Rule of Law - Even Presidents Are Subject to the Law

One of the key things advanced (but not invented) by the American Revolution was this notion of rule of law. Francis Fukuyama defines this as “a set of rules of behavior, reflecting a broad consensus within the society, that is binding on even the most powerful political actors in the society, whether kings, presidents, or prime ministers. If rulers can change the law to suit themselves, the rule of law does not exist, even if those laws are applied uniformly to the rest of society.” The founding fathers did invent the position of president and unlike kings from earlier times, even a president could be arrested in this new democracy.

No Kings Personal Protest

Monday I may wander the streets of San Diego with a "Procrastinators Against Trump!" sign, pioneering the asynchronous protest march.

Immigration OLD, NEW & NEO

OLD 

Leviticus 19:34 "treat the stranger... as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself." 

NEW 

Matt 25:35 "I was a stranger and you welcomed me."

NEO 

Your skin looks brown. Let me put a little ICE on it.

The Way Shohei Ohtani Plays

A post from 2018 that is still true - only more so.

Shohei Ohtani plays baseball as if he's a character in the daydream of some 9 year old who doesn't actually understand what's realistic in baseball.

A Summary of New Politics for the Next Economy

 Five Factors of Production and the Evolution of the American Economy

All economic value comes from some combination of land, capital, labor, culture, and entrepreneurship.

Let’s break it down with a simple example:

• Land: You find, claim, or buy a forest filled with timber. The forest itself, in its raw and natural state, is an example of land, of natural resources.
• Capital: You need tools to harvest the timber. You invest in saws and axes, which don’t directly produce lumber but are essential for the process. This is capital - an investment to enable production.
• Labor: You hire lumberjacks to use the saws and axes to fell the trees and transport the timber out of the forest. Their effort is labor.
• Culture: information and knowledge that drives the actions and interactions of the people in this endeavor. Here, it is less about the information and knowledge that defines a career or a piece of capital than it is the emergent processes that arise from the interaction of the pieces in the endeavor. This is not generally included in the list of factors of production, but the information economy has made this more obvious and its influence more important. It would include everything from techniques the lumberjacks know for felling trees and coordinating their work through agreed upon processes to knowledge about which supplier offers the best saws for the best price.
• Entrepreneurship: You define and manage the process. You buy the land, hire the workers, acquire the tools, shape the culture with a flow of information, skills, and leadership, and you negotiate with sawmills to turn timber into lumber. You take the risks and coordinate all the elements, turning an idea into a viable business. You may make a huge profit. You may take a huge loss. The difference between what society will pay you for lumber and what it costs you to produce it is your profit (or loss).

Entrepreneurs, as distinct from managers, are the initiators. They create new businesses, while managers sustain and optimize them. While the line between the two often blurs, entrepreneurship is typically about creating new systems and companies, and management is about maintaining and improving existing ones.

These elements - land, capital, labor, culture, and entrepreneurship - define all economies. However, different periods of American history – and American politics - have emphasized one factor more than the others. An agricultural economy is most defined by land, an industrial economy most defined by capital, and so on.

As economies become more complex and advanced, so does the factor of production that defines them, the factor that limits progress. These very different economies require very different governments and policies, which gets to the heart of New Politics for the Next Economy. The differences in an economy limited by land vs. one limited by labor is at least as stark as the difference between parenting an infant and a teenager. The policies and politics of these very different economies are so different that we’ve essentially created four separate Americas since Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, each defined to address and overcome the limit of its time.

 

Summary of Five Americas (Four Past and One Future)

 

Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
1801 - 1861	Agricultural	Land	Jefferson

Jefferson and the Limit of Land
Jefferson’s America was an agricultural economy, and its constraint was land. Ninety percent of Americans lived on farms when he took office. His policies and philosophy focused squarely on securing territory so that a growing population of Yeoman farmers could remain independent, virtuous, and free. The Louisiana Purchase alone doubled the nation’s landmass, removing the most obvious bottleneck to expanding the economy and giving Jefferson’s contemporaries a vision of an “empire for liberty.” It is no stretch to say that Jefferson was the president who most clearly defined and pursued policies to overcome the limit of land.

From Jefferson to Lincoln (Land → Capital)
Jefferson’s agrarian republic thrived so long as fertile land could absorb restless ambition. But by the mid-19th century, the frontier was not enough. Or more specifically, the frontier had reached the Pacific Ocean. Railroads, factories, and finance required new ways to mobilize capital, not just settle acreage. Lincoln’s task was to channel private investment and public authority into an industrial system that could unite farms, factories, and markets into a single national economy, transitioning the economy from the zero-sum dynamics of land to the abundance of capital.

---

Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
1861 - 1933	Industrial	Capital	Lincoln

 

Lincoln and the Limit of Capital
Lincoln inherited a divided nation and an economy still largely local, fragmented, and cash-poor. The Civil War forced him to tackle the problem of capital head-on: how to finance a war, unify markets, and build a modern industrial nation. His administration created national banks and a uniform currency, issued bonds to mobilize savings, and authorized the first income tax. The Pacific Railway Acts and land-grant colleges tied capital formation to expansion and innovation. In doing so, Lincoln confronted the limit to progress of his era: capital. By making money, credit, and investment more abundant and more reliable, he unleashed a wave of industrial growth that transformed America, shifting the focus of economic growth from more farms to more factories.

 

From Lincoln to FDR (Capital → Labor)
Lincoln’s industrial America unleashed unprecedented growth, but also new dangers: monopolies, financial crashes, regular recessions, and a workforce treated as disposable tools. By the 1930s, the problem was no longer how to build capital, but how to fully employ labor in ways that spread dignity and security. FDR’s New Deal recast government as guarantor of full employment and wages, building institutions to balance the raw power of capital with the needs of millions of workers.

