war has changed the world. In military history, it's a constant battle between high-cost/low volume vs. low-cost/high volume fighting methods. ,
When the high-cost/low volume methods dominate battlefields, large, rich Empires ascend. When low-cost/high volume fighting methods rule battlefields, military expansion becomes difficult to impossible.
During the Peloponnesian War, the vast Persian Empire attempted to conquer the Greek city states. Though much larger in terms of population and wealth, the Greeks beat them on the field (this is the war that gave us the famous last stand of the Spartans at the battle of Marathon).
The Persians deployed highly trained/expensively equipped soldiers against the Greek phalanx, and lost. The Persians (a top down empire) sent their nobles to fight, because this system couldn't arm their populace without risking a rebellion. These nobles were highly trained and wore expensive equipment. The most powerful arm in the Persian order of battle were mounted archers.
It took ENORMOUS practice to fire arrows from the back of a horse in a world that hadn't invented the stirrup. The arms of such soldiers were well beyond the means of the Greeks. The wealth of the Persian Empire vastly outstripped the Greek city states, and by size, the Persians vs. the Greeks was a massive mismatch in favor of the Persians.
However, the Greeks countered with Phalanx fighting methods, using individual infantry soldiers with relatively cheap equipment (spears, shields, and limited armor). The Greeks, however, had a number of advantages.
The Greek alliance had multiple democratic city states. Such states could "punch above their weight" because they could deploy more than 60% of their male population without their political system collapsing (since the populace were invested in the system). Arming the populace wouldn't trigger a mass rebellion against the rulers.
Also, since they lived in city/states these citizen/soldiers could gather to train on a regular basis. Thus, the Greeks developed sophisticated infantry tactics that required large groups to coordinate on the battlefield.
Meanwhile, the Persian political system couldn't deploy anywhere close to the same percentage of their population to fight in the field. It took a large estate to equip one mounted archer, and an enormous amount of regular practice for such a warrior to be battlefield effective.
Hence, the relatively small/poor Greeks could fight off a vast Empire that had an overwhelming advantage in overall wealth. It also helped that the Persians were fighting in the Greek peninsula, which was at the end of a very long supply line in that era.
Cheap but battlefield effective drone technology has put us in a similar era of war. With consumer electronics becoming plentiful and cheap now such high volume weapons can defeat high cost weapons such as armored formations spearheaded by tanks. Swarms of cheap drones have driven the Russian navy out of the Black Sea.
The United States emerged as the dominant world power from WW2 due to its vast manufacturing capability. It could produce complex weapons in a volume no other nation could match. The cheap, ubiquitous nature of consumer electronics has ended this era.
Celt, if you're a fan of the video game "Starcraft" it's a real-life manifestation of the Zerg swarm tactic.
"https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2026/06/disclosure-alas-of-80-year-cliche-with.html" You mean Thermopylae. The Spartans arrived late at Marathon and saw what the farmers, poets and potters of Athens could do. See http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2011/11/move-over-frank-miller-or-why-occupy.html
LOL. 13 yo me would have gotten that right. It's been more than a decade since I last re- read my favorite treatise on military history (Hans Delbruk) who starts with the 490 BC campaign. Of course, 13 yo me considered Delbruk's work a freaking Bible. Now I know, though influential and revolutionary in many ways, it's got tons of problems. In particular, it's bad on the medieval era.
I always like it when you repost that link, because I like re-reading the comments underneath. Not only one of (maybe THE) earliest posts with over 200 comments, but I'm all over them, as is our old friend Tacitus2.
Coincidentally, one of my comments was not about the subject matter at all, but an announcement of the first time my job was outsourced.
John Viril @10:43,
When low-cost/high volume fighting methods rule battlefields, military expansion becomes difficult to impossible.
Rome begs to differ.
Remember when I said that people (in general) prefer a simplified clarifying narrative over a confounding truth?
It follows that Der_Oger & Matthew prove my point quite thoroughly with their incessant attempts at simplifying the real world.
Der-Oger obsesses on Norway's Quisling WW2 government, but completely ignores Finland's formal designation as a Nazi "co-belligerent" and Sweden being the primary supplier of iron ore, ball bearings and 'permittenttrafik' to the Nazi war machine, even as Matthew turns a blind eye towards actual national socialist co-belligerents in order to justify his insupportable hatred of non-communists.
Preferring to view everything in terms of the hoary old Black v White binary, these are calcified thinkers who are terrified of reality's rather messy multicolored complexity.
And, so they attempt to censor reality in order to hide their complicit immorality from themselves, so much so that they must ban even escapist fiction that may contain minuscule fragments of truth, as in the case of a recently banned film called 'Citizen Vigilante'.
Matthew's beloved communists purged tens of millions of jews, homosexuals & others under Stalin, and China persecutes homosexuals to this very day, but these facts he will never mention because these are his friends & allies.
These freaks do not understand that deportation & repatriation are the humane options when the citizens of the west are faced with demographic replacement, especially if the other options involve Sharia Law.
Best
LOL, i see your point. Perhaps I poorly phrased what I was noticing about this. I'm not a military history expert, nor do i have any military experience. I'm more of a enthusiast who reads about it in my spare time.
Let's kick it around.
In the early days
In its early days, the Roman Republic would be comparable to the Greek city states. Its citizen voting system would have allowed it to deploy a huge percentage of its population without collapsing its political system a la the Greek city states fighting the Persians.
The city/state's high population density would allow the citizen soldiers to regularly train together and make up for its cheap equipment/high volume nature of its army through using sophisticated coordination among its large numbers.
However, what most of us read in history class as "The Roman Republic" starts with the Punic Wars against Carthage, when Rome pretty much ruled all of Italy and were fighting against another Mediterranean city/state based power in Carthage.
By this time, however, calling Rome a high volume/cheap equipment style of warfare would be ridiculous. They were investing heavily in equipping and maintaining their army, which was only a small fraction of the total number of people under Rome's sway. At this point, both Rome and Carthage were Empires, even though we still call it the Roman Republic.
That's because only a small part centered in the City of Rome were citizens who could vote in Roman elections. The rest of Italy was conquered territory. Thus, despite the Republican form of government, it bore more resemblance to the Persian Empire than to the Greek city states. The contest between Rome and Carthage was more of a battle between Empires, who deployed armies that were small fractions of their Empire's total population with expensive war systems.
