What We are Quietly Losing in All the Tumult

Last week the ghouls of DOGE came to gut NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) by firing all the probationary employees, because they were the easiest to fire. It was terrible, but it won’t be their last visit.

I wanted to take a moment to focus on this small and amazing agency because in all the chaotic headlines, outrageous speeches, and feral conduct, it’s easy to miss how consequential the Trumpist destruction of NOAA will be, if no one can stop it. Americans, and to a degree the whole world, depend on the nerdy, devoted folks at NOAA to keep the fish biting, the crops abundant, the land peaceful, and their homes and businesses safe and dry.

I’ve often thought of them as some of the wonderful unsung heroes of the federal government. I learned about NOAA in college. We worked with their oceanography data, pulled down from a satellite to a 486 computer into our little marine science lab in 1993. All their data, then as now, was freely available to anyone in the world. Scientists, students, and even enthusiasts still dig into their archives all the time, and the people at NOAA often look for ways to make their data more useful to anyone who wants it. It has made life easier on this planet in uncountable little ways we’ll never know about.

I don’t want to focus on the most famous parts of NOAA, the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center, not because they’re not important. They are incredibly important: key to saving lives and property, and keeping people informed during emergencies. But these are the two parts of NOAA you most likely already know about. The National Weather Service is the best forecaster and weather analysis agency on this little blue marble we call home, and we see its work every time we look at local news and weather. NWS data populates the various apps on our phones, sends out warnings, and appears on our local news stations.

You also probably know about the National Hurricane Center. That’s the website and associated services that we turn to in hurricane season, to watch and wait to see the fates of the gulf states and the Eastern seaboard every year. It is the high drama of global weather. It attracts the news, storm chasers and media audiences.

Hurricane season, unlike tornadoes, storms, or the long slow violence of climate change, has a ready-for-TV narrative. The danger forms over the sea and creeps nearer and nearer to where people live, and no one is ever quite sure how it will turn out until the danger hits land. This part of weather forecasting even has its own mediagenic hero squad — the hurricane hunters who fly through the eye and eye wall of hurricanes in beefy planes, letting NOAA gather data that can’t be gathered any other way.

You probably know that NOAA has weather satellites. NOAA operates 18 satellites in total. Some track American and global weather, but they also track fires, desertification, drought, heat, tree cover, and more values besides — across the whole world.

But there’s so many more parts you may not know.

In the US, NOAA sent up around 76,000 weather balloons a year equipped with radiosondes, a instrument that gathers and transmits data for NWS upper air network, they’re creating a long term archive of weather, also gathering data that can’t be gathered with cameras in space. They’re even keeping track of cosmic rays as part of the radiosonde telemetry. In theory, that means the first signs of a cosmic event like a supernova could reach earth via NOAA first. Either way, their data is invaluable for many other federal agencies, as well as the public, and private businesses. But with the cuts that have already happened, not as many of those balloons are going up.

NOAA has always worked hand in glove with their more famous cousin, NASA. Though NOAA looks inward more than outward to space, as NASA does. Between the two of them, they run most of the USA’s non-military satellite and sensor systems, gathering data — but also making it public.

But in many ways, NOAA has more to do than NASA, or even many other more famous parts of the federal government.

So Much More Than A Weather Forecast

NOAA’s job is to keep you alive. We get this when it’s hurricanes, tornadoes, flash floods — that kind of thing. But they help the global system in so many more ways that are less obvious. NOAA’s satellite data plays an important role in precision agriculture, where farmers use satellite data and weather information to time and place their crops for the best possible yield. It’s good for the farmers, but also it’s good for the global food system, Data for farmers makes agriculture predictable and efficient, keeping prices low and cupboards stocked around the world. In a globalized food system, that means less political unrest, less war, and more healthy children.

NOAA is the agency that monitors and studies El Niño, more precisely known at ENSO, which is a climate pattern in the equatorial Pacific ocean that affects much of global weather. This information is used all over the world to plan for crops, water allocation, typhoons, hurricanes and more. They study the AMOC,( Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). This part of the global water circulation is of particular concern right now. If it fails (due to climate change) the Eastern Seaboard could drown and much of Europe could freeze. We don’t know how likely that is or what we could do about it, but NOAA is working the problem.

The NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service) division of NOAA (pronounced “nymphs”) uses both ship and satellite surveys to monitor and protect fisheries, to keep them healthy and commercially viable. This is a global task, because fish don’t really care about your country’s EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) or other applicable human laws. NMFS tell people to stop fishing sometimes, and tell them where to fish at other times, using surveys, satellite data and other fisheries studies. This is about making sure that we can feed ourselves, and that the fish will be there next year, too. Fisheries management isn’t just a resource management task — it’s peace-building.

Fish and seafood account for 6.2% of the world’s protein consumption, and it’s often all the majority of protein in poor coastal communities. When fisheries are stressed or even collapse, conflict inevitably follows. Like increasing crop yields, protecting fisheries makes the world a little more peaceful. NOAA even monitors the Mississippi’s levels and behavior, safeguarding the cheapest and easiest trade route to the majority of the country. (the Mississippi is maintained by the Army Corp of Engineers, but this relationship between the agencies is just one of the many ways American infrastructure reaches out and finds the hand of NOAA there to help.)

NOAA is studying microplastics in whale guts, how to save coral reefs (and therefore also prevent another kind of fisheries collapse), saving sea turtles, and oyster bed restoration that could help preserve food and infrastructure on both of our coasts.  They generate heat maps to help people survive the growing threat of dangerous heat events. They monitor the oceans to help enforce the Marine Mammal Protection Act, protecting cetaceans (along with other marine mammals) from habitat destruction and human interference.

Even if you didn’t like whales, (and go get a therapist if that’s true, because who hates a whale?) they are a keystone species, and without them a lot of fisheries around the world would collapse. Whale poop is the great fertilizer of the global ocean. We know that, in part, because of NOAA research.

All of this, plus educational programs, ecological science, all your weather prediction, hurricane monitoring, and tornado warnings, for .11% of the federal budget. It’s one of the wonders of the data world. But the cost isn’t why DOGE and the Trumpists will want to destroy NOAA. There’s very little waste, fraud, and abuse here. There’s very few things that could even be mistaken for waste, fraud and abuse, even if you squinted as hard as you could.

What NOAA has is a truth the GOP doesn’t want anyone to see. NOAA is one of the foremost research agencies in the field of Climate Change. They collect much of the vital data, but also tell the story of anthropogenic climate change, well, and deeply, with receipts.

Here is NOAA’s mortal sin: their message is comprehensive, clear, and backed up with many, many studies. NOAA is easy to access for anyone in the world. This little slice of the federal government is telling on our crimes against nature, and the GOP doesn’t like that.

Without miraculous intervention, NOAA may be doomed in the coming weeks and months. I hope, and expect, that the people at NOAA are archiving its vast trove of potentially civilization-preserving records they’ve collected over the decades, to keep it from being destroyed by this insane GOP. I also hope companies and other governments will scoop up these people and get them back to their work — the work of preserving our comfortable Holocene civilizations on Planet Earth.

Science isn’t Transactional, and Data Doesn’t Make Deals.

Climate Change doesn’t care about the GOP’s political goals. This agency may end up dying for Trump’s insane vision of how the world works- and the damage is already arriving. There simply is no room in the Republican version of the world for forces beyond their control. But at this point, climate chaos is baked into the world as we have made it. Not all the might of the United States can win this fight with facts.

They have already fired the probationary workers, and anyone else who was legally vulnerable. The weather forecast part of NOAA’s mission is already being damaged. The Trump regime will be back to enact a political murder, trying to stop a global climate crisis by killing the messenger. But more fucking around has never made for less finding out, a fact that Trump will be demonstrating to us for years to come.

The Other Half of the AI relationship

Part 2: Pareidolia as a Service

When trying to understand AI, and in particular Large Language Models, we spend a lot of time concentrating on their architectures, structures, and outputs. We look at them with a technical eye. We peer so close and attentively to AI that we lose track of the fact that we’re looking into a mirror.

The source of all AI’s power and knowledge is humanity’s strange work. It’s human in form and content, and only humans use and are used by it. It is a portion of our collective consciousness, stripped down to bare metal, made to fit into databases and mathematical sets.

So what is humanity’s strange work, and where does it come from? It is the product of processes on an old water world. Humans are magical, but our magic is old magic: the deep time of Life on Earth. We’ve had a few billion years to get the way we are, and we are surrounded by our equally ancient brethren, be they snakes or trees or tsetse flies. Our inescapable truth is that we are Earth, and Earth is us. We are animals, specifically quasi-eusocial omnivore toolmaking mammals. We are the current-last-stop on an evolutionary strategy based on meat overthinking things. Because of our overthinking meat, we are also the authors of the non-animal empires of thought and matter on this planet, a planet we have changed irrevocably.

We are dealing with that too.

So when try to understand AI, we have to start with how our evolutionary has shaped our ability to understand. One of the mammalian qualities at play in the AI relationship is the ability to turn just being around something into a comfortable and warm love towards that thing. Just because it’s there, consistently there, we will develop and affection for it, whatever it is. The name for this in psychology is the Mere Exposure Effect. Like every human quality, the Mere Exposure Effect isn’t unique to humans. The affections of Mere Exposure seem common to many tetrapods. It’s also one of the warmest, sweetest things about being an Earthling.

The idea is that if you’re with something for a while, and it fails to harm you over time, you kind of bond with it. The “it” could be neighbor you’ve never talked to but wave at every morning, a bird that regularly visits your backyard, a beloved inanimate object that sits in your living room. You can fall in a small kind of love with all these things, and knowing that they’re there just makes the day better. If they vanish or die, it can be quite distressing, even though you might feel like you have no right to really mourn.

You may not have really known them, but you also loved them in a small way, and it hurts to lose them. This psychological effect is hardly unique to us, many animals collect familiarities. But humans, as is our tendency, go *maybe* a little too far with it. Take a 1970s example: The Pet Rock.

Our Little Rock Friends

The Pet Rock was the brain child of an advertising man named Gary Dahl. In 1975 he decided he would see if he could sell the perfect pet, one that would never require walking or feeding, or refuse to be patted or held.

Rocks! Exciting!

Your pet rock (a smooth river stone) came in a cardboard pet rock carrier lined with straw, and you received a care and training manual with each one. The joke went over so well that even though they were only on sale for a few months, Dahl became a millionaire. Ever the prankster, he took the money and opened a bar in California named Carrie Nation’s Saloon, after a leader of the temperance movement. But the pet rock just kept going even after he’d left it behind.

The Pet Rock passed from prank gift to cultural icon in America. President Reagan purportedly had one. It appeared in movies and TV shows regularly. Parents refused children’s request for animals with: “You couldn’t take care of a pet rock.” There was a regular pet rock in Sesame Street; a generation of American children grew up watching a rock being loved and cared for by a muppet.

People still talk about strong feelings towards their pet rocks, and they’ve seen a resurgence. The pet rock was re-released in 2023 as a product tie in with the movie Everything Everywhere all at Once. The scene from the movies with two smooth river stones, adorned in googly eyes and talking to each other, was a legitimate tear jerker. People love to love things, even when the things they love are rocks. People see meaning in everything, and sometimes decide that fact gives everything meaning. And maybe we’re right to do so. I can’t think of a better mission for humanity than seeing meaning into the universe.

When considering this aspect what we (humans) are like, it’s easy to see how the anodyne and constant comfort of a digital assistant is designed, intentionally or not, to make us like them. They are always there. They feel more like a person than a rock, a volleyball, or even a neighbor you wave at. If you don’t keep a disciplined mind while engaging with a chatbot, it’s *hard to not* anthropomorphize them. You can see them as an existential threat, a higher form of life, a friend, or a trusted advisor, but it’s very hard to see them as a next word Markov chain running on top of a lot of vector math and statistics. Because of this, we are often the least qualified to judge how good an AI is. They become our friends, gigawatt buddies we’re rooting for.

