First He Fucked Ayn Rand, and Then He Fucked the Country.

Alan Greenspan has died at the age of 100.

Here's hoping that he's being fed shit sandwiches in Hell right next to Henry Kissinger. 

How is This a Bad Thing?

America's lamest newspaper, the New York Times, just bleated their worry that new taxes on ultra expensive 2nd homes might make living in New York more affordable.

The hed reads, "New Taxes Helped Cool London’s Housing Market.Could That Happen in New York?"

That implies that this might help ordinary people looking to live in the city.

The rest of the article is hand wringing about the possibility that this tax might result in losses for the ultra-rich and real estate developers.

To quote Emilio Estevez from the movie Repo Man, "F%$# that."

When these folks win, everyone else loses.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan for a yearly surcharge on second homes in New York City worth $5 million or more could be an elegant political move — one that taxes the rich who don’t live in the city full-time.

If approved, the so-called pied-à-terre tax will be a populist win that avoids levying new taxes on constituents of Ms. Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York.

But real estate agents and economists say the tax could be catastrophic for the city’s housing market, hurting not the superrich investors who park their money here, but the very middle- and lower-income citizens it’s designed to benefit.

As to how this would hurt the, "Very middle- and lower-income citizens it’s designed to benefit?"

Crickets. 

The moneybags who, "Have historically made up nearly half of the homeowners in prime London neighborhoods," did not make those neighborhoods more affordable, they made them less affordable.

There is a mention of billionaires leaving London, and that some of said billionaires threw pocket change at charities.

They further claim that, "Smaller landlords threw in the towel, taking tens of thousands of apartments off the market and constricting supply."

Which means that these titans of industry are going on an Ayn Rand style, "Capital Strike," which has never happened in history. 

So Not Surprised

It appears, at least according to the headline, that the, "CEO of Palantir Says He Spends a Large Amount of Time Talking to Nazis."

Given that Palantir founder and literal vampire Peter Thiel spent some of his youth growing up in a Namibian Town controlled by South Africa where they literally greeted each other with Nazi salutes, this could just refer to his talking his boss, but he's referring to other Nazis, ones who proudly carry the label.

While you were busy wasting your time listening to podcasts and doomscrolling on your phone, one of America’s leading AI overlords was educating himself by talking to Nazis.

This was the startling admission made by Alex Karp, cofounder and CEO of the software company Palantir, a company that’s come under increasingly heavy scrutiny for its growing role as a provider of AI-powered surveillance technology to the military and government.

In an interview with podcaster Molly O’Shea published this week, Karp, who has Jewish heritage, was discussing German culture and his time in the country before going on a tangent about how outrageous it is that people online “laud the Nazis.” Then he fessed up to something even more eyebrow-raising.

“I spend a lot of time talking to Nazis,” Karp said, implying that this is an ongoing pastime of his. “Like, real Nazis,” he emphasized.

Karp explained that it was his way of “understanding what made them tick,” before making an ironic observation.

“Part of the crazy thing about people who laud the Nazis nowadays is there’s not a single Nazi that would ever have included them in their movement and would have shipped them off to the camps quicker maybe than they shipped me off to the camps!” he chuckled.

Proving that he does not understand Nazis.  They were pathetic losers.  Just look at Horst Wessel, or Goebbels, or Himmler, or Goering.

They were not only morally bankrupt, they were pathetic nerds living out a revenge porn fantasy.  (Something that they have in common with Ayn Rand's fans)

He's talking to Nazis because he wants to talk to Nazis.  That is all you need to know. 

 

Grows on You ……… Like a Fungus

I am referring, of course to Peter Thiel, who is attempting to privatize and loot the $700 billion Treasury internal payments system. (Basically, the federal government equivalent of company credit cards)

There is already a system which works, and is cheaper than the private alternative, but Pete Thiel needs a few trillion dollars to enslave human subjects for his life extension technology.  (I have mentioned before that Thiel is literally a vampire wannabee?)

One of the most important stories in some time came out two days ago. But with so much else going it didn’t get quite as much attention as it should have. It’s from ProPublica. And it’s about a Peter Thiel-backed start up called Ramp. It’s a corporate credit card processing outfit. The game here is pretty straightforward. Trump and Musk are looking to hand some or all of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program (SmartPay) over to Ramp. A bunch of the meetings were organized by Josh Gruenbaum, a private equity guy who Trump and Musk installed as chief acquisitions officer at the GSA. (He was also the lead signatory on the demand letter to Harvard we’re now told, as of last night, was accidentally sent. So Gruenbaum’s got a lot going on.) Ramp’s value add is supposed to be the use of AI to monitor spending.

The overall picture is a standard one: Come in, take over the data and financial architecture; discredit it by having your media arms dish out mountains of phony stories about fraud and abuse; fire all the employees and hand a cash-drenched, sweetheart contract to yours and your friends company.

It really is amazing how much all of these Ayn Rand worshiping individualists are spending every working moment trying to steal from the rest of us.

………

Now, yesterday I heard that a new DOGEr, named Roland Tenglong Shen, showed up (remotely) at the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS) and was hastily granted access to the Bureau’s systems. (Way faster than normal onboarding rules allow.) The focus of his access appears to be something called the Payment Analytics Cloud Environment (PACE) which is itself part of Disbursement And Debt Management Analytics Platform (DDMAP). I’m told it all came together very fast yesterday. At first I thought this might have something to do with DOGE’s new “Defend the Spend” program, which I mentioned last night and was discussed in an article in the Post. The timing seemed to come together very nicely.

But when I got around to googling Shen’s name this morning, that told a different story. Roland Shen works for Ramp. Right, the Thiel and Kushner family-backed company trying to land that motherlode payment processing contract.

In any case, back in the old days civil servants chose contractors and there was supposed to be a process of competitive bidding, though no bid contracts could come together in some circumstances. But if your company’s wants the contract, it certainly helps to have an employee literally scoping out at the environment in advance.

If fraud, bribery, and securities statutes had been properly enforced against the Silly-Con Valley tech bros, many of these folks would be enjoying that hip new theme park ride, the, "Orange is the New Black Experience."

Yeah, This Has "Dystopian Young Adult Novel" Written All Over It

It looks like a group of tech bros are trying to convince Trump and his Evil Minions™ to give them a license to create lawless corporate cities.

You know, the sort of corporate run arcologies that feature prominently in the genre of Cyberpunk:

Several groups representing “startup nations”—tech hubs exempt from the taxes and regulations that apply to the countries where they are located—are drafting Congressional legislation to create “freedom cities” in the US that would be similarly free from certain federal laws, WIRED has learned.

According to interviews and presentations viewed by WIRED, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

So, basically these dudes want to be able to operate recklessly with nuclear power, potentially irradiating the surrounding areas, conduct medically dubious experiments on live human beings, and pollute our water and our air.

This is Nazis with nukes.