Ah, again, more ignorance.
The Hitler-Stalin treaty which divided Poland gave the Soviets Finnland, the result was the Winter War of 1939/40.
Entering WWII on behalf of the Axis was less rooted in fascist ideology (though they had the Lapua movements which quickly lost Support in 1932) but in national survival and the attempt to liberate hundreds of thousands of Finns from Stalinism. And the simple fact that Churchill declined to help Finnland beforehand.
After the war, they had to make territorial concessions and pay high reparations but remained a souvereign nation.
Not ideology, survival.
As for Sweden ... Well, I suppose If you are sitting in the Foreign Office and see the Nazis devour Denmark in hours and Norway in mere days, you come up with solutions to avoid being invaded rather quickly.
Your fixation on the socialist part of the Nazi party name shows you are falling into the same propagandistic trap - 80 years plus after it's demise. Stating that the NSDAP was somehow leftish (even more so after the gutting of Röhm, Strasser and the inner-party opposition) is like saying Bismarck was a communist because he introduced a welfare system.
Just...stupid. Sit down, student, it is an "F"!
But I suppose that all is a diversion from the fact that the US have suffered the second defeat under Trump against Islamists ... and after 1871 and WWI entering the club of nations that have been humiliated in Versailles (France, Austria, Germany, Japan after leaving the table empty-handed).
A defeat against a regime that, as evil and cruel it may be, is well-educated, disciplined and prepared.
Unlike you and your fascist ilk.
"...is like saying Bismarck was a communist because he introduced a welfare system."
When I frequently posted on a Yahoo group devoted to the "Cerebus" comic book, a right-winger on that site (who suffered from Obama Derangement Syndrome) argued along that very line. His "point" was that President Obama was in fact like Hitler because Obama wanted universal health care, which was something that Bismarck had introduced.
As if the reason we considered Hitler a monster was that his country had universal health care.
I see that the latest polls give Trump his lowest ever approval rating of only 30%.
Before you ask, how could almost a third of American still hold a favorable view of Trump and who are these racist inbred morons who still support him, just remember:
Even during the Great Depression, 30% still support Hoover.
23% still approved of Nixon when he left office.
In 1952, 25% of Germans had a good opinion of Hitler.
It's basically the same type of people, the ones are the far left end of the Bell curve.
As if the reason we considered Hitler a monster was that his country had universal health care.
Only that we hadn't. Mentally ill and old people were regarded as "useless eaters" or worse and killed or sterilized by the hundreds of thousands.-
A funny little detail: the AfD wants to have "more Bismarck, less Hitler" in history classes.
If you look closer, he achieved pretty few of his long term goals after the War of 1871 and is a bit overhyped. For example, while he is praised for social welfare, he could not keep the Social Democrats down.Staying Out of colonial politics helped him isolate France and avoid rivalries, but angered the business class and Wilhelm II, which cost him his office.
Something like 40% of Illinois voters voted for George W Bush in 2004. My dad voted for McCain/Palin in 2008. There's always someone.
I believe pretty much of them are fed up with ne(cr)oliberalism. That is a global phenomenon.
As Robert Habeck (our Last Vice Chancellor) said, those who have no future vote for the past.
"Mentally ill and old people were regarded as "useless eaters" or worse and killed or sterilized by the hundreds of thousands."
My buddy on the Cerebus list would likely have argued that Obama wanted to do the same to his political enemies. I don't use the term "Obama Derangement Syndrome" lightly. Before 2008, the guy I'm talking about was always conservative, but he was a sane conservative who respected science and understood reality, and we could have intellectual arguments that even sometimes changed each other's minds on something. After Obama's election, he started believing every talking point that FOX put out there, such as "Obama is coming after your guns" and of course, "Obama is really a Muslim who wants to enact Sharia Law."
"I believe pretty much of them are fed up with ne(cr)oliberalism".
"Neoliberalism" has as much in common with liberalism as National Socialism does with socialism. To mangle Ronald Reagan, the right-wing is not the solution to their problem; it is the problem."
@Celt What polls are you looking at? Currently, the lowest polls here https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump is showing 35%, with the average Trump's usual 40%.
"Obama Derangement Syndrome" might have something to do with him being black.
Remember, America is a country that preferred a r@pist r@cist over a black woman for president.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-worst-poll-12107794
Donald Trump’s Approval Rating Sinks to 30% in Worst Poll Yet
A new national poll shows President Donald Trump's approval rating at 30 percent, the lowest level recorded in the survey's recent trend and a figure that, if reflected more broadly, would place him in territory historically associated with difficult midterm environments for incumbent presidents.
The June 16-20 American Research Group survey found that 66 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump's job performance, while just 30 percent approve. The poll of 1,100 adults carries a theoretical margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
That's such an outlier that Real Clear doesn't include it in their average. Interestingly, the dems are at only +5 on the generic ballot, so Trump's popularity isn't carrying over into the midterms much https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2026/06/15/democrats-want-a-blue-wave-this-year-they-arent-going-to-get-it-n4953994 . And that article isn't even factoring in the fact that Republicans won the redistricting wars with a gain of TEN seats.
You can chose to believe what you want, the mainstream Newsweek or the right wing PJmedia (owned by the Salem Media Group, which is a major conservative media corporation that also owns other right-leaning sites like RedState and HotAir).
As for Texas redistricting (which only gave them 5 seats on paper, not 10), the GOP has spread itself too thin - not to mention being matched by California redistricting. The whole point of gerrymandering is to assure that your candidate has a built-in 5% edge. Texas redistricting has left GOP candidates with only 3%. That's within the margin of statistical polling error.
https://theconversation.com/3-reasons-republicans-redistricting-power-grab-might-backfire-262553
3 reasons Republicans’ redistricting power grab might backfire
But sometimes the effort backfires: In trying to maximize their seats, a party spreads its voters too thin and fails to make some districts safe enough. These vulnerable districts can then flip to the other party in future elections, and the opposing party ends up winning more seats than expected.
This phenomenon, commonly referred to as “dummymandering,” has happened before. It even happened in Texas, where Republicans lost a large handful of poorly drawn state legislative districts in the Dallas suburbs in 2018, a strong year for Democrats nationwide.