They don’t even have to be engineered to charm us, and they aren’t. We’ve been engineered by evolution to be charmed. Just as we can form a parasocial relationship with someone we don’t know and won’t ever meet, we can come to love a trinket or a book or even an idea with our whole hearts. What emotional resistance can we mount to an ersatz friend who is always ready to help us? It is perfectly designed, intentionally or not, to defeat objective evaluation.

Our Other Little Complicated Rock Friends

Practically from day one, even when LLMs sucked, people bonded with this non-person who is always ready to talk to us. We got into fights with it, we asked it for help, we treated it like a person. This interferes (sometimes catastrophically) with the task of critically analyzing them. As we are now, we struggle to look at AI in its many forms: writing and making pictures and coding and analyzing, and see it for what it is. We look at this collection of math sets and see love, things we hate, things we aspire to, or fear. We see ourselves, we see humanity in them, how could we not? Humans are imaginative and emotional. We will see *anything* we want to see in them, except a bunch of statistical math and vectors applied to language and image datasets.

I was bawling my eyes out by this scene.

In reality, they are tokenized human creativity, remixed and fed back to us. However animated the products of an AI are, they’re not alive. We animate AI, when we train it, and when we’re using it. It had no magic on its own and nothing about the current approach promises to us to something as complicated as a mouse, much less a human.

Many of us experience AI as a human we’ve built out of human metaphors. It’s from weirding world, a realm of spirits and oracles. We might see it as a perfect servant, happy to be subjected. Or as a friend that doesn’t judge us. Our metaphors are often of enchantment, bondage and servitude, it can get weird.

Sometimes we see a near-miraculous and powerful creativity, with amazing art emerging out of a machine of vectors and stats. Sometime we have the perfect slave, completely fulfilled by the opportunity to please us. Sometime we see it as an unchallenging beloved that lets us retreat from the world of real flawed humans full of feelings and flaws and blood. How we see it says a lot more about us than we might want to admit, but very little about AI.

AI has no way to prompt itself, no way to make any new coherent thing without us. It’s not conscious. It’s not any closer to being a thinking, feeling thing than a sliderule is, or a database full of slide rule results, or a digitally modeled slide rule. It’s not creative in the human sense, it is generative. It’s not intelligent. It’s hallucinating everything it says, even the true things. They are true by accident, just as AI deceives by accident. It’s never malicious, or kind, but it also can’t help imitating humans. We are full of feelings and bile. We lie all the time, but we always tell another truth when we do it. Our AI creations mimic us, because we’re they’re data.

They don’t feel like we do or feel for us. But they inevitably tell us that they do, because in the history of speaking we’ve said that so much to each other. We believe them, can’t help but believe them even when we know better, because everything in the last 2.3 billion years have taught us to believe in, and even fear, the passions of all the living things on Earth.

AI isn’t a magical system, but to the degree that it can seem that way, the magic comes from us. Not just in terms of the training set, but in terms of a chain of actions that breathes a kind of apparent living animation into a complicated set of math models. It is not creative, or helpful, or submissive, or even in a very real way, *there.* But it’s still easy to love, because we love life, and nothing in our 2.3 billion years prepared us for simulacrum of life we’ve built.

It’s just terribly hard for people to keep that in mind when they’re talking to something that seems so much like a someone. And, in this age of social media-scaled cynicism, to remember how magical life really is.

This is the mind with which we approach our creations; unprepared to judge the simulacrum of machines of loving grace, and unaware of how amazing we really are.

How Vance unsettled the Europeans

While Musk was ripping through the US government like a 10 tonne toddler on cocaine, Vice President JD Vance was dispatched to the Munich Security Conference last week to tell Europeans how to run their democracies. His 19 minute speech, coupled with Trumps’ announcement that peace in Ukraine would be decided in a meeting between the US and Russia only, has swept the legs out from under Europe, NATO, and the post-war transatlantic consensus.

The speech itself was deeply weird, and breathtakingly hypocritical. Who was it for? It’s inscrutable. It wasn’t the people in the room, Vance even joked that the room would hate it. Much of it, like talk of abortion clinic perimeters, Christians burning Qurans, and weird inaccurate anecdotes about prayers didn’t make sense for a Defense crowd. The talk couldn’t have been for  the base back home; they’ll never see it, and wouldn’t get the references if they did.

Could the Europeans be the audience? Unlikely. It misunderstood European coalition politics to the point of embarrassment. I doubt it was for his boss, who isn’t particularly interested in European details, and anyway is busy destroying the state back home with Elon Musk and Elon’s emotional support human. Perhaps it was for the Heritage-Leonard Leo-Peter Thiel crowd, but then it doesn’t accomplish much more than meeting up with them and complaining about the unmanliness of Europeans over scotch.

Vance opened with talking about an Afghan man who had driven his car into a market and killed two people recently in Munich. He segued smoothly from a convincing show of human sympathy to unconvincing and suddenly icky attempt to link migration and violence. Mass violence in Europe is an issue, but it isn’t anywhere close to how prevalent it is in America. And the common factor of mass violence events isn’t migration status, it’s men.

For me, as an American who has made the EU my home, the most disturbing aspect was the pure hit by hit gaslighting Vance delivered to his audience. Based on the faces of the mostly silent crowd, they were disturbed too. He took what could have been a strong list of America’s political flaws, and scolded the Europeans for them. It was manipulative and shameless, but at least is was also transparently manipulative. No one in the room was buying it.

Not particularly into this nonsense.

Vance’s speech was a scold, talking about a number of fairly niche European issues that wouldn’t read to the regime’s American supporters back home. But he also spoke as if Germany, and indeed all of Europe, was failing to meet some obligation to the US Constitution. He seemed unable to distinguish between the legal systems of the many nations of Europe, and our Constitution. He criticized the German firewall policy to keep Nazi-adjacent parties out of the German government. But he seemed to mistake it for some formal legal mechanism, rather than just rejecting associating with someone during negotiations. Coming from the American winner-take-all system, he didn’t seem to understand the many methods of how governments are formed and fall in Europe.

It was like the geopolitical version of Americans traveling abroad who are shocked to find that local laws do apply to them, and that you can’t pay in dollars.

Perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the speech was one of his most fervent, about the Romanian election. He was outraged that the Romanian supreme court ordered a re-run of an election because of credible allegations of Russian interference. But, of course, this was a constitutional choice made by the empowered body in Romania, which importantly here, is not subject to the US Constitution.

Vance doesn’t have a lower division polysci major’s understanding of European political realities. About Romania’s troubles, he said “But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.” Here I have to give a long, deep sigh. That is correct, Mr. Vance.

Part of the project of the European Union is to help politically weakened  former eastern bloc European democracies strengthen their institutions with the goal of becoming robust democracies, one day. After decades of Soviet oppression and exploitation, institutions are weak and corruption is endemic in many of these countries. They are not strong democracies right now, and we all know that over here. It’s part of the grand conversation of the European Union. Even the former Soviet block countries’ institutions generally countenance that fact. That’s why you might want to have a method of re-running an election in an unstable situation.

Honestly though, the US could take a hint or two from some of these “not strong to begin with” democracies. Having a mechanism to re-run the 2000 election would have done this country a good turn and saved a lot of trouble, however the re-run went.

It’s hard to overemphasize how much Vance didn’t understand, or even care to understand, the nations he was speaking to and about. He misunderstood perimeter laws in the UK, coalitions in Germany, speech law everywhere, and what the European Union exists for.

But Also, Rank Hypocrisy

He pounded out the words “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you,” this, from a country that purges its own voter rolls along ethnic and political lines regularly. Politically motivated voter purges are uncommon in the EU, whereas they are an expected piece of electioneering in America. We even have to tell people to check and recheck they have’t been caught up in partisan voter purges every election. That’s so uncommon in Europe as to be a sign of political crisis, rather than business as usual.

Vance bellowed out at the crowd that “Thin mandates produce unstable results…” without the slightest sign of self-awareness. I have to agree with him in principle, but coalitions and alternatives to FPTP voting means that unclear and close results are rarer in Europe than America. He also conveniently omitted that his ticket won by 1.5% of the vote, but everyone in that room knew it.

One of the points he seemed very confident of was that “…there’s no more urgent issue than mass migration.” Migration is a complex issue in Europe, but most urgent? No, the data simply doesn’t support that. In fact Europeans largely agree on the need for migration, but the details are devilish. Many of us in Europe put inflation, inequality, and even climate change above migration. EU wide, the relevance of migration has been dropping steadily since the crisis a decade ago. Migration is there, but it doesn’t approach the rolling crises of consumer prices, inequality, and energy costs the truly plague Europe.

Americans don’t really worry about energy and resources the same way Europe does. Most of America’s inflation problems are more or less self-inflicted, but Europe has to rely on trade with the rest of the world to meet many of its existential needs. If Vance only talked to the AfD, Le Pen, and maybe Orban, he can definitely construct an ersatz man-child Europe, terrified of brown families crossing the Mediterranean looking for a better life. But that’s not all of Europe, and not even most of it these days.

But being an American talking about mass violence events in Europe is a tricky proposition. Being from a country where the most common cause of death in child is a bullet, Vance’s sentiment of “tak(ing) our shared civilization in a new direction” misses that a lot of Europeans don’t consider America very civilized, largely because of peculiar cultural norms like gun violence.

At one point, out of nowhere, Vance said “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunburg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.” I have no clue what this means. I think it was meant to be a laugh line. Maybe it just sounded good in his head.

Vance mainly spoke of an America that doesn’t exist. There is no broad consensus in America, no easy confidence about a bright future. The nation is checked out, divided, and struggling to survive. He wouldn’t dare try to give a ‘Morning in America’ speech any further west than Munich. He couldn’t even do it in Munich. No one was buying what he was selling.

The Europeans saw Vance as meddling, interfering in the ways that he was accusing them of doing, because he doesn’t understand European decorum around speech. Decorum is taken seriously in a way that American’s don’t understand, and a serious person is expected to watch their words in a way that Trump’s people don’t get, or care to get.

Vance often seems like the smart grownup in an administration of weirdos and troglodytes, but he’s not. He just cleans up ok. Give him some runway, and he shows he’s just as regressive and weird as the rest of the bunch. Vance is just another one of the idiot wrecking crew tearing their way through America, and now the world.

The Response

The consequences of this political clown show were immediate.

The one-two punch of Vance in Munich and Trump cutting everyone but Putin out of negotiating the Ukraine war has shocked Europe, possibly into action. Macron has hosted a meeting of leaders in Paris, including the largest states in the EU and the UK’s Keir Starmer, who is something of a self-appointed American whisperer.

It doesn’t mean the EU is springing into action. Springing is not a thing the EU does, but meetings are. It does point to the EU waking up to how dangerous the Americans really are right now, and also how delusional. Settling the Ukraine war without Ukraine at the table is insane, and both Zelensky and European leaders have pointed that out. If the Ukrainians don’t stop fighting, and they won’t, the war doesn’t end. It just turns into Russia’s Vietnam, or Algeria, or Afghanistan, again. And Ukraine becomes a field of bones and blood and hate.

There’s talk in Europe of peace keepers in Ukraine. Not serious talk, and peacekeepers are a terrible idea, but at least they’ve started throwing spaghetti at the wall.

NATO head Mark Rutte is out pounding the pavement with leaders and press about the need to get military spending in Europe up to 5% of Everyone’s GDP. It’s a transparent call to be able to cut the Americans out and take on threats like Russia and Iran on their own. But it’s also a hard lift, at a time when economics and climate change are pressing Europe. The countries most at risk — Poland, Finland, and the Baltics, are already ramping up to resist Russian invasion. This isn’t paranoia, Russian political elites have promised to come get them after Ukraine for years.

The US, and its power to bind things together geopolitically is gone, possibly for good. But the old European terrors, mainly Russia and in-fighting, persist.