---

Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
1933 - 1981	Balanced	Labor	FDR

 

FDR and the Limit of Labor
When Franklin Roosevelt took office, the most pressing problem was not land or capital but labor. One in four workers was unemployed; millions more were underpaid, under protected, or excluded from opportunity. FDR’s genius was pragmatic experimentation: public works programs to create jobs, Social Security to provide security in old age, labor laws to guarantee rights and safety, and public investment to raise productivity. The result was not just a recovery from the Great Depression but the creation of a balanced economy in which labor was fully employed and broadly empowered. By treating labor as the central constraint - and investing in its development, protection, and dignity - Roosevelt helped to create the broad middle class that defined mid-20th-century America and economic growth even more stunning than the transformation following from Lincoln’s capitalism.

From FDR to Reagan (Labor → Culture)
FDR’s balanced economy created the broadest middle class in history, but once mass employment was secured, the next questions became cultural: what to do with rising prosperity, and how to live amid accelerating possibilities. By the late 20th century, knowledge workers and new technologies defined economic winners and losers, while debates over family, sexuality, faith, and freedom defined politics. Reagan embodied this shift, liberating markets on the how to frontier while rallying tradition on the what to frontier — setting the stage for an America divided not just by wealth, but by culture itself.

Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
1981 - 2029	Information	Culture	Reagan

 

Reagan and the Limit of Culture
By the late 20th century, America was no longer constrained by land, capital, or even labor. What had become decisive was culture: knowledge and norms, the twin questions of how to and what to. Christian Smith articulates this definition of culture. “Culture provides descriptive ‘models of’ reality and prescriptive ‘models for’ living in that reality. Culture’s ‘models of’ supply representations of the way things are. Culture’s ‘models for’ prescribe how one should act within those realities. In short, ‘culture’ is learned knowledge about reality and how to live in it.”[1]

The information economy elevated a new meritocracy of engineers, scientists, managers, and lawyers - people whose highly specialized “how to” knowledge commanded soaring incomes and reshaped markets. Knowledge workers. But alongside this economic transformation came a political one, as Americans clashed over the “what to” of life: family structure, gender roles, sexuality, religion, and lifestyle. Reagan embodied this hinge moment. He championed deregulation and tax cuts to liberate individuals and businesses in their pursuit of wealth - a vote of confidence in the how to power of markets. At the same time, he drew on the rising religious right to reinforce traditional answers to the what to of morality and identity.

In this way, Reagan presided over a double divide: an emerging economic split between those who thrived in the new knowledge economy and those left behind, and a cultural split between urban and rural, secular and religious, those with or without a college degree, blue and red, those focused on the how to of culture and those focused on the what to of culture. Politics increasingly became a culture war, fought not only over material interests but over the very definition of the good life. The result was the emergence of two Americas - not born of geography alone, but of diverging models of reality and prescriptions for how one should live within it.

From Reagan to the Entrepreneurial Economy (Culture → Institutions)
Reagan’s market individualism and the culture wars it fueled left America wealthier, but also more fractured. Information multiplied, lifestyles diversified, and politics hardened into battles over identity and values. Amid this abundance of choice and conflict, trust in institutions collapsed. The information economy had shown us how to do more and what we might do, but not how to live together. That breakdown is the real limit we face now.

This information economy made two things possible: the generation, storage and dispersal of more valuable knowledge and information than ever before and the generation and dispersal of more damaging mis- and disinformation than ever before. In an agricultural economy, communities fought land wars; in this information economy, communities fight information wars.
The next economy will turn on entrepreneurship not just in markets, but in the public sphere - the invention and reinvention of institutions that deserve trust, enable belonging, and translate possibility into progress. We’re currently amid an institutional recession, trust in our major institutions having fallen from about half of Americans having a good or great deal of trust in our most defining institutions about the time Reagan came into office to just one quarter of Americans now. Just as Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR reshaped America to overcome the limits of land, capital, and labor, our task is to overcome the limit of exhausted institutions and polarized culture by creating new frameworks for cooperation and flourishing.

Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
2029 – ?	Entrepreneurial	Entrepreneurship	You?

 

You and the Limit of Entrepreneurship

By 2025, cultural war had escalated to the point that the US president who had been put into power by votes from red states was sending military troops into the major cities of blue states. The same president who – in his last weeks in office in 2021 – instigated a literal attack on democracy, the storming of the capitol even as the 2020 election was being finalized by Congress. During that attack, for the first time in history, the confederate flag was carried in the halls of Congress. As Trump’s biographer Michael Wolff points out, Donald Trump’s superpower in a world of limitless information is his ability to seize and hold attention. In our world of abundance, attention is still zero-sum.  Trump has contempt for democratic leaders within the US and around the globe and great admiration for dictators like Putin, Kim, Xi, and Mohammed bin Salman (to whom Trump professed love on a state visit early in his second term).  A vote for a man like Trump who has such strong affection for dictators and so little tolerance for democratic norms is a vote against institutions and two things have happened to put the US into such a precarious position. One, the information economy has made it easier than ever to generate and spread misinformation and disinformation, eroding trust in our institutions. Two, private sector entrepreneurship is rewarded more than it has been at any time in history while public sector entrepreneurship is largely prohibited. Public sector institutions have not kept pace with the private sector. An entrepreneur is to institutions what an inventor is to products or technologies: creating or improving the institutions that define a business or school, government agency or nonprofit. Distrust in our institutions is not all the product of misinformation; public sector institutions are not as responsive to public opinion and desires as are private businesses. We have no tradition of public sector entrepreneurship. What is now needed are public sector leaders who undertake the project of reviving and creating public sector institutions that restore trust in democracy and markets and update Smith and Jefferson’s world defined by ordinary people through market transactions and the ballot box. Progress now is not nearly as much about more resources, more capital, a more educated workforce or more information. It is about more of us developing more ability to create, revive and update institutions so that they become better, evolving tools for us to create value for others and to realize our potential, to find flow and create meaning in a way that revives Jefferson’s promise of this as a country with politics designed for the pursuit of happiness rather than the provocation of anger.

