Realism in Foreign Policy

Idealism or realism? This is not just a left-right issue, but a deeper issue of values in foreign policy.

Think tanks on both the right and the left tout foreign policy realism, impatient with the demands that the post-war era have placed on the US as the unique, exceptional (and rich) leader of the free and democratic world. Whether from a cost perspective or a peace perspective, backing off from our world-wide commitments and ideals is attractive to many. The current administration has dramatically taken up their banner, reversing US policy, dropping Ukraine, allying with Russia, and ending idealism, generosity and empathy as a elements of foreign policy. What was firmly planted after World War 2 and flowered under John F. Kennedy has now been buried. So, are we great yet?

Where idealism in foreign policy takes up moral crusades, like human rights, women's rights, and global equity, even climate change, realism sticks to power and assumes anarchy, not order, as the natural state of international affairs. Realists sell themselves as hard-headed, unsentimental, and into the bargain, less likely to get us mixed up in wars. The most recent US wars, after all, from Vietnam to Iraq, were all crusades to foster democracy, in one form or other. Better to wash our hands of it all, care less about saving the people of the world, and more about bullying our neighbors to get what we want.

These are not really exclusive approaches, but rather shades of emphasis. The raw power of military and economic kinds is central to both, even if soft power is more of a focus for the idealists. But if you think about it more deeply, even these distinctions fade away, and both approaches end up being idealistic, just differing in the ideals they vaunt. The current administration clearly has its ideals- of Putin, Victor Orban, and authoritarianism ascendant world-wide. Its lack of empathy is not realism, it is a crabbed idealism- that of the rich and powerful lording it over the masses, both domestically and internationally.  

International power is composed of many things. But mostly, it is made up of relationships multiplied by technological capabilities. Two people can always overpower one person, and the same is true internationally. Bigger countries can field bigger armies. Bigger countries can field more researchers and manufacturers to arm those people with better weapons. Alliances between countries can make even more menacing combinations. 

It is, at base, social relationships that create power, and this is where realism really falls down. If one's ideal is transactional and bullying, worshipping power and taking a small-minded and greedy approach to international affairs, (that is to say, a zero-sum approach), then one will find that the few friends one has are fair-weather friends of convenience. Alliances between such partners frequently fall apart and re-arrange, creating the extremely dangerous environment conducive to major wars. Relationships are fungible and disposable. Europe had a long balance-of-power phase in the 1800's after the Napoleonic wars, until it collapsed in the 1900's in cataclysmic world wars, thanks in both cases to unstable alliance structures, not to mention authoritarian manias. The post-World War 2 era, the one we are witnessing the collapse of right now, was founded on something much more stable- true friendship and shared ideals of democracy. 

One can reply that helping the weak defend themselves against the strong is a sure recipe for entanglement in a lot of wars. Our involvement (up to now) in Ukraine is a case in point. We encouraged Ukraine to pursue a democratic path, thwarting Russia's clear and stated interests. And then we got dragged into this cataclysmic war. Why not side with the strong against the weak, instead? Wouldn't that make for a more stable world? Well, at some point we may be the weak one, not the strong one. What then? In the ever-shifting constellation of international alliances in a transactional, "realistic" world, there is no telling what tomorrow may bring, since values are not anchored in natural friendship or sympathy, but in naked interests, which are subject to rapid adjustment and negotiation. The disastrous Ribbentrop-Molotov pact comes to mind, as an example of such "realistic" foreign policy.

That is not a good world to live in, even if it has represented most of history. Realists may be right that their view is the mafia-like baseline of international relations, devoid of any human values and run on a power basis. Well, we can do better, both morally and objectively. That is what the last eighty years of international relations were all about. They were about setting up an international system where big countries at least tried to cloak their leadership in common interests, progress, and values. Where there was order, of some basic sort, which led to prosperity and security. And the Soviets bought into it as well, trying desperately to sell their adventures as standing for some kind of progressive, pro-worker ideology. Which lasted all the way to the end of the cold war, till its contradictions had grown too glaring. The US-led system has had its contradictions and hypocrisies as well, but the latest leap into the authoritarian camp is hardly fore-ordained or natural to our traditions.

Now, it looks like Winter is Coming. If the US forcibly devolves the international system into a value-less scramble for power, no one can rely on, or be satisfied with, stable friendships, so the system will be in greater flux, as powers test each other. When friendships are devalued, what is left but competition, such as trade wars, causing general destruction, and eventually desperate measures to regain relative power. 

• The policy is plain.
• Social insecurity.
• Nothing strategic about it.
• Wells on the pandemic. For me, the remarkable memory is how little we collectively knew about the simplest things- masks, aerosols, surfaces. That was inexcusable.

Impeachment is Inevitable

Whether congress wants to or not, it will be forced to defend its role in government.

Looking out over the incredible destruction the new president has already wrought at home and abroad, it is hard to see this continuing for a full four-year term. There is a honeymoon now, and a shock campaign. There is delirium in hard-right circles that their fondest dreams of rampant chaos in the bureaucracy, with racism and fascism ascendant, are coming true. But there will come a time when the costs begin to appear, the appetite for dysfunction will wane, and the tide turns. Congress has small Republican margins, and it won't take many members to face up to our rapidly expanding constitutional crisis.

Maybe I am spinning a fantasy here, but one thing seems certain. The current president is constitutionally (pardon the expression) unable to follow directions. His oath of office was barely out of his mouth before he started violating the constitution and running roughshod over the explicit authorizations and appropriations of Congress. Not to mention direct assertions that the constitution doesn't mean what it plainly says, about birthright citizenship. This is not going to stop, and the only way our system of government is going to survive is that the other branches, specifically congress, use their powerful tools to reset the balance.

Article 2

Harder to judge are the attitudes of the congresspeople who are on the spot. The Republicans have largely rolled over in approving the first, abysmal slate of cabinet nominees. Again, there is a honeymoon of sorts. Party discipline is particularly strong on the conservative side, and the president has eagerly used his tools of intimidation and hatred to obtain obedience. So it is hard to say when they will crack. But as the functions of government degrade, the country is laughed at and reviled around the world, the economic damage accumulates, and constituents line up to complain, the equation will change. And anyhow, they would merely be elevating the vice president, who is hardly an opponent of their ideological aims, and is part of the Senate community (however disliked on both sides). So impeachment becomes a much less imposing action than it might otherwise be. 

As they say, the third time's the charm!

• Presidents day.
• Oh the irony. Science comes up with a vaccine that saves millions, who turn into idiots.

The Climate is Changing

Fires in LA, and a puff of smoke in DC.

An ill wind has blown into Washington, a government of whim and spite, eager to send out the winged monkeys to spread fear and kidnap the unfortunate. The order of the day is anything that dismays the little people. The wicked witch will probably have melted away by the time his most grievous actions come to their inevitable fruition, of besmirching and belittling our country, and impoverishing the world. Much may pass without too much harm, but the climate catastrophe is already here, burning many out of their homes, as though they were made of straw. Immoral and spiteful contrariness on this front will reap the judgement and hatred of future generations.

But hasn't the biosphere and the climate always been in flux? Such is the awful refrain from the right, in a heartless conservatism that parrots greedy, mindless propaganda. In truth, Earth has been blessed with slowness. The tectonic plates make glaciers look like race cars, and the slow dance of Earth's geology has ruled the evolution of life over the eons, allowing precious time for incredible biological diversification that covers the globe with its lush results.

A stretch of relatively unbroken rain forest, in the Amazon.

