phys.org | People have more efficient conversations, use more positive language
and perceive each other more positively when using an artificial
intelligence-enabled chat tool, a group of Cornell researchers has
found.
Postdoctoral researcher Jess Hohenstein is lead author of
"Artificial Intelligence in Communication Impacts Language and Social
Relationships," published in Scientific Reports.
Co-authors include Malte Jung, associate professor of information science
in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information
Science (Cornell Bowers CIS), and Rene Kizilcec, assistant professor of
information science (Cornell Bowers CIS).
Generative AI is poised to impact all aspects of society,
communication and work. Every day brings new evidence of the technical
capabilities of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4, but
the social consequences of integrating these technologies into our
daily lives are still poorly understood.
AI tools have potential to improve efficiency, but they may have
negative social side effects. Hohenstein and colleagues examined how the
use of AI in conversations impacts the way that people express
themselves and view each other.
"Technology companies tend to emphasize the utility of AI tools
to accomplish tasks faster and better, but they ignore the social
dimension," Jung said. "We do not live and work in isolation, and the
systems we use impact our interactions with others."
In addition to greater efficiency and positivity, the group found
that when participants think their partner is using more AI-suggested
responses, they perceive that partner as less cooperative, and feel less
affiliation toward them.
"I was surprised to find that people tend to evaluate you more
negatively simply because they suspect that you're using AI to help you
compose text, regardless of whether you actually are," Hohenstein said.
"This illustrates the persistent overall suspicion that people seem to
have around AI."
For their first experiment, co-author Dominic DiFranzo, a former
postdoctoral researcher in the Cornell Robots and Groups Lab and now an
assistant professor at Lehigh University, developed a smart-reply
platform the group called "Moshi" (Japanese for "hello"), patterned
after the now-defunct Google "Allo" (French for "hello"), the first
smart-reply platform, unveiled in 2016. Smart replies are generated from
LLMs to predict plausible next responses in chat-based interactions.
A total of 219 pairs of participants were asked to talk
about a policy issue and assigned to one of three conditions: both
participants can use smart replies; only one participant can use smart
replies; or neither participant can use smart replies.
The researchers found that using smart replies increased
communication efficiency, positive emotional language and positive
evaluations by communication partners. On average, smart replies
accounted for 14.3% of sent messages (1 in 7).
But participants who their partners suspected of responding with
smart replies were evaluated more negatively than those who were thought
to have typed their own responses, consistent with common assumptions
about the negative implications of AI.
NYTimes | A
fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches
them. But this does not fully solve the puzzle of why poverty has been
so stubbornly persistent, because many of the country’s largest
social-welfare programs distribute funds directly to people. Roughly 85
percent of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program budget is
dedicated to funding food stamps themselves, and almost 93 percent of
Medicaid dollars flow directly to beneficiaries.
There
are, it would seem, deeper structural forces at play, ones that have to
do with the way the American poor are routinely taken advantage of. The
primary reason for our stalled progress on poverty reduction has to do
with the fact that we have not confronted the unrelenting exploitation
of the poor in the labor, housing and financial markets.
As a theory of poverty, “exploitation” elicits a muddled response, causing us to think of course and but, no
in the same instant. The word carries a moral charge, but social
scientists have a fairly coolheaded way to measure exploitation: When we
are underpaid relative to the value of what we produce, we experience
labor exploitation; when we are overcharged relative to the value of
something we purchase, we experience consumer exploitation. For example,
if a family paid $1,000 a month to rent an apartment with a market
value of $20,000, that family would experience a higher level of renter
exploitation than a family who paid the same amount for an apartment
with a market valuation of $100,000. When we don’t own property or can’t
access credit, we become dependent on people who do and can, which in
turn invites exploitation, because a bad deal for you is a good deal for
me.
Our vulnerability to exploitation
grows as our liberty shrinks. Because undocumented workers are not
protected by labor laws, more than a third are paid below minimum wage,
and nearly 85 percent are not paid overtime. Many of us who are U.S.
citizens, or who crossed borders through official checkpoints, would not
work for these wages. We don’t have to. If they migrate here as adults,
those undocumented workers choose the terms of their arrangement. But
just because desperate people accept and even seek out exploitative
conditions doesn’t make those conditions any less exploitative.
Sometimes exploitation is simply the best bad option.
Consider
how many employers now get one over on American workers. The United
States offers some of the lowest wages in the industrialized world. A
larger share of workers in the United States make “low pay” — earning
less than two-thirds of median wages — than in any other country
belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
According to the group, nearly 23 percent of American workers labor in low-paying jobs,
compared with roughly 17 percent in Britain, 11 percent in Japan and 5
percent in Italy. Poverty wages have swollen the ranks of the American
working poor, most of whom are 35 or older.
One
popular theory for the loss of good jobs is deindustrialization, which
caused the shuttering of factories and the hollowing out of communities
that had sprung up around them. Such a passive word,
“deindustrialization” — leaving the impression that it just happened
somehow, as if the country got deindustrialization the way a forest gets
infested by bark beetles. But economic forces framed as inexorable,
like deindustrialization and the acceleration of global trade, are often
helped along by policy decisions like the 1994 North American Free
Trade Agreement, which made it easier for companies to move their
factories to Mexico and contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands
of American jobs. The world has changed, but it has changed for other
economies as well. Yet Belgium and Canada and many other countries
haven’t experienced the kind of wage stagnation and surge in income
inequality that the United States has.
Those
countries managed to keep their unions. We didn’t. Throughout the 1950s
and 1960s, nearly a third of all U.S. workers carried union cards.
These were the days of the United Automobile Workers, led by Walter
Reuther, once savagely beaten by Ford’s brass-knuckle boys, and of the
mighty American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial
Organizations that together represented around 15 million workers, more
than the population of California at the time.
In
their heyday, unions put up a fight. In 1970 alone, 2.4 million union
members participated in work stoppages, wildcat strikes and tense
standoffs with company heads. The labor movement fought for better pay
and safer working conditions and supported antipoverty policies. Their
efforts paid off for both unionized and nonunionized workers, as
companies like Eastman Kodak were compelled to provide generous
compensation and benefits to their workers to prevent them from
organizing. By one estimate, the wages of nonunionized men without a
college degree would be 8 percent higher today if union strength remained what it was in the late 1970s, a time when worker pay climbed, chief-executive compensation was reined in and the country experienced the most economically equitable period in modern history.
