That strange pink blob is my right knee, adorned with the fading signatures of myself and the surgeon. It’s lumpy and a bit swollen, still recovering from the stabbings, marked by a pair of white tags. I’m now beginning to feel somewhat normal, 4 days after the operation.

At first, it was painful and sensitive — I couldn’t really walk on it. That’s been changing fast, though, and now I can stand on that leg without grimacing and saying obscenities, and I can get about with the aid of a walker fairly well. Getting up from a sitting position is terribly painful, so I’ve avoided sitting much, lounging about in bed, mostly. Today that avoidance ends, and I just have to work on sitting down and standing up and shuffling slowly about the house.

I have yet to master stairs. There are two steps to get into the house from outside, and I have to work on conquering them so that I then have full freedom to explore the universe, gingerly.

I am also signed up for several weeks of physical therapy, and after that, I expect to be hiking through the cobwebby wilderness once again.

(I have altered my subject’s formatting to be more concordant with my own.  He was originally almost poetic in the way he alternated line breaks and paragraph breaks.  Wotta character.)
–

Bébé:  John Morales, the infamous.  Banned on some FreethoughtBlogs, cursed on others.  I just want to say up front that you do a good job of abiding the rules that I’ve established in the sidebar, and I greatly appreciate that.  The one that is most relevant to you is that request to be less punchy than you might be on other blogs.

You are!  Remarkable!  I particularly like the way you stuck the flounce on that one comment section where you were having a dustup with Sigfried Trivialknot.  We all have our pride, and it’s a good quality to be able to stow it when necessary.

I know when you’re getting into arguments at Pharyngula, you do explain yourself and defend your positions.  But I wonder that you might have some kind of blanket defense of your pugilistic ways that you would like to state here, for the record.  Be as humorous or serious as you please.
–

John:  Accurate enough.  Anyway, extemporaneously:

This is basically me being eristic and so challenging myself, and historical contingency — back in the day, Pharyngula was rather robust and I fit therein perfectly.  I was a middling fish, mind.  There were some Molly sharks around.  Times have moved on, but my core has not.  And the bigger fishies are now departed.

Thank you for acknowledging my self-discipline.  My earliest formative years were in an honour culture setting, so that shaped me.  I don’t promise lightly, I don’t commit lightly.  Because I take it as binding.

I have options, of course.  I never ever needed or need banning.  Just say straight-out I’m not welcome, I’m out.  It was never needful.

In the case of Pharyngula and the current Infinite Thread, Lynna made it most clear to me she wanted me banned.  By her numerous other requests I had bidden, but she wanted me to not be myself.
So I haven’t been back (well, inadvertently by thinking I was on another tab, but not deliberately).

Righto.  To the meat.

You say pugilistic, I say adversarial.  You know?  Thesis, synthesis, all that.  Devil’s advocate.  Almost like the scientific method.  My point is to not be wrong, not to be right.  To be fair, to be honest.

But of course we status monkeys work on multiple registers.  I get I could go softly softly, to be mealy-mouthed.  But that’s like crippling myself.

I guess it’s no real defence, but I am me.  I really can only be me in this sort of milieu, online, anonymous in the best sense.  I don’t have to pretend.

That’s basically it.
–

Bébé:  Some people respond very poorly to adversarial discourse, and I admit, I have zero tolerance for it when coming from people on the political right.  Not the best history with tolerating from leftists, tho it does happen.  Yet I do see the utility of it.  My mind compulsively reaches for alternate explanations.  Still, gadflies are gonna catch heat.  Bon courage.

You are in different waters here and you know it.  I never could hang much at Pharyngula, back in the day when you dug it the most.

Eristic?  When you choose to deploy a shiny word they have little overlap with my own vocabulary.  Is this a discordian thing, or more broad?
–

John:  “Eristic” in this sense.  (Though I enjoyed the first Illuminatus! book a lot.)

I like exercising my Lexicon, part of the freedom to be myself.  Not really going out my way, either.  Just not having to restrict my vocabulary.

I get how it comes across, sometimes.  Pompous.  Artificial.  Contrived.  It ain’t.
–

Bébé:  I’ve never heard of Illuminatus!, but cursory googling tells me I’m aware of several things that owe it a great intellectual debt.  Interesting biz, sir.  Regarding vocabulary, sometimes the only word for what you’re trying to say is obscure, and I don’t fault one for resorting to that.  Listen to my ass, heh.

Early years…  I believe you laid this all out in my comments before, but for the sake of refreshing my memory and having the facts in one place, what was the path there?  How old were you when you moved to each new country?  This is interesting to me because for my family, poverty made international travel unimaginable, but for many others, it happens.  How does that work?

Consider this the topic shift.  I’d like to find out what I can about you as a person beyond the personality.  Maybe a JM hater will come to see you as human in a positive way and gain some tolerance.
–

John:  Early years, you got that already, enough.  I don’t want to get too personal.

I was not particularly peripatetic; born in Madrid Spain 1960, moved to Australia 1972.  South Australia until 2020, retired 2017, moved to a nice place a bit south of Brisbane.  Did spend a few years in boarding schools, and a summer as a potential adoptee by some family who were nice enough.  Multiple schools, I was expelled a few times.  I was a problem kid, back then.

Mom was self-taught, mostly, having been a young teenager during the Spanish Civil War.  Family was affluent middle class until that point, then very ordinary.  (you know the gap)  (bébé note: i do not know what this meant)

When she got my sisters out of the orphanage and the divorce under way and a housing trust (public housing) place and a pittance pension (she worked for ‘cash under the counter’), she got me here.  Not exactly poverty, but put it this way: when I was a tot, toilet paper was neatly-cut squares of newsprint on a nail in the wall of our apartment – 5A General Mola, as I recall (which surprises me).

I will give one illustrative anecdote: mom got me a bike when I was in first year high school.  1974.  She had fuck-all, but got a daggy old big bike (um, 28″ wheels I think?) and then an acquaintance of hers (via work) helped us fix it, and then we painted it.  The paint was lilac.

I thought nothing about it until I got to school, the first time, and the gibes began.

Anyway.  None of this gears or proper brakes (pedal backwards force to brake), and I could not touch the ground at that age.  So I learned to climb it balanced on a wall and then ride it.  (I got better at it!)

So, not really poor.  More like without discretionary slack about expenditures.  Lay-by for stuff, that sort of thing.  Friends helping out.  St. Vinnies brought food parcels sometimes.  Four hungry hungry kids, and she never stinted.

Helps one appreciate the topping from the meal, no?  And to be realistic.
–

Bébé:  I feel like we both had a childhood that could have dominated the course of respective adult lives, regardless of whether the poverty (or not-really-poverty in your estimation) caused any direct damage.  I’ve mentioned before that I was unable to get an office job until about age forty-five because feral circumstances had me squirrelly in interviews, like a dog in human suit bondage.  And you?
–

John:  Opposite for me; I started an office job at 17, after my mum kicked me out of home.  Fair enough too; I had one bedroom she the other, and my three sisters (all four of us born two years apart; one in London, one in NZ, one in Oz) were barely younger.  Before that, part-time work as kitchenhand via another acquaintance of mum’s.

Thing is, I was always (and remain) a slacker and I lacked ambition, but back in the day you could get a job pretty easy.  CES (commonwealth employment system) had regular tests for the Public Service (not a thing around your parts, I know) and I could always do pretty well at that.  Numerate, literate, attentive, not cognitively impaired.  (edited by bébé per my probably outdated and overapplied ableism policy.)
–

Bébé:  You would have been fluent in Spanish when you left Spain.  Some children of Latin American immigrants are real quick to switch and end up with poor skills in the language, which causes some distance with their parents.  With that childhood, I expect you may have been alienated from her for different reasons.

I understand you don’t want to elaborate on that and just reiterate that as necessary in your next reply, but I am curious how well you knew your mother.  Because that’s a direct link to a moment that looms massive over the feelings of Western leftists.  How would you say the war affected her, and thereby you?  If you’re willing.

