My Amazon-/Microsoft-/VC-praised work + …* = stable nuclear-deterrence (i.e., no war involving nukes)**
* e.g., my tenure since 2016 as an/the-world’s-most accidental threat-analyst
** !?
Links to said praise*
bloomberg.com/news/articles/2005-02-13/one-more-thing-on-43-things (cached by Google; the praise is from the CEO of a defunct then-startup funded by Amazon and co-founded by members of Amazon’s first “personalization and recommendations” team)
blogmaverick.com/2005/01/31/grokster-and-the-financial-future-of-america/#comment-7049 (blogmaverick.com is Mark Cuban’s blog)
* praise for innovations (INs) that are: 1) products of my work from 1992 to 2005, 2) complemented by the disruptive INs that are products of my work since 2005 (all of my INs are previewed below)
Excerpts from the praise
From a 1998 email sent to me by the then-Manager of the Learning Sciences and Technology Group at Microsoft Research:
Frank, you are a good man. Have you thought about joining this team? Your only alternative, of course, is venture capital. But their usual models require getting rid of the “originator” within the first eighteen months.
From a 2004 email sent to me by said CEO (previously Amazon’s first Director of Personalization):
Frank, I just spent about an hour surfing around your website with a bit of amazement. . . . I guess I’m mostly just fascinated that we’ve been working a very similar vein to the one you describe, without having a solid name for it (we call it “the age of the amateur” or “networks of shared experiences” instead of [AI-powered] CLLCS [i.e., customized lifelong-learning and career services], but believe me, we are talking about the same patterns and markets, if not in exactly the same way). Thanks for sharing what you have—it’s fascinating stuff.
Re: the “. . .” in the title of this page
— Summary (details below) —
From* a University of Pennsylvania criminologist’s 2013 book:
The world’s ~78 million psychopaths (Ps) are IMPERILED (PsIMP) by ongoing advances in molecular-genetics research.
By 2034, involuntary “indefinite detention” of Ps—“time bombs waiting to explode”—could/should result from mandatory biomarker-testing of all people.
I read said book in December 2015, soon after I recognized that my planned startup (MPS) would contribute** to the imperiling of Ps. By mid-2016 I thought it was at least:
likely that a growing number of Ps were aware that PsIMP, and were preparing to resist
somewhat likely that Ps’ war chest was (very) large and growing larger (rapidly)
These seeming likelihoods led me to conclude during Fall 2016 that PsIMP portended: 1) a THREAT to MPS, 2) a THREAT/THREAT to the rest of my industry, 3) a threat/T/T to many other people (hereafter, 1-3 are abbreviated as T2M).
Since then my focus has been preventing/subduing T2M (e.g., by improving my understanding of T2M, by supplying (updated) T2M-analysis to U.S.-government agencies).
In late 2021 I recognized that my worst-case-analysis-re:-T2M (mWCA) must incorporate nuclear weapons. From mWCA (current version):
There are STRONG indicators that: 1) Ps are resisting (PR)*, 2) PR either includes** autocratic-leaders-with-nukes (e.g., Putin***, Xi Jinping) or it will soon, 3) absent my work being leveraged: 3.1) PR-with-nukes would (continue to) resist via a domino-theory that centers on challenging the U.S. et al. (US+) to a succession of game-of-chicken variants, 3.2) each variant would force US+ to choose between a default-loss (e.g., parts of Ukraine where “huge natural gas deposits” were discovered in 2010) or a Cuban-Missile-Crisis-like risk****.
* For starters, see the sections below titled “Re: [in 2016] I thought it was (very) likely that Ps were preparing to resist” and “Precedents for Ps-RESISTING-PsIMP that I was aware of in 2016”; more indicators of PR are provided/linked-to in other sections.
** e.g., because Ps are to repressive kleptocracies what Murder, Inc. was to organized crime in the U.S. during the 1930s; for more re: “PR either includes . . . ”, see: 1) the following footnote (***), 2) the sections titled “Re: the likelihood that: 1) a large and growing number of Ps are aware that PsIMP, 2) they're resisting, 3) their war chest is very large and growing larger rapidly” and “Re: mWCA now incorporates nukes possessed by Russia and China”
*** From 2020 book Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West:
“[Putin] was always asking, ‘What is that word beginning with s? Sovest–conscience.’ They don’t have receptors for this.”
From 2019 book The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime:
As we move along the continuum to Category 9 [of 22 categories of violent crime], we traverse an important threshold. The remainder of the scale encompasses persons who commit “evil” acts partly or wholly as the result of varying degrees of psychopathy . . .
TNE co-author Michael H. Stone, MD, is a professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. TNE co-author Gary Brucato, PhD, is: 1) a clinical psychologist and researcher in the areas of violence, psychosis, and other serious psychopathology, 2) the assistant director of the Center of Prevention and Evaluation at the New York State Psychiatric Institute/Columbia University Medical Center.
More details re: Putin are below (e.g., the following lowlights).
**** From a March 2022 post on the blog of the RAND Corporation:
[R]ulers like Putin . . . conflate the continuation of their rule with their personal survival . . . Perpetuating their own rule at any cost or risk of nuclear war is . . . rational for them [my emphasis].
From a March 2022 article in The New York Times (NYT; my emphases):
“[A] former U.S. intelligence official for Europe . . . recently wrote that ‘scores of war games carried out by the United States and its allies’ all projected that Mr. Putin would launch a single nuclear strike if he faced limited fighting with NATO or major setbacks in Ukraine that he blamed on the West.
. . . A recent Princeton University simulation, projecting out each side’s war plans and other indicators, estimated that it [i.e., said single nuclear strike] would be likely to trigger a tit-for-tat exchange that, in escalating to strategic weapons like intercontinental missiles, could kill 34 million people within a few hours.”
“Late in the Obama administration, two American war simulations imagined . . . [a] skirmish between NATO and Russia that Moscow met with a single nuclear strike. In the first, Pentagon leaders proposed a retaliatory nuclear strike . . . [A] civilian White House official . . . persuaded them to stand down and isolate Moscow diplomatically. . . . [T]he second simulation ended with American nuclear strikes . . .”
From an October 10, 2022 op-ed by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta:
Some intelligence analysts now believe that the probability of the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine has risen from 1-5 percent at the start of the war to 20-25 percent today.
More details below.
Sadly/bleeply, there are indicators that US+’s (WC)As-re:-autocratic-leaders-with-nukes don’t include the implications of PsIMP (ESP. implications re: achieving stable nuclear-deterrence (SND)). Re: s/b:
From an article in the May/June 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs:
As [former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara once observed, the United States’ “security depends on assuming a worst possible case, and having the ability to cope with it [my emphasis].”
Re: “ESP. implications . . .”:
From a 2022 op-ed in NYT, co-authored by two former members of the U.S. National Security Council staff (my emphases):
In the 20th century, constructive doomsaying helped prevent the Cold War from becoming a shooting war. It was ultimately worst-case thinking that stabilized nuclear deterrence and staved off Armageddon.
Key to SND ASAP: you emailing*** the U.S.’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (details (linked-to) below include text you can copy-paste).
* The two sentences that I attribute to the book summarize excerpts from the book that are linked-to in the sentences and/or that appear below.
** i.e., would make an unplanned/inadvertent contribution
*** Warning (‘x + y = z’ format): Ongoing advances in neuroscience re: “brain-reading,” esp. re: “memory detection” (details below) + precedent of revenge-SEEKING after World War II (details below) = not emailing DTRA could make you a target of many people’s wrath**** in the near future (i.e., the wrath of many of the world’s ~7.7 billion non-Ps).
**** You might be safer if you recommend to others that they read this write-up.
Re: my blueprint for SND (mSND)
Details are linked-to below, in the section titled “Re: mSND”.
More re: mSND is TIMELY
From Google News (August 17, 2022):
From the September 29, 2022 article on Newsweek.com titled “Biden Thinks Non-Nuclear Threats Will Stop Putin. His Military Doesn't”:
“Every operational plan in the DoD [Department of Defense], and every other capability we have, rests on the assumption that strategic deterrence, and in particular nuclear deterrence, will hold,” commander of U.S. Strategic Command Adm. Charles “Chas” Richard said in March at the Air & Space Forces Association's 2022 conference. That suggests that Richard, the man responsible for building the plans to deter nuclear use, worries not only that the Cold War model of nuclear deterrence might no longer hold, but that it is no longer clear what would happen if enemy nuclear weapons were actually used.
“If strategic or nuclear deterrence fails . . . no other plan or capability in the DoD will work as designed,” Richard said.
From an October 6, 2022 article in NYT:
“We are trying to figure out: What is Putin’s off ramp?” Mr. Biden said . . .
From a September 30, 2022 article by “the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine”:
Our intelligence agencies assess the threat of Russia’s tactical nuclear-weapons use as “very high.”
From said October 6, 2022 article in NYT:
On Thursday, Mr. Biden said he did not think it would be possible for Russia to use a tactical weapon and “not end up with Armageddon.”
“We’ve got a guy I know fairly well,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Putin at the fund-raiser. “He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.”
Re: my AI-/edu-preneurship doesn’t preclude mSND being TOP-quality
From the 1997 book by Harvard education psychologist Howard Gardner:
There are striking regularities in the lives of Makers—those . . . who have invented or decisively altered domains. . . . At approximately ten-year periods, they are able to produce further innovations . . . These later innovations are typically more general and synthetic, often working through implications of the early work. However, there may also be dramatic shifts to new areas . . . [T]he Maker moves regularly and repeatedly in new directions—confronting issues and challenges that are invisible to others or may even be actively resisted by them.
In 2015 I completed the 1.0 version of my first disruptive IN (DI).
In 2018 I completed the design of my second DI. (The design adapts my Amazon-/VC-praised* design of a next-gen variant of LinkedIn; keyword re: adapts: blockchain.)
In July 2022 I formulated mSND.
* From said 2004 email sent to me by said CEO (previously Amazon’s first Director of Personalization; my emphases):
I run a little company . . . We are a team of folks who worked together at Amazon.com developing that company’s personalization and recommendations team and systems. We spent about 1.5 years thinking about what we wanted to build next. We thought a lot about online education tools. We thought a lot about classified ads and job networks. We thought a lot about reputation systems. We thought a bit about personalized advertising systems. We thought a lot about blogging and social networking systems. . . . I guess I’m mostly just fascinated that we’ve been working a very similar vein to the one you describe . . .
From a 2004 email sent to me by an analyst at then-top-VC-firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson:
Hi Frank, Thanks for your time today. If you would like to provide us with further information about your [business] plan [for providing CLLCS], we would be happy to review it in more detail.
Re: my T2M-analysis in 2016
— Re: I believed that “time bomb”-level psychopathy is ~70% heritable —
From 2011 book The Science of Evil, by a University of Cambridge professor of developmental psychopathology:
If a trait or behavior is even partly genetic, we should see its signature showing up in twins.
. . . Regarding twin studies of Type P [i.e., psychopaths], none of these show 100 percent heritability, but the genetic component is nevertheless substantial (the largest estimate being about 70 percent).
From a 2015 article on CNN.com:
“The more severe the psychopathy, the greater the inheritance for the disorder,” . . . said [J. Reid Meloy, forensic psychologist and author of The Psychopathic Mind].
— Re: I believed that many/most/all genetic identifiers of said ~70% would be identified circa 2034 —
From said 2013 book—The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime—by said University of Pennsylvania professor of Criminology (and of Psychiatry and Psychology):
“Behavioral genetics is a shadowy black box because, while it tells us what proportion of a given behavior is genetically influenced, it does not identify the specific genes lurking in there that predispose one to violence. Molecular genetics is poised to pry open that black box . . .”
“Twenty years ago, molecular genetics was a fledgling field of research. Now it is a major enterprise providing us with a detailed look at the structure and function of genes.”
“The essence of the molecular genetic research we have been touching on above—identifying specific genes that predispose individuals to crime—is that genes code for neurotransmitter functioning. Neurotransmitters are brain chemicals essential to brain functioning. There are more than a hundred of them and they help to transmit signals from one brain cell to another to communicate information. Change the level of these neurotransmitters, and you change cognition, emotion, and behavior.
. . . It’s 2034 . . . [A]ll males in society aged eighteen and over have to register at their local hospital for a quick brain scan and DNA testing. One simple finger prick for one drop of blood that takes ten seconds. Then a five-minute brain scan for the “Fundamental Five Functions”: First, a structural scan provides the brain’s anatomy. Second, a functional scan shows resting brain activity. Third, enhanced diffusion-tensor imaging is taken to assess the integrity of the white-fiber system in the brain, assessing intricate brain connectivity. Fourth is a reading of the brain’s neurochemistry that has been developed from magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Fifth and finally, the cellular functional scan assesses expression of 23,000 different genes at the cellular level. The computerization of all medical, school, psychological, census, and neighborhood data makes it easy to combine these traditional risk variables alongside the vast amount of DNA and brain data to form an all-encompassing biosocial data set.
. . . Fourth-generation machine-learning techniques looked for complex patterns of linear and nonlinear relationships . . .”