Past crises on earth have been instructive. Two of the worst were the end-Permian extinction event, about 252 million years ago (mya), and the end-Cretaceous extinction event, about 66 mya. The latter was caused by a meteor, so was a very sudden event- a shock to the whole biosphere. Following the initial impact and global fire, it is thought to have raised sun-shielding dust and sulfur, with possible acidification, lasting for years. However, it did not have very large effects on CO2, the main climate-influencing gas.

On the other hand, the end-Permian extinction event, which was significantly more severe than the end-Cretaceous event, was a more gradual affair, caused by intense volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. Recent findings show that this was a huge CO2 event, turning the climate of Earth upside down. CO2 went from about 400 ppm, roughly what we are at currently, to 2500 ppm. The only habitable regions were the poles, while the tropics were all desert. But the kicker is that this happened over the surprisingly short (geologically speaking) time of about 80,000 years. CO2 then stayed high for the next roughly 400,00 years, before returning slowly to its former equilibrium. This rate of rise was roughly 2.7 ppm per 100 years, yet that change killed off 90% of all life on Earth. 

The momentous analysis of the end-Permian extinction event, in terms of CO2, species, and other geological markers, including sea surface temperature (SST). This paper was when the geological brevity of the event was first revealed.

Compare this to our current trajectory, where atmospheric CO2 has risen from about 280 ppm at the dawn of the industrial age to 420 ppm now. That is rate of maybe 100 ppm per 100 years, and rising steeply. It is a rate far too high for many species, and certainly the process of evolution itself, to keep up with, tuned as it is to geologic time. As yet, this Anthropocene extinction event is not quite at the level of either the end-Permian or end-Cretaceous events. But we are getting there, going way faster than the former, and creating a more CO2-based long-term climate mess than the latter. While we may hope to forestall nuclear war and thus a closer approximation to the end-Cretaceous event, it is not looking good for the biosphere, purely from a CO2 and warming perspective, putting aside the many other plagues we have unleashed including invasive species, pervasive pollution by fertilizers, plastics and other forever chemicals, and the commandeering of all the best land for farming, urbanization, and other unnatural uses. 

CO2 concentrations, along with emissions, over recent time.

We are truly out of Eden now, and the only question is whether we have the social, spiritual, and political capacity to face up to it. For the moment, obviously not. Something disturbed about our media landscape, and perhaps our culture generally, has sent us for succor, not to the Wizard who makes things better, but to the Wicked Witch of the East, who delights in lies, cruelty and destruction.

• The oligarchy is upon us. Oh, and they will help the working class!
• The attention economy.
• Which distorts our public understandings.
• Good coverage will never win in the attention economy.
• Keep Greenland white!

A Housing Guarantee

A proposal for an updated poor house.

I agree with MMT economists who propose a job guarantee. That would put a floor on the labor market with an offer to anyone who wants to work for a low, but living wage, probably set below the minimum wage mandated for the private sector. State and local governments would run cleanups, environmental restoration, and care operations as needed, requiring basic discipline and effort, but no further skills. But they could use higher skilled workers as they come along for more beneficial, complex tasks.

Similarly, I think we could offer a housing guarantee, putting a floor on homelessness and misery. In the state of California, homelessness is out of control, and we have not found solutions, despite a great deal of money spent. Housing in the private market is extremely expensive, far out of reach of those with even median incomes. The next level down is housing vouchers and public housing, of which there are not enough to go around, and which is extremely expensive. And below that are shelters, which are heavily adverse settings. They are not private, chaotic, unpleasant, meant to be temporary, can be closed much of the time. And they also do not have enough space. 

A local encampment, temporarily approved during the pandemic under the freeway.

As uncompassionate as it sounds, it is unacceptable, and should be illegal, for public spaces to be commandeered by the homeless for their private needs. Public spaces have many purposes, specifically not including squatting and vagrancy. It is a problem in urban areas, because that is where people are, and where many services exist at the intersection of public and private spaces- food, bathrooms, opportunities to beg, get drugs, etc. Just because we have been, as governments and citizens, neglectful of our public spaces, does not mean we should give them over to anyone who wants to camp on them. I was recently at San Francisco city hall and the beautiful park surrounding it. But at lunch time, I realized that there was nowhere to sit. The plague of homelessness had rendered park benches untenable. We deserve to keep these public spaces functional, and that means outlawing the use of public spaces by the homeless. At the same time, provision must be made for the homeless, who by this policy would have nowhere to go in fully zoned areas. Putting them on busses to the next town, as some jurisdictions do, is also not a solution. As a rich country, we can do more for the homeless even while we preserve public spaces.

I think we need to rethink the whole lower end of housing / shelter to make it a more regular, accessible, and acceptable way to catch those who need housing at a very basic level. The model would be a sort of cross between a hostel, an SRO (single room occupancy hotels) and army barracks. It would be publicly funded, and provide a private room as well as food, all for free. It would not throw people out, or lock them in.

This poor house would not demand work, though it would offer centralized services for finding jobs and other places to live. It would be open to anyone, including runaway teens, battered women, tourists, etc. It would be a refuge for anyone for any reason, on an unlimited basis. The space and the food would be very basic, motivating clients to seek better accommodation. It would be well-policed and its clients would have to behave themselves. The next step down in the ladder of indigent care would not be homelessness, which would be outlawed in areas offering this kind of poorhouse, but would be institutionalization, in increasingly stringent settings for either criminal or mental issues. 

Such a poor house might become a community center, at least for the indigent. It would be quite expensive, but given the level of inequality and lack of care for people in various desperate straits, we need to furnish a humane level of existence between the market housing system and institutionalization. Why not give everyone a house? That is neither financially practical, nor would that co-exist well with the market housing system. Certainly, more housing needs to be built and everything done to bring prices down. But to address the current issues, stronger housing policy is needed.

Why not go back to a public housing model? It turned out that public housing was somewhat unrealistic, promising far more than it could deliver. It promised fully functional neighborhoods and housing, pretty much the equivalent of market housing, but without the ongoing discipline from the market via private financial responsibility by the residents or from the programs via their bureaucratic structures and funding, to follow through on the long term. The public authorities generally took a hands-off approach to residents and their environment, in line with the (respectful) illusion that this was the equivalent of market housing. And the long-term is what counts in housing, since it is ever in need of repair and renovation, not to mention careful use and protection by its residents. Building is one thing, but maintaining is something quite different, and requires carefully though-out incentives. 

With a public poorhouse model, the premises and residents are extensively policed. Individual rooms may descend to squalor, but the whole is built, run and maintained by the public authorities with intensive surveillance and intervention, keeping the institution as a whole functioning and growing as needed for its mission. There is going to be a sliding scale of freedom vs public involvement via financing and policing. The less functional a person is, the more control they will have to accept. We can not wash our hands of the homeless by granting them "freedom" to thrash about in squalor and make dumps of public spaces.

• Or you could join the squid game.
• Economic policy should not be about efficiency alone, let alone rewarding capital and management, but about long-term cultural and environmental sustainability.
• Could AI do biology?
• Carter was an evangelical. But that was a different time.

Capitalism on the Spectrum

Prospects for the new administration.

Political economics can be seen as a spectrum from anarchic gangsterism (Haiti) to total top down control such as in communism (Cuba, North Korea). Neither works well. Each end of this spectrum ends up in a state of terror, because each is unworkable on its own terms. Capitalism, in its modern form, is a compromise between these extremes, where free initiative, competition, and hierarchical relations (such within corporations) are allowed, while regulation (via the state and unions) makes humane what would otherwise a cutthroat system of gangsterism and corruption. The organization and stability allowed by state-sponsored legal systems raises system productivity far above that of the primeval free-for-all, while the regulatory rules also make it bearable to its participants- principally the workers. The magic comes from a dynamic balance between competition and guardrails to keep that competition focused on productive ends (that is, economic/business competition), rather than unproductive ones (war, assassination, corruption, capture of the state, etc.)

