Martin Cruz Smith died last week. I was in the middle of his latest book , (Hotel Ukraine), that had just come out two weeks ago. The book, the last in the Arkady Renko series, takes place at the time of the Russian incursion into Ukraine.
For years, he was one of my favorite authors. His combination of interesting locales, good deduction, political overtones and one of the best and most likable police sleuths, never failed to satisfy.
“Best known as the author of (Gorkypark), Havana Bay, Wolves Eat Dogs, and Polar Star, were other best sellers by him. RJB
Secretariat won the Triple Crown in 1973. He set a record in each race, that are still records today. He won the Belmont Stakes by a remarkable 31 lengths. Truly a magnificent race horse. Many would call him the greatest race horse of all time. Some may consider another race horse as the greatest, but “that’s what makes horse races.”
We all hear that this song is the best, or this movie, book, or painting was the greatest ever created. The opinion is either subjective or what could be considered an objective universal view. Objective universal views are hard to find. They require that almost everyone is in agreement. You might say that Picasso was a good painter or that Jimi Hendrix was a good guitar player, are examples of objective universal views. Hard to debate. But saying that something is the greatest of all time obviously opens itself up to disagreement.
I recently read that Paul McCartney said that excluding his own albums, the Beachboys”Pet Sounds” was, his favorite album of all time. He said that when it first came out, and he still feels that way today. I saw a video where when asked about albums that he didn’t like, Bob Dylan had “Pet Sounds”high on his list. He thought the album was shallow and commercial. These views, while coming from experts, couldn’t be more diverse.
99 % of all opinions, don’t come from experts, but from regular folk. Other opinions about any work of art come from two main sources, exposure to and experience with. I remember (1970), riding to the top of Santa Monica Canyon in my friend’s 1929 Helms bakery truck, “After the Gold Rush” came on the radio. Young’s high voice captured the moment and made it unforgettable to me.
Contrasting opinions are easy to find. I read that when David Crosby first heard Bob Dylan’s voice, he didn’t like it. That opinion changed over time. How many people shared that evolution of opinion. To me, they couldn’t have been more wrong. When I first heard “Man of constant sorrow”, from his first album, I knew he was something special.
There is no measuring stick for perfection in art, only the artist’s efforts to achieve it. RJB
In the mix of counter-UAS systems under development today like kinetics, lasers, and jamming, only one technology, high-power microwave (HPM), is specifically designed to take out swarms of drones all at once.
Attacking swarms have become a common feature in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Defensive systems, however, can only shoot down one threat at a time. To address that gap, the Defense Department is experimenting with high-power microwave (HPM) to disable drone swarms and other devices dependent on electronics.
A defensive concept known as “one-to-many”, the U.S. Army is developing these systems with Epirus, a “neo prime” focused on asymmetric warfare. Epirus has delivered four prototype HPM counter-swarm systems under a $66 million OTA issued by the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office in early 2023 under the Integrated Fires Protection Capability High Power Microwave (IFPC-HPM) program. Epirus delivered the first IFPC-HPM system nine months after contract award and finalized delivery of all four systems in March 2024. The Army followed in October with an approximately $17 million contract modification for the development and integration of an upgraded sensor suite in support of IFPC-HPM.
Breaking Defense discussed HPM with Epirus CEO Andy Lowery.
Breaking Defense: What’s the idea behind using HPM to counter drone swarms and the concept of one-to-many short-range air defense?
Andy Lowery is Epirus CEO.
Andy Lowery: This is an idea that changes the paradigm of how we think about defense of critical assets from a one-to-one thought process to a one-to-many thought process. It could be from a detection point of view, a command-and-control perspective, or in the case of Epirus, an effector perspective.
There aren’t many other types of systems that have one-to-many effects. Kinetics you rule out. They’re all one-to-one.
The counter-UAS strategy that the DoD published recently describes a need for this one-to-many philosophy of going after threats like what’s seen in network attacks, which are one-to-many attacks. When I talk to cyber experts, they are bored with me talking one-to-many. They say we’ve been talking about this for 20 years. So, we’re not actually alone in this idea or concept.
In electronic warfare, there’s an interesting comparison with the Next Generation Jammer (NGJ). One of my chief engineering accomplishments at Raytheon was to design the NGJ system, which is a cousin or even a brother to Leonidas, the high-power microwave systems that Epirus specializes in.
Waymo is another example. They have a different mission to navigate a car automatically, but they are processing one-to-many threats: a bicycle, a car, a commuter, a red light. How do they take in all of those 10,000 things at the same time and produce a meaningful objective?
That’s what we have to think about — HPM for high-value asset protection, short-range air-defense protection. The ways of protecting our guarded assets now need to evolve because swarms have manifested into the physical realm and are being developed by the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians.
Do we still need kinetics? Absolutely. We need the kinetics because there’ll be high-value targets that they are assigned to. Then there’ll be swarms – cheap, attributable, and autonomous in the not-too-distant future. Ask any counter-drone warfighter what’s the first thing that pops into their head when they hear the word ‘autonomy’, and they’ll tell you ‘swarms’. Like a Waymo vehicle, each one of them can be sent out with no signals or attachment to anything. The future of autonomy is no outside connectivity.
This is where we come in because it isn’t just counter swarms, it’s counter electronics in a sector-defense way. HPM will affect anything with electronics in it: boat and car motors, night-vision goggles, computers, and switches. That’s all vulnerable. Those all are hypersensitive to this type of electromagnetic radiation.
Epirus delivered the first IFPC-HPM system nine months after contract award and finalized delivery of all four systems in March 2024. (Epirus photo)
Tell us about your HPM solution called Leonidas.
Leonidas spins on a gimbal and generates a persistent field of electromagnetic energy in the sky. As you push it into the airspace, incoming drones come into that energy field and begin to get confused. Different parts of the electronics are starting to pull energy onto the boards and they begin to overload.
Epirus HPM basically cyber-attacks a target through an analog vector of absorption, meaning we don’t move in through an antenna through an RF chain and then into the digital part of the system that pushes out some kind of effect. We come straight into the analog pieces like a servo motor or wires that run down the wing of an aircraft. These things become vectors of attack for this type of entry with high-power microwave.
The CONOPs would be to find the exposed area of whatever asset you’re protecting. If it is a base totally out in the open you can’t beam these HPM systems over the base, so you would need to have maybe five or six of our systems positioned in a way that gives you 360-degree coverage. Remember that they’re additive; as you scan off angle, you’re adding the two together in order to give you a homogeneous bubble – really like a force field of energy with five or six of these.
Once Leonidas is installed, it becomes a permanent way to generate an HPM shield that can go defend against any number of drones indefinitely at just the cost of electricity.
The Army has tested our HPM technology upways and downways with all their threats that are relevant to these fights overseas – not to mention the fights domestically starting to happen – and we have 100-percent effectiveness.
Final thoughts?
Epirus is a formidable neo prime or next-generation prime. We work directly with the government, DoD, international agencies, and foreign governments in order to employ one-to-many defensive systems that are geared toward high-value asset protection. That could be bases, military airfields, civilian airports, stadiums, and refineries. As we zoom in, there could be local protection for JLTVs, Strykers, Abrams tanks, and C-17 transports.
What we’ve, in fact, done is create a forcefield of sorts, which by nature is a one-to-many system that can effectively counter swarms, as well as attacks coming from the consumer electronics and the irregular/asymmetric warfare vectors.
In order to defend that adequately, we need to do a lot of ‘me too’ and ‘better than’ the other guys – like companies such as Anduril and Saronic are doing. We’ve got to keep up, but we also have to flip it on its head and create capabilities in areas where the United States still bears a strong advantage.
The folks at Epirus were largely trained by the primes. Many of us also have dual backgrounds in consumer electronics and big data. Our CTO has Waymo, Raytheon, and AFRL in his background. By fusing advanced technologies with bold thinking informed by decades of leadership at A&D primes, Epirus is positioned at the forefront of this new neo-prime ecosystem.
I’ll have more to say about this after it sinks in. But I will say that no one does righteous indignation like Bruce Springsteen. And he is certainly indignant about what he feels like the Trump administration is doing to the country he loves.
Judging from the fact that his people have already edited together and released these remarks — delivered in Manchester at the first show in what’s now called “The Land of Hope and Dreams Tour” — I’d also say he doesn’t care who knows it.
Will we see Bruce bring this message to America? If I were a betting man I’d start saving up for tickets now.
Before “Land of Hope and Dreams”:
Good evening. It’s great to be in Manchester and back in the UK. Welcome to The Land of Hope and Dreams Tour. The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock and roll in dangerous times.
In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.
Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us. Raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring.
Before “House of a Thousand Guitars”:
How we doing Manchester? All right?
The last check on power, after the checks and balances of government have failed, are the people, you and me. It’s in the union of people around a common set of values. Now that’s all that stands between democracy and authoritarianism.
So at the end of the day, all we’ve really got is each other.
Before “My City of Ruins”:
Now, there’s some very weird, strange and dangerous shit going on out there right now.
In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.
In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.
In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers, they’re rolling back historic Civil Rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society, they’re abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom.
They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.
A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government.
They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American. The America that I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real, and regardless of its faults, is a great country with a great people.
So we’ll survive this moment.
Now, I have hope because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, in this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like. But there’s enough.