— Re: I believed that “indefinite detention” of many/most/all Ps could/should ensue —
From The Anatomy of Violence (my emphases):
It’s 2034 . . . The economic cost of crime is now astronomical. Back in 2010, the cost of homicide in the United States was estimated at over $300 billion—more than the combined budgets of the Departments of Education, Justice, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Labor, and Homeland Security. Way back in 1999, it was estimated to consume 11.9 percent of GDP, but in 2034 it is gobbling up 21.8 percent.
. . . [This] leads the government to launch the LOMBROSO program—Legal Offensive on Murder: Brain Research Operation for the Screening of Offenders.
. . . Under LOMBROSO, those who test positive—the LPs—are held in indefinite detention . . . It sounds quite cushy, but remember that the LPs have not actually committed a crime. Perhaps the main drawback is who they live with, housed as they are in facilities full of other LPs—time bombs waiting to explode.
From 2011 book The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry:
[“]She said, ‘I’ve got a bad personality. I like to hurt people.’ I thought she was winding me up. I said, ‘Okay, fine.’ So we went through the [fMRI] tests [i.e., brain scans]. When she was looking at the photographs of the mutilated bodies, the sensors showed that she was getting a kick off of them. Her sexual reward center—it’s a sexual thing—was fired up by blood and death [my emphasis]. It’s subconscious. It happens in milliseconds. She found those things pleasant.”
— Re: I thought it was (very) likely that a growing number of Ps were aware that PsIMP —
From a 2016 article on PsychologyToday.com:
A [meta-analytic] review of [48] studies found that the correlation between psychopathy and intelligence is nearly zero [i.e., ~2.3% of Ps have an IQ ≥ 130; ~16% ≥ 115].
From the 2012 article in FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin titled “The Corporate Psychopath”:
Today’s corporate psychopath may be highly educated—several with Ph.D., M.D., and J.D. degrees have been studied . . .
En route to raising awareness, Ps can use the pretense of screening job applicants to test for psychopathy (i.e., to identify other Ps).
From a 2011 article in U.K. newspaper The Independent:
My companion, a senior UK investment banker, and I are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees. He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”
— Re: I thought it was (very) likely that Ps were preparing to resist —
From 2015 book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, co-authored by University of Pennsylvania professor Philip Tetlock (my emphases):
“OUTSIDE FIRST
. . . If Bill Flack were asked whether, in the next twelve months, there would be an armed clash between China and Vietnam over some border dispute, he wouldn’t immediately delve into the particulars of that border dispute and the current state of China-Vietnam relations. He would instead look at how often there have been armed clashes in the past. ‘Say we get hostile conduct between China and Vietnam every five years,’ Bill says. ‘I’ll use a five-year recurrence model to predict the future.’ In any given year, then, the outside view would suggest to Bill there is a 20% chance of a clash. Having established that, Bill would look at the situation today and adjust that number up or down.”
“Statisticians call that the base rate—how common something is within a broader class. [Nobel laureate] Daniel Kahneman has a much more evocative visual term for it. He calls it the ‘outside view’ . . .”
“You may wonder why the outside view should come first. After all, you could dive into the inside view and draw conclusions, then turn to the outside view. Wouldn’t that work as well? Unfortunately, no, it probably wouldn’t. The reason is a basic psychological concept called anchoring.
When we make estimates, we tend to start with some number and adjust. The number we start with is called the anchor. It’s important because we typically underadjust, which means a bad anchor can easily produce a bad estimate. And it’s astonishingly easy to settle on a bad anchor. In classic experiments, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed you could influence people’s judgment merely by exposing them to a number—any number, even one that is obviously meaningless, like one randomly selected by the spin of a wheel. So a forecaster who starts by diving into the inside view risks being swayed by a number that may have little or no meaning. But if she starts with the outside view, her analysis will begin with an anchor that is meaningful. And a better anchor is a distinct advantage.”
I thought the correct base-rate re: Ps-preparing-to-resist might be 75%.
From a 2015 article on TheAtlantic.com (my emphases):
[A] team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record[:] . . . [I]n 12 of 16 cases over the last 500 years in which there was a rapid shift in the relative power of a rising nation that threatened to displace a ruling state, the result was war.
— Precedents for Ps-RESISTING-PsIMP that I was aware of in 2016 —
From the 2018 article titled “Los Extraditables, the Pablo Escobar-Led Gang That Launched a Bloody Campaign [during the 1980s] Against U.S. Extradition”:
The terrorist group . . . claimed “we prefer a grave in Colombia to a prison in the United States . . .”
Escobar was a drug-trafficker whose net worth exceeded $60 billion (in 2022 dollars). The other leaders of Los Extraditables were wealthy drug-traffickers.
From 2001 book Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (my emphases):
“[Escobar] intended, he said, to use the public’s weariness with [Extraditables-funded] violence to his benefit. He planned to turn up the violence until the public cried out for a solution, a deal.
. . . A communiqué from the Extraditables not long after hammered home the point:
We are declaring total and absolute war on the government, on the individual and political oligarchy, on the journalists who have attacked and insulted us, on the judges that have sold themselves to the government, on the extraditing magistrates . . . on all those who have persecuted and attacked us. We will not respect the families of those who have not respected our families. We will burn and destroy the industries, properties and mansions of the oligarchy.”
“At his [Escobar’s] peak, he would threaten to usurp the Colombian State.”
“Ever since Pablo’s men had blown that Avianca flight out of the sky . . .”
“[A] total of 457 police had been killed since Colonel Martinez had started his hunt. Young gunmen in that city were being paid 5 million pesos for killing a cop.”
From 2008 book The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, by Columbia University historian Adam Tooze:
Hitler had seen himself as locked in a global confrontation with world Jewry. . . . For Hitler, a war of conquest was not one policy option amongst others. Either the German race struggled for Lebensraum [i.e., territory] or its racial enemies would condemn it to extinction.
From 2019 book Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War:
The failure to perceive the true character of the Nazi regime and Adolf Hitler [my emphasis] stands as the single greatest failure of British policy makers during this period, since it was from this that all subsequent failures—the failure to rearm sufficiently . . . to build alliances . . . to project British power . . . to educate public opinion—stemmed.
— Re: I thought it was (somewhat) likely that Ps’ war chest was (very) large and growing larger (rapidly) —
Keywords (details follow): de facto legalization of HUGE fraud within the U.S. financial sector; said bank that tested for psychopathy.
From a 2012 article on the website of The Harvard Business Review:
Twitter, the blogosphere, and traditional media have been buzzing about “The Financial Psychopath Next Door,” an article in CFA Magazine by Sherree DeCovny (subscription required).
The headline-grabbing factoid in the article was an estimate that 10% of people in the financial services industry are psychopaths. And that’s a conservative estimate, according to Christopher Bayer, a Wall Street psychotherapist cited by DeCovny.
DeCovny describes “financial psychopaths” as individuals who seek thrills, lack empathy, don’t care about what others think, are charming and intelligent, and are skilled at lying and manipulation. Citing Richard Peterson, managing partner of MarketPsych (a firm that provides psychological and behavioral finance training for the industry), DeCovny notes that these are some of the traits that also predict success on Wall Street.
From 2014 book Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, by Michael Lewis:
[W]hat big American firms had done [in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis]—rigged credit ratings to make bad loans seem like good loans, created subprime bonds designed to fail, sold them to their customers and then bet against them . . .
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is the 2010 book by Michael Lewis about the inflating of the U.S. housing bubble that burst in 2008. From The Big Short (my emphases):
By late September 2008 the nation's highest financial official, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, persuaded the U.S. Congress that he needed $700 billion to buy subprime mortgage assets from banks. Thus was born TARP, which stood for Troubled Asset Relief Program. Once handed the money, Paulson abandoned his promised strategy and instead essentially began giving away billions of dollars to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and a few others unnaturally selected for survival.
. . . [T]he U.S. Federal Reserve took the shocking and unprecedented step of buying bad subprime mortgage bonds directly from the banks. By early 2009 the risks and losses associated with more than a trillion dollars’ worth of bad investments were transferred from big Wall Street firms to the U.S. taxpayer.
From Flash Boys (my emphases):
Brad knew that he was being front-run—that some other trader was, in effect, noticing his demand for stock on one exchange and buying it on others in anticipation of selling it to him at a higher price. He’d identified a suspect: high-frequency traders.
. . . The HFT guys didn’t need perfect information to make riskless profits; they only needed to skew the odds systematically in their favor.
. . . The president of a $9 billion hedge fund—recalls the encounter this way: “I know I have a three-hundred-million-dollar problem on a nine-billion-dollar hedge fund.” (That is, he knows that the cost of not being able to trade at the stated market prices is costing him $300 million a year.)
. . . How was it legal . . . to operate at faster speeds than the rest of the market and, in effect, steal from investors?
. . . [M]ore than two hundred SEC staffers since 2007 had left their government jobs to work for high-frequency trading firms or the firms that lobbied Washington on their behalf. Some of these people had played central roles in deciding how, or even whether, to regulate high-frequency trading.
— Re: I thought PsIMP portended a THREAT to MPS et al. —
From a T2M-analysis of mine, written c. 2016 to MOTIVATE a particular U.S.-government agency (keyword re: MOTIVATE: China):
Re: PsIMP (reasons 2 and 3)
In the years ahead:
the cost of conceiving a child via buying a top-quality gamete will decrease steadily/rapidly (e.g., soon all women with health insurance will be able to afford in vitro fertilization and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis)
“superstar-biased” technological change (SBTC) will continue to be rapid and to accelerate rapidly
buying a top-quality gamete will be the best way for most individuals to co-conceive a child who can thrive amid SBTC (i.e., a buyer’s child would receive half of his/her DNA from the buyer and half from the seller)
scientists and technologists will continue to produce aids to child development (i.e., help for (single) parents)
As demand for top-quality gametes increases, demand for indicators of gamete quality will increase. In particular, demand for better indicators of learning ability.
TOP indicators of learning ability will take shape via the ongoing build-out of “human-capital” markets (e.g., said [i.e., MPS’s] next-gen variant of LinkedIn, [MPS’s online] prediction markets, [MPS’s online-market for] CE [customized education]).
Via the above re: “reasons 2 and 3,” there’ll be UPSIDE for all non-Ps: for some, income via selling one’s gametes; for all, access to top-quality gametes; etc.
Implications of this upside: Many/most people will soon be active in human-capital markets; many/most of these people will be active on a (near-)daily basis.
Via this activity:
Each P will be unable to reproduce via gaining access to (top-)quality gametes, unless s/he coerces.
Each P with superstar-level ability will suffer very costly career damage/loss, unless s/he coerces.
. . .
From 2015 international bestseller Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (my emphases):
The main products of the twenty-first century will be bodies, brains and minds, and the gap between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who do not will be . . . bigger than the gap between Sapiens and Neanderthals. In the twenty-first century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind will face extinction.
From 2016 book The Gene: An Intimate History, by a Pulitzer Prize recipient:
As the political theorist Desmond King puts it, “One way or another, we are all going to be dragged into the regime of ‘gene management’ that will, in essence, be eugenic. . . . Genetic change will be managed by the invisible hand of individual choice [my emphasis], but the overall result will be the same [as government-run eugenics”] . . .
From 2015 NYT bestseller Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (my emphases):
“Exponential progress is now showing up in dozens of arenas: . . . artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, genomics . . . ”
“[E]xponential technology refers to any technology accelerating on an exponential growth curve—that is, doubling in power on a regular basis . . . ”
From Homo Deus (my emphases):
In the early twenty-first century the train of progress is again pulling out of the station—and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it, you need to understand twenty-first-century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms.
From Bold:
“Underestimating the power of exponentials is easy to do. . . . [O]ur brains . . . were never designed to process at either this scale or this speed.”
“If I take 30 large linear steps (say three feet, or one meter per step) . . . I end up 30 meters away . . . [If] I take 30 exponential steps from the same starting point, I end up a billion meters away.”
. . .
From an essay in 2013 book What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night:
China has been running the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China’s ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization.
. . . Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more “next-generation” DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.
The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of “preimplantation embryo selection” might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.
The essay was written by New York University psychologist Geoffrey Miller.
— End of excerpt from a T2M-analysis of mine written c. 2016 —
Re: since 2016 my focus has been preventing/subduing T2M
— Summary (details below) —
In 2005 I came to believe that:
CE-for-improving-artificial-intelligence would be to the AI economy what oil has been to the industrial economy
the AI-economy’s variant of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil would provide the most popular variants of the online-markets that I had designed by 2005
At the time, MPS’s business-model wasn’t disruptive to relevant big companies (e.g., Amazon, Google), so I needed to affiliate with a BigCo.
For reasons previewed below, my plan by mid-2006 was to affiliate with a media conglomerate after I learned how to run a particular variant of Alloy Entertainment, the books-to-TV/-film company acquired by The Warner Bros. TV Group for $100M in 2012.
In 2012 the legalization of equity-crowdfunding (ECF) enabled an update to my plans for an Alloy variant. The update: 1) made MPS’s business-model disruptive to all relevant BigCos, 2) led me to hypothesize that I might become the Rockefeller of the AI economy (!?); keywords re: disruptive: startup comedies that’ll: 1) originate as serial “non-fiction novels”, 2) HELP MPS’s product-development groups raise ECF en route to spinning off (i.e., will make joining one of said groups MUCH more attractive to TOP talent (e.g., computer scientists, data scientists, software engineers) than working for any monolithic BigCo).