The new Trump administration promises to tear up this compromise, slash regulations, and cut government. That means that the workers that voted for this administration, and who are the primary beneficiaries of the regulatory state, will be hurt in countless ways. The grifting nature of so many in this incoming administration is a blazing alarm to anyone who pays attention. Whether it is stiffing workers, bloviating on FOX, hawking gold sneakers, making a buck off of anti-vax gullibility, defrauding the government of taxes, promoting crypto, or frankly asking for money in return for political favors like petroleum deregulation, the stench of corruption and bad faith is overwhelming. Many of them, starting from the top, see capitalism as a string of scams and frauds, not exactly Milton Friedman's vision of capitalism. An administration of grifty billionaires is unlikely to rebuild US manufacturing, help workers afford housing, or fulfill any of the other dreams of their voters. Indeed, a massive economic collapse, on the heels of bad policy such as crypto deregulation, or a world-spanning trade war, is more likely, and degraded conditions for workers all but certain.

Freedom for capitalists means permission for companies to abuse workers, customers, the environment, the law, and whatever else stands in the way of profit. We have been through this many times, especially in the gilded age. It can spiral into anarchy and violence when business owners are sufficiently "free" from the fetters of norms and laws. When the most powerful entities in the economy have only one purpose- to make money- all other values are trampled. That is, unless a stronger entity makes some rules. That entity can only be the government. It has been the role of governments from time immemorial to look to the long term interests of the collective, and organize the inherent competition within society into benign and productive pursuits.

OK, more than a little ironic, but you get the idea.

On the other hand, there is a problem even at the golden mean of governmental rule-making over the capitalistic free-for-all, which is that the quality of the rule makers and their rules, their attention to real conditions, and their prompt decision making, all can decline into bureaucratic inertia. While this may not be a Stalinist system of top-down planning and terror, it still can sap the productive energies of the system. And that is what we have been facing over the last few decades. For instance, there is the housing crisis, where home construction has not kept up with demand, mostly due to zoning stasis in most desirable places in the US, in addition to lagging construction after the 2008 financial and real estate crisis. Another example is public infrastructure, which has become increasingly difficult to build due to ever-mounting bureaucratic complexity and numbers of stakeholders. The California high speed rail system faces mountainous costs and a bogged-down legal environment, and is on the edge of complete inviability.

Putting rich, corrupt, and occasionally criminal capitalists at the head of this system is not, one must say, the most obvious way to fix it. Ideally, the Democrats would have put forward more innovative candidates in better touch with the problems voters were evidently concerned with. Then we could have forged ahead with policies oriented to the public good, (such as planetary sustainability and worker rights), as has been the practice through the Biden administration. But the election came up with a different solution, one that we will be paying for for decades. And possibly far worse, since there are worse fates than being at a well-meaning, if sclerotic, golden mean of governmental regulation over a largely free capitalist system. Hungary and Russia show the way to "managed democracy" and eventual autocracy. Our own history, and that of Dickensian Britain, show the way of uncontrolled capitalism, which took decades of progressivism, and a great depression, to finally tame. It would be nice to not have to repeat that history.

• Daniel P. Moynihan was for the job guarantee.
• Housing in New Zealand.
• Nature's key scientists of 2024.
• A grumpy Krugman signs off.
• Notes on crypto and its grifting community.
• Who is for workers?
• MAGA to kill off the greatest public health advance, ever.

Hubris, Terror, and Disaster in Afghanistan

Review of "The American War in Afghanistan", by Carter Malkasian.

This book is a nightmare to read. It records one bad decision after the next, through two decades of a slow-moving debacle. Should we have invaded at all? Should we have set up a puppet government? Should we have let the mission expand to incredible society-changing scope? Should we have built a sustainable Afghan military? Could any government have stood up to the Taliban? A million questions and pointed fingers follow such a comprehensive loss. Each of the four Presidents who presided over the war made grievous errors, and tried to muddle through the resulting quagmire, until Biden finally threw in the towel.

In the end, even Mullah Omar reportedly considered whether it had been wise to refuse the US demand to turn over or turn against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. It is a poignant coda to a national tragedy. But what could we have done differently? I will divide this question into several areas, including mission creep, Islam and the Taliban, the Afghan army, and the Afghan government. At the very outset there was a sad narcissistic paradox, in the "war on terror". War is terrorism, pure and simple. The idea that others are terrorists, and that we are not when we drop bombs on them, is a curious, but typical bit of American exceptionalism. Our whole adventure in Afghanistan was colored by the vast gulf in how we saw ourselves (righteous, moral, good), and how Afghans saw us (depraved infidels who violated every norm of civilized behavior).

Mission Creep

It is startling to look back at the progression of our goals in Afghanistan. First, we asked them to give up Al Qaeda. Then we overthrew the Taliban government and installed a new one. Then we sought to establish a democracy. Then we sought to hunt down not just Al Qaeda, but also the Taliban- the former government and a significant cultural and Islamic movement. Then we sought to advance women's rights, fight corruption, and set up a competent government and army. All these things were desirable, but replicated what we could not accomplish in either Vietnam or in Iraq, working with similarly bad partners. Contrast this with our occupations of Germany and Japan, where we put a few of the former leaders on trial, policed with a pretty light touch, kept political development local at first, and concentrated on economic reconstruction. While the cultural alignments were obviously much closer, that should have moderated our ambitions in Afghanistan, not, as it happened, stimulated them progressively to "civilize" the Afghans. This is especially true when the national will and funding to deal with Afghanistan was so impaired by the Bush administration's adventure in Iraq, and later by the tortured path of Afghanistan itself. It is somewhat reminiscent of the defeat the Democrats experienced in the recent elections- a party that got a little overextended in its missions to affirm every virtue, identity and interest group, far beyond the core issues.

Islam

That Afghanistan is an Islamic country is and was no mystery, but that did not seem to get through to those setting up our progressively more invasive policies, or the new government. Poll after poll found that the Taliban had continuing support, and if not support, at least respect, because they were seen as truly Islamic, while the government we installed was not. Malkasian points out that as religious scholars, the Taliban tended to not be infected by the fissiparous tribal conflicts of Afghanistan, which Hamid Karzai, in contrast, tended to encourage. This also led the Taliban to nurture a very strong hierarchical structure, (patterned on madrassa practices), also unusual elsewhere in Afghan society. These three properties gave them incredible morale and sway with the population, even as they were terrorizing them with night letters, assassinations, suicide bombings, and other mayhem. As long as the government represented the infidel, and however well-intentioned that infidel was, the population, including the police and army, would be reluctant supporters.

The only way around all this would have been to allow one of the Northern Alliance leaders to take control of the country after they helped defeat the Taliban, and then get the hell out. But this would have invited another civil war, continuing the awful civil war Afghanistan suffered through before the Taliban rose to power. The deep conflict between the Pashtuns and the northern Tajiks, Uzbeks and other groups would never have allowed a stable government to be established under these fluid conditions, not under the Tajiks. So we came up with the magic solution, to appoint a Pashtun as president, over a nominally democratic system, but with US support that, instead of tapering off over time, rose and rose, until we got to the surge, a decade into our occupation, with over a 100,000 US soldiers.

