For the past few months I’ve been hearing a growing alarm over the ”AI Problem”. First my credentials: lI have been a ”Coder/Programer/Software Engine/Software Designer” since 1973. A while I retired in 2013 I’ve kept up a lively interest in the industry. Also I am a great fan of Science Fiction, in fact some of my earliest favorite stores are Dr. A’s Robot novels & short stories. A while I have never directly worked on any Artificial Intelligence projects i have written a few programs that faked being human. It is not as hard to do as the layman thinks.
My suggestion to the current issues with AI is quite simple. Let’s just go back to the legal doctrine on who is responsible when a slave broke the law. Back in Roman times the owner of a slave was held responsible for any and everything a slave did, good or bad. Let’s just do the same thing with all programs, AIish or not. The person, corporate or individual, should be held responsible for anything the Program does. Criminal or Civil.
I know that it will take a lot of effort to work out the details on how the law(s) would work but we have a great deal of legal history to draw from, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, and Chinese just to name a few. The benefits would be great. First and for most there is someone who can and should be held responsible for the use/misuse of a program. I also know that there can, and should be, objections to this idea but I am convinced this a place to start.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is, at best a Conspiracy Hypothesis. For sure it is my idea of why the Crisis is happening. So sit back, get comfy and hang-on the ride just might get bumpy.
First I do not think there is a single causal factor for the Default crisis. I think it has many causes, big and small and I’m not going to try give them any any order and I just may leave out a few. So, dear reader, if readers there be, feel free to share with me your ideas.
To start with let’s look at the very bad idea that politics is a Zero Sum game. While politics can be played as a zero sum game doing so means there can be no compromise. There is no possibility of everyone wining or loosing. This goes against everything politics is suppose to be about, ”Compromise” is what it’s all about. Yes, there are some things you can’t compromise on but you need to be very clear in your own mind just what they are and what standing your ground will cost. You always have to assume the other side has their own no-compromise issues too. An you have to be ready for everyone to loose.
As an example of what I’m talking about let’s look at one of the most well known Zero Sum games, Tic-Tac-To. Played correctly neither ”X”s or ”O”s can win, it always ends in a draw (by the way it’s the same in chess). Unfortunately way too often when you try to play a non-Zero Sum game as a Zero Sum game you can end up with all the players loosing. A well known modern example is the doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction”. (A wonderful movie explaining this is ”War Games”)
Another idea helping the crisis along is that the other side will blink. This is a fools bet. It is based on the false assumption that the other guy is going to blink and you have nothing to loose. I politics this comes down to believing your people are willing to pay the price of everyone loosing. It is kind-of like playing Chicken by driving your car head on into another car believing that even if you hit you won’t be that bad hurt. In this case we have two sides playing Russian Roulette with fully loaded automatics pointed at their heads.
Finally I think a big reason for the crisis is the hubris of the House GOP Leadership. Particularly the current Speaker of the House. In making the deal(s) to get elected Speaker Rep. McCarthy demonstrated just how badly he wanted to be Speaker and that he was not willing to give it up for any reason. He now has the problem of not being able to control any of the several factions of his party. That he really is not a leader, but just a mouth piece for the current, most powerful faction. That he can not negotiate in good faith because any and every thing he agrees to has to be taken back to his caucus and it only takes five votes to renege on his agreement. That there are rumored to be a sizable number of votes in the GOP house caucus for forcing a default just makes things all the more difficult.
So that is it for now. Do let me know what you all think of these ideas I promise more once my ideas come to geather.
After watching the State of the Union last Tuesday and the reaction of the GOP to what President Biden said about some members of the GOP wanting to end Social Security I started looking into just what he could be referring to. Luckily the news media and the President made it very easy for me to find what I was looking for. In the large ’Pamphlet’ published By Senator Rick Scott in his effort to get GOP candidates elected to the US Senate.
“All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again“
Such a simple phrase, so fraught with deadly effects. Lets just look at what it says: ”All federal legislation…..” That means every law, ever passed by Congress, from the first congress till today would nolonger be in effect after 5 years. If you don’t think that this means a lot of work, just look at the US Tax code. A conservative estimate is that we currently have 300,000 active statutes at this time. But let’s not forget all the other laws and acts passed by congress. Would this law include all of the 47 enabling acts that added new states to the union? Who would decide? The supreme court? What about all of the acts that established the size of the Supreme Court? Or just those acts that established the Federal Court system?