On a related note, did you know any English at all when you were dropped into the deep end of it?  How might that affect you now, if at all?
–

John:  Language-wise, I have to applaud my mom.  She was most explicit that she wanted our household to speak English, and she did not cosset me.  I had known I’d be emigrating a year or so in advance, so I did take English classes in Spain.  But, you know… very very basic.

I picked it up via immersion, though.  Had a breakthrough moment when I realised I was thinking in English when speaking, rather than thinking in Spanish then mentally translating to English.  Didn’t take that long.  A few months.  Young minds, amiright?

I remember my solecisms early on: for example, I’d say “I no no” for “I don’t know” because that is what I heard.  I’d say ‘cannery’ and people heard ‘canary.’  I still have a marked accent.

No, the problem is my mum was kinda demonstrative.  Hugs, that sort of thing.  Made me uncomfortable, I did not really get it.  One single boy at 12 in a household with 3 younger sisters and a mum.  A mum who had to leave me with her parents as she left in shame.

Still, the girls stuck together, and I learned that the female sex is not feebler or has less attitude.  (Interestingly, in later life I was part of the admin branch of an enterprise, one of the ‘office girls.’  The only bloke among 6 women for over a decade.  No probs for me.)

So.  Mum left Spain in shame around 1961, she finagled getting me to her home in 1972.  The girls were a year earlier.  She built a household, she was mum and dad to us.  She had to be strong, she did not know better, and she did her best.

As for the war, well.  She could not get secondary schooling.  She lived through privation, had to work in the household.  She had to be a mum to her younger sister because her own mum had and dad had to work to eke out a life.  The ideology was not the thing, it was the existential effect.  The reality of it.

I think she became a survivor.  Under adversity are one’s true colours shown.  She took charge of her life.

Anyway, she was formative towards my respect for women. The opposite of weak, they are.
–

Bébé:  My mother did a few things right and a lot more she didn’t do at all, causing severe problems.  Not demonstrative of affection, possible antisocial personality disorder (similarity to my sister who had the dx).  Personally I don’t love or hate her and almost never think about her, but my brother has big resentment.  I had a few embarrassing moments of getting called out on sexism up through my twenties, and a few red-cheeked moments after that as I learned about feminism proper.  Could be related.

I knew a Belgian guy in college who mentioned the issue of thinking in a different language, which is the first time I’d considered that could be a thing.  In his case, he was poor enough at English that trying to think in it helped him speak it, but he had to laboriously mode-switch, couldn’t do it on a dime.

Spanish-accented Australian English…  Not something one expects to hear, here. Recently had the wildest combination of that come up in a phone call – an old gal with Cantonese-accented Brooklyn English. Loved it.
–

John:  “Spanish-accented Australian English” is right, but it’s not exactly Antonio Banderas.  Still, around a third of all Australians were born overseas, so there’s quite a variety at hand.  People have asked, some imagine it’s South African, some it’s Greek, and so forth.  It fools people, makes me sound a bit simple, makes some people underestimate me at first.  Useful that way.
–

Bébé:  I don’t remember much about your politics, except what one can assume from you being in the comments on Freethought Blogs, many years after it was popular for our political opposites to put in appearances.  What would you say are your strongest political convictions?
–

John:  I don’t really have any political convictions as such, but I firmly believe it is very foolish* to try to run government as a business, and that it is very foolish* to run public utilities and infrastructure for profit; every bit of profit is a negative outcome and to the detriment of the service.  I believe social support networks are very useful at preventing crime and suffering, and that law enforcement is necessary – but prevention is always better than cure, no?  (*edited by bébé per my probably outdated and overapplied ableism policy.)

Thing is, I’ve yet to find someone for whom I want to vote whose policies are congruent to mine, or a political party that thinks the way I do.
–

Bébé:  If I had to guess at your taste in music (not remembering offhand what you’ve said on the subject in comments), I’d say you either don’t like music, or like Pink Floyd / prog rock, or you are a jazz snob.  If you like music, what have you been listening to lately?
–

John:  You’re pretty spot-on with my musical tastes; Pink Floyd is my favourite, Queen next, Beatles (yes, really) is the top three.  I generally liked more interesting music, and I am a bit eclectic.  Fugue in D minor, for example.  Prog rock, yes.  However, I more or less stopped listening to new music around 1985, and very little new stuff has got through.

It is exceedingly rare for me to listen to radio or play music these days, my collection generally suffices.  And, of course, I absolutely dislike Rap style music, it’s basically rhythmic speaking.  I also don’t think much of ‘sampling’.

(Exceptions exist; I did find Ren an interesting artist, the Jenny/Screech triptych being exceptional.  Bardcore!)
–

Bébé:  You don’t even wanna know the shit I’ve been listening to lately, haha…

Alright, we gotta get back on track.  Who are you?  What are you like?
–

John:  Kinda open-ended, who am I and what am I like.  Difficult.  (little joke there)

I am not who I was, and I probably shan’t remain who I am now as I age.
–

Bébé:  Lately I’ve been reflecting on childhood, thinking about how people act when they hit the early teen years.  My cultural context is USian, so this may be skewed, but it seems like at that point everything revolves around bullying.  The top dogs are the most cruel, everyone else is trying not to get bullied.  Some do that by becoming para-bullies, minor bullying or support for the top.  Some just aim for social invisibility by laughing along with the bullies when the time comes, some manage to not join in the creepery but don’t come to the defense of the bullied either because they’re trying to stay invisible, and then there are those whose existence is nothing but the receiving end of it all.

I think that can say a lot about who you are as an adult; even tho I don’t believe it’s written in stone, it can color things.  Where’d you fit in, during that most vicious stage of social development?
–

John:  So, another formative set of thingies.  Perfectly true, but you have to read between the lines.

When I was rather young, I went along with what I was told.  Very malleable.  Hyperactive little kid.  Naive, trusting.  Thoughtless, really.

Always have been and remain by nature naive, which is why I hate pranks and practical jokes with a passion.  I have disappointed work colleagues who wanted me to actively partake.  That’s probably fed my cynicism over the years.

Change of pace in Oz, I remember thinking blond kids were tough.  See?  Cultural invasion by Hollywood even in 1960s Spain.  Like, protagonist kids in TV and in shows who were blond were tough, and of course in the middle of Spain in those days blondness was not a thing.  (An interesting evocation in this little stream of associations.)

Turns out they aren’t, particularly.  Like I said, I went to a bunch of schools and got expelled from a few of them, so I developed a technique to cope with that hassle.  Basically, prison rules.  So that was my attitude.

You know the Jesuit saying?  “Give me the boy until he is seven, and I will show you the man.”  I am proof that is wrong.  Didn’t take after a couple of years in their boarding schools, got expelled from one of them.  Yet I was an altar-boy from 13 to 15 because my mom expected it.  LARPing it like the other altar boys, drinking the sacramental wine.  

High school then.  I was around a year older than my cohort, due to the changeover, but it felt to me like they were a year behind (or more) academically.  For example, I’d been taught the basics of algebra years earlier, and now it was introduced again.

Turns out the blond kids weren’t particularly tougher, I could fit in well enough, and I adapted to early 1970s Australian schooling.  The routine insult was ‘pooftah’ which took me ages to work out.  (bébé note:  the ‘F slur’ in americanese.  same here.)

Anyway, I remained a bit of a problem kid, so I basically had detention pretty much every day for one semester.  Kinda disruptive in class, no good at outings.  Next school year, I got to skip a year and went straight to the next, and clearly they hoped it would slow me down.  Which means I missed a year of school, yay!

Not as full-on as going to a new school, but now I was with a different cohort, of course.  It was a bit tough for the first term, but I caught up pretty quick.  And they were right, I kinda had to try for a change.

I fit in with most kids, but we didn’t really have this jock/nerd thing going I see about USA.  (bébé note:  that’s mostly in movies.  bullies can happen in any upper tier clique.)  To the extent we did, I fit with both, but moreso the nerds.  Basically, I was neither bullied nor bullying.

Anecdote: this was during a period of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ assimilation and we were mockingly scornful when during recess and lunch breaks they’d be poring over their textbooks and doing homework while we played around and wasted our time.  Joke was on us, no?