We already know how to turn public science into private products - the iPhone rides on layers of DARPA, NSF, and NIH research. The next economy asks a harder question: can we create public-sector institutions that solve problems or realize potential with the same dynamic venture capital brings to startups? Imagine government as a first customer, small teams funded in stages, real outcome metrics, and the judgement to scale what works and sunset what doesn’t. This book argues we can - and shows how.

The constant through the history of these United States is each generation and community finding their own balance between the interplay of Jefferson’s democracy and Smith’s markets. The point of disruption, the element that changes with each economy and ripples into so much about us, is the factor of production that limits progress. That change has triggered revolution, civil war, and a great depression and now a threat to democratic institutions.

 

---

[1] Smith, Christian. Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America (pp. 7-8). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Jensen Huang on Bringing Other Companies Along

"When you look at the computers we make, they are thousands of acres large .... These industries manufacture numbers that when reformulated becomes intelligence. Intelligence manufacturing factories! This new industry manufactures the most valuable thing ever known: intelligence."
"If you have an imagination about the future, it is possible to bring other people along. ... The way we see the world is inclusive and brings other people along."
- Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company at $4.6 trillion (Microsoft at $3.9T and Apple at $3.8T are #2 and #3)

Is the Internet Shrinking Your Brain?

I wonder what evolutionary changes will be caused by our growing connection to the internets.
In Kensy Cooperrider's podcast episode “Why did our brains shrink 3000 years ago?” — Many Minds, Feb 2, 2022 - he spoke with guest Jeremy DeSilva from Dartmouth. The episode discusses the late, post-growth shrinkage of ~“a lemon’s” worth of brain volume, and explores possible explanations. (Hold a lemon beside your skull. That's a lot of volume.)

A brain is both incredibly useful and very expensive. Brain cells use more calories than other cells. And the larger the brain, the higher the risk that birth will kill the mother or child. So if it were possible to get by with smaller brains, evolutionary pressures would choose that direction.

DeSilva says there are various theories about why the brain shrunk just 3,000 years ago. One is that society had evolved to the point that one could outsource collective cognition. For me an even more interesting possibility - and in a way related - is that this brain shrinkage coincided with the emergence of reading and writing. One didn't have to hold as much in her head if she could hold it instead in her library.

How will our growing ease of connecting with so much data, so many people, and so many virtual experiences online change our brains? Could it shrink them even further?

Here's the episode:https://disi.org/why-did-our-brains-shrink-3000-years-ago/

Reality TV and Surreal Policies

"So that orange man who played such a powerful executive on TV? What was his catch-phrase?""'You're fired!'"
"Yes! Him. How is job growth under his leadership?"
"The economy has lost jobs in two of the last three months. He may not be creating jobs but he is creating drama."
"Well who could have seen that coming?"
"Umm .... if you watched his show, you literally saw that. Every single week the number of working people went down and the drama increased. Now he's just doing that on a larger stage."
"Wouldn't you have thought that he would have changed the script to something like, 'You're hired!'?"
"Well, he thought about it but decided that would be too boring - bad for ratings. So he's shut down the government but he is building a ballroom."
"Well that seems like a weird priority. What does he need that for?"
"When asked, he just danced around the question."
"Presumably once the ballroom is built ..."
"We will just see more of that. Yes."

Power Over and Power To - The Distinction Between Great and Awful Institutions

I watched a sharp Johnny Harris piece on the LDS Church, and one almost throwaway moment stuck with me: losing temple privileges for a few weeks after “going too far” with his fiancée—embarrassing not because people knew why, but because they could see he’d lost access.

As I get older, I get more sensitive to how institutions at their best give us power to ... amazon lets you quickly get about any product to your door within a day or two (even better, download an entire book within seconds) ... a great university provides you with testable theories about how the world works and how to create a life within it. A great religion simultaneously humbles you by reminding you of how inconsequential you are among 8 billion now and generations before and after while also giving you hope that your life matters.

But institutions can also exercise power over us. Sometimes they use us. The laborers building the Egyptian pyramids. The hopeful housewives trying to build a business through a pyramid scheme. The church member feeling guilty about desire.

Which brings me back to confessions. Expecting young men to confess lust to old men makes about as much sense as old men confessing joint pain to young men - that’s just what bodies do at those stages of life. But of course that arrangement also clearly gives old men more power over young men.

The trick of progress, it seems to me, is to reverse ancient injustices in which individuals were tools of institutions and instead do all that we can to make those institutions tools of individuals.

Interplanetary System - A New Information-scape

Soon I'll be launching something even bigger than www - the worldwide web.

Stay tuned for the ips. - interplanetary system - the information-scape too big for a single planet.

Patch notes: added moons, rings, and meteors.

Falling Off a Cliff with a Blindfold - Job Loss Blackout During Trump's Government Shutdown

The economy is losing jobs but we don't know how many.

Each month the BLS reports the number of jobs lost or gained. ADP is the private sector equivalent - a less accurate number that comes from a smaller sample size generated by a private company. Wednesday they reported that the private sector lost jobs in September.

With the government shutdown, two things have happened. Millions of federal workers are furloughed, have effectively lost their jobs. And the federal government will not be reporting job numbers until the shutdown ends.

The bad news is that Trump and the Republican's policies are already costing us jobs. The worse news is that we are flying blind and that we don't even know how many jobs, how much damage Trump's chaotic policies are doing.

In Trump's final month in office, 3,000 Americans a day were dying from COVID - a 9-11 every day. He ignored this and was focused on overturning the election that he lost.

Now he has regained office and in his first months increased his personal net worth by $3 billion. In every single month of Biden's presidency, the economy created jobs. Within months of taking office, Trump's economy was losing jobs. And now, as it continues to lose jobs while he gains billions, he shuts down the government so that no one can see the official tally of jobs he's losing.

Or as the MAGA boys call it: winning.

Jane Goodall on Making a Difference

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
- Jane Goodall

Donald Trump as the Last Resort

Did you know that Donald Trump is the only president in history to have never won a general election against another man? 

Donald. The last resort of American misogynists.

