I’m not in favor of assassinations; I’m especially not fond of sloppy wet work.
Fortunately I’m not in that business, and my only contact with that world stopped talking to me after he made different life choices following 9/11. In my view, and this is a key philosophical point, those in power or government are not more competent, or laudible, or careful, or even smarter than those who aren’t. Nor are they more duplicitious, clever, sneaky, mercurial, or subtle.
That’s one of the reasons I am disinclined to think that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators are particularly impressive. To be blunt: they are up against Joe Biden not Julius Caesar. And lost. Now they are up against Chuck Schumer, and we may be fucked.
I only see that as unfortunate because, were it so, Caesar would make sure we all got to see him impaled. Were it Cassius, I am sure the celebration would be private.
That’s the kind of minds I believe govern the United States, right now, and will for the future. If you want a historical context to situate against, we are in the early stage of the collapse of the republic, before it becomes an empire. In a roundabout way, I am saying Matt Gaetz is no Sulla. The problem we have, which I refuse to play, is one that can roughly be described as “grand strategy on the edge of a crumbling cliff.” It is “mate in 3 but a bomb goes off next turn.” Well, don’t complain about all my fine strategizing if everything gets blown to hell before I can tilt the table. I was not even here, giving advice about the climate crisis, until the late 1980s and once disco wore off, and I was done my stint in uniform, I thought I’d step back and let the smart kids run the show while I worked for a decent retirement. I even remember when CFCs came on the screen, and dutifully stopped using those but honestly I was busy writing the software that came to control the internet’s security stack. Sure, I could have done something but I honestly thought it was in train. I stopped using CFCs and leaded gasoline and even got a car with a 4-cyl engine. I thought it was OK. I thought someone was on it.
I thought someone was on the nuclear war thing, honestly, and, whoah that was complicated but it turns out that was mostly irrelevant marketing puffery and I spent all my effort and brainpower in the wrong place.
I trusted that the guys who were worrying about fuel efficiency and OPEC had their hands around the problem, and drove a fairly efficient motorcycle, a Honda CRX HF that got 55mpg in 1986 and I really didn’t think much more about fuel efficiency until talk about “carbon footprint” and hangon I’m a jet-set traveller, WTF?!
I didn’t understand that the same pencil-neck creeps we tried to chase away in high school were going to come charging back, take over the planet, and try to turn the remains into a bad episode from Star Trek. This planet started out as an ideal sort of garden, except for the mosquitoes, and we’re well locked-in to turning it into a fucked-over wasteland.
The point of all this is that each generation does not appear to figure out what the next one needs, in order to survive, until after we have thoroughly fucked up/dominated/resource constrained/etc the situation. In this case, we all should have started screaming about the climate crisis back in the 80s – and, I swear, we could have done something about it. We might have, or probably even would have, except that we operate on an insanely tight time-window and can actually drive ourselves extinct in one generation. Also, prolonging the lives of boomers was a bad idea. Too late!
Whups, bad idea, evolution! Better luck next time!
Don’t worry, I’ll get back to the AI stuff soonish. I am still coming to terms with what is going to happen.