It
is important to note that Old Labor was often a white man’s refuge. In
the 1930s, many unions outwardly discriminated against Black workers or
segregated them into Jim Crow local chapters. In the 1960s, unions like
the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks and the United
Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America enforced segregation
within their ranks. Unions harmed themselves through their
self-defeating racism and were further weakened by a changing economy.
But organized labor was also attacked by political adversaries. As
unions flagged, business interests sensed an opportunity. Corporate
lobbyists made deep inroads in both political parties, beginning a
public-relations campaign that pressured policymakers to roll back
worker protections.
A
national litmus test arrived in 1981, when 13,000 unionized air traffic
controllers left their posts after contract negotiations with the
Federal Aviation Administration broke down. When the workers refused to
return, Reagan fired all of them. The public’s response was muted, and
corporate America learned that it could crush unions with minimal
blowback. And so it went, in one industry after another.
Today
almost all private-sector employees (94 percent) are without a union,
though roughly half of nonunion workers say they would organize if given
the chance. They rarely are. Employers have at their disposal an
arsenal of tactics designed to prevent collective bargaining, from
hiring union-busting firms to telling employees that they could lose
their jobs if they vote yes. Those strategies are legal, but companies also make illegal moves to block unions,
like disciplining workers for trying to organize or threatening to
close facilities. In 2016 and 2017, the National Labor Relations Board
charged 42 percent of employers with violating federal law during union
campaigns. In nearly a third of cases, this involved illegally firing
workers for organizing.
racket |The campaign against “disinformation” in this way has become
the proxy for a war against civil liberties that probably began in 2016,
when the reality of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination
first began to spread through the intellectual class. There was a
crucial moment in May of that year, when Andrew Sullivan published “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic.”
This piece was a cri de coeur for
the educated set. I read it on the way to covering Trump’s clinching
victory in the Indiana primary, and though I disagreed with its premise,
I recognized right away that Andrew’s argument was brilliant and would
have legs. Sullivan described Plato’s paradoxical observation that
“tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy,”
explaining that as freedoms spread and deference to authority withered,
the state would become ungovernable:
The
very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly
intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention
the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of
women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A
father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a
son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before
or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is
frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light
of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich
mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The
foreigner is equal to the citizen.
And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
It
was already patently obvious to anyone covering politics in America
that respect for politicians and institutions was vanishing at warp
speed. I thought it was a consequence of official lies like WMD, failed
policies like the Iraq War or the financial crisis response, and the
increasingly insufferable fakery of presidential politics. People like author Martin Gurri pointed at a free Internet, which allowed the public to see these warts in more hideous technicolor than before.
Sullivan
saw many of the same things, but his idea about a possible solution was
to rouse to action the country’s elites, who “still matter” and
“provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself.” Look,
Andrew’s English, a crime for which I think people may in some cases be
excused (even if I found myself reaching for something sharp when he
described Bernie Sanders as a “demagogue of the left”). Also, his essay
was subtle and had multiple layers, one of which was an exhortation to
those same elites to wake up and listen to the anger in the population.
Unfortunately,
post-election, each successive version of what was originally a careful
and subtle “Too Much Democracy” idea became more simplistic and
self-serving. By 2019 the shipwreck of the Weekly Standard, the Bulwark, was publishing “Too Much Democracy is Killing Democracy,”
an article which insisted it wasn’t an argument for the vote to be
restricted, but “it is an argument for a political, social, and cultural
compact that makes participation by many unnecessary.” Soon we had
people like Joan Donovan of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center leading the
charge for “de-platforming,” not as a general principle of course, but
merely as a “short-term” solution. In its own way it was very Trumpian thinking: we just need to clamp down on speech until we can “figure out what is going on.”
Still, as far back as 2016, the RAND Corporation conducted a study showing the phrase most predictive of Trump support was “people like me don’t have any say.”
This was a problem of corporate and financial concentration invisible
to people of a certain class. As fewer and fewer people were needed to
run the giant banking or retail delivery or communications machines of
society, there were more and more going straight from college back to
their parents’ houses, where they spent their days fighting voice-mail
programs just to find out where to send their (inevitably unanswered)
job applications. This was going to inspire some angry tweets, and
frankly, allowing all of them was the least the system could do.
Instead
of facing the boiling-ever-hotter problem underneath, the managerial
types decided — in the short term only, of course — to mechanically
deamplify the discontent, papering things over with an expanding new
bureaucracy of “polarization mitigation,” what Michael calls the
Censorship-Industrial Complex. Instead of opening society’s doors and
giving people roles and a voice, those doors are being closed more
tightly, creating an endless cycle of anger and reaction.
Making a
furious public less visible doesn’t make it go away. Moreover, as we
saw at the hearing, clamping down on civil liberties makes obnoxious
leaders more conspicuous, not less. Democrats used to understand this,
but now they’re betting everything on the blinders they refuse to take
off, a plan everyone but them can see won’t end well.
dailycaller | “The biggest problem is that for Jewish students there are two
standards for how universities treat harassment … but Jewish students
have not been treated fairly,” Rossman-Benjamin said.
In 2022, a report
released by StopAntisemitism, which describes itself as the “leading
non-partisan U.S based organization” combating anti-Jewish hate, gave a
failing grade to both UCLA and UC Berkeley because of past incidents and
Jewish students reporting that they felt unsafe on campus.
UC
Berkeley Asst. Vice Chancellor Dan Mogulof told the DCNF that the
university recognizes the “rising tide of antisemitism” and noted that
is “one of the reasons we respond quickly to address antisemitic
incidents and support our Jewish community.”
“Among the “robust programming” referred to above by the ADL, is UC Berkeley’s Antisemitism Education Initiative,
launched by members of our faculty in 2019, “Mogulof said. “We also
take great pride in our kosher dining facility—the first of its kind in
the UC system; a vibrant Hillel chapter; the broad range of other Jewish
student groups; and the aforementioned Berkeley Institute for Jewish
Law and Israel Studies; The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life;
and our Center for Jewish Studies.”
Mogulof also pointed
to a 2022 Anti-Defamation League’s statement praising the campuses
Hillel community, Jewish program and “Israel-related course offerings,”
and explained that the university has a “strong stance against BDS.”
UC
Davis also struggled with several antisemitic incidents in the past
year. In February 2022, during a Zoom presentation by Israeli chemist
Sason Shaik, multiple individuals joined the call and started “broadcasting antisemitic messages,” according to a press release.
Later
that summer, four men dressed in black holding antisemitic held banners
on an overpass bridge claiming that “the Holocaust is an anti-white
lie” and “Communism is Jewish,” according to the Times. Several months afterward in October, several swastikas were found in a first-year-student dormitory, according to a university press release.