………

But Gil Duran, a former political consultant and author of the Substack newsletter Nerd Reich, warns that building new cities from scratch could have negative consequences. “To be outside of the law and above the law, what does that mean for the rest of the country?” he asks. “It seems like you're going to start hollowing out other places in order to have these places where the rules are suspended and don't apply anymore to certain people.” 

………

But Duran says that the same deregulation that could be seen as pro-business will likely not favor those outside Freedom Cities’ ultrawealthy backers. “These are going to be cities without democracy,” he claims. “These are going to be cities without workers' rights. These are going to be cities where the owners of the city, the corporations, the billionaires have all the power and everyone else has no power. That's what's so attractive about these sovereign entities to these people, is that they will actually be anti-freedom cities.”

These people all think that they are the character John Galt from the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged when in fact they are all people who feed the bears and destroy the town.

This has been tried many times, and in many places, and they have all failed, with the majority of attempts never constructing much of anything besides fraud.

JD Vance Is Worse than You Think

Short version is two words, "Peter Thiel."

The longer version is that Vance is entirely a creation of Peter Thiel, a right winger enamored with the delusions of Ayn Rand, part of the "PayPal Mafia," and a literal vampire.

When one looks at at Vance's pre-Senate career it is a nearly record of failure where he has continued onto new projects only because of the support of his patron.

Peter Thiel is one of the few public figures out there who is indisputably worse than Donald Trump:

When political observers describe J.D. Vance as “weird,” what they usually mean is the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s ranting about childless people, his extremism on questions like abortion and divorce, or perhaps his choice of eye makeup.

But there is a deeper level to Vance’s political weirdness that places him amid the most sinister forces in the nation today – and calls into question the supposed patriotism that motivates him and the “America First” movement he and Donald Trump now represent. To understand what Vance really stands for, and why his ideology is so distant from the Constitutional democracy he has sworn to uphold as a United States senator, it is necessary to examine the chief sponsor of his political and business career: a Silicon Valley billionaire named Peter Thiel.

Born in Germany and raised in South Africa, Thiel made his enormous fortune as a venture capitalist and executive in tech companies such as PayPal and Palantir. Attracted from an early age to far-right ideologues like the addled author Ayn Rand, the tech mogul has identified himself as a “conservative libertarian” and a critic of democratic systems. Not so long ago, he was heard to say that democracy and freedom – or at least his idea of “freedom” – are no longer compatible.

………

It isn’t hard to imagine that Thiel, who has financed research aimed at human immortality, [Thiel has funded the use of young people's blood to extend human life, literal vampirism] envisions himself as one of those godlike rulers. Does Vance agree with Thiel’s jaundiced view of democracy? Does he push crypto because digital finance will allow billionaires and their businesses to evade taxes and launder money? Does he look forward to a plutocratic dystopia replacing our republic?

No doubt the embattled Republican veep nominee would deny any such disturbing views. Yet Thiel isn’t the only ultra-reactionary influence on Vance. The Ohio senator has also endorsed Curtis Yarvin, a cranky computer programmer who says America needs “a national CEO, or what’s called a dictator,” and embraced Rod Dreher, an American writer who now serves the illiberal regime of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban.

JD Vance is a real horror show.

The only question is how to couch his awfulness in appropriate terms.  (Pun intended)

There is a Racist Thread Running Through Silicon Valley

As further corruption by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX unwinds as a result of its bankruptcy, we have found that he diverted funds to the racist advocacy group Litecone. (H/T Atrios)

Lightcone claims that they are into "Longtermism" and "Effective Altruism", but it appears that their real mission is to create a scientific and philosophical gloss for bigotry.

(on edit) I feel compelled to add my conclusion at the beginning, what we see here is not just a cabal of bigots, but rather an exclusive club where the price of admission (in addition to a few years at Stanford and/or growing up white in Apartheid South Africa) is subscribing to a toxic mix of Ayn Rand, eugenics, and racism.

So, I went down an FTX bankruptcy rabbit hole, and here we go:

Multiple events hosted at a historic former hotel in Berkeley, California, have brought together people from intellectual movements popular at the highest levels in Silicon Valley while platforming prominent people linked to scientific racism, the Guardian reveals.

But because of alleged financial ties between the non-profit that owns the building – Lightcone Infrastructure (Lightcone) – and jailed crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, the administrators of FTX, Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto exchange, are demanding the return of almost $5m that new court filings allege were used to bankroll the purchase of the property.

During the last year, Lightcone and its director, Oliver Habryka, have made the $20m Lighthaven Campus available for conferences and workshops associated with the “longtermism”, “rationalism” and “effective altruism” (EA) communities, all of which often see empowering the tech sector, its elites and its beliefs as crucial to human survival in the far future.

At these events, movement influencers rub shoulders with startup founders and tech-funded San Francisco politicians – as well as people linked to eugenics and scientific racism.

Since acquiring the Lighthaven property – formerly the Rose Garden Inn – in late 2022, Lightcone has transformed it into a walled, surveilled compound without attracting much notice outside the subculture it exists to promote.

So, what bigots are they promoting?

Well, they had a conference, and:

………

Alongside these guests, however, were advertised a range of more extreme figures.

One, Jonathan Anomaly, published a paper in 2018 entitled Defending Eugenics, which called for a “non-coercive” or “liberal eugenics” to “increase the prevalence of traits that promote individual and social welfare”. The publication triggered an open letter of protest by Australian academics to the journal that published the paper, and protests at the University of Pennsylvania when he commenced working there in 2019. (Anomaly now works at a private institution in Quito, Ecuador, and claims on his website that US universities have been “ideologically captured”.)

Another, Razib Khan, saw his contract as a New York Times opinion writer abruptly withdrawn just one day after his appointment had been announced, following a Gawker report that highlighted his contributions to outlets including the paleoconservative Taki’s Magazine and anti-immigrant website VDare.

The Michigan State University professor Stephen Hsu, another billed guest, resigned as vice-president of research there in 2020 after protests by the MSU Graduate Employees Union and the MSU student association accusing Hsu of promoting scientific racism.

Brian Chau, executive director of the “effective accelerationist” non-profit Alliance for the Future (AFF), was another billed guest. A report last month catalogued Chau’s long history of racist and sexist online commentary, including false claims about George Floyd, and the claim that the US is a “Black supremacist” country. “Effective accelerationists” argue that human problems are best solved by unrestricted technological development.

………

Several controversial guests were also present at Manifest 2023, also held at Lighthaven, including rightwing writer Hanania, whose pseudonymous white-nationalist commentary from the early 2010s was catalogued last August in HuffPost, and Malcolm and Simone Collins, whose EA-inspired pro-natalism – the belief that having as many babies as possible will save the world – was detailed in the Guardian last month.

The Collinses were, along with Razib Khan and Jonathan Anomaly, featured speakers at the eugenicist Natal Conference in Austin last December, as previously reported in the Guardian.

