The Politics of Delay

Martin Tye wrote in a post on the ex-bird site:

"Scale of demand" is the key component of #Sustainability.

Almost anything is #sustainable if demanded on a small enough scale,
& almost nothing if demanded on too large a scale.

— Martin Tye (@martinrev21) October 24, 2024

I replied with a thread, that I have reproduced with some corrections and clarifications here:

Yes, large scale is a risk. But not of unsustainable full coverage; rather, of sustainable-yet-incomplete coverage.

Either way not meeting climate goals, but depending how you describe predictions, you'll be seen as wise or not.

They'll say “it's working, but not yet done, wait more.”

Capitalism relies for its correct function on strategic choices by businesses about who not to serve. This is why government must never be asked to “run like a business.” Some issues must be handled fully. Government projects are just not all correctly described or modeled as profit & loss centers.

Capitalism, at least until we overconsume generally and it kills us, reacts to scarcity by hiking prices (price elasticity), so rather than too-large demand causing the system to implode, it will “just” not reach coverage—or not yet reach coverage. The public is ill-equipped for such conversation.

I'm no mathematician, but I'll risk their terminology in order to make a brief point: Many Capitalists' alleged or accepted “truths” (to include some mere “rules of thumb”) presume asymptotic effect. Climate physics adds a bounding box, inside of which such curves are truncated. It matters where that truncation occurs. It calls for different lemmas and fights common wisdom.

For example, capitalists might say “if X occurs, prices will naturally come down,” but if there is a bounding box, a time limit, then it matters whether “eventually” falls inside or outside of the box.

It may be that certain things we're used to seeing converge eventually do not converge in the short term, and that's all the time we have. So our rule of thumb that “the market will sort it out” might be true if we have infinite time, but false if we do not. Moreover, if they weren't going to converge at all, that fact may be hidden behind a time horizon. We might need to think very differently in a bounded-time scenario than we do if we think we have unbounded time. This might change how we have to judge what market-based strategies are acceptable.

So the difficulty is that we must convince people that certain rules of thumb they'll want to use to evaluate proposals are wrong, while at the same time proposing new ways to do something that will need some way of being judged. Changing both “manner of practice” AND “theory of testing” at same time is conversationally hard. It's needed, of course. But be ready for confusion, suspicion, and pushback.

Denialists have reimagined and reconfigured themselves as “delayists so they can say “we're getting there” or “we're going in the right direction.” It makes it not sound as much like lying. Unless people actually believe in the bounding time box. Folks still today, as we reach and possibly already exceed certain Climate tipping points, make economic and political choices that presume infinite time.

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I created the plot in Python using numpy and matplotlib, then touched it up in Gimp.

Common Ground on Reproductive Health

I want to bookmark and celebrate a particular interchange in the conversation from a recent town hall that featured Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney together. The remarks by Cheney capture what I think could be an important shift the political dialog on reproductive health, trigged by the anger and revulsion of many women to the Dobbs decision, the recent Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade

I suspect this is why, traditionally, the pro-choice community has said it's about “choice,” not “abortion.” Still, it was enormously encouraging to watch Cheney put this into plain and heartfelt terms of her own.

Harris: And then, of course, I feel very strongly the government should not be telling any woman what to do with her body. And when Congress passes a law reinstating the reproductive freedoms of women, I will gladly and proudly sign it into law because I strongly believe one does not have to give up or abandon their own faith or beliefs to agree that—not the Government telling her what to do. If she chooses she will consult with her priest, her pastor, her rabbi or imam, but not the government. We have seen too much harm, real harm, happen to women and the people who love them around our country since that decision came down, including women who have died. And I don't think that most people who, before the Dobbs decision came down who had strong opinions about this I don't think most people intended that the harm we've seen would have actually happened.

Cheney: Can I add to this? Just to—Because I think it's such an important point. And I think there are many of us, around the country, who have been pro-life, but who have watched what's going on in our states since the Dobbs decision, and have watched the state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need, and so I think this is not an issue that we're seeing break down across party lines, but I think we're seeing people come together to say what has happened to women, when women are facing situations where they can't get the care they need, where in places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing—is suing—to get access to women's medical records, that's not sustainable for us as a country, and it has to change.