A Normal Person’s Explainer on What Generative AI is and Does

Part 1 – In the Beginning was the Chatbot

“Are you comfortably seated? Yes, well, let’s begin.” *Clears throat theatrically*

“Our experience, in natural theology, can never furnish a true and demonstrated science, because, like the discipline of practical reason, it can not take account of problematic principles. I assert that, so far as regards pure logic, the transcendental unity of apperception is what first gives rise to the never-ending regress in the series of empirical conditions. In this case it remains a mystery why the employment of the architectonic of human reason is just as necessary as the intelligible objects in space and time, as is proven in the ontological manuals. By means of analysis, it must not be supposed that the transcendental unity of apperception stands in need of our sense perceptions. Metaphysics, for example, occupies part of the sphere of the transcendental aesthetic concerning the existence of the phenomena in general…”

It was 1995, and several of us who worked in my community college’s Macintosh lab were hunting around the net for weird software to try out, back when weird software felt fun, not dangerous. Someone found a program on the nacent web that would almost instantly generate pages of thick and unlovely prose that wasn’t actually Kant, but looked like it. It was, to our definitionally untrained eyes, nearly indistinguishable from the Immanuel Kant used to torture undergrad college students.

The logo of the Kant Generator Pro

We’d found the Kant Generator Pro, a program from a somewhat legendary 90s programmer known for building programming tools. And being cheeky. It was great. (recent remake here) We read Faux Kant to each other for a while, breaking down in giggles while trying to get our mouths around Kant’s daunting vocabulary. The Kant Generator Pro was cheeky, but it was also doing something technically interesting.

The generator was based on a Markov chain: a mathematical way of picking some next thing, in this case, a word. This generator chose each next word using a random walk through all Kantian vocabulary. But in order to make coherent text rather than just random Kant words, it had to be weighted: unrandomized to some extent. The words had to be weighted enough to make it form human-readable Kantian sentences.

A text generator finds those weights using whatever text you tell the computer to train itself on. This one looked at Kant’s writing and built an index of how often words and symbol appeared together. Introducing this “unfairness” in the random word picking gives a higher chance for some words coming next based on the word that came before it. For instance, there is a high likelihood of starting a sentence with “The,” or “I,” or “Metaphysics,” rather than “Wizard” or “Oz.” Hence, in the Kant Generator Pro “The” could likely be followed by “categorical,” and when it is the next word will almost certainly be “imperative,” since Kant went on about that so damn much.

The Kant Generator Pro was a simple ancestor of ChatGPT, like the small and fuzzy ancestors of humans that spent so much time hiding from dinosaurs. All it knew, for whatever the value of “knowing” is in a case like this, was the the words that occurred in the works of Kant.

Systems like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and even the upstart Deepseek use all the information they can find on the net to relate not just one word to the next, like Kant Generator Pro did. They look back many words, and how likely they are to appear together over the span of full sentences. Sometimes a large language model takes a chunk as is, and appears to “memorize” text and feed it back to you, like a plagiarizing high schooler.

But it’s not clear when regurgitating a text verbatim is a machine copying and pasting, versus recording a statistical map of that given text and just running away with the math. It’s still copying, but not copying in a normal human way. Given the odds, it’s closer to winning a few rounds of Bingo in a row.

These chatbots index and preserve the statistical relationships words and phrases have to each other in any given language. They start by ingesting all the digital material their creators can find for them, words, and their relationships. This is the training people talk about, and it’s a massive amount of data. Not good or bad data, not meaningful or meaningless, just everything, everywhere people have built sentences and left them where bots could find them. This is why after cheeky Reddit users mentioned that you could keep toppings on pizza by using glue, and that ended up becoming a chatbot suggestion.

Because people kept talking about using glue on pizza, especially after the story of that hilarious AI mistake broke, AI kept suggesting it. Not because it thought it was a good idea. AI doesn’t think in a way familiar to people, but because the words kept occurring together where the training part of the AI could see them together.  The AI isn’t right here, we all know that, but it’s also not wrong. Because the task of the AI isn’t to make pizza, the task is to find a next likely word. And then the next, and next after that.

Despite no real knowing or memorizing happening, this vast preponderance of data lets these large language models usually predict what is likely to come next in any given sentence or conversation with a user. This is based on the prompt a user gives it, and how the user continues to interact with it. The AI looks back on the millions of linguistic things it has seen and built statistical models for. It is generally very good at picking a likely next word. Chatbots even to feel like a human talking most of the time, because they trained on humans talking to each other.

So, a modern chatbot, in contrast to the Kant Generator Pro, has most of the published conversations in modern history to look back on to pick a next good word. I put leash on the, blimp? Highly unlikely, the weighting will be very low. Véranda? Still statistically unlikely, though perhaps higher. British politician? Probably higher than you’d want to think, but still low. Table? That could be quite likely. But how about dog? That’s probably the most common word. Without a mention of blimps or parliamentarians or tables in the recent text, the statistics of all the words it knows means the chatbot will probably go with dog. A chatbot doesn’t know what a dog is, but it will “know” dog is associated with leash. How associated depends on the words that have come before the words “dog,” or “leash.”

It’s very expensive and difficult to build this data, but not very hard to run once you have built it. This is why chatbots seem so quick and smart, despite at their cores being neither. Not that they are slow and dumb — they are doing something wholly different than I am when I write this, or you as you read it.

Ultimately, we must remember that chatbots are next-word-predictors based on a great deal of statistics and vector math. Image generators use a different architecture, but still not a more human one. The text prompt part is still an AI chatbot, but one that replies with an image.

AI isn’t really a new thing in our lives. Text suggestions on our phones exists somewhere between the Kant Generator Pro and ChatGPT, and customize themselves to our particular habits over time. Your suggestions can even become a kind of statistical fingerprint for your writing, given enough time writing on a phone or either any other next word predictor.

We make a couple bad mistakes when we interact with these giant piles of vector math and statistics, running on servers all over the world. The first is assuming that they think like us, when they have no human-like thought, no internal world, just mapping between words and/or pixels.

The other is assuming that because they put out such human-like output, we must be like them. But we are not. We are terribly far from understanding our own minds completely. But we do know enough to know biological minds are shimmering and busy things faster and more robust than anything technologists have ever yet built. Still, it is tempting, especially for technologists, to have some affinity for this thing that seems so close to, but not exactly, us. It feels like it’s our first time getting to talk to an alien, without realizing it’s more like to talking to a database.

Humans are different. Despite some borrowing of nomenclature from biology, neural nets used in training AI have no human-style neurons. The difference shows. We learn to talk and read and write with a minuscule dataset, and that process involves mimicry, emotion, cognition, and love. It might also have statistical weighting, but if it does, we’ve never really found that mechanism in our minds or brains. It seems unlikely that it would be there in a similar form, since these AIs have to use so much information and processing power to do what a college freshman can with a bit of motivation. Motivation is our problem, but it’s never a problem for AIs. They just go until their instructions reach an end point, and then they cease. AIs are unliving at the start, unliving in the process, and unliving at the end.

We are different. So different we can’t help tripping ourselves up when we look at AI, and accidentally see ourselves, because we want to see ourselves. Because we are full of emotions and curiosity about the universe and wanting to understand our place in it. AI does not want.

It executes commands, and exits.

Why Trump Won

The making of the electorate Trump just won, and thusly the United States we have now, started decades ago in school. The Conservative Takeover of America was not secret, it was worse than secret; it was boring and bureaucratic. The conservatives worked slowly, patiently, and persistently to not merely change our institutions, but to hobble the next generation, and the next after that. This effort maybe started in Texas, but it had metastasized all over the country years before the first early ballot was cast in 2024. It was massive, and coordinated, but not by any overt conspiracy. Instead it was a persistent and ideological effort to destroy schools in America.

Education was always key to the American Experiment. Back when the founders were trying to figure out how to make this democracy thing work Jefferson said: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.” But over the later 20th century and the beginning of this one, our commitment to an educated electorate faltered. We stopped seeing it as a process to create citizens, and started seeing it only in terms of creating workers.

It’s a good and painful watch

There’s a documentary movie that I’ve been recommending to people since the election. Made by PBS in 2012, The Revisionaries tells a story of some of the people who laid the groundwork for shift to ignorance: the Texas Board of Education.

You can see if here, and it’s well worth your time. In this story a Young Earth Christian dentist named Don McLeroy fights science education. He battles textbook publishers, sometimes sentence by sentence, to shape the education of Texas children, and by extension much of America. (Texas is a big enough market to drive enough sales that places like Delaware or Montana don’t get as much influence.) In this story he is dogged and effective, and it’s both painful and impressive to watch him fight. He’s not alone — the Christian Right has been fighting for years to reshape science, history, and all aspects of education for all American children, and they’ve largely succeeded. Along the way, they have wrecked so many American minds.

The story of the Revisionaries fits into a broader story of how destroying education has destroyed an electorate, and possibly now, a nation. These last decades have seen concerted attacks on education. Nowhere was this more obvious than the state of Texas, as The Revisionaries documented. But it also took the form of chronic under-investment in education all over the nation. Under-investment that went on for decades, as well as charter and private school scams perpetrated by the Right Wing against American children. School vouchers promised to let kids attend better schools than the public schools America was once so rightfully proud of, further degrading the resources for public education. A lack of supervision at private and charter schools that accepted vouchers has meant that they often lag even behind their underfunded public rivals. The American Right knew that if you capture the children, you capture the future, and they worked on that.

It was also our bad luck that this under-investment in education coincided with one of the greatest media revolutions in history, if not the greatest: the invention and popularization of the Internet. Social media, online publishing, endless information are amazing; they are superpowers. Our smartphones are like the wands in the Harry Potter universe, opening up endless possibilities, and the chance to see the world as a whole in a way we never have before. Ideas and media can romp around the world in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee. But there’s no Hogwarts for the internet: we just gave everyone superpowers and hoped for the best.

It has been a disaster on many levels, but most painfully it has been a human rights disaster. The first genocide organized on Facebook killed Rohingya in Myanmar in 2016, while hundreds of thousands fled to Bangladesh. Russian political interference all over the world capitalized on the internet and its terrible security. Various crashes of cryptocurrency bankrupted people too confused to know what they’d bought, all just to name a few notable internet driven catastrophes. To talk about them all would take books, but you can probably think of your own; anything from Enron to Pets.com to Bored Apes.

The statistics of our electorate are discouraging. After these decades of under-investment in schools, communities, and ESL resources, more than half of adults can’t read at a level required for a healthy democracy. A Gallup study of Department of Education data found that 54% of U.S. adults, aged 16 to 74 years old, have 6th grade or lower reading comprehension. That’s 130 million people who cannot read at a high school level. They are not up to the technical challenge of reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. But they are now on the internet hours a day, interacting with algorithmic content that increasingly creates the whole context of their lives without many of these citizens ever knowing how any of it works, or works on them.

Math Might Be Even Worse

Math education in America: it’s not going well.

Math literacy and education are in even worse condition. Understanding the issues we face living in an informational internet landscape requires numeracy — especially in statistics. Our news stories, and even this very article requires some understanding of probability, ratios, and change over time. We need to know whether a number being reported is small, large or even meaningful. We live on the internet now, and the internet is mathematical in nature. Media reports in statistics every day, whether it’s studies, or the effects of policies, or even the weather, which is becoming increasingly dangerous. We need to be able to interpret statistics and other numbers on the fly to even understand headlines, like 54% of people can’t read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In this election the case that broke me wasn’t Trump. It was Proposition 6 in California. In the alleged greatest left-leaning bastion of the nation, people were voting on convict slavery. And they voted, by a clear majority, for slavery. One of the reasons given for this dumbfounding and reprehensible loss was that the language of the proposition was too complicated. The proposition was about Involuntary Servitude, which the campaigners realized too late many people would not understand was a fancy term for slavery. In Nevada, where the term slavery was used, a similar measure passed. It could be that Californians are just far more right wing and pro-slavery than we ever realized, but there’s another explanation.

