Autocracies-with-nukes* + my innovations** (e.g., Amazon-/Microsoft-/VC-praised; subsequent disruptive) + you emailing*** the U.S.’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency + ...**** = nuclear deterrence***** that’ll: 1) be stable initially, 2) grow more stable over time
* e.g., Russia, China
** All of my innovations (INs) are previewed below. Re: said praise: Links are in the next section.
*** The email-address is associated with a particular funding-opportunity (PFO) offered by DTRA. My planned submission re: PFO is adapted/expanded-on below (the adaptation reflects DTRA’s limits****** re: submission-length). Re: “you emailing”: Details are in the second-to-last section below (e.g., text you can copy-paste).
**** e.g., my tenure since 2016 as an/the-world’s-most accidental threat-analyst; details below
***** From Google News (August 17, 2022):
****** maximum number of pages, mandatory size of page-margins and font, etc.
* for INs that: 1) I developed from 1992 to 2005, 2) are complemented by my INs from 2005-‘22
Brief summaryof the THREAT posed by ‘autocracies-with-nukes+ see-below’ (full summary (FS) follows; below FS are: 1) more details, 2) links to long write-ups of mine)
There are STRONG indicators that: 1) a large and growing number of Ps know they’re imperiled (PsIMP), 2) they’re resisting (PR), 3) PR’s war chest is very large and growing larger rapidly, 4) PR either includes autocratic-leaders-with-nukes (e.g., Putin, Xi Jinping) or it will soon, 5) absent my work being leveraged: 5.1) 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, 5.2) 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**.
* Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Xi’s management*** of China’s economy are consistent with a domino-theory that seeks (partly) to impact democratic electionss.t. in the coming years it’ll be (MUCH) easier for PR to stockpile nukes, (personalized) bioweapons, etc. (e.g., impact via inflation; CNBC.com (May 2022): “It’s not just Russia…China has—under the radar—…taken actions in three areas that are exacerbating inflation worldwide…”).
** 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].”
*** George Soros (May 2022): “With the disruption [by Xi] of [China’s (roles within global)] supply chains, global inflation is liable to turn into global depression[/stagflation].”; “For Shanghai [population: 28M] alone, the highway logistics index has dropped to 17% of its year-earlier level…these numbers point to a near-collapse of domestic commercial shipping.”
(Added on August 27, 2022: Recent reporting from The Washington Post shows that, re: Putin’s motives for invading Ukraine, my threat-analysis has much more explanatory power than other analyses.)
Full summary (expanded on August 26, 2022)
Via researching a risk re: my planned company, I read said book in 2015. During 2015-‘21, I: 1) read said Nature article; 2) inferred that said indefinite-detention might be possible years before 2034; 3) learned from a 2016 article on PsychologyToday.com that “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]”; 4) learned from a ‘12 article in FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin that “[t]oday’s corporate psychopath may be highly educated—several with Ph.D., M.D., and J.D. degrees have been studied…”; 5) inferred it’s very likely that a growing number of Ps are aware that PsIMP; 6) confirmed that, as a rule*, groups that perceive themselves to be imperiled RESIST; 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 anEpic Trail of Destruction, by the finance editor of The New York Times: “To any government official paying attention [in 2017], this was a powerful signal:Investigate Deutsche and risk the [U.S.] president’s wrath”; 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.’”); 9) posited a possibility-re:-Ps’/Ks’-resistance that centers on: 9.1) a P gaining the authority to deploy nuclear weapons, 9.2) the gain being a result of many non-Ps making a variant of the “category error” that many Brits et al. made during Hitler’s rise:
From 2008 book The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, by Columbia University (CU) 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.”
Added here on August 26, 2022 (excerpted from said possibility-re:-Ps’/Ks’-resistance):
From the 2020 book by Mary Trump, the clinical psychologist (Ph.D.) who’s Donald Trump’s niece: “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.”
From 2010 book Annihilation From Within, by a former U.S. undersecretary of defense (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.’”
Added here on August 26, 2022 (not excerpted from said possibility-re:-Ps’/Ks’-resistance):
From an August 3, 2022 article in The New York Times:
[“]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 2019 book The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime, by two CU psychiatrists: “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.”
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 The New York Times: [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).
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.”
Each PDwNs is/would-be very likely to: 1) have many P-children (PCs; e.g., have via leveraging the sciences of human-reproduction** (e.g., genetics) to engineer genius-PCs), 2) protect (almost all) PCs’ identities (e.g., from being known by non-Ps). Implication of 1-2: Each terminal-diagnosis of a PDwNs is/would-be very likely to motivate risk-taking*** in service of PCs/PR.
Absent Ps accepting the offer that I propose/preview below, said risk-taking can be expected to be consistent with a variant of the U.S.’s Cold War domino-theory. Elements of the variant (i.e., of each associated game-of-chicken):
Gain control of (part of) a democratic country (e.g., gain covertly****, after destabilizing).
En route to taking over more/all of the country or to taking over (part of) an adjacent/nearby democracy: 1) conscript part of the invaded population (precedent: Russia conscripting Ukrainians from the Donbas region), 2) gain more leverage over non-Ps (e.g., over conscripts) via the rest of the invaded population serving as de facto hostages (precedent, via 2019 book Hitler: A Global Biography: “[A] leading New York Jewish lawyer, Maxie Steuer, visited Berlin in the spring or early summer of 1933 bringing an offer from major figures of the American Jewish community…to finance the departure of all German Jews, not excepting those who had recently immigrated from eastern Europe….To Hanfstaengl’s astonishment, Hitler rejected the proposal, reminding him that he wanted to keep the Jews as hostages.”).*****
Install a P as dictator of the taken-over (part of the) country.
* KEY link to visit, especially if you’re not in the habit of thinking about national-security. Re: “thinking . . .” (my emphases):
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.’”
From a 2022 op-ed in The New York Times, co-authored by two former members of the U.S. National Security Council staff: “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.”
*** Precedent, via 2021 book Hitler’s Fatal Miscalculation: Why Germany Declared War on the United States, published by Cambridge University Press: “Hitler lived in particular dread of cancer and in October 1937 and August 1939 spoke with astonishing candour [sic] to a small circle about the need to implement his expansionist agenda in the very near future.”
**** Each such effort would be, in effect, a challenge to US+, because Ps would assume US+’s HYPERvigilance re: detecting the efforts. (From 1968 book Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Robert F. Kennedy: “President Kennedy called and asked me to come to the White House. He said only that we were facing great trouble. Shortly afterward, in his office, he told me that a U-2 had just finished a photographic mission and that the Intelligence Community had become convinced that Russia was placing missiles and atomic weapons in Cuba. That was the beginning of the Cuban missile crisis…”)
***** Re: these tactics—conscripting-as-(partial)-victories-permit and (de facto) hostage-taking—have a looong history, via 2004 book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (my emphases):
“Nowhere did Mongol ingenuity show itself more clearly than in their ability to transform the Jurched’s greatest asset, their large population, into their greatest liability.”
“The Mongols eagerly rewarded engineers who defected to them and, after each battle, carefully selected engineers from among the captives and impressed them into Mongol service.”
“People without occupations were collected to help in the attack on the next city by carrying loads, digging fortifications, serving as human shields, being pushed into moats as fill, or otherwise giving their lives in the Mongol war effort.”
“After executing the soldiers, the Mongol officers sent clerks to divide the civilian population by profession. . . . These workers would be put to use by the Mongols, who themselves practiced no crafts other than war, herding, and hunting. Their growing empire needed skilled workers in almost every service imaginable . . .”
“Genghis Khan innovated on an ancient political practice of hostage taking.”
— Re: Ps can be expected to (have) conceive(d) a domino-theory —
— Re: Ps’ domino-theory can be expected to yield a succession of game-of-chicken 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: “Some countries’ leaders play chicken because they have to, some because of its efficacy. ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’”
* e.g., via a healthy PDwNs being replaced (temporarily) by a terminally-ill P
— More re: each 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.”
From Arms and Influence: “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.”
— Re: CMC-like risk via PR could be MUCH riskier —
From a 2022 article in The New York Times (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…”; “[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 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…”; “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…”
From 2014 book War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization From Primates to Robots, by a Stanford U. 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.”
