Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex:

Clarke’s First Law goes: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Stuart Russell is only 58. But what he lacks in age, he makes up in distinction: he’s a computer science professor at Berkeley, neurosurgery professor at UCSF, DARPA advisor, and author of the leading textbook on AI. His new book Human Compatible states that superintelligent AI is possible; Clarke would recommend we listen.

I’m only half-joking: in addition to its contents, Human Compatible is important as an artifact, a crystallized proof that top scientists now think AI safety is worth writing books about. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies previously filled this role. But Superintelligence was in 2014, and by a philosophy professor. From the artifactual point of view, HC is just better – more recent, and by a more domain-relevant expert. But if you also open up the books to see what’s inside, the two defy easy comparison.

More here.

John le Carré in The Guardian:

I’m not just a remainer. I’m a European through and through, and the rats have taken over the ship, I want to tell him. It’s breaking my heart and I want it to break yours. We need your voice to wake us from our sleepwalk, and save us from this wanton act of political and economic self-harm. But you’re too late.

If Johnson and his Brexiteers had their way, it would be declared St Brexit’s Day. Church bells across the land would peal out the gladsome tidings from every tower. And good men of England would pause their stride and doff their caps in memory of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Trafalgar, and mourn the loss of our great British empire. Empires don’t die just because they’re dead.

We Brits are all nationalists now. Or so Johnson would have us believe. But to be a nationalist you need enemies and the shabbiest trick in the Brexiteers’ box was to make an enemy of Europe.

More here.

Katherine J. Wu in Smithsonian Magazine:

Boasting wingspans of up to 11 feet—the largest of any bird alive today—these feathered goliaths, native to the Southern Ocean and North Pacific, are built to soar. Gliding at speeds that often exceed 50 miles per hour, they can cover vast swaths of the sea in minutes, all the while scouring the water for bright flickers of fish. Some species are known to spend years at sea without touching down on land, and a few have even been documented circumnavigating the globe.

With their keen eyes and wandering ways, albatrosses are, in a way, the de facto “sentinels of the sea,” says Henri Weimerskirch, a marine ornithologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

Weimerskirch is working to make that title a little more official—by recruiting the seabirds to patrol the ocean for illegal fishing vessels. He and his colleagues have outfitted nearly 200 albatrosses with tiny GPS trackers that detect radar emissions from suspicious ships, allowing the birds to transmit the locations of fishers in the midst of illicit acts. The results of the tracking method were published today in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More here.

Peter Conrad in The Guardian:

At one point in A Very Stable Genius, the conservative lawyer George Conway – the husband of Trump’s acid-tongued apologist Kellyanne Conway – doubles over in incredulous mirth at the man’s idiocy. Then the joke palls, as Conway realises with a shudder that “the object of his ridicule was the president of the United States”. We’re lucky that it’s only Trump’s hissy fits that are “thermonuclear”; instead of launching missiles, he childishly makes war by weaponising sweets. At a summit he tosses two Starburst candies at Angela Merkel and grunts: “Don’t say I never give you anything.” I wonder what flavour he chose for this undiplomatic exchange: sour or summer blast?

Although the title of A Very Stable Genius ironically adopts Trump’s preening self-description, Rucker and Leonnig present him as a lord of misrule who delights in instability, running a government that resembles “a virtual tilt-a-whirl” at a carnival. Despite his claim to be a genius, under his combed-over crown he has an entirely vacuous head: he tells India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, that it’s a good thing the country doesn’t have a border with China, and at a ceremony in Pearl Harbor he asks what exactly happened there to justify the commemoration. Forget about CIA briefings: as Steve Bannon puts it, Trump “doesn’t even know what intelligence is”. As proof, Rucker and Leonnig have a scoop about one of his crazier wheezes. Denied funds for his wall along the Mexican border, he proposes a human chain of hefty enforcers, hundreds of thousands of them, who would join hands in a barricade extending across 1,200 miles. A stable genius or a rampaging dimwit?

More here.

“And if the white man had not come would there
still be dead zones in the Mexican Gulf?” —Harry Buck
_______________________________

They are Taking Us

They are taking us beyond Miami
They are taking us beyond the Caloosa river
They are taking us to the end of our tribe
The are taking us to palm beach, coming back inside
……Okeechobee lake.
They are taking us to an old town in the west
.
Native American poem of the Seminoles
… —After the White Man Came
from, American Indian Prose and Poetry
Capricorn Books, 1974

Cyril Josh Barker in Amsterdam News:

On Feb. 3, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting “the federal government and each state from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen’s race, color, or previous condition of servitude” giving Black men the right to vote across the nation. Just under a month later the first African American vote was cast in Perth Amboy, N.J. on March 31, 1870 by Thomas Mundy Peterson. Born in 1824 in Metuchen, N.J., Peterson was the son of ex-slave Lucy Green. Peterson worked as a janitor and handyman in Perth Amboy. After the Fifteenth Amendment was enacted, Peterson participated in Perth Amboy’s local election held at city hall over the city’s charter. A member of the Republican and Prohibition Parties, he cast his ballot in favor of revising the existing charter, making him the first African American to vote in any election in the nation. Along with being the first Black person to vote in America, he was also the first Black person in Perth Amboy to serve on a jury. Peterson would go on to be one of seven people appointed to make amendments to the charter’s revisions he voted in favor of.