DT 2.0 used a formula to calculate tariffs based primarily on the trade deficit between the US and each country as a trading partner. The formula converts the trade deficit into a percentage. That is how it gets to tariff rates with a floor of 10% and no ceiling. Essentially, the larger the trade deficit, the higher the tariff. So smaller and poorer exporting countries have higher and higher tariff rates. The formula considers factors like tariffs imposed on US goods along with non-trade factors like currency manipulation and/or intellectual property theft. This approach is aimed at balancing trade deficits and confronting unfair trade practices. (Source: The Hill from multiple reports)
Kotok note: Labels of fair or unfair trade practices are opinions formed by countries, and they differ widely. For example, if I am a poor country, and my wage rates are much lower than yours, and I sell to you at a lower price, am I “unfair” — or am I just poor?
I asked an expert why Trump and Co. selected this bizarre and discredited approach to create its formula. His name is David Blond. He is a former chief economist for the Pentagon, and he worked in the Reagan administration. He subsequently founded QuERI International (http://www.queriinternational.com). He models the entire world in a cross-country trade economic model that was developed by him for the US. Here’s his personal email: davidblond2000@gmail.com.
He answered:
Apparently, they were applying some random formula to get these tariffs. I guess they realized that trying to administer 2 million individual tariffs (countries in the world times HS6-8 tariff lines was impossible for the government but also for the customs clearance freight agents who would have to get the goods out of customs and pay the costs).
I asked David for his take on this approach. He said,
I’m shocked by their stupidity and lack of care for the American people’s welfare. I have always thought Trump is the Manchurian Candidate not for the Russians but for the Democrats. Everything he is doing should tie the Republican party to Hoover-like stupidity — that didn’t work well for Republicans for thirty years. In the Reagan years, Trump’s approach would have lasted a few seconds and died quickly on the vine.
Kotok note: “HS6-8 tariff lines” refers to the 6-digit Harmonized System (HS) codes, which are internationally standardized for product classification, and the additional two digits used by individual countries, including the United States, to create more detailed tariff lines for their own national tariff schedules and statistical needs. The Harmonized System (HS): The HS is a standardized system used by the World Customs Organization (WCO) to classify traded products. For example, the 6-digit HS code for “yoghurt” is 0403.10, while a US tariff line for “low-fat yoghurt” might be 0403.10.11. Sources: WTO, WCO
Kotok view — we are in serious trouble as a country now because of this cockamamie scheme. The political pivot needed from DT 2.0 appears impossible without more pain suffered by Americans, who will eventually turn against DT 2.0, and that will trigger change.
I asked David Blond for his approach to the problem. Here’s his answer as a professional. Readers can evaluate this for themselves. We thank him for taking the time to share his model and history with us.
I wrote many an article over the last twenty years about the hollowing out of the American manufacturing sector, but there are good ways to deal with the problem and bad ways. Trump’s tariffs are the wrong way and will yield. If we are lucky, a recession, but if not then a depression if companies choose to lay off workers and shutter plants when demand falls rather than build new, costly, and impossible to staff with skilled workers new plants to replace the 20% plus of US consumption that is imported.
But this next step is so counter to the laws of logic as to be laughable. If you are going to fight a war against the world, then get the facts right. The table below, taken from my integrated global model and dataset that is based on a true set of trade, industry, employment, macro data for 72 countries and over 150 industries of which about 120 are traded commodities, is instructive. The way to read it is to look at the first column showing the share of US production exported to the world. The second column shows the same percent for the rest of the world (71 other countries making up about 90% plus of world gross output). The third column shows how much of the exports of other countries could replace US exports excluding US imports. We would need 27% more skilled labor to replace the lost foreign products net of exports. Good luck on that one.
This week we have gone back to sending short or moderate-length commentaries out in full via email so that you can access an entire commentary quickly. We hope this practice makes reading more convenient for many. You can also view commentaries online.
There’s a big difference between secondary tariffs and reciprocal tariffs. Their purpose and intention are different, and the outcomes may be different, too. Secondary tariffs are a form of economic warfare, like direct sanctions.
“The only certainty in (fiscal, trade and monetary) policy, politics, in our capital markets, in our social lives and, even in sports, is the lack of certainty these days.” — Doug Kass
Trump 2.0 tariffs and our trading partners’ retaliations are taking shape. What can we expect? Today I offer my own macro perspective and some thoughts from others.
"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs … If you can wait and not be tired by waiting … If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim … If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you … Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it. -Rudyard Kipling
Always brought something fresh to a role. Always memorable. Proud that he grew up living next to Roy Rogers. Excelled even when next to Pacino and De Niro.
Expiration dates that can’t be read or are too small to read.
Don’t take it if you’re allergic to it.
Streaming football.
The internet is full of rankings. Everything from toasters to dish soap is ranked from best to worst. These rankings use a slide show format. The one thing they have in common is that they always start with the worst and proceed one slide at a time to get to the best. You cannot skip to the best. There are at times 50 slides to go through to arrive at the one that you are interested in.
Auto ads that offer reasonable monthly payments, but require large cash payments up front.
Politicians that do not honor their oaths.
Humans that can’t be reached on customer service calls. Chat agents that are inadequate. Excessively long hold times. Customer service scripts.
Calling actresses actors.
Official inflation rates that are never as high as actual rates.
The country’s infatuation with the net worth of individuals. A high net worth may be a sign of success, or it may just be a sign of being born to rich parents, inheritance, or luck. It most certainly is not a sign of good character or intention to do good.
Means Testing was always a good idea to cut Social Security costs. Those very wealthy individuals who are collecting, in many cases around $5000 a month, are legally entitled to receive their payouts, but most muti millionaires and all billionaires, do not need the monthly payouts.
If the law was established to allow Means Testing, those with assets in excess of $10m,$20m, or whatever the amount decided upon would not get those payouts.
The payouts would be given if those individuals fell on hard times and needed the money. Utilizing Means Testing would greatly reduce the costs to the Social Security system and should be one of the major cost cutting tools implemented. RJB
Elon Musk's supposedly "anti-woke" chatbot, Grok, keeps spewing outputs that are hilariously opposed to the billionaire's views — including that newly-minted President Donald Trump is likely a Russian asset.
Responding to a prompt from Arizona Republic columnist EJ Montini, Musk's "maximally truth-seeking" AI, which is built into X, said after an analysis that the probability of the president being in the pocket of Vladimir Putin is between 75 and 85 percent.
After Montini asked Grok to rate on a scale from 1 to 100 that Trump is a "Putin compromised asset" based on public information and his "failure to ever say anything negative" about the Russian president, the chatbot went to work analyzing a "complex web of financial ties, personal interactions, political behavior, and circumstantial evidence."
Weighing the real estate magnate's dealings with both pre- and post-Soviet officials, the KGB, and the Russian mobs, Grok said that although there is no "smoking gun [that] proves direct control," there's a good chance that Trump is a "useful idiot" for Putin — especially given that "Trump’s ego and debts make him unwittingly pliable."
"Adjusting for uncertainty and alternative explanations (e.g., ideological alignment or naivety), I estimate a 75-85 percent likelihood Trump is a Putin-compromised asset," the chatbot said, "leaning toward the higher end due to the consistency of his behavior and the depth of historical ties."
Though this is obviously not the first time Trump has been accused of being a Putin puppet, and most certainly won't be the last, it's hilariously ironic that the chatbot funded by his alleged "co-president" is talking such deep smack.
Notably, this output comes after an unnamed employee at xAI, the company that hosts Grok, seemingly directed the chatbot to, as it told someone who demanded it show its instructions, "ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation."
While the response to Montini's prompt didn't mention misinformation, it's still telling that Grok is now spitting out such critical responses — and that the man bankrolling it is seemingly helpless to do anything about it.
David Johansen passed away this week. Known as one of the icons of punk/ glam rock. My wife and I were in Barbados when we first heard his solo album “HOT HOT HOT”, as Buster Poindexter, and immediately fell in love with it. R&B, Soul, it featured songs such as the Freddie Scott original of “Are You Lonely For Me Baby” and “Heart of Gold”. Give it a listen . You won’t be sorry. RJB
Hermann Hesse's mother Marie wrote: "The little fellow has a life in him, an unbelievable strength, a powerful will, and, for his four years of age, a truly astonishing mind. How can he express all that? It truly gnaws at my life, this internal fighting against his tyrannical temperament, his passionate turbulence […] God must shape this proud spirit, then it will become something noble and magnificent – but I shudder to think what this young and passionate person might become should his upbringing be false or weak."
The human rights activist Ethel Kennedy was truly a child of nature. At Hickory Hill, the grand 19th-century Virginia estate that she shared with her husband, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, animals would often roam wild — dogs and chickens and gerbils, but also more unorthodox pets like Komodo dragons, skunks, a tortoise from Kenya, a donkey named Peter Piper, a red-tailed hawk, a peregrine falcon, a seal that swam in the backyard pool and a coati-mundi that once, while Kennedy was giving an interview to a group of journalists, clawed out of its cage and sank its teeth deep into her leg. “She was seven months pregnant,” recalls Kennedy’s daughter Kerry. “And off she went to the hospital, with a coati-mundi attached to her!” This happened on the day Robert was preparing to publicly criticize President Lyndon B. Johnson and call for an end to the Vietnam War; Kerry remembers her mother lightheartedly proclaiming, when she returned from the hospital, that “if this is the worst attack on a Kennedy today, everything’s going to be just fine.”
Kennedy paired the grace and tact that she honed as a politician’s wife with zany charm in her personal life: Once, for a costume party at her brother-in-law Ted Kennedy’s house, she dressed up as Lady Godiva and rode a horse into his living room.
She never remarried after her husband’s assassination in 1968 but instead devoted herself to her children, grandchildren and animals.