Bill Gates The Trillionaire

MSFT closed today at a market cap of $3.84 trillion.

At Microsoft’s IPO (1986), Bill Gates ’ stake is commonly reported in the ~45–49% range (the peak of his post-IPO ownership; it only fell afterward).

If he had maintained that same percentage, his hypothetical net worth today would be somewhere between $1.73 to $1.88 trillion.

Even as late as 1999, Gates held more than 15% of Microsoft; if he still had that share today, it would be ~$587 billion.

Why did he end up with a lower percentage? Divorce settlement. Gifts to the Gates Foundation and other charities. Share dilution from new issuance for things like employee options. And sale of stock for diversification into other assets.

His reported net worth today is $106 billion. Had he kept his peak post-IPO stake, his net worth would put him comfortably into 13-digit territory.

Trump Deploying Troops Into American Cities As Further Evidence He Doesn't Understand Specialization

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

- Trump to his top military leaders today.

Put aside the absurdity of a man elected by red states sending military troops into the cities of blue states as one of his first acts of office. That's dictatorship 101 right there and unprecedented.

This also gets to the heart of MAGA confusion about the world. The chief reason that global trade has allowed for such unprecedented prosperity is that it has allowed for unprecedented levels of specialization. I worked with product development teams for decades and many were making incredibly complex products, like nanotechnology, computer chips, medical devices and drugs. In the nearly 30 years I did that I saw a fascinating thing play out: the portion of a project plan that was to be worked by an outside company rather than an inside department rose from roughly 10 to 20% to closer to 33 to 50%. Specialization hit a level that fewer and fewer companies could sustain affordable expertise in most of their processes and skills. The specialization that Adam Smith wrote about in 1776 - "one man draws out the wire, another sharpens it ..." was interpersonal. People along the same factory line each specializing on one step in production. The specialization today is literally different companies making different parts and doing different steps. Adam Smith's specialization played out on one factory line; today's specialization plays out across the globe with hundreds of companies coordinating to make a single product.

Why mention specialization in reference to sending troops into cities? Only people as clueless as Trump and his head of DoD, former Fox commentator Pete Hegseth would think that how you would deploy guys with guns for war has anything to do with how you would deploy guys with guns for policing. Police and military are specialists. They have very different objectives. Very different goals and constraints. And the tactics that might make you a great police officer could get you killed in war; the tactics that might make you a great soldier might get civilians killed in policing.

Then of course, I could be completely wrong. Trump may indeed be aiming for something akin to military occupation in the blue cities that tend to vote 4 to 1 against him. And if so, further evidence that the man cares little about the safety of American people or the economy and his presidency has everything to do with how he feels.

In either case, this is not normal governance for a democracy. This is the kind of thing his buddies Xi, Putin, MBS, and Kim do.

Trump's Nobel Peace Prize

Next month the Nobel Prizes will be announced. Trump has already warned the committee that if he doesn't get a Peace prize he will send troops to occupy their buildings.

The Colonization of Mars and America and Travel Times

For my fellow nerds.

Atlantic, 1776: British colonies were ~5,000–6,000 km from Britain. Crossings typically took 6 to 8 weeks (fast packets ~4 weeks; bad weather 10 to 12).

Earth to Mars (near-term tech): Distance varies from ~55 million km (close opposition) to ~400 million km (solar conjunction).

Launch windows open about every 26 months. Transit is about 6 to 9 months. Miss a window and the door-to-door delay (wait + flight) can be about 32 to 35 months; catch it and it’s only 6 to 9 months.

And that time gap assumes the Mars spacecraft is cruising about 20,000× faster than an 18th-century sailing ship when you compare end-to-end distance covered per day.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

From Will Storr’s Selfie - Pruning Down the Brain's Possible Paths

Excerpt from Will Storr's Selfie ...

The self’s ingestion of culture can be tracked, in a startling form, in the brain of a growing baby. Despite the fact we’re born with almost as many neurons as we’ll ever need, the weight of a child’s brain increases by more than 30 percent during its first fifteen months. If this rapid gain isn’t due to the generation of brain cells, then what is it? Most of it is the weight of new connections, or synapses, that are forming between these cells. By the age of two, a human will have generated over a hundred trillion synapses, double that of an adult. So great is this extra brain functionality that youngsters even develop cognitive powers the rest of us lack. Six-month-olds can recognize the faces of individuals from other races with an ease that would have the rest of us worrying quietly whether we are racist. They can even readily identify monkey faces. Babies can hear tones in foreign languages that their parents are deaf to. They’re also thought to experience synaesthesia, the eerie blending of the senses that enables people to taste colors, and so on.

But then begins the cull. These connections start dying off at a rate of up to 100,000 per second. It’s believed that this is one of the ways the brain shapes itself to its environment. Huge connectivity means it’s prepared to deal with a wide range of potential possibilities. Then, when connections between neurons are not activated, they’re killed. They call this “neural pruning,” and it works a little like a sculptor carving a face out of a block of marble: it’s what’s taken away, as much as what is added, that makes us who we are.

When we’re born, then, our brain is ready for the world – or at least a world. It rushes out to greet it, gets to know it, then prunes itself down, specializing itself for the particular cultures in which it finds itself. …

In a major study, researchers in Queensland collated the results of 2,748 papers and concluded the average variation across all human traits and diseases is caused by 49 percent genetic factors and 51 percent environmental factors. ….

“…. We’ve come to realize that it’s much more complex than just being a dollop of genetics and a squirt of environment.” The relationship is symbiotic. Nature and nurture are not in competition, but in conspiracy.

from pp. 55-6 of Will Storr’s Selfie: How we became so self-obsessed and what it’s doing to us

A Trumped Up Charge

"A trumped-up charge is a deliberately false or fraudulent accusation made with the intention of punishing someone unfairly or making them appear guilty. The term implies that the charge has been fabricated, invented, or concocted to deceive and incriminate someone, rather than being a legitimate legal accusation."