In 1884, in honor of his history-making ballot, the Perth Amboy community raised the equivalent of $1,800 in modern dollars to buy Peterson a gold medallion featuring Abraham Lincoln’s profile. “Presented by the citizens of Perth Amboy, N.J. to Thomas Peterson the first colored voter in the provisions of the 15th Amendment at an election held in that city March 31st 1870,” the medallion’s inscription states. Peterson died in 1904 at the age of 79. The medallion Peterson received is housed at the historically Black Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. In 2017, the university loaned the medallion to the City of Perth Amboy for a presentation at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. “During the 19th century, and even up to the present day, many communities have attempted to stop African Americans from voting. Perth Amboy is different, that is, we encouraged the right to vote,” said local businessman and historian John Kerry Dyke. “The Thomas Mundy Peterson medal is more than just an award. It represents the efforts of all good people that want to enfranchise America’s voters. It embodies the concept that all men are created equal.”

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will honor The Black History Month. This year’s theme is “African Americans and the Vote.” Readers are encouraged to send in their suggestions)

Over at the International Security Off the Page podcast, Abe Newman on weaponized interdependence:

Samuel Moyn in The LRB:

Like his more impressive companion and tennis partner Anthony Lake, who at least learned Vietnamese, Holbrooke struggled with what he saw there: burned monks, raided pagodas and the displacement of genuine pacification by what he came to call ‘mil-think’. Packer credits Holbrooke, with his exposure to peasant politics in the countryside, for grasping more quickly than his superiors that the American strategy was, if not a failed crusade, at any rate losing more hearts and minds than it was winning. He wrote memos about this to his superiors, but after the Tonkin Gulf incident in summer 1964, the maelstrom of American escalation made the doubts of minor men in the field irrelevant. It would take nearly nine more years of mass killing in Vietnam for the Americans in charge to recognise that the war had been a losing proposition from the start.

‘Counterinsurgency isn’t for everyone,’ Packer writes. ‘It’s a sophisticated taste.’ Holbrooke believed that the mindless application of force by the US would damage its larger goal of converting the populace. In this he followed such practitioners of the dark arts as Edward Lansdale, a former advertising man in California who urged a reorientation in strategy away from military aggression towards protecting villagers and selling the regime’s virtues. (It is an approach that has often been revived in the wars of failing great powers.) But Holbrooke’s real significance is that his doubts about American beneficence led him to recognise the limitations of using military force to pound foreign lands into submission; he knew that if American power was to justify its continuing reach, an updated idiom would be needed.

More here.

Zoe Williams at The Guardian:

As late as the 20th century, grafting a monkey’s testicle on to your scrotum was considered a plausible cure for impotence and general sluggishness. As early as 1139, it was signed into canonical law that impotence was grounds for the annulment of a marriage, so you can see why the try-anything approach persisted, when a person could be unmade by physical failure, publicly ejected from the organising bond of society. Dough has reminded humans of sex, one way or another, pretty much since the cultivation of wheat began; any loaf of bread worth its salt was originally designed to resemble either a penis or a vagina. But much of the significance of food, especially in the early modern period, was not its erotic redolence but its mediating role in the bewitchery of carnal urges. So a wife might increase her husband’s ardency by keeping a live fish in her vagina for two days, then roasting it and feeding it to him. Or she might, conversely, set out to kill him by covering herself in honey and rolling in wheat, before grinding the wheat and turning it into bread, which she then fed to him. But she’d have to remember to mill it in the opposite direction to the sun, whatever that means.

more here.

Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times:

For those who don’t know about America’s involvement in Laos, which at the time U.S. officials called the “Secret War,” author Paul Yoon provides a thumbnail sketch at the beginning of the book. From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more bombs on Laos than were used against Germany and Japan combined during WWII.

When they are forced to leave, Noi, Prany and Alisak are split up. One of them gets on a series of planes to France; one is imprisoned in Laos with their doctor friend; the last disappears.

The novel then tracks their diaspora. It seems that luck is with the one who makes it to France, able to make a new life halfway around the world. But is fate playing tricks?

more here.