“Wherever she went,” Kerry says, “she’d always have a dog.” This summer, Kennedy and Rascal, her latest and final companion, spent hours every day swimming and walking along the pier in Hyannis Port, Mass. — the very place where she first got to know Robert and his family. “She loved that beach; she loved that sand,” Kerry says. “She knew that water backward and forward. She knew every path that a boat could get in and out of and exactly where all the rocks were, and she swam there every afternoon of her life.”
Google captivated the tech world Monday with Willow, a new quantum chip that outperformed even the world’s best supercomputer on an advanced test, and experts say this week’s revelations are just the start of a new phase of cutting-edge computing.
The new chip, which even wow'd Tesla CEO Elon Musk, can complete a complex computation in five minutes that would take the most powerful supercomputer 10 septillion years—more than the estimated age of the universe, wrote Hartmut Neven, the founder and lead for Google Quantum AI in a blog post.
Google researchers were also able to prove for the first time that the chip’s errors did not increase proportionately as the number of qubits, the basic information processing unit in a quantum computer, rises. The qubits in quantum computing are more prone to mistakes than a regular computer because they are highly sensitive to electromagnetic and other forms of interference and can only remain in a quantum state for very brief periods of time.
But in order for a quantum chip’s calculations to make sense, it needs to have a very low error rate, Javad Shabani, a physics professor and director of the Center for Quantum Information Physics at New York University, told Fortune.
Google’s breakthrough is “one of the highlights of the recent decade,” he said, and could mean quantum computers are a step closer to becoming more useful for practical purposes.
“Classical” supercomputers, including the “Frontier” supercomputer that is commonly recognized as among the most powerful, are used for advanced modeling and simulations. Yet, these supercomputers are more similar to the common laptop than you’d think. They operate on the binary system of 0’s and 1’s that less powerful computers use, albeit at a much more advanced level. While supercomputers are undoubtedly powerful, they are huge pieces of machinery that use massive amounts of energy for cooling systems.
Quantum chips like Willow operate on a much smaller scale. The qubits that make up these high powered chips are roughly the size of an atom, and operate via the rules of quantum mechanics. The chips pack a computing punch at a miniscule level and with potentially better energy efficiency than supercomputers, but they’re also limited in their uses.
The test Google ran on Willow is a “benchmark” meant to show the quantum chip’s capability relative to other systems, including the best existing supercomputers. Google in 2019 completed a benchmark test with its earlier “Sycamore” quantum chip and found at the time that the older chip could complete a calculation in 200 seconds that would take the best supercomputers thousands of years to complete, according to a blog post at the time.
Google’s Willow chip has around double the qubits used to power its computing than that of the Sycamore chip, and exponentially more computing power than a supercomputer has for some uses.
Google’s Willow findings show that quantum computers can perform much better than the best available supercomputers in certain cases, an assertion that just a few years ago was more widely doubted. It also possibly shifts the focus of future quantum chip development away from primarily trying to find a way to reduce errors to, instead, trying to increase the number of qubits that make up each chip, according to Rice University physics and astronomy professor and founder of the Rice Quantum Initiative Kaden Hazzard.
Google’s discovery is groundbreaking, but that doesn’t mean your standard laptop will be replaced by a quantum computer anytime soon, Hazzard told Fortune.
“It’s at least a few years away before we reach the kind of capabilities where the quantum computer can be used directly for things that have business applications, for example,” Hazard said.
Fears about Willow having the capacity to decrypt even the most advanced encryptions used in banking or tech are also overblown, Rice University assistant professor of computer science Tirthak Patel told Fortune. Solving such advanced cryptography would require a much more advanced chip than Willow, said Patel, and researchers are already finding ways to create quantum-proof encryptions.
Instead, Willow is a stepping stone toward greater progress in quantum computing. Monday’s findings confirmed it outperforms supercomputers in some cases and will do lots to convince naysayers of the potential quantum computing has to eventually help improve human lives, Patel said.
Still, while it may be several years away, advanced quantum computing could be used to accurately simulate miniscule quantum systems like chemical reactions that could help discover new drugs, or solve quantum mechanical problems to build new types of materials or better catalysts for reactions, said Hazzard.
Possibly sooner, the advanced computing ability of quantum chips could help improve weather predictions or streamline supply chain efficiency, all while being potentially less energy intensive than existing supercomputers, Patel said.
Because these types of applications can already run on quantum chips with fewer qubits and without the advanced error reduction that Google has shown is possible, better quantum chips could revolutionize these areas, said Patel.
“The biggest task right now that most scientists and engineers working in the quantum computing field are concerned with is demonstrating the utility and practicality of quantum computing for different real world applications,” Patel said. “While this experiment hasn't done that just yet, it is a major milestone in that step.”
ON HOPE: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled or uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.
“Fear not the path of Truth for the lack of People walking on it.”
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies
I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil. Government belongs wherever evil needs an adversary and there are people in distress.
“This much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.”
In 1831 Thomas Macaulay addressed the House Of Commons:
"All history is full of revolution, produced by causes similar to those which are now operating in England. A portion of the community which had been of no account expands and becomes strong. It demands a place in the system, suited not to it former weakness, but to its present power. If this is granted, all is well. If this is refused, then comes the struggle between the young energy of one class, and the ancient privileges of another".
He warned of past examples: in Rome, the plebians' clash with the patricians, which led to civil war, the fall of the Republic, and the rise of the Caesars: in America the colonists' war to cast off British rule: and in France, the repressed Third Estate's overthrow of the monarchy. From this history Macaulay drew the inescapable lesson: " Reform, that you may preserve".(1)
Zakaria finds similarities in past revolutions with the Progressive party movement in the United States now.
Hanging on the coattails of a man who would rather lie than tell the truth is a slippery slope. For all of the Trumpified followers who think his style will catapult them to higher ground — caveat emptor. These are the politicians, election workers and followers that get more involved with the campaign than just voting.
Trump has spent a lifetime honing his craft. By all accounts he developed behavioral problems at a young age, a bully, mentored by people who furthered his natural inclinations to do anything to get what he wanted. He expressed his desire for dominance at an early age. Showered with more cash than he ever knew what to do with, he made poor investment after poor investment. He could always count on being bailed out by his father and the banks.
The former President fights for relevancy on a daily basis. Winning is what Trump contends is his only mission. What Trump really values as a success is a positive outcome for his brand. If his business venture or thirst for governmental power fails, he would declare himself to be victorious and his effort a total success.
An outstanding example of this was Trump’s involvement with the Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. This was the first of many bankruptcies declared by his companies. In 1987, Trump was accumulating stock in the unfinished hotel and told New Jersey State Regulators that he could finance the $1 billion of the hotel with money borrowed from the banks at then Prime Interest rate of 8%, rather than the high junk bond rate that was normally attached to such a project.
He said the banks would finance the project at prime because he was Donald Trump and that his reputation, partially founded on his own self promotion, made him such a desirable business partner. The regulators gave him the green light to go ahead with the acquisition, but the loans at prime never materialized. Instead he was forced to take out junk bonds at 14 %. In just a few months, after the completion of the Taj Mahal, the increased debt brought about by his misleading assertions and poor foresight caused him to declare bankruptcy on all three of his casinos. Trump still characterizes this as a personal victory and successful venture.
The former President was as surprised as anyone when he won the 2016 election. After all, Clinton still maintained a 6 point lead in the polls, on the morning of the election. She went on to win the popular vote by 3 million votes, but was prevented from winning the election because of a series of mostly unrelated events. This was not Trump’s election to win, but Clinton’s to lose.
I think that barring any unforeseen event , the Harris Walz ticket will win the election, by a commanding majority. The election is right around the corner and the strong coalition comprised of young voters, blacks, women and traditional Democratic constituents, as well as a commanding lead in funding, will prove too much for the Trump -Vance campaign to overcome.
Policies play a small part in the Trump camp. False promises that can change from day to day, his brazen narcissism, his willingness to paint a picture of today and tomorrow that have no claim to legitimacy or reality, attract the voters looking for personal gain or crave the excitement that a Trump circus atmosphere brings. The politician that Trump fashions himself after, has no concern for consequences or the ramifications of his actions. Be they violence, or the unnecessary deaths of an estimated 100,000 American citizens from covid. When covid first struck in late 2019-early 2020, Trump refused to alert the public as to the seriousness of the disease and in march of 2020 would not allow passengers to disembark the Grand Princess, a stricken cruise ship, because he said it would hurt his polling numbers.
If Trump and Vance are not elected, the maga faithful are ready to declare the November election a fraud and stolen. Just remember, if Trump is not President, he won’t be able to pardon anybody. In their never ending efforts to control the narrative, Trump and Vance continue to dig their hole a little deeper.
As Trump sees his poll numbers dropping he has pivoted to a new method to maintain his position. He is telling jokes that most decent people would find repulsive and desperate. A recent example of this is an attack on Kamala Harris. At a recent rally, Trump said that Joe Biden has become mentally impaired, but that Kamala Harris was born that way. This brought about a spontaneous round of laughter by the crowd.
When not telling jokes he attacks a new and ridiculous enemy daily. One of his favorite scapegoats has always been the migrants. He condemns them for eating their neighbors’ pet dogs and cats. He says they are eating the ducks and geese near the pond. He takes hyperbole to never seen before levels. He has always seen himself as a showman who will stop at nothing to entertain and arouse his supporters.
A constant drumbeat of his is that things are terrible, the economy is terrible and that people can’t afford to buy food. Then he tells them to buy his $100,000 watches. Logic and reason don’t interfere with any of the lies and exaggerations that he says.
Why should we care? Because of the tripe that he and his followers spew out on a daily basis, real issues find a hard time getting airtime.