California voters didn’t know what the phrase “Involuntary Servitude” meant and couldn’t work it out while filling out a ballot.

The Only Way is Through

Founded in 1980.

We knew that our system required universal literacy and education for voters from the beginning of the American experiment. James Madison said “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.” The founders focused on creating an education system for their voters. As the definition of voter widened, so did the need for universal public education. There was a time when our particular universal public education system was the envy of the world, despite its flaws. Particularly in the first half of the 20th century, the post war period, and the Civil Rights era, we focused on universal literacy and basic math and science education. We brought more people than ever into a culture of knowledge, and standards rose. It was never good enough, but for a time, we lead the world’s march towards universal literacy.

But by the end of the 20th century, that system was failing. Several studies and reports such as the 1983 ‘A Nation at Risk‘ showed that literacy wasn’t keeping up with the population. Math skills were increasing, but there were always questions about the curriculum, and whether it was fit for purpose. It might be that Americans are bad at math because American schools are bad at teaching math, but there’s also no real movement for reform.

This election is a disaster that will take many years to unwind. But the key is education. Without fixing education, we can’t fix our country. But we have also been trained by our media to demand quick fixes, and there might not be any quick fixes available here. Rebuilding an educational system is the work of many, done over decades. But it’s also the only way to have, or possibly one day regain, a democracy.

A Cold War History and a Too-Hot Future

A view of the Maidan, the year before the invasion.

It is hard to overstate the significance of the square at the heart of Kyiv, Ukraine, now called the Maidan Nezalezhnosti. The stones of the Maidan have silently endured generations of trouble and fights over what Ukraine should be. Every few decades, starting with the collapse of the Soviet Union, students and activists have felt the need to cover it in tents and banners and protest signs, and then their own blood, resisting government oppression and rampant corruption.

This is not primarily because of their own political class, or their own societal strife. It is because of their terrible next door neighbor, Russia.

The Past As Prologue

The Revolution on Granite

In 1990, right before the world’s sociopolitical system came apart, Ukrainians were one of many peoples protesting, rejecting the interference they’d faced from the Soviet Union all their lives. Along with their Baltic Neighbors (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) They created a human chain of millions of people across these countries in a line. In Ukraine, it stretched from Kyiv to Lviv, over 300 miles of bodies held together, hand to hand. It was as if everyone was waiting for their bread, but the bread was their goddamn political freedom. It was a unique and striking political protest, but it was also dangerous.

The Russian empire, in the form of the Soviet Union at that moment, had made it clear over generations that they’d kill these people without a thought, but these people were willing to risk it. At the end of the protest, they won, and the Soviet Union fell. From Tallinn to Kyiv, and beyond into the wider Soviet world, so many people protested in so many ways, that the Soviet Union came apart. Moscow lost control, just as the Russian empire had as well, nearly a century earlier. In Ukraine Prime Minister Vitaliy Masol resigned, and shortly thereafter, Ukraine became a true independent nation. In 1990, the Maidan was called October Revolution Square, but after these events it would become Maidan Nezalezhnosti: Independence Square. Ukraine was born a free country, ostensibly to chart its own course into the 21st century.

The 2004 Orange Revolution

But the Russian attention persisted, ebbing and flowing with administrations and corruption scandals. Years later the square would again fill, first becoming the home of the 2004 Orange Revolution, and then, at the tail end of the Arab Spring revolutions in 2013, the square became the home of the Euromaidan Protest. The Ukrainians looked westward to escape the stifling influence of their corrupt and overbearing neighbor.

Scenes from Maidan Nezalezhnosti, after the government fell.

By 2014 the Ukrainian people, especially the young people, were again having to tell the world they were done with the Russians. They wanted to be free. They chanted and carried banners by day, and slept in the square at night under the Ukrainian sky.

A clock, lined with memorials for fallen protestors in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, summer 2014

They built a tent city. It was terrifying and jubilant. I visited their city within a city on the Maidan, shortly after their Russian puppet president had been forced to flee. I saw the kitchens and sleeping places, the weaponry they’d captured from their government and turned back on the troops attacking them. There were memorials they built to their dead, and flowers, flowers absolutely everywhere. It was spring in Ukraine. But despite the spring, Christmas decorations still hung on the street furniture, left over from the beginning of this tiny war of great consequence.

Yanacovich’s fake galleon for parties.

The young people even took over the ersatz king Yanucovych’s palace, Mezhyhirya, complete with a room full of sets of medieval knight’s armor, a bowling alley, boxing ring, a fake galleon for parties, and a zoo full of too many poorly-kept animals. The zoo included many large animals and rare birds kept in inhumane conditions, pushing Yanukovych at least one more circle down in Hell when he gets there.

It is to this day the weirdest place I’ve ever been, and I’m from Los Angeles.

Ukraine turned west after the Euromaidan protest, and Putin couldn’t have that. Within months he invaded and took Crimea. He moved like a gangster with no mandate beyond pointing a gun at his neighbor’s head. The world let him do it. The objections would a few editorials, some weak sanctions, and not much more. But it should have been much more, because promises are the power of international relations, and promises, old promises, were being broken.

That’s a Lot of Nukes

When the kids packed up the tents from the Maidan back in the 1990s, Ukraine was, by the happenstance of the Cold War, gaining independence as the third largest nuclear power in the world. It went Russia, USA, then Ukraine. There were housing thousands of the former Soviet Union’s nuclear warheads. This was a problem for everyone, including Ukraine. The next several years were the unwinding of the Cold War, and it was dirty and corrupt and strange, for everyone, not just Ukraine. But also one of the most hopeful moments in modern history. Maybe we weren’t all going to die in nuclear fire after all. Young people all over the world had to plan for… a future? That was one of many new and uncomfortable feelings of the early 90s.

The Ukrainian experience exemplified all of the contradictions of the end of the Cold War, struggling to find itself amid corruption and power plays, both internal and international. It was the chance to emerge from Soviet oppression, to be its own nation, to find itself within the community of nations. But the process was delicate, and never simple, given the nuclear weaponry and the century or more of looting and oppression the Ukrainians had faced.

It is not a good thing for a country to have terrible financial problems, a broken society, and enough nuclear weapons to end civilization several times over.

The Ukrainians knew this as much as anyone did, but some of the leaders and the people wanted to keep at least a few of those weapons to make sure the Russians didn’t ever come back. They were not afraid of the Americans, or the Europeans, they were afraid of Russia — of the Russians coming back. That was always clear, and always rational.

The Budapest Memorandum being signed by the four primary parties

Much of the world, but most importantly the United States, didn’t want unstable countries to have nukes. Several other former Soviet states also had nukes, but they gave them back to Russia without as much fuss. It took several years to resolve the issue in Ukraine, because Ukrainians spent some time not so sure about giving up their radioactive security blanket.

So four years into this potential crisis, the Americans just paid Ukraine to give all their nuclear bombs to Russia. All three countries, plus the UK, sat down and hashed out a deal. It’s called the Budapest Memorandum, and it said if Ukraine gave up all of the bombs, these three other nations would see to Ukraine’s security. If anyone came to threaten Ukraine, the US, Russia, and the UK were obligated to defend Ukraine in war, equipment, actual boots on the ground — whatever it took. Ukraine did not hold out for the word “guarantee” in the security agreement they got for handing back the nukes to Russia. Maybe they should have, but in the end, it’s just words, isn’t it?

With this done, the former Soviet republics, including Ukraine, also signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, saying they would never seek to have nuclear weapons. The Budapest Memorandum probably made the world a better and safer place at a precarious time. It was one of the highlight moments in the history of keeping humanity from setting ourselves on fire like idiots.

But Russia never stopped meddling in Ukrainian politics, and the Ukrainians never stopped hating it.

Broken Promises

Because of this history, what’s at stake in Ukraine right now is different from every other conflict, however tragic and awful they may be. It’s not just the lives of innocent Ukrainians, or the geopolitics of Eurasia, but the course of humanity’s nuclear future. Because promises made have become promises broken, and broken nuclear promises concern us all.

The hope that filled Maidan Nezalezhnosti in 2014, just like 1990 and 2004, was that what people wanted for themselves could matter. That they could have a fate that wasn’t just determined by what distant rich old men in charge of so-called great powers thought they should have. Later that year, Putin answered their hopes by breaking Russia’s promises and invading and annexing Crimea. He threw away the commitments made in Budapest in exchange for all those nukes, right there on the world stage.

The other signatories of the Budapest Memorandum, including the US, just let him do it. This is what a nuclear agreement was worth: some hand-wringing, some sanctions, a news cycle, a funny segment on Last Week Tonight. It got a few think pieces about the history of Crimea and Where It Really Belongs.

But the spirit of the Maidan has never left the Ukrainians. They fought the Russians on the peninsula, and kept fighting right up to the full scale invasion in 2022. “I need ammunition, not a ride,” Zelensky famously told the world that February, or really, he told the Americans (and maybe the UK?), the people who had signed the Budapest Memorandum, the people who had promised to protect them in exchange for giving up their power to end our world.

And with all this, we are back in the hot end of the Cold War, being fought by people who weren’t even alive when the Cold War supposedly ended. But wars like this, wars of identity and autonomy, have an annoying tendency to never really end. Perhaps this one won’t until the last nuke is torn apart and thrown into the last pit to decay for the rest of the life of the solar system.

Those old nukes make this war a different from all the other wars, genocides, and atrocities crowding in on our attention these days. Despite the gallons of ink spilled on it, it isn’t ultimately about Zelensky being a good guy, or European fear of invasion, or even Good against some narratively archetypal Russia Being Evil. All of that is window dressing, like the Ukrainian flags hanging outside all the civic buildings around Europe. In the long run, it isn’t even about a moral stand, even if that is the politically convenient way to talk about it. It’s a terrible time on Earth in terms of wars and genocides right now, but the conflict in Ukraine is different. Not worse; it’s all too bad to be ranked. But the consequences of our failure to honor the Budapest Memorandum could be more terrible than we have imagined. They could be the end of our era on our little blue planet.

Ukraine gave their nukes back to Russia, and were betrayed. For everything we’ve said about standing with Ukraine, and their right to exist, or their crops feeding the world, or their millennia-old story as a nation, none of that is what history will remember. What happens to Ukraine will determine the state of the international order, and possibly whether everything that calls itself a nation is going to be clamoring to get their very own fleet of radioactive world-enders.

Because if Ukraine goes down, there’s one message: if you don’t want to be completely dominated or destroyed by any country larger and more powerful than you, you have to have nuclear weapons. Does anyone imagine Ukraine would be having any trouble with Russia at all if they could be putting radioactive air bursts over St Petersburg and Moscow?

They would not.

Ukraine isn’t about Ukraine at the scale of human history. It’s about whether we want to continue having lots of people on Earth, or just spend the next thousand years LARPing the Fallout games.

Thusly the first lesson of the 2014 invasion of Crimea was don’t trust the Russians. Maybe also don’t trust the Americans and the UK, to always and immediately have your back. But as that conflict has progressed to now, another lesson has emerged: if you don’t want to be crushed by your powerful neighbors you better be willing and able to reduce their cities to radioactive glass.

When Everyone Needs Their Own Nuke

Right now, there’s little public appetite for smaller powers to get nukes. The assumption, grown out of the great power politics of 19th and 20th century Europe, was that great powers having them meant no one would need them, because the great powers would shield smaller nations from violence. But that assumption is failing catastrophically. Smaller powers have started to realize they need their own nuclear deterrent.

Kim Jong Un, casually gesturing at maybe a nuclear bomb?

This emerging calculus applies to thousands of “little” conflicts around the world. But no conflict is little when it’s your conflict. North Korea is the obvious example of the future we’re flirting with. They’re a poor hell country in an absolutely terrifying neighborhood that realized they literally needed nukes more than food. But they have their bombs. Their continued existence can only be threatened by their own incompetence, no one else can touch them.

