If you know business and government, the title says it all.
Put forward employee owned companies of people who have served in high level positions - one in each party - to serve as contractors and as a pool of appointees for each new administration. Their clearances can be quickly renewed, their ethics paperwork created and, for the current administration, unsolicited proposals should be submitted for both tariff negotiations and to get us out of the Iran war. I would say Israel could handle the negotiations, but Iran will not talk to them.
This could be done tomorrow by each party national committee or by prominent ex-appointees who would invite their colleagues to join them in such an effort. We cannot afford to wait - unless you support the goal of blowing up the world to trigger the Rapture (which is not a thing).
News Update - Iran, Ukraine, Gaza and the GOP Majority
I have not been posting on the foreign events news of the day - the wars on Gaza, Iran and Ukraine. They are the folly of old men and cannot stand. Trump, Netanyahu and Putin will not win their wars. Even if God will not punish them personally (God does not do that), he does punish nations and regimes.
The peace movement in Israel will finally triumph and Gaza and the West Bank will be given justice - by which I mean their populations can build settlements in Israel as Arab Israelis, who will eventually take full citizenship. Why anyone would want to live in that region of the world - which is desert were it not for irrigation - is beyond me. It is like moving to the South or the Southwest. Global warming will end both regions. Even if San Antonio, where I am from, were not ruined by climate, I found last time I visited 20 years ago that you really cannot go home. My condo unit has been home for about ten years (on June 4th). It is now home - until it is not. Same is true of the Middle East, the Donbas and Crimea. They will go back to where they should be. God's will in action.
The balance of this video is about the deal between the not-yet and never-will-be Attorney General giving Trump the benefit of Estoppel and retribution for his followers. This kind of corruption (not the Iraq War or the prospect of Social Security reform) is what costs the GOP majorities - leading to what amounts to constitutional majorities in both chambers. Unless Trump dies, he will be impeached and removed, Blanche will be dealt with, the deal will be unmade and Citizens United will be overturned by an iron clad constitutional amendment. Capitalism always goes too far.
As was said in Lettice and Lovage - to Trump, Netanyahu and Putin - "A long goodbye to you."
Insisting that nothing passes until the Save America Act does contains unacceptable risks and should be dropped. Let me detail them:
The Act is almost certain to be voided by the Federal Courts, including and especially the Supreme Court. They have spoken about the responsibility to assure free and fair elections and adequate representation. They won't even hear the case, as federal courts will be fairly unanimous in condemning the Act.
The Act, if passed, will be ignored in Democratic precincts - but will keep Republicans from voting where their documentation is not available - especially women.
The Act is blatantly partisan and will violate the ideas of fair play that most Americans, especially Republicans, hold.
Congress will not pass the Act. If all other legislation is blocked or vetoed, the public will react in a negative manner to the Administration, even Republicans.
More importantly, legislation that must be passed likely will be. Most importantly, veto overrides are likely to succeed - meaning that two-thirds of the Senate will start voting together against your agenda. Once that group has formed, impeachment and removal will be on their agenda.
Watch your back if you live in NYC or DC. The phrase for the day is situational awareness. The word for today is Vacation if you live in either place.
If you are in Iran or Russia (and Russia will collapse without its drones) the word is revolution. The US will not come and free you. If you cannot free yourselves, you are not worthy of freedom. Ladies and ethnic minorities, if Mullahs and GRU agents are still not un-alived, you have chosen your slavery.
The Washington Web, Trump's Abuse of Power, Quit Driving for Lent
1. The reporters fired from the Washington Post metro and sports sections need to create their own web site to report news - The Washington Web. Sell ads, compete, make the Post regret their decision. Anyone with boss skills who cannot work should do this, even if for free. I've been doing that on tax policy since the early 2010s. If I can be come known in the budget and tax game, others can certainly do the same on local news and sports. I might even jump on board, given my experience on the Examiner and in District Government. Who's with me!
2. Trump is imposing a 10% tariff on all nations because he can and because the Supreme Court clipped his wings. He identified no real need, he is doing it for spite. This is the very definition of abuse of power. Impeach him now. (Congress should enact tariffs - probably at the VAT rate of every nation who charges such a tax but zero rates it at the border when exporting).
3. Welcome to Lent. Pope Leo XIV gave a moving challenge - although not moving enough for me to remember it. I urge an act of solidarity with the planet and the poor. Don't drive to work. Take the bus and the train if possible for commuting - or car pool - do something. Since 1957 or so (we know for sure since 1980), the water temperature in The Barents Sea - which is the only body of water of any size adjacent to the Arctic Ocean - has gone up, on average 7 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. This process started when we traded in our trams and trolleys for cars and busses powered by gasoline. Oil and coal heat (and power) are declining and have been for a while now. Using gasoline has not. It is the main thing that has gone up with modern warming.