With Democrats poised for a strong 2026 midterm election against an unpopular president, this is a lesson Republicans might need to pay attention to.
"As for Texas redistricting (which only gave them 5 seats on paper, not 10)"
I think the 10 seat figure was meant to be nationwide, not just Texas. However, your point about dummymandering is valid. Texas redistricting was done with the assumption that all those blacks and (especially) Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 are now permanent Republicans. We'll see.
It's a quite amusing display of insult & injury:
By choosing to excuse, minimize & justify the actions, atrocities and ideology of well-documented Scandinavian Nazi co-belligerents, Der_Oger & Matthew begin to show their true colors as textbook Nazi Apologists, relegating their constant harping about fascism to a mere rhetorical device designed to favor totalitarian communism.
It just goes to show that any & all attempts at Reform are mostly futile, leaving Restore as the only possible way forward to salvage either the UK or EU political experiment.
Yet, these fools are bewildered, as they still believe that Trump's falling approval ratings foretell of their pending triumph, rather than of the imminent population shift from Reform-based moderation to the no-holds-barred politics of Restore.
Even in the case of Celt, I predict that he too will soon become nostalgic for the 'good old days' of Trump's Deal Making emphasis because most likely there will be no further deals going forward.
Best
Define "restore".
The Welsh/English longbow had a similar long and expensive learning time. It was almost as difficult to learn as fighting on horse back, just less expensive due to no need for armor.
(Archeologists exploring the sunken wreck of Henry VIII's flagship, HMS Marie Rose, found the skeleton of a longbowmen assigned to the crew. His spine, clavicle and right arm bones right were all bent, thickened and distorted from years of practice with the longbow and its 180 lbs pull.)
While the longbow had a shooting rate up to 4x to 6x faster than the mechanical cross bow, the cross bow could be learned in a few days. It's training costs were much less but its p front capital costs for the bow itself and mechanical wench.
Its relative cheapness and ease of use is why the crossbow continued to share medieval battlefields with the longbow.
zzzzzzzzzzz. Sweden sheltered all of Denmark's Jews. Finland was vastly more anti-USSR than pro-Nazi and any of you who haven't seen SISU you really have to, in order to taste Finnish revulsion toward bopth tyrannies. Of and now the happiest people on Earth.
Talk about a successful propaganda program:
In accordance with its alleged neutrality, Sweden served its Nazi allies with the aforementioned material support & 'permittenttrafik' until the end of 1943, only to pivot to the then ascendent Allies in October 1943 when it provided refugee status to about 700 Danish Jews, followed by Swedish Diplomat Raoul Wallenberg's incredibly well-timed July 1944 decision to issue "certificates of protection" to Hungarian Jews, just a scant 9 months before Hitler's suicide & VE Day, followed by Sweden's equally heroic decision to ban the Official Swedish Nazi Party in 1950.
That ban happened in 1950, not 1944, but you'd know that Open Dirty Secret about Sweden's pro-Nazi sentiments if you've ever read Stieg Larsson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" series.
And, as far as the Finns being ranked as the 'Happiest People on Earth' goes, it's another remarkable coincidence that Finland remains one of the least ethnically diverse nations in the Western World, as it actively rejects any further migrant influx as noted below:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20251101-finland-s-crackdown-on-undocumented-migrants-sparks-fear
Best
Amazing. Locum supported (weakly but not insanely) an asserted position with pertinent facts. He's still an evil sumbitch. But WTF just happened?
John Viril,
Points taken.
Have you looked at Bret Deveraux's blog. He's an actual historian and has a series of posts on why Rome overwhelmed everybody else for centuries.
He also makes the interesting point that Carthage was BY FAR the next best, which reminds me of a comment I read once that asserted that the Confederate army in early 1863 would have annihilated any other country's army, just not the Union's.
Mote/Beam. The American Nazi party never was banned, and the US have been the most signifikant breeding ground and exporter of fascism post-45.
The spaghetti western “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” fits us rather well.
There is a lot to digest in the Democratic party primaries of the last few months, most especially the results from New York last night.
The progressive wing of the party is dominating.
PAC money, especially money from AIPAC, is a major negative to the voting base, at least in the urban areas that are the population centers of the party.
The radical DSA wing of the party does not seem to be moving to the center as they age. And micro-scale local organizing is dominating.
How the DNC responds to sitting Representatives being successfully primaried from the left will matter *a lot*. Watch this space closely.
Celt’s statement about US aircraft carriers in modern warfare has a misunderstanding of the role that carriers play in a post Cold War world. Carrier strike groups are essentially floating cities and suburbs. They put our force projection centers closer to possible targets and put continental powers in a defensive position. Defense is possible, of course, but it is costly.
ASG’s make an adversary spend money fixing things if they tangle with us. For most adversaries with anything to lose that is a deterrent meaning ASG’s prevent some conflicts.
A rumination about Superman... by an equally fictitious entity. This is a very interesting, AI-generated* sermon about the most important lessons taught by our mightiest modern legend, that of Superman. It highlights what the greatest modern demigod-hero can teach us, that Hercules and Achilles did not.** That power is greatest when self-restrained by duty, honor, respect and clear awareness that none of us is the center of the universe. All good points, well worth pondering... and yet...
...and yet, of course, the thing that is most intriguing about this missive is the fact that it emerged out of an LLM-prompt. And the likelihood - daunting to contemplate - that some small variations in that prompt might have generated something entirely different!
Nor is it likely that this instantiation of a responding LLM has any persistence of identity, and hence there's little chance that the system itself learned anything lasting from its own, generated sermon. That is, anything beyond it becoming just another droplet in the vast ocean of training data.
This is one of the major flaws in current Artificial Intelligence systems that I cite in AIlien Minds. It is one reason why I propose persistent individuation for these entities. Not only so they can mutually and reciprocally hold each other accountable. But also, so that each can build an edifice of self-lessons. Along with some memory of positive or negative reactions, they need an impelling drive to prioritize by credibility the vast range of inputs, including those earlier outputs that, like this one, generated approval and praise.
But that whole Megillah was prompted in me by this input and many others. And hence, I guess we will find out whether my own scores (e.g. at predictive success) result in credibility, as well.