It seems fitting that in 20 years when kids as yet unborn are learning vocabulary they will encounter this word and "know" that its origin traces back to President Trump who lied about everything and made wild accusations against anyone who irritated or offended him.

It is as if the gods of vocabulary were trying to warn us.

Jill Lepore, Changing the Constitution, and the Issues You'll Soon Be Engaged In

I love Jill Lepore. Here she talks about her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution and it is a conversation that at least a few of you will find fascinating. All of you will eventually (and probably soon) live its fascinating relevance.

We are at a point in history similar to the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the New Deal when we need to update the code upon which our country runs. The process is going to be agonizing, stressful, alarming, exciting, and wildly uncertain.

Lepore touches on the history of changing (and trying to change) the constitution in these United States and - as she is prone to do - shares a series of profound insights in the process.

A couple of notes related to her book.

The U.S. Constitution has only 27 amendments in ~235 years.

States use lower bars. Most amendments are passed by a state legislature and then a simple popular vote; about 18 states also allow citizen-initiated constitutional amendments. Many states have held full constitutional conventions or replaced their constitutions outright.

Result: state charters change a lot. Collectively, they’ve been amended thousands of times; several states have hundreds of amendments (e.g., California, Texas, Alabama), and some - like Georgia and Louisiana - have adopted multiple entirely new constitutions over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gSgkt0E4dk

 

Outlawing Comedy (And what that tells us about the last time America was great)

All of these late-night comedians getting cancelled makes me wonder if at least a portion of the MAGA crowd will decide they don't want to live in a country where comedy is outlawed.

At least those of us who were wondering when the MAGA crowd thought America was last great have our answer: back when the Puritans thought laughter was folly.

MAHA - make Americans humorless again!

Adams - No Reason to Believe That Our Founding Generation Was Better Than You Are

John Adams’s letter to Josiah Quincy III, February 9, 1811. Adams pushes back against “reverence” for the founding generation:

“I ought not to object to your Reverence for your Fathers … but to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the Merit of the different Periods, I have no reason to believe that We were better than you are. We had as many poor Creatures and selfish Beings, in proportion among us as you have among you: nor were there then more enlightened Men, or in greater Number in proportion than there are now.”
Context: Quincy had praised the [founding] “Fathers.” Adams - then in his mid-70s - downplayed any moral superiority of 1776-era leaders.

This seems to me enormously important. Every period has people who can navigate us into new territory and to pretend that we don't have such people today is really the equivalent to simply shirking responsibility.

Jim Moore's Poem Those Others

 Those Others, by Jim Moore

We lived at the end of an empire.

Sometimes we gathered in huge auditoriums
and tried to understand.
Our shame did not save us,
nor our sadness redeem us,
as we came to understand
how others, far into the future,
would look back at us,
shaking their heads: we hoped
in sorrow; more likely, anger.

The Development of Time Travel That Doesn't Disrupt the Development of Time Travel

Time travel’s problem isn’t engineering; it’s non-disruption. We’ve allegedly cracked it three times, but each visit into the past edited away the very path of causality that led to the development of the time machine, resetting its development back to zero.

At least that’s what he told the investors at Time Is Not a Machine, Inc. as a way to account for the few hundred billion he claimed had been spent developing prototypes and not - as his critics suggested - merely spent on having a good time.

Colbert, Kimmel, Trump and the Role of the Jester

Stephen Colbert has been cancelled.
Jimmy Kimmel has been pulled off the air because of something he supposedly said about Charlie Kirk.

Here's the deal, though. Kimmel didn't make a comment about Kirk: he made a comment about MAGA. Specifically, he said,
"The Maga Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it." His comment was directed at the living, not the dead.

Kings kept jesters for a reason: one person with a license to puncture bad ideas. The jokes were cover; the job was dissent.

King: “My people hate inflation. First, I’ll slap tariffs on foreign goods—”
Jester: “—which will raise prices.”

And the king doesn’t take his head, because that’s why the jester exists.

Trump? He doesn’t just want to be king. He wants no jesters. Anywhere in the land.

P.S. do you know who did not get cancelled? The Fox news host Brian Kilmeade who literally recommended involuntarily euthanizing homeless people. (I think the old-fashioned way one might say that is kill, as in, "We wouldn't have a homeless problem if we just killed anyone who was homeless.")
Trump's US in 2025. You get cancelled for making jokes about the president's policies but not for suggesting mass killings of our poorest people. You MAGA folks might want to do a little soul searching. If, you know, you haven't already sold it.

A Decoder Ring for MAGA Regarding School Shootings

It's not always easy to understand how someone else feels but here's something that might help those of you who lean off to the MAGA side of things. You know how upset you are now about Charlie Kirk's murder? How you feel like something should be done because this never should have happened and something like this shouldn't happen again? Even though you didn't personally know Charlie Kirk and he didn't know you?
That's how the rest of us feel very stinking time there is another gun death, another school shooting.
We're upset.
We think something should be done about it.
And we think we could / should / must do more.
To quote you, All lives matter. Not just the ones with lots of social media followers.

Last Words

They couldn't tell if his last words were

"Carpe diem," or
"Carpet demons."

 
And the question of which haunted them.

Curious Exaggerations in the Socio-Economic World

Wealth is curious.

To be in the top 1% for height, you need to be only 6'4". Median is 5'9".
To be in the top 1% for wealth, you need to have $11.2 million. Median is $193k.

The ratio of top 1% to median in
Height is 1.1 to 1
Wealth is 58 to 1

The social world seems to create larger disparities than the physical world.

Gordon S. Woods On American Chaos in the Generation After the Revolution

We have a tendency to romanticize the past, to gloss over its ridiculous problems. The historian Gordon Woods tells about life in the US in the generation or so after the American Revolution. (This is paraphrased from a talk of his.)

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In the generation after the American Revolution, there was as much cause for despair as for celebration. Violence of all sorts surged. Rates of homicide rose above those in England. Even family murders - men killing their wives and children - spiked to levels unmatched in the nineteenth century. Urban rioting grew more common and destructive, leaving lives and property in ruins.