Ok, whups, I completely shanked that into the weeds. What I was actually supposed to be writing about what something cheerful. Yeah, that’s it. The cheerful thing I wanted to write about is the serious hanky panky Aaron Burr got up to after shooting Alexander Hamilton. I was (and am) amazed – he actually tried several paths to starting his own insurrection/secession movement – and it doesn’t really look like he had any particular ideology it was just him collecting power to himself. The reason that this piece spun out of controll and went bouncing into the weeds is because I have a tremendous amount of trouble connecting emotionally with people like Burr. It wasn’t enough to be famous and respected? Didn’t he realize that Lamborghinis hadn’t been invented yet, and neither had cocaine. There is something notable and horrifying about his story – that he appeared pretty openly to be a scalawag, a flibustier, a bad card, a trouble maker and so forth, but a lot of responsible people just sort of stood around and watched him openly plan to start his own country in the middle of the US. (Pro tip: you are not supposed to do that) but like some of history’s other great scalawags, he was remarkably energetic. From the sound of it he was able to create new problems faster than those stuck around him could clean them up. That was what made me realize that there’s only one good solution for such people and that’s for someone to shoot them before they make a big smoky trail and it’s relatively small. We have to remember that Julius Caesar was not a documentary but thinking about all of this makes me sympathetic for the plotters, who realized, “holy shit this Caesar guy is not going to stop!” and someone had the idea of ganking him while he was between bouts of manipulating everything. There have been times I have declared loudly (you may have heard it in the wind!) that humanity has a bad habit of putting the very worst examples of ourselves in charge of the heap. These people like Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin come along and announce that they’re going to reform agriculture and make the trains run on time, or deal with the CFCs and you turn your back and by the time you turn back, some jackswipe has built panzers and bombers and they are deployed everywhere as far as you can see. And, of course, it’s too late to do anything about it. There is where I started: Hamilton would have been a better show if it had opened with Doc Holliday making a canoe out of Burr’s head. But that would not have ended well, either. We need to somehow take into account the Doomey Microsecond* and somehow slow ourselves down. For example: Mamdani – seems OK to me. I’d have voted for him. But what do we really know about the guy? He could be worse than the charlatans running the show now. Or is this a race to the bottom? I do not know. I hope that if he turns out to be a pirate, someone just pushes him out a window, Russian-style.
Recommended listening: 3 or 4 episodes of detail about a genuinely amoral, sociopathic, uh, guy.
FAN FAVORITE: The Insurrection of Aaron Burr • Season 86 Episode 1 • Aug 6, 2025 • 39 min
https://wondery.com/shows/american-history-tellers/episode/5279-fan-favorite-the-insurrection-of-aaron-burr-an-affair-of-honor/
There are similarities to today’s situation. The whole time I kept thinkinig that all the problem needed was another lead ball from another pistol. But Jefferson, the great man, just sort of piddled around trying to be fair. Meanwhile, Burr set off on a trail of trouble-making that lasted nearly 40 years, trying to trade this part of the country to the british, and that to the Mexicans, etc. “Energetic Shitweasel” comes to mind. It all struck me as odd because Burr’s plans were almost as stupid as this other guy who tried an insurrection on Jan 6, 2020. Again, that show should have ended when the police rounded everyone up and all the hyper-energetic crimers got put up against a wall. As I write this, I know some of you are thinking “but what if a government is actually doing well, and is legitimate, and it ruins itself by putting the wrong jackass up against a wall?” I’m going to go out on a limb and observe that generally shooting troublemakers is cheaper than letting them develop fully. Ask the French about the little Corsican, speaking of energetic shitweasels.
It’s amazing how many sensible people stood around watching Burr, thinking, “someone should shoot that guy” and nobody did.
(* defined as “the time between which not enough is known about a problem, and everything is set in stone)
Seems very reminiscent of both Trump and Caesar, to be honest.
I learned from my 5th grade grammar teacher, who told me it should be Whom do you learn from?
I don’t know that much about him. But Ican recognize that the attacks against him amount to racism, religious bigotry, and distortions of fact.
We should start a betting pool on when Trump will issue a pardon for Brian Cole.
Reginald@3:
In essence, he already has (and Cole’s attorney is saying the same thing). That blanket pardon for the Jan 6 insurrectionists does seem to cover Cole’s . . . uh . . . hobby.
This is precisely why I am not a Doomer.
I’ve learned too much history to trust “leaders”, like authors, sports figures, and everyone else on the planet (including some animals), they are all human with their quirks, foibles, and idiotic views. I don’t exclude myself in that, I’m sure I have some opinions other people think are foolish, missguided, and flat out wrong.