— End of said adaptation of my planned submission to DTRA re: PFO (MPSrPFO) —
From the Department of ‘Right on Cue, Sadly/Bleeply’ (this section—completed on July 13, 2022—is the first significant departure from MPSrPFO; an update re: this section is below, as are other entries from said department)
From Google News (July 12, 2022):
From a July 11, 2022 article on NBCnewyork.com (my highlight):
From Google News (July 13, 2022; my highlights):
Twitter was/is abuzz with speculation, predictably.
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.”
“[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 . . .”
“[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 2016-‘22 I submitted (updated) THREAT-analyses to government agencies; details below.
From the Departments of ‘Better Safe Than Sorry’ and ‘Fast, Cheap, Good—Pick Any Two’ (section begun on July 13, 2022)
The rest of this write-up comprises four parts, completed as quickly as I could make part-2 seem passably coherent/free-of-presentation-errors:
the next four sections
1.0 details* re: (my blueprint for achieving) stable nuclear deterrence (details provided in multiple sections)
details re: the fit between said blueprint (BP) and said PFO offered by DTRA
details re: you emailing DTRA
* 2.0+ details will be posted online ASAP. To receive email-alerts re: 2.0+, subscribe to my mailing-list. I don’t have a finished write-up of BP because BP was conceived in early July 2022, after I’d completed the most recent draft of MPSrPFO. 1.0 details include said “links to long write-ups of mine,” along with additional excerpts from MPSrPFO.
From the Department of ‘Did I Write This Article?’
From the July 19, 2022 article on ForeignAffairs.com titled “What If the War in Ukraine Spins Out of Control?” (my emphases):
[An] escalatory cycle resembling the Cuban missile crisis could expand into a regional or world war.
. . . Western countries cannot deliver Putin from his temptations to enlarge the conflict. . . .
There is no silver bullet for avoiding a wider war. Talks, negotiations, and diplomacy will not do the trick. Putin can be restrained only by the application of force, and the application of force is never without risks. The first steptoward a good long-term policy is to recognize the novelty of this moment: a major war likely to last for years, festering at the heart of an international system drawing closer to anarchy.
. . . [T]he war in Ukraine will constantly turn up new, uncertain, disturbing, and frightening contingencies. The world will have to learn to live with it. The Cuban missile crisis lasted for 13 days. The crisis generated by the war in Ukraine will last for a long time to come.
From the Department of ‘Right on Cue, Sadly/Bleeply’ (begun July 26, 2022)
From a July 25, 2022 article in The New York Times:
Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, who is close to President Biden and deals with the administration often on issues involving Taiwan, said “there is a lot of attention being paid” to what lessons China, its military and Mr. Xi might be learning from events in Ukraine.
“And one school of thought is that the lesson is ‘go early and go strong’ before there is time to strengthen Taiwan’s defenses,” Mr. Coons said in an interview on Sunday. “And we may be heading to an earlier confrontation—more a squeeze than an invasion—than we thought.”[*]
From the May 20, 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 said July 25, 2022 article in The New York Times:
“The risk is that the visit by Speaker Pelosi will be perceived, including by Xi himself, as a humiliation of his leadership and that he takes some rash action to show his strength,” . . . said [“Susan L. Shirk, a former senior State Department official and author of ‘Overreach,’ an upcoming book on Chinese politics”]. “What’s more, in view of his recent misjudgments that have harmed the country and sparked internal controversy—the draconian approach to Covid management, aligning with Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the crackdown on private business—we can’t count on his prudence in his military response to Pelosi’s trip. Better to postpone rather than risk war.”
. . . American officials say it is unlikely that the Chinese government has decided what operation, if any, to carry out. But it is a subject being regularly simulated and war-gamed in Washington.
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 report by the RAND Corporation titled “The Return of Great Power War: Scenarios of Systemic Conflict Between the United States and China” (my emphases):
The war would probably inflict severe damage on the world’s economy and possibly lead to a global economic depression. The populations of both major belligerents and in many parts of the world could experience considerable unrest and instability owing to the stresses of war. A desire to bring the war to a close and restore economic growth and social stability could lead to the experimental use of even more destructive escalatory options, including tactical nuclear weapons, cyberattacks on civilian infrastructure, and attacks on space infrastructure. Failure to control escalation could result in truly nightmare scenarios of annihilation and breakdown.
From an August 16, 2022 article in TheWashington 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.
[I]t’s far from certain that the United States could hold off China.
I have been involved in dozens of war games and tabletop exercises to see how a conflict would turn out. Simply put, the United States is outgunned. At the very least, a confrontation with China would be an enormous drain on the U.S. military without any assured outcome that America could repel all of China’s forces. Mr. Biden’s comments may be aimed at deterring a Chinese attack, and hopefully they will.
After a decades-long military modernization, China has the world’s largest navy and the United States could throw far fewer ships into a Taiwan conflict. China’s missile force is also thought to be capable of targeting ships at sea to neutralize the main U.S. tool of power projection, aircraft carriers.
If China’s leaders decide they need to recover Taiwan and are convinced that the United States would respond, they maysee no other option but a pre-emptive strike on U.S. forces in the region. Chinese missiles could take out key American bases in Japan, and U.S. aircraft carriers could face Chinese “carrier killer” missiles. In this scenario, superior U.S. training and experience would matter little.
The need to project power across vast distances also makes U.S. forces vulnerable to China’s electronic and cyberwarfare capability. China could disrupt networks like the United States Transportation Command, which moves American assets around and is considered vulnerable to cyberattacks. China may also have the ability to damage satellites and disrupt communications, navigation, targeting, intelligence-gathering, or command and control. Operating from home turf, China could use more-secure systems like fiber-optic cables for its own networks.
Under a best-case battle scenario for the United States, China would attack only Taiwan and refrain from hitting American forces to avoid drawing in U.S. military might. This would allow the United States time to bring its forces into the region, move others to safety and pick where and when it engages with China.
If the United States did ever intervene, it would need regional allies to provide runways, ports and supply depots. But those partners may be eager to stay out of the crossfire.
I’m not the only one who’s worried. A 2018 congressionally mandated assessment warned that America could face a “decisive military defeat” in a war over Taiwan, citing China’s increasingly advanced capabilities and myriad U.S. logistical difficulties. Several top former U.S. defense officials have reached similar conclusions.
“[I]n the near-term, we should expect a more dangerous China—one that gambles big . . .
. . . U.S. military power is about to dip. The mid-2020s will witness the mass retirement of aging U.S. cruisers, guided-missile submarines and long-range bombers, leaving the U.S. military with hundreds fewer missile launchers—the key metric of modern naval firepower—floating and flying around East Asia. While Washington, Tokyo and Taipei are all undertaking much-needed defense programs focused on denying Chinese hegemony in Asia, those efforts won’t bear fruit until the early 2030s. Mr. Xi has repeatedly said that the task of ‘liberating’ Taiwan cannot be passed down from generation to generation. In the mid- and late 2020s, he’ll have his best chance to accomplish that mission.”
“The U.S. is running out of time to prevent a cataclysmic war in the Western Pacific.”
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 the Department of ‘Did I Write This Article?’
Imagine, for a moment, that Nancy Pelosi, en route to Taiwan, is confronted by Chinese fighter jets in the skies near the island. Taiwan scrambles its own planes to her defense. A game of chicken ensues. Who blinks first?
This scenario would be a Cuban-missile-crisis moment . . .
From the Department of ‘Is It Possible That NYC’s July 11th PSA Was/Is a Variant of a Partial/Limited Hangout?’
From a July 23, 2022 article in The Washington Post:
While it is true that some military leaders are concerned about the [Pelosi] trip, they are not the only ones. Over the past several weeks [my emphasis], officials including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, Indo-Pacific Command chief Adm. John C. Aquilino, NSC Asia czar Kurt Campbell and others have briefed Pelosi or her staff about the intelligence assessments of the risks and the military planning that would be necessary if she goes.
From a 2021 article titled “Here Comes the Limited Hangout”:
As that scandal [Watergate] started to unfold, Nixon’s White House aides discussed strategies to deal with the looming disaster. They talked about a standard spy service ploy called a “limited hangout.” When it’s no longer possible to sustain a phony cover story, dangle some partial truths in public . . .
“The goal is stable mutual deterrence [SMND] . . .”
“The basis for the strategy of stable conflict was that there was a shared interest in avoiding mutual destruction. This required coming to terms with a nuclear stalemate and accepting that this was preferable to both sides striving for victory.”
Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. It is based on the theory of rational deterrence, which holds that the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy’s use of those same weapons. The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which, once armed, neither side has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm.
In terms of stability, the goal should not be to restore an order that has disappeared . . . but to look for forms of stability that are relevant in this century.