Daniel HoSang, a professor of American studies at Yale University and a part of the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, said: “The ties between a sector of Silicon Valley investors, effective altruism and a kind of neo-eugenics are subtle but unmistakable. They converge around a belief that nearly everything in society can be reduced to markets and all people can be regarded as bundles of human capital.”

HoSang added: “From there, they anoint themselves the elite managers of these forces, investing in the ‘winners’ as they see fit.”

“The presence of Stephen Hsu here is particularly alarming,” HoSang concluded. “He’s often been a bridge between fairly explicit racist and antisemitic people like Ron Unz, Steven Sailer and Stefan Molyneux and more mainstream figures in tech, investment and scientific research, especially around human genetics.”

And then there is a string revealed in a random link:

………

Prediction markets are a long-held enthusiasm in the EA and rationalism subcultures, and billed guests included personalities like Scott Siskind, AKA Scott Alexander, founder of Slate Star Codex; misogynistic George Mason University economist Robin Hanson; and Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Miri).

 That link for Scott Siskind, is to a 2021 article about a blog/discussion space called, as is noted here, "Slate Star Codex."

It was shut down after this story, and later reestablished under a different name.

So, what is Slate Star Codex?

The website had a homely, almost slapdash design with a light blue banner and a strange name: Slate Star Codex.

It was nominally a blog, written by a Bay Area psychiatrist who called himself Scott Alexander (a near anagram of Slate Star Codex). It was also the epicenter of a community called the Rationalists, a group that aimed to re-examine the world through cold and careful thought.

In a style that was erudite, funny, strange and astoundingly verbose, the blog explored everything from science and medicine to philosophy and politics to the rise of artificial intelligence. It challenged popular ideas and upheld the right to discuss contentious issues. This might involve a new take on the genetics of depression or criticism of the #MeToo movement. As a result, the conversation that thrived at the end of each blog post — and in related forums on the discussion site Reddit — attracted an unusually wide range of voices.

There is a whole lot of corrosive sh%$ that is covered under, "An unusually wide range of voices."

“It is the one place I know of online where you can have civil conversations among people with a wide range of views,” said David Friedman, an economist and legal scholar who was a regular part of the discussion. Fellow commenters on the site, he noted, represented a wide cross-section of viewpoints. “They range politically from communist to anarcho-capitalist, religiously from Catholic to atheist, and professionally from a literal rocket scientist to a literal plumber — both of whom are interesting people.”

The voices also included white supremacists and neo-fascists. The only people who struggled to be heard, Dr. Friedman said, were “social justice warriors.” They were considered a threat to one of the core beliefs driving the discussion: free speech.

Yeah, it's all wokeness. That's the problem.

………

Slate Star Codex was a window into the Silicon Valley psyche. There are good reasons to try and understand that psyche, because the decisions made by tech companies and the people who run them eventually affect millions.

And Silicon Valley, a community of iconoclasts, is struggling to decide what’s off limits for all of us.

Yeah, that's reassuring.

………

The allure of the ideas within Silicon Valley is what made Scott Alexander, who had also written under his given name, Scott Siskind, and his blog essential reading.

But in late June of last year, when I approached Mr. Siskind to discuss the blog, it vanished.

Because the Randroid racist coffee klatch is profoundly allergic to the light.

To quote P.C. Hodgell, "That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be."

………

The roots of Slate Star Codex trace back more than a decade to a polemicist and self-described A.I. researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who believed that intelligent machines could end up destroying humankind. He was a driving force behind the rise of the Rationalists.

The Rationalists saw themselves as people who applied scientific thought to almost any topic. This often involved “Bayesian reasoning,” a way of using statistics and probability to inform beliefs.

………

But it was the other stuff that made the Rationalists feel like outliers. They were “easily persuaded by weird, contrarian things,” said Robin Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University who helped create the blogs that spawned the Rationalist movement. “Because they decided they were more rational than other people, they trusted their own internal judgment.”

So, they are arrogant.

Of course arrogance does not inevitably lead to bigotry, though I would argue that this sort of arrogance is required for white supremacy and the like.

Many Rationalists embraced “effective altruism,” an effort to remake charity by calculating how many people would benefit from a given donation. Some embraced the online writings of “neoreactionaries” like Curtis Yarvin, who held racist beliefs and decried American democracy. They were mostly white men, but not entirely.

………

Last June, as I was reporting on the Rationalists and Slate Star Codex, I called Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab backed by a billion dollars from Microsoft. He was effusive in his praise of the blog.

(emphasis mine)

So, I've always wondered how Altman, who has an unbroken record of failure, his social media idea was a privacy nightmare and a failure, he was removed as president of Y Combinator for self dealing and a toxic management style, etc.

Now I think that I see:

It was, he said, essential reading among “the people inventing the future” in the tech industry.

Mr. Altman, who had risen to prominence as the president of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, moved on to other subjects before hanging up. But he called back. He wanted to talk about an essay that appeared on the blog in 2014.

The essay was a critique of what Mr. Siskind, writing as Scott Alexander, described as “the Blue Tribe.” In his telling, these were the people at the liberal end of the political spectrum whose characteristics included “supporting gay rights” and “getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots.”

But as the man behind Slate Star Codex saw it, there was one group the Blue Tribe could not tolerate: anyone who did not agree with the Blue Tribe. “Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?” he wrote.

So, Mr. Altman is a big supporter of the idea that being a racist is actually brave and forward looking.

It is an entry point, along with going to Stanford for a while, it seems, into the world of the high wealth tech entrepreneurs, like everyone's favorite literal vampire and gay basher in his student days at Stanford, Peter Thiel:

In 2005, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, befriended Mr. Yudkowsky and gave money to MIRI. In 2010, at Mr. Thiel’s San Francisco townhouse, Mr. Yudkowsky introduced him to a pair of young researchers named Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis. That fall, with an investment from Mr. Thiel’s firm, the two created an A.I. lab called DeepMind.

And what is the allure?  A tacit acceptance of racism:

………

Part of the appeal of Slate Star Codex, faithful readers said, was Mr. Siskind’s willingness to step outside acceptable topics. But he wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed.

"A willingness to step outside of acceptable topics," is a code word.  It means saying that women are less capable in IT, that blacks are genetically inferior, and that we should be practicing eugenics to improve the species, all while pretending that it is just, "Asking questions."

………

As he explored science, philosophy and A.I., he also argued that the media ignored that men were often harassed by women. He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books. He said that affirmative action was difficult to distinguish from “discriminating against white men.”

In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”

He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” — the blogs he endorsed — included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.

In 2017, Mr. Siskind published an essay titled “Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due to Offensive Attitudes.” The main reason computer scientists, mathematicians and other groups were predominantly male was not that the industries were sexist, he argued, but that women were simply less interested in joining.