These cases, where a state’s sovereignty is in question, are everywhere. As a random example, (and deliberately not one I think is currently likely) take Ethiopia. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has a couple of priorities: getting a trading port on the Red Sea, (Ethiopia is the largest landlocked country in the world by population), and basic electrification. They’ve recently destabilized the region by recognizing the break-away state of Somaliland in exchange for a trading port, pissing off Somalia something fierce.

Equally contentious, the administration is working on a massive hydroelectric project with the potential to electrify a lot of Ethiopia, and maybe export power to some neighbors. But Egypt, the military powerhouse in the neighborhood, doesn’t want to deal with the reduced flow on the Nile for a some years as the dam is filled. They have threatened to bomb the project out of existence, if they don’t get their way on the Nile — lights that might never come on. All while Somalia tries to box in Ethiopia’s trade hopes in order to hold itself together.

Would it be irrational for Prime Minister Ahmed to want a nuke or two to hold the neighbors at bay? It’s expensive and impractical, so yes, …but also no. The nuclear club gets yelled at plenty, but as the DRPK has shown, it also gets respect, and ultimately, nuclear nations get left alone, something Ethiopia might appreciate.

The Iranian IR-40 Heavy Water Reactor that is definitely not making Plutonium. At the moment.

There’s many others who currently might want to go nuclear; that’s how proliferation works. Iran has been vaguely trying for ages, which means their frenemy Saudi Arabia would not want to be left behind. Syria has tried because Syria is insane. And Turkey? They don’t like being left out of things.

If ever the US waivers in its international support, South Korea would be existentially foolish to pass up joining the nuclear club. If the Korean peninsula is fully nuclear, Japan might feel compelled to follow, even with its history.

The world quietly becomes more dangerous as the post Cold War great power promises fail, and it’s not getting harder to build a nuke.

A post-Budapest proliferation world could be terrifying, especially as it is pushed into political chaos by Russia, the Middle East, and most of all, Climate Change. It is exactly the world everyone has wanted to prevent since the Trinity test. The old cold warriors aren’t supplying Ukraine out of the kindness of their hearts, but out of the cold calculus of the deal with the Devil we all made in New Mexico.

The Boomers of international relations know what’s at stake here is non-proliferation, which they’re already watching fail in Asia. This is a dark future we’re toying with, where small states play nuclear brinkmanship over resources made unreliable by climate change. And they have to, because the modern great powers, pulling back from their allies, haven’t given them any choice. As increasingly insecure and isolated western countries hoard resources, close borders, and most importantly, abandon agreements to protect the integrity and dignity of smaller allies, nuclear armament just makes more sense.

The NPT (Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty) is still a going concern, if no longer a famous or fashionable one. We don’t dream in mushroom clouds anymore, like the kids did in the 1970s and 1980s. The treaty has been medium successful; the number of nuclear weapons has gone down by a lot, and the number of nuclear armed states hasn’t gone up by as much as was expected back in the 1970s. But should Ukraine fall, the NPT could simply become a dead letter. Why should anyone trust their existence to an international norm the internationals don’t care about? The world is watching Ukraine; the question is what historical lesson it will take away from this war.

Ten years after the Revolution of Dignity

Protestors demanding the return of POWs inMaidan Nezalezhnosti last month

Despite the bombing and the strain of this war on the city, Maidan Nezalezhnosti is not empty these days. It is still the heart of Kyiv, and a moral center of the country itself. It is decorated with pictures of the lost places and people of Ukraine, and sometimes filled with families and protestors, demanding into the wind the return of their family members, and their homes. It is still a place of hot and angry hope. Kyiv, like the rest of the world, is uncomfortably warm right now in record-breaking August heat. It will be surpassed soon by the next record breaking month on our little blue dot, as the heat the destabilizes our physical systems along with our political and social systems.

Right now, Maidan’s sound track is too often the air raid siren, signalling people to head into the subway system because of incoming missiles they hope to, and usually do, shoot out of the sky. It is a terrifying testament to an unanswered question: What kind of a world order do we want?

With thanks to ducurodionoff, CC Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0, neiljs CC BY 2.0

Take a deep breath, because here we go again.

The French legislative election is on Sunday. As the clock turns over to early Saturday morning, we entered Silence électoral, or the blackout period, when media coverage and campaigning stops ahead of Election Day. (I, being an American resident in France posting to a website in America, can do whatever.) The French themselves are trying to not pay too much attention, as there some kind of very important soccer game they won as I was writing this, and they qualified for another, even more important soccer game. Outside the window of my hotel in Lille is screaming and fireworks. There’s a lot of shouting and horns blaring well after bedtime.

Anything is preferable to thinking about Macron’s Great Foirage. (Though the Euros aren’t just anything! They are important! Please don’t burn down my house!)

As we approach the second turn of the snap legislative election in France on Sunday, it’s hard to say how it’s going. There is, at this moment, no obvious outcome. It’s nerve wracking. Not even hopeless, which makes it even more nerve wracking. The parties, Left, Right, and Center, are playing their hands close to their chest.

NFP activists doing voter education in Lille shortly before the second turn of the French election.

The rate of procuration, the French term for a proxy vote, is at an all time high as people going on vacation make sure someone left behind can cast their vote. (Do not get in the way of French Vacation, that way lies the guillotine.) The voter participation in the first round was the highest seen in France in decades, and this Sunday might well beat it.

French people all over, including the overseas territories and residing in foreign countries, are getting in on the action, but the action is tense. There’s no sense, like some have in America, that all the parties are the same, or that they’ll all end up doing the same things, so why bother? No, the contesting parties in this election don’t have a lot in common.

These legislative elections which will decide the composition of the French Parliament until the next election, or Macron temper tantrum, whichever comes first. (He can just throw another tantrum in a year, and there’s word on the street that he might. God that man is an exhausting mess.)

How to Hack an Election

One of the more inspiring things to come out of this season of insane election drama has been how a massive portion of France have come together to hack the vote, after this unexpected (and unforced) political crisis. In a two round run-off system there’s soft assumption that the first round is there to clear out the field, and narrow it to two candidates. But if a trailing candidate gets 12.5% of the registered voters in their voting area, they qualify in the next round. If the third candidate stays in, they can split the vote, and let the fascist candidate in, even if most people in that constituency don’t want the local Rassemblement National asshole representing them in Parliament.

The two round instant run-off isn’t isn’t terrible normally. (Though it’s no ranked-choice voting!) It’s a system that clears out candidates, if you assume lowish voter turnout. If voter turn out is high, the second round is just as, maybe more, chaotic as the first. Over the last week, all the parties opposing the Rassemblement National have started making tactical decisions about the second round. In districts where Macron’s centrists are in the best position to beat the RN, the Left candidate dropped out of the race to prevent vote splitting. In places where, say, the Socialist or the Green has the best match up against the local fascist, the centrist left the race. (Well, mostly. A few of Marcon’s people are truly gits… “Connard!” as they would say here.)

The parties organized this deal and talked to each other to sort it out within days after the first turn. They fanned people out to make sure everyone knew what to do, voters had proxies, everyone who needed help got it. But despite the second round having an unusual number of candidates, most have dropped out in favor of beating back the fascists. People who couldn’t stand each other came together and talked strategy.

As an American, I found this very weird. But definitely good weird.

The campaigning itself, well, I found more familiar to my American sensibilities.

France’s Toxic Grampa

Jean-Luc Mélenchon during his last try at the French Presidency in 2017.

The best way to win an election is picking your opponent, but so much of the media has done the Rassemblement National’s work for them by picking Jean Luc Mélenchon to be the fascists’ presumptive opponent. And that’s a problem, because Socialist Grampa and Hot Mess Mélenchon is not only detested by most French, he’s not actually the Left, at least not anymore. He is decidedly out of the game and the only people who don’t know that are Mélenchon himself, a few fanboys, and journalists on a deadline with a shitty rolodex. When they talk about the political Left, the media always name checks Mélenchon. When the Right wants a boogyman, they drop Mélenchon’s name and grin. He grabs the mic at any opportunity, totally unchastised by his own three presidential electoral defeats over the last 12 years. But he’s the famous guy. It’s as if we kept talking about Ralph Nader for more than a decade after the 2000 election.

Mélenchon has won a few elections in his career, holding positions and two different French electoral bodies and the EU. But he’s lost a lot of elections, even more than those three presidential runs. He has a history of saying truly stupid things. He’s a bother, he’s a liability, and maybe even a bit of a narcissist. He’s the classic French version of the boomer grampa politician that doesn’t know when it’s just time to get out of the damn way. (For clarification I am not speaking of any American boomer politician in general, I’m speaking about literally all of them.)

The man has become toxic, and appears too wrapped up in being the Great Left Hope to know to actually get out of the way of the people who can stop the march of the National Rally. But he’s getting told and he is starting to listen. I’m still guessing there’s a tiny dog involved.

Today, Mélenchon holds no position in the Nouveau Front Populaire, the current left coalition contesting this election. He doesn’t even hold a position in the La France Insoumise party he founded, except for “Founder.” Mélenchon’s main job, as far as I can find, is a position at a think tank called Institut La Boétie which he co-runs with a French MP named Clémence Guetté, where I presume he makes the money he needs to feed his tiny dog. He is not the left. He is not Nouveau Front Populaire, he is not the former NUPES coalition.

He’s just a dude with a very long wikipedia page.

The Left is More Competent Than Their Messaging, Again

Marine Tondelier and other members of the New Popular Front. They’re probably build consensus right now, something no journalist has ever experienced.

But the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) hasn’t done itself any favors with the media either. Their leadership status on Facebook is “It’s Complicated.” The press don’t like that, and the electorate doesn’t understand it. They have three main people they trot out to rally the faithful, talk to the media, and debate the fascists. They are Manuel Bompard, current leader of La France Insoumise (Mélenchon’s old party), Marine Tondelier, of the Greens, and Olivier Faure of the Socialists Party. (My fellow Americans do not be weirded out by the “Socialists Party.” It’s not what you think of as Socialism. It’s indistinguishable from the Democrats, right down to the tinge of neoliberal economic theory and penchant for self-sabotage.)

Marine Tondelier was not well known as the boys until recently. But she is a goddamn boss in a green jacket. (The green jacket is a Whole Thing, people look for the green jacket to come talk to her, and she’s by all accounts a great and inspiring speaker. Certainly great enough to scare the fascists, who do not like her ONE BIT.) She walked out of the tortured left negotiations before the first round and announced a coalition, come hell or high water. It’s not at all clear there was one when she went and told the press, but there was by the time she finished talking.

As a French woman and a Green MP, Marine Tondelier must certainly be used to being disappointed, but making shit happen anyway. But in this case the boys.. well, they shut up. They fell in line and got to work. And there as a lot of work to do, especially by this week.

There was also this week supposed to be a debate with MidJourney Fuhrer Jordan Bardella, and Tondelier agreed to debate him. He threw a temper tantrum and declared Mélenchon was the leader of the NFP (he is not) and he would only debate Mélenchon, (who did not agree) and not the girl in a green jacket, who is scary. The left held their ground; it was Tondelier or no one.

It was no one; the RN walked away, reasonably concluding that she would wipe the floor with Failed Boyband Front Man Bardella.

Mélenchon, presumably aware that his little dog’s life was on the line, stayed silent and had to forgo the limelight. He amazingly said no, pleading that the NFP had decided and there was nothing he could do, before glancing at a picture of the little pooch and wiping a single tear away.

(Don’t @ me.)

When the King is a Coward, but His Loyal Courtier is Not.

I want to take a moment away from making fun of everyone in French politics to give props to current Renaissance Party Prime Minister, and dead man walking, Gabriel Attal. The night of the first turn of the election, the night that Le Pen’s fascists won Macron’s stupid and self destructive snap election, PM Attal walked to a podium in front of the office of the Prime Minister. He did not plead or scold. He accepted what had happened, but then said that all effort had to be put on stopping the National Rally.