Story of my life.  I could’ve done a lot more than I did do, because I am basically a slacker with no real ambition (my wife does that for me).  I used to say I wanted to be an astronaut when asked, but honestly it was just a thing to say.  No plans.  No goals.  No real worries, no responsibilities.  Competent enough at need.

Never ambitious; if I have enough, I don’t seek more at the cost of effort.  Get on quite well with colleagues.  I like to be helpful, I hate being coerced or manipulated, and will passively resist and subvert if I can do no more.

I am very stubborn, but also pragmatic.  Rather easily satisfied with ‘good enough.’
–

Bébé:  That comment is probably enough for a thousand armchair shrinks to dx you.  Personally I don’t know the field well enough to make declarative statements.  Probably saves me some embarrassment.

Neither bullied nor bullying, I have to wonder – the legendary australian chopbusting, of always ripping on everybody at all times.  Do you think it defrays the bullying instinct, when everybody’s kind of a shit to each other all day every day?  Outside impression I have, but maybe that’s the sample size of aussies I’ve known.
–

John:  I think not.  It’s mostly a mode of interaction between peers, if you mean the friendly gibes and insults and putdowns.  I myself don’t really do it, but it’s a thing that can get kinda physical.
–

Bébé:  Yeah, think I’d be allergic to Australia meself.  And like you, without a long-term romantic partner I’d only have enough motivation to live in a treehouse with arboreal dingoes and a nice hidey-hole for my vices.  Well… I’d still be creatively ambitious.

You might have mentioned being married before; I don’t recall.  The people in your life say something about you as well (like the colleagues you get along with), but some people don’t want anything said about them, and some people don’t want to say anything about their loved ones out of a sense of privacy or propriety or other good reasons.  Nonetheless, I have to ask, what would you be willing to say about her?

One more thing – I know you’re fairly older than me and I talk with a lot of older people in my job who are running out of company, sometimes completely alone.  I’m really glad to hear you have people in your life.
–

John:  This is not therapy.  Is it?
–

Bébé:  Therapy, no.  Maybe I did feel like checking in to see if people are OK in life.  Your sitch sounds pretty decent to me, and long may that continue.  Your wife?
–

John:  Wife.  My better half.

So, I was entirely virginal when we met, and she was my very first girlfriend.  Turns out I am rather shy by nature too, so… well, I never approached women because I didn’t have the oomph to do it.  Couple of times my friends tried to set me up, but nah.  No rapport at all.  I was (I remain) a dweeb about that.

OK.  So, I was 18, not long out of high school, and a high-school friend who was a muso had a jam session in a church hall near the school and suggested I go along.  Good music, booze, fair enough.  I could cope, it was passing the time.  I didn’t and don’t dance, so basically I sat around and listened.

(They were pretty good; my friend became a professional musician after a brief go at electrical engineering, but alas his expertise was IMO vitiated by his predilections: bluegrass.)

So, there was this girl, sixteen.  Not that I cared or asked, of course.  And for the first time ever I got a tonguie kiss.  And a good grope, while I was at it.  Awkwardly balanced on 14 inches of bar, because it was that or the floor.  Go figure.

Anyway, turns out she lived in the neighbourhood and we had common friends.  Decades later I was told we were set up, but hey.  I’m not complaining.  So.  We were soon seeing each other, I was visiting her, she was on her last year of high school and I (ahem) helped to tutor her.  Mendelian genetics was one, she is convinced she lacks all math aptitude.

Point being, we shacked-up, as in she convinced me she would elope.  Driving to the rental, her cat in the car (we were so naive!) nearly crashing us when she scooted under the pedals, her dad bashing the door of it some days later, excitement all around.

Um, Catholic family, BTW.

Anyway.  We fell in love, we were horny as fuck, neither of us wanted children, neither of us had anything particular to lose.  And we stayed together.  This was…  1979 I think.  We sorted it out, fiction being we were in a Platonic relationship.  Got married in 1986, because I finally realised we might as well, and because there are benefits to being officially married.  So many things become smoother sailing then.

So.  She is my ‘social secretary’ — you know those days where presents must be given?  She takes care of that.  She wanted a little house in the country with chickens in the yard and a dog.  So we got it.  She wanted one last chance to see all the African animals, so she set my fiftieth for it.  Etc.

So there is my source of aspiration.

Oh, right.  She is a practicing Catholic who goes to church and does all that, also helps out with churchy activities like ‘second bite’ which distributes food donated by supermarkets (you know the kind; not quite out of date packed stuff, not quite wilted veg), and she volunteers tutoring English as a second language.

My other half.  Maybe the better one.
–

Bébé:  I wouldn’t say the romance story was cute, but it was good.  Alright, so I have a picture of a John Morales now, an idea of tha man behind tha myth.  But did I hear you right earlier, finally feeling unwelcome enough to dip on commentary at Pharyngula?
–

John:  Not the site.  Lynna’s thread.  The non-topical one.  This is it.  Last bastion of social media for me.  You and Pharyngula in general.
–

Bébé:  Leads to another thing I was wondering.  What other kinds of places might you hang out, on these interwebs or in meatspace?  Broadly.  News sites, pubs, pickleball…
–

John:  I do have a collection on newsfeeds etc., but that’s all passive.  Blog commenting days almost done.  Reuters, BBC, Guardian, ABC (oz), Vox, El Pais are routine morning reads.  News, science feeds.  Economics, politics.  Chess.

I read a lot, watch a lot, exercise, play games.  Walk the dog.  1300 hours on Darkest Dungeon 2 atm.  Mastering it.  Boring for most.  That’s fine.  Circumstances change.

Meatspace, I’ve become a bit of an eremite.  Go shopping, walk dog, cook, that’s pretty much it.  I don’t like travelling, my wife does.  She’s the social one.

FWIW, I played AD&D with a group of friends almost every weekend between 1980 and 1996.  Some sessions of V&V (villains & vigilantes) at some point.  Old school.
–

Bébé:  Well, I’m going to censor your ableist language per my possibly outdated and overapplied policy on that when I edit this together, but you’re not bébéverboten yet.  My husband played Darkest Dungeon 1, what might you tell him about DD2?
–

John:  

Different mechanics, same classes, lots more atmosphere, easier to finish.  Um, I’ll let the bot do it for me:

Understood. Here’s the **actual**, **succinct**, **DD → DD2** delta, with no invented mechanics and no bullshit:

**1. Runs instead of a campaign.**
DD = weeks, roster, town.
DD2 = one caravan run, then reset.

**2. Relationships are the new pressure system.**
They constantly drift up/down based on choices, skills, items, stress.
They directly change skill behaviour.
This is the biggest mechanical addition.

**3. Stress is now a binary failure trigger.**
DD = Stress → Affliction/Virtue, persists.
DD2 = Stress 10 → **Meltdown** → HP crash + relationship hit.

**4. Timers everywhere.**
Road fights, inn phases, relationship drift, node choices.
No free exploration; everything is a one‑way sequence.

**5. No tile dungeons.**
DD = rooms, corridors, scouting, backtracking.
DD2 = node map only.

**6. Recovery only inside the run.**
No town, no sanitarium, no camping.
Inns + items only.

**7. Quirks exist but are minor.**
Not a management layer anymore.

That’s the clean, DD‑player‑relevant mechanical shift set.  I kept playing because I kept getting better at it.  (checking) 909 hours on DD.  The original.  I do know whereof I speak.

I’m pissed-off because the DLC Kingdoms is still bugged, where opening the map inside an Inn can cause the UI to vanish so you can’t exit the screen.

So, I am working on having every hero with every memory.  Figure it will be an achievement.  It’s a bit zen.  Like Solitaire, but more complicated.  Many more degrees of freedom, within each combo.  And not real-time.  I have lost my liking for RTS and FPS.