That week, a Google employee named James Damore wrote a memo arguing that the low number of women in technical positions at the company was a result of biological differences, not anything else — a memo he was later fired over. One Slate Star Codex reader on Reddit noted the similarities to the writing on the blog.

Mr. Siskind, posting as Scott Alexander, urged this reader to tone it down. “Huge respect for what you’re trying, but it’s pretty doomed,” he wrote. “If you actually go riding in on a white horse waving a paper marked ‘ANTI-DIVERSITY MANIFESTO,’ you’re just providing justification for the next round of purges.” 

So, according to Mr. Siskind, the problem with writing that women can't code is not that this is misogynist bullsh%$ unsupported by the facts, it's that woke folks will come after you.

In 2013, Mr. Thiel invested in a technology company founded by Mr. Yarvin. So did the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, led in the investment by Balaji Srinivasan, who was then a general partner.

That year, when the tech news site TechCrunch published an article exploring the links between the neoreactionaries, the Rationalists and Silicon Valley, Mr. Yarvin and Mr. Srinivasan traded emails. Mr. Srinivasan said they could not let that kind of story gain traction. It was a preview of an attitude that I would see unfold when I approached Mr. Siskind in the summer of 2020. (Mr. Srinivasan could not be reached for comment.)

“If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to *their* advertisers/friends/contacts,” Mr. Srinivasan said in an email viewed by The New York Times, using a term, “Dark Enlightenment,” that was synonymous with the neoreactionary movement.

You remember Mr. Srinivasan, don't you?  He's the one who called for the ethnic cleansing of San Francisco, and Marc Andreeson thinks that he is one of the most interesting people in the world.

You do not need a tinfoil hat to conclude that Silicon Valley "Bro" culture is toxic and racist.

I would argue that these attitudes are a requirement for playing for the big boys in and around Santa Cruz, California. 

They think that they are all John Galt, and that everyone else is mud people.

Yeah, Not a Good Look

One of the hardest groups to unionize are engineers, because too many of them subscribe to a sort of Ayn Rand view of the world.

Boeing's relationship with its engineers has been fraught enough that they have been unionized as the SPEEA since 1946, and they went on a largely successful 40 day strike in 2000.

Well, now the SPEEA is conducting whistleblower rights training.

It seems to me that the rank and file is kind of honked off:

A union representing Boeing employees held a training session last week on whistleblower protection rights, suggesting the troubled jetmaker's problems may be far from over.

The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), which represents workers at Boeing and Boeing spin-off-slash-supplier Spirit AeroSystems, held a training session for council representatives at both corporations on Friday.

"The seminar comes after two years of SPEEA unsuccessfully trying to negotiate strong anti-retaliation language with the Boeing Co. in particular," the union said on its website. It said such anti-retaliation measures are needed because SPEEA members continue to report being punished for speaking out about safety concerns.

"The whistleblower seminar will provide Council Reps the basic tools to be front-line resources to SPEEA members who are considering speaking up about an issue but don't trust their employers' internal systems," the SPEEA added.

And then there is this:

………

Brian Knowles, a lawyer who represented both deceased Boeing whistleblowers, said earlier this month that he has at least ten more Boeing employees ready to come forward. Those ten may not be alone if the need for whistleblower training is any indicator.

Yeah, this is beginning to sound like an aviation themed sequel to the Tom Cruise movie The Firm, but that is crazy talk.

Then again, considering the body count that has come from Boeing adopting the management philosophy of Jack Welch, it is way more than just 2 whistle blowers, who knows what a relentless pursuit of shareholder value might lead to?

And We Are Approaching the Crypto Event Horizon

The bank that is laughably the most cryptocurrency involved bank in the word, and a primary source for dollar liquidity for much of the in the world, Silvergate Bank, appears to be in an unrecoverable death spiral.

They have been unable to file their 10-K, which is required for all public companies in the United States, in large part because their auditor is unwilling to certify their numbers.

Bombs away:

Silvergate Bank, the US dollar banker to the crypto world, is having issues. The latest red flag: Silvergate is unable to file its 10-K annual report for 2022 on time, and it won’t even be able to meet an extended March 16 deadline.

In a late filing notice to the SEC, the California bank said it was not sure it could survive as a “going concern.” [NT-10-K notice of late filing]

Silvergate is toast. We suspect the FDIC will be swooping in sooner rather than later to sell the bank or liquidate its assets.

………

Amongst other reasons for delaying its accounts, Silvergate needs additional time to “complete management’s evaluation of internal controls over financial reporting.”

That is: someone inside the bank may have been fiddling the books. At absolute best, they were sloppy.

Silvergate’s auditors, Crowe LLP, have refused to sign off on the Q4 2022 accounts without considerable further information on just what happened here.

This also means the preliminary Q4 accounts released on January 17 should be treated as wild guesses.

From the BIS report:

One single bank makes up 61.7% of total, worldwide “cryptoasset prudential exposures” — that’s almost certainly Silvergate, with their bitcoin-secured loans to MicroStrategy and bitcoin miners.

And Silvergate is a VERY small institution.

This is why the crypto-bros libertarian wet dreams will never come to fruition.

In the absence of regulation, systemically important entities do stupid and dangerous things, and when they go over a cliff, so do a lot of other people.

If Alan Greenspan, who likely actually f$#@ed Ayn Rand, was forced to admit that regulation was essential to market function, it's essential to the proper function of markets.

No amount of trustless computer code enforced contracts will ever fix this.

Just shut it all down.

Schadenfreude, Day 2

Courtesy of Charles Laquidera, legendary rock DJ at WBCN and creator of Duane Ingalls Glasscock. (Hello Rangoon!)

Well, we have yet another day without a speaker, and Kevin McCarthy actually lost one vote, it's now 20 Republicans voting against him. 

An interesting pointe to note here, as Mike the Mad Biologist does, is that Republicans are fundamentally uninterested in governing, and once again are expecting the Democrats to bail them out:

That’s not to say they won’t do real damage: their primary agendas of pushing White Christian supremacy and cutting taxes and protective regulations is relatively easy to enact. But the whole McCarthy fracas does demonstrate how dependent Republicans are on Democrats to accomplish the basic functions of government.

In terms of McCarthy winning the speakership, as best as anyone can tell, McCarthy is counting on Democrats deciding not to vote (or vote present). Unfortunately for him, Democrats seem to be having a grand time watching him flounder, to the extent where they’re literally showing up with buckets of popcorn. If nothing else, every day Republicans aren’t in control is another day they can’t hurt America.

But his strategy is simply the Republican governance strategy writ small. Democrats pass bills, both aggressive and expansive bills (e.g., the IRA) along with the ‘keeping the lights on’ bills, often to their short-term political detriment, thanks to Republican propaganda. Meanwhile, Republicans return to their districts and hold ribbon-cutting ceremonies touting projects funded by the very same bills they opposed (there’s an entire subgenre of reporting dedicated to this phenomenon). To put it vulgarly (and destroying any feminist cred I might have built up over the years), Republicans get the mistress and the wife: they get political points for opposing Democratic legislation, while simultaneously getting credit for its benefits.