Justin Vogt at The New York Times:

The early years of the American nuclear program were dominated by men in the mold of Curtis LeMay, the Air Force general who had overseen the firebombing of Japan during World War II as commander of the Strategic Air Command (SAC). His philosophy of how to win modern wars, Kaplan writes, was simple: “Bomb everything.” For many years, LeMay exercised remarkable influence over nuclear policy by maneuvering to secure SAC’s near-total control of the arsenal while avoiding any meaningful civilian oversight. By 1960, he had put an enduring stamp on the atomic age through the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, SAC’s list of all the nuclear weapons in the American arsenal and their intended targets. Reflecting LeMay’s maximalist approach to firepower and minimalist approach to sparing civilians, the SIOP called for the president to fire thousands of nuclear weapons in the event of an armed conflict with the Soviet Union. Nine would strike Leningrad; 23 would hit Moscow. A Soviet city similar to Hiroshima in population and density would be struck with four bombs that would together yield more than 600 times the blast power of the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on the Japanese city in 1945.

more here.

Bruce Levine in Counterpunch:

Getting rid of Trump means taking seriously “shit-life syndrome”—and its resulting misery, which includes suicide, drug overdose death, and trauma for surviving communities. My state of Ohio is home to many shit-life syndrome sufferers. In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton lost Ohio’s 18 electoral votes to Trump. She got clobbered by over 400,000 votes (more than 8%). She lost 80 of Ohio’s 88 counties. Trump won rural poorer counties, several by whopping margins. Trump got the shit-life syndrome vote. Will Hutton in his 2018 Guardian piece, “The Bad News is We’re Dying Early in Britain – and It’s All Down to ‘Shit-Life Syndrome’” describes shit-life syndrome in both Britain and the United States: “Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security.” The Brookings Institution, in November 2019, reported: “53 million Americans between the ages of 18 to 64—accounting for 44% of all workers—qualify as ‘low-wage.’ Their median hourly wages are $10.22, and median annual earnings are about $18,000.”

For most of these low-wage workers, Hutton notes: “Finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.” Shit-life syndrome is not another fictitious illness conjured up by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex to sell psychotropic drugs. It is a reality created by corporatist rulers and their lackey politicians—pretending to care about their minimum-wage-slave constituents, who are trying to survive on 99¢ boxed macaroni and cheese prepared in carcinogenic water, courtesy of DuPont or some other such low-life leviathan. The Cincinnati Enquirer, in November 2019, ran the story: “Suicide Rate Up 45% in Ohio in Last 11 Years, With a Sharper Spike among the Young.” In Ohio between 2007 and 2018, the rate of suicide among people 10 to 24 has risen by 56%. The Ohio Department of Health reported that suicide is the leading cause of death among Ohioans ages 10‐14 and the second leading cause of death among Ohioans ages 15‐34, with the suicide rate higher in poorer, rural counties.

More here.

Being out West When Time Stood Still

Once she had a seamless mind.
Clouds rolled into her thinking
like opposites attracting. And hitching.
There was that openness of beginning.
Those crisp little white cockle shells. And then
that low fog. Spreading around
like when once you could touch time without rules or referees,
like when you used to dance alone with your eyes closed
serenading crazy in your room late, doors shut, the music on fire,
and you moved around in there, bumping the walls
like salmon swarming and flopping up the ladder.
Just that. Somehow just
to be seamless that way. Fiercely in the free.
Clouding in open fog.

by Linda E. Chown
from The Other Side of Language

From ASALH:

When Carter G. Woodson established Negro History week in 1926, he realized the importance of providing a theme to focus the attention of the public. The intention has never been to dictate or limit the exploration of the Black experience, but to bring to the public’sattention important developments that merit emphasis. For those interested in the study of identity and ideology, anexploration of ASALH’s Black History themes is itself instructive. Over the years, the themes reflect changes in how people of African descent in the United States have viewed themselves, the influence of social movements on racial ideologies, and the aspirations of the black community. The changes notwithstanding, the list reveals an overarching continuity in ASALH–our dedication to exploring historical issues of importance to people of African descent and race relations in America.

2020- African Americans and the Vote

The year 2020 marks the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment and the culmination of the women’s suffrage movement.  The year 2020 also marks the sesquicentennial of the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) and the right of black men to the ballot after the Civil War.  The theme speaks, therefore, to the ongoing struggle on the part of both black men and black women for the right to vote. This theme has a rich and long history, which begins at the turn of the nineteenth century, i.e., in the era of the Early Republic, with the states’ passage of laws that democratized the vote for white men while disfranchising free black men. Thus, even before the Civil War, black men petitioned their legislatures and the US Congress, seeking to be recognized as voters. Tensions between abolitionists and women’s suffragists first surfaced in the aftermath of the Civil War, while black disfranchisement laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries undermined the guarantees in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments for the great majority of southern blacks until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  The important contribution of black suffragists occurred not only within the larger women’s movement, but within the larger black voting rights movement. Through voting-rights campaigns and legal suits from the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-1960s, African Americans made their voices heard as to the importance of the vote.  Indeed the fight for black voting rights continues in the courts today.  The theme of the vote should also include the rise of black elected and appointed officials at the local and national levels, campaigns for equal rights legislation, as well as the role of blacks in traditional and alternative political parties.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will honor The Black History Month. This year’s theme is “African Americans and the Vote.” Readers are encouraged to send in their suggestions)