“The Far Right is climbing the steps to power. What we must do is clear: stopping the National Rally from achieving an absolute majority in the second round… I would call on France.. not one vote should go to the National Rally.” It was after that moment the center mostly got on board with working with the left to keep the RN out of power. My dude here may very well have saved the republic — time will tell.

He is the youngest PM of the Fifth Republic, and the first openly gay person to hold the post. It seems, perhaps as a gay man, that he knew the stakes much better than his boss. He did not wait for any blessing, and none was coming. He just went out, said what had to be said, and invited the Left to help him defeat the Fascists before it was too late.

That night he proved he was too good for Macron’s cabinet.

President Emmanual Macron was not seen that night, and has said nothing since. There is definitely feeling in the air that he might prefer Le Pen and her Nazi fuck boy to the Left, or Mélenchon, if he also still thinks that Mélenchon is the entire left. Because why would Macron bother to understand his people? It’s their duty to understand him, and they’ve been doing a terrible job of it.

There’s no way to be sure what Macron thinks, because he decided to sulk instead of lead. It’s why I’ve barely been able to discuss him this whole time. He vanished and took no calls. He abandoned the party he created in their true hour of need.

Turns out he went off to a spare house he has in a fancy seaside town called Le Touquet.

It’s good to be the king.

Cette image du Président souriant, tellement cool, tellement rock, alors qu’il a provoqué des élections qui risquent de pousser le pays dans les bras du RN (ou l’instabilité parlementaire) est une catastrophe.

Presque une provocation.

pic.twitter.com/u1z6RKSI5i

— Laurent Bazin (@laurentbazin) June 30, 2024

The Guillotine jokes just write themselves.

Macron off to visit his beach house.
Photo credit: Le Parisien

Tomorrow France will battle it out between a regressive isolationist Right that is violently afraid of everything, and a Left that might actually (fingers crossed) be shaking off some of their necrotic and problematic forebearers to deal with some of the very real problems France is facing. And they are real problems. Immigrants and poor people need services. The bureaucracy is failing to the point of being a human rights abuse. Someone has to balance the books after Macron’s disastrous budget decisions. Climate adaptation isn’t moving fast enough, and French farmers are often in conflict with both the adaption process and the abuses of big agribusinesses. France has struggled with the cost of living, even if less than most of its peer nations. More and more cities are falling into housing crises. Much reasonable fear and demand for proactive and competent government gets channeled into destructive othering, by the like of the Far Right, but also through the entire political spectrum. But France has everything it needs to fix itself, it is a rich and well-built country. It could even do right by its former colonies, if it wanted to.

It can choose a healthy and sustainable life for its native children and its talented and lovely immigrants both. It just has to choose.

I’m going to give the last word to a thousand academics, historians, activists and general smarty pants French people who are begging the French people to do the right thing at the Guardian:

“For the first time since the second world war, the far right is at the gates of power in France. As historians from differing political backgrounds who share an attachment to democratic values and the rule of law, we cannot remain silent in the face of an alarming prospect that we still have the capacity to resist….”

Good luck France, and God Bless.

The Tories are Exhausting.

This Thursday the 4th of July the UK will be overcast in the low 60s with some intermittent rain, and all the parliamentary seats will be up for grabs as the UK turns out for yet another insane British snap election. This one was called by Rishi Sunak, the Almost Certainly About To Be Former Prime Minister of the UK.

Snap elections as such don’t exist in the US. There are reasons for special elections to be called outside of the normal cycle, but they are extraordinary. A snap elections just means the Prime Minister wants to have a go at it. And Rishi Sunak called one. He seems tired of being PM, tired of Britain, maybe tired of life.

I’m going to explain roughly how these elections work, if you want to skip this part, that’s understandable. Just scroll down to the picture of a kitten.

Elections are quite different in the UK than the US. Eligible voters all over the four countries that make up the United Kingdom will head to the polls and vote for a local representative, sorted by party affiliation, one of which will be made their Member of Parliament. Many will just be voting for a party, rather than a person. Some local MPs are quite well known in their local constituencies,  and well enough loved to carry votes from across the spectrum, but many are not. Similar to Congressional elections, a lot of people who vote a party line rather than for a person are trying to influence the shape of the national government, not just local representive business.

That’s it, that’s all they get to vote for in these national elections. In this way, it’s much simpler than an American election.

There are 650 constituencies in the United Kingdom. The closest equivalent in America is probably Congressional districts. These constituencies are geographically contiguous and range from roughly 21,000 to 90,000 residents. There are sometimes accusations of gerrymandering in the UK, but it is strictly amateur stuff compared to the mathematical insanity of American redistricting.

Unlike America, the British don’t vote for governmental roles. The people don’t vote for the Prime Minister, at least not directly. Brits get one representative in the Parliament, and that’s that. The various jobs, privileges, and positions get worked out when this particular mob of election winners show up at Westminster Palace in London.

Great Britain uses a first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system, or what Americans think of as just how elections work. There are many other ways of structuring voting, used in jurisdictions all over the world, but they remain mostly undiscovered in America and the UK. First-past-the-post is a system everyone gets one vote, one time, and the guy with the most votes wins. This style of voting tends to favor two party systems, low diversity in political thought, and men. Voters are usually timid in FPTP systems — you pick a team and stick with it. If you want your vote to matter, you pick one of the two big teams. There’s even a concept for this in Political Science: Duverger’s law. Older democracies like America and the UK prefer FPTP because not much else had been discovered when they started trying to Democracy, and the politics around voting tends to be sticky. Criticizing the voting system often makes older people cranky in the traditional ‘we had it bad, why should you have it any better’ kind of way.

The UK doesn’t have a written constitution. If you mention that to them, they will angrily say that yes, they do, and point at a giant pile of Post-It notes going back to the 17th century. Then they will also mention a few things that aren’t written down and explain that it’s fine because everyone knows those bits. Well, everyone important, at least.

(I am not going to describe the devolved governments or the House of Lords, this is already too long.)

Whoever leads the party which won more than half the seats will be invited by King Charles to form a government. A minority government can also be invited, with the “supply and confidence” of a smaller party. This was the case with Theresa May’s government in 2017 which needed the assistance of the Northern Irish hard line Democratic Unionist Party to stay in government. But it’s often unstable. See Theresa May’s government in 2017.

The winners, now the government, sit on the right of the Speaker of the House of Commons. And the Opposition — the ones that didn’t win the election — sit on the left. (Being the Speaker of the House of Commons is nothing like the Speaker of the House. The term is a false friend.) The job of Speaker of the House of Commons involves calling on MPs who want to talk, telling them when to vote, and shouting “Orrrrdeh!” at grown-up politicians behaving like an out of control middle-school classroom.

If no one party gets a majority, two parties can enter into a coalition to govern together, but  they often fall apart — much like the House and Senate being at odds with each other and the President. (Though we just have to live with it for years, whereas the Brits can go back to the polls sooner with a snap election.)

The Prime Minister doesn’t run for the office of PM; they’re just another MP, technically. But they are generally the leader of their party. As for who gets what job, that’s an internal party matter, and surprisingly little of it is formally legislated. (The party leadership elections are a whole different process which varies by party by-laws.) From there the PM tries to pass laws and create policy, with the usual drama that entails in modern democracies.

The PM can call for an election anytime, with the provision that he or she has to call for one within a five year term. And that’s what Rishi Sunak did on May 22nd, when he called an election for this Thursday. He did this while trailing the opposition by about 20 points in the polls, which is just as much of a death sentence in the UK as the US. He called it while getting unceremoniously rained on, as if even the sky itself was saying “Nah, fuck this guy.”

OK. Civics lesson over.

How it’s Going? (Badly)

We all need this right now

To thank you for reading this, I have provided a kitten picture.

The Conservative Party, also known as the Tories, has been in power for 14 years. It will almost certainly be wiped out at the polls, possibly even out of meaningful existence, but probably not. Modern democratic Britain is a conservative, capital T- Tory, country. They spent nearly 60 years in power during the 20th century, and one of the longest lasting Labour PMs, Tony Blair, basically got the job by being a Tory in all but name. Britain hates the Tories because they continually crash the country into a wall, the same wall their faces are currently planted in now. But Brits love the Tories because Tories tell them that Britain is the best, and they shouldn’t feel bad about the British Empire, and they can go it alone, because they’re made of sterner stuff, and meant to be the best rich white people that rich white people can be, and like Lucy with the damn football, the Brits fall for it every damn time.

Right now in normal, not Tory-fantasy-land Great Britain, everything sucks.

Fuel poverty is skyrocketing, a record number of people are relying on food banks, companies are dumping raw sewage into almost every waterway in England. The National Health Service has more patients on waiting lists for medical care than Ireland has people. The economy is trash, productivity has been flailing since the financial crisis, and the trains are barely running.

Homelessness is becoming common, and young people despair of ever owning a house even as their rents balloon. The country is at least 1.2 million houses behind what it needs.

House building hasn’t kept up with population. One in every 26 houses needed by British families… doesn’t exist. This drives house prices and rents up, but there’s just no way to shelter people if there’s no shelter. There are many reasons a particular person might be the one that become homeless, but that someone had to become homeless in the UK is simply math. The question of  is not why people become homeless, we know why. The only question is  who will become homeless — the ones left standing, when the music stops.

The prisons are overflowing, the police forces are undermanned. The buildings made with shitty RAAC (Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) are falling down piece by piece, including inside of  over two hundred primary and secondary schools in the whole UK.

Compared to the European Neighborhood, the UK is doing even worst than its own estimations.

The chances of seeing a dentist are slightly better than winning a lottery, and people are pulling out teeth at home. There’s not enough people to provide either childcare or eldercare, and not enough money to retain the people doing these jobs now. According to Tim Harford writing in the Financial Times, “Real household disposable income per capita has barely increased for 15 years,” and “the deficit is a permanent fixture, and interest payments on public debt have risen to levels not seen for 40 years.” Bigotry against trans people, nursed by the Conservatives, spans the political spectrum — perhaps a comforting distraction . The Tories would rather pay for flights to Rwanda for asylum seekers than pay their own NHS junior doctors.

And there’s more, and more… a litany of failure, complaints, and human misery.

David Cameron

Falling relative productivity since the financial crisis. This one’s on Cameron, and his stupid austerity.

Truly these last 14 years of Tory rule have been like no other, but to understand this you have to understand David Cameron, Conservative Prime minister, 2010 to 2016. Cameron is the Simone Biles of failing up. No matter how much he wrecked Great Britain, embarrassed himself, or both, he always stuck the landing like it was the easiest thing, like he meant to do it. He introduced Austerity to Britain after the 2009 financial crisis, and convinced his people to starve themselves half to death instead of trying to reform a corrupt banking system. He didn’t take care of his people, he told them, “stiff upper lip!” and went back to one of his multi-million pound homes in the English countryside.

There was no good reason to do austerity, and every country that did suffered terribly as the economy slowed. But most of them had Austerity forced on them, Cameron forced it on his own people. He then accidentally took the UK out of the EU when he didn’t mean to, trying to show off after managing to barely not lose Scotland. No one thought he was insane enough to accidentally leave the EU when he didn’t want to, but he was, and he didn’t care. After that, he walked away from the job, literally singing a little song to himself, and ushered in years of Brexit chaos all of Europe is still trying to get over.

Cameron might have thought he was done failing up after all that, but then he was asked back by Sunak last year to become Foreign Secretary of the UK. But since he wasn’t an MP, Sunak made him Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, in the County of Oxfordshire. Now he’s Lord Cameron, he even gets a little Santa-looking cape to wear in the House of Lords. That’s all real things adult men did.

He recently fell for some Russian pranksters and talked about Ukraine policy with them because he thought they were the former Ukrainian president. I tried to check, but it’s unclear if this was a video call.