Global warming is causing people to die and threatens the food supply - especially for what is grown in US heartland. Lent started as a way for the rich to be in solidarity with the poor so that everyone ate (so that the poor would be alive to keep working the land). The Church made sure that happened. We need to do this again - so quit driving for Lent unless your penitential practice is entirely self-centered. Given the ongoing tragedy of climate change - shift your penance to what matters.
Join me and the rest of the poor on the bus and train.
The question of whom Luke was associated with is most interesting. The thinking had been Paul, but Acts and the Epistles do not agree, so that's a no. P wish scriptures - with Mark exposing this analysis. Matthew's Gospel is, in part, included in the Didache which likely originated with James the Just, brother of Jesus. John is advanced theology - which may or may not have been written by the son of Zebedee and Salome (the sister of Jesus). That leaves Peter.
Mark had been associated with Peter, but that is incorrect. The association between Peter and Mark was because of the assumption that Mark was the scribe of Peter - who was the first Pope and therefore wrote the first gospel. No proof exists for this at all, just pious belief - which is the most dangerous kind. The fact that Luke starts Acts with a sermon by Peter on Pentecost is the obvious clue as to who worked with whom. Peter is so central to the early part of Acts that it could only be sourced by one of his followers. The question is, where was Luke written? That gives us the best answer.
AI is a consumer or technical product that cannot buy itself to be by itself. There are four basic cognitive functions according to Jung - creativity/intuition, thinking, feeling/values and sensation. They are best used within four cultural arenas (realism, hierarchy, activism and individuality/retreatism). The best AI provides the user with input from all four functions - with an independent thinking check verifying intuitive creativity. They cannot both use natural language models. Thinking must be rigorous in fact checking where intuition is concerned with the general paradigms of the group (which generative AI is good at teasing out). The thinking subroutine must independently check the intuitive against both sensory reality and questioning the group intuition - or if the intuitive is "introverted" and comes up with one solution rather than suggesting many - thinking must than look at the broad base of knowledge as it exists in an organized fashion - checking some kind of index in opposition to a best guess scenario. Intuition must also be checked against values/feelings/ethics. AI cannot have its own - but it can look at both societal positions and an ethical values matrix.
It needs to report on all four (or 8) functions and how they relate to other social actors within an organization or society. Part of the ethics of AI is to be allowed to look at the analysis of other AI solutions by competing actors. For example, if a corporation hierarchy is using an AI to do the above analysis, an AI serving either egalitarian or reactionary organizations should be able to deconstruct the competing analysis. The question is how to manage disclosure of facts and values. References must be supplied and verifiable to each side. Individualists and realists (aka consumers and the working class) should also be in the client position and AI for each way of life should be able to project what the AI in the other ways of life will recommend. Also to how the human actors would respond, even and especially without AI assistance.
Again, let me emphasize that the AI systems proposed above are tools, not something with agency. Indeed, using such a tool should not replace humans, it should educate them so that neither some shadow AI or more likely those who operate against their interests - capitalist hierarchs and reactionaries - cannot exploit them.
No Customs and Border Patrol Agent involved in the murder of a fellow federal employee can be allowed to leave Minneapolis - from their agency head on down. If the agency head ordered agents to obstruct citizens filming their activities, he is an accessory to murder. He needs to talk to local FBI and prosecutors before leaving - and if he gives what would be truthful answers or does not answer, he must stay exactly where he is - although he should be immediately fired - as well as all agents involved who discharged their weapons or who obstruct any investigation.
Yes, the right to life is a right to not be executed. Because their mothers cannot be executed while pregnant, this right has always been secure.
Do unborn children have a right to vengeance against those who harm their mothers?
Yes, but this law also affirms a federal right to abortion and this should have been argued in Dobbs.
What are liberty interests regarding abortion?
For women, the right to have available abortion providers and to be immune to questioning on whether the police have a power to question them about receiving a therapeutic abortion.
Doctors want to provide the best care for their patients, which includes both saving their lives and their health - because carrying a pregnancy doomed by a life ending defect is increasingly harmful as the pregnancy is long and immunity from prosecution, investigation and their freedom to participate in their medical society - and for others to participate as well. The latter is a property right. Making abortion illegal means that the government must be given access to the medical records of their patients - and subject doctors to second guessing as to when the pregnancy began. This will stop some doctors from performing procedures to end the pregnancy when the child is already dead - which risks the life of the mother - not just her health.
Medical societies have a freedom of association right to police their membership, as non-members are already prohibited from performing abortions - and no one is arguing that this should change. The problem may be that some doctors do not like the concept of abortion - so rather than arguing the issue internally, they seek common cause with other elites in the political realm.