A UC Davis spokesperson told the DCNF that the university’s Principles of Community reject all forms of discrimination.
“UC
Davis is partnering with the city of Davis and Yolo County to create
Hate-Free Together, a community-wide framework to combat the recent
string of local hate incidents and prioritize the well-being and safety
of all residents,” the spokesperson explained.
All of the
incidents at UC Davis were condemned by university leaders, a step that
Marcus noted was an improvement from the past, but he also pointed out
that many of these statements by UC schools were “weak.”
“It’s a
good sign that UC [campus] chancellors are condemning antisemitism, this
is an improvement from past years,” Marcus said. “The fact is they need
not only to speak in clear plain terms but also to back it up with
action.”
Rossman-Benjamin also pointed out that those statements
had done little to improve the climate for Jewish students on college
campuses, particularly when the complaints had to do with Israel.
“I
talked about the sympathy of the campus community when the antisemitism
is motivated by classical sources … but when it’s motivated by
anti-Zionism nobody cares,” Rossman-Benjamin said. “Not only does nobody
care, they actually would get upset if the university were to address
it … so there is no motivation, in fact, there is an incentive to
complain when Jewish students say, ‘[anti-Zionism] is hurting me.'”
noahpinion |So
far I’ve talked about police “professionalization” purely in terms of
hours of training. But it’s also important to get the right kind of training — for example, the “warrior mentality”
training that some cops currently receive seems a lot less likely to be
useful than the “procedural justice” training that has been shown to
reduce violence.
And in fact, I think
professionalization should probably go beyond training, to include
education. Usually, when we think of a “profession”, we think of
something that requires a degree. In the U.S., policing tends to be a
blue-collar, low-education profession — in California, only 42% of officers have even a bachelor’s degree.
I’m
all for expanding opportunity for American workers who didn’t go to
college. But policing seems like a special case, because it’s about much
more than wages and work — it’s about public safety and the legitimacy
of U.S. institutions. Being able to sit through some lectures on Plato
and do a bit of algebra homework shouldn’t be a requirement to get a
decent, good-paying job in the U.S., but it seems like a pretty low bar
for the people who are responsible for deciding when to deal out violent
death to citizens on the street. We make teachers get a college degree,
so why not cops? In fact, many teachers get a Master’s in Education
after college; we should think about expanding the use of Master’s degrees in law enforcement as well.
Requiring
higher education works through at least two separate channels. First,
it creates positive selection effects — it means that the police of the
future would come from a more educated, intellectual subset of the
populace. (The military already does this with the AFQT and ASVAB.) But it also changes people’s lifestyles in generally positive ways. A number of studies
have established a causal link between higher education and healthier
lifestyles, leading to reduced mortality and better overall health. It
seems likely that more education would also give cops a healthier mental
and emotional outlook as well, which would result not just in less
confrontational interactions with civilians, but in better overall
policing and crime reduction as well.
Again, requiring
cops to get more education would raise the costs of policing in the
United States, because educated workers command higher salaries. This
would not sit well with some activists, but it seems to me like
something worth spending money on.
So I think that when we talk about professionalizing the police, it should mean exactly that: Making policing a profession
rather than just a job. Doctors, teachers, lawyers, etc. all serve
specialized and critical functions in our society, for which we require
not just extensive training but also formalized and specialized
education. I fail to see any good reason why we shouldn’t treat law
enforcement as a similarly critical function, deserving of similar
investments of time, money, and care.
NYTimes | George
Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped
Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives,
built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of
the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.
His
campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of
Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House
seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a
New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier
and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13
properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs
and cats.
But a New York Times review
of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil,
as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made
on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that
he sold to voters.
Citigroup and
Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign
biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there.
Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from
in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of
birth graduating that year.
There
was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets
United, was, as Mr. Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The
Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity
with that name.
His financial
disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth. He lent his campaign
more than $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of
dollars to other candidates in the last two years and reported a
$750,000 salary and over $1 million in dividends from his company, the
Devolder Organization.
Yet the firm, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is something of a mystery. On a campaign website, Mr. Santos once described Devolder as
his “family’s firm” that managed $80 million in assets. On his
congressional financial disclosure, he described it as a capital
introduction consulting company, a type of boutique firm that serves as a
liaison between investment funds and deep-pocketed investors. But Mr.
Santos’s disclosures did not reveal any clients, an omission three
election law experts said could be problematic if such clients exist.
And
while Mr. Santos has described a family fortune in real estate, he has
not disclosed, nor could The Times find, records of his properties.
newenergytimes | Omar A. Hurricane, chief scientist for the inertial confinement fusion program at the NIF lab, explained the facts to New Energy Times:
The total laser energy delivered to the
target was 2.05 MJ and the total fusion yield was 3.15 MJ of energy. The
laser pulse duration was about 9 nanoseconds long. The duration of the
fusion reaction was 90 picoseconds long. Very short time-scales,
obviously, which are the nature of inertial fusion systems.
Practically speaking, the result is irrelevant. The NIF device did
not achieve net energy. The scientists who are promoting this result to
the news media are playing word games. They use multiple definitions for
the phrase “net energy.” Only the fuel pellet achieved “net energy.”
This does not account for the energy required to operate the device.
The 3.15 megajoules of fusion output energy were produced at
the expense of 400 megajoules of electrical input energy. A fusion
device that loses 99.2 percent of the energy it consumes, in a reaction
that lasts for 0.00000000009 of a second, does not indicate technology
that could provide an abundant zero-carbon alternative to fossil fuels.
On Monday, CNN implied that the reactor produced a small amount of power, but too little to be practical:
“It’s about what it takes to boil 10
kettles of water,” said Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Centre for
Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College in London. “In order to
turn that into a power station, we need to make a larger gain in energy –
we need it to be substantially more.”
The “10 kettles” represents the 3.15 megajoule output. CNN didn’t
mention the 400-megajoule input. It’s a deceptive material omission,
bordering on fraud.
The public promotion of this result as evidence that fusion is a
potential energy solution is a scam and promotes false hope. NIF is a
taxpayer-funded project that is never going to power any house. NIF is
useful only to test nuclear weapons. Are there other laser fusion
results that are better than NIF? No.
We have already explained the technical details but it seems that some journalists didn’t get the memo. See our reports #73, #102, #103, #104.
P.S.: Let us not forget that half of the fuel mixture required for commercial fusion reactors does not exist. Does. Not. Exist.