Re: maximizing the stability of MND between Ps and non-Ps
Two keys: 1) conceiving an/the ideal 1.0 win-win (i1WW) between the groups, 2) identifying reasons that the win-win would STRENGTHEN over time.
Frank, I just spent about an hour surfing around your website with a bit of amazement. I run a [now defunct] little company [funded entirely by Amazon]...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, 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.
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.
Inputs to mp-i1WW (part 2)
From the 1999 article in Harvard Business Review titled “Creating Breakthroughs at 3M” (my emphases):
[A] new method for developing breakthrough products: the lead-user process. The process—which makes the generation of breakthrough strategies, products, and services systematic—is based on two major findings by innovation researchers. First, the researchers found that many commercially important products are initially thought of and even prototyped by users rather than manufacturers. (See the chart “Users as Innovators.”) Second, they discovered that such products tend to be developed by “lead users”—companies, organizations, or individuals that are well ahead of market trends and have needs that go far beyond those of the average user. Those discoveries transformed the difficult job of creating breakthroughs from scratch into a systematic task of identifying lead users—companies or people that have already developed elements of commercially attractive breakthroughs—and learning from them.
“[The] control variable, ‘frequency of unmet needs,’ refers to the degree to which a respondent felt that he or she had needs not satisfied by products on the market, and so would have a reason to innovate. The association of this variable with innovation likelihood has been documented in numerous studies of innovation by lead users [my emphasis] (e.g., Morrison, Roberts, and Midgely 2004; Franke and von Hippel 2003). As can be seen in row four of table 9.1, this control variable was significantly associated with both successful completion of the idea generation phase and completion of the prototype phase too.”
“Free innovation involves innovations developed and given away by consumers as a ‘free good,’ with resulting improvements in social welfare. It is an inherently simple, transaction-free, grassroots innovation process engaged in by tens of millions of people. As we will see, free innovation has very important economic impacts but, from the perspective of participants, it is fundamentally not about money.”
As a result of the regularity, increased volume, and greater speed of the flows of goods and materials made possible by the new transportation and communication systems, new and improved processes of production developed that for the first time in history enjoyed substantial economies of scale and scope. Large manufacturing works applying the new technologies could produce at lower unit costs than could the smaller works. In order to benefit from the cost advantages of these new, high-volume technologies of production, entrepreneurs had to make three sets of interrelated investments.
The first was an investment in production facilities large enough to exploit a technology’s potential economies of scale or scope. The second was an investment in a national and international marketing and distributing network, so that the volume of sales might keep pace with the new volume of production. Finally, to benefit fully from these two kinds of investment the entrepreneurs also had to invest in management: they had to recruit and train managers not only to administer the enlarged facilities and increased personnel in both production and distribution, but also to monitor and coordinate those two basic functional activities and to plan and allocate resources for future production and distribution. It was this three-pronged investment in production, distribution, and management that brought the modern industrial enterprise into being.
From the 2013 article in American Scientist magazine titled “The Math of Segregation”:
In the 1960s [Nobel laureate Thomas] Schelling devised a simple model in which a mixed group of people spontaneously segregates . . .
Whites and blacks may not mind each other’s presence, may even prefer integration, but may nevertheless wish to avoid minority status. Except for a mixture at exactly 50:50, no mixture will then be self-sustaining because there is none without a minority, and if the minority evacuates, complete segregation occurs. If both blacks and whites can tolerate minority status but place a limit on how small the minority is—for example, a 25 percent minority—initial mixtures ranging from 25 percent to 75 percent will survive but initial mixtures more extreme than that will lose their minority members and become all of one color.
We watched it all on TV—the surrender of Pablo Escobar.
None of us saw it coming, and we all took it badly—a crushing blow to our efforts to bring him to justice. It was June 19, 1991, and I was in Medellín, but Toft immediately called me back to Bogotá after the surrender was announced. We all watched the events live at the embassy in stunned silence: the yellow government chopper landing near the ranch-style prison that included a pool, jacuzzi, soccer field, and what we assumed were luxurious accommodations close to Escobar’s hometown of Envigado in the mountains outside Medellín. The sprawling “jail” was housed in the former Rehabilitation Centre for Drug Addicts, renovated to Escobar’s specifications, so spectacular that it was nicknamed La Catedral.
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. They 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 . . .
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 reached $58 billion (in 2018 dollars). The other leaders of Los Extraditables were wealthy drug-traffickers.
“[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.”
“Some 10 million people were directly affected by these population transfers—that is, they were resettled consequent to an international agreement . . .”
“Making Minorities History examines the various attempts made by European states over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, under the umbrella of international law and in the name of international peace and reconciliation, to rid the Continent of its ethnographic misfits and problem populations. It is principally a study of the concept of ‘population transfer’—the idea that, in order to construct stable and homogeneous nation states and a peaceful international order out of them, national minorities could be relocated en masse in an orderly way with minimal economic and political disruption as long as there was sufficient planning, bureaucratic oversight, and international support in place. Tracing the rise and fall of the concept from its emergence in the late 1890s through its 1940s zenith and its geopolitical and historiographical afterlife during the Cold War, the following chapters explore the historical context and intellectual milieu in which population transfer developed from being initially regarded as a marginal idea propagated by a handful of political fantasists and extreme nationalists into an acceptable and a ‘progressive’ instrument of state policy, as amenable to bourgeois democracies and Nobel Peace Prize winners as it was . . .
. . . [B]eyond the late 1940s the notion of population transfer enjoyed a political afterlife of sorts as an option of last resort in instances where intractable communal or ethnic conflict became internationalized.”
Re: mp-i1WW
— Summary (details follow) —
All Ps reside in Russia, non-Ps exit Russia.
P-Russians (hereafter Ps) leverage/indulge their hypersexuality to design/prototype lead-user innovations (LUIs).
Non-Ps: 1) implement the designs, leveraging: 1.1) economies of scope and scale that Ps can’t generate, 1.2) (said) complements to these economies; 2) sell the implementations to Ps (i.e., FEED Ps’ sex-addiction).
Ps pay for the implementations with money gained from exporting oil, etc.
Non-Ps: 1) sell complements of the implementations to Ps; 2) consume (modified versions of) the implementations.
Re: all Ps reside in Russia
Among autocracies, Russia has by far the largest number of nuclear weapons (i.e., the most nuclear-deterrence capability).
Because Russia can gain A LOT of money by exporting natural resources, Ps’ work could center largely/mostly* on designing LUIs.
Putin . . .
Per-capita GDP in Russia would almost double (the population would decrease from ~114M to ~78M) . . .
Once the wheat seeds are tossed on the ground, you are pretty much done until harvest time. And if the wheat tends to itself, then farmers can do other things for 90 percent of the year.
Re: non-Ps sell complements of said LUI-implementations to Ps
P-Russians could be expected to, ASAP: 1) optimize their gender-ratio* by leveraging the sciences of human reproduction, 2) make their population as physically attractive as possible (e.g., by leveraging cosmetic surgery and said science).
In the near-/medium-term, Ps might want to consort with sex workers who aren’t Ps (SWnPs).
A/the key to this consorting being, for SWnPs, as safe, comfortable and lucrative as possible: a partnership between my planned company (MPC) and: 1) the Biden administration (keywords: emergency/war powers), 2) parts of the U.S. government (e.g., DTRA) that can help to maximize the safety of SWnPs.
Psychopaths exist across cultures and ethnic groups and at an estimated frequency of about 1 percent of the population for males and 0.3–0.7 percent for females.
A key objective of MPC will be providing the most popular online-market for customized-education and artificial intelligence (e.g., CE-for-AI, which will be to the AI economy what oil has been to the industrial economy*).
Said market for CE & AI is the 3.0 market in MPC’s business model.
The 2.0 markets are prediction markets (which’ll be complemented by other forecasting competitions that MPC will provide/administer).
The 1.0 market is said next-gen variant of LinkedIn (NGLI).
Establishing said Amazon variant requires providing the most popular variants of said forecasting competitions, which starts with popularizing said 1.0 market.
A key to said 1.0-popularizing is providing particular disruptive innovations.
All told, MPC’s markets-and-complements will be foundational for establishing a next-gen wealth-creation ecosystem* (NGWCE).
As a special case, the ecosystem could be LEVERAGED to continuously improve the safety/comfort of SWnPs during said consorting.