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Emperor's Wardrobe Day

Spoiler Warning: I'm going to speak of the ending of a certain fairy tale here, so if it's something you've waited your whole live to read, you'll want to stop when it's mentioned and go read it before continuing on. —kmp

So we're on the same page

In the well-known Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes, the emperor is sold a garment that is said to be invisible to stupid people. No one wants to seem stupid, so no one tells the emperor there is no garment at all. He just walks around naked and everyone tells him how great his outfit is. It takes an innocent child to finally break the spell by blurting out what should have been obvious to everyone all along, but that everyone was afraid to say: the emperor is the stupid one, and they have all been enablers. The story doesn't quite end there, but that's as much as I want to rely on for here.

People have sometimes used the “emperor's new clothes” metaphor for the dark spell that Donald Trump has cast upon the Republican party (GOP). In the early days, I think everyone was looking around expectantly for such a Deus ex machina ending to the otherwise bottomless pit that is Trump's daily sinking to new lows. But no GOP leader stepped forward to play the role of the innocent.

The cancer has mestastasized

Some say there were never any innocent leaders in the GOP. Others say they lost their innocence over time or through specific actions. For our purposes here, it doesn't matter. Actions by single individuals at this point are unlikely to work.

It's commonly suggested that people are afraid to act. I'm sure fear is involved. But too often it's offered not just as explanation, but excuse. People worry they might lose their job, or that they might face physical violence. They cite danger to their families. And I don't disagree there are risks.

But these leaders are the ones we trust to make weighty decisions for our government. They decide who will get medical care and who will not. They decide who will be sent to war. They decide who qualifies for financial aid late in life, or after a storm. They hold the lives of others in their hands every day. And others accept that it's proper for them to do this, at least collectively, because we have a government by and for We The People.

Under our system of government—and I mean as it's intended, not as it's been perverted by recent decisions by a corrupted Supreme Court —those in our government are not special people, better than us. They are just us, charged for a time for performing actions in our interest. The reason, under the original design, that we might trust them with all these life-or-death decisions is that we know those decisions apply to them, as well. They ask some of us to take occasional risks in the name of society, for example, because they know they are subject to those same risks.

I would say there is already a civil war, a battle to undermine and restructure government through mechanisms that are not ordinary governmental consensus process. Wars are often fought with guns, but not always. In The Art of War, written by famous Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who lived around the 5th century B.C., there is a recurrent theme of minimizing unnecessary resource expenditures, and only resorting to armies as a last resort. “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle,” he says.

Some say that some element of government has always operated behind the scenes in ways that make democratic control an illusion. I argue that some changes have made even that process far worse. Maybe it's just that with each step, it all gets worse, and after a while the exponential nature of the growth of evil is too hard to ignore.

All hands on deck

There's an election coming up. It matters like no other. Voting may not fix everything, but it's important to vote, and to vote for Democracy. That means voting for the Democrats.

I emphasize that I'm not a card-carrying Democrat myself. I'm a political independent. I don't even always agree with the Democrats on policy. But lately, policy is not the issue. Having a democratic government at all is the issue. This is a matter that is beyond policy. It's about survival of our way of life. One of two parties will win: The Republicans, promising to bring Democracy down. Or the Democrats, promising to safeguard Democracy. That choice seems clear to me. It should be to you as well.

To underscore this point, many staunch Republicans, including who've worked closely with Trump in the past, have spoken out in favor of Kamala Harris and the Democrats. former Representative Liz Cheney, for example. And her dad, Dick Cheney, who was George W. Bush's Vice President. John Kelly, Trump's chief of staff and a retired Marine general, recently called Trump a “fascist.”. Thirteen former Trump administration officials signed an open letter backing this. General Mark Milley and other retired generals have issued similarly strong statements in recent days.

Breaking the wardrobe silence

Maybe the dam will finally burst as more and more people come out about the danger. I hope so, but I'm not so sure.

There have been numerous reports that many GOP leaders privately want Trump to lose the election, but aren't willing to say so publicly. Explanations of why vary. Some say they just want to keep their jobs. Others cite threats of various kinds. Romney has spoken about this, for example.

I think the sense is that there is safety in numbers. Going back to the “emperor's new clothes” metaphor, no one is willing to be the singular voice of reason.

But does it have to be one single person?

Maybe someone with a sufficiently large microphone could just designate a day. I'm tentatively calling it “Emperor's Wardrobe Day” when everyone who is afraid to come out individually agrees that they'll suddenly say what they really feel. If everyone plans on the same day, there can be a giant deluge of people speaking the danger, and no one will feel singularly at risk.

It needs to be soon because people are already voting, but also far enough out that people could hear the message and plan their statements. So it really depends on when someone picks up the idea.