LATimes | While West initially struggled to be taken seriously as a rapper, his
solo breakthrough came after a brutal car wreck that required his jaw
to be wired shut. The impervious confidence of his song “Through the Wire” and his debut, “The College Dropout,” propelled him to 10 Grammy nominations in 2005.
When he castigated President George W. Bush’s failed response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on live TV — “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” — many Americans saw a brave rapper taking on the government and standing up for the Black community.
“In that moment after Katrina, his lack of social graces made him an important figure speaking truth to power,” Wasow said.
West
recorded a bestselling, orchestra-driven album, “Late Registration,”
with indie producer Jon Brion. West’s next LP, “Graduation,” won a 2007
sales war with 50 Cent, seen as a victory for ambitious, heartfelt
hip-hop.
Yet the sudden, tragic death
of his mother in 2007, after complications from cosmetic surgery,
shattered his world. He seemed to blame himself for it — “When I moved
to L.A., she moved to L.A. And she wound up in a place that would eat
her alive,” he wrote in XXL after her death. “If I had lived in New
York, she’d still be here.”
He rapped about his feelings on 2008’s “Pinocchio Story,”
from the bleak and groundbreaking LP “808s & Heartbreak”: “The only
one was behind me / I can’t find her no more, I can’t call her no more …
The day I moved to L.A., maybe that was all my fault.”
“A single
mom with a single child, they had each other’s backs no matter what,”
Baker said. “That’s a little bit of where that fierce protectiveness
comes from. When I found out that Donda died, my first reaction was,
will he be OK?”
His boastfulness and hair-trigger temper enlivened
awards shows and earned a “South Park” parody. In 2009, he rushed the
stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to vent frustration over Taylor
Swift beating Beyoncé for best female video. It blew up a planned tour
with Lady Gaga and led Obama to insult him on that hot-mic recording.
From a fellow Chicago legend, it hurt. “You know I’m your favorite,”
West said afterward. “Just tell me you love me. And tell the world you
love me. Don’t tell the world I’m a jackass, I’m fighting hard enough.”
West
made some of his finest music in the next years, including 2010’s “My
Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” and 2013’s “Yeezus,” and in 2014 married
Kardashian in a fame-merging event for the ages. Yet signs of creeping
antisemitism began to emerge. West said in a 2013 radio interview that
“Black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people.
… We ain’t Jewish. We don’t get family that got money like that.” He
responded to criticism by saying, “I thought I was giving a compliment. …
I don’t know how being told you have money is an insult.”
Fans
began to question his beliefs, and even his stability, in 2016. He wrote
on Twitter that “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” and depicted him and
Trump nude in bed in the video for “Famous.” He declared onstage at a
California concert that, while he didn’t vote, he “would have voted for
Trump.” He underlined the point by meeting with Trump in New York,
claiming, “I feel it is important to have a direct line of communication
with our future President if we truly want change.”
That
November, after Kardashian was bound and robbed in a Paris hotel room,
West’s paranoia spun out further. Onstage at a concert, he said, “Jay-Z,
call me, bruh. You still ain’t called me. ... Jay-Z, I know you got
killers. Please don’t send them at my head. Just call me. Talk to me
like a man.” He ended the show early and canceled his remaining tour.
Just hours later, after police responded to a welfare check call at his
trainer’s home, West entered treatment at UCLA Medical Center for a
“psychiatric emergency,” according to the Los Angeles Fire Department
dispatch call.
profilesinsuccess | Ed’s wife, Marilynn, was beside him every step of the way through the
BTG journey. In fact, several years before they married, she left CTEC
and became Ed’s first employee at BTG. “She’s my moral compass,” he
says. “Through all the ups and downs, she’s always kept me on the
straight and narrow, and is an exceptional judge of character. She’s got
this sense about her, and she keeps me grounded.” Ed is also grounded
by his remarkable daughters—one a research physician and professor at
Harvard Medical School, and the other a practicing physician in DC who
successfully treated one of the anthrax patients. “As proud as my
parents were of me when I showed them my speech at the White House, I’m
equally proud of my daughters,” says Ed.
Ok I'll weigh in. The question for me isn't whether it's okay to express schadenfreude wrt Walensky. It's how can we pressure her, as executor of a family trust whose $ comes from her father's role in Titan Corporation, to pay reparations to Titan's torture victims in Abu Ghraib
Ed’s engagement in the
business community has remained strong in the wake of selling BTG. In
2006, he joined with a team of investors to form a Special Purpose
Acquisition Corporation, raising $126 million in the public market to
purchase a civilian government contractor called ATS Corporation. Ed
served as CEO of ATS, leading it to flourish until it was sold in 2010
to Salient Technologies, Inc.
Ed then shifted his focus full-time
to his participation in nonprofit and for-profit boards—commitments he
has prioritized since 1984. Using his “Seven P’s” as guiding beacons,
he has served as a Board member, Advisor, or Committee member of over
fifty organizations, including Virginia’s Center for Innovative
Technology, the Northern Virginia Technology Council, the Technology
Work Group of the Virginia Economic Recovery Commission, and Holy Cross
Hospital.
Education, as well, has remained a passion for Ed, and
although full-time academic teaching never became the focal point of his
career, he taught mathematics at NYU and Kingsborough Community
College. During his tenure at NASA, he taught similar courses at Boston
University and Northeastern University. Later on, he continued to teach
at American University, the University of Maryland, and George Mason
University. He served as President of the Board of Directors of the
Northern Virginia Community College Educational Foundation, as well as
on the Board of Trustees at Virginia Commonwealth University. One of his
greatest honors came when he was asked to serve on the Board of
Trustees at New York University, his Alma Mater, and more recently, he
was invited by Governor Terry McAuliffe to serve on the Board of the
Virginia 529 Program. “It’s a lot of fun,” he says. “We have to think
about how you finance a college education, and what the return on
capital for that education will look like in 20 years.”
In
advising young people entering the working world today, Ed underscores
the importance of commitment as a foundation for laying out the Seven
P’s. “Nothing is easy,” he says. “Don’t flounder. Figure out what you
want to do and then go do it. And when you face setbacks, remember you
have two choices. You can go back to bed and hide, or you can go to work
and put on a brave face. Those moments will be your waypoints, and I
hope you choose to do what you have to do, rather than what you might
want to do in that moment.”
Beyond that, Ed has found that the
Seven P’s tend to lead people to that ideal ground where altruism and
self-interest intersect. “Self-interest is fine, but never at the
expense of others,” he says. “Altruism is wonderful, but you can’t have a
mission without money. I think the real value set is all about pursuing
something of importance, but in a business-like way so you ensure you
have the resources to actually accomplish it.”