I'd never thought about it this way before.

While I have always maintained that a significant portion of the Republican Polity is dedicated to opposing the very concept of governance, it follows from the beliefs of child murder admirer Ayn Rand, I thought to think that they were relying on the Democrats to bail them out when they have no alternative.

I am not sure if this is true, but it is intriguing

I Did Nazi That Coming

It looks like there are a bunch of tech bros out there want to have huge numbers of children so that their (perceived) genetic superiority can be spread throughout the world.

This sh%$ is straight out of the pre-WWII eugenics movement, beloved by Francis Galton, Winston Churchill, J.H. Kellogg, and that unpleasant short German man with the tiny mustache.

I am not surprised.  Much like the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the "science" of eugenics is beloved by ordinary people who through luck and privilege achieve some success in life:

Sitting in their toy-filled family room on a sunny September afternoon, Simone and Malcolm Collins were forced to compete with the wails of two toddlers as they mapped out their plans for humankind.

"I do not think humanity is in a great situation right now. And I think if somebody doesn't fix the problem, we could be gone," Malcolm half-shouted as he pushed his sniffling 18-month-old, Torsten, back and forth in a child-size Tonka truck.

Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents' calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.

If they succeed, Malcolm continued, "we could set the future of our species."

So this guy does not have the vaguest notion of how this all works.

First, they have not factored in deaths which will reduce the number who will reproduce, and second, you are going to start seeing intermarrying at the second, (legal in all US states) third, or fourth cousin level.

This becomes even more likely when one realizes that families tend to live closer to each other than random people, and in this case, they would all be living in the same cult compound.

Malcolm, 36, and his wife, Simone, 35, are "pronatalists," part of a quiet but growing movement taking hold in wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles. People like the Collinses fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization. It's a theory that Elon Musk has championed on his Twitter feed, that Ross Douthat has defended in The New York Times' opinion pages, and that Joe Rogan and the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen bantered about on "The Joe Rogan Experience." It's also, alarmingly, been used by some to justify white supremacy around the world, from the tiki-torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting "You will not replace us" to the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who opened his 2019 manifesto: "It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates."

And, of course, that, "Unpleasant short German man with the tiny mustache."

This is all about the idea that non-white people are untermenchen, and so white people must have many children to prevent said, "Mud People," from taking over.

The reason that this sounds like a fever dream inspired by The Turner Diaries, is because, this is where eugenics of humanity inexorably takes you.

………

I reached out to the Collinses after I received a tip about a company called Genomic Prediction, where Musk's OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman was an early investor. (Altman, who is gay, also invests in a company called Conception. The startup plans to grow viable human eggs out of stem cells and could allow two biological males to reproduce. "I think having a lot of kids is great," Altman recently told an audience at Greylock's Intelligent Future event. "I want to do that now even more than I did when I was younger.")

Genomic Prediction is one of the first companies to offer PGT-P, a controversial new type of genetic testing that allows parents who are undergoing in vitro fertilization to select the "best" available embryos based on a variety of polygenic risk factors.

Rather ironically, if there is a genetic connection found to homosexuality, preventing gay children will become one of the, if not the, most common uses of the technology, because people are bigots.

That Altman does not "Get It" is a mark of his sense of privilege, and his deep stupidity.

………

They [the Collinses] both said they were warned by friends not to talk to me. After all, a political minefield awaits anyone who wanders into this space. The last major figure to be associated with pronatalism was Jeffrey Epstein, who schemed to impregnate 20 women at a time on his New Mexico ranch. Genetic screening, and the underlying assumption that some humans are born better than others, often invites comparisons to Nazi eugenic experiments. And then there's the fact that our primary cultural reference point for a pronatalist society is the brutally misogynist world of "The Handmaid's Tale."

If your movement is associated with Jeffrey Epstein and that, "Unpleasant short German man with the tiny mustache," you might want to reexamine your life.

………

The payoff won't be immediate, Simone said, but she believes if that small circle puts the right plans into place, their successors will "become the new dominant leading classes in the world."

Wow, I did Nazi that coming.

………

While pronatalism is often associated with religious extremism, the version now trending in this community has more in common with dystopian sci-fi. The Collinses, who identify as secular Calvinists, are particularly drawn to the tenet of predestination, which suggests that certain people are chosen to be superior on earth and that free will is an illusion. They believe pronatalism is a natural extension of the philosophical movements sweeping tech hubs like the Silicon Hills of Austin, Texas. Our conversations frequently return to transhumanism (efforts to merge human and machine capabilities to create superior beings), longtermism (a philosophy that argues the true cost of human extinction wouldn't be the death of billions today but the preemptive loss of trillions, or more, unborn future people), and effective altruism (or EA, a philanthropic system currently focused on preventing artificial intelligence from wiping out the human population).

No, EA is a way of justifying enormous wealth and making it appear virtuous, because you will be making donations (in the distant future) to help people in the far more distant future.  It is morally bankrupt, or as one Twitter wag put it, "It's a prosperity gospel for agnostics."

It is camouflage for greed and bigotry.

………

According to tech-industry insiders, this type of rhetoric is spreading at intimate gatherings among some of the most powerful figures in America. It's "big here in Austin," the 23andMe cofounder Linda Avey told me. Raffi Grinberg, a pronatalist who is the executive director of Dialog, said population decline was a common topic among the CEOs, elected officials, and other powerful figures who attended the group's off-the-record retreats. In February, the PayPal cofounder Luke Nosek, a close Musk ally, hosted a gathering at his home on Austin's Lake Travis to discuss "The End of Western Civilization," another common catchphrase in the birth-rate discourse.

Here, once again, I have to go back to the real world experiment that some call history, and note that after the Black Death killed half of Europe, living standards rose further and faster than at any time in history.

The elites did not see the benefits of the increased productivity, because they had to pay their workers more, and passed laws to suppress wages, but in some cases (Poland) where contemporaneous records of the Black Death are absent, we know that the plague hit them because of the post plague wage spikes.

A declining population, one where the average Joe pays 10% more in old age benefit taxes, but earns 40% more is good for everyone, except the holders of capital, like Musk or Nosek.

………

These worries tend to focus on one class of people in particular, which pronatalists use various euphemisms to express. In August, Elon's father, Errol Musk, told me that he was worried about low birth rates in what he called "productive nations." The Collinses call it "cosmopolitan society." Elon Musk himself has tweeted about the movie "Idiocracy," in which the intelligent elite stop procreating, allowing the unintelligent to populate the earth.

"Productive nations," and "cosmopolitan society," huh?  What they mean is "Wipipo".  They might as well just say that they are worried about N*****s taking over.