“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., MPC] 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 a simple matter 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 notLorena 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…”
Re: my focus on comedy and novel-writing doesn’t preclude my THREAT-analysis from being TOP-quality
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 The New York Times 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.
Red Alert . . . exceeds in thoughtfulness any nonfiction available on how war might start [my emphasis].
From a 2022 op-ed in The New York Times, 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.”
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.
OSG’s 1.0 implementation of the site/app will feature:
a market for the advertisement spaces on solo-blogger blogs (e.g., portfolio blogs) [1]
a virtual currency (cash transactions will be supported also)
Prices in OSG’s virtual currency (OVC) will contain/reflect only truthful peer ratings of work samples. Ratings of this kind are a top predictor of work performance, according to a much-cited meta-analysis of 85 years of personnel-selection research [(6387 citations as of July 17, 2022)] [2]. . . . Other top predictors of work performance are often unavailable (e.g., test results). So OVC prices will be ideal for ranking people within individual job/skill categories. These rankings will make it much easier for Jane Q. Upwardly-Mobile to identify others who (can) best complement her (ditto for John Q.).
[1] An ad space sold for OVC will typically be on the homepage (i.e., front page) of the seller’s blog; key reasons: 1) sales of spaces for OVC will occur via weekly auctions, 2) per week, each blogger will be able to sell only one ad space for OVC (which space is sold can vary weekly). Keywords re: said auctions: sealed-bid, second-price; combinatorial auctions via fractional allocations, so each week’s auction will provide a “spot” market and an “up-front” market; traders will make these markets “information-efficient.”
The latest sensation that’s grabbing the attention of netizens is BlogShares . . . an online stock market in which you get to speculate on the future of your favourite blogs. . . . Every player gets 500 BlogShare dollars upon signup.
[T]he influencer marketing industry, which has skyrocketed from a roughly $1.7 billion market in 2016 to an estimated $13.8 billion in 2021, according to a study by the Influencer Marketing Hub. It’s expected to grow to $16.4 billion this year, which reflects the amount of money companies are spending on the increasingly popular marketing channel.
Influencers are seen as key tastemakers, who can help companies unlock access to a specific audience demographic, and they often have rabid and engaged fan bases. Many social media stars are now commanding lucrative endorsement deals from major brands.
Re: MPC’s prediction markets and other forecasting competitions(i.e., 2.0 offerings of MPC)
From thebiggestshort.substack.com/p/chapter-1:
Re: a high and/or fast-rising ad rate in OVC will be achievable partly via OSG’s prediction markets (OPMs)
High prices/rankings in OPMs will serve as PageRank-like pointers to high-quality blogs. Details are in a section below. Keywords: OPM prices denominated in OVC.
. . . What will new AI technologies make so cheap? Prediction.
. . . When prediction is cheap, there will be more prediction and more complements to prediction [my emphasis].
— End of excerpt from thebiggestshort.substack.com/p/chapter-1 —
In particular, these 2.0 offerings could HELP MPC and the U.S. government fill-in-the-details re: mp-i1WW (e.g., details re: managing the existential risks that’ll persist in the absence of (an) mp-i1WW (variant); IMPORTANTLY, “details re: managing . . .” could HELP motivate Ps and non-Ps to pursue a win-win).
From MPSrPFO (again, written before I conceived mp-i1WW):
Re: DTRA funding the initial leveraging of my work
Research objective (RO) #1: Total Prevent-War ASAP, or FC-only [i.e., only MPC-as-front-company*] at the outset? RO #2: action plan for “1.0” (e.g., for funding/protecting (FP) the large # of people (LNP) required to provide, at scale: 1) said INs (SIs), 2) many/most/KEY (future) complements of SIs, 3) threat-analyses/strategies/tactics re: protecting LNP, 4+)…; DTRA-fitting precedent for FP: The Manhattan Project, which employed ~125k people during its second year (1944)). Re: methodology: Facebook via proto/private variant (PPV) at Harvard; SIs via PPVs for achieving said ROs; KEY 1.0 complements: forecasting-competitions/-tools/-techniques/-innovations (e.g., FCTTIs proposed in 2022 paper “Improving Judgments of Existential Risk: Better Forecasts, Questions, Explanations, Policies [← emphasis isn’t in MPSrPFO],” co-authored by past recipients of IARPA funding (e.g., UPenn researcher who co-authored 2015 book Superforecasting, published by Random House); excerpts from said paper: “Consider one of the gloomiest scenarios that futurists have conjured for the 21st century, one blending several suspected drivers of X-risk (Ord, 2020). Humanity doesn’t realize it yet, but we are stumbling along a path toward a Great Power war in the 2030s, a biological-and-nuclear conflagration that, amplified by automated weapons systems, will kill at least 600 million, roughly 10x the death toll of World War II.”; “Even if cumulative information gains prove modest and are confined to a 1-to-5 year planning horizon, the expected value of lives saved would be massive.”; “[A forecasting-]tournament organizer with large incentives to maximize accuracy will use prizes to encourage a high level of individual effort from forecasters.”).
Cost estimate
All available funds, in part because: 1) if PR [Ps’ resistance] is prevented/subdued via efforts that include a partnership between MPC, DTRA and the Biden admin, then MPC would emerge as the Amazon.com/Standard Oil of customized-education and artificial intelligence; 2) ownership-stakes in MPC could be provided to forecasters, via a formula for rewarding performance; 3) the more funding MPC receives, the more said formula would motivate forecasters.
* From MPSrPFO:
— Keys to preventing the worst-case re: ‘nukes + autocracies + PsIMP’ —
* From the March 2022 article in Foreign Affairs titled “The World’s Most Dangerous Man”: “[The U.S.] must do what it can to reinforce any [fear/FEAR of Putin’s re:] reluctance by the Russian military[, FSB, Kremlin-insiders et al.] to cross the nuclear threshold.”
Re: as a special case, said NGWCE could be LEVERAGED to continuously improve the safety/comfort of SWnPs re: said consorting
Continuous improvement of a next-gen variant of [Escobar’s] La Catedral . . . 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)
. . .
— End of excerpt —
Re: said NGWCE
From thebiggestshort.substack.com/p/chapter-1:
From Nobel laureate economist Paul Romer’s entry on Economic Growth in the 2008 edition of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:
[T]he country that takes the lead in the twenty-first century will be the one that implements an innovation that more effectively supports the production of new ideas in the private sector [e.g., AI-produced ideas].
. . .
From said entry of Romer’s on Economic Growth:
Perhaps the most important ideas of all are meta-ideas—ideas about how to support the production and transmission of other ideas. . . . North Americans invented the modern research university . . .
In the 1990s, Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google . . . discovered that once a technology becomes digital—that is, once it can be programmed in the ones and zeros of computer code—it hops on the back of Moore’s Law and begins accelerating exponentially.
. . . The technologies now accelerating at this rate include some of the most potent innovations we have yet dreamed up: quantum computers, artificial intelligence . . .
. . . [F]ormerly independent waves of exponentially accelerating technology are beginning to converge . . . For example, the speed of drug development is accelerating, not only because biotechnology is progressing at an exponential rate, but because artificial intelligence . . .
— End of excerpt from thebiggestshort.substack.com/p/chapter-1 —
Re: MPC would HELP to make said consorting as lucrative for SWnPs as possible
In particular, HELP via:
producing comedies that provide SWnPs with valuable showcasing
leveraging delegated emergency/war powers (EWPs) to $$$upplement Ps’ expenditures
200 pages of the first startup-comedy**, a serial “non-fiction novel” that: . . . , 4) can spin-off the startup-camedy (SC) that I’ve researched and partly designed (CNBC.com: “CamGirls: The New Porn Superstars”; the SC’s working-title: Sexcerpts and the City; SatC would: 4.1) showcase . . . (guest-)camgirls,...; 4.2) spin-off SCs that’d raise ECF…
From thebiggestshort.substack.com/p/chapter-1:
— Re: the value of the showcasing —
From thebiggestshort.substack.com/p/chapter-1:
Re: AEs [adult entertainers] who cam raising equity-crowdfunding
[O]f all the models in the sample who have earned $10,000 in any month camming, there was not one who had been camming for less than a year. Alicia once earned $54,000 in one month and averages $11,000 a month; she has been camming for seven years. Quinn, who one month earned $50,000 and averages $5,000 a month, has cammed for five years. Tanya once earned $25,000 in a month and usually makes $10,000 a month; she has worked as a cam model for over eight years . . . [E]xtremely high wages occurred but disproportionately went to full-time cam models who have worked in the industry for long periods of time and who labored incredibly hard to build popular brands.