From his days
delivering papers and playing street ball in Manhattan, to his
introduction of President Bill Clinton at the White House, to his legacy
of leadership throughout the DC business community, Ed’s astounding
accomplishments are the projection of the mission sense that has always
guided him—a pixel-precise vision he hopes the entire country will
reclaim with time. “When I graduated from college and started work at
NASA, every single person in that organization—and across the U.S.—was
aligned and motivated in our goal to make it to the moon,” he reflects.
“Now, I attribute our national sense of malaise to the fact that we’ve
lost our mission sense as a country. Everyone needs that object called
mission—the new moon that inspires them to write their future, and then
go out and live it.”
americanaffairsjournal | The book really comes into its own in the long sections on the
American economy. These chapters seem especially prescient after Western
sanctions against Russia failed to stop the invasion or decisively
cripple the Russian economy, while causing increasing strains in the
West. In a word, Martyanov views American prosperity as largely fake, a
shiny wrapping distracting from an increasingly hollow interior.
Martyanov, reflecting his Soviet materialist education, starts by
discussing the food supply. He recalls the limited food options
available in the old Soviet Union and how impressed émigrés were by the
“overflowing abundance” of the American convenience store. But
Martyanov notes that today such abundance is only the preserve of the
rich and powerful. He references a 2020 study by the Brookings
Institution which found that “40.9 percent of mothers with children ages
12 and under reported household food insecurity since the onset of the
Covid-19 pandemic.” And while some of this was driven by the pandemic,
the number was 15.1 percent in 2018. Martyanov makes the case that these
numbers reflect an economy that is poorly organized and teetering on
the edge. In the summer of 2022, when the food component of the CPI is
increasing at over 10 percent a year and rising fast, Martyanov’s
chapter looks prophetic.
Martyanov then moves on to other consumer goods. He recalls the
so-called kitchen debate in 1959 when Vice President Richard Nixon
showed Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev a modern American kitchen.
During this debate, Nixon explained to Khrushchev that the house they
were in, with all its modern luxuries, could be bought by “any steel
worker.” Nixon explained that the average American steel worker earned
about $3 an hour—or $480 per month—and
that the house could be obtained on a thirty-year mortgage for the cost
of $100 a month. Martyanov points out that this is impossible in the
contemporary American economy. As vital goods have become less and less
affordable for the average American, debt of all types has exploded. He
notes that the flip side of this growing debt has been a decline in
domestic industrial production, which has been stagnant in nominal
terms and falling as a percent of U.S. GDP since 2008. “The scale of
this catastrophe is not understood,” he writes, “until one considers the
fact that a single manufacturing job on average generates 3.4 employees
elsewhere in non-manufacturing sectors.”
Needless to say, Martyanov does not believe that America has the most
powerful economy on earth. Deploying his old school materialist
toolkit, he surveys core heavy industries—including the automotive industry, the commercial shipbuilding industry, and later the aerospace industry—and
finds U.S. capacity wanting. He points out that in steel production
“China outproduces the United States by a factor of 11, while Russia,
which has a population less than half the size of that of the United
States, produces around 81% of US steel output.”
Martyanov is particularly critical of GDP metrics as a basis for
determining the wealth of a country or the power of its economy, because
they assign spending on services the same weight as spending on primary
products and manufactured goods. He believes that the postindustrial
economy is a “figment of the imagination of Wall Street financial
strategists” and that GDP metrics merely provide America with a fig leaf
to cover its economic weaknesses. In a separate podcast
that Martyanov posted to his YouTube channel, he explains why these
metrics are particularly misleading from the point of view of military
production. He compares the U.S. Navy’s Virginia-class fast-attack
submarine and the Russian Yasen-class equivalent. He argues that these
are comparable in terms of their platform capabilities, but that the
Yasen-class has superior armaments. Crucially, however, he notes that
the cost of a Virginia-class submarine is around $3.2 billion while the
cost of the Yasen-class submarine is only around $1 billion. Since GDP
measures quantify economic output (including military output) in dollar
terms, it would appear that, when it comes to submarine output, Russia
is producing less than a third of what it is actually producing. Using a
purchasing-power-parity-adjusted measure might help somewhat here, but
it would still not capture the extra bang for their buck that the
Russians are getting.
A few years ago, it would have been fashionable to dismiss this sort
of materialist analysis as old fashioned. Pundits argued that the
growing weight of the service sector in the American economy was a good
thing, not a bad thing, a sign of progress, not decline. But today, with
supply chains collapsing and inflation raging, these fashionable
arguments look more and more like self-serving bromides every day.
Next, Martyanov looks at energy. While many American pundits believed
that the emergence of fracking technology would make Russian oil and
gas less and less important, Martyanov views the shale oil boom as “a
story of technology winning over common economic sense.” He believes
that America’s shale boom was a speculative mania driven by vague
promises and cheap credit. He quotes the financial analyst David
Deckelbaum, who noted that “This is an industry that for every dollar
that they brought in, they would spend two.” Ultimately, Martyanov
argues, the U.S. shale industry is a paper tiger whose viability is
heavily dependent on high oil prices.
Martyanov is even more critical of “green energy,” which he views as a
self-destructive set of policies that will destroy the energy
independence of all countries that pursue them. He also points out that
China, Russia, and most non-Western nations know this and, despite lip
service to fashionable green causes, avoid these policies.
Finally, Martyanov returns to the collapse of America’s ability to
make things. He recites the now familiar numbers about falling
manufacturing output and an increased reliance on imports from abroad.
But he also points to the collapse in manufacturing expertise. Martyanov
cites statistics showing that, on a per capita basis, Russia produces
twice as many STEM graduates as America. He attributes this to a change
in elite attitudes. STEM subjects are difficult and require serious
intellectual exertion. They often yield jobs on factory floors that are
not particularly glamorous. “In contemporary American culture dominated
by poor taste and low quality ideological, agenda-driven art and
entertainment, being a fashion designer or a disc jockey or a
psychologist is by far a more attractive career goal,” he writes,
“especially for America’s urban and college population, than foreseeing
oneself on the manufacturing floor working as a CNC operator or mechanic
on the assembly line.”