Any break in solidarity before the election, explaining the danger, and perhaps most importantly, explaining that attempts to claim there is an election fraud problem are just made up, could be very important to processing of election results. Our election system is not broken in the ways Trump is saying. If he can, even now, be exposed as just making this up, that could matter.

It feels to me like it's worth a try. Everyone is just waiting for there to be a right time. Let's just put one on the calendar.

Hallmark, if you're listening...

 

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Author's Notes:

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Also, if you're looking for more reading, these recent pieces by me may offer additional insight:

• Vance Notice
• Political Terraforming
• American Dictatorship
• The Pace of Political Evil

There's also my recent poem The Fraud Who Stole Freedom, which covers many of the same issues as does Vance Notice, but in a hopefully-more-entertaining way.

The graphic was produced by abacus.ai's ChatLLM using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Flux.1. The prompt was: «draw a grayscale image of sad old donald trump wearing just a barrel, holding up a hand-lettered cardboard sign that says "Will dictate to stay out of prison."» It inroduced the misspelling of “dictate” and I decided to just keep it.

Pretty Messed Up

I needed a graphic for another of my posts, so I asked an “AI” (really just a Large Langugage Model, or LLM).

Sketch a grayscale image of a wall calendar for november 2024.

This is what I got. I cropped it and reduced the resolution slightly.

It's pretty. But it's messed up.

• Days are not lettered right.
• Numbers are not in the right order and are duplicated.
• Starts on wrong day of the week.
• There should be at most two ragged line lengths in a month, one at the start, one at the end.
• Underneath the month at the top is a line that says something about Thanksgiving but blurs out what day it is.
• It shows Thanksgiving on the 29th. The latest possible first Thursday is the 7th. Three weeks after that is the 28th.

This was done with Abacus.ai's Claude Sonnet 3.5 using Flux.1.

So I thought maybe I could just get Google to make me a calendar. I forgot somebody would want to sell me one. My search turned up these, among others. No wonder the first one is on sale. It doesn't have the right start date for the month either.

I wonder if this is just business as usual or part of some disinformation campaign for the election.

 

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The Fraud Who Stole Freedom

Version 2 by Kent M Pitman

Once player loads, click “Play” to hear
this poem read by the author.
It's about 10.5 minutes long.

Most voters in Freedom liked voting a lot,
  but the Fraud_{(dumb, dumb, dumb)}—who was fearful of voters—did not.

The Fraud hated Freedom, the whole Freedom spirit.
  Though if there’s a reason, we’re waiting to hear it.

It could be, perhaps, that his life was too soft.
  It could be his woodpecker wasn’t aloft.

Still, I think that the most likely cause, on the whole,
  may have been that his ego was out of control.

Whatever the reason--no frays or no lays,
  he logged on FraudSocial just needing some praise.

Staring down at his keys, the Fraud muttered aloud,
  at an enemy rally that had drawn quite a crowd.

“They’re making it up,” came his frustrated wail
  “They’re using A.I., but I’ll see they all fail.”

Soon the Fraud’s tiny fingers were whipping a potion.
  “I must find a way to set chaos in motion.”

“Not long ’til the time when the voters will go
  to the polls to elect me as king of the show.”

“But what if they don’t?” he thought with a scowl
  “I’ll have to derail them by calling a foul.”

“They’ll only be honest, if voting for me.
  All else is injustice, I’ll make them all see.”

“I’ll make women like me, as stars get to do.
  If they try to reject me, I’ll hasten to sue.”

“All men will revere me. I’ve bragged of much wealth,
  They’ll want to be near me, a stud in such health.”

And yet as he sat there, it stuck in his craw,
  Past vote counters failed him, they’d followed the law!

The more the Fraud sat there, the more he went bullshit.
  To make sure he won, he’d be needing to pull shit.

“I’ll mount a campaign, I’ll rally the masses.
  I’ll help them to see only I’ll save their asses”

“They’ll think it’s well-meant, say my threats are just kidding.
  But I’ll not relent ’til the world does my bidding.”

“At first I’ll just fraud about doubts that I’ve had.
  If that doesn’t work, I’ll allege ‘migrant chad.’ ”

“Whatever I say, my base will refraud me.
  At the end of the day, they’re just waiting to laud me.”

“I’ll fuss about taxes, I’ll make it sound bad.
  That it’s just about me they won’t see if they’re mad.”

“I’ll make some pronouncements that seem quite attractive
  But each of them will be, of course, quite extractive.”

“I’ll wheel and I’ll deal, they’ll be totally smitten,
  They’ll feel it for real by the time they get bitten.

He had a quick thought, which was all he could muster.
  He wasn't coherent, so padded with bluster.