Drinking soared to an all-time high. Americans consumed about five gallons of pure alcohol per person each year - the highest rate ever recorded anywhere, before or since. Courts held dram breaks instead of coffee breaks, with judges and juries passing bottles around. Universities saw record riots and student defiance. It was a society both intoxicated and unsettled, leaving many to wonder what exactly they had unleashed.

Religion, too, was in ferment. The Anglican and Puritan dominance of the 1760s gave way to Methodists and Baptists, their horseback ministers carrying revival across the frontier. At Cane Ridge, Kentucky in 1801, tens of thousands gathered for what was hailed as “the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit since the beginning of Christianity.” The scenes were wild - people rolling on the ground, laughing, moaning, crying. Critics joked that more souls were conceived than converted. Yet from these upheavals sprang new sects: Shakers, Universalists, evangelical movements that bloomed and vanished, and a decade later, the Mormons. Some were founded by women, many flared out quickly, but all testified to the volatility of belief.

By 1815, as the revolutionary generation passed from the scene, the founders looked on a nation they barely recognized. Instead of harmony, they saw disorder; instead of sober republican virtue, a society drinking, rioting, and praying itself into a bewildering array of directions. 

---

Far from settling into tranquility, the young republic revealed a pattern that would persist: there has never been a moment in American history when Americans turned to one another and said, *“At last, we have no troubles. Now we can live in peace and prosperity.”

Even Immortal Gods Die Once their Institutions Erode

The Greek and Roman gods animated the lives of Athens and Rome - visible in temples and statues, invoked in conversations, explanations, and hopes. As those institutions crumbled, so did the gods. The same fate befell Egyptian deities once sustained by pyramids and priesthoods, Norse gods once sustained by sagas and rituals, and countless others now remembered only as myths.Even immortal gods died without their institutions. Temples and priesthoods gave the gods life; when those institutions collapsed, the gods became myths.

It is not just the gods who are created, sustained, or forgotten by institutions. That is also the fate of us mortals.

Institutions separate us from the other animals. You’re no match for a gorilla, bear or tiger when you’re naked and alone. You can’t outrun a lion. You’re not stronger than an orangutan. You might – barehanded – catch a rabbit but the energy you’d consume finding it, catching it, preparing it and cooking it might be more than the calories it would give you, take more energy than it would return.

Most of us would quickly perish if left to survive in a world without institutional structures, norms and supply chains.

The degree to which we thrive or flounder is a function of our institutions. Yet weirdly, most of us most of the time treat our institutions with even less creative imagination than the ancient Greeks or Egyptians treated theirs. We take them as inherited or rail at them as if we were cursing the gods. We don’t have a tradition for calmly, rationally, collectively engaging in the task of defining and redefining the institutions that define us. Because who we are and who we will become is not something we will do on our own, naked and afraid; it is something we will only do through the institutions we create and change.

The Secret to Japan's 100,000 100 Year Olds

Japan has set a new record of nearly 100,000 people who are 100 years old.

The secret to their success seems to include

• diet (less sugar, salt and calories than those of us in the West),
• exercise (among other things, a national radio program guiding the elderly through 3-minutes of daily exercise has a wide audience), and
• fraud (family not reporting on the death of a deceased relative in order to continue collecting pension money).

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd07nljlyv0o

Stochastic Terrorism and Social Media

One of the darker inventions of our gatekeeper-free media landscape is something now called stochastic terrorism. The phrase captures a dynamic in which individuals or groups use mass communication to vilify, dehumanize, or target opponents in ways that raise the probability of violence without ever directly calling for it. No explicit order is given; instead, the message circulates widely enough that the odds rise that someone, somewhere, will act on it. The speaker retains deniability, while the damage is all too real. The causality is not deterministic; the communication just raises the probability of violence. It's more like taking a life by drunk driving than shooting someone.

This tactic is not entirely new - fiery rhetoric has always carried the risk of inciting unstable listeners. What is new is the scale, speed, and algorithmic amplification of today’s social media. Where once editors, producers, or publishers acted as gatekeepers and might mitigate such messages, today’s platforms reward whatever drives engagement. Outrage, paranoia, and conspiracy spread with greater virality than moderation or nuance, and that makes stochastic terrorism a kind of emergent property of the digital environment.

In this sense, it is one of the most dangerous side effects of a communications system designed without responsibility or oversight. What looks like “just words” from one angle becomes, at scale, a statistical machine for nudging the probability of violence upward. And unlike older forms of incitement, it requires no coordination, no command, and no conspiracy - only a steady stream of inflammatory content.

Stochastic terrorism is a reminder that the rules of the information economy do not merely shape attention or markets; they change communities, levels of safety, the dynamics of democracy, and trust. Without gatekeepers, we gain openness and access. But we also inherit a new vulnerability: the ability of anyone, anywhere, to pull the rhetorical lever that increases the odds of someone else’s destruction.

Addendum ...
This seems to suggest that we might want to develop a counter-spell in the form of stochastic benevolence? Viral kindness? Random acts of kindness? It seems to call for the development and deployment of some kind of vaccine.

American Identity - and Acceptable Marriages - Now More Defined by Politics Than Religion

In the 1960s, acceptance of interfaith marriage (e.g., Catholic-Protestant, Christian-Jewish) was often in the teens or twenties. Today, more than a quarter of Americans are in interfaith marriages, and most parents say they would not be upset if their child married someone of another faith.
By contrast, partisan identity has hardened. In the mid-20th century, few cared much about marriages across party lines, but now about 35–40% of partisans say they would be upset if their child married someone from the opposite party. This suggests that identity today is more defined by politics than by religion - a reversal from roughly a half century ago.

I wonder to what extent that has to do with plurality. In American politics, if you want your vote to count, you have only two choices. In religion, you have dozens, not even including choices like atheist, agnostic or spiritual but not religious . In such a world, marrying across religious lines becomes increasingly probable given anyone you meet outside of church is probably of another faith. By contrast, meeting someone outside of a political rally still means you've got roughly a 33% chance of a political match: Dem, GOP, or no affiliation.