His claims that he will prosecute his political rivals, bring cheers. He claims he will stop the war in Ukraine on day one. He will end the bloodshed in the middle east on day one. He will stop the migrant invasion on day one. He will make women very happy. Sooner or later, hopefully sooner, his followers will see that he is dragging them down a rabbit hole that will benefit no one but him. Robert Bender
Trump’s long list of failed businesses began with the Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. This was the first of many bankruptcies declared by his companies. In 1987, Trump was accumulating stock in the unfinished hotel and told New Jersey State Regulators that he could finance the $1 billion of the hotel with money borrowed from the banks at then Prime Interest rate of 8%, rather than the high junk bond rate that was normally attached to such a project.
He said the banks would finance the project at prime because he was Donald Trump and that his reputation, partially founded on his own self promotion, made him such a desirable business partner. The regulators gave him the green light to go ahead with the acquisition, but the loans at prime never materialized. Instead he was forced to take out junk bonds At 14 %
In 1990 the Taj Mahal opened, but months later in 1991, the hotel was forced to declare bankruptcy. The ongoing debt from his two other casinos and the Taj Mahal were too much for him. Trump was the sole owner of The Trump Taj Mahal. He was personally on the hook for $833 million according to the New Jersey Casino Control Commission. In March 1992 his remaining two casinos declared bankruptcy. Trump was forced to sell off many of his personal assets and give 50% of his holdings in the three casinos to the lenders. He was allowed to maintain his licenses and the banks effectually allowed him to avoid personal bankruptcy.
Trump was taking his use of personal promotion and lies to a new level. As he went on to build his brand he attracted more and more of a following. This accelerated with the introduction of the first of his Reality T.V. shows, (The Apprentice) in 2004 and was followed up by the introduction of (Celebrity Apprentice) in 2008. His mantra “Your Fired”, proved successful.
Trump’s political aspirations improved when, in the weeks leading up to the election, Anthony Weiner, husband of Huma Abedin, Clinton’s close advisor, brought a scandal to the campaign. Pictures of Mr. Weiner’s genitalia, that he had put in emails, were circulated.
Then there were the leaked emails and the revelation that then Secretary of State Clinton had government emails on her personal server. This was followed by a news story that broke telling of a meeting between former President Bill Clinton and then Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, while both were waiting to depart from Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Attorney General Lynch was investigating Mrs. Clinton’s use of her personal computer at the time.
Clinton made a statement to the effect that “all of Trump’s followers are a bunch of deplorables”. I have always felt that if she had said “many of Trump’s followers are deplorable”, it would not have had nearly as negative an effect as it had. The constant drumbeat of “Benghazi” that some Republicans kept alluding to, kept a negative story from Clinton’s time as Secretary of State in the news.
On October 28 2016, just days before the election, FBI director James Comey made a bombshell statement to the press that he had reopened the probe of Mrs. Clinton’s emails. This might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
At the same time President Obama, withheld information regarding an investigation into Trump’s involvement with the Russians. In an effort not to put his thumb on the scale, days before the election, President Obama omitted telling the American people something that affected the outcome of the election.
The former President was as surprised as anyone when he won the 2016 election. After all, Clinton still maintained a 6 point lead in the polls, on the morning of the election. She went on to win the popular vote by 3 million votes, but was prevented from winning the election because of a series of mostly unrelated events. This was not Trump’s election to win, but Clinton’s to lose. RJB
The two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why. —–Mark Twain
“Life is on the wire. The rest is just waiting.”–One of the Flying Wallendas
What do they call a leader with no followers?…. Just a guy taking a walk.
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,–the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
William Wordsworth
“Inches…the difference between livin’and dyin’!”– from “Any Given Sunday”
A man falls into a steep hole.
A priest passes by and says what happened to you? Do you need help getting out and the man replies thank you, but no. G-d will save me.
After a while a Doctor walks by and asks if he can be of some assistance and the man says thank you but no. I am waiting for G-d to answer my prayers.
Then a third man comes by and says “I can get a ladder and help you out”. The man responds that he has great faith and G-d will deliver him.
Eventually the man dies in the hole and goes to Heaven and asks G-d why he didn’t save him and G-d tells the man”I sent you a Priest, a Doctor and a man with a ladder; what more did you want”.
A young person enjoys excitement whenever, while an older person needs to control events.
Without leaning toward political commentary, or an overly cultural point of view, these are some people who I think bring an honest, thoughtful, interesting, and sometimes humorous dialogue to the American conversation: Bob Costas, Eugene Robinson, Caitlin Flanagan, Howard Dean, Andrew Sullivan, Neal Katyal, Bill Maher, Anand Giridharadas, Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman. There are a few other people I could add, but I put the above mentioned at the top of my list.
We are here on this planet thanks to an amazing force that endowed people with the ability to discover and control complex and original ideas, created DNA and allowed for evolution. An incredible array of beauty and relentless times of destruction are but a couple of examples of the incredible power of the creator.
Realizing G_D as the creator is a distant experience, made more understandable if there is a creator, not a controller. Will G-D answer your prayers for the winning lottery ticket or for your favorite team to win the super bowl, I don’t think so. Could you win the lottery or your team win the superbowl, it is possible, but was it the hand of G-D that swayed the fortune in your favor; I heartily doubt it. For the masses that choose to believe that a Divine entity has a hand in all events everywhere and at all times, there is an alternate belief.
While some seem to experience a miracle, others experience terrible events and bad luck. There is an explanation. G-D created a Perennial Wind that flows around us at all times, that influences at times, and neglects at other times. It is invisible, cannot be called up at will, or controlled in any other way. Endless breezes flow in a random fashion from the Perennial Wind and effect all things with results either beneficial or damaging. When G-D created life, free will was given to all. This bestows upon all creatures the ability to think for themselves and is thus a determining factor in all our daily lives.
Organized religions and any other kind of religion may give comfort, a feeling of belonging to something greater than oneself, and a unifying center of the family; but devastating harm has been done in the name of religion. Though there are many instances of humanism and good will emanating from religion, so much destruction has been carried out in its name. From biblical times through the Crusades, the Inquisition, The Thirty Years’ War, the Holocaust and multiple other wars and genocides, religion was the core of the disputes. The negative side of religion is the daily expression of hatred and antipathy, that is seen around the globe.
Religions should be judged by how well they carry forward basic tenets of positive attitude and good will. What are the beliefs of the people the religion advocates. Whether religion is used as a crucible or scapegoat, or as a catalyst for dispute among tribes, alternate ways of embracing a higher power are decidedly more appealing.
One such philosophy is the belief in Deism. Notable adherents of Deism as a more rational expression of a belief in G-D include; Spinoza, Voltaire, Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, James Watt, Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Thomas Edison and Neil Armstrong.
While their traditions had them affiliated with various religious denominations,(to differing extents), the first five Presidents of the United States, had all expressed their belief in the rational tenets of Deism. RJB
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.
“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”
“I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, all that you’re yet to be.”
"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.”
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are stronger at the broken places.”
“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”
“Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.
”When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.
“The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can’t be found.”
“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
The Attraction of a Dangerously Damaged Individual
From Socialite To Comic Book Villain
I really don’t want to spend any more time, emotional capital or energy writing about D. J. Trump. I wrote extensively about him from 2015 through 2020, when I felt it was a responsibility to shout out what I thought should have been obvious to everyone.
I knew there was something terribly wrong with him in 2015, when he said, and I quote, “I know where she went. It’s disgusting. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s too disgusting. Don’t say it. It’s disgusting. Let’s not talk, we want to be very, very straight up, OK?” Who talks like that!! He was referring to something that took place at a debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination. I knew there was something deeply wrong with him and so did 27 psychiatrists, who in 2017 wrote essays for a book titled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.
Many of his initial voters supported his views on immigration and tax cuts. There were others that were attracted to his T.V. persona and displays of machismo. These supporters welcomed a chance to feel some power and camaraderie, much like participating in a mob. His incitement to violence is well documented. His lying, misogyny and use of invectives were not turn-offs to his group of supporters. Paying $50(allegedly) a person to stand behind him at rallies, hold up signs, wear hats, and applaud everything he said was an effective method of energizing and solidifying a base.
I understand that a trade off of common sense and renewed participation in the Democratic process, for power and tribalism, is something many are willing to accept. There is a notion felt by many of his base that although he is not who they thought he was, they are still willing to accept the consequences, rather than admit they were wrong. The realization that he is not someone interested in benefiting the common good, is not something they have arrived at yet. His motivations are more closely aligned with being part of a triumvirate with Putin and Xi.
His lack of a work ethic is legendary. By his own admission he liked to shoot from the hip when making business decisions. On his first day in office he pulled the U.S. out of the TPP, and threatened to take the U.S. out of NATO. Any organization that would require him to share authority was anathema to him.
To truly understand this man, you must first understand two fundamental characteristics of his nature. He has disdain for everyone and he likes to f*** with everybody.
Roy Cohn, a disbarred lawyer and Trump mentor, was the poster boy for abrasive and amoral behavior. It is these traits that Trump emulates today. RJB
Before chatbots exploded in popularity, a group of researchers, tech executives and venture capitalists had worked for more than a decade to fuel A.I.
From left, Larry Page, Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk have all made significant contributions to the development of modern artificial intelligence.Credit…Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News; pool photo by Toby Melville; and Amir Hamja/ The New York Times
While artificial intelligence has taken the limelight over the past year, technology that can appear to operate like human brains has been top of mind for researchers, investors and tech executives in Silicon Valley and beyond for more than a decade.
Here are some of the people involved in the origins of the modern A.I. movement who have influenced the technology’s development.