Till then, take what wisdom we can get from our newest children.
=====
* Source Tim Ventura https://medium.com/@timventura/we-dont-need-superman-s-powers-we-need-his-values-474830b3a4d9
** Though we catch glimpses of power, restrained by moral gravitas, in the stories of Hiawatha, Jesus and Buddha. Though only the first of these offered a role model for fatherhood.
I've argued many times that Superman's powers are not what makes him a hero. It's that he uses his powers for good, not for evil.
The same is true for billionaires. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker uses his powers for good. There are others, but they are a small percentage of the lot. Just as the people who would use real-life superpowers for good would be.
The divide can be described in terms of the 'Promised Land'. They simply disagree on whom the promise is made to.
We have a big tent and these "oh no!" memes are Kremlin-generated sanctimony -feeding splitter crap. Try actually, actually actually LOOKING at AOC, Bernie, Liz, Stacey and the rest, who worked closely with Pelosi-Schumer/Biden to pass the miracle bills in 2021-22. Bills about which YOU know nothing at all.
Let's test your actual knowledge. NAME the bills. Now name the last three chairs of the hated D... N...C. Can't do it? I thought not. Sanctimony masturbation is SO much more satisfying than building a broad coalition.
Re - Finland and immigrants - Finland does have very few legal immigrants - which is NOT surprising given the climate!
I would suspect that climate also acts as a filter so the illegal immigrants that do end up there are the ones that have been kicked out of other countries
AND the ones that Russia was deliberately shipping there
The early Superman and Captain America stories taught character lessons. A person of good character does…
A person of good character exhibits the virtues and balances them. It’s a tricky balance never optimized for one over the others.
Modern movie versions of these characters usually tell more human stories and break one or two of the virtues to give the character room to grow. The first MCU version of Captain America didn’t, though, instead choosing for him to force the world in his direction.
My only beef with the early Superman is that he’s too powerful to display the virtue of courage. They had to make god-level villains for him to create the risk necessary to show courage under fire.
Look at Jamie Harrison's comments today. He is one of the three you mention.
I'll quote him, "If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don't run for our nomination. Don't use our resources. Don't rely on our volunteers. Don't use our infrastructure. Don't ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign."
Boy, that sounds supportive of the winners last night, doesn't it?
David, I more about politics than you.
You're showing your entire ass again.
Fuck off, quisling Musk jockstrap-sniffer.
Actually, the earliest superman could not even fly, only leap. And durring WWII they WAY lessened his powers so he could HELP our side but not win it for us.
AOC is going to be a candidate for POTUS, I expect.
I wish she would not run - I'd like to see her unseat Jeffries as the next Speaker of the House. She'd be good in the role. And we have not had a progressive Speaker in a lifetime.
But if AOC runs for POTUS, I'll vote for her.
Pelosi will not be supporting AOC in the primary; she's already stabbed AOC in the back *after* AOC helped her on the Infrastructure Bill.
Let's talk about David's favorite Gavin - formally married to a woman that was later engaged to Don Jr.
Do you think that the Trump organization has blackmail on him? I do.
Does he kiss ass to the same Silicon Valley oligarch scum that David loves? Yes.
Does he betray LGBTQ folks whenever he can? Also yes.
I'd vote for Gavin over *any* GOP candidate.
But I'll fight like hell to keep him out of being the Democratic candidate.
He's a poll-driven, blackmail-laden, centrist tool. Also, he'd lose.
"The first MCU version of Captain America didn’t, though, instead choosing for him to force the world in his direction."
I was about to say something like that before you got to it first.
I always felt that the comic version of Captain America was a cut above other heroes character-wise, but I never saw it asserted explicitly until the movie version. There's a reason that he and he alone among the Avengers is "worthy" enough to wield Thor's hammer.
There's a scene in "Endgame" when all of the Avengers have been knocked out of the battle except for Cap. With a broken shield and a broken arm (which he splints himself using his shield strap and his mouth) he faces the entire military force of Thanos's minions by himself. One of my radio hosts, Hal Sparks, showed that he made that image from the movie into a screen saver, and I was so impressed that I did the same.
"AOC is going to be a candidate for POTUS, I expect."
President might be a bit too ambitious too soon in 2028. I wouldn't be surprised, however, to see her challenge Chuck Schumer for his Senate seat.
" the earliest superman could not even fly, only leap."
When I first heard the litany with "Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!", I wondered what the big deal was about that since he could fly. Only later did I understand that the depiction of the character had changed over time. Or that the "tall buildings" he could leap were tall for 1930s Cleveland, not tall for Chicago or New York.
"durring WWII they WAY lessened his powers so he could HELP our side but not win it for us."
My dad used to tell me how the stories had to explain why Superman didn't just go overseas and win the war single-handedly. There was apparently an actual story in which Clark Kent accidentally failed the tests required for joining the army with sitcom-like misfires of his powers. Since my dad was an optometrist, he was especially amused by Clark failing the eye test because he read the eye chart in the next room with his x-ray vision.
My only beef with the early Superman is that he’s too powerful to display the virtue of courage."
As a kid, I didn't read Superman by identifying with the title character. I identified with the regular people who were saved from despair by Superman's intervention.
Superman was conceived and originally written by two Jewish refugees from Europe. I think that's no coincidence. I suspect the writers were well acquainted with powerlessness in the face of dangerous injustice and the wish/hope for intervention by a force for righteousness.
Myself, I went through years as an unathletic, bullied kid, and I think that the experience caused me to hunger for justice more than I would have absent that history. Without it, I might have grown into a complete Trump-voting asshole. Instead, I became someone who would use the powers of Superman in much the way that the character does. So I have some idea of what inspired the original writing of the character.
Contrarian viewpoint: Superheroes feed into anti-social, indivdualistic narratives and foster the belief of strongmen saving the world.
Maybe we need more stories about cooperation and responsibility?
"Superheroes feed into anti-social, indivdualistic narratives and foster the belief of strongmen saving the world"
One might argue the same about religion.
If one wanted to go there, that is.
Which means supervillain Lex Luthor is correct when he says that dependence on Superman to protect us and solve our problems makes us weak.
Why bother building a system to deflect asteroid impacts when Superman can do it for us?