But with bitterness honed on a long ago day,
  ’twasn’t long ’til he moaned, “I must make them all pay!”

So the Fraud thought his thought, and approved his own trick.
  A quick, slick, sick pick that was sure to off-tick.

He’d post infinite frauds, for his base, so expecting.
  They’d be riddled with lies, far too dense for rejecting.

And yet, like a train, in his Fraudulent brain
  came a painful refrain he could hardly restrain.

“What if my posts get some judge’s attention?
  They’re nudgy with me, I might get detention.”

The voice rambled on and he started to curse.
  Like most of his thoughts, it was more than one verse.

This thought made the Fraudster both itchy and twitchy.
  He needed some safety if things got too glitchy.

So again the Fraud brain did what only it could
  It began thinking fraudulence only it would.

Soon the Fraud made another plan, quick as could be.
  “I’ll sue any district not promised to me!”

“I’ll question their methods and forms of ID
  I’ll cry if they fix it, ‘It’s unfair to me!’”

Pennsylvania and Georgia, said the Fraud analytical...
  And if they sue back, I’ll say it’s political.

“To seal the deal fully, it’s time they all learn
  I can call on some bullies, and tables will turn.”

“But still it could fail,” thought the Fraud with no thrill,
  “Even that,” he then brightened, “is grist for my mill.”

“To cover a failure I must have a fallback.
  I’ll file more lawsuits and ask for a callback.”

“‘Elections can’t have a replay,’ they’ll say.
  They’ll throw it to Congress, where my guys hold sway.”

With his plan seeming ripe, the Fraud started to type
  And he typed and he typed ... and he typed hype-type type.

But then as he typed, he stopped with a hissing.
  “Even though perfect, some detail was missing.”

“I’m in need of a scandal.”
    The Fraud looked around.
  Though their scandals were scarce, …
    maybe … some … could be ‘found.’

He reached out to helpers, phoned ‘fellas’ he knew.
  “Saying just a few ... thousand ... will easily do,”

“We can’t conjure votes,” they said with a shock.
  They never imagined they’d have such a talk.

The fraud seemed impatient, and primped his thin ‘hair.’
  “Not votes, I need scandals, then all will be fair!”

Real billionaires joined, and they funded each fake,
  they knew at the end there were jackpots at stake.

In search of more dirt, the Fraud urgently browsed.
  Just kidding. His mob did. As he mostly drowsed.

Soon tidbits were offered that he could enfraud,
  And they sent him their bills, which he’d hastily wad.

He frauded out why, and he frauded out wherefore.
  He pressed REFRAUD for all, shrugging, “that’s what it’s there for.”

He posted it all. He posted it twice.
  Then he posted some more. And he posted that thrice.

“I’ll show the whole world there’s conspiracy brewing,
  They’ll stick to their stories but I’ll see their doing.”

The Fraud posted and pasted, he pasted and posted,
  Whatever they answered, he always out-mosted.

He pasted and wasted and always lambasted,
  The Fraud was dead set to see victory tasted.

He made some big lies, from whole cloth. They spread.
  And deep-faked some horns on his enemy’s head.

He frauded as Guests, sometimes Red, sometimes Blue,
  and told all who’d listen the rumors were true.

A batallion of bots was unleashed ’round the world,
  They amplified stories and insults were hurled.

He spammed, and he slammed, and he made people stammer.
  “Put the Fraud in a slammer,” a few dared to yammer.

Charges were leveled with harrowing proof,
  But the Fraud called on lawyers who kept him aloof.

Some laws were invoked that had long lacked a use,
  But he argued that singling him out was abuse.

And the public agreed with a sort of a groan
  “A law isn’t fair once a need has been shown.”

A piece at a time, all shame was erased.
  Morality fell and was crudely replaced.

Then pretense was made for the High Court to enter.
  They’d bided their time ’til they came front and center.

They made up some lies about founders’ intent,
  They’d never admit just how much they’d been bent.

Not trusting the Congress, they called it themselves
  An outcome so gifty, ’twas worthy of elves.

They said they avoided a violent coup.
  Too bad they relinquished democracy, too.

Day One saw the Fraud in his dictator best,
  But soon Twenty-Five was put to the test.

They tossed him from office that very same day,
  And courts set to work at lifting each stay.

Back at the White House there'd be quite a scramble,
  The public was shocked they'd received no preamble.

The Snake who stepped up, no one’d looked at too seriously
  It was quite a surprise when he acted imperiously.

Most thought at this point, things would go back to norm.
  But really this only began the real storm.