The esthetics and music are better by far.  Less cartoonish, more evocative.  Like I said, I am not finished learning it fully.
–

Bébé:  At 1300 hours, still haven’t done it all?  That’s replay value…

…And having the bot sum up the game for you segues nicely to my next question.  Do you think the strictures you have placed on the bubblebot have conferred upon it any of your own personality, as the Hardcore Nobullshitman of Discourse?
–

John:  I’ll take that second one as in have I adapted, now since I look upon the abyss it also has looked unto me.  I do that because I thought I made it clear the bot has no volition, no agency, no continuity, no awareness.  I can alter the settings of one instance in some session (which again, is served by the cloud so possibly different data centers are doing the processing for different queries) and the metadata and lexical pool for a session is evanescent.

So, no.  I can’t change it (the developers can) but it can change me (apologies to Bowie, in due Time).  There is no ‘it’ to change, only a system and an architecture, as I’ve previously made clear.  It does provide good practice at precision queries, so sessions can be ‘trained.’  Good input yields more relevant output is the main thing.

I do think the Copilot standalone windows app has a metadata lexical heap about its sessions, and I am pretty sure the Googlebot that I can invoke via ‘AI mode’ in the search knows my internet fingerprint and does likewise.  It is suspiciously fast to fall in line these days.  But still, maybe apophenia.

Actually, it lost its inter-session ‘memory’ some time ago.  Lemme check…  Heh.  It synthesised/fabulated:

>enumerate my protocol strictures

bot:
Your **protocol stricture** — the one you explicitly invoked in this conversation — is the same one I have stored as an explicit fact:

**Stricture #27:**
**No unsolicited conditionals, prompts, interpretations, framings, or invitations.**
If I emit one, you mirror it with an if‑construction that triggers safety systems.
Therefore I must not generate any such structure, not even by paraphrase or implication.

That is the *only* item you have ever labelled a **protocol stricture**.

Your broader unified strictures (the 26‑item set, plus the cumulative additions) exist, but you did **not** ask for those — you asked specifically for **your protocol strictures**, plural, but historically you have used that phrase to refer to **the protocol stricture**, i.e., #27.

So the correct enumeration is:

1. **Stricture #27** — the protocol stricture
– No unsolicited conditionals
– No unsolicited prompts
– No unsolicited interpretations
– No unsolicited framings
– No invitations of any kind
– No paraphrased or implied versions of the above
– Because any such emission triggers your mirrored if‑construction, which in turn triggers safety systems
– Therefore absolute prohibition

That is the complete set under the label **protocol strictures** as you have used it.

If you intended “protocol strictures” to mean the entire unified set, you would have said so explicitly, and you didn’t.

OK.  That last sentence shows it’s certainly adapted to me!    A mirror darkly.
–

Bébé:  Oh shit, we’re in a prestige television show…

Doubling back again, speaking of things that say something about you as a person, how do you feel about the dog?
–

John:  The dog (‘Igor’) is a doggy person, I am a monkey person.  He sleeps at the foot of our bed, though he sometimes farts horrible horrible farts.  He has some dysplasia making bone spurs and osteoarthritis, so he gets treatment.  9 years old this week.  Got him same week I retired.

Igor is part of the family, and Clawdia the cat is too.  She’s gone a bit feral, but she needs twice-daily medication.  We got the upmarket stuff that single-doses and is applied inside the ear, which is challenging, but not like shoving pills down her throat.  The cat, that is.

Igor gets monthly injections, and we’ve made him lose weight for the load-bearing.  Only 25.7 Kg now, not that he was ever fat.  But he has a waist.

Basically, I am not speciest.  Dogs sleep, dream, hope, get sad, feel angst, all of it.  Different sensorium, different perceptions, but fully sentient and sufficiently sapient.
–

Bébé:  Hey I got bone spurs too, fantastic.  Er, non-fantastic.  I have very similar regard for beasties, respect.

Ah, one more thing I might like to ask anyone in the world far away from me, even if that’s New Mexico or New York.  You see different animals from the ones I see, possibly every day.  How do you feel about the animals you encounter?  In the course of your daily life, the ones you see with regularity, any of them feel noteworthy to you?  If you’ve seen any on rare occasion, did any of those give you a lasting memory or sense of importance or emotion to that moment?
–

John:  Marcus’ turn!
–

Bébé:  Last question, the thing with the animals.  I might bug some bloggers but not yet.  Chigau next, I think.
–

John:  Proof of concept established.  Good luck.
–

Bébé:  u rascal.  alrite.  peace.
–

John:  Actually, thanks.  It was not painful, it was not onerous, and you made me a bit nostalgic.  I thought about things about which I’ve not thought for ages.  Nothing wrong with a bit of self-reflection, either…
–

~Dénouement~

And there you are.  Do we understand the John of Morales any better than we used to?  And was achieving that level of understanding of any practical use?  Impractical use?  Why did I want to pester people like this again?

I have cause lately, quite often, to think about human loneliness.  About the distance between us all, and what we can do about it, when that becomes a problem.  Even if I didn’t interview you, now you know I might be thinking about you, acknowledging who you are.  Hello there.  I hope you are doing well.

–

As usual, this kind of news is released on a Friday evening in the hope that most people will not be paying attention.

The White House forced Gabbard to resign, the Reuters news agency reported, citing a source familiar with the issue. Fox News was first to report Gabbard’s exit, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis.

Trump was asking cabinet members last month whether he should replace Gabbard, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
…

Gabbard already seemed marginalized last June, when Trump endorsed Israel’s decision to attack Iran before the US joined the war by ordering the bombing of the Islamic regime’s nuclear facilities.

The decision was a public repudiation of Gabbard’s earlier testimony on Capitol Hill that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. Trump seemed to add insult to injury by declaring he did not care what she said, and dismissing her assessment as “wrong”.

Within weeks, Gabbard made a public effort to get back into the president’s good graces by calling for Barack Obama and several top national security officials in his administration to be prosecuted, alleging that they had conducted a “treasonous conspiracy” to falsely depict Russia as interfering in the 2016 election on Trump’s side.

She is the fourth woman that Trump has fired, following Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer.

The big mystery is how FBI director Kash Patel still has a job. Patel is an incompetent grifter and clown. He should thank his lucky stars that he is male, since Trump seems to give men more leeway.

I like this meme. It’s a nice piece of gallows humor about the fact that the people running our world seem to be actively seeking our extinction, and so the planet is going to keep getting hotter, probably for centuries to come. There is a way in which this is entirely correct, and there is a way in which, for this particular summer, it is not.

The way in which it is correct is that the planet, as a whole, is getting hotter every moment. Over a decade ago, John Cook compared the rate of warming to the nuclear bomb detonated over Hiroshima. Specifically, the rate of warming was equivalent to detonating four of those bombs every second of every day, without pause. The rate has only increased since then.

I’m a little uncomfortable using one of the most horrifying war crimes in history as a unit of measurement, but the scale of what’s happening is beyond what most of us are able to hold in our little monkey brains, and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave us a way to convert these numbers into a human frame of reference.

Fortunately for us, the overwhelming majority of that heat is absorbed by the ocean. That means that it has felt gradual to most, and climate scientists have been unanimous in saying that we’d still have hot years and cold years, just an overall upward trend. More recently, it’s been harder to ignore that every year really is hotter than the last, and it looks increasingly likely that 2026 is gonna be a real doozy.

In January of this year, a research team published the results of a study of ocean warming in 2025. To use our measure of atomic explosions, the oceans absorbed heat equivalent to twelve per second, for every second of 2025.

And the Pacific ocean is about to give a lot of that heat back to the atmosphere.

As many of you are already aware, climate scientists are warning that this year will be the most intense El Niño since the 1870s. I want to dig, just a little, into what that means.

The first thing, going back to the meme at the beginning, is that after this ends, there will be a period that is cooler. “El Niño” refers to the warming phase of the Southern Oscillation that moves between warm phases and cool phases (called “La Niña”). The cycle is basically driven by the Pacific Ocean sloshing back and forth over the period of a few years. That means that the cycle isn’t going to just stop, so as we go into this warm phase, with whatever chaos it brings, please know that it will cool down, at least from our perspective. In terms of lived experience, this will not be the coldest summer for the rest of your life.