State government is, by nature, more conservative. Most voters don't pay attention to Assembly elections, especially liberal voters. Elites, like doctors, lawyers and clergy, have an outsized influence - especially the latter - although COVID has decreased this. People thought missing services was a sin, especially Catholics. Making Mass optional changed that perception. This leaves Catholics who are on the fence on abortion immune from October letters from the bishop on who to vote for.
BTW, on the God issue - God does not care about the issue. He has no sovereignty or rights to protect. Any God who needs such assistance is a reflection of the clergy, not the divinity. Souls also are fine with leaving the planet and the associated pain and going back to Heaven. People get squeamish about those abortion procedures which cause a pain reaction when performed - but the antidote for that is sedation (rather than simply stopping the heart with sodium chloride - which is painful) or for confining later term abortion to induction of labor - because no one has a right to not be born.
The ACLU and National Center for Abortion Rights made a mistake in not answering the questions in the Dobbs oral argument regarding viability. Viability is the ability to be born - in essence, citizenship. This is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, which stops the states from changing that boundary. Ceding that point would give power to Congress to ban abortion before viability. That was too much of a concession for the Respondents, whose argument was based on a right to abortion rather than denying the power of state government. Now state government has the power it sought.
This issue is as much about power as rights. The Church wants power over its members and employees (its called the freedom of the Church - which it invokes in gay marriage cases - wrongly). The GOP wants power in states where they are favored by religious demography - but again, that power is waning and there is a reaction to Dobbs.
Vice President Harris thought this would help her win the White House, not counting on both mid-range Catholics for whom a federal abortion law is a bridge too far - so they stayed home - and sexism in the Black and Hispanic voting blocs. Ignoring abortion was Obama's secret sauce. Catholic surrogates - like me - carried the water on this. Harris and Clinton made promises that made some uncomfortable.
This leads us to the core question: the control of men over women's bodies. In some states, they say it out loud by requiring that fathers be notified and allow an abortion to occur. Most places they claim that this is not one of their intentions. These people are lying. Note the pregnant pauses in the video when I bring that subject up. Not without irony.
When talking about a right to abortion, the Respondents should have gone there rather than citing precedent. If the women had been united on this point, Roberts would have voted with them.
Men want to know when their partners are pregnant - not just their wives. It really is about control and the basic rights of women over their lives.
Trump is a dottering old fool. Make a deal with him with a secret protocol that makes it expire on noon on January 20, 2029 - or sooner if God wills it.
There may be intelligence that calls for a greater American-Canadian Coast Guard presence to protect Greenland's coast and manage these waterways. She has a direct line with Moscow and may be operating on their intelligence - although attributing that factor to Putin is like doing so with Trump.
The important point is to protect the rights of the Greenland Inuit. Frankly, they should be offered common government with their Canadian brothers and sisters in Nunavut territory. As long as they are protected from forced relocation, this is by far the best solution.
That North America and Eurasia are different continents is a fiction - and an incorrect one. The North Atlantic Ridge is growth within the larger plate - not the formation of a proto-continent. Every mountain is not a boundary - see Hawai'i as an example of this.
There is no fool like an old fool - and as long as Putin and Trump don't do anything nuclear, its all good.
Funny thing is, if anyone notices this video, Trump will always assume that any deal made has this intent. Too fun.
Adam Marblestone – AI is missing something fundamental about the brain
Not sure if evolution is the right thing to look at. Individuation from childhood to adolescence may be a better model to try to replicate. A good model to base this study on is Socionics or Jungian Social Psychology (which is source for Myers Briggs' work). This becomes really useful when overlaid onto the cultural matrix of Mary Douglas - with some modifications base on political philosophy and social theory. Doing this can give a model of artificial intelligence which does not replace people, but rather serves them in dealing with society or within an organization - an environmental tool so that people in one way of life - say academy or hierarchy - can behave appropriately with or understand egalitarian, sectarian or reactionary organizations, ways of life; also individualists and the mostly unenlightened majority (working class, fatalists, etc. - the last being most consumers and workers, the people who follow the rules but do not make them and who don't want to join any movement or escape from society). An AI model of this kind can also help people migrate to a new way of life - both socially and cognitively.
The answer was not really given. The author relied on explaining the ways to define the question - but did not follow through.
I am reframing in this video, which has me think through the parameters, which help define the final question - which I will now state:
TIMEFRAME going forward: The point in local time when the collision of the Milky Way with Andromeda changes the orbit of Sol within the Milky Way -
OR
the point at which Terra is rendered uninhabitable through natural progression - rather something unexpected like a nuclear war or collision which ends all life.
WHICHEVER COMES FIRST.