Rotting from the Head Down
Martyanov’s economic analysis may reflect his Soviet materialist
education, but ultimately, he views America’s core problem as being a
crisis of leadership. He traces this problem back to the election of
Bill Clinton in 1993. Martyanov argues that Clinton represented a new
type of American leader: an extreme meritocrat. These new meritocrats
believed their personal capacities gave them the ability to do anything
imaginable. This megalomaniacal tendency, Martyanov observes, has been
latent in the American project since the founding. “Everything
American,” he writes, “must be the largest, the fastest, the most
efficient or, in general, simply the best.” Yet this character trait has
not dominated the personality of either the American people or their
leaders, he says. Rather, the American people remain today “very nice
folks” that “are generally patriotic and have common sense and a good
sense of humour.” Yet in recent times, he argues, something has happened
in American elite circles that has let the more grandiose and
delusional side of the American psyche run amok, and this has happened
at the very time when America is most in need of good leadership.
Martyanov believes that America’s extreme meritocrats vastly
overestimate their capabilities. This is because, rather than focusing
on the strengths and weaknesses of the country they rule, they have been
taught since birth to focus on themselves. They believe that they just
need to maximize their own personal accomplishments and the good of the
country will emerge as if by magic. This has led inevitably to the rise
of what Martyanov characterizes as a classic oligarchy. Such an
oligarchy, he argues, purports to be meritocratic but is actually the
opposite. A proper meritocracy allows the best and the brightest to
climb up its ranks. But an oligarchy with a meritocratic veneer simply
allows those who best play the game to rise. Thus, the meritocratic
claims become circular: you climb the ladder because you play the game;
the game is meritocratic because those who play it are by definition the
best and the brightest. Effectively, for Martyanov, the American elite
does not select for intelligence and wisdom, but rather for
self-assuredness and self-interestedness.
TAC | The same media sources who have been telling us
that Putin is a madman now assure us, without any sense of
contradiction, that he would never use tactical nuclear weapons to avoid
total defeat in Ukraine. “Don’t let Putin bluff us” exhorted Max Boot, an exemplar of hawkish neocon wrongthink ever since he urged us into the Iraq War with lies
about WMD and Saddam’s connection to 9/11. Having been wrong about so
much over the past twenty years, one would expect more humility and less
certainty from Boot as he confidently waves away Putin’s nuclear
threat. But in Washington, neoconservatism means never having to say
you’re sorry.
Neocons aren’t the only voices in media and academic circles blithely
assuring us that Putin is bluffing. Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia,
now Stanford professor, Michael McFaul, giddy with the success of the
Ukrainian counteroffensive, declared
that this is the moment for the U.S. “to go all in” on Ukraine, with
“more and better weapons and more and better sanctions.” Clearly, he too
dismisses the nuclear threat.
Charles Pierce mocked Putin in Esquire, saying “he has decided to butch it up quite seriously for the public” and “his speech reeks of a monumental bluff.” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin
shrugged off the threat while calling for the West to escalate its
support for Ukraine, writing that “Putin and his circle have made
nuclear threats frequently in recent years – and they have always been a
bluff.” Michael Clarke, professor of war studies at King’s College
London, told NBC News
that Putin “is doubling down politically because he is losing
militarily… He says, ‘This is not a bluff,’ which shows that it is.”
Cloistered within the high walls of the media, academy, or government
bureaucracy, most of these commentators have never held a job that
required serious risk-taking. They have not conducted a cost-benefit
analysis or even played a hand of high-stakes poker. Yet they claim to
know exactly what cards Putin is holding and how he will play them.
Smart poker players understand that they can’t precisely know their
opponent’s hand, so they seek to put them on a range of possibilities
and then evaluate whether their previous actions tell a story more
consistent with a credible hand or a bluff.
What story is Putin telling about Ukraine? Since 2008, Moscow has
warned that the admission of Ukraine into NATO was an unacceptable red
line for Russian security because it meant American troops, weapons, and
bases directly on their most vulnerable border. Current CIA director
Bill Burns, who was our emissary to Moscow at the time, conveyed these
concerns back to Washington in his now-famous memo Nyet Means Nyet. Since then, Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have warnedrepeatedly
that Moscow regards NATO weapons inside Ukraine, most particularly
American missile systems that could hit Moscow in minutes, as an
existential threat. Putin repeatedly warned
that he would invade Ukraine if his security concerns weren’t
addressed, and indeed he did when they weren’t. This decision was
immoral, criminal, and barbaric, but it was not the act of a bluffer.
Newsweek | In the past three months, investigators across Europe have
intercepted thousands of Captagon pills, an amphetamine-based drug
popular with the Islamic State militant group. Nicknamed "the jihadists'
drug," Captagon keeps users awake for long periods of time, dulls pain
and creates a sense of euphoria. According to one former militant who spoke to CNN
in 2014, ISIS "gave us drugs, hallucinogenic pills that would make you
go to battle not caring if you live or die." Given similar testimony
from other fighters, experts say it seems likely that the hallucinogenic
pills the militant took were Captagon.
Invented in Germany in the
1960s to treat attention and sleep disorders, and highly addictive,
Captagon was banned throughout most of the world in the 1980s.
On
May 10, Dutch investigators said they had discovered a drug lab the
previous month that was churning out Captagon pills, and they were
looking for two suspects associated with the lab. In March, Greek police
confiscated more than 600,000 Captagon pills in a raid and arrested
four people for allegedly manufacturing the drug.
Greek and Dutch police haven't said the Captagon stashes they found were destined for ISIS fighters.
Captagon is one of the brand names for the drug fenethylline, a combination of amphetamine and theophylline
that relaxes the muscle around the lungs and is used to treat breathing
problems. A German company first synthesized fenethylline in 1961, and
when it discovered the drug improved alertness, doctors began
prescribing it to treat narcolepsy and attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder. Though generally without side effects, says Dr. Raj Persaud, a
fellow at the London-based Royal College of Psychiatrists, overuse can
cause extreme depression, tiredness, insomnia, heart palpitations and,
in rare cases, blindness and heart attacks. In the 1980s, when the
drug's addictiveness became clear, the United States and the World
Health Organization listed it as a controlled substance, and it is now
illegal to buy and sell throughout most of the world.
Nevertheless,
fenethylline remains popular in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi
Arabia, where more Captagon is consumed than in any other country in the
world.
Though Islamic law forbids the consumption of alcohol and other drugs,
many users there see Captagon as a medicinal substance. In October 2015,
Lebanese authorities arrested a Saudi prince at the Beirut airport
after two tons of cocaine and Captagon pills, which sell for roughly $20
per pill in Saudi Arabia, were found on a private plane.
Once manufactured in Eastern Europe, Turkey and Lebanon, according to Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs,
Captagon is now predominantly made in Syria. The Syrian conflict has
allowed for illicit activities to flourish, and many fighters there know
the benefits of using the drug.