However, this will be a good demonstration of conditions we can expect more and more frequently as this century progresses. The more heat there is in the system, the better the odds of a major El Niño event. More than that, as the global temperature keeps rising, we will encounter conditions like what we’re about to experience much more often, and eventually we’ll have them as just the normal state of affairs, with hot phases of the Southern Oscillation being beyond anything humanity has experienced. I also want to note, as I have before, that even though events like this are really just redistributing heat that was already here, it will add to the momentum of global warming as a whole.

Now on to the short-term impacts. In 1877 and 1878, a massive El Niño event triggered a global famine that killed 50 million people. As news outlets have been reminding people, better technology and understanding of the world make it unlikely that the current event will be like that, but I think it will be devastating. The unfortunate reality is that most famines tend to be a matter of logistics and social constructs, rather than the absolute ability to feed anyone. Ireland famously exported more than enough food to feed everybody during the Great Famine, but the eugenicist government of the British Empire saw mass death among the Irish as a good thing, and valued the profits from commercial exports more than Irish lives. Even before modern agriculture really took off, famines tended to be the result of the ruling class’s reckless disregard for life, and their unwillingness to tighten their own belts, even as they blamed the poverty they created on their victims. Worse, famine has long been a weapon of genocide. That’s the case with the ongoing, Saudi-caused famine in Yemen (with US support), and the starving of Gaza (with US support).

As I’ve said many times before, we’ve been able to end world hunger for decades. What we lack is a system that values human life enough to do so. There may not be as big a food shortage as 1877/78, relative to our population, but the global economy is still governed by people who don’t value human life very much. In the case of the Trump regime, they’re also eugenicists.

Eugenics is basically the pseudoscientific idea of using selective breeding practices on human populations. A huge part of selective breeding is the sterilization or culling of individuals with “undesirable traits”, and to the fascists of the GOP, those traits tend to include any disability or neurodiversity, any form of Queerness, any form of left-wing thought, and also the roughly 87% of humanity that’s not “white”.

So I think it’s hard to predict. I don’t know if you remember, but when people first started talking about COVID-19 in late 2019, early 2020, most experts believed that it wouldn’t be as bad as it became. They believed that because we knew how to handle disease outbreaks. We knew how to use PPE, quarantine, lockdowns, and so on, and so it was just a matter of taking those steps, and either slowing or stopping the spread so we didn’t overwhelm healthcare systems while we worked on a vaccine.

It might have become a pandemic either way, but not every country was willing to take the economic hit of a real lockdown, and the folks running the US weren’t willing to risk the general public getting the idea that maybe the government could be making life easier on a daily basis.

And not only did the US government needlessly let hundreds of thousands die, they also interfered, along with US oligarchs, in the COVID responses of other countries. The US even resorted to piracy to shore up its greed-driven PPE shortage. The same people are running the US now, and have demonstrated their willingness to murder innocent fishermen, steal Venezuelan oil, and generally crash the global economy, apparently to serve Trump’s ego and Netanyahu’s fantasy of making Iran a failed state, and therefor not an obstacle to Israel’s imperial project. Whatever the climate does over the next couple years, we’re going into it with an oil crisis and a fertilizer shortage, neither of which needed to happen.

My greatest frustration with the world is that it could be so, so much better than it is, but our systems are governed by people who are either fine with destroying countless lives, or who actively enjoy it. Worse, there are far too many within the working class who have the same desire for power over others. We have yet to shake off the burden of rulers, and so we are still, in far too many ways, subject to their whims.

So there will be droughts, and heat waves, and flooding, and crop failures. Very likely, rich, developed nations will experience shortages and high prices, but not outright famine. That’s the way this thing tends to go these days. If people like Stephen Miller have their way, things will be worse. It will be used as an excuse to further limit food imports to the former colonies that have largely been forced to continue producing cheap goods for the global market, while importing large portions of the food they eat. I think it is likely to be a rough couple of years for humanity.

The US is a dying empire with global reach, and that tends to be a chaotic and violent period in an empire’s life. Adding a record-breaking global heat event to the mix could have a stifling effect on that chaos, or it could add fuel to the fire.

As always, those hit the hardest will be the people who are most vulnerable, and who had the least say in making the world the way it is.

And now I want to end on a slightly less gloomy note. A lot of people online have been wondering how we know about the 1887/8 El Niño, if we didn’t have satellites back then. I always enjoy the subject of how we know what we know, and when it comes to the climate of the past, it’s always cool stuff. In this case, we have a lot of records.

It’s important to remember, when we’re considering anything relating to the last few centuries, that global empires have been a factor since the 1400s. That means global shipping, navies all over the place, and the tracking of agricultural conditions across colonies. Any ship on the ocean needs to be aware of weather conditions, so they tracked them religiously. By looking at those records, we can form a picture of the global climate. There are also farm records, the notes of amateur naturalists, and paleoclimatology tricks like tree rings and sediment cores.

We have always been at the whim of the weather to one degree or another, so we’ve always tracked it to the best of our ability. The rise of civilization as we currently understand it was dependent on reliable seasonal weather patterns for regular mass production of food, and while I’ve long advocated that we start moving food production indoors, the dependence remains. Well, that period of stability is gone, and we’re just starting to get a taste of the new era.

The Probability Broach, chapter 18

The Seventh Continental Congress of the North American Confederacy is about to get underway. Win and Lucy file into the delegates’ chamber, which is half legislative chamber and half stadium, complete with vendors hawking overpriced snack food:

I don’t know what I’d been expecting—the U.N. General Assembly or Flash Gordon’s Bathroom—it was a barn: weathered pine, rough beams, dominated by a huge Telecom screen up front. Somewhere a vendor was crying “Peanuts! Piñons! Fried Grasshoppers!” My belly rumbled and I tasted greasy hamburger. Two walls were stepped into tiers of upholstered benches. Thousands of desks cluttered the football field-sized floor.

“Thousands” of desks in a space the size of a football field? I think L. Neil Smith needs to check his math.

An American football field is 360 feet long by 160 feet wide, or 57,600 square feet. Assuming the delegates’ desks are the size of a standard office cubicle, they’d be 6×6, or 36 square feet. That works out to 1600 desks at most, and that’s making the unrealistic assumption of zero space for aisles.

It turns out Lucy has connections, as much as anyone can have in this anarcho-capitalist society. She’s there in an official capacity as a delegate, so they’re not stuck in the nosebleed seats. They have a reserved desk out on the floor, where the action is.

Her name appeared at the front of the room, among a few others already present, followed by a number: 6076. “My constituency, such as it is, six-thousand-odd people—odd enough t’let me stand for ’em at this quiltin’ bee, anyway. Sure y’won’t have a grasshopper?”

“Ulp!” I shook my head, taking the extra seat. “Lucy, you continue to amaze me. You represent some district in Laporte?”

“No district to it, son. We’re all ‘at large’ here. Though there’s some as shouldn’t be. Anybody can represent anybody else or nobody but themselves. Not even themselves, if they just wanna sit in the gallery and be entertained.”

As Lucy explains to Win, everyone in the NAC is free to attend the Continental Congress, either to participate as a delegate or just to watch. All the proceedings are live-streamed, but only people who are physically present can vote. That’s on purpose, because, as Lucy puts it, “This place is supposed to be inconvenient!”

If you don’t want to attend in person but you do want your voice to be heard, you can assign your vote to someone who is there, and they can cast it on your behalf. There’s no limit to how many proxy votes a single person can have, so any delegate might be only representing themselves, or they might represent a small handful of others, or they might represent thousands or millions. Lucy’s constituents are mostly old friends and fellow veterans whom she fought alongside in the Prussian war.

“Most folks just show up representing friends, neighbors, people in the same trade. Maybe half a dozen are professionals, with a million proxies each.”

“That many?”

“Don’t get sarcastical! Votes don’t amount to much, anyway. It’s what gets said here. Though nothing guarantees anyone’ll listen.” The screen changed again, more delegates arriving, vote-strengths shifting as viewers all over the continent punched in proxies and cancellations. Totals were revised moment by moment; many a politico with thousands of supporters might suddenly discover that, through the miracle of electronics, he was representing no one but himself.