However, “leaders” are too often just people who crave power over others. I wish they would all just find a BSDM sub and fulfill their fanasies in private, not in public. Maybe they wouldn’t be completely satisfied with that, but better a big fish in a small pond then being continually frustrated by all the other wanna-be big fish in a big pond.
Climate change is certainly the big looming problem for humanity. I have no doubts that it will lead to mass suffering and death. It doesn’t need to, but if there is a constant in human history it is that tribal relationships are more important than any other human relationship and tribes will fight each other for resources. Every action Steven Miller takes can be understood as protecting what he views as his tribe. We are very much like baboons in that way. Humanity as a whole could decide to reduce birthrates, put tighter regulations on capitalism and resource use, identify and mitigate externalities. But we won’t. We will defend our tribes and reduce our population the good old human way, through war, famine, pestilence, and death. It worked for our fathers, why change a winning strategy? But the survivors will be thankful they are alive and feel they are blessed by whatever deity they are worshiping at the time.
I see Doomers are thinking this is some sort of unique event, the destruction of life. When, as I see it, it’s just humanity acting like they always have over the entire course of recorded history (and undoubtedly prehistorically as well).
Over the last 5-6 centuries societies have created better and better social tools to remove people from positions of power who demonstrate they cannot be trusted with that power. Many of the tools we have in the USA are over 200 years old. It’s about time for a re-fresh.
most of humanity has outsourced their thought processes to social and mainstream media.
They are spoon-fed what to think by the greedy billionaires.
Something like a third of this country doesn’t have any values, morals, or considerations other than being “anti-democrat”
We’ve got people on national TV claiming that statutory rape “isn’t that bad”
Research institutions are telling their researchers they can’t do any research on “sustainability” (like, wth is the alternative, everything has to fail in a short-term timeframe?)
And on top of that, every company is pushing AI slop everywhere, especially where it’s least needed/wanted, and there are plans to build multiple data centers specifically for AI that will individually draw a city’s worth of power and water.
I thought cryptocurrencies were bad…
Not having viewed or listened to that podcast (if a thing’s worth recording, it’s worth writing down), I still must recommend Nancy Isenberg’s Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr for a better perspective on AB. He was an ambitious scoundrel – like most of the Revolutionary leaders – but not the demonic villain that Thomas Jefferson & Co. made him out to be.
Pierce R. Butler@#7:
He was an ambitious scoundrel – like most of the Revolutionary leaders – but not the demonic villain that Thomas Jefferson & Co. made him out to be.
The Wondery account is light on the “what a bastard!” stuff from Jefferson. If I may be sloppy, Jefferson sounds a bit like Merrick Garland: he gives Burr enough rope to hang a platoon and then moves too slowly to do anything once Burr is all in. There is a shortage (IMO) of personal analysis of Burr’s roguery, but they deliberately present it so it becomes a confusing pile that sounds a lot like the Trump Gang: stuff flying in all directions. That is why I kept thinking “you know how Putin would have simplified this?”
@ Reginald Selkirk:
Your 5th grade grammar teacher did NOT end a sentence with a preposition.
From whom do you learn?
Marcus Ranum @ # 8 – I took a look at wondery.com, and must admit it’s not all entertainment fluff – but enough of it is that I have to take a jaundiced eye to the rest.
Jefferson would have happily hanged Burr, but he didn’t have a way to get around Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall (himself more anti-Jefferson than pro-Burr, but assisted by the vagueness of Jefferson’s case).
We didn’t really get a Putin-class simplifier in the presidency until maybe Jackson, at least as regards bourgeois white folks.
LykeX@#1:
Seems very reminiscent of both Trump and Caesar, to be honest.
Or Mussolini, Churchill, MacArthur, Mao, Pol Pot, DeGaulle, Gadaffi, Hussein, Bonaparte…
So many trouble-makers. The worst seem to be the nihilists who ghost in along behind a trouble-maker and wait until they stumble, then take over – Stalin, Bonaparte, Putin – those are the ones who wait and watch.