By Fall 2015 I was qualified to run my planned Alloy-variant (i.e., I had developed enough craft/artfulness to begin, en route to developing more c/a while running the variant).
Title of a 2007 paper in The Journal of Creative Behavior:
Ten Years to Expertise, Many More to Greatness: An Investigation of Modern Writers
In December 2015 I hypothesized T2M, via researching the risks associated with MPS providing a gamete market.
By Fall 2016 I had:
completed my 1.0 T2M-analysis
hypothesized that a key to preventing/subduing T2M was gathering particular (anticipatory) intelligence
recognized that MPS’s business-model could be adapted/extended to yield an IDEAL front company (FC) for gathering said intelligence
recognized that MPS’s FC might disrupt/preclude-competition-from future startups (i.e., might make MPS a monopolist by default)
— 2022 version of the comedy-opener of my 1.0 startup-comedy —
“Nineteen states,” I said, “have legalized recreational marijuana. A lot of partying happens away from home. Smoking weed gives people the munchies. Many popular night-spots don’t serve food. So there’s a greenfield opportunity at the intersection of mobile storage, weed storage, and food storage. Specifically, an opportunity for OSG [The Opportunity Services Group; i.e., MPS] to patent my design of clothing-pockets that close via Ziploc.”
Seolhyun’s eyes widened for an instant. Then her lips formed a thin smile.
“I see you’re worried about developing laugh lines,” I said. “You shouldn’t be. Laugh lines are no match for modern cosmetic surgery. After all, cosmetic surgery is getting so advanced that, soon, it will be simple to make a woman’s face after surgery appear completely different than her face before surgery.”
Then I tried to appear struck by a flash of insight.
“Which means,” I said, “that soon millions of Caucasian women will find it impossible to get a date! Unless . . .”
I picked up the handset of my desk phone, then appeared to dial an extension.
“It has come to my attention,” I said into the handset, “that OSG can profit obscenely by purchasing the rights to develop and market the only DNA test that enables a woman to prove she’s not Lorena Bobbitt!”
Seolhyun laughed.
I restored the handset to its cradle, then used my laptop. A new presentation-slide appeared on the wall-mounted screen:
From a 1978 article in The New Yorker:
“When it comes to saving a bad line, [Johnny Carson] is the master”—to quote a tribute paid in my presence by George Burns. . . . One sometimes detects a vindictive glint in Carson’s eye when a number of gags sink without risible trace, but [Tonight Show writer Pat] McCormick assures me that this is all part of the act . . .
— Precedent for MPS’s startup-comedies —
From a 2015 issue of a newsletter about podcasts:
Gimlet, your friendly neighborhood podcasting company that narrates its own emergence [on its podcast titled StartUp] . . .
[A]ccording to the StartUp episode that dropped last Thursday, Graham Holdings invested $5 million into the $6 million round [raised by Gimlet], with the remainder split between some existing investors upping their commitment and a crowdfunded pool [via StartUp listeners] that was mediated through Quire, the equity crowdfunding platform [my emphasis] . . .
— Re: my focus on novel-writing and comedy doesn’t preclude my (WC)A-re:-T2M being TOP-quality —
From a 1960 article by Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling, a “Master Theorist of Nuclear Strategy”:
For a detailed scenario of how [nuclear] war might start, or almost start, we have to turn to the paperbacks.
From the 2016 obituary in NYT titled “Thomas C. Schelling, Master Theorist of Nuclear Strategy, Dies at 95”:
In “Meteors, Mischief and Wars,” published in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1960, Professor Schelling looked at the possibility of . . . nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union and reviewed three novels that imagined such an event. The director Stanley Kubrick read his comments on the novel “Red Alert” and adapted the book for “Dr. Strangelove,” on which Professor Schelling was a consultant.
From Meteors, Mischief and Wars:
Red Alert . . . exceeds in thoughtfulness any nonfiction available on how war might start [my emphasis].
From a 2022 op-ed in NYT co-authored by two former members of the U.S. National Security Council staff:
Herman Kahn’s clinical projections of nuclear devastation dazzled and horrified a growing audience—his warnings began with a series of Princeton lectures and eventually became the basis of his [1962] best seller “Thinking About the Unthinkable.”
From the website of Harvard University Press:
Herman Kahn was the only nuclear strategist in America who might have made a living as a standup comedian. Indeed, galumphing around stages across the country, joking his way through one grotesque thermonuclear scenario after another, he came frighteningly close.
— Re: my entrepreneurship has always been partly a means to a comedy end —
From a 2021 write-up of mine:
In 1985 I learned that I can reliably generate comic insights* (e.g., I can write jokes).
That year my focus shifted to developing a likable comic persona. My 1985 approach to said developing comprised 3 steps, with a corollary:
S1: Select a problem that’s causing many people a lot of distress.
S2: Try to solve the problem.
S3: Mine the experience for comedy.
C: The more effective I am at solving (part of) the problem, the more likable my persona will be.
The problem I selected was lack of educational/economic opportunity.
. . .
* More recently, I learned that I have what some neuroscientists call “comedy-writer brain” (e.g., my neuroanatomy includes a “flat” memory hierarchy that enables non-conscious processes of my brain to reliably identify associations that other types of brains can’t reliably identify independently (e.g., the other types can comprehend jokes, but can’t reliably conceive jokes)).
— Re: comedy-writer brain —
From 2014 book Ha!: The Science of When We Laugh and Why, by a cognitive neuroscientist:
[I]t’s worth noting that no single brain region is responsible for this type of creativity. One scientific review of seventy-two recent experiments revealed that no single brain region is consistently active during creative behavior. There is, however, something special about people who make novel connections or imagine the unimaginable. What sets them apart is the connectivity within their resting brains. This finding was discovered by a team of researchers from Tohoku in Japan, who observed that people with highly connected brains—as measured by shared brain activity over multiple regions—are more flexible and adaptive thinkers. Connected brains are creative brains.
From 1999 book The Entertainment Economy:
— Re: non-conscious processes identifying remote associations —
From 2017 book Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work:
Carhart-Harris set out to take real-time pictures of the unconscious [using neuroimaging technologies (e.g., fMRI)] and when he did, he saw the unconscious actively hunting for new ideas.
— End of excerpt from 2021 write-up of mine —
— Re: MPS as an FC —
In 2016 I thought that identifying Ps who were resisting PsIMP, or were likely to start soon, should start with gathering (anticipatory) intelligence about people who were: 1) likely to be Ps, 2) (becoming) wealthy, 3) (very) intelligent (i.e., people who might’ve been doing a lot to advance (preparations for) said resisting).
Re: “likely to be Ps”: Psychopathy correlates STRONGLY with hypersexuality (i.e., with sex-addiction).
From my 2022 draft of a submission to DTRA (note: the excerpt reflects DTRA’s limits re: submission-length (i.e., re: number of pages, size of font/margins, etc.)):
— Key to said gathering [of intel] and said acting-on . . . —
my 2016-‘22 innovations (INs) that: 1) position my planned company (MPC) to be an IDEAL front company (FC), 2) adapt/expand-on my ‘92-‘15 INs. Keywords (KWs) re: 9215INs: next-gen variant of LinkedIn (e.g., prices in planned-NGLI’s virtual currency will contain/reflect only truthful peer-ratings of work samples) and disruptive complements*; foundational for owning the top market for customized education (e.g., CE-for-AI . . .); IDEAL for said acting-on (e.g., IDEAL via being scaled-up during said gathering). KWs re: 1622INs: NG variant of Playboy Enterprises circa ‘60s/‘70s (e.g., NG “sugar dating” (SD) via adapting NGLI).
* e.g., 200 pages of the first startup-comedy**, a serial “non-fiction novel” that: 1) is a product partly of my ‘06-‘15 focus on learning to run a variant of the books-to-TV/-film company acquired for $100M in ‘12, 2) will HELP MPC’s product-development groups raise equity-crowdfunding (ECF) en route to spinning off, 3) will double as the first flowmantic-comedy (flow is the state-of-mind that enables top performance/problem-solving; often, “group flow” sparks romantic attraction; NGLI will give rise to MANY flowmances), 4) can spin-off the startup-camedy (SC) that I’ve researched and partly designed (CNBC.com: “CamGirls: The New Porn Superstars”; the SC’s working-title: Sexcerpts and the City; SatC would: 4.1) showcase adapted-NGLI, particular-AI-for-SD, (guest-)camgirls,...; 4.2) spin-off SCs that’d raise ECF en route to highest-bidders/part-owners casting (partly) via couches), 5+)…
— End of excerpt from DTRA draft —
Re: my T2M-analyses from late 2016 through 2021
— Re: PsIMP —
From a 2020 article in Nature:
In the past decade, studies of psychopathological genetics have become large enough to draw robust conclusions.
— Re: Ps are dangerous —
From the 2017 article in The Atlantic titled “When Your Child Is a Psychopath”:
At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”
Starting at age 6, Samantha began drawing pictures of murder weapons: a knife, a bow and arrow, chemicals for poisoning, a plastic bag for suffocating. She tells me that she pretended to kill her stuffed animals.
“You were practicing on your stuffed animals?,” I ask her.
She nods.
“How did you feel when you were doing that to your stuffed animals?”
“Happy.”
“Why did it make you feel happy?”
“Because I thought that someday I was going to end up doing it on somebody.”
“Did you ever try?”
Silence.
“I choked my little brother.”
. . . One bitter December day in 2011, Jen [who adopted Samantha] was driving the children along a winding road near their home. Samantha had just turned 6. Suddenly Jen heard screaming from the back seat, and when she looked in the mirror, she saw Samantha with her hands around the throat of her 2-year-old sister, who was trapped in her car seat. Jen separated them, and once they were home, she pulled Samantha aside.
“What were you doing?,” Jen asked.
“I was trying to choke her,” Samantha said.
“You realize that would have killed her? She would not have been able to breathe. She would have died.”
“I know.”
“What about the rest of us?”
“I want to kill all of you.”
Samantha later showed Jen her sketches, and Jen watched in horror as her daughter demonstrated how to strangle or suffocate her stuffed animals. “I was so terrified,” Jen says. “I felt like I had lost control.”
Four months later, Samantha tried to strangle her baby brother, who was just two months old.
Jen and Danny had to admit that nothing seemed to make a difference—not affection, not discipline, not therapy. “I was reading and reading and reading, trying to figure out what diagnosis made sense,” Jen tells me. “What fits with the behaviors I’m seeing?” Eventually she found one condition that did seem to fit . . . “In the children’s mental-health world, it’s pretty much a terminal diagnosis, except your child’s not going to die,” Jen says. “It’s just that there’s no help [i.e., no treatment/cure].”
— Re: the likelihood that: 1) a large and growing number of Ps are aware that PsIMP, 2) they’re resisting, 3) their war chest is very large and growing larger rapidly —
From said draft for DTRA:
During 2015-‘21, I: 1) . . . 7) learned/inferred: Ps’ resistance to PsIMP could be DANGEROUS for non-Ps, in part because: 7.1) Ps comprise “virtually all” contract-killers (CKs); 7.2) hiring-CKs-often is a MUST[*] for kleptocrats (Ks; i.e., PsIMP suggests/implies KsIMP); 7.3) worldwide, kleptocracy has been ASCENDANT and LUCRATIVE; so it’s at least somewhat likely that: 7.4) Ks have-been/are HELPING to raise Ps’/Ks’ awareness of PsIMP/KsIMP; 7.5) Ps’/Ks’ war-chest for resisting PsIMP/KsIMP is LARGE and growing larger rapidly; 8) recognized an indicator that a Ps-Ks alliance has reached an advanced stage: parallels/similarities between parts of: 8.1) Deutsche Bank, 8.2) the defunct, violent, politically influential/coercive, worldwide criminal-enterprise of the 1980s known as Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI; from a 1992 U.S. Senate report on BCCI: “largest case of organized crime in history”; from 2021 book American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History: “BCCI had created a blueprint that numerous kleptocrats and international criminals would soon follow”; from 1993 book The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI, co-authored by two journalists who covered BCCI for Time magazine: “BCCI, fueled by petro-dollars, was going to forge the shining new sword of Islam. It would be a terrible Nuclear [my emphasis] Age sword”; from a 2020 article on the website of Foreign Policy magazine: “[BCCI went] so far as to fund leading U.S. presidential campaigns, corrupt the leading voices in at least one American political party, and even grow close to the American president himself”; from 2020 book Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction, by the finance editor of NYT: “To any government official paying attention [in 2017], this was a powerful signal: Investigate Deutsche and risk the [U.S.] president’s wrath”; . . .)
— End of excerpt from said draft —
* More re: “is a MUST,” via a 2022 write-up of mine:
— Re: Ks hiring contract killers often —
Summary (details follow)
Ks need to use violence (e.g., murder).
Ks don’t want “their” violence perpetrated by people with inside-knowledge of the Ks’ kleptocratic/criminal activity.