As to basing your philosophy on Idiocracy, I would suggest that you go with a far better movie from Mike Judge, Office Space.  Elon Musk already has the role of William Lundberg, so marvelously played by Gary Cole in the original, down pat.

………

Once pronatalists reach critical mass, the Collinses hope, they can begin to shape society around their needs.

"You have to create cultures that reward" and have structures for large families, Simone explained. Pronatalist pet issues include everything from increasing housing development to changing laws around car-seat regulation (one study found that people would stop having children when they couldn't fit any more car seats in their vehicle). During the coronavirus pandemic, the Collinses tried to raise money for a family-friendly "startup town" they called Project Eureka, where all community rules would be "ultimately set — all disputes resolved" by the Collinses.

When fundraising stalled, they redirected their focus to the Collins Institute for the Gifted, a specialized online lab school that is partnering with the Bari Weiss-cofounded University of Austin and the Thiel-backed 1517 Fund. (Musk similarly created a boutique education program, Ad Astra, for his family and employees' children that has since expanded into the online school Astra Nova.)

The logic behind the Collins Institute reflects their thinking at large: "If you want to make the future better for everyone and you could choose to dramatically increase the educational outcomes of the bottom 10% of people or the top 0.1% of people," the Collinses say to choose the 0.1%. 

The Collinses are paraphrasing William Edward Hickman, who kidnapped and dismembered a little girl in 1927, and said "What is good for me is right."

They benefit from lobbying for a future in which all of society's resources are directed toward them, because this is all that they concieve of.

It should be noted that Ayn Rand described that Hickman quote as, "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard."

To be fair, Hickman's victim, Marion Parker, was born October 11, 1915, which means that she would be dead now, so according to the ethics put forward by "Effective Altruism," it's all good.

I Don’t Want to Live on This Planet Any More

This is QAnon level stuff.

In case it's not obvious, what public health officials try to anticipate future threats and figure out how to ameliorate them.

Monkeypox has been an obvious candidate as an emerging infectious disease since before I wrote about that in 2003.

— Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) May 23, 2022

So they studied it.

I and many many other people more knowledgable about orthopoxviruses have been pointing for decades at monkeypox as a potential emerging pathogen. And you can find those articles easily in the scientific literature. https://t.co/oO6M3f3hD6 pic.twitter.com/7Gv07NczWI

— Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) May 23, 2022

I weep for the children.

On a more serious note, worries about monkeypox, a member of the same genus as smallpox, has been an object of concern for years.

As to the Brownstone Institute, they are literally an organization opposed to public health measures of all forms, because, Ayn Rand, I guess.

I used to laugh at these folks, but seeing as how they are directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and millions of people world wide, I don't think that laughter is the appropriate response.

We're just lucky that the current outbreak, which includes community transmission, is of the West African clade, with a mortality of around 3% untreated, as opposed to the Congo Basin clade, which has a mortality rate above 10%.

Speaking of Faceberg

In response to a proposal in Australia to institute a link tax, it appears that the criminal enterprise now known as Meta deliberately shut dozens of Australian organizations out in order to intimidate Canberra.

Seriously.  No one should have this much power, even if we are all wise, all men an women of understanding, and all learned in Torah:

Last year when Facebook blocked news in Australia in response to potential legislation making platforms pay publishers for content, it also took down the pages of Australian hospitals, emergency services and charities. It publicly called the resulting chaos “inadvertent.”

Internally, the pre-emptive strike was hailed as a strategic masterstroke.

Facebook documents and testimony filed to U.S. and Australian authorities by whistleblowers allege that the social-media giant deliberately created an overly broad and sloppy process to take down pages—allowing swaths of the Australian government and health services to be caught in its web just as the country was launching Covid vaccinations.

The goal, according to the whistleblowers and documents, was to exert maximum negotiating leverage over the Australian Parliament, which was voting on the first law in the world that would require platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay news outlets for content.

Let me clarify my position here, one which I share with Cory Doctorow:  There is no need for a link tax, and it will be incredibly destructive to the open internet, "Big tech isn’t stealing news publishers’ content, it’s stealing their money.

Going after the fraudulent and oligopolistic online ad industry would do a lot more while allowing fair use of people's creative content.

Despite saying it was targeting only news outlets, the company deployed an algorithm for deciding what pages to take down that it knew was certain to affect more than publishers, according to the documents and people familiar with the matter.

It didn’t notify affected pages in advance they would be blocked or provide a system for them to appeal once they were.

The documents also show multiple Facebook employees tried to raise alarms about the impact and offer possible solutions, only to receive a minimal or delayed response from the leaders of the team in charge.

F%$#ing their users in order to f%$# Australia was a feature, not a bug.

After five days that caused disorder throughout the country, Australia’s Parliament amended the proposed law to the degree that, a year after its passage, its most onerous provisions haven’t been applied to Facebook or its parent company, Meta Platforms Inc.

“We landed exactly where we wanted to,” wrote Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of partnerships, who pressed for the company’s aggressive stance, in a congratulatory email to her team minutes after the Australian Senate voted to approve the watered-down bill at the end of February 2021.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg chimed in with congratulations as well, with Ms. Sandberg praising the “thoughtfulness of the strategy” and “precision of execution.”

………

Instead of using Facebook’s long-established database of existing news publishers, called News Page Index, the newly assembled team developed a crude algorithmic news classifier that ensured more than just news would be caught in the net, according to documents and the people familiar with the matter. “If 60% of [sic] more of a domain’s content shared on Facebook is classified as news, then the entire domain will be considered a news domain,” stated one internal document. The algorithm didn’t distinguish between pages of news producers and pages that shared news.

………

The team also created a timeline for how it would roll out the takedown that showed it intended to launch before an appeals process was ready, the documents show. The move didn’t follow typical procedure, according to the people familiar with the takedown.

Unfortunately, Silicon Valley Tech Bros, and I am including the Lean In Girl Sheryl Sandburg in this group, are people who have largely been born on 3rd base and thought that they hit a triple, and are now convinced that they are the super men from a trashy Ayn Rand novel (But I repeat myself) who think themselves above the law.

This will not end unless and until the powerful are held to account, and tried and imprisoned for their crimes.

In a Place that Sounds Like a Disease

My niece Zahva is getting married on Sunday in Suffern, New York, and we are staying in an Airbnb in Teaneck, New Jersey.

I can imagine to a doctor delivering the bad news,  "I'm sorry Mr. Saroff, but you had be been diagnosed with Teaneck, there's nothing we can do."

We are going to hit to the City this weekend, and because we I do not want to upstage the happy couple, I will not be urinating on Ayn Rand's grave, Kensico Cemetery, 273 Lakeview Ave, Valhalla, NY 10595.

Maybe later.