I felt a moment of disorientation at the idea that I was positioning Ubu Roy on the same stage as Caesar.
Reginald Selkirk@#3:
I don’t know that much about him. But Ican recognize that the attacks against him amount to racism, religious bigotry, and distortions of fact.
I am a supporter of his on the grounds that you can judge a man by his enemies. To a lesser degree on their weapons – I am 100% that if Mamdani had any skeletons in his closet, they’d have been aired out. All the establishment could come up with was to imply a bunch of lies about muslims and his statements. That was what made me support him (such as I can) – anyone who Washington elites scream at as a “socialist” or “communist” may actually be a decent human being. What was amazing was that he was running against Cuomo, and the lie machine still fired up and spit its bile. I would have expected that almost anyone with a metabolism who was not an overt cannibal or secret child molester could have beaten Cuomo. But this is American Democracy, ain’t it great?
The phase-out of CFCs was an example of something done right. Industry was given help to find alternatives that worked as well or better without damaging the ozone layer. And throughout the transition, no ordinary consumer lost the use of their aerosol cans, refrigerators or air conditioning (are these even different categories? What is a fridge, if not an air-conditioned cupboard?) Just, the inevitable replacements came with a discreet little green symbol on the packaging. But no-one’s underarms were any less sweat-free, and not so much as a sandwich was spoiled.
Now imagine if actual dead-animal meat had been quietly phased out of burgers, sausages, pies and so forth in favour of plant-based substitutes, and there had been a general push to replace coal, oil and gas-fired power stations with renewables backed up with gravity storage, and all the while no-one noticed a bit of difference; except maybe they were less likely to find bone or gristle in a snack product, and perhaps the electricity meter might have been lasting a bit longer between top-ups.
@bluerizlagirl, 13:
Something I post with reasonable regularity around and about:
We all remember, don’t we, when the government had to threaten Motorola and Nokia with huge fines to force them to stop making Razrs and 3310s, remove consumer choice and for the transition to smartphones.
We all remember, don’t we, when the government had to threaten Panasonic and Sony with huge fines to force them to stop making CRT TVs and monitors, remove consumer choice, and force the transition to flat screens…
… and later, when the government threatened huge fines unless they stopped making standard definition screens to remove consumer choice and force the transition to HD…
… and later, to 4K.
We all remember when the government had to threaten Marantz and Pioneer with huge fines to force them to stop making cassette players, remove consumer choice and force the transition to CDs…
… and later, when they had to threaten huge fines to force them to stop making CD players, remove consumer choice and force the transition to MP3 players…
… and later, when they had to threaten huge fines to force Apple and Microsoft and Sony to stop making MP3 players, remove consumer choice and force everyone to start using their phones instead.
We ALL remember, don’t we, when the government had to threaten Sony and the rest with massive fines to force them to stop making DVD players, remove consumer choice and force the transition to streaming services.
Because when a new product comes out, you MUST threaten manufacturers with massive fines if they don’t remove the choice to buy the old stuff, because consumers will be reluctant to buy the new stuff, because consumers, bless ’em, are fucking idiots and if they see that the new stuff is in many ways considerably worse than the old stuff the bastards won’t buy into it and you won’t hit your arbitrary targets.
Never mind actualy making the new stuff BETTER, it’s far better to simply make the old stuff illegal. It worked with phones, cassettes, DVD playerts, MP3 players and CRTs, didn’t it? Didn’t it?
I won’t be buying an EV any time soon, because for the use case I have for a vehicle, they simply can’t do the job. Annoyingly, however, the effort doesn’t seem to be going into making them equal to or better than ICE vehicles for all use cases, it seems to be going into rapidly complying with government edicts to phase out ICE cars without having a viable replacement.
As an engineer, consumer and driver, I find this infuriating. The best and only thing I can do is look after my ICE cars and hold onto them for as long as humanly possible.