Sam Altman
Mr. Altman is the chief executive of OpenAI, the San Francisco A.I. lab that made the chatbot ChatGPT that went viral over the past year and ushered in recognition of the power of generative artificial intelligence. Mr. Altman helped start OpenAI after meeting with Elon Musk about the technology in 2015. At the time, Mr. Altman ran Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up incubator.
Dario Amodei
Mr. Amodei, an A.I. researcher who joined OpenAI early on, runs the A.I. start-up Anthropic. A former researcher at Google, he helped set OpenAI’s research direction but left in 2021 after disagreements about the path the company was taking. That year, he founded Anthropic, which is dedicated to creating safe A.I. systems.
Bill Gates
Mr. Gates,a founder of Microsoft and for many years the richest man in the world, was long skeptical of how powerful A.I. could become. Then in August 2022, he was given a demonstration of OpenAI’s GPT-4, the A.I. model underlying ChatGPT. After seeing what GPT-4 could do, Mr. Gates became an A.I. convert. His endorsement helped Microsoft move aggressively to capitalize on generative A.I.
Demis Hassabis
Mr. Hassabis, a neuroscientist, is a founder of DeepMind, one of the most important labs of this wave of A.I. He secured financial backing to create DeepMind from the investor Peter Thiel and built a lab that produced AlphaGo, an A.I. software that shocked the world in 2016 when it beat the world’s best player of the board game Go. (Mr. Hassabis was an award-winning chess player as a teenager.) Google bought DeepMind, which is based in Britain, in 2014, and Mr. Hassabis is one of the company’s top A.I. executives.
Geoffrey Hinton
A professor at the University of Toronto, Mr. Hinton and two of his graduate students were responsible for neural networks, a key underlying technology of this wave of A.I. Neural networks captivated the tech industry, and Google quickly agreed to pay Mr. Hinton and his crew $44 million in 2012 to bring them on, beating out Microsoft and Baidu, a Chinese tech company.
Reid Hoffman
Mr. Hoffman, a former PayPal executive who founded LinkedIn and became a venture capitalist, was — alongside Mr. Musk and Mr. Thiel — part of a group that invested $1 billion in OpenAI.
Elon Musk
Mr. Musk, who leads Tesla and founded SpaceX, helped to establish OpenAI in 2015. He has long been concerned about A.I.’s potential dangers. At the time, he sought to position OpenAI, a nonprofit, as a more ethical counterweight to other tech companies. Mr. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after disagreements with Mr. Altman.
Satya Nadella
Mr. Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, spearheaded the company’s investments in OpenAI in 2019 and this year, committing $13 billion to the start-up over that period. Microsoft has since gone whole hog on A.I., incorporating OpenAI’s technology into its Bing search engine and across many of its other products.
Larry Page
Mr. Page, who founded Google with Sergey Brin, has long been a proponent of A.I. and its benefits. He pushed for Google’s acquisition of DeepMind in 2014. Mr. Page has a more optimistic view of A.I. than others, telling Silicon Valley executives that robots and humans will live harmoniously one day.
Peter Thiel
Mr. Thiel, a PayPal executive turned venture capitalist who made much of his fortune from an early investment in Facebook, was a key investor in early A.I. labs. He poured money into DeepMind and, later, OpenAI.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Mr. Yudkowsky, an internet philosopher and self-taught A.I. researcher, helped seed much of the philosophical thinking around the technology. He was a leader in a community who called themselves Rationalists or, in later years, effective altruists, and who believed in the power of A.I. but also worried the technology could destroy people. Mr. Yudkowsky hosted an annual conference (funded by Mr. Thiel) on A.I., where Mr. Hassabis met Mr. Thiel and secured his backing for DeepMind.
Mark Zuckerberg
Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has pushed for A.I. for at least a decade. Recognizing the power of the technology, he tried to buy DeepMind, before Google made the winning bid. He then went on a hiring spree to bring aboard A.I. talent to Facebook.
Reporting was contributed by Cade Metz, Karen Weise, Nico Grant and Mike Isaac.
As Israel debates what to do next in Gaza, I hope Israel’s political-military leadership will reflect on the adage often attributed to Confucius: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves” — one for your enemy and one for yourself.
Wise man, Confucius.
The reason I was so wary about Israel invading Gaza with the aim of totally eliminating Hamas was certainly not out of any sympathy for Hamas, which has been a curse on the Palestinian people even more than on Israel. It was out of a deep concern that Israel was acting out of blind rage, aiming at an unattainable goal — wiping Hamas from the face of the earth as one of its ministers advocated — and with no plan for the morning after.
In doing so Israel could get stuck in Gaza forever — owning all its pathologies and having to govern its more than two million people amid a humanitarian crisis, and even worse, discrediting the very Israeli military that it was trying to restore Israelis’ trust in.
Quite honestly, I thought back to America after 9/11. And I asked myself, what do I wish I had done more ofbefore we launched two wars of revenge and transformation in Afghanistan and Iraq for which they and we paid a huge price?
I wish I’d argued for what the C.I.A. calls a “Red Cell” or “Red Team” — a group of intelligence officers outside the direct military or political chain of command, whose main job would have been to examine the war plans and goals for Iraq and Afghanistan and stress-test them by proposing contrarian alternatives for achievable goals to restore U.S. security and deterrence. And to have that Red Team’s recommendations be made public before we went to war.
As a retired senior U.S. intelligence official said to me: The role of the C.I.A.’s Red Cell on other thorny problems “was to help the U.S. government make decisions with eyes wide open and to buy down, but not eliminate, risk. It’s not a sign of weakness to make fully informed decisions and I think the Red Cell is a great tool for weighing alternative options and potential second- and third-order effects. Israel’s leaders need to be rigorous and not only passionate at this moment in time.”
So it’s with that in mind that I am proposing Israel create not only a Red Team for how to deal with Hamas in Gaza but also a Blue Team to critique the Red Team. Israel needs to have a much more robust internal debate because it has clearly rushed into a war with multiple contradictory goals.
Israel’s stated aim is to get back all its remaining hostages — now more than 130 soldiers and civilians — while destroying Hamas and its infrastructure once and for all, while doing it in a way that doesn’t cause more Gazan civilian casualties than the Biden administration can defend, and without leaving Israel responsible for Gaza forever and having to pay its bills every day. Good luck with all that.
Here’s what an Israeli Red Team might point out and advocate instead.
For starters, because the military and cabinet rushed into Gaza in this war and seemingly never game-planned for any endgame, Israel now finds itself in a difficult predicament. It has pushed well over one million civilians from northern Gaza to the south to get them away from the fight as it has attempted to wipe out all Hamas fighters in Gaza City and its environs. But now, the only way that Israel can take the ground war to southern Gaza — around Khan Younis, where Hamas’s senior leadership is suspected of hiding in tunnels — is by moving through this mass of displaced people and by creating even more.
Facing this predicament, the Israeli Red Team would suggest a radical alternative: Israel should call for a permanent cease-fire that would be followed by an immediate Israeli withdrawal of all military forces in Gaza on the condition that Hamas return all the hostages it has left, civilians and military, and any dead. But Hamas would get no Palestinian prisoners in return. Just a clean deal — Israeli withdrawal and a permanent cease-fire in return for the 130-plus Israeli hostages.
There would be an Israeli asterisk, though, which wouldn’t be written in, but everyone would understand it is there: Israel reserves the right in the future to bring to justice the top Hamas leaders who planned this massacre. As it did after the Munich massacre, though, Israel will do that with a scalpel, not a hammer.
What might be the advantages of such a strategy for Israel? The Red Team would cite five.
First, it would argue, all the pressure for a cease-fire to spare Gazan civilians more death and destruction will fall on Hamas, not on Israel. Let Hamas tell its people living out in the cold and rain — and the world — that it will not agree to a cease-fire for the mere humanitarian price of returning all the Israeli hostages.
Moreover, Israel would have ensured that Hamas got no big political victory out of this war like forcing Israel to free all the more than 6,000 Palestinians in its jails in return for the hostages Hamas is holding. No, no — it would just be a clean deal: permanent cease-fire for Israeli hostages, period. The world can understand that. Let’s see Hamas reject it and declare that it wants more war.
Second, some, maybe many, in Israel would complain that the military did not achieve its stated objective of eliminating Hamas, therefore it was a Hamas victory. The Red Team would respond that, for starters, the objective was unrealistic, especially with a right-wing Israeli government unwilling to work with the more moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to build an alternative to Hamas to run Gaza.
What Israel will have achieved, the Red Team would argue, is to have sent a powerful message of deterrence to Hamas and to Hezbollah in Lebanon: You destroy our villages, we will destroy yours 10 times more. This is ugly stuff, but the Middle East is a Hobbesian jungle. It is not Scandinavia.
And think smart about it: In the wake of such a permanent cease-fire, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader, would have to come out of his tunnel, squint into the sun, and face his own people for the first time since this war started. Yes, the morning after he comes out, many Gazans will carry him on their shoulders and sing his name for dealing such a heavy blow to the Jews.
But on the morning after the morning after, the Red Team would predict, many of those carrying him around would begin whispering to him: “Sinwar, what were you thinking? My house is now a pile of rubble. Who is going to rebuild it? My job in Israel that was feeding my family of 10 is gone. How am I going to feed my kids? You need to get me some international humanitarian assistance and a new house and job — and how are you going to do that if you keep lobbing rockets at the Jews?”
With Israel out, the humanitarian crisis created by this war in Gaza would become Sinwar’s and Hamas’s problem — as it should be. Every problem in Gaza would be Sinwar’s fault, starting with jobs.