Re: Ks need to use violence
From 2020 book Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World, by a Financial Times reporter (my emphases):
“[F]or the kleptocrat, ruling by licensing theft rather than seeking consent, money can achieve most of what needs to be done. For everything else, there is violence.”
“[V]iolence was still required. It was to dirty money what the law was to clean—a guarantee that agreements would be honoured.”
Re: Ks don’t want “their” violence perpetrated by people with inside-knowledge . . .
From Kleptopia (my emphases):
Geremeyev had rented a flat in Moscow for the hit squad, then flew out the day after their work was done, alongside the shooter. Putin’s officials had permitted the investigators to indict the hit squad and the missing driver, but refused to allow any charges against Geremeyev. That would have brought the matter too close to the sacred networks of kleptocratic power that stretched between Moscow, Grozny and beyond.
Precedent for Ks “outsourcing” murder to contract killers (CKs)
From Wikipedia:
Murder, Inc. . . . was an organized crime group, active from 1929 to 1941, that acted as the enforcement arm of the Italian-American Mafia, the Jewish Mob, and other closely connected organized crime groups in New York City and elsewhere.
More indicators that Ks outsource to CKs
From Kleptopia:
They formed a new five families, these international kleptocrats: the Nats, the Brits, the Sprooks, the Petros and the Party.
. . . The Party, the Nats, the Brits, the Petros and the Sprooks are like the clans of the Cosa Nostra that came before them. On the surface they are rivals. But ultimately they are engaged in a common endeavour . . .
. . .
From 1993 book The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI, co-authored by two journalists who covered BCCI for Time magazine (my emphases):
From interviews with sources close to BCCI, Time has pieced together a portrait of a clandestine division of the bank called the Black Network, which functions as a global intelligence operation and a mafia-like enforcement squad . . . [T]he 1,500-employee Black Network has used sophisticated spy equipment and techniques, along with bribery, extortion, kidnapping and even, by some accounts, murder.
From a 2021 article on CNN.com titled “Hundreds arrested after police infiltrate secret criminal phone network”:
EncroChat, which offered a secure mobile phone instant messaging service, was a “criminal marketplace” used by 60,000 people worldwide for coordinating the distribution of illicit goods, money laundering and plotting to kill rivals . . .
. . . The crime agency said it had worked with police partners to prevent kidnappings and executions by “successfully mitigating over 200 threats to life.”
From a different 2021 article on CNN.com:
[T]here were other, larger encrypted communication apps which police were working to access.
— End of excerpt from said 2022 write-up —
More re: Deutsche Bank (DB), via said 2022 write-up of mine:
From Dark Towers (my emphases):
“[DB] helped funnel money into countries that were under economic sanctions for pursuing nuclear weapons or participating in genocides.”
“The hundreds of millions of dollars that Deutsche [had] wired to Iranian banks [by 2006] provided vital funding for the sanctioned country to pay for its terrorism. Soon Iraq was being ripped apart by violence. Roadside bombs detonated all over the country, targeting the country’s fragile government and the U.S. military forces that were trying to keep the peace. Much of the violence was the work of a terrorist group, Jaysh al-Mahdi, which had been armed and trained by Hezbollah, which had been bankrolled by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which had been financed by Deutsche.
. . . The sanctions violations weren’t the work of an isolated crew of rogue Deutsche employees. Managers knew. Their bosses knew. American regulators would later find evidence that at least one member of the bank’s vorstand—in other words, one of Deutsche’s most senior executives—knew about and approved of the scheme.”
From a 2020 article in The New Yorker (my emphases):
“Between 2011 and 2015, ten billion dollars left Russia through Deutsche Bank’s mirror trades.
. . . The recently published FinCEN files . . . add some fascinating detail to the mirror-trades affair.
. . . The FinCEN files cover around two trillion dollars’ worth of suspicious transactions reported at major banks between 1999 and 2017. Of that two trillion, more than half—around $1.3 trillion—passed through Deutsche Bank.”
“As we now know, mirror trades were not just suggestive of financial crime. Major criminal organizations, terrorist groups, and drug cartels used them to launder and transfer money, and benefited more generally from this geyser of dirty money.”
“According to the documents . . . nearly fifty million dollars were also funneled through mirror trades to the Khanani network, whose clients include associates of Hezbollah and the Taliban.”
“The FinCEN documents are based on Suspicious Activity Reports—essentially whistle-blowing reports made by banks themselves—filed to the U.S. government. They were leaked to BuzzFeed News, then shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which shared them with news outlets around the world.”
From Dark Towers (my emphases):
“[DB] would soon become enveloped in scandals related to . . . tax evasion, manipulating interest rates, manipulating the prices of precious metals, manipulating the currencies markets, bribing foreign officials[*], accounting fraud, . . . ripping off customers, and ripping off the German, British, and United States governments. (The list went on.)”
. . .
More indicators that DB functions (partly) as a next-gen variant of BCCI are below . . .
— End of excerpt from said 2022 write-up —
* From said 1992 U.S. Senate report on BCCI:
BCCI systematically bribed world leaders and . . . prominent political figures in most of the 73 countries in which BCCI operated.
From The Outlaw Bank (my emphases):
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the BCCI affair in the United States was the failure of the U.S. government and federal law enforcement to move against the outlaw bank. Instead of swift retribution, what took place over more than a decade was a cover-up of major, alarming proportions, often orchestrated from the very highest levels of government.
Re: my work from Fall 2019 to Summer 2022 on subduing T2M
— Summary (details follow) —
During Fall 2019:
I came to believe that it was too late to prevent Ps’ resistance (e.g., via gathering anticipatory intelligence).
My focus shifted to providing Ps with a next-gen variant of the offering that motivated Pablo Escobar et al. to surrender.
Keys to continuous improvement (CI) of said offering: MPS’s planned offerings.
Key to maximizing Ps’ awareness of said CI: a particular update I made to the premise of MPS’s 1.0 startup-comedy.
Again, in late 2021 I recognized that mWCA must incorporate nuclear weapons.
— Re: said offering that motivated Escobar et al. —
From 2019 book Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar:
We watched . . . on TV—the surrender of Pablo Escobar [et al.]. . . . The sprawling “jail” . . . renovated to Escobar’s specifications, so spectacular that it was nicknamed La Catedral [my emphasis].
From 2018 book Mrs. Escobar: My Life With Pablo (my emphases):
I started going up to La Catedral several days a week. And while Pablo was meeting with somebody or playing soccer, I’d take the opportunity to organize, rearrange and mend anything in his room that needed attention, but I also looked through the many letters he’d started receiving. There were messages from women all over the world, many of them with photos showing the senders in various poses, many of them naked, and the common denominator was that they were offering themselves to him in exchange for money. I was even more surprised when I read shocking letters from women recalling their recent intimate encounters with him in great detail and inviting him for an encore whenever he wanted; others wrote flowery missives dreaming of another night of passion in La Catedral.
. . . At La Catedral he returned to his old predilection for beauty queens, who visited in droves . . .
Remember, psychopathy correlates STRONGLY with hypersexuality (i.e., with sex-addiction).
— Re: CI of next-gen La Catedral (NGLC) via MPS’s offerings —
Said CI would require:
ideation (e.g., via CE for people, (CE-for-)AI)
implementation (e.g., via teams formed via a next-gen variant of LinkedIn)
funding (e.g., equity-crowdfunding attracted via startup comedies)
Maximizing the yield from said CI would require:
Ps’ awareness (e.g., via comedies)
convincing Ps that their access to said CI (i.e., their yield from surrendering) wouldn’t be undone by a bait-and-switch
— Re: a key to maximizing Ps’ awareness of said CI would be a particular update I made to the premise of MPS’s 1.0 startup-comedy —
Adapted from a 2022 write-up of mine:
Keywords: for each of us (e.g., non-Ps like me), maximizing the amount of time we’re in a flow state is a key to thriving amid “superstar-biased technological change” (e.g., amid “winner-take-all” markets); often, flow via collaboration—“group flow”—sparks romantic attraction; keeping collaborators happy . . . polyamory . . . ; human society is a type of “complex adaptive system”; CASs generate “order-for-free” (OFF) at “the boundary between order and chaos”; variant of OFF that seems very likely to emerge soon, partly/largely via group flow and MPS: orgies-for-free (O-F-F); women-FRIENDLY almost certainly; re: w-F and “seems very likely”: 1) “new science” re: “women, lust and infidelity”; 2) women are ~60% of recent college grads in many countries (e.g., the U.S.), so MPS has to be w-F; 3) women can invest B-B-BILLION$ via investing (e.g., via equity-crowdfunding) . . .
— Re: MANY orgies (will) result from people adapting to said tech-change (i.e., to an evolutionary selection-pressure that’s intensifying rapidly) —
From 2018 book Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life:
I will offer an analysis of the largest-ever survey of Americans’ sexual fantasies . . .
89 percent [of respondents] reported fantasizing about threesomes, 74 percent about orgies, and 61 percent about gangbangs . . . [T]he majority of women reported having each of these sex fantasies . . .
More than three-quarters of the men and women I surveyed hope to eventually act on their favorite sexual fantasies.
Tell Me’s author has a PhD, is a former lecturer at Harvard and is a Research Fellow at the Kinsey Institute.
From a paper in the August 2017 issue of Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy (my emphases):
Although academic and popular interest in consensual nonmonogamy (CNM) is increasing, little is known about the prevalence of CNM. Using two separate U.S. Census based quota samples of single adults in the United States (Study 1: n = 3,905; Study 2: n = 4,813), the present studies show that more than one in five (21.9% in Study 1; 21.2% in Study 2) participants report engaging in CNM at some point in their lifetime. This proportion remained constant across age, education level, income, religion, region, political affiliation, and race, but varied with gender and sexual orientation. Specifically, men (compared to women) and people who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual (compared to those who identify as heterosexual) were more likely to report previous engagement in CNM.
From a 2020 article on YouGov.com:
A January poll of more than 1,300 US adults finds that about one-third (32%) of US adults say that their ideal relationship is non-monogamous to some degree.
Millennials (43%) are particularly likely to say their ideal relationship is non-monogamous . . .
Title of an April 2022 article in Vogue magazine:
Is Monogamy Over? Inside Love’s Sharing Economy
— Precedent for O-F-F (being women-FRIENDLY), via humans’ closest primate relative —
From 2018 book Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free:
[T]he bonobo, with whom we share nearly 99 percent of our DNA . . .
A 2017 study comparing human, chimp and bonobo muscles confirmed what previous molecular research had suggested: “Bonobo muscles have changed the least [from our common ancestor], which means they are the closest we can get to having a ‘living’ ancestor,” according to the research head of the George Washington University Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology.
. . . [P]erhaps the most remarkable thing about bonobos . . . Basically, they seem to have sex constantly throughout the day, with just about anybody. Meredith Small reports being in a room of three hundred or so primatologists and journalists of some early footage of bonobos in 1991, before much was known about them. Moments after the film began, the room fell utterly silent as the assembled took in the spectacle of these primates having sex more times and in more positions and combinations than most humans in any culture could even imagine.
. . . [B]onobos have sex to diffuse potential tension—when they come upon a cache of food, for example, or a new bonobo troop, having sex is a way to bond and take the stress level down. Parish pointed out that this was happening as we observed them being fed. Once the food was flung down to them, at least one pair of bonobos began to “consort” immediately. Only then did they get down to the business of eating.
Untrue’s author is a woman who has a PhD from Yale and a background in anthropology.
From 2022 book The Bonobo Sisterhood: Revolution through Female Alliance, by “the founding director of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School, where she has taught since 2004”:
[B]onobos, are peaceful, loving, food sharing, freely sexual, and xenophilic, meaning they love strangers, they do not fear them. . . .
. . . [E]volutionarily, bonobos have eliminated male sexual coercion [my emphasis].
— Re: flow(mance) —
From 2021 book The Art of the Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer (my emphases):
Flow may be the biggest neurochemical cocktail of all. The state appears to blend all six of the brain’s major pleasure chemicals and may be one of the few times you get all six at once.
. . . What we can say for sure: all of these neurochemicals help explain why flow tends to show up when the impossible becomes possible. The reason? It’s because of how these neurochemicals impact all three sides of the high-performance triangle: motivation, learning, and creativity.
On the motivation side, all six of these chemicals are reward drugs, making flow one of the most rewarding experiences we can have. This is why researchers call the state “the source code of intrinsic motivation” and why McKinsey discovered that productivity is amplified 500 percent in flow—that’s the power of addictive, pleasure chemistry[*].
From 2014 book The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance:
“[T]here are extraordinarily powerful social bonding neurochemicals at the heart of both flow and group flow: dopamine and norepinephrine, that underpin romantic love . . .”
“In jazz, the group has the ideas, not the individual musicians . . . When performance peaks in groups . . . this isn’t just about individuals in flow—it’s the group entering the state together . . .”
From 1997 book Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration, by eminent scholar Warren Bennis:
Great Groups are sexy places.
. . . [During Apple’s early years, Steve Jobs mandated that] employees share [hotel] rooms when they were at conventions and other professional meetings . . . to limit bed-hopping . . .
From the 2017 article in Wired titled “The Ins and Outs of Silicon Valley’s New Sexual Revolution”:
In Silicon Valley, love’s many splendors often take the form of, well, many lovers.