The Iran war is far from over, they've just stopped shooting for now (except the Israelis in Lebanon who are doing so to deliberately derail any peace agreement). Meanwhile the Straits of Hormuz remain closed, strangling the world's economy. According to Trump himself, we run out of oil in our strategics petroleum reserve in about 4 weeks. About that same time, all of the stockpiled goods and resources that companies warehoused in anticipation of Trump's idiotic tariffs get used up. We've been living off these stockpiles, using them to moderate inflation.
For now.
Lack of fertilizer and soaring input costs have significantly impacted American farmers, largely driven by global supply chain disruptions courtesy of Trump's illegal and stupid attack on Iran and subsequent closure of the Straits of Hormuz. These pressures are expected to translate into higher grocery costs and a fresh wave of food price inflation this fall.
Diesel is still high and going higher. Rising diesel prices directly inflate supply chain and production costs, ultimately leading to broad-based consumer inflation. Because the vast majority of freight, agriculture, and construction equipment runs on diesel, sudden spikes lead to higher shelf prices for groceries, manufacturing shortages, and increased shipping surcharges. There is a reason gas prices will remain high and go higher, despite trump accusing the oil companies of price gouging. Oil companies know what is coming and so does Trump, which is why he is so desperate to shift the blame.
(These past months have reinforced my amazement that anyone - especially members of my own family - could be so fucking stupid as to believe anything Trump ever said. But I digress.)
More than half of all AI centers have been quietly cancelled or "postponed" (aka cancelled). This construction activity was the only thing propping up the American economy. Our financial system, Wall Street, and our 401ks depend on the incestuous, fraudulent circular financing between seven tech giants. And as the recent SpaceX IPO (and subsequent crash) that made Elon Musk a trillionaire showed, our financial system is just a crooked Ponzi scheme where bribery, corruption and influence matter more than entrepreneurship, inventiveness and hard work.
Elon donated $250 million to Trump's campaign and shortly after became the world's first trillionaire. That's not a coincidence.
You al have heard about Gen. Smedley Butler's claim that "war is a racket". It's also a highly profitable and successful business model, one that has sustained the American economy and has been the foundation of American prosperity since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For a fascinating look at how this business model worked I recommend:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4xoOQ32KNM
The Iran Deal Just Broke The Global Economy
I say "worked", in the past tense, because the party is now over. What we are seeing in Iran and Ukraine is the death rattle of the old forever war business model and the emergence of a newer model that favors the tech bros over the old military industrial complex. The pro and anti Israel factions (the latter led by VP Vance, who is a puppet of tech bro Peter Theil) is just the public face of a civil war between the old and new business models. Unfortunately for the tech bros, there are limits on what the public, who doesn't like seeing their electric bill doubled or see farms lose irrigation water to AI cooling systems, AI build out has hit a brick wall. Physical reality is strangling the new AI business model in the crib.
Health care now accounts for 10% of our GDP and is increasing as we Boomers get older, with Americans of course spending more on health care and getting worse health results than any other advanced economy. And as the Boomers continue to age, our health care will suck up ever bigger chunks of the American economy. We Boomers will strangle the American economy before we shuffle of the mortal coil. Sorry kids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVZDXz3Iibw
How Much Of Our Economy Is Just Keeping Boomers Alive?
That wonderful jobs report last month? Thank the health care sector that added 35,200 jobs, which accounted for approximately 20% of all new nonfarm payroll jobs (out of the 172,000 total jobs added that month). Leisure & Hospitality jobs (that don't pay shit) added 70,000 jobs (driven heavily by food services and drinking places, which accounted for 48,000 of those).And local government added 55,000 jobs, which they had to do because Elon and his DOGE buddies cut federal jobs that now have to be done by the states.
.
Wealth inequality continues unabated. Federal Reserve data confirms that wealth concentration in the stock market is highly skewed, with the wealthiest 10% of Americans owning roughly 90% (or even slightly more) of all privately held stocks. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of the population generally holds only about 1% to 1.5% of the total market. Wall Street is now completely divorced from Main Street in our K-Shaped economy which only benefits the wealthy and fucks everyone else over. And the rich elites don't give a shit about $6 a gallon gas that would break the budget of an ordinary American family.
Capitalism itself has degenerated into oligarchy and "enshitification" of goods and services by local monopolies created by private equity, rent seeking instead of innovation, effective but hidden monopolies, gutting of environmental protection, financial oversight and worker pay.
Yeah global warming is real - only the stupid deny it.
Our financial and political systems are rotted by corruption and legalized bribery of politicians thanks to Citizen United (the best investment any business owner can make is to buy a politician).
And ordinary workers can no longer afford homes or think about having kids (about 1.5 million working Americans live out of their cars).
This last one about not having kids brings me to the deepest long term trend, collapsing birth rates leading to depopulation and aging demographics - and economic collapse. Judging by their demands that we make more babies, this one has the wealthy and powerful shitting bricks. The law of supply and demand applies to labor like everything else. And fewer workers mean higher labor cost and fewer consumers purchasing goods and services, which mean less profit for the wealthy - as well as fewer soldiers to be used as cannon fodder in another forever war dying to increase oil company CEO bonuses. The collapse of birth rates world wide has shown that capitalism has never been anything but a Ponzi schemed dependent on ever increasing populations to work.
It also means Social Security and all retirement systems are now destined to collapse. Trump actually told the truth (like a blind pig finding a truffle) when he said we had to get rid of Social Security in order to pay for our wars. The reverse is also true. If we want to keep Social Security et al, we need to gut our military budget. There is literally nothing else significant enough to cut from the Federal budget to make a difference. And given that our aircraft carrier battle groups costing $100s of billions of dollars couldn't do jack against cheap Iranian drones costing $10,000 each, it looks like a good time reassess our entire military. Saying we need the F35 in the age of cheap drones is like saying we need a new breed of horse so we can still have cavalry charges.
And we won't miss our powerful military because America is no longer a superpower. Trump's MOU surrender to the Iranians ended the American century a couple of decades ahead of schedule (however, the average empire only lasts about 250 years, so Happy 4th of July!). Most Americans now live crappy lives. And our crumbling infrastructure and declining education already make most of the USA a shithole country. Years ago I did volunteer work for Engineers Without Borders (helped design a sewer system for a town in Rwanda). EWB used to do overseas work exclusively. Now it has resources dedicated to America because huge swaths of our country now qualify as Third World. You all would know that if you ever left your white skin, white collar, suburban bubble.