Keep in mind, as Reuters recently noted, that before Oct. 7 Israel was issuing “more than 18,000 permits allowing Gazans to cross into Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank to take jobs in sectors like agriculture or construction that typically carried salaries up to 10 times what a worker could earn” in Gaza. Gaza was also exporting over $130 million a year of fish, agricultural produce, textiles and other products to Israel and the West Bank. That’s now all stopped.
Third, the Israeli Red Team would argue, this will create the same kind of deterrence for Hamas that Israel’s devastating bombardments of pro-Hezbollah communities in the southern suburbs of Beirut did in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has never dared to provoke a full-scale war with Israel since.
The Red Team would add that not only would the damage Israel has inflicted on Hamas and Gaza create similar deterrence, but so too would the fact that Israel could now reimagine and strengthen its own border defenses. Hamas has shown Israel where all its vulnerabilities were and how it smuggled in so many weapons — and Israel can now make sure this will never happen again.
Fourth, one of the biggest strategic benefits of Israel getting out of Gaza in return for an internationally monitored cease-fire is that it could then devote full attention to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah and Iran would not like that. They want Israel permanently militarily overstretched and forced to keep a good chunk of its 300,000-plus reservists — who drive its economy — permanently mobilized to govern Gaza.
They also want Israel’s economy permanently overstretched to pay for it. And they want Israel morally overstretched by permanently owning the Gaza humanitarian crisis, so that every day the sun did not shine in Gaza, the rain did not fall, the electricity did not flow, the world would say that it is Israel’s fault. Israel’s worst enemies could not design a worse fate for it — and that is what Hezbollah and Iran are praying for.
Finally, the Israeli Red Team would argue, Israel has important healing to do at home. This surprise attack happened because Israel had a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had fractured the country by trying to mount an insane judicial coup and who governed Israel for a total of 16 years with a strategy of dividing everyone — religious from secular, left from right, Ashkenazim from Sephardim, Israeli Arabs from Israeli Jews — weakening the country’s immune system. Israel can be healed internally and resume its project of normalizing relations with its Arab neighbors and forging a stable relationship with the more moderate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank only if Netanyahu is removed. If the war goes on forever, that will never happen. And that is exactly what Netanyahu wants.
But now comes the Israeli Blue Team. What would it say about the Red Team?
Well, first, it would ask, what do you do if Sinwar simply says no, I won’t accept just a cease-fire, I need my 6,000-plus prisoners out of Israeli jails and I will pay the price in Western public opinion to hold out for them? Then Israel is stuck again.
The Israeli Blue Team would say: We have a better idea. First, downgrade our objectives. Declare that the military’s objective is not to wipe Hamas off the face of the earth, but to significantly diminish its fighting capacity.
Because, the Blue Team would say, we actually don’t believe in deterrence. Hezbollah has not really been deterred since 2006. That is an illusion. Iran is just saving Hezbollah for the day Israel will threaten its nuclear program. We Blue Teamers believe in constantly diminishing our enemies’ capabilities. Once we have greatly diminished Hamas’s capabilities, we are not going to stay in Gaza forever until we kill every leader.
Instead, we will pull back and create a perimeter and outposts one mile inside the Gaza-Israel border to ensure that our border communities can never again be attacked overland as they were on Oct. 7. And we will do that to emphasize that we have the abilities and intentions to return at will if Hamas keeps firing rockets at us. If Hamas wants to trade our hostages for prisoners, we can talk. As for governance of Gaza, a diminished Hamas can stay in charge if that is what Gazans want. Let Hamas be responsible for the water and electricity.
Finally, the Blue Team would say to the Israeli political leadership: “Stop lying to yourself and the public. If we try to conquer and hold all of Gaza, Gaza will not only swallow us in the end, you politicians will create huge doubts in the public’s mind about the military by giving it an unachievable goal and Israel simply cannot afford more doubts about the military a second longer.”
In sum, Israel needs this kind of internal debate, where an Israeli Red Team and Blue Team can remind the country’s leadership that there is no perfect outcome waiting for Israel in Gaza. Fixing Gaza “once and for all” was always a fantasy.
But here is what is not a fantasy: The true history of Israel-Hamas relations. It is very simple. It is war, timeout, war, timeout, war, timeout, war, timeout …. Hamas thrives in the wars, because that is all it can deliver and all that it exists for. Israel thrives in the long timeouts — in the cease-fires — when all of its societal, economic and innovative strengths come to the fore. Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah want to drag Israel into a permanent state of war. Israel needs a Red Team and a Blue Team to advocate instead for longer cease-fires, a more hardened border and the flexibility to return to Gaza if Hamas forces it to.
Not perfect, but perfect was never on the menu. It’s the Middle East, Jake.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – When British naturalist Charles Darwin sketched out his theory of evolution in the 1859 book “On the Origin of Species” – proposing that biological species change over time through the acquisition of traits that favor survival and reproduction – it provoked a revolution in scientific thought.
Now 164 years later, nine scientists and philosophers in Oct. 2023, proposed a new law of nature that includes the biological evolution described by Darwin as a vibrant example of a much broader phenomenon, one that appears at the level of atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more.
It holds that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity and complexity.
“We see evolution as a universal process that applies to numerous systems, both living and nonliving, that increase in diversity and patterning through time,” said Carnegie Institution for Science mineralogist and astrobiologist Robert Hazen, a co-author of the scientific paper describing the law in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Titled the “law of increasing functional information,” it holds that evolving systems, biological and non-biological, always form from numerous interacting building blocks like atoms or cells, and that processes exist – such as cellular mutation – that generate many different configurations. Evolution occurs, it holds, when these various configurations are subject to selection for useful functions.
“We have well-documented laws that describe such everyday phenomena as forces, motions, gravity, electricity and magnetism and energy,” Hazen said. “But these laws do not, individually or collectively, describe or explain why the universe keeps getting more diverse and complex at scales of atoms, molecules, minerals and more.”
In stars, for instance, just two elements – hydrogen and helium – were the main ingredients in the first stellar generation following the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago that initiated the universe.
That first generation of stars, in the thermonuclear fusion caldrons at their cores, forged about 20 heavier elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen that were blasted into space when they exploded at the end of their life cycles. The subsequent generation of stars that formed from the remnants of the prior generation then similarly forged almost 100 more elements.
On Earth, living organisms acquired greater complexity including the pivotal moment when multicellular life originated.
“Imagine a system of atoms or molecules that can exist in countless trillions of different arrangements or configurations,” Hazen said. “Only a small fraction of all possible configurations will ‘work’ – that is, they will have some useful degree of function. So, nature just prefers those functional configurations.”
Hazen added that “function” might mean that a collection of atoms makes a stable mineral crystal that can persist, or that a star maintains its dynamic structure, or that “a life form learns a new ‘trick’ that allows it to compete better than its neighbors,” Hazen added.
The authors proposed three universal concepts of selection: the basic ability to endure; the enduring nature of active processes that may enable evolution; and the emergence of novel characteristics as an adaptation to an environment.
Some biological examples of this “novelty generation” include organisms developing the ability to swim, walk, fly and think. Our species emerged after the human evolutionary lineage diverged from the chimpanzee lineage and acquired an array of traits including upright walking and increased brain size.
“I think this paper is important because it describes a view of the cosmos rooted in function,” said Carnegie Institution astrobiologist and planetary scientist Michael Wong, the paper’s lead author.
“The significance of formulating such a law is that it provides a new perspective on why the diverse systems that make up the cosmos evolve the way they do, and may allow predictions about how unfamiliar systems – like the organic chemistry on Saturn’s moon Titan – develop over time,” added co-author Jonathan Lunine, chair of Cornell University’s astronomy department, referencing a world being scrutinized for possible extraterrestrial life.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
Gary Gensler, the chairman of the S.E.C., has been studying the potential consequences of artificial intelligence for years. The recent proliferation of generative A.I. tools like ChatGPT has demonstrated that the technology is set to transform business and society.
Mr. Gensler outlined some of his biggest concerns in an interview with DealBook’s Ephrat Livni.
A.I. could be the next big systemic risk to the financial system. In 2020, Mr. Gensler co-wrote a paper about deep learning and financial stability. It concluded that just a few A.I. companies will build the foundational models that underpin the tech tools that lots of businesses will come to rely on, based on how network and platform effects have benefited tech giants in the past.
Mr. Gensler expects that the United States will most likely end up with two or three foundational A.I. models. This will deepen interconnections across the economic system, making a financial crash more likely because when one model or data set becomes central, it increases “herding” behavior, meaning that everyone will rely on the same information and respond similarly.
“This technology will be the center of future crises, future financial crises,” Mr. Gensler said. “It has to do with this powerful set of economics around scale and networks.”
A.I. models may put companies’ interests ahead of investors’. The meme stock frenzy driven by social media and the rise of retail trading on apps highlighted the power of nudges and predictive algorithms. But are companies that use A.I. to study investor behavior or recommend trades prioritizing user interests when they act on that information?
The S.E.C. last month proposed a rule that would require platforms to eliminate conflicts of interest in their technology. “You’re not supposed to put the adviser ahead of the investor, you’re not supposed to put the broker ahead of the investor,” Mr. Gensler said. “And so we put out a specific proposal about addressing those conflicts that could be embedded in the models.”
Who is responsible if generative A.I. gives faulty financial advice? “Investment advisers under the law have a fiduciary duty, a duty of care, and a duty of loyalty to their clients,” Mr. Gensler said. “And whether you’re using an algorithm, you have that same duty of care.”
Precisely who is legally liable for A.I. is a matter of debate among policymakers. But Mr. Gensler says it’s fair to ask the companies to create mechanisms that are safe and that anyone who uses a chatbot is not delegating responsibility to the tech.“There are humans that build the models that set up parameters,” he said.