. . . Some workplaces (coughGooglecough) have quasi-official poly clubs . . .
From 2017 book Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work:
[W]e crossed the country for a trip to the Googleplex. We were there to talk flow states with engineers . . .
[W]e . . . attend[ed] the opening of their new multimillion-dollar mindfulness center . . . Google had realized that when it comes to the highly competitive tech marketplace, helping engineers get into the zone and stay there longer was an essential . . .
We’ve been collaborating with some of the top experience designers, biohackers, and performance specialists to help develop the Flow Dojo . . . a learning lab dedicated to mapping the core building blocks of optimum performance.
In the fall of 2015 we had the opportunity to bring a prototype of the Dojo to Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters and engage in a joint-learning project. For six weeks, a handpicked team of engineers, developers, and managers committed to a flow training program, and then capped that off with two weeks in a beta version of the training center.
From the chapter titled “Group Flow” in 2017 book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:
Patagonia was an early adopter, but soon after, Toyota, Ericsson and Microsoft made flow integral to their culture and strategy.
From the 2018 book by the female journalist who hosts Bloomberg Technology:
[S]ex parties happen so often among the high-end, premier VC and founder crowd that this isn’t a scandal or even really a secret, I’ve been told; it’s a lifestyle choice. This isn’t Prohibition or the McCarthy era, people remind me; it’s Silicon Valley in the twenty-first century. No one has been forced to attend, and they’re not hiding anything, not even if they’re married or in a committed relationship. They’re just being discreet in the real world. Many guests are invited as couples—husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends—because open relationships are the new normal.
. . . I doubt history has ever seen a cohort of women more adventurous or less restrained in exploring sexual boundaries.
* Said addictive chemistry is the (main) reason that flowmance (e.g., polyamory, orgies) is 100…000% NOT rooted in coercion or related power-dynamics; flowmance is an outgrowth of each partner’s desire (need?) to make a flow-generating collaboration as satisfying as possible for the other partner(s).
— Re: the link between professional success and polyamory is unlikely to favor a particular gender —
From Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free:
[A] 2017 study shows that among women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, group sex and threesome experience equaled that of men the same age, and women were nearly twice as likely to have gone to a dungeon, BDSM, swingers’, or sex party.
From 2013 book What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire:
[R]ecent science and women’s voices left me with pointed lessons:
That women’s desire—its inherent range and innate power—is an underestimated and constrained force, even in our times . . .
[T]his force is not, for the most part, sparked or sustained by emotional intimacy and safety . . .
[O]ne of our most comforting assumptions, . . . that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale.
What’s author is a contributing writer for NYT Magazine and the author of five books of nonfiction.
From a 2012 book:
The most patient and thorough research about the hook-up culture shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventure without commitment . . . and where they can enter into temporary relationships that don’t derail their careers.
To put it crudely, now feminist progress is largely dependent on hook-up culture. To a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture . . .
The book’s author is Hanna Rosin, then a national correspondent for The Atlantic.
From What Do Women Want?:
Terri Fisher, a psychologist at Ohio State University . . . asked two hundred female and male undergraduates to complete a questionnaire dealing with masturbation and the use of porn. The subjects were split into groups and wrote their answers under three different conditions: either they were instructed to hand the finished questionnaire to a fellow college student, who waited just beyond an open door and was able to watch the subjects work; or they were given explicit assurances that their answers would be kept anonymous; or they were hooked up to a fake polygraph machine, with bogus electrodes taped to their hands, forearms, and necks.
The male replies were about the same under each of the three conditions, but for the females the circumstances were crucial. Many of the women in the first group—the ones who could well have worried that another student would see their answers—said they’d never masturbated, never checked out anything X-rated. The women who were told they would have strict confidentiality answered yes a lot more. And the women who thought they were wired to a lie detector replied almost identically to the men.
. . . When Fisher employed the same three conditions and asked women how many sexual partners they’d had, subjects in the first group gave answers 70 percent lower than women wearing the phony electrodes. Diligently, she ran this part of the experiment a second time, with three hundred new participants. The women who thought they were being polygraphed not only reported more partners than the rest of the female subjects, they also . . . gave numbers a good deal higher than the men.
From 2011 book Chick Lit and Postfeminism, published by the University of Virginia Press:
“The overwhelming popularity of chick lit . . . can be traced to the social reality of its readership with regard to work . . . [Via chick lit’s] attempts at synthesis of work and love it shows the challenges of straddling both realms.”
“One of chick lit’s contributions as a genre is the production of what we might call a sexual theory of late capitalism . . .”
“The high number of sexual partners the chick lit protagonist experiences parallels the romance’s pattern of the questing hero’s confronting false or impostor versions of his eventual beloved.”
“Though an offshoot of popular romance, chick lit transforms it significantly, virtually jettisoning the figure of the heterosexual [male] hero . . .
Men are not really valued as individuals as much as means to a lifestyle . . .
Even texts that end with marital happiness present a predominantly depressing take on marriage.
. . . Chick lit heroines’ preoccupation with money . . . is normative with recent real-life social science findings: researchers . . . have found that the worst fear for single women . . . is having no money.”
— Re: the for-free in orgies-for- . . . —
Summary (details follow)
Order for free is a proposed law of nature, hypothesized at book length in 1993 by a MacArthur Fellow (i.e., a “genius grant” recipient). Believers in the hypothesis include Nobel-Prize winners.
One type of order—complexity*—results from “networks of adaptive agents” (e.g., networks of people):
being subjected to selection-pressures that are new and/or are intensifying rapidly
adapting to these pressures
Adaptation that yields/increases complexity occurs at the boundary between order and chaos (i.e., in complex adaptive systems, agents are clustered at and around said boundary).
This clustering takes shape “for free” via “self-organized criticality”**.
All told, complexity-for-free is shorthand for ‘complexity via adaptation via clustering-for-free’***.
Orgies-for-free (O-F-F) is a variant of clustering-for-free that will (continue to) enable people to adapt to selection-pressures of said kinds.
* From a 2013 article on ScientificAmerican.com:
[Stephen] Hawking was asked what he thought of the common opinion that the twentieth century was that of biology and the twenty-first century would be that of physics. Hawking replied that in his opinion the twenty-first century would be the “century of complexity” [my emphasis].
Title of a 2005 book published by Harvard Business School Press:
Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics
Title of a 2014 book published by Oxford University Press:
Complexity and the Economy
** From 1996 book How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality:
The system had become “critical”! There were avalanches of all sizes just as there were clusters [my emphasis] of all sizes at the “critical” point for equilibrium phase transitions.
*** From How Nature Works:
Self-organized criticality is so far the only known general mechanism to generate complexity.
— End of adapted excerpt from my 2022 write-up —
— Re: convincing Ps that their access to said CI (i.e., their yield from surrendering) wouldn’t be undone by a bait-and-switch —
Details linked-to below; key acronym: mSND. (!!??)
— Re: in late 2021 I recognized that mWCA must incorporate nuclear weapons —
Summary (details follow)
In late 2021 I read Annihilation From Within, a 2010 book written by a former U.S. undersecretary of defense.
Soon after reading AFW I read the 2020 book by Mary Trump, the clinical psychologist (Ph.D.) who’s Donald Trump’s niece; I learned that WCA must incorporate the specter of Donald Trump being re-elected President.
Re: TrumP
From said 2020 book:
A case could be made that he [Donald Trump] also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy.
From the 2018 article on PsychologyToday.com titled “The Differences Between Psychopaths and Sociopaths”:
Many psychiatrists, forensic psychologists, criminologists, and police officers . . . use the terms sociopath and psychopath interchangeably.
From Mary Trump’s book:
“In addition to teaching graduate psychology, including courses in trauma, psychopathology, and developmental psychology, for several years as an adjunct professor, I provided therapy and psychological testing for patients . . .”
“[Donald Trump’s father] Fred seemed to have no emotional needs at all. In fact, he was a high-functioning sociopath.”
Re: WCA must incorporate TrumP
From Annihilation From Within (my emphases):
[T]he United States, other democracies, and indeed most nations ought to prepare themselves to cope with a new, potentially more overwhelming form of aggression. Nations will have to prevail against an attack that seeks to annihilate their political order from within . . . Within the next half century, perhaps even within a decade or two, a nation might be vanquished—not by a foreign terrorist organization or by the military strength of a foreign power, but by a small group of domestic evildoers ruthlessly using weapons of mass destruction against their own country. . . . After the first nuclear detonation, the aspiring dictator would rely mainly on his legitimate organizations and his popular influence to seize political power by exploiting the chaos, havoc, and psychological shock he had deliberately caused.
From 2021 book Peril, co-authored by Bob Woodward (my emphases):
Former defense secretary William J. Perry had been saying for years that the president has sole control of the use of U.S. nuclear weapons. In an article published in early 2021, Perry said, “Once in office, a president gains the absolute authority to start a nuclear war. Within minutes, Trump can unleash hundreds of atomic bombs, or just one. He does not need a second opinion.”
In particular, my updated WCA hypothesized that Trump’s re-election would result from many Americans making a base-rate error of sort that Brits et al. made during Hitler’s rise.
Re: 2022 updates to my (WC)A-re:-T2M
— Re: PsIMP —
From 2022 book Coercive Brain-Reading in Criminal Justice, published by Cambridge University Press:
“[N]euroimaging data could be very helpful in predicting future dangerousness. For example, Glenn, Focquaert, and Raine expect that it would be possible in the future to identify with 80 per cent certainty that a child or young adult will develop persistent violent behaviour, by either neuroimaging, genetic tests, or other biological examinations.”
“Emerging neurotechnology offers increasingly individualised brain information, enabling researchers to identify mental states and content. When accurate and valid, these brain-reading technologies also provide data that could be useful in criminal legal procedures, such as memory detection[*] with EEG and the prediction of recidivism with fMRI.”
* e.g., memories of past thoughts that are consistent with a dangerous level of psychopathy
From 2022 book Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control:
It didn’t take long for Uyghurs in Urumqi to draw connections between the spreading surveillance, the biometric data collection, and the disappearances. A proliferation of new security gates made it impossible for residents to move around the city without having their ID cards and faces scanned. Some Uyghurs’ cards or faces set off alarms, which led to them being shuffled off to police stations, and from there to the shadowy schools. Reports began to circulate about a system the government had built to categorize Uyghurs according to how “safe” for society they were.
Over time, Tahir started to understand the implications of the visit to the police basement. The government now had a collection of his biometric markers, none of which he could change. With the scan of his face on file, the surveillance cameras could recognize him from any angle. If this new system decided he was a threat to the social order, he wouldn’t have anywhere to hide.
— Re: Trump is dangerous —
From an August 3, 2022 article in NYT:
The broad outlines of the emerging Trump 2025 agenda are sketched in a recent two-part Axios series by Jonathan Swan, “A radical plan for Trump’s second term” and “Trump’s revenge” . . .
. . . On July 22, Swan wrote:
[“]Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system—in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining ‘the swamp.’ This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda. The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually nonexistent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition. These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6-3 Supreme Court.[”]
Swan described the creation of the Schedule F classification, which would eliminate Civil Service protection for top-level government workers as “the centerpiece” of Trump’s plans for his second term in the White House, writing that “sources close to the former president said that he will—as a matter of top priority—go after the national security apparatus, ‘clean house’ in the intelligence community and the State Department, target the ‘woke generals’ at the Defense Department, and remove the top layers of the Justice Department and F.B.I.”
. . . Max Stier, founding president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service—a nonpartisan nonprofit group committed to the revitalization of public service—argued in a phone interview that “the broad contours of the Trump proposal are profound. This is about our democracy. What is at risk is a government made up of professionals committed to the public good.”
To better understand the dangers posed by ending Civil Service protections and merit requirements, Stier suggested envisaging the country under a Trump administration, or a president with a similar program, in which the “I.R.S. agents, the F.B.I. agents and prosecutors were all there on the basis of their loyalty to the president.”
In particular, Trump et al. could be recruiting/training people en route to enacting a variant of the possibility previewed in the above excerpt from Annihilation From Within.
From WashingtonPost.com:
From Google News (August 29, 2022):
— Re: mWCA now incorporates nukes possessed by Russia and China —
From the 2015 article in The New Yorker subtitled partly “How Xi Jinping . . . became China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao”:
In a meeting in March 2013, he [Xi] told the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, “We are similar in character,” . . .
Title of a 2019 article in NYT:
[Xi ordered:] ‘Show Absolutely No Mercy’: Inside China’s Mass Detentions [of Uyghurs]
From an article in the May/June 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs:
[China’s nuclear] arsenal is now on track to nearly quadruple, to 1,000 weapons, by 2030, a number that will put China far above any other nuclear power save Russia and the United States.
If China and Russia aren’t run by Ps, it’s (very) likely that each country will be run by a P soon:
The more repressive an undemocratic regime is, the more P-friendly it has to be as an employer. (For more details, see my long write-ups and the paper in the July 2022 issue of Journal of Criminal Justice titled “Psychopathy and crimes against humanity: A conceptual and empirical examination of human rights violators”; excerpt from the paper: “[T]ests indicated that the mean PCL-R score [i.e., psychopathy rating/level] of men in the junior ranks was significantly lower than that of those in the middle…and senior ranks…All those with the maximum Factor 1 score of 16 were in the senior ranks.”)