The use of drugs in war has a
long history. The ancient Greeks, the Vikings, U.S. Civil War soldiers
and the Nazis all relied on drugs—wine, mushrooms, morphine and
methamphetamines, respectively—to get them through the horror of battle.
"The holy grail that armies around the world have been looking for is a
drug that gives people courage," says Persaud, and Captagon comes
close. "It doesn't give you distilled courage, but it gives you a
tendency to want to keep going and impaired judgment, so you don't
consider whether you're scared or not," he says. "You feel euphoria. You
don't feel pain. You could say it's courage without the judgment." For a
fighter in a war so brutally waged, the benefits of that are clear.
zacharydcarter | So why all the vitriol over student debt? When we argue about student
debt, we aren't really debating credit policy, inflation, growth or the
separation of powers under the U.S. Constitution. All of these avenues
of discussion are elaborate detours around the central issue: the
structure of the American social order.
In the United
States, a college degree is about much more than securing a higher wage.
People without college degrees aren't just excluded from a lot of jobs
that pay well. They're more likely to be laid off and less likely to be
hired during recessions. They're less likely to have health insurance,
and more likely to have a disability
(the causal arrow there probably points both ways, but the combination
is particularly cruel). People who do not graduate from college even
have shorter life expectancies
than people who do. Higher education is perhaps the single most
important factor in determining who has access to a financially secure
lifestyle and the leisure to pursue intellectually interesting
activities. A college degree confers respect and prestige.
In
a better world, the simple fact of being human would command equal
respect for everyone. That is not our world, but we can imagine such a
place and work toward realizing it. Prestige, by
contrast, is inherently exclusive. The less there is to go around, the
better it is for the people who have it. And so the more people we
exclude from higher education, the more secure people with college
degrees will feel about their place in society.
The recent student debt freak-out reminds me a lot of God and Man at Yale --
the 1951 memoir that launched William F. Buckley into the conservative
intellectual stratosphere. It's remarkably bad for a book that has a
reputation as a political classic -- a wealthy conservative Catholic
goes to Yale and is horrified to find Protestants and Keynesians. What,
pray, can the Board of Trustees do to save our dear, beloved Yale? The
ideological material is generic McCarthyism, the writing is flat
(Buckley would get better at that), and the entire project is
preoccupied with weird provincial details. At one point he even
complains about the vending machines. The literary establishment
basically laughed at it, with both The New York Times and The Atlantic
running devastating reviews.
But God and Man at Yale became
a publishing sensation. After World War II, millions of new college
students arrived on campuses around the country to receive an education
funded by the G.I. Bill. Suddenly, an experience that had once been
restricted almost exclusively to the very rich became open to
infantrymen. And though the vast majority of colleges and universities
continued to exclude Black students, millions of white people who had
never dreamed of going to college eventually earned degrees. For many
prior graduates, this step toward democratization was threatening. Their
credential was being diluted. Buckley's book about the waywardness of
newfangled university life spoke to this new and unexpected status
anxiety among the American upper-class, and so it flew off the shelves.
They’re excited about the arctic being open for shipping and drilling.
They’re excited about future archeological expeditions to places that will become accessible due to climate change.
Like all the land below the ice in Antarctica.
They’re excited about their investments in farmland and water rights paying off.
They’re excited about water becoming more valuable than oil.
In fact, quite a few large companies are positioning themselves to profit off of “big water”.
They’re excited about Montana becoming great wine country.
They’re excited about the coast line changing and creating more opportunities for development.
They’re excited about public private partnerships for the infrastructure to protect the places they decide to protect.
They’re excited about the opportunities to redesign cities to handle “chronic inundation”, “induced seismicity” and “heat challenged districts”.
These people absolutely see themselves as winners in climate change. They see no reason to stop making profits off the activities that are driving climate change because they see no reason to stop accelerating climate change. They’re looking forward to the world to come.
They might acknowledge that there isn’t as much room for people like us in the future. But as long as they can keep shifting the idea of responsibility to suburban moms and soy eating college activists they’ll be happy to continue funding environmental goals that don’t achieve anything for the environment.
They’ll always be able to find another Greta Thunberg to scold them while looking suitably young and idealistic. And most people will fall for it because they want their actions to mean something. Because who could believe that our leaders know they’re destroying our world and that they don’t care.
johganz |“But, John, are you saying we should use the Justice Department politically? With the express purpose of getting rid of someone you don’t like.” Kind
of! As Trump’s intellectual defenders love to remind us, there’s
ultimately no neutral administration of justice, everything is
political, and when you get the state apparatus in your hands you use it
beat up on your enemies and help out your friends. So, in part, these
are their rules. (If you start talking about how you are gonna apply the thought of Carl Schmitt when you administer the state, I may start to get the sense you are my enemy.)
Also,
let’s not play innocent. Historically speaking, the F.B.I. has always
been used “politically:” it was used against Reds, Nazis, Reds again,
the KKK, civil rights leaders, black power leaders, Nazis again etc. A
lot of this was abusive and terrible and you know where my political
sympathies lie, but this was because the political establishment
implicitly or explicitly viewed these groups as threats to the United
States itself. In many cases, they were not. (Yeah, yeah, I know what
you are gonna say, “but J. Edgar Hoover, blah, blah, blah”—The fact is
that Hoover lasted so long because powerful people thought he was useful
and mostly right.) But here is a case where the real deal has come
along: a bonafide domestic threat to the constitution. People these days
are willing to call everything from annoying college students to crummy
D.E.I. consultants “totalitarian threats to democracy” or whatever, but
when a big, fat threat to democracy is standing right there, suddenly
everyone is like, “Well…it’s a little complicated, isn’t it?” No, it
really isn’t. And, in this case, we don’t have to break the law or do
anything underhanded: just actually try to uphold the law for a change
and stop playing little political games around it.
A
political class that can’t defend the constitutional order and the rule
of law is worse than useless: it’s actually conspiring with its enemies.
Trump attacked the very heart of our system of government.
If the system can’t respond to that forcefully it doesn’t deserve to
exist anymore. Let’s stop pretending Trump is anything but a mobster and
a would-be tyrant. In this case, prudence demands action.
alchetron |Charles Howard Hinton (1853, United Kingdom – 30 April 1907, Washington D.C., United States) was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances. He was interested in higher dimensions, particularly the fourth dimension. He is known for coining the word "tesseract" and for his work on methods of visualising the geometry of higher dimensions.