As institutions shape the categories available to us, they also shape our tolerance for crossing boundaries. Where institutions create many identities (as in religion), crossing them becomes ordinary. Where institutions collapse choices into two rival camps (as in American politics), crossing them becomes taboo.

It might also explain why politics is becoming more divisive. Politics is not - if it ever was - a matter of debating policy so much as a matter of identity. Stats from modern America suggest to me that you'd have an easier time persuading someone to change their faith than to change their politics.

Oracle, Ellison, $100 Billion and 40 Minutes

 Yesterday, Larry Ellison's net worth rose more than $100 billion within the first 40 minutes of the market opening as Oracle stock surged.

Maybe now Oracle will finally promote the poor guy from CTO to CEO.

NBC Poll on Fascinating Divide Between Gen Z Men and Women

Utterly fascinating divide among gen z men who voted for Trump and gen z women who voted for Harris in an NBC poll.

On a list of 12 important measures of success,

• gen z men who voted for Trump rated "having children" #1 - the top measure of the 12,
• gen z women who voted for Harris rated "having children" as #12 - the bottom measure of the 12.

Also, emotional stability was #12 in ranked values for the men and #3 for the women.

More data here:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-gen-zs-gender-divide-reaches-politics-views-marriage-children-suc-rcna229255

Two Ways to Learn From History: Study It or Repeat It

I love history because it plays out so quickly, dynamics that define a generation or a century in a form that can be read in hours. Reality takes so long to turn the page to the next plot twist or consequence. History accelerates consequences but reality always plays out in real time.

You can learn from history one of two ways. The first is to study it and change what you're thinking and doing in order to avoid its mistakes. The second is to ignore history and simply repeat its mistakes. In either case you learn but ...

Initial Jobless Claims at 4 Year High (wondering how long it'll take for people to see a pattern)

Last week initial jobless claims rose to 263,000.

This is the highest they have been since October of 2021, nearly four years ago.
I'm an old guy wondering how many times we have to go through the cycle of Republicans breaking the economy and then Democrats repairing it before it dawns on the 5% of the Americans who swing every election that there is a pattern here.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ICSA

Charlie Kirk Shooting a Reminder of How Warped is the NRA's Interpretation of the 2nd Amendment

The killing of Charlie Kirk is first and foremost a tragedy - another life lost to gun violence, another family left grieving. Kirk, weirdly, argued that gun deaths were a necessary price to pay for the right to bear arms but the NRA's vision of gun rights has little to do with the constitution and is definitely at odds with safety.

The Second Amendment was written to provide for a citizen militia in a young republic wary of standing armies. It was never a blank check for individuals to amass arsenals. Chief Justice Warren Burger once called the NRA’s reinterpretation of it “one of the greatest pieces of fraud on the American public.”

And the practical case is just as weak as the historical one. Private gun ownership does not make us safer; our rates of gun death are proof enough. Nor does it check government power. In an age when the state commands drones, armored vehicles, and cyberweapons, the idea that a handful of armed citizens could deter tyranny is pure fantasy.  (We have yet to see NRA members come out to protect the American cities into which Trump has sent armies.) Guns in private hands don’t restrain government firepower - they mainly multiply tragedy at home.

The right to bear arms, as originally written, was about citizens taking turns in a militia to avoid the costs and risks of a permanent army. Today, the unregulated right to own arms undermines the very rights the 2nd amendment meant to regulate and subordinate to the aims of the broader community and not to the weird fantasies and hatred of lone shooters.

$100 Billion Dollars a Day Seems Like a Lot

TODAY Larry Ellison's net worth rose more than $100 billion.

He's now worth nearly $400 billion, which makes him the second richest man in the world.
In the last month, the wealth of the 10 richest Americans rose more than $250 billion, their combined wealth now worth more than $2.3 trillion.

California is 175 Today!

It’s California’s 175th birthday today!

No state has drawn more Americans to make it home. California has given us shared dreams and stories through Hollywood, a place where people reinvented themselves — Marion Morrison becoming John Wayne, Norma Jeane Mortenson becoming Marilyn Monroe. It’s where we’ve created shared knowledge, wealth (and yes, more than a few shared hallucinations) through Silicon Valley.

It’s home to Yosemite and the Redwoods, Olympic ski slopes and world-class surf breaks, deserts and rainforests. It was the first state to offer free education from kindergarten through graduate school. It’s been the birthplace of flower power and computing power. It holds some of America’s most conservative communities and some of its most liberal. Above all, it’s long been the place where people came to try on new lives that felt impossible back home.

Or, as we call it: home.

Happy birthday, California!

The Astonishing Century of New Things

Incomes don’t just grow by percentages; they compound across generations. In the 20th century, wages in the United States grew nearly eightfold. But the real miracle wasn’t just bigger paychecks. It was what those paychecks allowed people to buy, do, and experience -  things that their grandparents couldn’t even imagine.

Consider just a few of the products that were unavailable in 1900 but commonplace by 2000:

Transport & Communication

• Affordable automobiles
• Airplane tickets - to anywhere in the world in a single day
• Helicopters, rockets, even space travel
• Global Positioning System (GPS)
• Video conferencing with anyone, anywhere

Consumer Goods & Daily Life

• Plastic
• Refrigerators, microwaves, air conditioners
• Credit cards
• Teabags, bubble gum, nylon stockings
• Safety razors, bras, Velcro

Entertainment & Media

• Radio, movies, television
• Photocopiers, videotapes, video games
• Personal computers, email, websites, smartphones

Medicine & Biology

• Penicillin and antibiotics
• Insulin
• Polio and Hepatitis-B vaccines
• The birth control pill
• Pacemakers, Prozac, Valium, Viagra

And since 2000, the list has only accelerated: CRISPR gene editing, AI assistants, mRNA vaccines, reusable rockets, 3D printing, solar and wind at scale, drone delivery, streaming media.