“It’s easy to do anything in victory. It’s in defeat that a man reveals himself.” –Floyd Patterson
Sometimes when I’m alone
I Cry Cause I am on my own. The tears I cry are bitter and warm. They flow with life but take no form I Cry because my heart is torn. I find it difficult to carry on. If I had an ear to confide in, I would cry among my treasured friend, but who do you know that stops that long, to help another carry on. The world moves fast and it would rather pass by. Then to stop and see what makes one cry, so painful and sad. And sometimes… I Cry and no one cares about why.
All is not what it seems with this Prigozhin led Wagner revolt. Why did Prigozhin lead his mercenary convoy north to Moscow? What did he intend on accomplishing? Surely he knew that Russian war planes could destroy an exposed convoy with relative ease. What was it that stopped this convoy dead in it's tracks? Why would he trust a Lucashenko offer of amnesty and safety, in return for abandoning his plans (whatever they were)? Is a coup that starts and ends without a shot being fired, and without a change in government, a real coup?
Anyone who could get near a microphone expounded on how this supposed coup weakens Putin. The opposite may be closer to the truth. Putin can focus attention on the fact that he resolved a problem within 24 hours, with no confrontation necessary, no bloodshed and no loss of government control. There will be many who will consider this a show of strength.
LONDON, June 16 (Reuters Breakingviews) – Already reeling from the “Razzlekhan” scandal, punch-drunk from the collapse of TerraUSD, and floored by the implosion of FTX, cryptocurrencies were finally dealt a knockout blow last week by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The watchdog brought separate charges against two leading crypto companies, Binance and Coinbase Global(COIN.O), accusing them of operating unlicensed U.S. exchanges for unregistered financial securities and illegally commingling brokerage and clearing.
In truth, the market for digital tokens like bitcoin was already out for the count. Prices have collapsed since the peak of the speculative mania in November 2021. The combined value of cryptocurrencies is down by nearly two-thirds. Trading volumes are less than 10% of their peak.
In retrospect, it is obvious that these electronic securities were the most extreme beneficiaries of the “everything bubble” which propelled the valuations of financial assets with negligible or even non-existent cash flows to astronomical heights. The end of near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing and pandemic-era fiscal stimulus has sent prices crashing back to earth. Rising real interest rates have proved to be kryptonite for crypto, as for so many other speculative assets.
Yet investors should think twice before writing crypto off completely. The normalisation of interest rates may have done for crypto in its most recent incarnation as a get-rich-quick scheme. But it might also be exactly what is needed to resurrect its original sales pitch as the technological breakthrough that would facilitate the global circulation of privately issued currencies capable of transferring economic value across time and space more safely, efficiently and freely than ever before.
That may sound like a tall order. If crypto is to rise once more from the canvas, it will need to extricate itself from the reputational mire of a market structure that SEC Chairman Gary Gensler last week described as “rife with fraud, abuse, and noncompliance”. Digital currencies will also need to convince central bankers that they are not a threat to monetary policy or existing payments systems – something Facebook owner Meta Platforms’ (META.O) ill-fated Libra project, for example, failed to do.
Yet the underlying structural drivers of crypto’s popularity remain as powerful as ever. In democratic and authoritarian political systems alike, public trust in elites and institutions continues to crumble. Faith in the traditional financial system never recovered from the global crisis of 2008 and has sustained further damage from the recent failure of central banks to foresee inflation and the need for yet another round of taxpayer-funded bailouts. Meanwhile, the digitisation of our daily lives continues at a dazzling pace.
Crypto’s underlying attraction is that it sits squarely at the centre of all these secular trends, offering a seductive vision of how technology can enable citizens to take back political and financial control in the age of digital surveillance. Balaji Srinivasan, author of crypto bible “The Network State”, sums it up: “End the wars. End the Fed. End-to-end encryption.”
It is easy to dismiss such crypto-maximalist manifestos as prime examples of the concept’s crankiness. Nevertheless, they speak to the powerful forces behind the popularity of crypto’s original prospectus as the platform for alternative global currencies. That is something investors should take seriously, especially because neither the idea of private moneys circulating alongside sovereign currency, nor the notion that this might serve a constructive economic role, are remotely novel.
From continent-wide experiments such as the “écu de marc”, which medieval European merchants used to settle international trade, to the humble baby-sitting circle chit popularised by the economist Paul Krugman, through myriad community currencies such as Ithaca hours and the Brixton pound, privately issued moneys have always been a feature of capitalist economies.
Historically, however, two constraints have tended to limit their reach. The first is that, because they lack the backing of the state, their acceptability is limited to users who know and trust one another as partners in some joint commercial or social project. The second is that arranging central private counterparties responsible for issuing, clearing and settling currencies is time-consuming, costly and hard.
Yet modern technology has consigned these obstacles to history. With 5 billion people connected to the internet, communities built around even the most esoteric of interests can now number in the tens of millions. The combination of cryptographic certification and public digital ledgers, meanwhile, means clearing and settlement can be automated and central counterparties eliminated altogether.
The proposition that the circulation of private currencies might be economically beneficial has also been around for a while. Friedrich Hayek’s 1976 book “The Denationalisation of Money” argued that allowing foreign and privately issued moneys to circulate alongside national currencies would improve monetary stability through competitive pressure on central banks. Hayek’s scheme formed the basis for the UK Treasury’s 1989 proposal to launch the euro by first allowing it to circulate alongside existing European currencies. The underlying argument goes back at least as far as the 18th century, when the pioneering Scottish economist James Steuart characterised competition from private money as “the most effective bridle ever was invented against the folly of despotism”.
Nevertheless, history shows that for privately issued currencies to attain critical mass it has typically required more than just the availability of viable alternatives. The official, national currency must also become harder to get.
The golden age of private currencies in the United States came during the Great Depression of the 1930s. With the Federal Reserve persisting with a tight monetary policy, U.S. dollar liquidity dried up. As a result, businesses and households slaked their thirst with privately issued scrip currencies. The sky-high interest rates imposed by the Central Bank of Argentina to stabilise the country’s exchange rate after its January 2002 devaluation had the same effect. By March private currencies made up nearly a third of all the money in the country, taking the place of a peso which had become too expensive to source.
It is precisely when access to official, national currencies becomes prohibitively expensive that privately issued alternatives have historically had a chance to thrive. The Fed and the SEC have joined forces to kill the casino case for crypto, but perhaps its day as the internet of money is yet to come. Crypto is dead. Long live crypto?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and anti-Nazi dissident who was executed in Germany in 1945.1 Bonhoeffer’s ideas and beliefs have continued to resonate long after his death, particularly his theory of stupidity. Bonhoeffer argued that it was not evil people who were the greatest danger to society- it was stupid people.
Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity:
Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity is rooted in his belief that there are two types of people in the world: those who think and those who don't.2 According to Bonhoeffer, the latter is far more dangerous than the former. Evil people, he argued, are often intelligent and motivated by a clear goal. They know what they want and are willing to go to great lengths to achieve it. Stupid people, on the other hand, are often driven by a mix of selfishness, laziness, and ignorance. Stupid people lack the ability to think critically and evaluate information and are often content to blindly follow whatever is put in front of them.
Bonhoeffer believed that the proliferation of stupid people in society posed the greatest threat to democracy and freedom. He argued that stupid people were easily manipulated and could be used by those in power to achieve their goals.3 They were the foot soldiers of authoritarian regimes, blindly following orders without question.
Moreover, Bonhoeffer believed that stupid people were a greater danger than evil people because they were far more numerous. Evil people, he argued, were relatively rare, and it was often easy to spot them. Stupid people, however, were everywhere, and they were often difficult to identify. They blended in with the crowd, and their stupidity was often mistaken for innocence or naïveté.
The relevance of Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity today:
Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity has profound implications for modern society. In an age of fake news and disinformation, it is easier than ever for stupid people to be misled and manipulated. Social media has made it possible for false information to spread like wildfire, and many people are willing to believe whatever they read or hear without questioning its veracity.
Moreover, Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity sheds light on the rise of authoritarianism in many parts of the world. Populist leaders have been able to mobilize large numbers of people by appealing to their basest instincts and exploiting their fears and prejudices. They have used propaganda and disinformation to create a climate of fear and distrust, and they have demonized their opponents in order to maintain power.
In conclusion, Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity highlights the danger posed by those who lack critical thinking skills and are easily manipulated. Stupid people are not necessarily evil, but they can be used by those who are. In order to protect democracy and freedom, it is essential that we promote critical thinking and educate people to be more discerning consumers of information. We must also be vigilant against those who seek to manipulate us and use fear and ignorance to maintain their grip on power. Only by recognizing the danger posed by stupid people can we hope to build a more just and equitable society.
If you think you have a strong password, it's time to think again. A new study from Home Security Heroes(opens in new tab), a cybersecurity firm, shows how quickly and easily artificial intelligence (AI) can crack your password. Statistics show that 51% of common passwords can be cracked in less than a minute.
The security researchers used PassGAN, a password generator based on a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). PassGAN and other password generators differ because the former doesn't depend on manual password analysis. In contrast, the PassGAN model, as its name implies, leverages GAN to learn from real password leaks and generate realistic passwords that you may use. A GAN is a machine learning (ML) model that pitches two neural networks (generator and discriminator) against each other to improve the accuracy of the predictions.
In short, the generator produces fake data to fool the discriminator. Meanwhile, the discriminator's job is to identify the real data from the fake data created by the generator. It becomes a cat-and-mouse game where both networks benefit from the constant dispute. The generator continually improves to construct better fake data, and the discriminator gets better at differentiating the real data from the fake.