That was never going to win any popularity contests, even if it did put the Taliban on the back foot militarily. Why was the government never seen as truly Islamic? Malkasian does not explain this in detail, but in Afghan eyes, more tuned to the US as foreign infidels than to the formal conditions of Islamic jurisprudence, the question answers itself. Democracy is not inherently un-Islamic. Consultative bodies that advise the leadership are explicitly provided. Whether they promote women's rights, or accept foreign soldiers, night raids, and legal immunity of foreigners is quite a different matter, however. Whatever the form of the government, its obvious dependence on the US, as painfully illustrated by Karzai's incessant and futile complaints about US military transgressions, was the only evidence needed that the Afghan government was, in popular terms, un-Islamic. It was the same conundrum we experienced in Vietnam- how to be a dominant military partner to a government that had at best a tenuous hold on the affections of the populace, which were in turn poisoned by that very dependence? It is an impossible dilemma, unless the occupying power is ruthless enough to terrorize everyone into submission- not our style, at least not after our dalliance in the Philippines.

The Armed Forces

Because the government never managed to get true popular support, its armed forces were hobbled by low morale and corruption. Armies and police forces are only expressions of the political landscape. Afghans are, as the Taliban shows, perfectly capable of fighting, of organizing themselves, and of knowing which way the wind blows. The army dissolved when faced with its true test. The most powerful solution would clearly have been to have a more effective and popular government that either included or sidelined the Taliban. But could there have technical solutions as well?

The air force was emblematic. The US experience in Afghanistan from start to finish showed the immense power of air attacks, when combined with ground forces. So we planned for an Afghan air force. But we seem to have planned for a force that could not maintain its own equipment, relying in perpetuity on Western contractors. Nor was the selection of assets well-organized. The Afghans mostly needed close air support craft, like attack helicopters and A10 gunships. They should have focused on a very few models that they could fully sustain, with financial and parts support from the US. But that assumes that the US, and the Afghan government, had more thoughtful long-range planning than actually existed.

Always a difficult relationship

The Government

Apart from being seen as a puppet and un-Islamic, the government was riven with tribal and regional conflicts. Karzai spent most of his time managing and trying to win tribal contests. Malkasian repeatedly shows how major decisions and mental energy went into these issues, to the exclusion of attention to the armed forces, or the resurgent Taliban, or resolving corruption, among much else. 

Overall, however, the main issue was that the US installed a top-down quasi-democracy without giving the people true power. Unlike the local political reconstruction in the post-WW2 occupations, let alone our own system, the new Afghan government was explicitly centralized, with provincial and district heads appointed by Karzai. Karzai was really the new king of Afghanistan, more or less foisted on the country, though he had a significant amount of national credibility. There was a great deal of effort to sell this to the people as democracy, and foster "communication" and collaboration, and buy-in, but the people were never allowed into a true federal system with full electoral control of their local districts. Perhaps this was done for good reason, both from the monarchical Afghan tradition, and in light of the strong tribal tensions frequently at work. But it sapped the mutual support / accountability between the people and their government.

Karzai himself broached the idea of bringing Taliban into the system early on, but was rebuffed by the US. We went on to lump the Taliban in with the other "terrorists", and they, like Ho Chi Minh, used their natural legitimacy (with enormous helpings of terror, suicide bombings, and other guerilla tactics .. yes, terrorism again!) to eventually get the upper hand. How much better it would have been to have drawn a relatively generous line against allowing the former Taliban top echelon into official capacities, suppress militias and all forms of political violence, and let the rest re-integrate and participate in a truly ground-up federal system? It was those excluded from the system who holed up in Pakistan, seethed with resentment, and organized the return to power that started in earnest in 2005/2006. The Taliban may have been a bad government and in bed with Al Qaeda and the rest of it. They were not particularly popular with people in many areas of the country. But they were also very nationalistic, highly Islamic, and made up a fair slice of Afghanistan's educated demographic. 

A common theme through all these issues is American hubris, and lack of listening / empathy / respect for / understanding of local conditions. We insisted on making the Taliban the enemy, then insisted on rooting them out through night raids, Guantanamo imprisonment, exile to Pakistan, and other degradations. And were frequently getting fraudulent intelligence to base it all on. We thought that more military power, and more money, would get what we wanted. But what we wanted was Afghans to want to work on behalf of their own country in a free, stable, and prosperous system. How could that system be built on our money and blood? It couldn't. I had to be built by the Afghans, in their own way.

• Global leadership is in play.
• Private jets are abominable. Gas taxes, anyone?
• The planet simply can not take it.
• Meritocracy... good or bad? I would offer that is a lot better than the alternative. But can it be improved?
• Drilling for the climate: geothermal power is coming along, at large scale.

Who Needs the Fed?

Project 2025 promotes "free" banking, which is to say, no pesky regulations or backstopping from the Federal Reserve. What could go wrong?

Policy wonks can't help themselves- they need to write down their plans so that all the world can see how brilliant they are, and how real they could be, if only others recognized their brilliance. In that way, the project 2025 plans from the Heritage Foundation have been a gold mine, at least for Democrats. And since the Republican Party couldn't be bothered to write down a platform, other than "anything Trump wants", this project serves as the functional platform of the current Republican campaign, written as it was by scores of officials from the first Trump administration, plus many others itching to be appointed to a second. And it is crazy- more like a project 1825 than anything we would want to look forward to.

One of its less publicized planks is its approach to banking. It heaps criticism on the Federal Reserve, and recommends, as the most effective solution, its abolition and a return to "free banking". Which means a world where no regulator controls the banks, and no federal reserve backs it up against panics and crises. And just to complete the return to barbarism, it recommends a return to the gold standard as well.

"In free banking, neither interest rates nor the supply of money is controlled by the government. The Federal Reserve is effectively abolished, and the Department of the Treasury largely limits itself to handling the government’s money. Regions of the U.S. actually had a similar system, known as the “Suffolk System,” from 1824 until the 1850s, and it minimized both inflation and economic disruption while allowing lending to flourish." - From Chapter 4

Needless to say, US history is littered with banking panics, runs, and depressions, usually due to the unregulated nature of this "free" banking and to monetary gold backing. It is hard to express just how absurd and damaging it would be to return to such a world. The Federal Reserve was conjured up after a long history of the establishment of the first national bank, then its destruction by Andrew Jackson, a century of economic instability with particularly damaging panics in 1893 and 1907. By 1913, the US finally had had enough, and set up an updated national bank in the form of the Federal Reserve, to regulate and backstop the banking system. 

Illustration from 1873, portraying "Panic" on Wall Street.

Unfortunately, until the advent of Keynesian economics, it didn't really know what it was doing, and was particularly ineffective during the Great Depression, making things worse instead of better. Even now, it amounts to a cabal of bankers who are more interested in jacking up interest rates than in national prosperity. MMT economists tend to think that interest rates should be kept low, and the functions of the Federal Reserve folded into the Treasury Department, with greater political oversight. The use of interest rates- which are such a blunt tool of economic policy- could then be de-emphasized, in favor of more dynamic fiscal policy to manage inflation and monetary conditions. It is worth noting that over the last eighty years, the Fed has routinely over-shot its mark in raising interest rates, ending up with recessions, and rapid, belated retreats to lower rates. It is only with the current cycle that it has achieved, at least so far, the dream of a soft landing, taming inflation while avoiding recession.

Recessions (gray) have regularly followed interest raising campaigns by the Fed, and not always intentionally.