SPATIAL BUBBLE:
POSSIBLE ASSUMPTIONS - explain each
1. No travel at all - so radius of the bubble is the thickness of the galactic cloud from the point that is perpendicular to a plane at the center of the galaxy - but the bubble itself moves based on the current position of Sol. In other words, since we are not at the plane described above, some point outside the cloud will be within the bubble at certain times.
MOTION OPTIONS:
2a. Travel by plasma drive where the ejecta comes from some stored Uranium until the Uranium is gone - one way trip. Finesse the impossibilities and go with it. For this one, assume departure times after 2100. Assume acceleration to .5C, with travel at that velocity (no boost) until deceleration at the same rate until we hit something.
2b. Same assumptions, but assume 1G acceleration on each end of the trip with a .5C speed limit.
Question: Will travelers hit anything, ever, and if so what and when. Leave the end time indeterminate.
3. Instantaneous travel through either wormhole or astral means (assuming ascension starting at 3000 CE. Same end date with regard to collision with Andromeda.
PERCEPTION:
What exists inside that bubble from each of these POVs - both in terms of what will be seen with C being the limit AND what will actually be at each point of time if the old assumption on C (as being infinite) were used. Ignore objects outside the bubble's path.
DATA TARGETS:
What objects will be seen and/or be present for the entire period of the study and what events of note will happen during that time - particularly collisions with the solar system.
REWARD: I assume a Nobel Prize in Physics for publication of that model.
There's an Actual Reason You Can't Recycle Plastic
Ounce for ounce, how does burning waste plastic compare to flaring? On recycling v. virgin plastic - society could tax the new stuff and use that revenue to subsidize recycling. This is essentially how a carbon tax works.
Happy New Year!. So far, its been busy - ruining my vacation.
Venezuela: I am a defense Democrat, as I was a defense Republican (an extinct species) and was never a defense Green (no such thing). I am perfectly happy with getting Russia out of the country. Slava Ukrani!
American oil companies are the ones who would fix their infrastructure anyway - and it needed doing. As for the Maduros? SDNY have jurisdiction and the extraterritorial precedent already exists under the Noriega case. Nothing new here.
Minneapolis: The situation makes me sick. The ICE agent behaved as badly as any American cop, but is protected from lawsuit under sovereign immunity - unless the case gives us a chance to relitigate the issue. Same issues, different day. The local government is right - the the F out of Minnesota.
Greenland: There would be no change if the US purchased it. For purposes of defense - we already have a base there. It is already NATO territory - and therefore under control in times of war of an American Supreme Commander. On both Canada and Greenland, the American Coast Guard and Navy would likely police any issues involving the international waters - or local waters - so no change.
Extraction: For all practical purposes, the citizens of Greenland would have tribal status as native Americas. Their local government would be tribal government. Any attempt of extraction would likely lead to attention to whether American tribes can stop extraction on their land. On Greenland, there would have to be a treaty - and there is no way the locals would let extraction take place under any arrangement.
If Trump had competent staff, they would already have said this. If the American media had competent staff, this would already be reported. Same old same old.
Canada: Provincial finance and healthcare would stay the same. The only difference is that - with the possible but unlikely exception of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta - every province would be solid Blue - especially Ontario. This would forever consign the Republican Party to minority status in the Senate, the House and the Electoral College.
If Trump had competent staff, which he does not, this issue would drop. He needed people from the Hoover Institute, not the Heritage Foundation. Same for American media talking heads. Same old, same old.
Why 2026 Will Be Worse Than 2008 (THE GREAT RESET 2.0)
Net interest on the debt is rolled over into new debt - where it becomes the leverage for capitalism to occur. Of course, if the asset markets this debt backs collapse some of the investors may leave the field - selling their bonds as they go.
The cure for the nation on the debt - and to raise GDP - is to decrease the savings sector by raising tax rates on corporations, high income individuals, dividends, pass through income and capital gains and increase tax benefits for lower income individuals - those who make under $130,000 - with phase out beginning at $80,000.
Degrowth advocates call on policy makers and scientists to do something without offering options. They deal from values rather than making plans themselves. They like getting screen time but refuse to go beyond the egalitarian coalition, because the obvious solution to warming (and cooling Barents Sea) is to abandon gasoline fuel for cars and go to some kind of tethered electric vehicle powered by small modular reactors. That last bit is what they can't face.
How a 15th-Century Cardinal Changed Philosophy Forever
This is approaching the universalism of Spinoza, the humility Augustine at the shore, the quantum mechanics of Feynman (all is quantum fields) and the radical love found in Near Death Experiences. Call it profound humility. You cannot really Grok it in this life, but will understand it completely in the next. That simple and that complex. All that there is left to do is radical dependence on God for all things - including personal development - and ultimate acceptance of all Others - seeing God in them and being God to them. Impossible to do without God - but when attempted is the experience of the kingdom of God in this life.