From a 2015 article on CNBC.com titled “Porn stars’ best business advice: Diversify”:
Today’s big stars aren’t just performers. They’re also directors, sex educators and lecturers. They oversee huge social media empires on Twitter, Instagram and their own websites. And they license their names to adult novelty companies in return for a portion of the sales of their branded sex toys.
From Camming:
— End of excerpt from thebiggestshort.substack.com/p/chapter-1 —
— Re: leveraging delegated EWPs to $$$upplement Ps’ expenditures on SWnPs —
MPC would leverage:
said NGWCE to identify* the non-Ps around the world whose profiteering-from-HUGE-fraud (e.g., from (enabling) kleptocracy) is partly/largely responsible for the existential threat of Ps-with-nukes not being prevented
EWPs to freeze/seize** the assets of these profiteers
* Precedent for bloggers attracting MANY readers via reporting-on/contributing-to the IDing:
From 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.”
. . . 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 [my emphasis] 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 . . .
** From a March 2022 press release issued by the U.S. Department of Justice (my emphases):
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland Announces Launch of Task Force KleptoCapture
. . . “Oligarchs be warned: we will use every tool to freeze and seize your criminal proceeds.”
The moment the president declares a “national emergency”—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—more than 100 special provisions become available to him . . . For instance, the president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to . . . freeze Americans’ bank accounts [my emphasis].
Re: if the number of SWnPs isn’t sufficient to satisfy Ps’ near-/medium-term needs
Details below.
Re: the “ick factor”-re:-involving-SWnPs (part 1 of 2)
“The landing on Kyushu was the planned invasion of Japan in November of 1945, an invasion expected to cost the lives of more than half a million American soldiers . . .”
“I asked the military historian Tami Biddle, who teaches at the Army War College, what she tells her students about the spring and summer of 1945, and she recounted a personal story. ‘My grandmother Sadie Davis had two children, two sons fighting in World War II. One had been in the Pacific theater for a long time; one had been fighting in the European theater but didn’t have enough points to leave the war prior to what would have been the landing on Kyushu.’
. . . [Biddle] continued, ‘He would have been in that landinghad it not been for the Americans being exceedingly brutal with the Navy and the blockade, with the air war against Japanese cities, and then, ultimately, with atomic weapons . . .
For her, I’m sure that she was quite prepared for us to be brutal in that moment, because she wanted her sons to come home.’”
— Re: planned invasions imposing COSTS on non-Ps in the absence of said win-win between non-Ps and Ps —
From the 2002 article in U.K. newspaper The Guardian titled “‘They raped every German female from eight to 80’”:
Antony Beevor, author of the acclaimed new book about the fall of Berlin, on a massive war crime committed by the victorious Red Army.
“Red Army soldiers don’t believe in ‘individual liaisons’ with German women,” wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. “Nine, ten, twelve men at a time—they rape them on a collective basis.”
Re: non-Ps consume (modified) implementations of Ps’ LUIs
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 MPC: 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 MPC has to be w-F; 3) women can invest B-B-BILLION$ (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) —
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.
[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.
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 . . .
[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.
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[*].
“[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 . . .”
. . . [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 . . .
[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.
Patagonia was an early adopter, but soon after, Toyota, Ericsson and Microsoft made flow integral to their culture and strategy.
* 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).
[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.
[T]he one element that truly sets flow apart: the creative, problem-solving nature of the state. Because flow requires action—otherwise action and awareness cannot merge—there’s decision-making involved at every step.
. . . [F]low doesn’t just happen anywhere. . . . the state shows up most reliably when we’re using our skills to the utmost. It requires challenge.
Re: flow isn’t a state of mind that novices can experience
All told, complexity-for-free is shorthand for ‘complexity via adaptation via clustering-for-free’ [3].
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.
[1] 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:
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.
[3] From How Nature Works:
Self-organized criticality is so far the only known general mechanism to generate complexity.
. . .
Re: O-F-F would be women-FRIENDLY almost certainly
— Summary (details below) —
The link between professional success and polyamory is unlikely to favor a particular gender.
A key to popularizing Adver-ties is facilitating the build-out of complements.
OSG’s facilitating will center on advancing “hyper-specialization,” for reasons explained by complexity science (i.e., this facilitating will center on speeding the complexification of the business ecosystem that centers on Adver-ties).
Some/many of the hyper-specialists in said ecosystem can be expected to make flowmantic orgies women-FRIENDLY (i.e., can be expected to compete to make said orgies entirely civilized, increasingly artful, etc.). This can be expected in LARGE part because:
Amazon of CE . . . via popularizing Adver-ties . . .
Women can invest B-B-BILLION$ via crowd-investing (e.g., via equity-crowdfunding).
So Amazon of CE via making Adver-ties POPULAR with women . . .
OSG could employ/REWARD specialists who make flowmantic orgies women-FRIENDLY (e.g., employ via raising equity-crowdfunding from MANY women).
— 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.
Untrue’s author is a woman who has a PhD from Yale and a background in anthropology.
[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 The New York Times Magazine and the author of five books of nonfiction.
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 . . .
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.
“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.”
. . .
— Precedent re: specialists who’d make O-F-F women-FRIENDLY —
— End of excerpt from ike1952yang2020ruscica2024.substack.com/p/preventing-worst-case —
Precedent for O-F-F via said blueprint for SMND (i.e., via mp-i1WW)
From War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization From Primates to Robots (my emphases):
Pygmy chimpanzees (to avoid confusion, scientists usually call them bonobos; journalists often call them hippie chimps) and regular chimpanzees (usually just called chimpanzees, without any qualifying adjective) have almost identical DNA, having diverged from their shared ancestor just 1.3 million years ago (Figure 6.5). Even more surprisingly, the two kinds of apes are genetically equidistant from humans. If chimpanzee wars suggest that humans might be natural-born killers, bonobo orgies suggest we could equally well be natural-born lovers.
. . . DNA analysis suggests that as recently (on an evolutionary scale) as 2 million years ago, the now-extinct proto-Pans [i.e., said shared ancestor] roamed over a central African rain forest the size of the continental United States. But nothing lasts forever, and as the climate fluctuated over the following half-million years, a great inland lake in East Africa burst its banks. The water flowed north and west toward the Atlantic, turning into what is now the mighty, mile-wide Congo River (Figure 6.7). Impassable to apes, this split proto-Pan’s kingdom in two. By 1.3 million years ago, apes north of the Congo were evolving into chimpanzees and those south of the river into bonobos.
Re: i1WW would STRENGTHEN over time
— Summary (details in the section after next) —
The number of Ps’ LUIs per time-period (e.g., per year) would increase/INCREASE, as would the average quality of the LUIs, because Ps would:
WANT the increases (e.g., because of (the prospect of) O-F-F)
leverage the sciences of human-reproduction to become, as a group, much/MUCH smarter
Non-Ps: 1) will ADVANCE human-longevity science, and medical research more generally, 2) would sell to Ps the offerings that result from the ADVANCES.
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**.
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 . . .
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 . . .
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 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 “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?”
Re: Ps leveraging the sciences of human-reproduction to become smarter
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.
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.
There is a market for sperm and egg donors today, but the information available to consumers about donors is limited. This industry will flourish as individual genotyping costs go down and knowledge of genomics grows.
Potential consumers will be able to evaluate not only whether or not a gamete provider has brown eyes, is tall or short, has a professional degree, but also whether the donor has the appropriate MHC genotypes, long or short androgen receptors, the desired dopamine receptor types, and so on. The list of criteria and the sophistication of algorithms matching consumers and donors will grow at an increasing rate in the next decade.
The essay was written by Henry Harpending, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah.
[S]ometime in the next twenty to forty years . . . [m]ost of those people [with any health insurance] will no longer use sexual intercourse to conceive their children.
. . . [N]ew techniques, drawn from several different areas of modern bioscience research, will combine to make this future not just possible but cheap and easy.
Re: non-Ps will ADVANCE human-longevity science, and medical research more generally
[Google’s] Ray Kurzweil and longevity expert Aubrey de Grey have begun talking about “longevity escape velocity,” or the idea that soon, science will be able to extend our lives by a year for every year we live. In other words, once across this threshold, we’ll literally be staying one step ahead of death. Kurzweil thinks this threshold is about twelve years away, while de Grey puts it thirty years out.