But note that the word "depression" is no longer in our lexicon. For all its faults, the Fed has kept the economy on a much more even keel than was possible under the wild-west free banking era, when monetary conditions were hostage to whatever Yosemite Sam dug up in the Yukon, or how wildly bankers over-extended their issuance of notes. Banks built impressive buildings to foster the illusion of stability in an environment where stability was impossible, lacking the infinite backstop that the Federal Reserve can now bring to bear during a crisis. Both individual depositors and the population as a whole benefit. It is a classic example of the people of the US coming together to create an institution that makes our lives better, so that we can worry about other things than the next banking panic. 

This economic craziness is just one small example of the fevered imaginations of the right wing in current US politics, which seems to have crawled out from the former fringes of Lyndon Larouche and the Birchers to take over an entire half of our political system. And this is fundamentally thanks to the air given them by an appalling right wing media that cares nothing for truth or civility, rather making its money from button pushing, whining grievance, and reflexive anti-state propaganda. And people complain about social media! Just how long ostensibly reasonable and decent (even Christian(!)) people will wallow in this environment is anyone's guess, but our common, rational, and beneficial institutions will in the mean time be in constant danger.

• Luddites of today.
• We need to win this war.
• Profile in courage.

Correction- The Republican convention did actually come up with a platform.

Welcome to Lubyanka!

Another case of penal systems illuminating their culture.

Most of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle is a desultory slog, at least if you have already read the Gulag Archipelago. But there are a few glorious set-pieces. One is the mock trial of Prince Igor of Kiev that the prisoners stage in their free time, a bitter satire of the Soviet judicial system. The second is a meticulous description of how prisoners are brought into and introduced to the Lubyanka prison- the central prison of the KGB/FSB/Cheka/GPU/OGPU/NKVD/NKGB, etc.. the frequently renamed, but never-changing organ of the Russian government.

The character is Innokenty Volodin, a Soviet diplomat who has recently had second thoughts about the rightness of the Soviet system, and has placed a call (around which the book's plot, such as it is, mostly revolves) to the Americans to prevent Russia from obtaining certain critical atomic secrets. Solzhenitsyn carefully prepares the way by portraying Volodin's rarified position and luxurious life. As was customary, Volodin is lured into his arrest under false pretenses, and finds himself driven to the prison almost before he knows what has happened. Then, with almost loving detail, Solzhenitsyn describes the not just systematic, but virtuosic process of degradation, step by step, shred by shred, of Volodin's humanity, as he is inducted into Lubyanka.

One cardinal rule is that prisoners must have no contact with other prisoners. Even to see others is forbidden. As they are conducted from one cell to the next, they are shoved into mini phone-booth cells if another prisoner is being conducted in the opposite direction. Their possessions are gradually taken away, down to buttons, belts, and steel shoe shanks. They are shorn. They are sleep deprived. They are relentlessly illuminated by glaring bulbs. They are spied on constantly. They are moved relentlessly from place to place and disoriented. In the middle of the night, the building is abuzz with activity, as though this were the very nerve center of the Soviet empire. 

While the rest of Russian society is mired, or cowed, in mediocrity, this is a shining point of competence. The purest expression of its obsessive leader, and the product of decades of careful study and accumulated wisdom. It is also a deeper expression of the nature of Russian society- its reflexive despotism and its strange infatuation with suffering. The closest thing we have is mafia culture, with its honor codes, brutality, and constant battle for dominance. Chess, the emblematic game of Russia, expresses this view of life as a pitiless contest to crush one's opponent. There may be a lot of historical reasons for this nature, such as the long centuries of Mongol rule, the many invasions, both ancient and modern, and the perceived success of leaders such as Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, but it is a deep and disturbing aspect of the Russian psyche. 

Should we have expected anything else, in the long road of declining relations after the cold war? Should the Russian people give thanks to the ruthlessness of their national leadership and psyche for the current position of relative power they wield in the world, far out of proportion to their population or economic strength? Other countries with larger populations peacefully mind their own business, avoid outside entanglements, and eschew invading their neighbors. It is the bullies, the intransigent, and the cruel, who appear to account for most of the drama in the world. Should we understand them, or fight against them?

• Another way to crush spirits.
• It is good to be outside.
• AI is not helping job seekers.
• On paying the devil his due.
• Why have kids anymore?

Hungary for Power

Hungary has become a one-party, authoritarian state, not a democracy.

Victor Orban recently paid a visit to Donald Trump in Florida, with glowing photos and pledges of goodwill. Republicans in the US have nurtured a deep fascination and alliance with Orban and his government, holding several CPAC conventions in Hungary, and hosting Orban and his lieutenants at US events. It is clear that they view Hungary as a shining example and template of where they could take the US. Not the shining city on a hill of Reagan's democratic and anti-authoritarian dreams, but a whole other kind of city, one that never will fall into Democratic hands again.

So it is worth looking in detail at what has happened in Hungary, to observe the ideals of our current Republicans and what is in store for the rest of us from a second Trump term. I was, incidentally, beaten to the punch of this analysis by a recent story in the Atlantic. Orban's party, Fidesz, is very similar to the GOP in its mix of business right-wingery and rural values. Its strength is handing out the red meat of traditional, anti-cosmopolitan values to the rural base, along with helpful economic subsidies. In the pivotal 2018 election, it won all the rural districts, even though the opposition bowed to the logic of re-written (winner-take-all) electoral system and tried to join into a unified party. 

Fidesz came to power originally on an anti-socialist platform, vowing to get rid of the remnant bits of the prior communist system, which had settled into the same kind of semi-kleptocratic mode as in most of the former Soviet states and its satellites. That they did, but not to bring an end to corruption, let alone authoritarianism, but rather to partake themselves instead. After coming into power, Fidesz rewrote the constitution, in ways large and small to entrench their own power, and has since continued a campaign of extremely effective, gradual, and often surreptitious legislation to cement its advantages. Gerrymandering is now standard procedure, which when combined with the winner-take-all districts creates the opportunity to win overwhelming majorities in parliament founded on very thin electoral pluralities. Small parties can not win any more, but are also prohibited from combining with other small parties into election list coalitions.

The courts were remade by putting them under the control of a political appointee- the president of the National Judicial Office. This president is appointed by parliament, and in turn appoints, promotes, and runs the operations and budget of the whole judicial system. Needless to say, it is heavily influenced by the now Fidesz-controlled parliament and executive.

The media has been remade by gradual pressure on independent media owners to sell to Fidesz-friendly interests, which now control 90% of the country's media. Government advertising buys were strategically placed with friendly outlets, and government run media was put under direct political control. A Russian inspired "security" law was passed to outlaw ill-defined criticism of the state, public morality, or "imbalance" of coverage, answerable naturally to a parliamentary-appointed body, rather than the courts. Imagine if in the second Trump administration, PBS and NPR were put under political control and given a "FOX" makeover. 

Hungary is now effectively a one-party authoritarian state with managed elections. We are not far off. To see the battle of titanic interests and billionaires now openly showering money on favored candidates, and extending their tentacles down to the school board level, is sickening. The Republican party has partnered with Heritage foundation to offer an openly Orbanist plan for the second Trump administration. The court system has already re-written our constitution in extensive ways over the last four years, without an amendment being passed, or even proposed. The antics of Judge Eileen Cannon show that very little may remain of the rule of law if it is left in the hands of partisan extremists.

And our media is in even more perilous condition, with the relentless lying of FOX, Sinclair, and their ecosystem. The Republican convention just past was a pageant of lies and grift, betokening the criminal enterprise that party has turned into. Headed by their adored, and now divine, leader who is not just a felon and business fraud, but rapist and insurrectionist as well. But no matter. With enough money, and enough shamelessness, anything is possible.