He’d planned a big Project and started with zeal
  What only his patrons had thought would be real.

This wasn’t a Seuss tale, so ended up ugly.
  It’s hard to imagine a world quite so thugly.

For the rest of the tale, read Atwood’s banned book
  It shows the dark path society took.

The Fraud and the Snake hadn’t stopped crime at all.
  They’d only made Freedom first tumble, then fall.

It turned out the things that the Fraud had foretold,
  Were lies propagated so merchandise sold.

People learned a hard lesson, and cried boo hoo hoo.
  But nothing they tried could build Freedom anew.

And still to this day, those poor souls, so impacted,
  wonder what would be different if only they’d acted.

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Copyright © 2024 Kent M Pitman. All Rights Reserved.

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Vance Notice

It's in the news that Trump is “exhausted,” and that's supposedly why he's been canceling appearances.

Maybe.

There's a lot of attention paid to him seeming to nod off. But, you know, he's been doing that all along. and it's never been portrayed by him or his team as exhaustion. What is happening more often are incoherent rambles, which some of the media has tried to paper over. And that has led to accusations of “sanewashing.”

Numerous stories have suggested that his aids are hiding him. Such a story in The Wrap quotes political commentator Tara Setmayer from an appearance on MSNBC's The ReidOut as saying, “The more he’s out there, the more people are repelled by him, and his advisers are smart enough to know that.”

The Mental Decline Scenario

Let's consider, just for a moment, the mental decline hypothesis. We have two reasons to take this seriously. One is that he accused Biden of it, and he's long been accused of projection. But the other is that there's a lot of evidence that his campaign rallies are getting weirder and weirder, to the point where Harris is straight out suggesting that people watch or attend her opponent's rallies, just to see it for themselves.

Consider, for example, the recent town hall that he turned into a “musical fest” playing his Spotify favorites list after declaring “Let's not do any more questions, let's just listen to music. … Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?“ Yeah, at a town hall. Why would anyone expect questions there? Surely they just came to hear Pavarotti sing Ave Maria.

It probably won't surprise anyone that some artists have threatened legal action over the unauthorized use of their music. No, I didn't think so.

People, including medical experts, have credibly accused him of mental decline, not just because of this event, but for other reasons as well.

Around the same time as this musical incident, a story ran on CBS News saying that “More than 230 doctors, nurses and health care professionals, most of whom are backing Vice President Kamala Harris, are calling on former President Donald Trump to release his medical records, arguing that he should be transparent about his health ’given his advancing age.’” Of course, some will point to these being Harris supporters. But if you were a doctor alarmed about the mental health of one of the candidates, would you be still voting for him? So it's not clear that this statistic disqualifies those people. And it's not helpful that there isn't transparency of his medical records, which we've asked of other candidates and Presidents.

Prison Looms

But Trump is pending sentencing on the hush money case. And there are several other trials pending as well. It doesn't reliably work his favor to drop out of his candicacy. And it really doesn't help Vance either, because the GOP made the argument that if Biden dropped out, that invalidated the ticket. They suggested Kamala had never won a Presidential primary. Vance has never won a Presidential primary either. Both have been Senators. But Kamala has been on a winning ticket in the general election, and Vance has not. Would that sway GOP voters? Maybe not. OK, almost certainly not. But it's a bad look. It might influence some independents.

It's pretty clear that Trump's path to steering clear of jail is to get elected, turn the US into a dicatorship, and cancel anything that looks like a prosecution. And it's pretty clear that anyone else claiming to be a GOP leader is really just a sycophant. They want the power of a Republican presidency at all costs, and this is as close to “all costs” as one could really imagine. It may cost us the survival of democracy, and perhaps the survival of the human species on planet earth. But they want power that badly, so they're on board with what they hope is the Trump juggernaut.

After Election

If elected, he might serve 4 years and then gracefully step down. The Constitution would not permit him to run again. What are the chances he wouldn't try to overcome that?

He might live that long, but he's old enough that he could die of poor health during that time. I wouldn't bet money on it, but I also wouldn't bet money against it. Who ever knows?

But is he mentally agile enough to lead for four years? Again, we don't have the advice of a doctor who's examined him to really say. Though we do have reason to think we might never get the full story .

Reporters often mention that, behind the scenes, Republicans don't like or respect Trump. It seeems they just won't go on the record about it. Mitt Romney comments on this in his book. In a recent biography of Mitch McConnell, the book's author says the same of McConnell. The common theme seems to be that they recognize Trump as their ticket to power.