What about the acts that establish the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force? Are they also sunseted? I don’t know. I don’t think anybody does. So I just ask this….Is it really worth the madness that would ensue just to play a trick move to get ride of two of the most popular laws in the country? An just what does proposing something this fraught with very bad side effects tell us about the the people and Party puting it fourward.
For over 60 years now what we now call the ”Conservative Movement” has been chasing the ’Car’ of what they thought of as the Ultra Left Wing Liberals control of the courts. They didn’t have much luck in the 60’s with their voters split between the two major parties but with the advent of the ’Southern Strategy’ in ’69 by the Nixon campaign things have changed. An with the ferocious reaction to the Obama Presidency and mind blowing backlash of the Trump administration they have reached their goal. They have gained effective control of the Republican Party.
But like the dog chasing a car, they really have no clear idea what to do next. We hear lots of generalities like ”Tough on Crime” and ”Secure the Border”, and the traditional favorite “Balance the Budget”. We have heard these so many time before but once they GOP is in control nothing ever seems to happen. An I have a theory why this is.
The hypothesis is that they are just ”platitudes” to be said. The theory is that they are not meant to mean anything specific but rather they are indented to mean what ever the listener want’s it to mean. Lets just take one, ”Tough on Crime” as an example. To on audience it can mean doing something about the ”Evil” banks, while to someone else it is doing something about the street gangs or doing something to end the mass shooting in schools. What ”Tough on Crime” really means is getting though on things I don’t like. An each of these GOP platitudes is like this. They don’t mean anything and they mean everything. So that is the problem the GOP will be facing soon.
An like the dog who has caught the car the GOP is now facing the problem of ”What Now?” But unlike the dog the GOP has some clear options. They can do what the part of their base scares them the most. An hear I am talking about those who are most violent and hard to control. Or they can do what the most monied base wants. Or they can do what they think will get them the most power, either personal or as a group. The next few years will so just what the GOP leadership decides to do.
One of the first things I notice about Justice Alito’s option in Dobbs v Jackson was it was very careful about all of the texts in the Constitution it thought would apply or be affected by the decision. Except one. The IX Amendment (see above). Years ago when I first started to really started to study the Constitution one of my Professors called the IXth the forgotten amendment. We spent quite some time on just why it was forgotten and why it is so important.
Take a moment to look at it carefully. Now think about just what it is saying. It is just one sentence but it says something very important to all of us. In more modern language it says that the enumeration of specific rights, does not mean and should not be taken to mean, that the people do not still retain those rights. What Justice Alito’s ignoring of the Amendment seems to be implying is that the Federal Courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, has no role in protecting these unenumerated rights.
This idea is just one of many issues I have with both the ”Originalist” and/or ”Textualist” doctrines on interpreting the Constitution. I will not go into all of my issues with these two doctrines for they are legion. In stead I will concentrate on just one issue bought to light here. This is the idea that Enumerated Rights take president over unEnumerated rights to the extent that the IX Amendment is meaningless.
Before I start I’d like to point out one fundamental principle I have in reading the Constitution. There is nothing in it just for ”show”. Every word, every phrase, everything is there for a reason and therefor can not be ignored. Too many modern scholars of the Constitution seem to be unaware of this principle. They read the Constitution like “ Elmer Gantry“ read scripture. Quote what supports your view and ignore what contradicts you. We have seen this before in the “Great 2nd Amendment Debate” where the entire first clause is totally ignored. The same thing is being done with the IX Amendment, except it is the entire text being relegated to the trash bin.
What is truly fascinating about Dobbs is that in many many cases it takes head on the many of the clauses they wish to overturn in the reasoning of Roe vs Wade. Justice Alito does this in with the 15th Amendment. He does not with the IX. I think this is because, like himself, Roe vs Wade also ignores the IX. It also could be that he thought that the IX Amendment had no bearing on the case before the Court. (By the way, I accept this is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.) This seems to be stretching things just a might as Dobb’s deals with rights not enumerated in the Constitution (ie Privacy) and the IX Amendment is all about unenumerated rights.
In closing all we can really say is the Dobbs totally ignores the IX Amendment and we don’t know why.
As I promised in my last posting I’m now going to list some of the reasons I see an ongoing Sheldon Crisis.
The similarities of the the 1850’s and the fall of the American Wigs party and now.
The rise of religious back political action, that is the uses of religion to support political action.