“It is not at all extravagant to expect that someday living to 150 will be standard. And if the Information Theory of Aging is sound, there may be no upward limit; we could potentially reset the epigenome in perpetuity.”
“How long will it be before we are able to reset our epigenome, either with molecules we ingest or by genetically modifying our bodies, as my student now does in mice? How long until we can destroy senescent cells, either by drugs or outright vaccination? How long until we can replace parts of organs, grow entire ones in genetically altered farm animals, or create them in a 3D printer? A couple of decades, perhaps. Maybe three. One or all of those innovations is coming well within the ever-increasing lifespans of most of us, though. And when that happens, how many more years will we get? The maximum potential could be centuries . . .”
“If I am wrong, it might be that I was too conservative in my predictions.”
“When technologies go exponential, even experts can be blindsided.”
“We often fail to acknowledge that knowledge is multiplicative and technologies are synergistic.”
The ultra-rich are investing in companies trying to reverse aging. Is it going to work?
[From the August 3, 2022 article on Nature.com* titled “Pig organs partially revived in dead animals—researchers are stunned”:
Researchers have restored [1] circulation and cellular activity in the vital organs of pigs, such as the heart and brain, one hour after the animals died. The research challenges the idea that cardiac death—which occurs when blood circulation and oxygenation stops—is irreversible, and raises ethical questions about the definition of death. The work follows 2019 [2] experiments by the same scientists in which they revived the disembodied brains of pigs four hours after the animals died, calling into question the idea that brain death is final.
The latest experiments are “stunning”, says Nita Farahany, a neuroethicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Although this study is preliminary, she says it suggests that some perceived limitations of the human body might be overcome in time.
Insilico calls its AI drug discovery tool Generative Tensorial Reinforcement Learning (GENTRL). Once trained, the algorithm starts to “imagine” new molecules with the desired properties. This process not only vastly reduces the time it takes to discover molecular candidates and enables the creation of molecules that do not yet exist in molecular libraries; it does so with a much higher degree of success than conventional trial and error, and at a much lower cost. Insilico has used its AI to find better alternatives to existing medications as well: it developed a precision medicine system called Inclinico that predicts which patients are most likely to respond to a particular drug. It provides this capability as a service to pharmaceutical companies but also ranks the drugs by their predicted ability to target the mother of all diseases—aging itself.
Insilico is not the only biotech company using AI to discover, create, and optimize pharmaceutical treatments. There are already more than two hundred start-ups and multiple big-pharma companies pursuing an ambitious set of goals that will soon completely disrupt the pharmaceutical industry.
“AI for Longevity is the ‘smart money’ sector of the industry, and can achieve enormous results and accelerated timelines in terms of progress in actual, tangible, real-world Healthy Human Longevity, even with comparatively tiny levels of financing compared to other sectors.”
“The intensive application of AI to all stages of Longevity and Preventive Medicine R&D has the potential to rapidly accelerate the clinical translation of both validated and experimental diagnostics, prognostics and therapeutics, to empower patients to become the CEOs of their own health through continuous AI-driven monitoring of minor fluctuations in biomarkers . . .”
“AI will come into prominence as the critical and fundamental driver of progress in the industry . . .”
LS-BigCos will benefit also from OSG’s offerings a/o clones.
—End of excerpt from ike1952yang2020ruscica2024.substack.com/p/preventing-worst-case—
Re: if the number of SWnPs isn’t sufficient to satisfy Ps’ near-/medium-term needs
MPC would leverage:
again, said NGWCE to identify the non-Ps around the world whose profiteering-from-HUGE-fraud (e.g., from (enabling) kleptocracy) is partly/largely responsible for the existential threat of Ps-with-nukes not being prevented
EWPs to conscript 18+-y.o. sons/daughters of these profiteers
Re: the “ick factor”-re:-involving-SWnPs (part 2 of 2; e.g., SWnPs via conscription)
As was previewed in part 1: Absent a win-win between Ps and non-Ps, the ick-factor-re:-Ps-vs.-non-Ps would be MUCH worse. More details:
Re: JE [Jeffrey Epstein]’s trafficking* of underage girls (UGs) might’ve HELPED Ps weaponize LS
From [2021 book] This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race[, by a cybersecurity reporter for TheNew York Times](my emphases):
“[H]ackers seized on the coronavirus to take aim at our hospitals, our vaccinelabs, and the federal agencies leading the Covid-19 response.”
“The pandemic is global, but the response has been anything but. Allies and adversaries alike are resorting to cyberespionage to glean whatever they can about each country’s containment, treatments, and response.”
“[H]ackers were . . . pilfering intellectual property from every major company in the Fortune 500, American research laboratories . . .”
~30% of male Aspies have “pedophilic sexual fantasies of female children” (source: 2017 article on the website of the U.S. government’s National Center for Biotechnology Information).
So JE’s trafficking might’ve enabled Ps to coerce TOP hackers.
Police say Epstein was sexually abusing girls as young as 13, many of them from poor families and broken homes. And, according to lawsuits filed by victims, Epstein loaned them out to his famous friends.
Re: JE-coerced-TOP-hackers is consistent with [(parts of)] DB [Deutsche Bank] functioning as a next-gen variant of BCCI
See below; keywords: BCCI trafficked UGs en route to blackmailing.
Another indicator re: said alliance weaponizing LS
In December 2011, Jeffrey Epstein brought together some of the most brilliant scientific minds in the nation on his remote island . . .
It was, essentially, a Global Doomsday conference.
The attendees were instructed to identify some of the greatest threats to the earth, contemplating such phenomena as bioterrorism . . .
. . .
Re: JE fit the profile of top BCCI execs (part 1 of 2)
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):
[G]irls as young as twelve (and later, even younger) were dressed in silk harem pants and procured by BCCI officers for their clients. In the middle 1970s the man in charge of inspecting the girls was Zafar Iqbal, who would later become the chief executive officer of BCCI.
. . . [T]he wife of a Pakistani doctor, was in charge of rounding up the girls and bringing them to Karachi to be outfitted in proper clothes before being presented to the princely clients. Often she would shepherd more than fifty girls at a time through a department store, shopping for jewelry and dresses. This practice was so successful—far more effective than giving away microwave ovens or toasters—that the bank would spend as much as $100,000 on such an evening’s entertainment. According to the Senate testimony of Nazir Chinoy, Madame Rahim would also “interview girls, women, and take them . . . to Abu Dhabi for a dancing show or arrange some singing shows.” Throughout the Middle East, “dancing girls” and “singing girls” are euphemisms for prostitutes; Chinoy chose to be tactful before the TV cameras.
. . . According to [BCCI employee] Masri, the protocol officers . . . were also responsible . . . for luring businessmen, military officers, and politicians into Abedi’s web of intrigue through a combination of favors, money, blackmail, and intimidation.
. . .
Re: Americans would BENEFIT from USG [U.S. government] blackmailing top hackers who live in undemocratic countries
From This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends:
“One day in 2008, almost simultaneously, five of the NSA’s most elite hackers turned in their security badges and pulled out of the Fort’s parking lot for the last time. Inside the agency, these men had been revered as ‘the Maryland Five,’ and time and time again, they had proved indispensable. They were each members of a premier TAO access team that hacked into the systems nobody else could.”
“The United States doesn’t forcibly conscript talented hackers at Google and MIT to moonlight as nation-state attackers like the Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, and Chinese do.”
“My source had gotten his hands on an urgent DHS-FBI alert [issued in 2017]. It was meant solely for the utilities, the water suppliers, the nuclear plants. The bureaucrats were trying to bury it on a holiday weekend. And as soon as I got eyes on it, I could see why: the Russians were inside our nuclear plants.”
“‘Cyber is a tailor-made instrument of power for them,’ former NSA deputy director Chris Inglis said after North Korea’s role in the WannaCry attacks became clear. ‘There’s a low cost of entry, it’s largely asymmetrical, there’s some degree of anonymity and stealth in its use. It can hold large swaths of nation-state infrastructure and private-sector infrastructure at risk. It’s a source of income.’ In fact, Inglis said, ‘You could argue that they have one of the most successful cyber programs on the planet, not because it’s technically sophisticated, but because it has achieved all their aims at very low cost.’”