Yeah, It's Randroids

You may have noticed in the comments, when I suggested that the aggressive push-back against masking was pushed by toxic individualism in general, and the incoherent philosophy of Ayn Rand in particular, a self-described, "Bear of very little brain," sarcastically noted that, he was impressed with my, "Ability to read the minds of others this thoroughly."

Well, now we know that the most prominent, contemptible, and rich people in America, the remaining Koch brother, have been aggressively funding premature in person schooling and the end of mask mandates.

Just so you know, I cannot read minds, and thankfully, neither can Sharon,^* which is good. If she could read my mind she would never stop slapping me, because my soul has the equivalent of Backpfeifengesicht.^†

Whether it's public health, or Sears Roebuck, these people are menaces to society.

They also, unfortunately, are very much a part of the US zeitgeist:

At the end of last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new guidance on wearing masks, significantly easing recommendations for most of the country, including in schools. In response to the CDC’s new rules, many blue states that still mandated masks in schools announced they would end the requirement, including New York, California, Oregon, and Washington. Now, the only state not planning to end its school mask mandate by mid-march is Hawaii.

The development may have been confusing for parents of schoolchildren, since the American Academy of Pediatrics and the president of the American Medical Association continue to recommend masking in schools — and a week before the CDC’s announcement, the agency’s director had said the CDC had no immediate plans to update its guidance. Polls have shown strong support for school mask mandates, and in January, teachers and students all over the country led demonstrations calling for even stronger COVID safety protocols. Strong opinions on the issue and conflicting directives put further pressure on the country’s already overwhelmed teaching staff. A recent survey of U.S. teachers found that more than half were on the brink of leaving their jobs over pandemic stress.

Even more worrisome for many parents and teachers: Last week, new data revealed the Pfizer vaccine, the only option approved for children ages 5 to 11, protected against hospitalization but offered almost no protection against infection for this age group.

The updated CDC guidance signals the Democratic party’s shift from beating the virus to surrendering to it as a fact of life — including in schools. The new approach was likely shaped by a number of factors, including declining COVID numbers, concerns about far-reaching public COVID fatigue, and the fact that many of those now most at risk of severe disease have refused to get vaccinated for non-medical reasons.

But the end of school masking is also in part due to a campaign by right-wing business interests, including the dark money network of oil billionaire Charles Koch, to keep the country open for the sake of maintaining corporate profits. These interests have been meddling in the education debate, first pushing to reopen schools and then fighting in-school safety measures, even as COVID case numbers were rising and children were ending up in hospitals. For nearly two years, these groups have been promoting questionable science and creating wedges between parents, teachers, and administrators in order to get America back to work — even at the risk of the nation’s children.

………

On March 13, 2020, Yes Every Kid — a front group founded by the Koch network in 2019 as part of a larger effort to shape K-12 education in the states — launched a #LearnEverywhere campaign promoting remote learning and homeschooling. Three days later, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank co-founded and heavily subsidized by Koch, published a commentary declaring that the U.S. could “tap into” charter, private, and homeschooling “if brick-and-​mortar schooling is substantially disrupted.”

The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing nonprofit heavily funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and Charles Koch Institute, also published articles in March 2020 in favor of using public school funds to pay parents to homeschool their kids. Heritage senior policy analyst Jonathan Butcher wrote a policy brief for the Koch-founded-and-funded Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank based at George Mason University, calling to funnel state funds into for-profit charter school companies providing virtual learning.

The message was blasted out by other groups in Koch’s orbit, including his flagship political advocacy outfit, Americans For Prosperity (AFP); the Independent Women’s Forum, a dark money group bankrolled by Koch organizations and the heirs to the Walmart fortune; and the State Policy Network, a web of libertarian state-based policy organizations.

But within a few months, the school narrative out of Koch world began to shift, coinciding with growing concerns about labor shortages and changing workplace dynamics caused by nationwide school closures. According to Education Week, a staggering 55.1 million students were impacted by the closures at their peak.

………

The tight labor market changed the relationship between employers and their workers, who began demanding more flexibility and better work-life balance. Companies were forced to respond by raising wages — albeit inadequately — in order to attract workers.

………

In May 2020, two months after the World Health Organization declared COVID a global pandemic, the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank based at Stanford University that has received substantial backing from Koch over the years, held a virtual conference at which senior fellow Eric Hanushek argued that remote learning was causing learning loss among low-resourced students and damaging “teacher accountability” through the elimination of standardized testing.

………

Big industry groups also fought school closures, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s premier corporate lobby group. In September 2021, Chamber executive vice president and chief policy officer Neil Bradley said that “we have to have the schools fully reopen” in order to help solve the labor shortage.

Quick translation here, "Help solve the labor shortage," means, "Treat our employees like crap again."

As schools started reopening under the new Democratic administration, Koch-affiliated groups adopted a harder line. In the lead-up to the 2021 state elections, the organizations began opposing in-school mask requirements for students and teachers in addition to closures.

Observers say business interests likely saw masks as a damper on the return to pre-pandemic economic normalcy, given that they are a reminder of the ongoing public health crisis. Although the economy was recovering in 2021, it would still fall short of pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year, in terms of the number of workers and jobs. As of January 2022, the economy had 4.4 million fewer jobs and 2.7 million fewer workers.

………

Meanwhile, Koch groups and their affiliates have also quietly worked to support grassroots efforts to end mask mandates.

………

“While potential risks and benefits have been postulated, the most likely scenario is that masking during outings or school sessions will have a minimal impact on childhood development,” said child and adolescent psychiatrist Tyler Black, medical director of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Emergency Department at British Columbia Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, who has long been a vocal critic of mental health justifications for easing pandemic protections.

Many pediatricians are alarmed at the end of school mask mandates.

“It’s sort of surprising to us that people want to remove some of these layered protection measures that we know work,” said veteran pediatric emergency physician Christina Johns, senior medical advisor and vice president of communications for PM Pediatrics, the country’s largest provider of specialized pediatric urgent care.

………

Kansas-based pediatrician Natasha Burgert shares Johns’ concerns about abandoning masks and other safety measures. “You can’t just drop one of the cheapest, easiest, and quite honestly — at the larger scale — probably one of the most effective measures when you’re talking about the volume of schoolchildren that it’s protecting,” she said.

(emphasis mine)

………

The business-backed school normalcy campaign has proven to be remarkably successful. The CDC’s recent about-face on masks followed weeks of pressure from media declaring it was time to return to pre-pandemic schooling. In January, outlets like The Atlantic, New York Times, and Washington Post published op-eds calling to end school masking requirements. Cable news contributors joined in as well, like physician Leana Wen, who declared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 that “the science has changed.”

These people are a cancer on society, and you cannot negotiate with cancer.

Also, at some point, I really want to go to Valhalla, New York, get drunk, and piss on Ayn Rand's grave, if the line is not too long.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
^†A face that begs to be slapped in German.