The rise of accepted corruption in the body politic
I will tackle these in reverse order. Since the turn of the 21st century the acceptance by the electorate of corrupt dealings by people in the government, either elected, appointed, or Civil Service, has been becoming more and more pronounced till we end up electing Donald J. Trump as President. Then the powers that be totally ignoring it. An I’m not just talking about the Congress. I’m also talking about the electorate, and not just in the general election. The GOP voter had an entire Primary season to put Trump in the trash, but they didn’t. (see earlier posting on my thoughts on why they did this.) Even now, almost two full years after the end of the Trump administration we have stores coming out about self-dealing of high officials and family members with little or no reaction from the self same high ethics/morality touting conservatives. The last time this happened was in the Gilded Age.
Next is the use of ones religion to justify ones political action(s). Or rather the use of religious fervor to opt-in voters for political power. This has been going on for almost 50 years now to greater and greater effect. Now, please note I am NOT talking about acting or voting based on ones religious beliefs. Nothing can be better than following your religious moral/ethical teaching when voting. I would just like to share one of the earliest bible school teaching I ever got. ”The Devil Quotes Scripture.” When I first heard this someone had the good since to ask the teacher just what that meant. She replied that you can find something in the Scriptures to just doing just about anything. That’s why you need to read not the the passage but also what came before and what comes after. When we told to go look to see if we could find a scripture that would justify staying up past bed time, or only have desert for diner, low and be hold we found quite a few. (Unfortunately all our parents had been warned about the teaching in the class, so no joy there.) It is an unfortunate truth that when people start believing that their religion justifies their doing something they, themselves, would never stand for being done to them we come to the point of doing that which we hate.
An now to the final, and most important point. Also the hardest to really understand. This is because the politics of the USA in the decade before the Civil War is both complex and little written about. It is also fragmented. We have not only the collapse of the American Wigs party and the rise of the Republican party. We have the rise of the ’Nativist’ or ’American’ political movement. Add to that both sides of the Abolition movement justified their position with bible texts.
An that leads me to this final point, a Sheldon Crisis is not simple. It is Complex, Convoluted, Hidden and Obvious. An it is dynamic and always changing. That is why it is so hard to see the answer till the ’crux’ of the crisis is reached. A lot of people will see the answer, a lot won’t, and, unfortunately too many will think they see the answer and be mistaken. These last are the most dangerous.
Just read in “News & Guts” that the Gov. of Florida has signed a bill that will establish a special election crime unit to ‘end’ election fraud. This is a great unit, even before it is established the crimes it is to prevent are already almost non existent. I know of only two cases of actual election fraud in Florida in 2020 out of over 11 million voters. Given those numbers the election fraud rate would be 0.00001818%. A veritable crime wave? Nope.
But what the election police can do is keep all those people who shouldn’t be voting, but are, away from the polls. You know who I’m talking about. All those ‘not white’ people who just don’t know how to keep in their place. The ‘uppity’ ones who demand to be treated like all the ‘good’ people. By ‘good’ I mean all those who agree with what the MAGA is saying. That those who are at the top are, by their very position are “right, good, just”. Or if you like, the ‘Elect’.
Political Scientists, and Historians have seen this all before. It happens way to often in our history. It has happen in Russia in the 2000’s, it happened in Germany in the 1930’s. It has happen in the USA in the 1870’s. First you identify a ‘problem’ that really doesn’t exists and then you create a solution to fix it that lets you control the people. Since the 2020 election MAGA and it’s captive political party, the Republican, has been crying ‘wolf’ over election fraud.
They are telling us that it is ‘rampant’ in the nation. Their proof is that ‘election fraud’ is the only way to explain Donald J. Trump’s loss, even thought many Republicans won their elections. (This, by the way, is classic double speak.) So they now create a police force to eliminate the non existent crime of election fraud by apprehending the fraudsters.
An like any newly created unit the EP (election police) unit(s) will want to show they are doing their job by having a large arrest record. Thousands, ten’s of thousands can be arrested. Most, if not all will be let go, after the polls close, with only a few actually being charged and even few going to trial. An those who do go to trial, the ones who are not “The Right People” will get nice long prison sentences. Those that are will get nice, understanding suspended or public service sentences.
All I can say is I hope the electorate of Florida is paying attention and does the something about this come November.