PsIMP, so Ps (will) want to gain the/more authority to deploy nukes (Ns).
High-ranking Ps in repressive regimes can gain the authority via assassinating/replacing* dictators-with-Ns who aren’t Ps.
Ps can keep the authority via each P-dictator (PDwNs) choosing a successor who’s a P.
* From 2022 book Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in China, published by Oxford University Press: “When violent groups become too powerful, they may end up usurping state autonomy. The Chinese state’s relationships with violent criminal groups in the late Qing and Republican periods [1901-11 and 1912-49] provide ample evidence to illustrate this point.”
— Re: Ps can be expected to (have) conceive(d) a domino-theory —
From 1998 book Emergence: From Chaos to Order, by “a MacArthur Fellow known as the ‘father of genetic algorithms’”:
Stage-setting is the very essence of winning game play.
— Re: Ps’ domino-theory can be expected to yield a succession of game-of-chicken (GoC) variants —
From 1991 book Dominoes and Bandwagons: Strategic Beliefs and Great Power Competition in the Eurasian Rimland, published by Oxford University Press:
[C]onsequences follow from the inflation of the importance of local disputes caused by the expectation of domino dynamics. First, the adversary can create a crisis at the time and place of its choosing. This is unfortunate, but inevitable[. From 1966 book Arms and Influence, by Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling (i.e., by a “Master Theorist of Nuclear Strategy”)]: “Unlike those sociable games it takes two to play, with chicken it takes two not to play. If you are publicly invited to play chicken and say you would rather not, you have just played.”
From Arms and Influence (my emphases):
Some countries’ leaders play chicken because they have to, some because of its efficacy. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
— Re: each GoC variant would force US+ to choose between default-loss or Cuban-Missile-Crisis-like risk —
From Arms and Influence:
“If one is repeatedly challenged, or expected to be, by an opponent who wishes to impose dominance or to cause one’s allies to abandon him in disgust, the choice is between an appreciable loss and a fairly aggressive response.”
“It may seem paradoxical that with today’s weapons of speedy destruction brinkmanship would be so common . . . [T]he reason why most contests, military or not, will be contests of nerve is simply that brinkmanship is unavoidable and potent. It would be hard to design a war, involving the forces of East and West on any scale, in which the risk of its getting out of control were not . . . commensurate . . . with the other costs and dangers involved.”
— Re: Cuban-Missile-Crisis (CMC) risk —
From 2017 book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, by the Director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs:
At the height of the crisis, which lasted for a tense thirteen days, [President] Kennedy confided to his brother Robert that he believed the chances it would end in nuclear war were “between one-in-three and even.” Nothing historians have discovered since has lengthened those odds.
From 2020 book Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1945–1962, by a Pulitzer Prize recipient:
In a review of Thirteen Days . . . former secretary of state Dean Acheson asserted that war was avoided due to “plain dumb luck.” When I began my research for this book I was certain he was wrong. Now that I am finished I know he was right.
— Re: CMC-like risk via PR could be MUCH riskier —
From a 2022 article in NYT:
Mr. Putin may not know his nuclear red lines for sure. But American fears[*] of Russian nuclear escalation may be dangerous, too[**].
* From 2011 book The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry:
[“]She said, ‘I’ve got a bad personality. I like to hurt people.’ . . . So we went through the [fMRI] tests [i.e., brain scans]. When she was looking at the photographs of the mutilated bodies, the sensors showed that she was getting a kick off of them. Her sexual reward center—it’s a sexual thing—was fired up by blood and death [my emphasis]. It’s subconscious. It happens in milliseconds. She found those things pleasant.”
** From said 2022 NYT article (my emphases):
“Recent advances in short-range missile technology means [sic] that leaders now have as little as a few minutes to decide whether or not to launch, drastically increasing the pressure to launch quickly, widely . . .”
“Both sides know that rapid nuclear strikes could wipe out their military forces . . . even their entire nuclear arsenals . . . This means that both sides face an incentive to launch widely before the other can . . .”
— Re: subduing T2M —
In July I recognized that T2M could be subdued via the Biden administration leveraging mSND ASAP.
— More re: ASAP —
From the May 2022 article on ForeignAffairs.com titled “A Fight Over Taiwan Could Go Nuclear: War-Gaming Reveals How a U.S.-Chinese Conflict Might Escalate”:
A recent war game, conducted by the Center for a New American Security in conjunction with the NBC program “Meet the Press,” demonstrated just how quickly such a conflict could escalate.
. . . [I]n a conflict over Taiwan, China would consider all conventional and nuclear options to be on the table. And the United States is running out of time to strengthen deterrence . . .
From the article in the September/October 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs titled “Time Is Running Out to Defend Taiwan” (my emphases):
Many of the PLA’s new capabilities are now coming online at scale, significantly complicating the U.S. military’s operational challenges. Yet many of the U.S. military’s most promising capabilities to counter China in the event of a conflict over Taiwan will not be ready and fully integrated into the force until the 2030s. This creates a window of vulnerability for Taiwan, most likely between 2024 and 2027, in which Xi may conclude he has the best chance of military success should his preferred methods of political coercion and economic envelopment of Taiwan fail. Indeed, thanks to the PLA’s substantial investments, the U.S. military has reportedly failed to stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in many war games carried out by the Pentagon.
From a survey of 64 experts that was conducted during August/September 2022 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies:
Seeming implication of said responses: China could invade successfully by 2023.
From said article on ForeignAffairs.com:
For one thing, it [i.e., said war game] showed that both countries would face operational incentives to strike military forces on the other’s territory. In the game, such strikes were intended to be calibrated to avoid escalation; both sides tried to walk a fine line by attacking only military targets. But such attacks crossed red lines for both countries, and produced a tit-for-tat cycle of attacks that broadened the scope and intensity of the conflict.
. . . [T]he U.S. team responded to China’s moves by hitting targets in mainland China, and the Chinese team responded to Washington’s strikes by attacking sites in Hawaii.
. . . One particularly alarming finding from the war game is that China found it necessary to threaten to go nuclear from the start in order to ward off outside support for Taiwan. This threat was repeated throughout the game, particularly after mainland China had been attacked.
. . . [T]he war game resulted in Beijing detonating a nuclear weapon [my emphasis] . . .
From the August 2022 article in The Wall Street Journal by the co-authors of 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (one co- is a professor at Johns Hopkins University, the other is at Tufts University):
“[I]n the near-term, we should expect a more dangerous China—one that gambles big . . .
From Danger Zone:
If China were to follow in Russia’s footsteps and expand violently in its region, Eurasia would be engulfed in conflict. The United States would again face the prospect of a two-front war, only this time against nuclear-armed aggressors fighting “back to back” along their shared border. America’s military would be overstretched and, likely, overwhelmed [my emphasis]; America’s alliance system might come under unbearable strain. The postwar international order could collapse as countries across Eurasia scramble to defend themselves and cope with the knock-on effects of major-power war, including economic crises and mass refugee flows. A world already shaken by Russian aggression could be shattered by a Chinese offensive[*].
From 2014 book War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization From Primates to Robots, by a Stanford University historian (my emphases):
[T]he U.S. Strategic Concepts Development Center had run a war game [in 1983] to see how the opening stages of a nuclear exchange might go. They found that no player managed to draw the line at counterforce attacks. In every case, they escalated to countervalue attacks, firing on cities as well as silos. And when that happened, the first few days’ death toll rose to around half a billion, with fallout, starvation, and further fighting killing another half billion in the weeks and months that followed.
. . . Likely casualties from nuclear war in the 1980s: . . . U.S. war game: Bracken 2012 . . .
From 2012 book The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics, by Yale University political scientist Paul Bracken:
The game was called Proud Prophet, and it began on June 20, 1983. This wasn’t any ordinary war game. Schelling’s earlier games in the 1950s and early 1960s had used staffers from think tanks, the Pentagon, and the CIA to play the roles. The president might be played by a think tank analyst, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs might be played by an air force colonel. Schelling wanted to change this, and so Proud Prophet was to use actual decision makers, the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To make it as realistic as possible, actual top-secret U.S. war plans were incorporated into the game. This wasn’t easy. These plans are very tightly held and the military doesn’t like showing them to anyone.
Proud Prophet was the most realistic exercise involving nuclear weapons ever played by the U.S. government during the cold war.
. . . What happened in the game? For one thing, many of the strategic concepts proposed to deal with the Soviet Union were revealed to be either irresponsible or totally incompatible with current U.S. capabilities and immediately thrown out.
. . . American limited nuclear strikes were used in the game.
. . . The result was a catastrophe that made all the wars of the past five hundred years pale in comparison. A half billion human beings were killed in the initial exchanges and at least that many more would have died from radiation and starvation. NATO was gone. So was a good part of Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Major parts of the northern hemisphere would be uninhabitable for decades.
. . . This game went nuclear big time, not because Secretary [of Defense] Weinberger and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs were crazy but because they faithfully implemented the prevailing U.S. strategy, a strategy that few had seriously thought about outside of the confines of a tight little circle of specialists. I have played other games that erupted, and they shared this common feature, too. A small, insulated group of people, convinced that they are right, plows ahead into a crisis they haven’t anticipated or thought about, one that they are completely unprepared to handle. The result is disaster.
If there was ever a reason to do some hard thinking about what we are doing, this is it. To assume that everything will work out, that we shouldn’t be overly pessimistic, and that people will come to their senses has proven incorrect in one field after another. This one is no exception.
From an August 16, 2022 article in The Washington Post:
[N]uclear war could starve 5 billion to death, study says
Some two-thirds of the world could starve to death in the event of a nuclear war . . . according to a Rutgers University-led study published Monday. Nuclear conflict would lead to “catastrophic” disruptions in food supplies, as sun-blocking soot and ash wilt crops around the world, researchers wrote in the peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature Food.
* In early September I emailed top Taiwanese companies et al.
Re: indicators that US+’s (WC)As-re:-autocratic-leaders-with-nukes don’t include the implications of PsIMP
— Re: U.S.’s (WC)A —
From the August 16, 2022 article on WashingtonPost.com titled “Road to war: U.S. struggled to convince allies, and Zelensky, of risk of invasion” (the article is part of a series titled “Russia’s Gamble”):
In a grim actuarial assessment, the [U.S.] analysts concluded that Putin, who was about to turn 69, understood that he was running out of time to cement his legacy as one of Russia’s great leaders—the one who had restored Russian preeminence on the Eurasian continent.
Um, YIKES*.
— Re: U.S. allies’ (WC)As —
Readers of said article can infer that: 1) U.S. analysts had 6+ months to sell their ‘legacy theory’ (i.e., Putin would ‘go big’ in Ukraine) to U.S. allies, 2) 100% of allies who learned of the theory rejected it. S/b, the rejections weren’t for reasons that would be encouraging . . .
From the article (my emphases):
[A] senior [Biden-]administration official said . . . [that t]o many in Western Europe, what the Russians were doing was “all coercive diplomacy, [Putin] was just building up to see what he could get. He’s not going to invade . . . it’s crazy.”
. . . Macron and Merkel had been dealing with Putin for years and found it hard to believe he was so irrational as to launch a calamitous war.
. . . Kuleba and others in the government believed there would be a war, the Ukrainian foreign minister later said. But until the eve of the invasion, “I could not believe that we would face a war of such scale. The only country in the world that was persistently telling us” with such certainty “that there would be missile strikes was the United States of America. . . . Every other country was not sharing this analysis and [instead was] saying, yes, war is possible, but it will be rather a localized conflict in the east of Ukraine.”
“Put yourself in our shoes,” Kuleba said. “You have, on the one hand, the U.S. telling you something completely unimaginable, and everyone else blinking an eye to you and saying this is not what we think is going to happen.”
. . . “If you discover the plans of somebody to attack a country and the plans appear to be completely bonkers, the chances are that you are going to react rationally and consider that it’s so bonkers, it’s not going to happen,” said Heisbourg, the French security expert.
* Re: claims** that Putin’s/Xi’s bellicosity arises (partly) from their desires to enhance their legacies as government officials:
Putin and Xi preside over sprawling organized-crime operations that have-been/are stealing untold billions (trillions?) from their populations (sources: 2016 book China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay, published by Harvard University Press; 2019 book Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy, published by Yale University Press; September/October 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs; etc., etc., etc., . . .).
The populations know*** about the stealing, and said crime-bosses know the populations know; hence the bosses’ MASSIVE expenditures on myriad forms of repression (e.g., violence, “lawful” injustice, next-gen gulags, next-gen concentration camps).
Moreover, the populations know that lack of democracy is itself a form of MASSIVE theft:
From Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China:
By the 1980s, per capita income in the West was nine times greater than in the Soviet bloc.
All told, the claim that Putin and Xi are concerned about said legacies is roughly as credible as the claim that:
Throughout the 1930s, Hitler’s consuming focus was maximizing the likelihood that untold generations of future Jews would sing his praises.
By putting in his 10,000 hours, Hitler was able to recognize that his best bet was to visit upon Jews [drum-roll here] a Holocaust.