A Catastrophic Failure of Philosophy

 Human beings are social creatures who have relied on each other to survive since the paleolithic era.

In fact, in those days, humans were so dependent on their group that banishment was literally a death sentence, because a human being could not survive on his own. 

This behavior is quite literally baked into our DNA.

Of course these days, we let wealthy sociopaths run our discourse, so man as the rugged individualist has become that to which we aspire to.  We are all John Galt, as Objectivist writer, and serial killer groupie Ayn Rand would say.

Unfortunately, Objectivism simply does not work, look at Sears, where Rand afficianado Eddie Lamper drove the company into the ground following the precepts of that miserable excuse for a philosophy, or any of the attempts by people with more money than brains to set up a, "Galt's Gulch," which have all collapsed in acrimony, fraud and lawsuits.

Unfortunately, this attitude has permeated the public health establishment in the United States, which has led to active hostility to the idea of universal masking, which is the remediation mechanism that has the highest cost/benefit ratio of any interventions.

This has happened because masking is a policy that is most geared toward preventing fellow members of our society, so even though we all benefit from this unselfish behavior, it is condemned and minimized because  the worship of selfishness has poisoned the public discourse so thoroughly:

This time last week, nearly all Americans were still being urged by the nation’s leadership to please, keep those darn masks on. Then the Great American Unmasking Part Deux began. On Friday, the CDC debuted a new set of COVID-19 guidelines that green-lit roughly 70 percent of us—effectively, anyone living in a place where hospitals are not being actively overrun by the coronavirus—to doff our masks in most indoor public settings. The stamina of mask policy had been flagging for quite some time: Governors and mayors had already been weeks deep into vanishing their own mask mandates (and other pandemic precautions), including in schools. But the CDC’s decision still marks a substantial cross-continental change, delivering a final blow to what little remained of the country’s collective approach to quashing the pandemic.

In the new playbook, recommendations for individual people, not communities, sit front and center, and mitigation frequently falls under the purview of medicine rather than public health—heaping more responsibility on the already dysfunctional American health-care system. “It is public health’s job to protect everybody, not just those people who are vaccinated, not just those people who are healthy,” says Theresa Chapple-McGruder, the director of the Department of Public Health in Oak Park, Illinois. I asked Chapple-McGruder if the CDC’s new guidelines meet that mark. “Not at all,” she said. (The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.) Throughout the pandemic, American leaders have given individuals more responsibility for keeping themselves safe than might be ideal; these revised guidelines codify that approach more openly than ever before. Each of us has yet again been tasked with controlling our own version of the pandemic, on our own terms. “The onus of public-health measures has really shifted away from public and toward vulnerable individuals,” Ramnath Subbaraman, an infectious-disease physician and epidemiologist at Tufts University, told me.

………

The CDC’s new stance on mitigation glosses over all that, Julia Raifman, a policy expert at Boston University, told me. In her ideal, the country might turn off mask mandates while making clear that they could turn back on if community threat levels warrant it. Mandates are tough to tolerate in the long term, but maybe enough Americans are still on board: A smattering of recent polls suggests that a slight majority of U.S. residents still favor certain pandemic-caliber protections while the virus continues to run rampant.

So maybe the CDC swung the pendulum too far in the other direction, experts told me. The agency also updated its risk guidelines to focus primarily on hospital burden rather than local transmission alone. By the old metrics, nearly all American counties should be masking; under the new standards, that recommendation applies to only about 37 percent, designated orange on the agency’s map, at a “high” COVID-19 community level. In another 23 percent of counties, at the “low,” green-colored level, no one needs to mask. Smack in between, in the 40 percent of American counties currently at the “medium,” yellow-tinted level, some people—if they’re “high risk” or immunocompromised—maybe should? The CDC’s best advice to those people: “Talk to your healthcare provider about whether you need to wear a mask and take other precautions (e.g., testing).”

………

A medical framework—almost resembling a prescription model—is not public-health guidance, which centers community-level benefits achieved through community-level action. People act in the collective interest, a tactic that benefits everyone, not just themselves. Where the CDC leaves us now feels especially disorienting when we consider where most mask-up messaging began: with the idea that masking was an act of communal good—“my mask protects you, your mask protects me.” Now masking is about, as the CDC puts it, “personal preference, informed by personal level of risk.”

(emphasis original)

We are sacrificing significant portions of our society to the cult of faux individualism.

Needs to be Said

Dwana Franklin-Davis Ruthe Farmer make the following exhortation, "Tech companies: Stop conflating privilege with potential."

Enabling bigotry while concealing it is a large part of many tech companies out there.  Just look at Airbnb, which allows renters to vet potential renters for race, or Uber and Lyft, which allows drivers and riders to do the same, or the Facebook's incorporation of racism into its employment advertisements, etc.

It's a feature not a bug of the tech bros, it's a part and parcel of their view of themselves as Ayn Rand style entrepreneur supermen.

If the market wants to pay for bigotry, by John Gault they will give it to the market.

Read Jane Mayer

She follows the money on the Republican attempts to gin up allegations of voter fraud, with the ultimate goal of giving Republican legislatures the power to routinely overturn elections.

This is not just politics, this is a deliberate attempt to overthrow the government.

This is far worse than vote suppression:

It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.

But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election. Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—the film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies. Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.

………

Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state’s audit as a “domino,” and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere.Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”

………

Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.

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These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.

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Since the 2020 election, this movement has evolved into a broader and more aggressive assault on democracy. According to some surveys, a third of Americans now believe that Biden was illegitimately elected, and nearly half of Trump supporters agree that Republican legislators should overturn the results in some states that Biden won. Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, recently told The Economist, “We need to regard what’s happening now as epistemic warfare by some Americans on other Americans.” Pillars of the conservative establishment, faced with a changing U.S. voter population that threatens their agenda, are exploiting Trump’s contempt for norms to devise ways to hold on to power. Senator Whitehouse said of the campaign, “It’s a massive covert operation run by a small group of billionaire élites. These are powerful interests with practically unlimited resources who have moved on to manipulating that most precious of American gifts—the vote.”

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What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen? Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which invested deeply in expanding Democratic turnout in 2020, suggests that the two parties now have irreconcilable beliefs about whose votes are legitimate. “What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require

Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.” proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”

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It’s a surprisingly short leap from making accusations of voter fraud to calling for the nullification of a supposedly tainted election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group funded by the Bradley Foundation, is leading the way. Based in Indiana, it has become a prolific source of litigation; in the past year alone, it has brought nine election-law cases in eight states. It has amassed some of the most visible lawyers obsessed with election fraud, including Mitchell, who is its chair and sits on its board. 

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One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.

These folks will literally betray the Republic in order to win, because they are psychopaths who are driven by the philosophy of child murderer (and Ayn Rand crush) William Edward Hickman, "What is good for me is right."

These people are not a the opposition, they are the enemy, and they need to fought every step of the way.