A Second Trump Presidency

It's no secret I'm hoping sanity prevails and that Harris is elected. But let's consider the case that Trump is.

Do the Republicans still need him? My guess is that even they would see strong grounds to remove him, sooner or later. Probably sooner, given that he toys with the idea of dispensing with the Constitution. After all, both the Impeachment Power and the 25th Amendment need the Constitution to still be in play.

I'm guessing you worry I'm exaggerating, but Newsweek fact-checked one such claim in 2023 and found Trump had indeed called to suspend the Constitution. Moreover, there is his claim that he wouldn't be a dicator “except for day one.”

Here's the thing, though. There is no procedure for becoming a temporary dictator. If he can pronounce himself a dictator on Day One, and get away with it, he can do it any day. At that point we'd just be relying on him to use self-control on all other days. Is that really something we can expect of him?

So let's take a moment to assess where we are, shall we? It's day one. The President wants to be a dicator. The same guy whose staff didn't think they could show him in public during the end of the election for fear people would see he was, perhaps, faltering mentally. At this point, the Constitution has a 25th Amendment. But he's planning strong-arm tactics to make the Constitution less effective. Republicans want to have power, but is that even meaningful in what's to come in this scenario? A few may imagine they'll have posts in a coming dictatorship, but I think most haven't thought that far ahead. The power most of them seek still relies on the Constitution.

After Trump's Presidency

But whether on Day One or some day soon after, I think its sufficiently possible that the 25th will get used that we dare not overlook that fact in considering the political consequences of this election.

In plain terms, the ordinarily-rare issue that a Vice President might take over seem unusually possible.

In even plainer terms, we had better be seriously contemplating the significance of a President Vance.

For example, if Vance becomes Acting or Actual President, would the world return to normal? I think not. I think it will just trade one source of dangers for another.

If you're thinking otherwise, perhaps you have missed a recent episode of The Rachel Maddow Show (TRMS) on MSNBC. Lately she's only doing it Monday nights, but it's really essential viewing. Set your DVR. In this case, I'm referring to an episode where she said this of JD Vance (and offered video to back up her claims):

«JD Vance says not only do conservatives need to, in his words, “wake up” but what they need to wake up to is the fact that most of American life and culture should be, in his words, “ripped out like a tumor.”»
  —Rachel Maddow on The Rachel Maddow Show (Sep 30, 2024)

Maddow goes on to say:

«When JD Vance says stuff like “we're in a late Republican period,” which is something he says all the time, he doesn't mean anything about the Republican Party, he means we're at the time right before the Roman Republic collapsed. And what happened after the Roman Republic collapsed? Well—whoo!—a dictator, Caesar, came in—and wasn't that better?»
  —Rachel Maddow on The Rachel Maddow Show (Sep 30, 2024)

The piece makes a decent case that he's not only comfortable with, but excited about, the idea of America having a dictator. Watch it in its entirety. Outtakes here cannot do it justice. It's well-researched and compellingly told. Typical Maddow.

There's so much more to be said from here, but I'll only sketch it. Project 2025, for example. It's a product of the Heritage Foundation, and Vance has in some forums tried to distance itself from it, as has Trump, but as Simon J. Levien, a political report for The New York Times, writes in an article titled What to Know About JD Vance and Project 2025:

«Mr. Vance … has connections to Project 2025 and its authors. Vance wrote the foreword for a book by Kevin Roberts, who oversaw Project 2025. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Mr. Vance wrote in the foreword for “Dawn’s Early Light,” a forthcoming book by Kevin D. Roberts, the leader of the Heritage Foundation and the man who oversaw Project 2025. The book was set for publication in September, but after Project 2025 drew national scrutiny, that was postponed until after Election Day.»

The ACLU also offers a summary of Project 2025's dangers. And the Center for American Progress (CAP) offers a useful comparison with how other dictatorships have taken hold.

It may also be worth a look at Timothy Snyder's book On Tyranny.

This long nightmare has seemed to be about Trump. With him lately ailing, maybe you thought it was over. But if Vance takes over, and that seems likely if the election goes “Trump's way,” this could just be the start of something even worse.

My point here is that you can't say you didn't know.
You've been given Vance notice.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

If you'd like to read or listen to this warning in Seuss-style poetry form, check out my recent epic poem The Fraud Who Stole Freedom.