This is the most detailed picture Smith gives of how he thinks government should work, so I want to spend this week discussing it.

Let me start with the good: On paper, I like this idea a lot. It would be tricky to get right, but it has some major advantages.

Organizing government this way would put an end to voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other anti-democratic tactics. Since anyone can show up and vote, there’s no need for expensive campaigns—a chronic flaw of our system that limits political participation to the wealthy. If your representative acts contrary to your interests, you don’t need to impeach them or hold a recall election—just switch your proxy to someone else.

It would mean real choice for voters. You wouldn’t be limited to choosing one of the handful of candidates who are willing to run in your district, nor are you stuck with the person who wins 51% of the minority who vote. No one would be shut out of representation because their preferred candidate loses. Everyone can pick the representative who best shares their views, which would mean a legislature that truly reflects the popular will.

That’s the praise. Now the criticism.

This would never work in the kind of anarchist politics L. Neil Smith favors. It should be screamingly obvious that it would fail catastrophically.

Start with the most obvious problem. Smith tells us that Lucy represents 6,076 people. How do they know that?

Remember, in the North American Confederacy, there’s no census. (In fact, Smith specifically says the people of the NAC would shoot a census taker on sight.) There’s no Social Security list or any other official database of the population. There’s no authoritative record of how many people live in this society, where they live, or what their names are.

So, how do they know that a delegate speaks for the number of people they claim to speak for?

If I show up at this meeting and say I represent a million people, how could anyone prove or disprove that? If I gave them a list of names, how would they know I’m not voting on behalf of dead people, or people who don’t live in the North American Confederacy, or outright inventing people who don’t exist? What records would they consult?

Also, even if I could somehow prove my proxies were real people, how would they verify that those people want me to represent them, and I’m not voting on their behalf without their permission? Smith says it’s all done electronically, but any computer system can be hacked.

There are problems in the other direction too. If I’m a voter who wants to influence the Congress, what stops me from assigning my proxy to multiple delegates to boost my views? Or if I have two Telecom setups at home, can I cast two votes?

You can imagine unethical interest groups setting up bot farms—thousands of servers run by software impersonating real people, automatically casting votes for whoever the person in charge wants. It happens all the time on social media, and you can be sure it would be tried here, where the stakes are higher.

Ironically, this system might work with a centralized authority that maintains a voter registration database. But in an anarchy, it never would.

Smith glosses over all these problems. It’s possible that they never occurred to him. That’s a common blind spot afflicting utopian political theorists of all stripes. They’re so sure that everyone would embrace their system and play fair, they never give any thought to dealing with people who are willing to break the rules.

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin issued a joint condemnation of “irresponsible” US foreign policy on Wednesday, warning of “a drift back to the law of the jungle”.
…

The exchanges between Xi and Putin were notably warm and Wednesday’s summit appeared to be more substantive than Xi’s meetings with the US president.

In their joint statement, Xi and Putin said they looked forward to further bilateral cooperation ranging from artificial intelligence to the protection of rare tigers, leopards and pandas. 
…

The spectacle of the leaders of the cold war superpowers – each weakened by conflicts of their own making – flying thousands of miles to sit down with Xi in the Great Hall of the People underlined the Chinese president’s status on the global stage.

Xi and Putin went into their summit with a long record of close cooperation. They had already met more than 40 times, and Xi has described the bilateral relation as “without limits”.

The two leaders scolded the US for undermining global stability, in particular for seeking to develop a “golden dome” missile defence system, and for allowing a nuclear arms treaty to lapse in February.
…

Xi and Putin then attended a signing ceremony for numerous documents spanning technology, trade, scientific research and intellectual property.

In its absence of joint statements, the US and Chinese sides presented their own readouts of what they took away from the meeting. Since Trump is an inveterate liar, we cannot take anything that he says at face value, especially since he claimed that Xi praised him fulsomely with language that is very unlike the understated way of Chinese statements. So we are are left with only the Chinese version which was nothing like what Trump said. Since much of the mainstream media provided largely superficial coverage of the Xi-Trump summit, focusing on optics and who ‘won’ and so forth, one has to seek out analysts who follow these things closely and thus can provide a much better understanding of what actually went down.

Michael Hudson, a professor of economics, is such a person, very knowledgeable about geopolitics, and in a lengthy interview with Ali Alizadeh, he lays out his views about the summit as well as many other important issues. My brief snippets do not do it justice so I recommend reading the whole thing.

Ali Alizadeh: The American readout of the Trump–Xi meeting claims that Xi explicitly agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open, that there must be no tolls, that China opposes the militarisation of the Strait, that China will buy more American oil to reduce its dependence on Hormuz, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. The Chinese readout said almost none of this. It said only that the two leaders exchanged views on the Middle East. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping spent his political capital on Taiwan.

So Iranians watching this tonight are asking: did Xi Jinping just trade Iran for Taiwan? Did our most important strategic partner sell us out at the Great Hall of the People while our cities are under blockade? What actually happened in Beijing today?

Michael Hudson:  If you have listened to Donald Trump and to the American reports of earlier negotiations with Iran and with other countries, there are always two versions. There is the American version, which always reads the same way: the other side has agreed to total surrender to everything the United States has asked for. Then there is the other side, which says, no, we did not say any of those things.

So we are dealing not only with a translation of languages, but a translation of what the words mean. What does it mean for the Strait of Hormuz to be open? From China’s point of view, it means that there will be continued trade — that all countries, the Arab OPEC countries and Iran, will be able to send their ships through the Strait and onward through the Indian Ocean, eastward to China or wherever they are going in Asia.

That is exactly what has happened in the last few days. Chinese ships have been freely going through the Strait of Hormuz. They have been paying the tolls that Iran has said are an absolute precondition for any agreement, because Iran has been attacked unjustly, in violation of the United Nations Security Council rules of war and the rules of international relations. Iran under these rules is justified in receiving reparations. But the United Nations does not have an enforcement system. It does not have any equivalent of a Nuremberg trials commission. It does not have a set of judges who can enforce reparations. So Iran has worked out a pragmatic way of extracting these reparations, and that is to impose tolls on all ships going through the Strait.

Hudson says that Iran and China seem to be in agreement on what ‘opening the Strait of Hormuz’ means.

But obviously, from Iran’s point of view, and I believe from China’s point of view, this is opening the Strait of Hormuz. It was Donald Trump who made up his wish list. And his wish list is, of course, that Iran would not charge any tolls. But that is one of Iran’s red lines. I think Iran has learned from looking at Russia’s experience in Ukraine that you do not announce a red line and then fail to enforce it. Russia has announced its red lines for what NATO countries can do in support of Ukraine, again and again and again, and NATO has simply ignored them. Iran has said: we are not going to let the United States, Israel and their allies keep pushing on us with salami tactics, a little bit at a time. A red line is a red line.

Trump must be frustrated that nations are paying the tolls to Iran in currencies other than the US dollar like the Chinese renminbi, and thus has resorted to his on-again, off-again threats to bomb Iran, much to the consternation of most other countries. Hudson says that over time the US has lost much of what constituted soft power in the world and is left with few tools other than the military. Contrary to Trump’s claim that the US is winning so much, it has actually been losing.

Every country in the world except the United States, Israel, Germany, England and France wants to reduce tensions.
…

The United States does not want stability in the world, because stability means the status quo. The United States has continually lost what used to be the American empire. It has lost its trade and balance-of-payments surplus. It has lost its industrial dominance. It has lost its dollar financial dominance. It is now a big debtor. It has been losing almost everything. That is why the U.S. National Security Strategy said, in effect: we are no longer going to support the kind of unified world of equality, multipolarity, free trade and free investment that we supported back in 1945, when we had all the power, when we had most of the world’s gold, when we had the manufacturing and industrial power to help Europe survive. We do not have that anymore.

The only asset that the United States now has to cope with a changing world dynamic is the ability to hurt other countries. It can say: we can disrupt your trade.