“I came to survey the rubble at ground zero for the most devastating cyberattack the world had ever seen. The world was still reeling from the fallout of a Russian cyberattack on Ukraine that less than two years earlier had shut down government agencies, railways, ATMs, gas stations, the postal service, even the radiation monitors at the old Chernobyl nuclear site, before the code seeped out of Ukraine and haphazardly zigzagged its way around the globe. Having escaped, it paralyzed factories in the far reaches of Tasmania, destroyed vaccines at one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, infiltrated computers at FedEx, and brought the world’s biggest shipping conglomerate to a halt, all in a matter of minutes.
By the time I visited Kyiv in 2019, the tally of damages from that single Russian attack exceeded $10 billion, and estimates were still climbing. Shipping and railway systems had still not regained full capacity. All over Ukraine, people were still trying to find packages that had been lost when the shipment tracking systems went down. They were still owed pension checks that had been held up in the attack. The records of who was owed what had been obliterated.”
President Biden inherited a lot of intractable problems, but perhaps none is as disruptive as the cyber war between the United States and Russia simmering largely under the radar. Last March, with the coronavirus spreading uncontrollably across the United States, Russian cyber soldiers released their own contagion by sabotaging a tiny piece of computer code buried in a popular piece of software called “SolarWinds.” The hidden virus spread to 18,000 government and private computer networks by way of one of those software updates we all take for granted. The attack was unprecedented in audacity and scope. Russian spies went rummaging through the digital files of the U.S. departments of Justice, State, Treasury, Energy, and Commerce and for nine months had unfettered access to top-level communications, court documents, even nuclear secrets. And by all accounts, it’s still going on.
From This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends:
“In 2018, terrorist attacks cost the global economy $33 billion, a decrease of thirty-eight percent from the previous year. That same year, a study by RAND Corporation from more than 550 sources—the most comprehensive data analysis of its kind—concluded global losses from cyberattacks were likely on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars. And that was the conservative estimate. Individual data sets predicted annual cyber losses of more than two trillion dollars.”
“Gosler began with two experiments. That year, 1985, he convinced his bosses at Sandia to sponsor a study. They called it Chaperon, and its premise was simple: Could anyone design a truly secure computer application? And could someone subvert that application with a malicious implant that could not be detected, even through a detailed forensic investigation? In other words, a zero-day [i.e., “a software or hardware flaw for which there is no existing patch. They got their name because, as with Patient Zero in an epidemic, when a zero-day flaw is discovered, software and hardware companies have had zero days to come up with a defense”].
Sandia divided its top technical brass into bad guys and good guys: the subverters and the evaluators. The former would plant vulnerabilities in a computer application. The latter would have to find them.
Gosler still spent most of his evenings away from work breaking hardware and software for the fun of it. But professionally, he had only ever played the role of evaluator. Now, he relished the chance to play subverter. He designed two implants and was sure the evaluators would discover his first subversion.
‘I was immersed in a fantasy world back then,’ Gosler told me. When he wasn’t breaking software, he was playing the 1980s computer game Zork, popular with some of the techies he worked with. For his first trick, he inserted a few familiar lines from the Zork game into the security application’s code. The Zork text effectively fooled Sandia’s application into revealing secret variables that could be used by an attacker to take over the application—and any data the application secured. Gosler was sure his colleagues would pick up on it quickly.
For his second subversion, Gosler inserted a vulnerability that he and others would later only describe as a ‘groundbreaking technical achievement.’
The evaluators never did find Gosler’s two implants. Even Gosler’s Zork subversion proved maddeningly difficult to track down. Sandia’s evaluators still describe the study as one of the most frustrating experiments of their career. They spent months looking for his implants before they finally threw up their hands and demanded that he tell them what he had done.
It took Gosler three eight-hour briefings, pacing in front of a whiteboard covered in notation, which he attacked in bursts, to painstakingly explain his implant. His peers nodded along, but clearly they were baffled.
Initially Gosler thought the second implant could be useful as a Sandia training exercise, but seeing employees’ frustration, his bosses rejected the idea outright. They worried that the exercise would only compel new recruits to quit.
Instead, his bosses decided to start over and put together a new study: Chaperon 2. This time, they chose someone other than Gosler to lead the subversion. Some one hundred Sandia engineers spent weeks and months hunting for the implant. While others came close, only one—Gosler—discovered the subversion and presented it in a detailed hours-long briefing.
. . . Rick Proto and Robert Morris Sr., the respective chiefs of research and science at the NSA’s National Computer Security Center, thought Gosler could teach their analysts a thing or two.
At their first meeting [in 1987], Gosler asked Morris Sr. the question that had been troubling him for some time now. ‘How complex can software be for you to have total knowledge of what it could do?’
. . . Morris Sr. told Gosler that, off the top of his head, he would have ‘100 percent confidence’ in an application that contained 10,000 lines of code or less, and zero confidence in an application that contained more than 100,000 lines of code. Gosler took that as his cue to share with Morris Sr. the more complicated of the subversion tactics he had developed for Sandia’s Chaperon 1 study. Turns out it was an application with fewer than 3,000 lines of code.
Morris Sr. invited an elite NSA squad of PhDs, cryptographers, and electrical engineers to take a look. Not one discovered Gosler’s implant, nor could any replicate the subversion once Gosler pointed them to it.”
[T]he “10X” coder . . . describes a programmer who is provably better, multiple times so, than the average code monkey.
. . . Bill Gates once said, “. . . a great writer of software code is worth ten thousand times the price of an average software writer.”
. . . When I ask venture capitalists and founders whether 10Xers really exist, many immediately say: Oh yes. Hell yes. . . . “I think it’s probably 1000X,” . . . Marc Andreessen . . . co-founder of Netscape . . . tells me.
— End of excerpt from https://ike1952yang2020ruscica2024.substack.com/p/threat-to-many-or-most-people —
Re: the fit between: 1) the above blueprint for SMND, 2) said PFO offered by DTRA
The PFO: Broad Agency Announcement DTRA-BAA HDTRA1-22-S-0004 (hereafter BAA), issued by DTRA’s Strategic Integration Directorate, Strategic Trends and Effects Department, Strategic Trends Division.
From BAA:
“[Title of “thrust-area #2”:] WMD-Relevant Research Studies to Characterize the Future Battlespace (5 to 10 Years from Present)”
“Each study—whether regionally or functionally-oriented—should specify actions the United States can take [my emphasis], including potentially in cooperation with allies and partners, to address the challenge, threat, or issue.”
“Priority will be given to studies that focus on China or Russia. China is the primary priority while Russia is the secondary priority.”
“DTRA SI-STT will not consider any studies that do not include a clear focus on WMD issues/topics.”
From the June 20, 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 agencytasked exclusively with countering and deterringweapons 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.”
Re: DTRA isn’t likely find my proposal for achieving SMND (too) strange
What was distinctive about Cold War rationality was the expansion of the domain of rationality at the expense of that of reason, asserting its claims in the loftiest realms of political decision making and scientific method—and sometimes not only in competition with but in downright opposition to reason, reasonableness, and common sense.
“[T]he idea became widespread that the Cold War between the two superpowers was a game in the technical sense of game theory, and in which the problem of how to choose rationally in this situation became perhaps the central problem of the age.”
“[L]ed to the discovery of a number of . . . paradoxes.”
“Schelling argued that ‘the power to constrain an adversary may depend on the power to bind oneself.’ The greatest strength a bargainer may possess was actually a certain kind of weakness . . . [Schelling’s] essay therefore explored the concrete details of how this paradox might work itself out in the practical details of economic bargaining and foreign policy alike.”
“While only the induction argument is ‘logically correct,’ ‘nevertheless the deterrence theory is much more convincing,’ and in general, based on his experience, while ‘mathematically trained persons recognize the logical validity of the induction argument . . . they refuse to accept it as a guide to practical behavior.’
Not long after Selten published his account of the paradox . . .”
“However, in non-zero-sum games such as PD [i.e., Prisoner’s Dilemma*], a simple maximizing conception of ‘rationality’ became paradoxical: as Rapoport asked, ‘Can we accept the definition of rationality (based on “doing the best for one self”) which leads to a result which definitely is not the best that each player can do for himself?’ By exhibiting such contradictions and paradoxes, game theory might open the door to the identification of new norms of rationality that pertained to the players as a group rather than to the players as individuals.”
[* “The Prisoner’s Dilemma game—initially dramatized by the mathematicians as a story of cops and robbers—came to stand in for the arms race . . .”]