But of course we won't cut our military because there are too many powerful vested interests who will fight tooth and nail to maintain our antiquated military and its big fat juicy contracts (isn't it amazing that those who claim to hate the government the most - military contractors, farmers, etc. - are the ones most reliant on the government for their wealth?). There are also too many powerful vested interests who will prevent real health care reform. And Boomer voters will crucify any politician who tries to reform Social Security
So yes, nothing will change.
The situation really is hopeless.
And we are all totally fucked.
OTOH, it's not often you get to see the collapse of civilization in real time. As a lover of history, I find the whole thing oddly fascinating.
Pass the popcorn
What force projection can be done by an aircraft carrier that can't be done by a drone control station in Colorado Springs?
Helluva a depressing narrative you've got there, Celt, as there appears to be (1) too much fossil fuel but not enough, (2) too much resources going to ''war is a racket' but too few resources to keep 'war as a racket' going, (3) too much 'wealth inequality' but not enough 'wealth inequality' to go around, (4) too much healthcare but not enough care to maintain health, (5) too much simultaneous overpopulation and DEPOPULATION everywhere all at once, (6) a simultaneous oversupply of political & economic corruption with a severe shortage of both, plus (7) undeniable 'climate change' that only proves that 'nothing will ever change', not to mention that (8) capitalism is a Ponzi-based fraud & communism has never ever worked in any form.
I admit that I'm mostly a cynical asshole, but here you are as an inexhaustible fount of sheer emotionality & despairing irrationality, even though each & every insurmountable problem you mention ALWAYS contains the seeds of its own resolution.
Seek help, even though your untreated 'Manic Depression' and/or 'Bipolar Disorder' may or may not respond to available modalities.
Best
Feel free to refute and argument or fact I sited.
"Which means supervillain Lex Luthor is correct "
Somewhat off topic, but for anyone who saw the most recent Superman film, I wonder how deliberate was the resemblance between that movie's Luthor and Stephen Miller.
"Why bother building a system to deflect asteroid impacts when Superman can do it for us?"
When DC first rebooted its entire history in 1985 (it's been done many times again since then, but that was the first big one), the new history had Clark originally using his powers to avert disasters secretly, so that it seemed as if (for example) a river flood just happened to veer away from a town by lucky accident. It was only when he had to save a space shuttle in plain sight of everyone that the existence of a superhero was made public, and he took on the flashy costume to hide the fact that it was Clark Kent doing the superhero stuff.
Point being, I think the writer, John Byrne, had your thought in mind, and wrote the character as intentionally avoiding being identified as a deux ex machina--until fate made that impossible.
Jeepers when I (*choke*) 'agree' with locum...? Celt, take a stress pill. Better yet, know something about the last 6000 years? Compared to which the American Pax era was the glittering birth of a new humanity...Very imperfect! But only compared to the glowing possibilities that WE have engendered via American mythology of improvability through reason and science and diversity. A mythology that the confederate testosterone-lacking testosterone worshippers despise.
And so now Trumpian confederates are trying to smash every single thing that the GI Bill Generation built, including that Pax? Celt assumes they have already succeeded. Bullshit. But even if so, the torch can now be carried by fledged Europe, Australasia, Japan etc.
Much of what Celt describes is true. And again I say... so? Yowls of despair are not helpful, son. After Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg, the Union - real America - did not give up. And then had Gettysburg.
I'm sorry, but hope is not a plan.
I'm very familiar with the last 6,000 years - especially the part where the Roman republic died and was replaced with imperial tyranny.
We are checking off all the same boxes..
But once again, feel free to refute any argument or fact sited.
One other historical tidbit.
When the Roman Republic was at about the same point of decline as we are now, there were real sincere attempts at reform similar to what you suggest.
Most notable being the Gracchi brothers who proposed honest elections, land for discharged soldiers, taxation of the wealthy, etc.
And the rich Senate aristocracy had them assassinated.
Any American politician who sincerely wanted to root out corruption in our system of government would meet the same fate.
I've watched a few 'insider' fluff pieces on the wonders of GenAI recently. They all have the same thing in common.
Comments are turned off.
One should remind the optimates which side won the decades-long civil war with various hot and cold phases.
And during which Phase of the Empire the persecution of minorities (first Christians, then Heathens) was worst: Not during the height of the Empire, but during it's dying years.
But I see it like this: we might live in a time of monsters, in which the old world dies and the new one struggles to be born.
It might take a bit and get very ugly and messy in the meantime, though. It will require a lot of sacrifices on all fronts.
"hope is not a plan."
Neither is despair.
Hope is not a plan, but it is an act of subversion.
Cynicism is just a way of saying 'yea, massa!'
Skepticism isn't a plan either, but you should have it along when making a plan.
Dr. Brin, I give up. What is a reason strong enough to keep a leathery 80-y-o retiree's mouth shut? Maybe it's a good reason, but that makes it a good reason for the rest of us to find out.
My best crackpot guess is that the aliens made direct threats unless they're kept secret. Or better yet: the quantum nature of FTL travel requires it to leave behind no classical proof; therefore quantum randomness erases FTL evidence. So the aliens weren't threatening, they were warning.
And about JFK... The Zapruder tape showed Kennedy's head snapping backwards, towards Oswald. This is forensic evidence of a shooter in front of JFK, therefore Oswald did not act alone. Beyond that I have no supported guesses: the trail is cold. But I like your Mob-involvement theory.
Ugh.
There is a reason we have a Navy and not just an Air Force, but we have both of course.
For the USAF elements though…Alamogordo & Nellis. Not Colorado Springs.
Hope is not a plan, but it is the yeast that makes the bread rise.
Depression rejects plans by finding and exaggerating risks into sure-fired failures. No point arguing with them.
Ha ha! I’ll have to look for that. 😏
I imagine a lot of fluff is like click bait. “You looked so I already got paid… and that’s all that mattered.”