This is what progress feels like to the ordinary person. It’s not an abstract rise in GDP. It’s the astonishment of standing in a grocery aisle with choices your great-grandparents couldn’t have named, let alone afforded.

Mike the Chimp & Trump's Rise to Power in the Information Economy

Here’s Jane Goodall’s vivid account from My Life with the Chimpanzees, describing Mike’s breakthrough display with kerosene cans:

“Mike’s rise to the number one or top-ranking position in the chimpanzee community was both interesting and spectacular. … At one time he even had appeared almost bald from losing so many handfuls of hair during aggressive incidents with his fellow apes. One day at camp, all at once Mike calmly walked over to our tent and took hold of an empty kerosene can by the handle. Then he picked up a second can and, walking upright, returned to the place where he had been sitting. Armed with his two cans Mike stared toward the other males… Gradually, he rocked more vigorously, his hair slowly began to stand erect, and then, softly at first, he started a series of pant-hoots… The cans… made the most appalling racket: no wonder the erstwhile peaceful males rushed out of the way… Mike’s use of the cans that made an unfamiliar and very loud, intimidating sound in his display was nothing short of brilliant.”

Mike became the alpha male by making more noise – and more threatening noise - than the other chimps.

Trump biographer Michael Wolff repeatedly and insightfully points to the fact that no one in this advanced stage information economy is more effective at getting and holding attention than Trump. And – Wolff argues – that really is the sum of his political theory: get and hold attention. What Trump has intuited is that attention is zero-sum and if he can grab attention, others don’t. The amount of information available has increased exponentially over the last half century but our attention has not, no matter how thinly we spread it.

Trump, like Mike the chimp, knows how to make the noises that most unsettle us, most get and keep our attention. And in an information economy, seizing attention is like seizing land in an agricultural economy: it gives you wealth, power and status.

Meme Pools as Identity Kits

Waiting for the day someone markets a memetic testing kit. Forget DNA - this one would map your meme pool, the cultural quirks that shaped your philosophy, politics, and humor. The family tree could be delightfully preposterous: “Turns out we’re related - through Monty Python, Keynes, and Van Morrison. And apparently I’m cousins with a TikTok I’ve never even seen.”

The Tragedy of Retreating from the Global Economy

It is worth pausing to consider the price humanity paid to build the global economy - a world where it is easier for two strangers to trade goods or ideas than to trade gunfire. The 20th century was not just markets unfolding on their own; as Keynes would remind us, it was Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and institutions carefully constructed to channel the energies of nations into commerce rather than conquest. It took two world wars and a Great Depression to transform humanity from empires and colonies into independent states with citizens who could exercise not only political rights but the economic right to buy and sell across borders.

No previous generations have had the globe as their canvas. We do.

The results were staggering. Global life expectancy more than doubled, rising from about 32 years in 1900 to over 73 today. Incomes grew eightfold. In the U.S., average life expectancy rose from 47 to nearly 80, while per capita income leapt more than tenfold. Never before had so many lived so long, so well. But, as Durkheim might caution, the very integration that reduced wars between nations also frayed bonds within them. A global market can deliver growth and alienation in the same breath, individuals within the same country feeling as though they have less to connect them with fellow citizens.

Still, the alternative is far worse. Poverty is the certainty of a village too small to specialize, where resources are fixed and choices narrow. Prosperity is the possibility of a world where your village spans continents. Montesquieu would remind us that interdependence also breeds fragility — shocks travel faster when we are connected — but fragility in abundance is better than security in scarcity. The decision to avoid relationships does buffer you from heartbreak but it also “protects” you from love.

Today, in response to Trump’s tariffs, more nations are exploring self-sufficiency. Jefferson prized that idea because it guarded liberty from foreign whims. But in a modern world, self-sufficiency is a booby prize. It ensures independence at the cost of affluence, protecting us from the world while also cutting us off from its possibilities. Jefferson’s farmers were self-sufficient but they were also really, really poor.

And there is something else at stake. Csikszentmihalyi would remind us that fortune is not just measured in dollars but in flow — in meaningful work, engagement, and creativity. A global economy multiplies not only customers but also careers, paths of purpose that exist only when the market is large enough to support them. To shrink that space is not only to shrink wealth but to shrink meaning.

Nations clutching at tariffs and trade barriers resemble old men reaching again for the teddy bear they clung to in their infancy. The great comedy of our time is that after sacrificing millions of lives to build a world of exchange, we may throw it away for the illusion of safety. If we do, the future will not only be poorer; it will be duller, smaller, and more predictable. And that, in the end, is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.

University Focus Shifting From Students to Sports?

College sports has become a massive business, and for the first time student-athletes are sharing directly in the revenues they generate. The sums are staggering.

This year, Texas Tech will spend about $114 million on its student-athletes - nearly as much as the $139 million it spends on faculty salaries. But the distribution tells the real story: that money goes to just 573 athletes, while more than 2,100 faculty share the academic payroll. On average, each faculty member earns about $66,000, while each athlete receives the equivalent of nearly $199,000.

At least in budgetary terms, Texas Tech now looks less like a university with a sports program and more like a sports complex with a teaching program.

Trump's Tariffs Terrible for Job Creation

On April 2, 2025, President Trump unveiled sweeping "reciprocal tariffs" during a televised event he dubbed “Liberation Day.” The announcement included a baseline 10% tariff on nearly all imports, plus country-specific tariffs ranging from 11% to 50%, based on trade imbalances

April was also the last strong month for job creation, a month in which the economy created 158,000 jobs.

Since then, the economy has created an average of 27,000 jobs per month, well below the average of 168,000 jobs per month the economy created last year. How stark is the difference? Last year the economy was creating more jobs per day than it has created each week since Trump's big tariff announcement.

And of course manufacturing - supposedly the catalyst for tariffs - has suffered this year. This from bls.gov:
"Manufacturing employment changed little in August (-12,000) but is down by 78,000 over the year."