Related paradox (e.g., strengthens the case for O-F-F via said win-win between non-Ps and Ps)
“The decisive form of social control represented by the killing of aggressive males could clearly have had far-reaching significance in human evolution. With regard to the idea that Homo sapiensself-domesticated [my emphasis], the critical question is whether individuals with a particularly high propensity for reactive aggression tended to be killed. The characteristic fact of egalitarian relationships indicates that the execution of would-be despots was indeed systematic.
. . . In the millennia before groups found a way to control the bullies, reactive aggression would have dominated social life in the same way as it does in most social primates such as chimpanzees, gorillas, and baboons. In those species, alpha males achieve their position at the top of their group’s dominance hierarchy by defeating each rival in turn in physical and often bloody fights. . . . The alpha’s bullying is strongly correlated with having high levels of testosterone, which appear to support his motivation to dominate others. To judge from the ubiquity of such behavior in the social primates, our ancestors once followed the same brute fashion.”
“[T]here is no reason to regard our domestication as complete. How much more domesticated we could become . . . is an open question. Given sufficient sanctions against reactive aggressors . . . humans could in theory become as hard to rile as lop-eared rabbits at a petting farm, which remain gentle even when stroked repeatedly by dozens of eager children.”
Re: DTRA-to-Biden-admin ASAP
From an August 10, 2022 article in The Washington Post (my emphases):
McFaul was among a socially distanced group that met to discuss Ukraine in the East Room earlier this year, along with . . . analyst Ian Bremmer . . .
. . . Biden began with brief comments and then spent about two hours asking questions.
“They really wanted outside-the-box thinking of, is there any way that this war, which will be horrible for everyone involved, can be stopped? Can we stop it? How can we stop it?” Bremmer said. “All of my interactions [with the White House] in the last few years have been uniformly open, constructive and really wanting to get my best sense of where they’re getting it right and where they’re not.”
2020 precedents for U.S.-/worldwide-BETTERMENT-via-you-emailing-DTRA
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: if you still have reservations re: emailing DTRA
[Initial v]iewers said they hated them [i.e., All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show]. But, as quickly became clear when these sitcoms became two of the most successful programs in television history, viewers didn’t actually hate them. They were just shocked by them. And all of the ballyhooed techniques used by the armies of market researchers at CBS utterly failed to distinguish between these two very different emotions.
Note: I’ll be submitting to DTRA ASAP, but I’ll be delayed 2+ weeks by DTRA’s requirement that I first register at sam.gov. In the interim, I encourage you to contact DTRA re: the above. (In particular, I ENCOURAGE Americans, whose taxes . . . )
BONUS motivation for you to contact DTRA, via MPSrPFO:
From 2018 book The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: How the NSA Failed to Protect America from the 9/11 Attacks: “[S]tarting in early summer of 2001, CounterTerror staff, managers, and even the director were worried that something terrible was coming…”; “At the president’s ranch in Crawford, his CIA briefer Mike Morrell presented him the soon-to-be-infamous August 6 presidential daily briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.’”; “On the afternoon of August 20, 2001, [NSA-er] Maureen Baginski asked Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe to her office. She explained that she was officially terminating their program ThinThread.”; “Tom Drake, who remained at the agency after Binney and the others retired, describes how, shortly after 9/11, he used ThinThread as a testbed to analyze information in the NSA databases from the weeks preceding the attacks. The program, he says, swiftly pinpointed each of the terrorists involved, their communications and movements before the hijackings…”
Copy-able:
BONUS motivation for DTRA to act on Frank’s work (esp. DTRA -> Biden-admin ASAP)
All told, a/the key to preventing nuclear war in the coming years is Frank leveraging emergency/war powers ASAP. As a means of motivating President Biden to delegate these powers: If Biden doesn’t, I’d support Frank as a Forward Party candidate for president in 2024 (i.e., if Biden doesn’t, I expect that a (vast) majority of voters will). Key precedents for Ruscica 2024: Eisenhower 1952, Yang 2020; details: ike1952yang2020ruscica2024.substack.com/p/precedents-for-ruscica-2024.
Related/other causes for OPTIMISM re: Ruscica ‘24:
[T]he life or death of much of the human race has now come to depend on the character of the single person who happens to be the President of the United States.
From The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency:
If you were constructing a job interview by which to determine whether candidates could manage the presidency, the role of commander in chief would be the most important part of the conversation.
George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?”
From the 2020 book by Mary Trump, the clinical psychologist (Ph.D.) who’s Donald Trump’s niece:
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.”
From 2010 book Annihilation From Within, by a former U.S. undersecretary of defense (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.’”
“[General Mark] Milley [chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff since 2019] felt no absolute certainty that the military could control or trust Trump.”
From an August 3, 2022 article in The New York Times:
[“]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.”
Re: Ks and Ps might fund much/most of TrumP’s 2024 presidential campaign
From a 2018 article co-authored by President Biden:
[L]ack of any requirement to disclose the beneficial (i.e. “true”) ownership of limited liability companies (LLCs) makes it easy for foreign [and/or criminal] entities to establish [anonymous] shell companies [ASCs] in the United States. These shell companies can then . . . channel money directly to a super PAC.
[E]ven with the ouster of a would-be authoritarian like Trump, and with the passage of the new anti–shell company legislation, the fight to end the reign of American kleptocracy is hardly tied to a single event, or a single president, or to his removal. If anything, it’s just beginning.
There are a few areas of obvious, low-hanging fruit on the counter-kleptocracy front moving forward. (The one benefit of surveying the landscape of loopholes and financial secrecy mechanisms remaining in the U.S.: there’s an entire buffet of options for reformers!)
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.
— End of excerpt #1 —
#2:
Precedent for Ks “outsourcing” murder to contract killers (CKs)
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 . . .
BCCI had created a blueprint that numerous kleptocrats and international criminals would soon follow. It was one of the earliest case studies in what would grow into the modern kleptocracy playbook . . .
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.”
“[L]argest case of organized crime in history . . . finance[d] terrorism . . . assist[ed] the builders of a Pakistani nuclear bomb . . .”
“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: Deutsche Bank (DB)
Title of the 2020 book by the finance editor of The New York Times:
Indicators that DB: 1) employs many Ps, 2) banks many Ks and Ps, 3) functions (partly) as a next-gen variant of BCCI
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.”
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, bribingforeign officials, accounting fraud, . . . ripping off customers, and ripping off the German, British, and United States governments. (The list went on.)”
“To any government official paying attention [in 2017], this was a powerful signal: Investigate Deutsche and risk the [U.S.] president’s wrath.”
More indicators that DB functions (partly) as a next-gen variant of BCCI are below (pp. 17, 19-20, 27-43).
— End of excerpt #2 —
Re: from 2016-‘22 I submitted (updated) THREAT-analyses to government agencies
In theory, T2M [said THREAT to many/most] can be PSed [prevented/subdued] via carrots and/or sticks.
There are many indicators that providers of relevant sticks won’t PS T2M (e.g., pp. 126-30, 139-48; KWs: fear/awareness that the enemy is within, resultant paralysis; greed (‘g’ added late; details via link, so I don’t having to reformat (much of) pp. 45-237)).
“[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 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.’”
[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.
“The number of publicly reported attacks by uniformed Afghans against their foreign allies rose from two in 2008 to forty-five in 2012, causing the deaths of at least 116 U.S. and NATO personnel during that period.
. . . In 2011, a U.S. Army behavioral scientist based in Kabul conducted an internal study titled ‘A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility’ that concluded insider attacks ‘are no longer isolated; they reflect a growing systemic threat.’”
“[U.S. Marine Gen. John] Allen[, commander of U.S. and NATO forces,] expressed fury at the Afghan security forces’ inability to stop the fratricidal killings. ‘I’m mad as hell about them,’ he told the CBS News program 60 Minutes. ‘We’re willing to sacrifice a lot for this campaign, but we’re not willing to be murdered for it.’”
By 1969 and 1970 [American] soldiers [fighting in Vietnam] had established a two-front war, one against the Vietcong and NVA and another against their commanders . . . War-managers could not fight a war with troops who killed their commanders; as the revolt spread, the United States had no choice but to withdraw its ground combat forces . . .
— End of excerpt from pdf —
* From the June 2021 article in The New York Times 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.”
From Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World (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.”
“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.”
“[T]he Ur of Kleptopia, post-Soviet Moscow.”
“[Kazakhstan’s] kleptocracy had gone after a man . . . Any spook, lawyer, lobbyist or PR could see there was a fortune to be made from that. And fortunes had been made. Half a billion dollars had gone out [to bleep with one person] . . .”
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 . . .
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