• Everything is fine!
• Scandals erupt out of a corrupted system.
• The new GOP.
• Which is a blue collar party, right?
• Tom Tomorrow, on last week.
• Historical note on the great California land grab, and the fate of "free" land generally.
• Notes from the early days of life.

The Shadow War

We are in a new world-wide cold war. And ironically, the many new technologies from the West have given autocratic states extraordinary new powers. 

Paul Theroux had a remarkable passage in one of his travel books, as he was passing through Myanmar, a military dictatorship then and now, that illuminated attitudes towards China and from China. 

"I heard lots of praise for the United States in distancing itself from the regime, and lots of blame for China and Russia and Singapore in supporting it- China especially. But China's prosperity, its need for oil and wood and food, had created a new dynamic. China had no interest in any country's developing democratic institutions; on the contrary, it was a natural ally of repressive regimes. When the World Bank withheld funds from an African country because it was corrupt and tyrranous, demanding that it hold an election before it could qualify for aid, China would appear with money- 'rogue aid,' with no strings attached, and got the teak, the food, and the drugs." - Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, 2008

The world seems headed into another cold war, definitely rhyming with the last cold war. It is highly unfortunate, and testament to some defects in US management of the post-cold war era, to the surprising durability, even attractiveness, of authoritarian systems, and to the many weaknesses of democratic systems. This new cold war, which I will call the shadow war, features Russia and China as the main poles of opposition to democratic and developed countries, mostly in the West, but including many others. This time around, China is the stronger power by far, and both Russia and especially China are quite advanced in their development, so that the West no longer has a monopoly in any particular technology or kind of organization. China has adopted all the magic of capitalist market mechanisms to grow its wealth, and stolen (or forced the transfer of) huge amounts technology and knowledge to make itself a leader in all sorts of industries.

The West has lately begun to wake up to the problem. Our hope that capitalism was somehow related to, or a leading wedge for, democracy has been dashed several times over. Instead of China turning into Hong Kong, it is Hong Kong that is turning into China. Not only is capitalism, as has been tirelessly pointed out from the left, amoral and indifferent to human rights, (as we already knew from slavery in the US), but democracy is also far more fragile than we had hoped, requiring a wide range of civic understandings, media practices, and forms of education that are far from universal, or natural. We had, in the windup to the cold war, seen many countries make slow and fraught transitions to democracy (Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and Eastern Europe), but have more recently seen countries backtrack into autocracy (Russia, Hungary).

Naturally, the war in Ukraine has put the most urgent point on this conflict, where Russia, which is to say its autocratic leader, felt that the existence of an independent and democratic Ukraine next door was too much to bear. Now, China also tells us that it loves its brothers in Taiwan so much that re-unification will come, no matter what the Taiwanese themselves might want. Love certainly takes some strange forms!

But it is a much broader issue, spanning the globe, and the depths of human psychology. On one list of countries ranked by democratic governance, the median country is Armenia, with a "hybrid regime" and scores of roughly five out of ten. This is not a great situation, where half the world, in rough terms, lives in various states of miserable, oppressive government. And as the quote above suggests, the authoritarians have in some ways the stronger hand. What happened?

We in the West had thought that democracy was the natural harbor of all peoples- the end of history, indeed. But in the first place, people power is a very limited power, if whoever has power is authoritarian enough to use tanks against it. And in the second place, democracy is not natural in many cultures. The Muslim culture, for instance, for all its virtues, has a fundamentally patriarchal and tribal governance model, with little room for democracy, though there are, traditionally, various forms of freedom, for men at least. So however attractive democracy is in theoretical terms, and as a model in the West that people from authoritarian countries like to vacation to... as a cultural pattern, it is not universal. And authoritarian patterns are hardly foreign to the West either. The Catholic church is an example of the preserved archetypes of patriarchy and authoritarian strong-man rule.

The Chinese dream is highly militaristic, and rather threatening.

But more deeply, the archetypes we have of leadership and politics are authoritarian.. the king, the hero. Jungian psychology, aside from its focus on archetypes, deals in the shadow, which is our real needs and instincts, insofar as they run counter to our surface goodness and conscious ego construction. A person like Donald Trump exemplifies all these trends. Why on earth are we still saddled with this sociopath after a decade of drama-queenity? He clearly touches a lot of people's archetypal conceptions of strength and heroism. His powers of psychological projection, reflectively rejecting his own shadow, are immense. He is rubber, others are glue. And his fundamental bond with the followers, by licensing their shadow sides of hate and violence, makes his every pronouncement right no matter what. We in the US are facing a cataclysmic political season, trying to repress the shadow of humanity, which is so amply expressed around the world in political / power systems that follow the logic of strength, ending up in states of terror.

Modern technology hasn't helped, either. After a brief flush of excitement about the ability of social media to amplify people power, especially across the Muslim world, it all went to pot as the shallow-ness and disorganization of such movements became apparent. The powers of databases, personal identification, surveillance, and media manipulation have been much more useful to authoritarian governments than to their antagonists, making state terror more effective than ever. Authoritarian countries now control their internet and media environments with great precision, increasingly project their twisted narratives abroad, and even hunt down dissidents outside their borders using the new information tools. So while information may want to be free, it doesn't really have a say in the matter- those with power do.

What to do about it? We in the West have lost control of our media environments. While we are waking up to some extent the the malevalent media from abroad, domestic media is controlled by money, which in the current environment of yawning wealth inequality, political fissiparation, and clickbait "business models" is just as crazy and corrupt. So there should be two approaches to this. One is to strengthen quality media, like PBS and its cohorts, with more offerings and deeper reporting. The other is to restrict how corporations can control media. The right to individual free speech can be preserved while making corporations more sensitive to social goods. The Dominion case against FOX was a small example of the powers available. Liability for lying should be a broader effort in the law, specifically against corporations, which are creatures of the state, not natural persons. We need to recognize the deep psychological powers we are up against in preserving enlightened, respectful civil government and discourse.

Obviously getting our own house in order, against the atavistic forces of political authoritarianism, is the first order of business. Abroad, paradoxically, we need to project strength as a democratic and developed community, holding the line in Ukraine and Taiwan, and against all sorts of authoritarian encroachments, until temperatures are lowered, and the current nationalist fevers abate. For what China has right now is an imperialist fever. It has been weak for so long and surrounded by so many unfriendly countries, that one can understand that it sees its recent economic prosperity as a special opportunity to recover a leading position in its neighborhood, militarily and politically as well as economically. That would be fine if it were not also trying to subvert free political systems and prop up tyrannical ones. There are good reasons why its neighbors are fearful of China.

Like in the last cold war, I think time plays a key role. We have to believe that democracies, for all their weaknesses, are better, and are seen as better, by people around the world. While today's authoritarian powers may have greater durability than those of the communist era due to their embrace of, rather than flouting of, market principles and modern technologies, they are ultimately fragile and subject to the opinions of their own people. Putin will not last forever. Xi will not last for ever. (The Kim regime of North Korea may, however, last forever!) Change is the achilles heal of authoritarian conservatism. So we are in for a very long haul, to keep spreading people power and peace internationally.

• Trade theft and IP warfare.
• Myanmar is a typical case of China's influence and values.
• Religion and war.
• Food oligopoly.
• Ghost roads and the end of nature.
• What, exactly, is the problem?

How the Supreme Court Should Rule in the Colorado Ballot Case

There is one path forward that can salvage the court's standing.