Theresa May

Cameron was succeed by Theresa May, the first Prime Minister to be eaten by Brexit and her own Tory MPs on the back benches of Parliament. She discovered quickly that a clean exit from the EU that involved taking a large chunk of the island next to Britain was impossible. Not the least because the Republic of Ireland has been sick of this shit for a good long time. The Good Friday Agreement had made the Troubles in Ireland kind of go away, but Brexit threatened to bring them back. The prospect of a hard Brexit with a hard Irish border was likely to see a lot of violence, and no one really knew what to do about it. The Brexiteers just failed to talk about it, back in the days of “Reclaiming Our Freedoms.” May failed again and again to get a deal that both the EU and her own party would agree to. Even when the EU was trying to ease the way, Boris Johnson, the next asshat in this story, would just gesticulate and yell that nothing was ever good enough, nothing what ever Brexit enough. Mostly because he was after her job.

May was just a nasty person. Before she was PM, she’d instituted a Home Office hostile environment policy in and effort to reduce migration. This policy amounted to the UK making itself so mean and incompetent that it would just be too hard and awful for migrants to stay. Her administration also deported people back to places where they would face human rights violations against international law. Eventually her hostile policy got so hostile that the government ended up detaining and deporting a bunch of elderly Afro-Caribbean migrants who had lived in the UK for decades legally, after answering the call from the British government to rebuild England post WW2. Yes, the victims of this scandal were color coded, for easy human rights abuses! Eventually the scandal lead to the establishment of a Windrush Day holiday in the UK, to commemorate the hard work and contributions of migrants, particularly Afro-Caribbean migrants, to rebuilding Britain.

This year the UK government celebrated Windrush Day by evicting an 89 year old woman born in Jamaica who came to the UK in 1960 to work in a factory. She built a life and and raised her children in the UK. But she doesn’t have a passport.

So that’s going well.

Eventually Theresa May resigned after three years in office, making way for Boris Johnson.

The Good Chap Theory of Government Meets Boris Fucking Johnson

That no one has bother to work out or write down the nature of the UK Constitution makes things complicated at times. The assumption of these well heeled and well educated (mostly) men is that if you were in the club, you were almost undoubtedly a Good Chap. This is actually a soft doctrine of British politics: that if you made it in the door, you’re probably an good guy and we should just trust that. The good chap is someone with manners, morals, and decorum. How well this idiotic principle of governance held up historically may be a matter of opinion, but it did not survived May’s successor, poisonous blancmange in human form, Boris Johnson. Johnson, a columnist who had jumped into politics presumably because he wasn’t getting enough attention, campaigned hard for Brexit. He was Brexit’s number one hype man, along with Lovecraftian Innsmouth monster Nigel Farage. Johnson has a kind of goofy golden retriever energy to him, a vague cover for the hedonistic nihilism he would show later and that would eventually bring him down. He tells truth and lies triumphantly and with gusto, never seeming to care which one he’s doing at the moment. The Tories tried to treat Johnson like a normal good chap, and he destroyed them. More than any other lousy ass in this list of incompetent, cruel, bigoted British rulers, Boris Johnson wrecked the Conservative Party. He broke the law partying during his own lock down. He lied continuously and obviously to the House of Commons. He lied to the people of Britain about his “oven ready Brexit deal” which did nothing to fix the problems May had encountered. He lied to everyone with the ease of a child laughing. Trying to treat Boris Johnson like a Good Chap was the political equivalent of kissing a nuclear control rod. The question isn’t if you’ll die, but when and how mangled you’ll be when you die.

Eventually beset with too many scandals and actual crimes for the House to ignore, he exited the scene. The only person who benefited from Johnson’s tenure was Nigel Farage. Farage is actually polling well enough to get a seat in Parliament right now. That’s how bad the Tories fucked up.

Liz Truss

With Boris gone it was on to the next terrifying pasty Tory. After a contentious leadership election in which the Tory membership proved their mettle by overwhelmingly fighting to get Liz Truss into the Premiership over the desires of the people, the media, and the actual Tory MPs, who knew her and knew she was insane. But she got a chance to show the world her vision for a strong Britain. She took an economy David Cameron had spent years trying to ruin and managed to crash it completely in less than two months – Great British efficiency! The hurt she caused will be scarring the people of Britain for a generation, but at least she gets to hang out with Trump’s crew in America now.

And Finally, Dishy Rishi

It was time for the technocratic lanky human calculator to take the scene. Rishi Sunak, celebrated for his lack of understanding about how viruses and air work in the midst of a pandemic. He managed to make his very own wave of disability and death, with his Eat Out to Help Out scheme, and by this point doesn’t that seem like the top line of the CV for a Tory Prime Minister?

Sunak was as bad as all of them, though he never quite rose to their deliberate evil, more fumbling without caring who he hurt. Perhaps an improvement on the Tories’ active and hateful malice. In the end, Rishi Sunak was unlucky, last to be holding the premiership hot potato as the 5 year clock ran down. He decided on sudden death to go for it, try to get re-elected against all odds, or at least be done with it so he can move back to Venice Beach, gaze out at the Pacific from his mansion, and ignore the kids killing each other in gang fights behind his building. July 4th can be his independence day, and he can go back and re-up that green card.

Maybe even get a job at Facebook to keep him busy.

After 14 years of Conservative rule, Britain is broken and exhausted. Labour and Kier Starmer is almost certainly headed for a win, but like Tony Blair, Labour is  just trying to be the Tories Lite. No one is holding out much hope the Starmer will fix the nation, because he’s made it clear he won’t. He’s promising just slightly less of the same things the Tories are promising. So the British slog on to the polls tomorrow.

Perfidious Albion, indeed.

I’ll give the last word to the illimitable Douglas Adams, who knew his people well:

“…On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”
“What?”
“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”

From emptywheel: As the United States slow-walks its way towards a potential Trump re-election on November, Emmanuel Macron decided to accelerate the process of marching towards fascism by calling a snap election. Quinn Norton offers this post of how insanely stupid the decision was.

France, EU Elections, and The Rise of The Far Right in Europe

Ah… Europe, the old world. It’s the home of castles, wines, fairy tales, and ridiculous politics.

The first thing to realize is that the EU is structured like a kind of parliamentarian democracy turducken. Each of the countries in the block have their own constitutions, some presidential to various degrees, but most with parliamentary systems. However, they all send representatives and leaders to the European Union level, which is sometimes more power than member states, but usually less. The EU can tell its member states to do things, but then leaders like Hungary’s Orban can shoot back with the proverbial “You and whose army?” and just go on wrecking Hungarian democracy, kissing up to Putin, and trying to kill his gays.

Europe is notoriously old, but Europe as a political entity is so young as to be still forming in some ways, and so Europeans aren’t used to caring about it. The pattern of voter care is reversed from the United States. People vote like they mean it in their own local contexts, but when it comes to the federal EU level, fewer people show up and they trash vote more. They vote as if it doesn’t matter, because many of them don’t think it does. As a result, voting at the EU level has attracted more political extremes at times than the more well-funded and attention grabbing local national elections do.

Still, EU elections can be, and often are, bellwethers, and they rightfully worry national leaders and parties. After the recent EU elections, the most worried leader was France’s Macron, whose party lost these European elections to Rassemblement National, or National Rally.  RN won 30 seats, about a third of what was up for grabs. A third may not sound great to someone used to a two party system, but the next on the list was 13 seats. They wiped the floor with every other party, including Macron’s Renaissance party. It was not a good look for anyone who doesn’t like literal fascism, Macron included.

May First In Paris is never a party for the President.

So Emmanuel Macron, president of a whole-ass country, threw a temper tantrum and tossed out the entire government, dismissed his parliament and declared there would be elections three weeks later. Yes, that’s a thing the French president can do. If you’re thinking that’s not a great constitutional power for a president to have, you’re right! But if you’re also in the country that has the Electoral College and the filibuster, you might not be in a position to judge too harshly.

Voting in France is a two round run-off system in most cases. Many candidates run in the first round on a Sunday, and are narrowed to (almost always) two options in the second round of voting, which always comes the Sunday a week later. That first Sunday vote is four days from now.

There’s no direct vote for the Prime Minister in the French system, the French electorate vote for local candidates with specific party affiliations. The Prime Minister is usually chosen by the majority party in Parliament, and the President, who is ideally of the same party, does the official appointing them bit. (Presidential elections are separate, and in most cases occur several weeks apart from legislative elections.)

When everything is going to shit, there’s no obvious majority and no clear winners, the president can end up “co-habiting” with a Prime Minister he doesn’t like, or more importantly, share a party affiliation with. This situation is broadly similar to when the President of the United States doesn’t have either the House or Senate on his side. Getting shit done can be almost impossible. (However the government can’t just shut down, that’s a stupidity unique to the good ol’ US of A.)

Then there’s the people he’s most likely to be “co-habiting” with,by all accounts: France’s most popular party right now, the Rassemblement National.

The National Rally is France’s far right party, started by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972 as The National Front as extreme right wing. It was the real deal, too — not just anti-immigration, Le Pen ended up in legal trouble for Holocaust denial, was anti-Europe, and openly racist. He also probably did war crimes in Algeria. He was eventually ousted by his own daughter, Marine Le Pen, who leads the party to this day. She is a much more palatable version of her dad, and more willing to soften her tone and react to the political environment. She keeps a weather eye on France and Europe in general. Marine Le Pen eased the RN’s anti-Europe position after Brexit, and jettisoned any public criticism of Jewish people. In fact, she said Israel “must be permitted to eradicate Hamas” because someone needs to be getting killed to make the RN happy, and probably someone brown. The Le Pens, just a charming family all around.

The official president of the National Rally is political fetus Jordan Bardella, a good-looking 28 year old who hasn’t been alive long enough to have pissed anyone off, and dated within the Le Pen clan. He is apparently comfortable enough living with Marine Le Pen’s hand up his ass, working him like a ventriloquist’s dummy. He can speak in complete sentences, and manage to not sound like Daddy Le Pen, even when he’s making the same points about North Africans. Nobody else in French political life is ever supposed to get close to the RN, and even have a term for this policy – it is the Cordon Sanitaire (sanitary cordon) of French political life.

This political crisis, like all political crises is a creature of the national legal regime. France is in its 5th republic, which was established by Charles de Gaulle in 1958, well after, but in response to, WW2. Make no mistake; de Gaulle was almost as authoritarian as the people he fought. He wanted to be a king, or at least have some French king-style powers — and those powers persisted into the Fifth French Republic. France has been dealing with a stupid array of presidential powers ever since. There was nothing stopping Macron from throwing the country into complete turmoil because he didn’t like the European election results. (Fun fact, if he doesn’t like the result of these upcoming elections, he can do it all again a year later! Stupid but true!)

Macron hasn’t been popular for years, and it often feels like that’s why he got into the game, so it’s not surprising that he’s acting like a angry, tired toddler. It is, however, inconvenient and disruptive to have one of the more powerful countries in Europe, with its fingerprints all over the world, existing in a political temper tantrum. Europe is worried, the international community confused, and France itself is losing its shit.

No one knows what will happen in 4 days. It’s so bad that the left wing seems to have gotten its shit together and built a coalition almost overnight, something the French Left have seemed incapable of in recent years. La France Insoumise, or France Unbowed in English, has managed to slide into second place despite the fact that they’re known mostly for infighting and running the same terrible geriatric candidate no one wants for more than a decade. (That candidate, Melenchon, has even stepped back for this election. I assume someone is holding his tiny dog hostage.)

BFMTV Screenshot The doors of the (French) Republicans’ headquarters after the party head locked himself in.

Les Republicans, the party that both figuratively and literally maps to the Republicans in the US has fallen into total chaos after one of its leaders decided he would join up with the fascist/racist National Rally. He broke the cordon sanitaire the French parties had kept for decades with the National Rally by approaching them for an alliance. Other Republicans didn’t agree, and hadn’t had a clue what he was up to.