The Roberts Court, April 23, 2021
Seated from left to right: Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr. and Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor
Standing from left to right: Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Neil M. Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Photograph by Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
With the news that the Gov. of California is thinking of using the Texas anti-abortion law as a blue print for an anti-assault gun law I’ve heard from several sources the idea that SCOTUS will be faced with the problem of how to up hold one while striking down the other. While it maybe a little difficult anyone who has studied the history of the court knows this will not be the first time SCOTUS has faced this problem. I, for one, see this as a golden opportunity for the ‘Textulests’ and ‘Originalist’ of constitutional legal theory. Both of these philosophies have a fundamental aversion to the concept of “Implied Rights”.
Before we dive deeper let me give you my understanding of “Implied Rights” as it deals with the Constitution. For me there are basically two kinds of “Implied Rights”. In both cases the right is not enumerated, stated explicitly, in the text of the constitution. The first kind of “Implied Right” is of the kind that if the right didn’t exist, then an stated right would be functional meaningless. A good example of this is the “Implied Right” to have a vote counted. The right to vote assumes that once a vote is cast it will be counted, otherwise the casting of the vote has no reason to be. The next “Implied Right” is much more nebulous. This is the right of liberty in our person. This is the right that is at issue with ‘Roe vs. Wade’. The right to liberty is not expressly stated in the constitution.
The closest the Constitution gets to granting the right to Liberty is in the Preamble where is states the Constitution is established to “Secure the Blessings of Liberty.” The inalienable rights are given in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. An while SCOTUS has stated the Declaration is part of our fundamental national law the Constitution takes no note of it. In my view to exclude the Declaration would make a mockery of the Constitution, it is quite possible for some future court to do that. So where does that leave us with the new Texas legal theory?
Just this: the Texas law deals with an “Implied Right” and the proposed California law deals with an enumerated right (the Second Amendment). All SCOTUS needs to do is find some reasoning that says that “Implied Rights” don’t get the same degree of protection, if any, as “Enumerated Rights”. This would be a very interesting slippery slope to go down an I invite you, my dear reader, to think upon all of your ‘Rights” that an just an “Implied Right” and not explicitly stated in the Constitution.
As those of you who know me, I am quite a lover/student of history. I read as much as I can about the American Civil War (ACW). Both the Military and Political histories, a lot. One of the newest things in ACW history studies is the critical look at what is called the “Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History”. I’ll just call it MLC for short. That is why I have the last of the Confederate States of America’s National Flag. For me, it represents the start of the creation of the MLC. Not that the idealizing the cause by the side that lost is anything new. It is not. But it is one of the first such myths in the modern age. Another such myth, one with much more dire results for the world was the “Stabbed in the Back” myth of Imperial Germanys loss in World War One. An it is this kind of dire effects of Lost Side Myths I wish to talk about here.
In the past few weeks since the election on Nov 3rd the myth of the “Stolen Election” has arisen among the MAGA supporters of Donald J Trump. Like the myth of the “Stab in the Back”, this new myth is the deliberate creation of just a few people being foisted off on unsuspecting people. It is meant only to let the leaders of MAGA keep the power they crave. It is to keep their followers from putting the responsibility of the loss where it belongs. On the leaders themselves. On the action these leaders not only let happen but actively encouraged. They are doing this out of fear of their own base and the anger this base feels.
And this fear they feel is quite justified. It is real and they know it is real. They know this because they have been stoking this anger for over twenty years. They are now faced with giving the base someone or something to blame for the backlash of the voters at Donald J. Trump in 2020. And what is good about the myth of the “Stolen Election” is no actual proof is needed other than the loss. All they need do is spin conspiracy theories and when nothing is found say “See, that is just how nefarious the ‘liberals/socialists’ really are”. I can hear you saying “But that is not ‘Logical/Reasonable.’” Your right it is neither reasonable nor logical, but it is the way think.
On Wednesday, 6 January 2021, in the Nation’s capital we saw just how far the leadership and would-be leadership of the Republican are willing to go. Not only did they attempt to challenge the electoral collage votes of two states, Arizona and Pennsylvania, they did this second ((challenge)), Pennsylvania, after an Insurrectionist Mob was sent by President Trump to take and hold the nation’s capital. After the mob broke into both the House and Senate chambers howling for blood. After the mob attempted to take both V.P. and the Speaker prisoners while calling for the hanging of the V.P. They, the Republicans still objected to the Pennsylvanian E.C. Votes. What has been for over a hundred years a boring pro forma action of the Congress was turn into a horrible moment of American history.