You might also like these recent posts by me:

• Political Terraforming
• A to-do list for repairing US democracy
• American Dictatorship
• The Pace of Political Evil

Also, although I count myself a political independent, not a Democrat, while democracy is hanging in the balance, I'm voting all-blue. If you're a US Citizen able to vote, I'm recommending the same for you. Please not sit it out. Please do not vote for a third party. Such actions leave the outcome to chance, which could have dire consequences this time around. This is not a normal election.

For the sake of Democracy,
please vote Democrat in 2024.

The graphic of Vance with the 25th Amendment in the background was created by me using a screenshot of text of the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution that I typeset in LibreOffice with a mix of Papyrus and Goudy Old Style fonts, then overlaid with the public domain photo of Vance from Wikipedia, and blended with layer effects using Gimp.

Green AI

I don't believe in “Green AI.”

It's not that it's impossible to do the things people are calling Green AI. Rather, it's that I'm not willing to call those things “green.”

Some of the most technologically capable people in the world see the environmental challenge that Large Language Models (LLMs) pose and think “I should make a green data center for this new project.” Then they buy offsets—a horror I'm not going to address here—or they actually invest money to make a new and allegedly green data center.

The thing is, humans didn't—and don't—really need AI. Human society worked fine without it. And those technologists could be solving preexisting problems that are still there but now perceived as someone else's problem.

New ‘green data centers’ for AI represent both the creation and the solution of a problem that didn't exist, leaving the world with as many probiems as before but also leaving the world with fewer technologists focused on the problems human society faces because those technologists are resting on their laurels—as if solving these problems—problems that needn't have existed—helped something other than their consciences.

AI and its associated effort has a big opportunity cost, stealing from the body of people who could solve others' problems. Myriad companies around the world are diverting effort from what they normally do to explore how not to have AI leave them behind. That effort and cost isn't solving the Climate Crisis either. It is plundering our best and brightest for noncritical problems.

Meanwhile Climate Change is killing us. We have real and immediate problems that LLM-style AI can't solve.

I say it can't because, as Chomsky so aptly puts it, it's a “plagiarism” engine. If, like me, you think Chomsky is right, then it's easy to conclude that if a solution was there to plagiarize, that solution could have already saved us. LLMs are not performing new and immediately trustable computation of the kind we need for Climate, they're just blurring and regurgitating already-existing, often even already-tried, thought.

Makework and waste and distraction are the key elements here, and none of that is helping. And, yes, enormous resource use makes it worse. But my point is that the resource spent isn't just on a problem we needn't have sought to solve, which would be bad enough, but addressing that steals human resources from problems we do need to solve.

There's a denialist belief that down the road things will pay off. But human civilization may not have that long to wait. The climate crisis is now. It will not wait. We need all hands on deck solving that, not distracted by a problem that, while intriguing, isn't yet mature enough to help.

Big Tech needs to solve existing problems, not make new ones, solve those new ones, and then collapse exhausted, leaving everyone else out here in the land of Little Or No Tech to solve the existing problems that were here in the first place, but without any help.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This post began as a post on Mastodon. I did light editing to re-host the essay here. Think of that one as a rough draft.

I created the graphic in Gimp, starting from a circle with a line through it that began as an SVG image that one of the chatbots at Abacus.ai made for me one day when I was exploring how to use it. The code for that is just:

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 100 100">
  <circle cx="50" cy="50" r="45" stroke="red" stroke-width="10" fill="none" />
  <line x1="15" y1="85" x2="85" y2="15" stroke="red" stroke-width="10" />
</svg>

Political Terraforming

This observation by David Roberts helped me crystalize some thoughts. I wrote them originally as a reply thread, but have included a tidier and slightly expanded form below that for easier reference.
   —Kent Pitman

Remember, everyone: the tech bros are not "libertarian." There are no libertarians in the wild -- they can only exist in environments separated from the real world, like a think tank or a dorm.

"I don't want my shit regulated & I want my taxes cut" isn't libertarian!

— David Roberts (@drvolts) October 15, 2024

In reply to David:

Rachel Maddow, over the last few weeks, has run some great pieces. In one of them, I recall her quoting one of Vance's idols saying something about just needing to rip out government agencies and install a smart guy who innately knows what needs doing. Your remark on libertarians matches that.

What they propose is utterly self-serving, not defensibly fair. It's full of bias and subject to corruption and degradation. No notion of oversight, like the current Supreme Court overseeing itself. But they soothe themselves that bludgeoning democracy into collective unconsciousness is ‘minimal,’ indulge the claim it's therefore a principled action, and then—in the safety of their own minds—call it a win.

This is why they dislike diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). If everyone were just like them—not diverse, if they had no obligation to include anyone not like them, then equity and fairness would come for free and there would be no one to include.