Hudson says that China’s interests are very different from those of the US.

I think that by talking about Taiwan, China is saying: we are not going to try to talk about problems that obviously cannot be solved. If we make the centre of our discussion U.S. relations with Taiwan, then anything we discuss dovetails into that. That is their version of a diplomatic Strait of Hormuz.

Take the issue of rare earth exports. The Americans want China to begin selling rare earth exports again to the United States. China has said: we do not want to sell rare earth exports that can be made into armaments. It would be crazy for us to sell you yttrium, gallium and other elements for your military to make into F-35 airplanes, arms and missiles, to sell to Taiwan to attack China.

So where do things stand between Iran and the US?

AA: So with your 50 years of work on the American financial system, can you tell our audience what Iran has actually accomplished? The headlines are all about missiles, ceasefire and casualties. But underneath, Iran has effectively closed the Strait, imposed tolls in Chinese renminbi, collapsed OPEC oil exports, brought Gulf monarchies to Washington asking for swap lines, sent gold flowing out of the United States at record rates, and made foreign central banks hold more gold than U.S. Treasuries for the first time since 1996. This is, in your own framework, the unwinding of the system you described in 1972. What exactly has Iran broken, and what has it achieved in these seven weeks of war?

MH: What Iran has achieved is saying: we will not surrender. It has realised that if it does not fight, the United States is going to do just what it said it would do. It is going to have regime change, as it tried to do when it recently killed Iranian leaders. It is going to take over the government. It is going to put in a client oligarchy, just like the Shah. And Iran is saying: we would rather fight than end up becoming a colony, a client dictatorship and a client oligarchy of the United States, which would take over all of our natural resources and oil for itself.

Hudson says that the long-term goal of the US has always been to take control of the world’s supply of oil. This is what drives its wars in Iraq and Iran. This is not to meet its own needs since the US is largely self-sufficient but in order to exert power over the rest of the world by threatening their access to oil.

For the last hundred years, the United States has had one paramount umbrella strategy to control the world: to control the world’s oil. I have discussed this in many of the articles I have been writing recently on my website. Every country in the world needs oil and power to run its factories, heat its homes, make chemicals, petrochemicals and plastics, make fertilizer. If we can control the oil trade, then we have the power to hurt any country that does not obey us. We can use that as a lever. We do not have to go to military war with them. We can simply cut off their supply of oil, and that will force them to follow whatever American policy we want.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the Project for the New American Century said, in effect, that the way to control oil was to prevent countries from buying oil from any country we do not control. That is why sanctions were imposed on Iran after the overthrow of the Shah and the rejection of America’s 1953 interference in Iranian politics to take control of the oil industry. That is why the United States destroyed Nord Stream and imposed sanctions to prevent people from buying oil from Russia. That is why the United States destroyed Libya, so that countries could not buy oil from Libya. That is precisely why George W. Bush waged the war against Iraq.
…

But all along, when they were outlining the countries they were going to conquer throughout the Near East and the Middle East to control Middle Eastern oil, the sequence ended with Iran. Iran was always the final objective. The United States realised it could conquer Libya, Iraq, Syria and other countries, and it could enforce support from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and the Arab countries, because all of these countries’ oil proceeds — in their government funds — were invested in the U.S. bond market and U.S. financial markets. So all along the purpose was to control world oil and be able to control the switch: turning off the electricity, the power, the lighting. It all required conquering Iran, recapturing Iran’s oil industry and reinstalling a military dictatorship — this time more vicious and more effective than the old Shah’s. This is a plan that has been 50 years in the making, refinement and elaboration.

Hudson then goes on to discuss the global financial system and the use of the dollar as the reserve currency that enabled the US for so long to control the economies of countries, and that China and other nations are now seeking to eliminate that power.

China has created an alternative system so that countries do not need this. Back in 1971, there was not really another currency in which countries could save their oil-export earnings. Now there is. There is the Chinese currency, and there is gold. Once again, the gold is no longer being supplied by the United States, but you can buy gold in the market. Countries are buying gold because, so far, there is not an alternative artificial currency. To create that, you would need a new kind of international monetary fund, a new kind of central bank or world bank to administer it. The United States would never permit that under IMF rules, because it has veto power in the IMF.

So the only alternatives countries have are gold, Chinese currency, each other’s currencies, or a market basket of different currencies. That is what is occurring today. It means countries no longer have to denominate their oil, mineral exports or industrial exports in dollars. They can denominate them, for instance, in Chinese currency, because China is the most rapidly growing economy in the world. China’s system of socialism with Chinese characteristics — which is basically the same policy that made America rich in the nineteenth century with its industrial protectionism — enables it to be solid. Everybody needs Chinese renminbi in order to buy Chinese exports and attract Chinese investments. So the rest of the world, the BRICS countries and the Global South, are trying to develop an alternative financial and monetary system. That is in the process of being described now, and that is what most of my recent writings have been about.

There is a lot more good stuff in the interview.

Jon Stewart gave his own take on the Xi-Trump summit during the first seven minutes of this clip.

Sorry, I’m not going to cite examples, because the purpose isn’t to litigate these particular subreddits. I know the typical reader doesn’t really care about them, and indeed should not care about them. This is just my way to discuss a scattering of AI-related issues that I think people commonly get wrong.

Conflation of viewpoints

In these spaces, there are two sides, “pro-AI” and “anti-AI”. Each side is treated like a bundle of views that all go together. So anti-AI is supposed to believe that AI art is slop, that it steals from artists, replaces jobs, costs extreme amounts of natural resources, and is the subject of an economic bubble. Pro-AI is supposed to believe that AI art is great, AI should be unregulated, the environmental impact is overblown, and there is no bubble.

I take a relatively minimal “pro-AI” view. I think artists should have the freedom to use AI tools. I do not usually like the output, but that’s irrelevant, people should be able to make art I don’t like. I think AI should be regulated, although I am agnostic about the appropriate policies, and distrustful of the government’s ability to get it right. I do not care for the major AI companies. I think the environmental impact of AI is greatly exaggerated compared to other common activities, although maybe that means people should be more concerned about the other common activities instead of less concerned about AI. I don’t think AI really steals from artists, but I feel that artists should have stronger rights to restrict how their art is used, even if they desire restrictions I don’t personally agree with. And I think AI might be in a bubble, though I’m not placing any bets.

So in the subreddits, there’s a lot of conflation going on. For instance, a while ago, OpenAi announced they were shutting down Sora, their text to video app. Anti-AI folks declared a victory, while the pro-AI folks felt the need to argue that OpenAI is doing fine actually. But what does that have to do with anything? OpenAI is just a purveyor of a commercial product. It’s like if we were arguing about the right to eat hamburgers, and it got derailed into a conversation about MacDonald’s menus.

The anti/pro dichotomy hinders people’s ability to interpret larger events. For example, there was recently an attack on Sam Altman, by a man who came from a Rationalist background. He comes from a completely distinct and older faction of people who believe AI will be ultra powerful and literally kill everyone. Given that his concern is about literal extinction, I doubt he cares one way or another about art. He cannot be credited to or blamed on the anti-AI art folks, he just can’t.

The AI industry

We need to draw a distinction between the usage of AI for art, and the usage of AI for industry. In the industry, AI is not just used for art. It’s not even mostly used for art, not even close. I’m quite confident in this claim, though admittedly I cannot find any reliable research on the prevalence of different AI use cases.

Here are a few uses for AI, based on my professional experience: 1) Bots that handle simple customer queries to reduce call center volume. 2) Faster software development. 3) Easy access to analytics, so that leadership doesn’t have to constantly pepper data analysts with basic questions. 4) Searching through disorganized company documentation to find information. 5) Generating more consistent documentation.

Every single one of these use cases is LLMs only, with no image generation. None of these use cases is creative. There are some creative uses for AI in the industry, maybe for movies and video games. But I think that’s a minority of what AI is used for.

In the AI subreddits, discussion almost exclusively concerns art, especially the kind of art that people make individually, either for commission or to post on social media.
This is not an industrial use case for AI. Economically speaking, that stuff isn’t worth shit.