We must remember that Donald John Trump is just a symptom of the what is wrong in this country. Getting rid of him must just be the start. We must dig deep and identify what is wrong and we must develop ways to clean up the mess. We must take a long hard look at ‘Social Media’ and figure out just what went wrong and why. We must look at our police and discover just what is going on and what to do about. We must have a thorough house cleaning of our political system to rein in all of the uncontrolled use of false facts and then call them ‘Alt-True’. True/False is a binary state and facts can only be True, False or Un-proven. We must be ready willing and able to recognize and call out willful false states as lies. Only in this can we stop the Myth of the Stolen Election. Only this way can we save out Democracy.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there will not be a political party known as the Republicans. Not at all. What I’m saying is the political party we know as the Republican Party will be no more. It will go the way of the Federalists, the Wigs, and the Know Nothings to name just a few. What do these all have in common? They all have gone the way for good.
No to say the political ideals the stood for, an fought for have all gone away. In some cases, like the Federalists, many of their ideal the stood for have become totally institutionalized in the American political landscape. Something every American takes as a given and is proud of. In other cases like the Know Nothings, while their ideals also became a part of the American Political landscape they are not something we can take pride in. But in all cases’ the political movements these parties represented have faded away in history. And this is what is facing the Republican Party from Lincoln to Eisenhower.
From the late 1960’s the the Republican Party has been an ill advised wedding of the Economic Conservatives and the Social Conservatives. On the surface it would look like a match made in heaven. But it was not. All too often Social Conservatives were not Economic Conservative votives and Economic Conservative were not Social Conservatives. All they agreed upon was their knee jerk reaction to the label ‘Liberal’. They were told by their leaders that “liberals’ were a monolithic block. If you were ‘liberal’ on economics you had to be ‘liberal’ on social issues too. An for many years this worked. Thru the Regan/Bush administrations the Economic Conservatives could depend on the whole ‘conservative’ base to vote Republican. An this base grew.
But not only did it grow, it ossified. At the turn of the century the base became more and more under the control of the leaders of the Social Conservatives. They gave bear the to the ‘Religious Right’. People who said ’No need to think or examine critically, just ‘Believe’ us and you will be in the right. When the leaders of the Republicans saw how well this worked with the ‘Religious Right’ they took it one step further and told all their followers “Accept what we tell you. The ‘Liberals’ are lying to you. Don’t accept all that scientific mumbo-jumbo they spout, it will just confuse you”. An when they did, the base did exactly what it’s leaders wanted. It ossified into a sold base that would do what the leaders wanted, in mass. Unfortunately it had one or two faults.
The first fault to be seen was that it was unruly. It wanted to think it was choosing it’s leaders. An so the “Tea Party” movement was born. Followed quickly by the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives. The next fault happened in the Republican leadership. They became committed to “winning”. They accepted the old half-time idea that “Wining isn’t everything. It is the only Thing!” That power, and the un-restrained use of power became their only political principle. This meant that if the leaders wanted to keep their power they had to lead where ever the monolithic base decided to go.
An that leaders us to the age of Donald John Trump. A man who had spent his entire adult life selling the same people who made up the Republican Base and many of the Republican Leadership ‘Snake-Oil’. In 2015/16 he saw that the Democratic Party was going to make one of the biggest mistakes in it’s long history. Maybe as big, if not bigger, as the mistake(s) it made in 1860. They were going to nominate someone who was either personally distrusted or not like by lots of the electorate and someone who could and would motivate many of the undecided away from the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton. In 2016 there were very few people who had not heard of her and did not have an opinion of her. It was the perfect time for someone who had great name recognition but almost no-one really knew. So Donald J. Trump jumped in and won.
He not only won the nomination, he, against everything, won the election. Not that he really either want’ed the job or knew what to do with it once he had it. An along the way he convinced the Republican Base that they were no longer the Republican Base, they were the Trump Base. That only he knew, truly, what they wanted. That only he knew how to get it for them. That anyone, anywhere, who attacked him was attacking them. He started with the ‘Deplorables’ and moved on from there. An the Republican leadership quaked in their boots every time he roared and his crowds roared back.
An so here we are, 2020. They year that everything started to come apart. The election is over and it is looking more and more likely that Joe Biden has won. But while it is totally understandable that Pres. Trump can not bring himself to accept the lost, it it not so understandable why the Republican leadership is following his lead. We will have to wait and see after the Senate run-offs in Georgia to see if they will follow Donald J. Trump down the rabbit hole. Only time will tell us that.