A need to satisfy someone other than oneself creates a problem they can't solve. They've given it no thought. In that light, it's easy to see why narcissists find DEI troubling. To them it is just an irritating inefficiency to be forced into having a mechanism for dealing fairly with anyone other than themselves.

Attacks on DEI aren't random. Just as attacks on women are not. Nor racial attacks. Nor those related to sexual preference or gender identity. And so on. It isn't just that they disdain these groups, though they do. It's that they want no rights at all. Rights are potential barriers to them. And barriers to them are the only ones they want to remove.

They want no rules. That's the kind of ‘libertarianism.’ they seek. But as I've long said:

“Where there are no rules, bullies rule.”
—me

They, these bullies, are terraforming our world to be habitable to them—at the expense of our pre-existing forms of life, which had previously thrived but which they have no use for.

Author's Notes:

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The graphic was produced at abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Flux.1. The prompt was “Draw a black and white sketch of a bulldozer mowing down the supreme court's building with a crane and a wrecking ball.”. Using Gimp, I made some adjustments to the image it generated, flipping which side of the “T” the ball was on, adding a public domain image of the scales portion, adjusting the rubble and taking a small bite out of the columns.

Still imaginable

“Don't wear your heavy coat yet,” my mom used to warn me. “You'll need it when it's colder.” She knew I had no heavier artillery for holding the cold at bay and felt somehow it was best to have a sense of proportion.

I mention that because news reports are describing Hurricane Helene's aftermath described as “unimaginable.” It's not. It's very, very painful to imagine because all death and destruction is painful, but we can imagine this much if we try.

Of course, if you have to go through it, even a single death—a single building falling in, a single shooting, a single cancer—is, in some sense, unimaginable. Words will never capture the horror. But, collectively, when doing news reporting, we don't use the word “unimaginable” for that. And it's not because it isn't severe. It's just because, horrifying as each individual bit of death and destruction is, we still need words left over to describe bigger events, those with more people, those that will take communities a longer time to recover from, if at all.

Maybe let's dial the language back. We probably shouldn't use up these extreme words yet. Save them for later. Climate's wrath has barely even given a hint of where it's going, and it's not going to relent until we start taking meaningful action. So far we're still mired in denial and daring Climate to do its worst.

So, yes, every death matters, and I hope not to trivialize a couple hundred deaths. What Helene did was horrible. And yet… And yet, let's be clear: The possibility of billions of deaths hangs now tangibly in the balance, or should. If you don't see that as a possibility, consider that you might be engaged in Climate denial.

The problem is that Climate is bigger. It's hard for us to see, but if there were a thousand deaths, even a million, that could still be comparatively small compared to what is very likely coming. Implicitly, by using superlative terms like “unimaginable” we send the subtle cue “this is it, this is finally an example of what we've been talking about.” It is not. A thousand instances of a million people dying is closer. Or a million instances of a thousand people dying. Or ten million situations like Hurricane Helene if it helps you visualize the magnitude of the pain—if it helps you imagine it.

We'd be alarmed about a thousand traffic accidents—we'd have trouble imagining even that because we'd want that to be an upper bound. But a couple hundred people dying due to a climate-related event (a storm, a flood, a fire, a famine, etc.) is not an upper bound on how bad things can get. It's not even a rounding error. I'm not saying it's small if you're living it, but I am saying Climate is big in a way that we're not used to talking about. So that's why I'd like to hold a few words in reserve. Otherwise, we'll be reaching for phrases like “unimaginable squared“ to compensate for the wasteland of available terminology.

We'll look back and wish for events so small as Helene, if there are any of us left to look back. Even that is not clear. If there is something for which the term unimaginable is warranted, it is that. And yet even for that, we must try to imagine it, because otherwise we're not going to fear it enough. We already don't.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This essay began with a post on Mastodon. On a first pass, I did very light editing here, mostly to add fonting and a graphic, a few small wording changes. Later in the day, after publishing and before doing any broad advertising, I decided to expand this a little, so this version ended up more elaborated than the original.

I'm worried people will interpret my remark about 20 million such events literally. It might be fewer but larger events. They might not be hurricanes but floods, fires, famines.

The graphic was produced at abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Flux.1. The prompt was “Draw an image of a meter that is a semi-circle with a range of measurement that is normal, a range that is marked in yellow as indicating concern, and a range that is marked in red as an active problem. Show the meter pointing into the yellow area.”. Using Gimp, I made some adjustments to the image it generated, removing some lettering and changing where the dial pointed to.