Home Security Heroes fed PassGAN with 15,680,000 common passwords from the RockYou dataset to train the model. The firm excluded passwords that were shorter than four characters and longer than 18 characters from the experiment. For those who have never heard of RockYou, it was a widget developer for popular social media platforms like MySpace or Facebook. Hackers breached RockYou in 2009, stealing over 32 million users' data because the company was storing data inside an unencrypted database. The RockYou dataset eventually became a popular option for training ML password-cracking models.
Numerous data breaches have occurred over the years with victims, including Facebook and Yahoo. So, plenty of personal datasets are out there to train password generators like PassGAN. More data equals more fodder for cultivating the AI.
# of Characters
Numbers Only
Lower-Case Letters
Upper-case, Lower-case Letters
Upper-case, Lower-case Letters, Numbers
Upper-case, Lower-case Letters, Numbers, Symbols
4
Instantly
Instantly
Instantly
Instantly
Instantly
5
Instantly
Instantly
Instantly
Instantly
Instantly
6
Instantly
Instantly
Instantly
Instantly
4 Seconds
7
Instantly
Instantly
22 Seconds
42 Seconds
6 Minutes
8
Instantly
3 Seconds
19 Minutes
48 Minutes
7 Hours
9
Instantly
1 Minutes
11 Hours
2 Days
2 Weeks
10
Instantly
1 Hours
4 Weeks
6 Months
5 Years
11
Instantly
23 Hours
4 Years
38 Years
356 Years
12
25 Seconds
3 Weeks
289 Years
2K Years
30K Years
13
3 Minutes
11 Months
16K Years
91K Years
2M Years
14
36 Minutes
49 Years
827K Years
9M Years
187M Years
15
5 Hours
890 Years
47M Years
613M Years
14Bn Years
16
2 Days
23K Years
2Bn Years
26Bn Years
1Tn Years
17
3 Weeks
812K Years
539.72M Years
2Tn Years
95Tn Years
18
10 Months
22M Years
7.23Bn Years
96Tn Years
6Qn Years
Home Security Heroes' findings revealed that PassGAN cracked 51% of common passwords in less than a minute. However, the AI took a bit more time with the more challenging passwords. For example, PassGAN cracked 65% in less than an hour, 71% under a day, and up to 81% in less than a month.
According to Statista(opens in new tab), six out of ten Americans have a password with a length between eight to 11 characters. However, less than one-third of the population utilizes a password with over 12 characters. It's comprehensible since shorter and simple passwords are easier to remember but more susceptible to attacks.
It took PassGAN less than six minutes to crack a seven-character password, even if it includes numbers, upper and lower case letters, and symbols. For instance, PassGAN can unravel a ten-character password with only numbers and lower-case letters in an hour. However, adding upper-case letters, numbers, and symbols to the mix increases the decryption time by up to five years. Therefore, it's not just having a long password but one with a challenging pattern, so the AI can't solve it quickly.
Home Security Heroes provided some guidelines for safeguarding your passwords' integrity. For starters, the cybersecurity firm recommends you create a password with at least 15 characters with a strong pattern, combining two upper- and lower-case letters at the minimum with numbers and symbols.
PassGAN can figure out a password with eight or nine characters in around seven hours and two weeks, respectively, even if you follow the best practices. Passwords with 10 or 11 characters would take the AI approximately five and 365 years to decipher. A 15-character password, however, takes 14 billion years to decode. So changing your password periodically, between three to six months, is also essential. And for good measure, avoid using the same password for different accounts.
AI is here to stay, and the hardware that powers AI will improve over time. It's undeniable that AI brings many benefits to our daily lives, but nothing prevents evil parties from leveraging it for malicious purposes, such as cracking passwords to steal your data.
The Superyachts of Billionaires Are Starting to Look a Lot Like Theft
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By Joe Fassler
If you’re a billionaire with a palatial boat, there’s only one thing to do in mid-May: Chart your course for Istanbul and join your fellow elites for an Oscars-style ceremony honoring the builders, designers and owners of the world’s most luxurious vessels, many of them over 200 feet long.
The nominations for the World Superyacht Awards were all delivered in 2022, and the largest contenders are essentially floating sea mansions, complete with amenities like glass elevators, glass-sided pools, Turkish baths and all-teak decks. The 223-foot Nebula, owned by the WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, comes with an air-conditioned helicopter hangar.
I hate to be a wet blanket, but the ceremony in Istanbul is disgraceful. Owning or operating a superyacht is probably the most harmful thing an individual can do to the climate. If we’re serious about avoiding climate chaos, we need to tax, or at the very least shame, these resource-hoarding behemoths out of existence. In fact, taking on the carbon aristocracy, and their most emissions-intensive modes of travel and leisure, may be the best chance we have to improve our collective climate morale and increase our appetite for personal sacrifice, from individual behavior changes to sweeping policy mandates.
On an individual basis, the superrich pollute far more than the rest of us, and travel is one of the biggest parts of that footprint. Take, for instance, Rising Sun, the 454-foot, 82-room megaship owned by the DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen. According to a 2021 analysis in the journal Sustainability, the diesel fuel powering Mr. Geffen’s boating habit spews an estimated 16,320 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere annually, almost 800 times what the average American generates in a year.
And that’s just a single ship. Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht. This fleet pollutes as much as entire nations: The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitants. Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.
A changing climate, a changing world
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Climate change around the world: In “Postcards From a World on Fire,” 193 stories from individual countries show how climate change is reshaping reality everywhere, from dying coral reefs in Fiji to disappearing oases in Morocco and far, far beyond.
The role of our leaders: Writing at the end of 2020, Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, found reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency, a feeling perhaps borne out by the passing of major climate legislation. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been criticisms. For example, Charles Harvey and Kurt House argue that subsidies for climate capture technology will ultimately be a waste.
The worst climate risks, mapped: In this feature, select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces. In the case of America, our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths.
Then there are the private jets, which make up a much higher overall contribution to climate change. Private aviation added 37 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2016, which rivals the annual emissions of Hong Kong or Ireland. (Private plane use hassurged since then, so today’s number is likely higher.)
You’re probably thinking: But isn’t that a drop in the bucket compared with the thousands of coal plants around the world spewing carbon? It’s a common sentiment; last year, Christophe Béchu, France’s minister of the environment, dismissed calls to regulate yachts and chartered flights as “le buzz” — flashy, populist solutions that get people amped up but ultimately only fiddle at the margins of climate change.
But this misses a much more important point. Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part,” the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallier wrote last year in Le Monde.
In that sense, superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change; they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it. Why bother when the luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is cruising around on the Symphony,a $150 million, 333-foot superyacht.
“If some people are allowed to emit 10 times as much carbon for their comfort,” Mr. Baumard and Ms. Chevallier asked, “then why restrict your meat consumption, turn down your thermostat or limit your purchases of new products?”
Whether we’re talking about voluntary changes (insulating our attics and taking public transit) or mandated ones (tolerating a wind farm on the horizon or saying goodbye to a lush lawn), the climate fight hinges, to some extent, on our willingness to participate. When the ultrarich are given a free pass, we lose faith in the value of that sacrifice.
Taxes aimed at superyachts and private jets would take some of the sting out of these conversations, helping to improve everybody’s climate morale, a term coined by the Georgetown Law professor Brian Galle. But making these overgrown toys a bit more costly isn’t likely to change the behavior of the billionaires who buy them. Instead, we can impose new socialcosts through good, old-fashioned shaming.
Last June, @CelebJets — a Twitter account that tracked the flights of well-known figures using public data, then calculated their carbon emissions for all to see — revealed that the influencer Kylie Jenner took a 17-minute flight between two regional airports in California. One Twitter user wrote, “kylie jenner is out here taking 3 minute flights with her private jet, but I’m the one who has to use paper straws.”
As media outlets around the world covered the backlash, other celebrities like Drake and Taylor Swift scrambled to defend their heavy reliance on private plane travel. (Twitter suspended the @CelebJets account in December after Elon Musk, a frequent target of jet-tracking accounts, acquired the platform.)
There’s a lesson here: Hugely disproportionate per capita emissions get people angry. And they should. When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on ridiculous boats or cushy chartered flights, it shortens the span of time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating. In this light, superyachts and private planes start to look less like extravagance and more like theft.
Change can happen — and quickly. French officials are exploring curbing private plane travel. And just last week — after sustained pressure from activists — Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam announced it would ban private jets as a climate-saving measure.
Even in the United States, carbon shaming can have outsize impact. Richard Aboulafia, who’s been an aviation industry consultant and analyst for 35 years, says that cleaner, greener aviation, from all-electric city hoppers to a new class of sustainable fuels, is already on the horizon for short flights. Private aviation’s high-net-worth customers just need more incentive to adopt these new technologies. Ultimately, he says, it’s only our vigilance and pressure that will speed these changes along.
There’s a similar opportunity with superyachts. Just look at Koru, Jeff Bezos’ newly built 416-foot megaship, a three-masted schooner that can reportedly cross the Atlantic on wind power alone. It’s a start.
Even small victories challenge the standard narrative around climate change. We can say no to the idea of limitless plunder, of unjustifiable overconsumption. We can say no to the billionaires’ toys.
DeSantis previously said that he'd support open permitless carry of firearms because "if it's concealed, it makes it easier for somebody to potentially do a crime." He added that he wouldn't veto a permitless concealed carry bill from his legislature if it didn't have open carry. He signed the bill into law on April 3, 2023.
A March University of North Florida poll of 1,452 registered voters found that just 21% of people in the state support concealed carry without a permit, with 77% of those polled saying they oppose the bill strongly or somewhat.