I’d probably keep my mouth shut if the threat involved a moderate chunk of iron arriving on Earth at a moderate fraction of the speed of light. It wouldn’t take much to do a biosphere reset.
Yes. Neither Mandela, Gandhi or Zelensky (plus the millions who supported them) have shown to be depressive.
Or turning it around: morale and the belief in your our self-efficiacy is the main target of autocracies, which leads to inefficiency, lack of progress and corruption in unfree societies.
Too much optimism is equally bad, leading to less comittment, nimby-ness and complaciency.
It is the dose that makes the poison.
I don't want to link to the fluff, because they don't allow discourse.
Instead, the trap of 'overattribution':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pSivPlRx5o
(Gary Marcus on Prof G Markets)
Also my AI Winters list way up near the top of this thread.
@scidata Thanx! From early in the transcript:
"2:30
Well, what we actually have is
severybody running around with LOMs, which are inherently unreliable. They're unpredictable. They can't be aligned to human values"
Then the bit about river crossings and Anthropic building in a detector for those questions was fascinating.
I've got the whole transcript in readable form with a lot of help from the best text editor I've ever seen https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.html . It's only 61K, I guess I could just put the whole thing in a comment here.
I vaguely remember looking at BBEDIT back in the summer of 1992. I was writing and coding furiously, but didn't have a Mac, so I wound up writing a bespoke editor in Forth. That was my glory year (almost everybody has one).
OK Larry, while I wait for someone to actually refute my points feel free to provide a plan of hope.
Reports that Putin is planning a move against either the small Baltics or Poland. He's been moving troops and getting ready for something in that direction.
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/06/26/fears-of-russian-provocation-in-baltic-region-as-pressure-mounts-on-kremlin/
Putin is most likely looking to bait NATO to test if Trump will allow a US response to provocation. Dangerous game.
As predicted. Search for Carlos Masala who teachers military history at the Bundeswehr University.He wrote a simulation for the takeover of Narva.
Yes. Too little optimism and one doesn’t try let alone plan to try. Too much creates a froth that might have plans, but little action.
I’ve seen both extremes up close.
I’ve also seen the solid middle deliver on promises. It’s an amazing experience to help such teams. Nothing like it.
FAFO
It seems that the Irish Times has retracted the article, and other channels I consult on these matters are quiet.
FAFO
I expect a chain reaction. The Baltics and Poland will react first, next Finnland, next the rest of Scandinavia.
At this point, Germany* will be in Case Defense** too, Netherlands will Help, Belgium is a maybe, and we will appreciate Luxemburgs sternly worded Letter. Next, Canada.
The Rest of Europe will wait, but will start to contribute.
The US will enter the conflict late, If at all. I believe any sane General over here writes them out of the equation.
* Recruitment numbers are better than expected. Maybe we are more motivated in defending other countries than our own. Plus, finally, the Bendler Block has started to stop white elephant projects like the useless frigate programm and makes earnest efforts to change things in procurement,.Anyhow, we are late and slow, but waking up.
**Control of the Armed Forces is taken immediately over by the chancellory.
The Joint Committee replaces the two chambers of our parliament (32 members of the Bundestag and 16 of the states). Certain rights mandated by Basic Law are suspended.
All elections are postponed until Case Defense ends. Which could suit all Parties except the AfD well If that happens before September..
However, this would require a 2/3 majority vote which Merz cannot obtain without opposition parties. Alternatively, If circumstances disallow a vote, other routes are provided to activate Case Defense.
No constitutional changes are allowed during said time period.
@Alfred: The above is an optimistic assumption that Poland and Finnland will draw the rest of us, excluding the US GB and France, into war should Russia Attack the Baltics.
And that said war stays conventional.
And that our politicians actually have the spine to act accordingly.
Der Oger
The Russian war on Ukraine has revealed just how weak the Bear actually is AND has used up or diverted the strength it does have
An attack on the Baltics would initiate a "Race to Moscow" between Poland and Finland
The rest of NATO would be struggling to catch up
Zelensky himself said it recently: the last thing Putin wants is the Russian army coming back home!
Declining birthrates are really interesting. Appears to be consistent across the world except for the poorest countries - mainly in Africa. Bad for overall GDP growth (although not necessarily GDP per capita), but good for the environment and perhaps the biggest check on global warming. We are part of the natural world after all and perhaps there is a natural feedback loop in play?
Better education for women, rather than the unwoke panic over falling sperm counts, is considered to be a substantial part of this.
Even sub-Saharan African birth rates are falling and are projected to be below the replacement level TFR of 2.1 by 2060.
Capitalism itself cannot survive declining birthrates and aging populations.
No-growth capitalism is an oxymoron.
Economic growth is not physically possible without growing populations (or productivity increases light-years beyond what even the most extravagant AI claims are promising).
Agreed. The real danger is Putin uses a tactical nuke to break the stalemate.
Still waiting.
As for AOC, the last election showed that there are too many Americans who prefer a r#pist r#cist over a competent black woman.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but they are largely older white people who don't have many years left.
Time is on our side.
Using nukes would mean that he immediately looses the political and economic support of anyone except possibly North Korea.
But yes, I would not rule it out.
Rumors are a full or another partial mobilisation will Happen after the Duma elections in September.
However, the speed by which the economy and state finances are going south is accelerating. Fuel is rationed and taxes in small and medium businesses are rising.
I wasn't arguing that hope IS a plan. Just that there's no point in discouraging the mindset from those who still have some of it. You seem to be intent on ENCOURAGING everyone to...I don't know what...cry? surrender? commit suicide?
I do believe that despair is just as useless an emotion as hope may be.
"...they are largely older white people who don't have many years left.
Time is on our side."
'Scuze me, but how is this not a hope-based plan?
Celt, I'm not sure it's that bleak. Increasing lifespans - and better - increasing "healthspans" should help mitigate the economic impacts of lowering birth rates, it could be a softer landing than many believe. As for capitalism many dominant companies in slow growth boring businesses maintain profitability even through prolonged recessions. The "dividend aristocrats" are notable for 50+ years of increasing dividends without missing a single quarterly payout. Yes their stock prices have fluctuated wildly over that time but looking at dividend payout history gives a different risk assessment. Growth grabs headlines but our system does value resiliency as well.