** Related, via a scene from David Halberstam’s 1972 book The Best and the Brightest (the scene occurs in The White House, while the Tet offensive is ongoing/raging; an officer in the U.S. military is briefing members of LBJ’s administration):
At one of the briefings of the Wise Men it was Arthur Goldberg . . . who almost single-handedly destroyed the military demand for 205,000 more troops. The briefing began with the military officer saying that the other side had suffered 45,000 deaths during the Tet offensive.
Goldberg then asked what our own killed-to-wounded ratios were.
Seven to one, the officer answered, because we save a lot of men with helicopters.
What, asked Goldberg, was the enemy strength as of February 1, when Tet started?
Between 160,000 and 175,000, the briefer answered.
What is their killed-to-wounded ratio? Goldberg asked.
We use a figure of three and a half to one, the officer said [so 45,000 killed implies 157,500 wounded, 202,500 killed or wounded].
Well, if that’s true, then they have no effective forces left in the field, Goldberg said.
What followed was a long and very devastating silence.
*** At least many in the populations know that the amount of said stealing will always tend toward the maximum amount possible:
From 2012 book The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, by two New York University professors:
“Staying in power, as we now know, requires the support of others. This support is only forthcoming if a leader provides his essentials with more benefits than they might expect to receive under alternative leadership or government. When essential followers expect to be better off under the wing of some political challenger, they desert.”
“There can simultaneously be many different groups trying to organize to overthrow a regime . . .”
From 2016 book Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, Revised Edition, published by Harvard University Press:
[C]orrupt rulers of even the smallest and poorest countries can swiftly become billionaires. Corruption, therefore, actually generates coups because if successful their material rewards can be so very large.
Re: my submissions to U.S.-government agencies don’t seem to have informed said (WC)As of US+
— Re: my 2022 submissions —
From an October 7, 2022 article in NYT (my emphases):
[A]s one senior European diplomat said earlier this week, when the history of this era is written, many will be shocked at how much work was underway to assess the risks of a nuclear detonation—and to think about how to deter it. It is a hard topic to talk about in public for most officials, for fear of inducing public panic or market sell-offs.
— Re: my previous submissions —
Keywords re: one possibility: fear/awareness that Ps are within, resultant paralysis.
Re: Ps within
From a 2018 article on Politico.com:
e.g., via TrumP or Trump-as-useful-idiot or Trump-for-sale . . .
Re: fear . . . resultant paralysis
From a 2020 article in NYT:
[A]nother problem making the German authorities increasingly anxious: infiltration of the very institutions, like the police, that are supposed to be doing the investigating [of Neo-Nazis].
. . . In July the police chief of the western state of Hesse resigned after police computers had been repeatedly accessed for confidential information that was then used by neo-Nazis in death threats. It was in Hesse that a well-known neo-Nazi assassinated a regional politician last summer . . .
From 2018 book The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: How the NSA Failed to Protect America from the 9/11 Attacks:
Kiriakou was bothered by Rodriguez in a way he was not by most others he worked near, and he does not mince words. “You work with so many sociopaths in the agency [i.e., CIA] and recognize them as potentially dangerous, but he’s a psychopath. I really believe that.”
Rodriguez was making an astounding leap up the hierarchy, to lead, among other things, the powerful new program, which they were calling “Renditions, Detentions, and Interrogations,” or RDI. When George Tenet personally made the call to promote Jose Rodriguez to head the counter-terror division, Kiriakou believes it was the DCI acknowledging he understood the nature of his RDI program. “I think Tenet was being advised by [his spies director] James Pavitt. Pavitt knew Rodriguez very well. The message from the seventh floor was,” Kiriakou believes, “‘If we’re really taking the gloves off, then we’re going to put this psychopath in charge.’”
From 2012 book How to Get Away with Murder in America: Drug Lords, Dirty Pols, Obsessed Cops, and the Quiet Man Who Became the CIA’s Master Killer:
[T]he two halves of Prado’s life in the 1990s—murder suspect/stellar CIA officer—made no sense. When I initially searched for the case files of the investigation into Prado—conducted jointly by the FBI and the Miami-Dade Police Department—I discovered they’d disappeared from the MDPD’s records bureau. When I located them elsewhere through a tip from a federal investigator, they were far more extensive than I had expected. There were some three thousand pages, including interviews with eyewitnesses who placed Prado at numerous crimes. I eventually interviewed more than two dozen people involved with the investigation—cops, FBI agents, federal prosecutors, and witnesses—who provided a disturbing portrait of a case abandoned because of CIA intervention, political maneuvering, and possibly corruption. The evidence against Prado was so compelling that one investigator from the case described him as “technically, a serial killer.”
“It was a miscarriage of justice that Prado never faced charges,” says Mike Fisten, the lead homicide investigator on the case. “The CIA fought us tooth and nail, and basically told us to go fuck ourselves.”
Another investigator from the case, who is now a Florida law enforcement official, said, “You can’t indict people like Prado. It doesn’t work that way.”
Later he e-mailed me: “Your target is bad news and dangerous. Be careful.”
When I phoned him, he said, “Forget this story. I dropped Prado’s name on a friend of mine from the CIA and he said, ‘Leave this one alone. You don’t want to fuck with this guy.’”
“What do you think?” I asked him.
“You’re going to get whacked.”
No public official I’d interviewed had ever made such a comment. Yet his warning is in keeping with the amazing story of Ricky Prado and his rise from the criminal underworld into the top echelons of the national-security establishment. It’s a story you’d expect to encounter in the twilight stages of a corrupt dictatorship, but this one takes place mostly in Miami. It centers on Prado’s long relationship with [Cuban drug-kingpin Albert] San Pedro, and on the cop who began pursuing them more than two decades ago and still hopes to put them in prison for murder. In protecting Prado, the CIA arguably allowed a new type of mole—an agent not of a foreign government but of American criminal interests—to penetrate its command.
From the June 2021 article in NYT titled “As Dictators Target Citizens Abroad, Few Safe Spaces Remain”:
Russian . . . poisoning [of] a former spy in . . . Britain, or China’s sweeping persecution of Uyghurs abroad . . .
From a March 2022 press release issued by the U.S. Department of Justice:
Lin, 59, of the PRC [People’s Republic of China], is charged with conspiracy to commit interstate harassment [of an American, in the U.S.] . . . Lin works on behalf of the PRC’s Ministry of State Security. . . Lin explained to the PI [i.e., the private investigator who Lin hired] that Lin was working with other unidentified individuals in the PRC to stop the Victim from being elected to U.S. Congress [i.e., to stop said American]. . . . In December 2021, Lin proposed that the PI also consider physically attacking the Victim to prevent his candidacy. In a voice message to the PI, Lin stated: “. . . [V]iolence would be fine too . . . Car accident, [he] will be completely wrecked [chuckles], right?”
. . . [Lin] also promised [the PI] that “we will have a lot more—more of this [work] in the future . . . Including right now [a] New York State legislator.”
Re: the Biden administration leveraging mSND ASAP via you emailing DTRA (part 1 of 3)
From the June 2022 article on TheAtlantic.com titled “What if Russia Uses Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine?” (my emphases):
In 2019, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) ran extensive war games on how the United States should respond if Russia invades Ukraine and then uses a nuclear weapon there. DTRA is the only Pentagon agency tasked exclusively with countering and deterring weapons of mass destruction. Although the results of those DTRA war games are classified, one of the participants told me, “There were no happy outcomes.” The scenarios for nuclear use were uncannily similar to the ones being considered today. When it comes to nuclear warfare, the participant said, the central message of the 1983 film War Games still applies: “The only winning move is not to play.”
2020 precedents for U.S.-/worldwide-BETTERMENT-via-you-emailing-DTRA
From 2021 bestseller The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, by Michael Lewis:
The only way to get attention for this new tool for disease control, Glass decided, was to write it up in a paper for an academic journal. The scientists at Sandia National Labs worked under the highest security clearance in the federal government, called “Q clearance,” and were prohibited from revealing their work without first seeking approval. The work was his kid’s science fair project, but he was now taking it as seriously as anything he did at Sandia. So he explained the situation to his superiors and wrote up a long paper, which, at length, they allowed him to publish. He sent it to Science and Nature and to other, more obscure journals of medical science. “Every one of them just returned it to me unread because I wasn’t known in their field,” he said. “So then I got really worried.” When asked about himself, which he seldom was, as he spent so much of his time alone in thought, Bob Glass described himself as “an extreme introvert.” It violated his nature to reach out personally to people in the field of communicable disease and seek their help. But he did it anyway. He found the names of professional epidemiologists who claimed to be using computer models to study disease spread and sent them his paper, along with a note. “They wouldn’t even return my emails,” he said. “They just didn’t respond. So then I got pissed. I had this fear: a pandemic will occur, and no one would do anything right. I thought I was dead. I thought we were all dead. Then I remembered the guy at the VA.”
A year and a half earlier, Laura had gone to Washington, DC, to visit her aunt. Over dinner one night, she told her aunt’s boyfriend, an infectious-disease specialist who worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs, about her science fair project. “You should write that up and publish it,” he said with enthusiasm. He said he’d never heard of anything like it. When she returned home, she told her father about the dinner. “I thought, ‘Jeez, this is going to take a lot of work,’” he’d said, but he agreed to turn the science fair project into a serious academic paper on disease control, authored jointly. The VA guy had already had one big effect on their work, Bob Glass thought; maybe he could have another. It troubled him deeply to use his sister’s boyfriend to get attention for a scientific discovery, but he didn’t know anyone else in the federal government in Washington, DC. “You just don’t do this in science,” Glass said. “But I said, I’m going to do something someone my age never does. I’m going to go around the system. I write him an email and attach the paper and ask: ‘Do you know anyone who needs to see this?’”
At that point, he’d spent the better part of six months trying to get the attention of experts in disease control. Inside of six hours, he had a call from Richard Hatchett. “He said, ‘We’re in the White House,’” recalled Bob Glass. “‘When can you come and talk to us?’”
. . . He and Richard and others had spent years creating and selling the ideas that would, if quickly seized upon, prevent a lot of Americans from dying. Those ideas were useful, and yet no one in authority seemed willing to use them. “We were going nuts,” said Carter. Each of the Wolverines went into their contact lists to look for what Carter called “high-value nodes.” People they knew who might influence American policy . . .
The goal was to find at least one state to take the lead and roll out an aggressive response to the virus, introduce the social interventions outlined in the pandemic plan, and create a domino effect. “We had to create an epidemic for an idea,” said Carter. At some point Duane Caneva realized that he had something to add . . . In his two years inside Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, Duane had had various dealings, many acrimonious, with various public officials in states that shared a border with Mexico. One struck him as just the type to grab hold of an entire state and turn it into an example that might lead the nation. “Just got off the phone with Dr. Charity Dean,” Duane wrote . . .
. . . Charity walked them through what had happened back in 1918 and what was happening again, in only slightly different form. She explained how, six weeks earlier, she had arrived at a fairly good estimate of all the important traits of the virus, and she said that once you knew these things about the virus, you could predict its future. She did not tell them that she had spent the previous six weeks in conversations with maybe the world’s greatest redneck epidemiologist [i.e., Carter]. Park and Patil mostly just listened to her and asked questions.
. . . After a couple of hours with Charity, Park and Patil decided that the most useful thing they could do for the state of California was to deliver the contents of her mind onto [Governor] Gavin Newsom’s desk. “Our only job was to make it possible for Charity to talk through a model,” recalled Park. “Our job was to take everything in her brain and get it to the governor.”
. . . Park and Patil presented the model’s output to Governor Newsom’s senior advisers. “When we showed them what the model was saying, it sucked the air out of the room,” said Park. The next day, Governor Newsom issued the country’s first statewide stay-at-home order.
. . . What Charity couldn’t figure out was how, or even if, what she said on the calls found its way into the ears of the decision makers [in the U.S. federal government]—and who those people were. At one point she put the question to James Lawler. “James,” she asked, “who exactly is in charge of this pandemic?” “Nobody,” he replied. “But if you want to know who is sort of in charge, it’s sort of us.”
Re: the Biden administration leveraging mSND ASAP via you emailing DTRA (part 2 of 3)
From 2005 book Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War:
Within days of its receipt the “long telegram” [of February 22, 1946] and Kennan’s other dispatches had been circulated, read, commented upon, and for the most part accepted in Washington as the most plausible explanation of Soviet behavior, past and future.
From 2005 book The Cold War: A New History (my emphases):
Kennan’s “long telegram” [KLT] became the basis for United States strategy toward the Soviet Union throughout the rest of the Cold War . . . What would be needed, as Kennan put it in a published version of his argument the following year, was a “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
From 2011 book George F. Kennan: An American Life:
“[KLT] was the geopolitical equivalent of a medical X-ray, penetrating beneath alarming symptoms to yield at first clarity, then comprehension [of the clarity’s implications] . . .”
“[T]he realities which it [KLT] described were ones that had existed, substantially unchanged, for about a decade [my emphasis] . . .”
“[KLT] set out no fully conceived grand strategy, but it was a start . . .”