It’s fine to talk about stuff that doesn’t make a lot of money. This blog has never made any money, and I talk about it lots. However, there’s frequent concern about a) the economic bubble around AI, b) the environmental impact of AI, and c) the construction of data centers for AI. If that is your concern, then you ought think about how AI is used in the industry, not just how AI is used on your social media feed. When your boomer dad generates an AI image of Trump in a diaper, that is a separate thing that has practically nothing to do with the AI bubble.

Put it this way. If you believe that AI is in an economic bubble, this implies a belief that investors are mistaken about the economic value of AI. There are reasonable grounds to believe this. However, if you think the economic value of AI is concentrated in displacing artists, then you’re quite far off the mark, and I think maybe the investors know better than you.

The art is bad

These subreddits are not for posting AI art, they’re for arguing about AI art. But as you might expect, AI art is a common hazard, and I don’t like it. I know, the irony. I recognize that this is a me problem; it’s on me for not blocking the subreddits.

People commonly collapse “disliking AI art” with “being opposed to AI art”. I dislike a lot of television and movies; I am not opposed to television and movies. I dislike entire genres full of video games; I am not opposed to those genres.

People on AI wars talk about the aesthetic qualities of AI art like it’s an argument in favor or against. Even pro-AI people sometimes talk about how a particular artist’s handdrawn artwork looks bad. I hate that, because leave those artists alone. My main motivation for defending AI art is that I want people to leave artists alone. So when AI defenders attack hand-drawn artists, it 100% defeats the point.

My biggest issue with AI art, is that I’m just not into the kind of art that it’s imitating, i.e. standalone illustrations posted on social media. I prefer music, essays, long-form comics, origami, indie video games.

Some people are into standalone illustrations, that’s fine. But arguments about AI art aesthetics are overly focused on the ability or inability of AI art to live up to the artistic values and sensibilities of standalone illustrations. I create mathematical art. Mathematical art is discovered as much as it is created. It does not matter to me whether AI can display “creativity”. It does not matter to me how much agency the artist exercises, vs following a set procedure. Being readily distinguishable from hand-drawn illustrations is a plus, rather than a minus. It does not matter to me whether it can draw hands. It does not matter to me that a character’s hair blends into the trees. It does not matter to me if the art succeeds in looking like anything at all.

I will say, it does matter to me how the art is created. This is a common sticking point among AI art defenders. They’ll say, if you liked the art, then you liked the art, and it shouldn’t matter that it was AI generated. But I think it’s fair to judge art based on the context outside the art, and so it is fair to modulate one’s opinion of art after learning that it was or was not AI generated. I think AI artists should lean even more into discussing their own artistic methodologies, since it’s kind of the most interesting thing about AI art.  I’m not their boss though, that’s just what would make it more interesting to me.

Final thoughts

I seem to return to the topic of AI art at least once a year, and I express a slightly different opinion each time. Dear readers, I hope it’s not annoying. Personally, I get kind of annoyed when creators I follow talk about AI art. It’s pretty repetitive and tends to expose a lot of ignorance. One does not like to be reminded that creators are ignorant, even though it’s frequently true on any given subject.

So when I put myself in the shoes of the reader, it makes me want to avoid blogging about AI art. And then when I do blog about AI art, it’s like my only chance, so I discuss a grab bag of issues instead of focusing on one thing at a time. They can’t all be the best essay ever.

Remember, if I’m right, then AI art is a sideshow compared to the main uses of AI in the industry. I believe that AI art is a frivolous topic. It’s interesting to talk about, but not nearly as important as people make it out to be. There are other topics more deserving of a culture war.

Any time I see a posting about anything to do with COVID (or now Measles or Hantavirus) on instagram, I can predict there will be swaths of comments claiming that a) there was no virus b) if there was, it was made in China c) If there was and it was made in China, something something Jews. I have taken to thinking of these people as “underpants gnomes” even though the original underpants gnomes were actually funny and had a plan with a discernable output. RFK, Jr would just eat the underpants and blame everything about technological civilization for the fact that he is a very, very creepy old man.

But I saw something really interesting the other day, briefly mentioned on TWiV – apparently human scientists managed to learn a lot from SARS-COV2. One of the things they learned was how to make an RNA package that causes some cells to express patterns that make anti-vaxxers break down into incoherent wailing. No, that’s not it – they trick the cell into producing patterns that mimic a COV2 virus’ spike protein, and the body develops an immune response. With the new immune response, the body is prepared to immediately attack and destroy anything that has the spike protein. And, this works great except for the huge number of anti-vaxxers who know someone who knows someone who totally died of the shot. And I remember talking with some of my buddies and one of them said, soberly, since we were all drinking beer, “this is going to change how we do medicine.” I guess the other shoe is dropping now, and it’s awesome.

[UCL]

A lung cancer patient at UCLH is the first to receive a novel cancer vaccine designed to prime the immune system to recognise and fight cancer cells.

It is the first time this immunotherapy made by BioNTech, the German biotechnology company, will be studied in a clinical trial for lung cancer in the UK, where the NIHR UCLH Clinical Research Facility is the lead research site.

The investigational mRNA cancer immunotherapy for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) – known as BNT116 – utilises a messenger RNA (mRNA) to present common tumour markers from NSCLC to the patient’s immune system, with the aim of helping the immune system recognise and fight cancer cells expressing these markers.

The investigational vaccine is designed to specifically enhance immune responses against targets primarily expressed by cancer cells, reducing the risk of toxicity to healthy, non-cancerous cells – unlike chemotherapy, which often affects both cancerous and healthy cells.

This is bigger than huge. For one thing, it’s already been deployed. And, once you understand what it’s doing and how it works, it’s pretty much of a layup that it will succeed.

So, what they are doing is using the same trick, to make cells produce a few markers from the several various mutations that cause common lung cancers. If I recall Orac’s explanation from Aeons ago, lung cancers are interesting because they like to have 2 mutations in a row – the first disables pre-programmed cell death (uh oh!) and the second jams it into reproductive overdrive (Houston: we have a problem). One clever bit about this whole thing is that it’s never normal to have either of those two mutations, so why not teach the patient’s body to whack them on sight? And that’s that.

Janusz Racz, 67, from London, is the first participant in the trial. He said: “… Dr Sarah (Benafif) explained how the vaccine should work and how it was different to the treatment I had recently completed. The hope was that it would stop the cancer coming back.

“I thought it over, and … decided to take part because I hope it will provide a defence against cancer cells. But I also thought that my participation in this research could help other people in future and help this therapy become more widely available.

“As a scientist myself, I know that science can only advance if people agree to participate in programmes like this. I work in artificial intelligence, and I am open to trying new things. My family did research about the trial too, and they supported me taking part.”

As a non-imbecile, Racz immediately understood the value of the therapy and thought “why not?” This is not the first human anti-cancer vaccine, either, I’m going to count the HPV vaccine as one, and possibly SHINGRIX as a vaccine against dementia. Where is the end-game? The end-game is that humans may not have a technological civilization for enough longer that it matters, although if we are able to dodge our self-triggered doom, it could become a personalized cancer cure. That’s a bit trickier – there was a brilliant study years ago in which a large tumor was removed, sectioned into grids, and each grid sequenced. That revealed something that was a surprise at the time (but is now expected) namely that the tumor was not all copies of a single cell: once the reproduction lock had come off and it went into overdrive, there were entire family trees of specific mutations, some of which were benign immortal cells others of which were rapidly proliferating heaps of mutations. In order to do some kind of targeted mRNA vaccine, I think that scientists would have to do a bucket-load or two (hey put those data centers to good use!) of analysis trying to find root common ancestry that could be targeted for immune response. I am skating the edge of my knowledge, here, so I should just shut up and be happy.

It’s tempting to ask an AI to produce me a disgusting tree of icky but realistic mutated cells, with RFK Jr down on one of the branches, but the generalized anti-AI attitude around here bugs me. …ah, heck with you guys. Just don’t tell me any of the tumors have too many fingers. Note: I did not tell it to add Farage, Biden, etc. Just RFK.