In 1880 Hinton married Mary Ellen, daughter of Mary Everest Boole and
George Boole, the founder of mathematical logic. The couple had four
children: George (1882–1943), Eric (*1884), William (1886–1909) and
Sebastian (1887–1923) inventor of the Jungle gym. In 1883 he went
through a marriage ceremony with Maud Florence, by whom he had had twin
children, under the assumed identity of John Weldon. He was subsequently
convicted of bigamy
and spent three days in prison, losing his job at Uppingham. His father
James Hinton was a radical advocate of polygamous relationships, and
according to Charles' mother James had once remarked to her: "Christ was
the saviour of Men but I am the saviour of Women and I don't envy him a
bit." In 1887 Charles moved with Mary Ellen to Japan to work in a
mission before accepting a job as headmaster of the Victoria Public
School. In 1893 he sailed to the United States on the SS Tacoma to take up a post at Princeton University as an instructor in mathematics.
Fourth dimension
In
an 1880 article entitled "What is the Fourth Dimension?", Hinton
suggested that points moving around in three dimensions might be
imagined as successive cross-sections of a static four-dimensional
arrangement of lines passing through a three-dimensional plane, an idea
that anticipated the notion of world lines. Hinton's explorations of higher space had a moral basis:
Hinton
argues that gaining an intuitive perception of higher space required
that we rid ourselves of the ideas of right and left, up and down, that
inheres in our position as observers in a three-dimensional world.
Hinton calls the process "casting out the self", equates it with the
process of sympathizing with another person, and implies the two
processes are mutually reinforcing.
Hinton created several new words to describe elements in the fourth dimension. According to OED, he first used the word tesseract in 1888 in his book A New Era of Thought. He also invented the words kata (from the Greek for "down from") and ana
(from the Greek for "up toward") to describe the additional two
opposing fourth-dimensional directions (an additional 4th axis of motion
analogous to left-right (x), up-down (y), and forwards-backwards (z)).
Hinton's Scientific romances,
including "What is the Fourth Dimension?" and "A Plane World", were
published as a series of nine pamphlets by Swan Sonnenschein & Co.
during 1884–1886. In the introduction to "A Plane World", Hinton
referred to Abbott's recent Flatland
as having similar design but different intent. Abbott used the stories
as "a setting wherein to place his satire and his lessons. But we wish
in the first place to know the physical facts." Hinton's world existed
along the perimeter of a circle rather than on an infinite flat plane.
He extended the connection to Abbott's work with An Episode on Flatland: Or How a Plain Folk Discovered the Third Dimension (1907).
Hinton influenced P. D. Ouspensky's thinking. Many of ideas Ouspensky presents in "Tertium Organum" mention Hinton's works.
Hinton's "scientific romance," the "Unlearner" is cited by John Dewey in "Art as Experience", chapter 3.
Hinton is the main character of Carlos Atanes's play Un genio olvidado (Un rato en la vida de Charles Howard Hinton). The play was premiered on Madrid in May 2015 and published in May 2017.
Hinton is mentioned several times in Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell;
his theories regarding the fourth dimension form the basis of the
book's final chapter. His father, James Hinton, appears in chapters 4
and 10.
He is mentioned twice in Aleister Crowley's novel Moonchild. The first mention mistakenly names his father, James Hinton.
And what choice did American security agencies have? They couldn’t stop Hunter, who had his father’s blessing. So they spied on both of them.
Ever since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI and the CIA have vied over
which could get the most dirt on presidential candidates, for use at
opportune times when presidents might be tempted to veer off the
straight and narrow path. What happened to JFK when he tried the
off ramp is always an instructive first lesson for incoming presidents.
“They” could’ve stopped hunter anytime “they” wanted. A little fentanyl in his drugs would have ended him once and for all, and no one would have questioned it. “Intelligence” assets are no strangers to such “solutions.” But “they” didn’t. Instead “they” let him stumble into some computer shop and turn over his loaded laptop to some random guy, in a mental state in which he “forgot” about it later.
Somebody knew what he’d done, and the laptop was allowed to languish for months on purpose, while the repair guy looked at what was on it to get this whole thing going. This story is inevitably framed as a “hamstrung, subservient” intelligence apparatus protecting the powerful and colossally corrupt biden family because they have no other choice.
But the real upshot is that the “intelligence” apparatus owns; lock, stock and barrel; the most feeble, inept, unpopular administration ever “elected,” and can bring it down at anytime. And despite the undeniable senility of the “president” and the gross incompetence of his pants-suit-wearing sidekick, any actions they take still pack the power of the presidential punch.
It seems to me that getting control of a barely alive “chief executive” lugging so much slimy, debauched baggage as Biden, is just the kind of thing that gets American “intelligence” operatives salivating. And portraying him as omnipotent enough to keep them in their place is just the kind of joke they like to tell the people they’re manipulating.
There’s been a “coup” alright, but it has nothing to do with the electoral college, or guys in Halloween costumes and MAGA hats seeking to “overturn” the “election.”
tabletmagazine | The
recent release of more gigabytes of images and information from Hunter
Biden’s laptop adds to the evidence that the all-out elite effort to
bury the scandal before the 2020 election wasn’t just to protect Joe
Biden, the preferred candidate of the American oligarchy. Sure, the
50-plus senior U.S. intelligence professionals who signed a letter
claiming the laptop’s contents were “Russian disinformation” wanted to
stop Donald Trump from sending angry tweets at them, but the laptop
suggests there was much more at stake.
The
U.S. spy chiefs who signed that infamously misleading letter—including
John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and James Clapper—had
directed America’s foreign intelligence services while Biden was vice
president and before that chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. They knew what his son Hunter was doing abroad, because it
was their job to know what foreign services know about leading U.S.
officials and their families, and how it might affect U.S. national
security.
But
none of these powerful and experienced men, presumably dedicated to
defending the national interest, lifted a finger to stop Hunter
Biden—and really, how could they? He was Joe Biden’s son, after all. And
by doing nothing about him, the pillars of America’s intelligence
community became the curators of the Biden family’s scandal.
When Trump started asking questions in 2019 about Hunter and his father, prompted by Joe Biden’s public comments
about protecting Hunter’s business associates abroad, it became clear
that the only way to contain the mushrooming scandal involving key U.S.
interests in Ukraine and China—a scandal whose magnitude they had known
about for a decade—was to provide the former vice president with all the
resources the U.S. government could muster. And that helped make him
president.
Begrudgingly Acknowledged Country Bangers
-
When someone says they hate country music, they’re typically referring,
whether they know it or not, to the neotraditionalist “young country” that
arose in...
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...