“Kennan regarded the ‘long telegram,’ years later, as resembling ‘one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or by the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers . . .’”
“Harriman [U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1943 to January ‘46] found the telegram ‘fairly long, and a little bit slow reading in spots.’ But it did contain what Kennan ‘hadn’t been allowed to say before.’ Harriman shared it with Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, who had long been looking for an analysis of this kind. Forrestal, in turn, had the telegram reproduced and circulated all over Washington, including to Truman himself. As Kennan recalled:
[‘]Six months earlier this message would probably have been received in the Department of State with raised eyebrows and lips pursed in disapproval. . . .[’]
It all showed, Kennan concluded, that the real world was less important than the government’s ‘subjective state of readiness . . . to recognize this or that feature of it.’ Harriman did not find this surprising. ‘That was one of the things,’ he later recalled, ‘that I couldn’t get George to understand—that our timing had to be right.’ It was ‘why I didn’t want a lot of [his] stuff to go in, because I knew it would have gone in the files and died. But this was just the critical time. It hit Washington at just the right moment. . . .’”
From the October 14, 2022 article syndicated by Reuters titled “Is this a drill? Upcoming Russian nuclear exercises a challenge for the West” (my emphases):
With Russia expected to soon carry out large-scale drills of its nuclear forces as Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens to use them, the United States and its allies will be challenged to ensure they can spot the difference between exercises and the real thing.
Russia typically holds major annual nuclear exercises around this time of year, and U.S. and Western officials expect them perhaps in just days. They will likely include the test launch of ballistic missiles, U.S. officials say.
But with Putin having openly threatened to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia in its unraveling invasion of Ukraine, some Western officials are worried Moscow could deliberately try to muddy the waters about its intentions.
From an October 13, 2022 article on Bloomberg.com (my emphases):
Russia has conducted other military drills since its invasion of Ukraine, and they were not a prelude to bigger action against Kyiv.
Still, “if I were going to hide an attack, that’s how I would do it, exercises,” said William Alberque, director of strategy, technology and arms control at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. He noted Russia had previously used exercises to mask preparations for attacks, including in its invasion of Georgia in 2008. In the case of Ukraine, Russia did not attempt to hide its military buildup on the border before it went in.
Moving from exercise to an operation could be fairly swift, making the window to assess and react to any switch very tight, according to a European defense official who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters.
From an October 15, 2022 article on TheAtlantic.com (my emphases):
Through its satellites, other surveillance capabilities, and various forms of on-the-ground intelligence, the U.S. government would probably (not certainly) be able to spot signs of Russian efforts to move tactical nuclear weapons out of storage facilities.
A particular challenge with reading the Kremlin’s tea leaves is that Russia has nearly two dozen “dual use” delivery systems, some already being used in the war in Ukraine, which can carry conventional or nuclear warheads. U.S. intelligence could “assume they have conventional warheads on them, but actually they don’t,” because Putin has “switched them out somewhere and we didn’t detect that,” Kroenig noted. “So it is possible, I guess, that we just start seeing mushroom clouds in Ukraine . . .”
From said Bloomberg article (my emphases):
Meanwhile, around 14 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will take part in “Steadfast Noon” starting Monday and located in the western part of Europe, more than 1,000 km (621 miles) from Russia’s border, according to a NATO official. The exercise, which runs for two weeks, will test a mix of more than 50 fighter, escort and surveillance jets as well as tankers needed for a nuclear mission, but will not use any live bombs.
The drills will involve flights from an air force base in the northeast of Belgium to test procedures related to the dropping of nuclear bombs, Belgian broadcaster VRT NWS reported . . .
More re: memory-detection-via-brain-reading
From 2022 book Coercive Brain-Reading in Criminal Justice, published by Cambridge University Press:
“To date, brain-based CITs [concealed-information tests] have mainly been examined with EEG [i.e., electroencephalogram] and fMRI. Most studies used EEG . . .”
“In Japan, the CIT (applied with a polygraph) has already been used on a regular basis in criminal justice. In the USA, the results of a brain-based recognition test similar to the CIT (‘brain fingerprinting’) have been used in a few criminal procedures as well. Other types of memory detection have been introduced in criminal cases in Italy (Implicit Association Test) and India (Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature Profiling).”
“Using EEG, the CIT measures a specific event-related potential (ERP): P300. This positive electrical voltage in the brain occurs automatically between 300 and 800 milliseconds after observing a stimulus. It increases when the stimulus is significant to the subject. As Rosenfeld writes:
The P300 is a special ERP component that results whenever a meaningful piece of information is rarely presented among a random series of more frequently presented, non-meaningful stimuli often of the same category as the meaningful stimulus. Observing a meaningful stimulus provokes a larger P300-amplitude compared with nonmeaningful stimuli. In general, this indicates that the subject recognises the stimulus.
Re: revenge-SEEKING after World War II
— Re: (the prospect of) being targeted by revenge-seekers was itself often fatal —
Title of a 2019 book:
“Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself”: The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945
— Re: revenge-SEEKING —
From 2019 book Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators, published by Harvard University Press:
When Allied forces broke open the gates of concentration camps in 1945, they discovered not only piles of corpses and dozens of gravely ill inmates but also survivors who were seeking revenge. Many of those who were liberated sought retribution not just against the Germans but against former Jewish functionaries in the camps and ghettos as well. Freed inmates lynched and beat Jews who, as ghetto policemen, had surrendered them and their family members to the Nazis or who, as kapos in concentration camps, had harassed or abused them.
This violence continued outside the liberated camps. To quell the brutality, leaders in the re-emerging Jewish communities in European towns and displaced persons (DP) camps channeled these disputes into honor courts, which were established to resolve ordinary disagreements among members of the community. These courts, presided over by prominent individuals, also examined the moral behavior of functionaries and issued social punishments such as public denunciations and excommunication from the community. In most instances, these judgments succeeded in curbing the violence within the community; they also helped it rebuild its self-identity as a wholesome society, free of impure elements that had contaminated it.
When survivors immigrated to Mandatory Palestine [i.e., pre-state Israel], the same kinds of intra-Jewish clashes that had been seen in Europe erupted in public spaces there. . . . Media commentators and public figures called upon the heads of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine, to alleviate tension by establishing a public committee of socially prominent figures to deliberate these cases and issue social punishments. The leadership chose, however, not to establish such a committee, deeming social penalties insufficiently severe for those accused of cooperating with the Nazi mission to annihilate the Jewish people.
It was only after the establishment of the State of Israel and after a repeated demand from a high-ranking police officer that the Ministry of Justice drafted a bill setting up a system for trying functionaries in criminal court, where they would face their accusers. The Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law, passed by the Knesset in 1950, inaugurated what became known as the kapo trials, which would go on for the next twenty-two years.
From 1969 book Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940:
Of the principal figures in the last act of the drama of the Third Republic before the curtain fell, Pétain and Laval were tried for treason after the war, convicted and sentenced to death. The sentence of the Marshal [Pétain] was commuted by the then Provisional President, General de Gaulle, to life imprisonment on the Island of Yeu, where he died on July 23, 1951, at the age of ninety-six. Laval was executed by a firing squad at the Prison of Fresnes on October 15, 1945. He was sixty-two.
. . . Admiral Darlan, who for a time became the head of government at Vichy under Pétain and pursued a vigorous policy of collaboration with the Germans, was assassinated . . .
From 2019 book Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War:
One evening during the Phoney War [of 1939–40], members of the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department discussed which [British] politicians might be considered “criminally responsible for [the] war and should be hanged on lamp-posts.” As the former journalist and spy Robert Bruce Lockhart recorded, there was consensus as to the leading candidates. Sir John Simon, Foreign Secretary between 1931 and 1935, was first to be placed in the tumbril, followed by Stanley Baldwin and Sir Samuel Hoare. Others to receive capital sentences included “Labour lunatics who wished to attack everyone and voted against rearmament, Beaverbrook (for isolation and ‘no war’ propaganda), Geoffrey Dawson and The Times,” and, of course, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.
Four months later, following the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, a similar conversation took place between three Beaverbrook journalists standing on the roof of the offices of the Evening Standard. Appalled by the defeat—the most portentous in British history—as well as by the circumstances that had led to it, Frank Owen, a former Liberal MP, Peter Howard, a Conservative, and Michael Foot, the future leader of the Labour Party, decided to write a book shaming those men they deemed responsible for the debacle. Completed in just four days and displaying a notable talent for invective, Guilty Men sold, in the words of one of its authors, “like a pornographic classic.” By October, it had been reprinted twenty-two times and by the year’s end had succeeded in pinning the blame for the catastrophe, not just in the minds of contemporaries but for large swaths of posterity . . .”
Re: the Biden administration leveraging mSND ASAP via you emailing DTRA (part 3 of 3)
Details: ike1952yang2020ruscica2024.substack.com/p/nukes-autocracies-stable-deterrence, starting with the section titled “Re: the fit between: 1) the above blueprint for SMND [stable mutual nuclear-deterrence], 2) said PFO [particular funding opportunity] offered by DTRA”.
Re: mSND
Details: ike1952yang2020ruscica2024.substack.com/p/nukes-autocracies-stable-deterrence, starting with the section titled “Re: stable deterrence”.
Excerpt from the section titled “BONUS cause for optimism re: said win-win taking-shape/STRENGTHENING”:
Title of an October 2020 article on ScientificAmerican.com:
Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are About 50–50[*]
This write-up and write-ups of mine that’re linked-to above/below strengthen the case that we’re living in a simulation that’s at least partly a simcom**.
From 1997 book Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee (my emphases):
Comedy contains myriad subgenres as well, each with its own conventions, but one overriding convention unites this mega-genre and distinguishes it from drama: Nobody gets hurt. In Comedy, the audience must feel that no matter how characters bounce off walls, no matter how they scream and writhe under the whips of life, it doesn’t really hurt.
* From the March 2022 article on Wired.com titled “Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation”:
[T]his past January, the Australian technophilosopher David Chalmers published a book called Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, the central argument of which is, yes indeed: We live in a simulation. Or, more accurately, we can’t know, statistically speaking, that we don’t live in a simulation—philosophers being particularly prone to the plausible deniability of a double negative. Chalmers isn’t some rando, either. He’s probably the closest thing to a rock star the field of philosophy has . . .
. . . [H]is new book, despite its terrible title, is far and away the most credible articulation of simulation theory to date, 500 pages of immaculately worked-through philosophical positions and propositions . . .
From a 2016 article in The New Yorker:
Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology event in California. What, a man in the audience asked, did Musk make of the idea that we are living not in the real world, but in an elaborate computer simulation? Musk exhibited a surprising familiarity with this concept. “I’ve had so many simulation discussions it’s crazy,” Musk said. Citing the speed with which video games are improving, he suggested that the development of simulations “indistinguishable from reality” was inevitable. The likelihood that we are living in “base reality,” he concluded, was just “one in billions [my emphasis].”
Musk, it seems, has been persuaded by what philosophers call the “simulation argument,” an idea given its definitive form in a 2003 paper . . .
** From Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy:
Let’s say that a sim sign is a feature that raises the probability that a creature is a sim. . . .
The economist and futurist Robin Hanson has suggested that interestingness is a sim sign. Designers interested in entertainment [my emphasis] or in historical simulation will more often create and sustain interesting . . . sims . . .
From the Amazon.com page for 2019 book The Simulation Hypothesis:
— From the Department of ‘Seems Needless to Say’ —
An ALL-TIME negative-to-positive plot-twist* would be: growing[/imminent] threat of nuclear-annihilation → the emergence of O-F-F.
From Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting:
“Writers and the stories they tell can be usefully divided into three grand categories, according to the emotional charge of their Controlling Idea.
. . .
Idealistic Controlling Ideas
‘Up-ending’ stories expressing the optimism, hopes, and dreams of mankind, a positively charged vision of the human spirit; life as we wish it to be.”
* Specifically, said plot-twist would: 1) yield the climax of a [TRAGIcomic] “setup subplot”, 2) double as the “Inciting Incident” of a “Central Plot” (i.e., of the story of O-F-F).
From Story:
“A setup subplot dramatizes the Central Plot’s exposition so that it’s absorbed in a fluid, indirect manner.”
“[T]he second most difficult scene to write is the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident. We rewrite this scene more than any other. So here are some questions to ask that should help bring it to mind.
What is the worst possible thing that could happen to my protagonist? How could that turn out to be the best possible thing that could happen to him?”
— End of excerpt from ike1952yang2020ruscica2024.substack.com/p/nukes-autocracies-stable-deterrence —
Re: many more details about the above
See my write-ups that: 1) are linked-to above, 2) are linked-to in the linked-to write-ups (i.e., are two degrees of separation from this write-up).
Re: presentation-errors above
From 2012 book APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur—How to Publish a Book, co-authored by Guy Kawasaki, a former chief evangelist at Apple:
Every time I turn in the “final” copy of a book [Kawasaki has (co-)authored twelve books], I believe that it’s perfect. In APE’s case, upward of seventy-five people reviewed the manuscript, and [co-author] Shawn [Welch] and I read it until we were sick of it. Take a wild guess at how many errors our copy editor found. The answer is 1,500. [APE is 410 pages.]
And, of course, I’m preoccupied with . . .