The US Supreme Court is sinking to unusual depths of corruption and illegitimacy. Bush v. Gore was a step down in its ability to manage the rules of our political and legal system, where it made a hasty and, it claimed, one-time-only carve-out for its favored candidate, leading to almost a decade of tragically bad policy and poor government. Then came Citizens United, another step downward, opening firehoses of secret money from the wealthy, using the fig leaf of "free speech" to cover the corruption of politics with money. Then came the overturning of Roe, deeming women unworthy of rights that are far more basic and intimate than those enumerated in the Bill of Rights. And most recently have come the drumbeat of reports of corruption among the right-wing justices, who appear to regard themselves as too dignified to abide by the laws and norms they hold others to.

Now it is faced with a case that tests the very core of the court's abitlity to do its job. What does the constitution mean? Does the fourteenth amendment mean what it says, and if so, should it be enforced? A great deal of commentary suggests, probably correctly, that this court is desperately looking for a way out of this legal conundrum that allows it to do nothing and avoid overturning any apple carts. That would not, however, be a wise course. 

To recap, the Colorado case was brought by voters who sought to bar Donald Trump from the Colorado primary and general election ballots, due to his participation in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. The fourteenth amendment to the federal constitution bars such participants from federal and state offices. The Colorado Supreme Court ultimately agreed, sending the case to the US Supreme Court. The congressional report on the January 6 events makes the record of those events quite clear. It uses the word "insurrection" several times, as do many of its sources, and it is crystal clear about the participation by and culpability of Donald Trump in those events. 

The question is really about how the Constitutional provision should be brought into execution, being worded without a lot of explicit legal structure. One thing it does say is that congress can relieve its prohibition in individual cases by two-thirds votes of each house. But it leaves unsaid who should adjudicate the question of fitness for office, as is also the case for the more basic qualifications such as age and citizenship. Trump had previously, and ironically, dabbled in these same legal waters by casting doubt on the citizenship of Barack Obama. But since no one with half a brain took him seriously, the issue never entered the legal sphere.

Well, the worst course would be to let the clear language of the constitution lay inert and find some technicality by which to do nothing. What I would suggest instead is that the court recognize that there needs to be a national adjudicating power to decide this question in the case of candidates for national office (and indeed for any office whose qualifications are mentioned in the constitution). And that power should be itself, the US Supreme Court. The court might invite the legislative branch to provide more regular methods of fact-finding, (or even a clarifying amendment to the constitution), but given the constitutional clear intent, history, and logic, (not to mention the general Article III clauses putting all questions arising from the constitution in its hands), the court should take upon itself the power to say that the buck stops at its door. And naturally, in consequence, that Trump merits disqualification, on the facts of the January 6 events as found by the lower courts, and on his position as an officer, indeed the paramount officer, of the United States.

This solution would neatly take over from the states the responsibility of saying that any national candidate meets or does not meet the various qualifications set forth in the constitution. Such cases could begin in state courts, as this one did, but would need to go to the US Supreme Court for final decision. This solution would hold Trump to account for his actions, a principle that Republicans have, at least  traditionally, cherished. This solution would also go some way to removing the stain of the Bush v Gore decision, and establish a new and clear element of constitutional jurisprudence, in setting forth who adjudicates the qualifications of national political candidates. In fact, this function can be tied to the practice of having the chief justice of the United States administer the oath of office to the incoming president. It would be proper for the court to be the institution that decides on the basic fitness tests, and thus who in general may take the oath, while the people decide the political outcome of the election, among fit candidates.

I am no legal scholar, but the merits of this solution seem pretty clear. On an earlier occasion, the court summarily took on the task of determining the constitutionality of laws. This role was not explicitly set out in the text, but was a logical consequence of the structure that the constitution set up. Here likewise, the logic of the constitution indicates strongly that the final word on the fitness of candidates for national office must rest with, not the voters, not the states, and not the legislative or, heaven forbid, the executive branch, but with the federal judicial branch, of which the US Supreme Court is the head.

An alternative, and perhaps more likely, solution, is for this court to state all the principles above, but then hold that in its judgement, Donald Trump is fit for office after all. Maybe it will deem the insurrection just a little insurrection, and not the kind of big insurrection that would turn a jurist's head (despite the over thousand charges filed, and hundreds of federal convictions so far). Or maybe it will deem Trump insufficiently involved in the insurrection to merit disqualification. What it can not do is deem him not an officer of the federal government- that would be beyond belief. The pusilanimous, partisan sophistry of this alternative would not go over well, needless to say. Many would ask whether Clarence Thomas, himself virtually a participant in the insurrection at one remove, should have recused himself. Minds would be blown, but few would be surprised, since for this court, expectations could hardly be lower. Going against its partisan grain would, on the other hand, be a signal and heartening achievement.

This second approach would at least resolve the legal questions, but at the cost of further erosion of the court's legitimacy, given that the events of January 6 are so well documented, and the constitutional peril that Trump poses so obvious. For the whole point of having a Supreme Court which takes on tough issues and plugs logical holes in our constitution is that it also takes some care to plug them well, and preserve our democracy in the process.

• What happens when the Supreme Court gives in to politics?
• One state, one system.
• A solar energy insurrection in Puerto Rico.
• Democratic inequality is related to wealth inequality.
• More on the court case- ballots vs office holding.

Preliminary Pieces of AI

We already live in an AI world, and really, it isn't so bad.

It is odd to hear about all the hyperventilating about artificial intelligence of late. One would think it is a new thing, or some science-fiction-y entity. Then there are fears about the singularity and loss of control by humans. Count me a skeptic on all fronts. Man is, and remains, wolf to man. To take one example, we are contemplating the election of perhaps the dummbest person ever to hold the office of president. For the second time. How an intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is supposed to worm its way into power over us is not easy to understand, looking at nature of humans and of power. 

So let's take a step back and figure out what is going on, and where it is likely to take us. AI has become a catch-all for a diversity of computer methods, mostly characterized by being slightly better at doing things we have long wanted computers to do, like interpreting text, speech, and images. But I would offer that it should include much more- all the things we have computers do to manage information. In that sense, we have been living among shards of artificial intelligence for a very long time. We have become utterly dependent on databases, for instance, for our memory functions. Imagine having to chase down a bank balance or a news story, without access to the searchable memories that modern databases provide. They are breathtakingly superior to our own intelligence when it comes to the amount of things they can remember, the accuracy they can remember them, and the speed with which they can find them. The same goes for calculations of all sorts, and more recently, complex scientific math like solving atomic structures, creating wonderful CGI graphics, or predicting the weather. 

We should view AI as a cabinet filled with many different tools, just as our own bodies and minds are filled with many kinds of intelligence. The integration of our minds into a single consciousness tends to blind us to the diversity of what happens under the hood. While we may want gross measurements like "general intelligence", we also know increasingly that it (whatever "it" is, and whatever it fails to encompass of our many facets and talents) is composed of many functions that several decades of work in AI, computer science, and neuroscience have shown are far more complicated and difficult to replicate than the early AI pioneers imagined, once they got hold of their Turing machine with its infinite potential. 

Originally, we tended to imagine artificial intelligence as a robot- humanoid, slightly odd looking, but just like us in form and abilities. That was a natural consequence of our archetypes and narcissism. But AI is nothing like that, because full-on humanoid consciousness is an impossibly high bar, at least for the foreseeable future, and requires innumerable capabilities and forms of intelligence to be developed first. 

The autonomous car drama is a good example of this. It has taken every ounce of ingenuity and high tech to get to a reasonably passable vehicle, which is able to "understand" key components of the world around it. That a blob in front is a person, instead of a motorcycle, or that a light is a traffic light instead of a reflection of the sun. Just as our brain has a stepwise hierarchy of visual processing, we have recapitulated that evolution here by harnessing cameras in these cars (and lasers, etc.) to not just take in a flat visual scene, which by itself is meaningless, but to parse it into understandable units like ... other cars, crosswalks, buildings, bicylists, etc.. Visual scenes are very rich, and figuring out what is in them is a huge accomplishment. 