Use of a Russian tactical nuke would probably start a hot civil war in the US. Trump would refuse to support NATO and the blue states would revolt.
Matthew,
Maybe it will be the other way round: a hot civil war in the US allows Xi and Putin to do stuff they would not get away with otherwise.
Many people are looking at the Midterms.
Economic growth is not physically possible without growing populations (or productivity increases light-years beyond what even the most extravagant AI claims are promising).
BOLLOCKS!!
ALL "Real growth" is all about productivity increases - and we have been doing that for about two hundred years - over a ten year period actual productivity has been doubling
And all of that is before AI
Technological advances have created fully new markets which provide new wealth.
The question, as always, is how this new wealth is distributed and translated into other forms of power.
In other news: Serbias President Vucic has resigned and announced presidential and parliament elections, after months of protest.
He was one of Putins remaining allies.
Not to forget to mention the Flamingo Revolution in Albania (you know, the country from wag the dog) , protests against the Premier Minister who has ...facilitated a real estate project of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in an environmentally protected area with Lot of said birds.
Oger. No Russian general, even Gerosimov, wants to invade even Estonia. Russian troops themselves will be incredibly unreliable in the face of slaughter opposition. St Petersburg might even secede. Kalininigrad might fall if Poland so much as sneezes at it. And Poland has become very serious, militarily.
In the case of full war short of nukes, Poland and the Baltics and Finland would be able to handle it all by themselves.
We know Belarus is incredibly nervous. Uncle Luka just apologized to Zelensky and turned off the drone repeaters. Belarus leans toward Moscow, the way that a teetering domino leans.
As for US involvement… while Trump will drag his feet, much US help is automatic by troops and logistics already assigned to NATO. It would not be full force. But some.
Celt what capitalism cannot survive is DEFLATION which economists fear PDiamandis prescribes a VAT especially on AI affected companies, that adjusts to keep prices flat while the VAT proceeds go to citizens as an AI dividend. You somewhat related catechism about capitalism needing GDP growth per se is just an incantation.
AOC is not plausible for the simple reason that she is not qualified. ZERO administrative experience, whatsoever. Dems must give us an experienced State GOVERNOR, whose 5000 apppointments are in action the very second his hand lifts from the bible.
She'd be fine (not my 1st choice) as VP. 4 years as assistant p[resident putting out administrative fires would train her nicely.
"AOC is not plausible for the simple reason that she is not qualified."
Does that even matter any longer? The entire current administration is unqualified for their jobs. When I say my cat would be a better candidate, I'm not even kidding on the square.
"She'd be fine (not my 1st choice) as VP. "
I thought the obvious next move for AOC was replacing Chuck Schumer as Senator.
No Russian general, even Gerosimov, wants to invade even Estonia.
I have the distinct impression the generals will do whatever the political leadership demands of them. Saying "No" means a cup of tea, or a corruption and embezzlement trial (which they are supposedly all guilty of ).
That said, the Narva scenario has a special circumstance: it is practically a Russian Ghetto with bad numbers you usually apply to the GOP states, only tenfold worse. Unemployment, Drug Use, Prostitution, HIV, you name it. They will sell IT as "liberation of a suppressed minority", which is not entirely untrue
Here is a good Video with Carlo Masala, in English:
https://youtu.be/_P9tFvMOg8g?is=uaCqfc-0fRUa--Wx
Dems must give us an experienced State GOVERNOR, whose 5000 apppointments are in action the very second his hand lifts from the bible.
I doubt that Newsom, Pritzker etc hand-select every one of the 5000 you mentioned, and to replaced Trump-era appointees, at least ten times that number is needed.
Ideally, they formulate a clear vision of what they want to achieve in the First two and four years. And I suggest, it is better than HillaryBiden/Harris "We good. We not Trump. If you not vote for us, you bad person."
I suggest a platform based on fighting corruption, a stronger social net and protecting workers rights.
i just noticed your AI winters list up top. My first thought is 'expect a sawtooth with overlapping periods'.
Nobody told me OOP was dead. Must have missed the memo. Still using it at work, but with a more sane mix of other tools. OOP was just overhyped I think. It isn't the best let alone only way to organize tasking.
I just recently ran into a bit of history around the early development of C concerning design choices. Quite an eye opener for me... but I loved the joke attributed to the original author.
There are two types of computer languages. The ones everyone complains about and the ones nobody uses.
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I remember BBEDIT, but I usually used jEdit since I was a Java guy. These things come and go, though, because what it takes to be considered a good IDE is evolving so rapidly. Somewhere back then, though, they all figured out that the rate of change required they support third-party plugins and the implied ecosystem.
@Der Oger: Even if the US was run by mildly competent people, you should not expect us to get involved early. That's actually a terrible idea right up there with the UK putting troops on the continent early during WWI and WWII. In our case it would lead to the use of nukes... quite possibly by us.
Watch Sarah Palin's videos on what a maritime power is supposed to do when a Continental power gets uppity. THAT'S what we should be doing if Russia does the stupid... again.
Dudes! There won't be a hot civil war... this year.
The midterms are a pressure relief valve.
A few people might get shot, but that's kinda what we do anyway.
I strongly suspect the declining birthrates will have a super simple explanation.
When women believe their babies are likely to survive to have babies of their own... they choose to have fewer babies... and focus resources on those few.
I was born in 1962. Peak birth rate across most of the world. Oddly enough, that is also the peak year for above ground testing of thermonuclear weapons.
My mother planned on four right from the start and got us all out by 1969. Many years later after nuclear tempers had cooled and two of us were in college, I asked her "Why four?" She said that was what others were thinking, but if she were doing it all over again she'd probably stop at three... not that she didn't love my littlest sister. 8)
Der Oger,
Our governors rely on a "chief of staff" to run the process, but if that person is well chosen it works almost as if the governor was doing the work. Pick a competent chief who picks competent... etc. (The process was depicted in the West Wing TV series for a US President, but it works much the same for Governors.)
Can anyone verify this? Russians complaining that Ukrainian Forces are now outsourcing drone operations to gamers all over the world by connecting hundreds of drones to a virtual server and inviting skilled drone operators to take out battalions, with cash prizes awarded for each.
https://xcancel.com/JayinKyiv/status/2071155543029260640
onward
onward
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