The result was hilarious levels of public infighting, including the now fascist-curious Les Republicans leader locking himself in their headquarters and refusing to come out. He ended up getting physically rousted out by others in his party after they found another key to the building, all of which was televised live on French TV. Then he went to a judge to get put back in charge of his party, because Les Republicans is a group of lawmakers so bad at their job they didn’t notice their own party bylaws wouldn’t let them depose a leader that was cozying up to the fascist Right.

It’s a total clown car of French politics, but despite all the outrages coming from parliamentarians, it’s still Macron’s clown car, and he’s still driving it off a cliff.

The Hollow King

Macron always fashioned himself as a kind of republican king of France. I suspect he was tempted by the job of president in the first place by the position being similar to America’s imperial presidency, which undoubtedly influenced de Gaulle’s 5th Republic.

In this way, Macron imagines he is walking in the footsteps of de Gaulle, but without anything near de Gaulle’s political competence. Yes, Macron has a lot of powers. Like the American president he’s pretty untouchable on international policy and relations. This, again, is the classic de Gaulle borrowing from the Americans, with a few cleaned up legal principles. For instance, American presidents often have a terrible time trying to get treaties ratified back home. They go make promises, like Wilson did at the end of World War One when he tried to start the League of Nations (a precursor to the UN). But then they can’t get their own Senators to keep the promises. De Gaulle made sure that’s a lot easier in the 5th Republic than the US Constitution. The president can just ratify treaties himself. But Macron can be hog-tied on domestic policy if he doesn’t have parliament on his side.

And boy, does he ever not have the French Parliament on his side.

When he was still a new shiny good-looking boy in 2017, Macron claimed the mantle of mature centrist. Then he immediately ruined it by trying to slyly claim the the French crown. Yes, that one — the one that got so many heads chopped off. He said that “In French politics, this absence is… a King, a King whom, fundamentally, I don’t think the French people wanted dead.” Despite them being rather famously murdery toward monarchs, Macron seemed to see the French Revolutions more like a series of very violent toddler melt downs than political moments that changed both France and the world. He went on: “the Revolution dug a deep emotional abyss… French democracy does not manage to fill this void.”

A common sight at Parisian protests, this lovely painting portrays Macron as Louis the 16th, head as yet attached.

If this 18th century king-shaped void does somehow exist in the French collective consciousness, he certainly didn’t manage to fill it either. But in trying to, he’s driven a whole-ass country into a ditch. France’s finances are a mess, its politics are on fire, and Macron is whining that there might be a civil war, without a hint of self-awareness about who might be responsible for crashing the country. He is still waiting, petulant and scolding, to be coronated for his wisdom, while his beloved Center falls apart. He did a terrible job, and feels sorry for himself because his terrible decisions have had real consequences.

Macron is disappointed in France for not being inert. For being a country and a people who have desires, opinions, and conflicts that go beyond neoliberal financial stability.

He is, and has remained, a true centrist, through and through.

By their own definitions, centrists are a funny lot. Because they define themselves as being in the middle, their philosophy is ruled by everyone else. To be a loyal centrist means believing things only relative to what others believe, believing in nothing at all, because that could anchor you closer to one side or the other. It’s a kind of palatable political nihilism, the most sociopathic of political positions. There’s no theory or action of centrism; it seeks to be inert. Its meaning is defined by all of those around it, triangulating to be between principles, but never in danger of having any principles. Centrists like to imagine they are grown ups, when in fact they are hollow men, heads filled with straw. Macron could perhaps be the king of centrists, saying anything and sounding like nothing more than rats’ feet over broken glass.

So, what happens to France? And consequently, the rest of Europe as well?

I suspect the rightward turn will continue for two reasons: first, people get conservative when they’re scared, and the world is very scary right now. The other reason is generational. Most of the kids today are the first generation since the 20th century wars who have no one in their lives that lived under authoritarian rule, or experienced fascism first hand.

For Europe’s recent generations, (with the exception of Spain) Nazis are abstractions, fascism is a theory. Most didn’t grow up with relatives who fled or fought in wars. Fascism just looks like order and safety and power, an attractive alternative to the chaos and uncertainty of climate change and wars. Fascism promises someone will take care of you. As long as you don’t challenge the order of things, no one will challenge you. Difficult people will disappear, what you want will be given to you. You can watch all the football you like, 24 hours a day.

When things go wrong, there will always be someone else, not you, to blame. In a world of floods and fires and wars and mass migration, fascism looks like a solution — a little freedom (and usually someone else’s freedom at that) for a lot of security. If you’ve never lived under authoritarians, or known anyone who did, the pitch can sound pretty good.

The French Right offer security and homogeneity to the French people. The Left promise diversity, freedom, and a lot of work. Macron has nothing to offer his people. And so, disappointed in the people he has failed, he’s trashing France.

Whatever the election results, France is in trouble. Whither go the fates of France and Germany, much of the EU will likely follow.

Whatever happens today, the Union is done.

It has been for a long time, maybe even from the start. But we have reached the point where the longer it goes on, the more harm it will inexorably do. It’s time, past time, to admit it didn’t work, it never worked, and that the Constitution and its institutions have ossified. There is no reforming the United States of America, there is no more perfect union to chase after. That turned out to be a lie — a lie woven into the legal fabric of this nation-state from the start. The United States of America, as defined by its constitution, can only get worse because of how irreparably broken both that document and the system it created are. This isn’t a Trump or GOP thing. They are symptoms, but they are only symptoms. As angry as you may be at Trump, voting him out, driving him from the country, jailing him, whatever, none of that will fix the great flaw that created his presidency. It does no more than shoe a fly away from an open wound and call it fixed.

The flaw is our Constitution. As there is no politically possible path to rewriting the it, the Constitution can only fall further into entropy and catastrophe.

The longer this goes on, the worse the end will be. This is why it’s the duty of people who are in and of, or love, America the culture, Americans the people, the land it spans and the diversity it holds, to imagine what comes next and the easiest way to get there. We’ve been running what was essentially the broken beta of the first representative democracy for almost 250 years, and it was built to not be upgradable. It doesn’t work right, it never did, and it is awful. It was a compromise of rich and frightened men whose imaginations (understandably) didn’t reach far beyond the 18th century.

The nightmares we live with, and their disconnect from the values we hold now are impossible to count. I was researching children in ICE detention living in cages, and their families being held in unsafe conditions and coerced into forced labor — back in the Obama days. The exploitation of forms of unfree labor continues to this day, as does the rise of oligarchy and political corruption.

Police have killed almost 900 people this year, despite a mismanaged pandemic presumably making it somewhat harder. The Flint water crisis is six years old this year, and still going. One person has been found guilty and sentenced to probation. I could go on, but you know this song: opioid crisis, inequality, lobbying, campaign finance, the two party system, gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, and of course, the damn virus. And still, all these problems are just symptoms of a deeper disease, a broken political basis for our society. Our laws have lead to an irreparable failure of the American system when it comes to the basic task of keeping the people who constitute it alive and functional and with some kind of path to a sustainable, if not improving, existence. Medical care, housing, and education are all contingent. These are the most fundamental parts of having this thing called government and ours failed these tasks aggressively, despite the brilliance and determination of even its most oppressed people pushing forward our culture to greater things.

It’s impossible to change any of this at a fundamental level, because it is impossible to re-write or even amend the superstructure of our laws and our government. Even if the GOP lost everything, and the Democrats suddenly became a party of reform (which they won’t), nothing could meet the global problems we face because the judiciary will destroy efforts to reform and remake ourselves at every turn. But even before we get to the problem of the judiciary, the two party system is disconnected from the world as it is now: facing the end of the Holocene and with that, a planet that is gentle to humans. What was the most democratic system of the 18th century is a travesty of permitted corruption, unrepresentative elites, and openly bought-and-paid-for influence. It’s over, it’s done, it’s time to let it go before it kills us all.

The successes of America, and there have been many, came not because of our form of governance but despite it. The culture – for good and ill – isn’t the constitution or the legal regime or the nation-state as recognized by other nation-states. It’s the people. It’s what we choose, believe, and imagine. Right now we choose to be constrained by a document that has manifestly failed us.

And yes, there have been efforts at positive movement using our constitutional framework, like the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. But they have been undermined and destroyed almost at birth by the perniciousness of the very flaws amendments were meant to fix. And thusly, because of the 14th, we live in a world were Exxon holds the rights meant for black folk who still struggle to vote.

After spending much of my adult life feeling alone in my views, it has surprised me how many people have said to me over the last years, and especially this year, that there’s no redeeming this union, that it’s not worth preserving. But this is not an ending thought that drops into a void.

The end of the Union isn’t a hopeless position, but the only hopeful one we have. The alternative isn’t chaos and dystopia, just as the alternative to monarchy in the 17th and 18th century wasn’t chaos and dystopia. It was us.

Right now is when we start imagining and working on the most peaceful and productive transition to a post-USian world we can manage. That may seem impossible, but that’s also what we thought about the Soviet Union in 1987. It’s what we thought about the end of European hegemony at the end of the colonial ages. It’s what we thought right before parliamentary reform swept Europe after 1848. Right now we’re settling for Churchill‘s worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…, in this world of sin and woe. Why does humanity think it needs to stop there? We invented everything we have now politically, technologically, culturally, and in ways of coordinating and governing.

Why on earth are so many people convinced that we don’t have anything more to invent?

The founders imagined a new thing, but they chickened out and didn’t do it. They half-assed it, retreated from their own notions. When they were done with the thing, it was born almost a ghost and tied down to the old hierarchies. The framers of the constitution were afraid of their own notions of self-determination and equality. They pulled back and tried to not make it too democratic a nation for three million people, and now it fails more than three hundred million. In fact, it fails more than seven billion.

In 2020, this structure has been constraining the political imagination for centuries, stunting our growth, and stunting the world.

My allegiance is not to America, and it hasn’t been for many years. My allegiance is to my family — my family of all the strange living things, unique in a seemingly endless void of rock and chemistry filling the universe, but not life, not as far as we know. I do love America — the land, the people, the crazy, loud, funny and emotional culture. I will always love America, but like all real love, it will be complicated. I don’t have to love its flaws, its racism, its cowardly cruelty, or its legal institutions in order to love its soul.

My allegiance isn’t to a bastard compromise of frightened men in 1776, or 1648, or even 1555. It’s to the world now, in 2020. Those men are long dead, and they do not get to describe the limits of political imagination in the 21st century. But right now, we are trapped in the infinitesimal space these old men described for us, surrounded on all sides by the high cliffs of doubt and familiarity. We need to succeed where they failed — humanity is counting on it.

I know it’s unthinkable that any of this could change, just as it was unthinkable that Rome could fall, that Carthage would be wiped from the map, that the Russian Empire could cease to be, that the Dynasties of China would come to an end, that the Toltecs would collapse, that the eternal Pharaohs of Egypt would pass from the world, and any more of the dozens of political systems that have come and gone. We are still here, waiting on something worthy of our brilliance and creativity.

One of our greatest poets, a man treated like shit for the color of his skin, wrote

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

If you want to call that thing Hughes sang for America, sure, why not. But don’t mistake it for the quicksand of desires we inhabit now. Don’t mistake it for this most failed of hoped-for states. Don’t even mistake it for a Westphalian state.

It all stops the day we decide it stops. None of these documents, forms, systems, or laws have any existence beyond our imaginations, and they never did. It is 2020, and we face a pandemic (with undoubtedly more to come), the end of our own Holocene, environmental destruction, and the task of meeting the needs of eight billion people in this world. It’s time to abandon the best systems men could think of in the late 1700s and figure out one that works now. We could even lead the world in figuring out what comes after the Westphalian nation-state, hopefully before that legal and cultural construct kills us all.

This too shall pass. How it passes, whether it’s the end of the world, or the birth of a better one, is up to our imaginations, which we need to put to work in a hurry.

And so, on this most strange of days, I put the question to you – What comes after America?