But is it intelligence? Yes, it certainly is a fragment of intelligence, but it isn't consciousness. Imagine how effortless this process is for us, and how effortful and constricted it is for an autonomous vehicle. We understand everything in a scene within a much wider model of the world, where everything relates to everything else. We evaluate and understand innumerable levels of our environment, from its chemical makeup to its social and political implications. Traffic cones do not freak us out. The bare obstacle course of getting around, such as in a vehicle, is a minor aspect, really, of this consciousness, and of our intelligence. Autonomous cars are barely up to the level of cockroaches, on balance, in overall intelligence.

The AI of text and language handling is similarly primitive. Despite the vast improvements in text translation and interpretation, the underlying models these mechanisms draw on are limited. Translation can be done without understanding text at all, merely by matching patterns from pre-digested pools of pre-translated text, regurgitated as cued by the input text. Siri-like spoken responses, on the other hand, do require some parsing of meaning out of the input, to decide what the topic and the question are. But the scope of these tools tend to be very limited, and the wider scope they are allowed, the more embarrassing their performance, since they are essentially scraping web sites and text pools for question-response patterns, instead of truly understanding the user's request or any field of knowledge.

Lastly, there are the generative ChatGPT style engines, which also regurgitate text patterns reformatted from public sources in response to topical requests. The ability to re-write a Wikipedia entry through a Shakespeare filter is amazing, but it is really the search / input functions that are most impressive- being able, like the Siri system, to parse through the user's request for all its key points. This betokens some degree of understanding, in the sense that the world of the machine (i.e. its database) is parceled up into topics that can be separately gathered and reshuffled into a response. This requires a pretty broad and structured ontological / classification system, which is one important part of intelligence.

Not only is there a diversity of forms of intelligence to be considered, but there is a vast diversity of expertise and knowledge to be learned. There are millions of jobs and professions, each with their own forms of knowledge. Back the early days of AI, we thought that expert systems could be instructed by experts, formalizing their expertise. But that turned out to be not just impractical, but impossible, since much of that expertise, formed out of years of study and experience, is implicit and unconscious. That is why apprenticeship among humans is so powerful, offering a combination of learning by watching and learning by doing. Can AI do that? Only if it gains several more kinds of intelligence including an ability to learn in very un-computer-ish ways.

This analysis has emphasized the diverse nature of intelligences, and the uneven, evolutionary development they have undergone. How close are we to a social intelligence that could understand people's motivations and empathise with them? Not very close at all. How close are we to a scientific intelligence that could find holes in the scholarly literature and manage a research enterprise to fill them? Not very close at all. So it is very early days in terms of anything that could properly be called artificial intelligence, even while bits and pieces have been with us for a long time. We may be in for fifty to a hundred more years of hearing every advance in computer science being billed as artificial intelligence.

Uneven development is going to continue to be the pattern, as we seize upon topics that seem interesting or economically rewarding, and do whatever the current technological frontier allows. Memory and calculation were the first to fall, being easily formalizable. Communication network management is similarly positioned. Game learning was next, followed by the Siri / Watson systems for question answering. Then came a frontal assault on language understanding, using the neural network systems, which discard the former expert system's obsession with grammar and rules, for much simpler statistical learning from large pools of text. This is where we are, far from fully understanding language, but highly capable in restricted areas. And the need for better AI is acute. There are great frontiers to realize in medical diagnosis and in the modeling of biological systems, to only name two fields close at hand that could benefit from a thoroughly systematic and capable artificial intelligence.

The problem is that world modeling, which is what languages implicitly stand for, is very complicated. We do not even know how to do this properly in principle, let alone having the mechanisms and scale to implement it. What we have in terms of expert systems and databases do not have the kind of richness or accessibility needed for a fluid and wide-ranging consciousness. Will neural nets get us there? Or ontological systems / databases? Or some combination? However it is done, full world modeling with the ability to learn continuously into those models are key capabilities needed for significant artificial intelligence.

After world modeling come other forms of intelligence like social / emotional intelligence and agency / management intelligence with motivation. I have no doubt that we will get to full machine consciousness at some point. The mechanisms of biological brains are just not sufficiently mysterious to think that they can not be replicated or improved upon. But we are nowhere near that yet, despite bandying about the word artificial intelligence. When we get there, we will have to pay special attention to the forms of motivation we implant, to mitigate the dangers of making beings who are even more malevolent than those that already exist... us.

Would that constitute some kind of "singularity"? I doubt it. Among humans there are already plenty of smart people and diversity, which result in niches for everyone having something useful to do. Technology has been replacing human labor forever, and will continue moving up the chain of capability. And when machines exceed the level of human intelligence, in some general sense, they will get all the difficult jobs. But the job of president? That will still go to a dolt, I have no doubt. Selection for some jobs is by criteria that artificial intelligence, no matter how astute, is not going to fulfill.

Risks? In the current environment, there are a plenty of risks, which are typically cases where technology has outrun our will to regulate its social harm. Fake information, thanks to the chatbots and image makers, can now flood the zone. But this is hardly a new phenomenon, and perhaps we need to get back to a position where we do not believe everything we read, in the National Enquirer or on the internet. The quality of our sources may become once again an important consideration, as they always should have been.

Another current risk is that the automation risks chaos. For example in the financial markets, the new technologies seem to calm the markets most of the time, arbitraging with relentless precision. But when things go out of bounds, flash breakdowns can happen, very destructively. The SEC has sifted through some past events of this kind and set up regulatory guard rails. But they will probably be perpetually behind the curve. Militaries are itching to use robots instead of pilots and soldiers, and to automate killing from afar. But ultimately, control of the military comes down to social power, which comes down to people of not necessarily great intelligence. 

The biggest risk from these machines is that of security. If we have our financial markets run by machine, or our medical system run by super-knowledgeable artificial intelligences, or our military by some panopticon neural net, or even just our electrical grid run by super-computers, the problem is not that they will turn against us of their own volition, but that some hacker somewhere will turn them against us. Countless hospitals have already faced ransomware attacks. This is a real problem, growing as machines become more capable and indispensable. If and when we make artificial people, we will need the same kind of surveillance and social control mechanisms over them that we do over everyone else, but with the added option of changing their programming. Again, powerful intelligences made for military purposes to kill our enemies are, by the reflexive property of all technology, prime targets for being turned against us. So just as we have locked up our nuclear weapons and managed to not have them fall into enemy hands (so far), similar safeguards would need to be put on similar powers arising from these newer technologies.

We may have been misled by the many AI and super-beings of science fiction, Nietzsche's Übermensch, and similar archetypes. The point of Nietzsche's construction is moral, not intellectual or physical- a person who has thrown off all the moral boundaries of civilization, expecially Christian civilization. But that is a phantasm. The point of most societies is to allow the weak to band together to control the strong and malevolent. A society where the strong band together to enslave the weak.. well, that is surely a nightmare, and more unrealistic the more concentrated the power. We must simply hope that, given the ample time we have before truly comprehensive and superior artificial intelligent beings exist, we have exercised sufficient care in their construction, and in the health of our political institutions, to control them as we have many other potentially malevolent agents.

• AI in chemistry.
• AI to recognize cells in images.
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali becomes Christian. "I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable."
• The racism runs very deep.
• An appreciation of Stephen J. Gould.
• Forced arbitration against customers and employees is OK, but fines against frauds... not so much?
• Oil production still going up.