So there are layers to the security history of SAC, including a twenty-year period when we had all our Permissive Action Links set to 00000000, on the pretense that not only could we trust any president to be sane, but we could trust any air force officer to be sane as well.

Curiously this has been proven mostly true. Even Ronald Reagan, who believed wholeheartedly the Second Advent was imminent including a nuclear showdown between the US and the USSR in which he would play the role of President of the United States. President candidate Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone by Stephen King (who commands a first strike in a prophetic vision) is inspired by Reagan. Despite Reagan’s eagerness to play his very big role in the apocalypse, he wasn’t willing to launch a first strike, and despite all his efforts to provoke the Soviets, they wouldn’t either.

(In the meantime, as per the Vulcan saying Only Nixon could go to China, Nixon brought back word of Мирное сосуществование or Peaceful Coexistence a Soviet Politburo policy plan that might allow capitalist and communist ideologies to get along more or less, which Carter was pursuing until his term ended. What no-one would know until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the Politburo had long secretly decided to not respond with a retaliatory strike for sake of giving the human species a chance if the unthinkable were ever to occur.)

My ex-roommate had an uncle who was a key turner at a Polaris silo, and every single time he was up for re-evaluation, he promised that nothing, not threats of violence, not acts of god, would drive him to turn that key ever. He was just not going to do it and feel free to write up a reprimand or a transfer. Notoriously (for years) they kept him at his post.

No, like Prohibition, everyone will keep some around, and the laws will only be enforced against non-whites, non-Christians and uppity women. Oh and gays are right out.

So I have two (conflicting) thoughts regarding people as right wing.

Firstly, here in the States, right-wing encompasses a lot of spectrum, from the extreme reactionary / accelerationist folks that are keen to replicate the worst of the atrocities of the German Reich, to those who are neoliberal / neoconservative, and believes in a multi-faceted economy, a pluralist, secular culture and the use of military adventurism to secure American interests abroad when diplomacy and trade relations fail to bring those about.

Crooks could come from anywhere in this gamut, whether he is (what I suspect) an extremist glad to serve the new American order as a militant or an operative on the field, or someone who is Republican because they identify as [R] but still wish to see the US as a place where democracy and government by the people prevails. (It isn’t, with our democratic features tightly constrained, but the rival party prevents one party from taking absolute power.)

Secondly, when it comes to Republican intellegentsia, there’s a tendency to want their party to be less extreme than they have become, as we’ve seen with those Republicans like Brad Raffensburger who is not willing to cheat or collaborate with Republican officials to bend the system to secure an election victory, but who still believes in the anti-poor, anti-labor, pro-prison, pro-police Republican policies that laid the rails to our current situation on the precipice of autocratic takeover. We have a lot of people who knowingly voted in Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, and kept voting Republicans down-ballot, aware that the policies they preferred would eventually drive the US to the kind of general precarity and discontent that leads to systemic breakdown and autocratic rule.

But that’s not where Crooks is, as much as we like to imagine our operatives are playing 5D chess, whether they’re allies or enemies. Essentially, Crooks did as most terrorists and rampage killers did, and committed angry suicide, with as little actual planning as he could manage.

But that could change if Mr. Wrench chatted with him on line for twenty hours over the course of four weeks convincing him to take a pot-shot at Trump, or if he’s done a lot of reading of political theory and came to such a conclusion on his own. But until that evidence comes up, I think he was just acting out of pure rage based on personal circumstances.

I’ve commented about this elsewhere, but the experiences, beliefs and opinions that radicalize ad hoc shooters typically are very removed from their choice of target. Though, heck, he might have written or recorded a manifesto somewhere. Otherwise he was sick and tired of living a life that sucks and just wanted to express pure rage.

Political operatives look for guys like this to turn into assassins and terrorists. Militant groups of the transnational white power movement looke for guys like this at earlier stages for recruits for counterprotests, harassing marginalized groups and liberal voters and other violence to serve their cause.

The AR-15 is nominally chambered in .223 Remington or 5.56×45mm NATO according to Wikipedia. Although some are chambered at 0.22. But typically gun makes targeted at children are not semi-automatic which is a feature of AR-15 style rifles.

While this is partially a safety concern, I remember target shooting alternatively with a pump-action and a semi-auto and my cousin and I would be tempted to lose our temper with an evasive target and mag-dump. With the pump action I didn’t have the option but to aim every time.

Not with an AR-15 clone. The accuracy on those beyond 100 meters is crap. That was almost assuredly a weapon of convenience.

Now, it’s totally possible some operative groomed him to take the shot, if he was already eager enough to make an attack and just needed encouragement / direction. But then even he probably didn’t know actually who.

Unless the late Mr. Crooks jotted down a manifesto or otherwise is discovered to reveal his motive, we’re not going to know, and are only able to guess at why he shot at Trump. Let me repeat that: We can only guess and will never know unless we get really lucky.

(One of my favorite details of a shooter incident was Adam Lanza’s favorite video game obsession, Dance Dance Revolution since it was still a common opinion that video games trained rampage killers. Tastes in video games and music are about as useful as needing to impress Jodie Foster, or reread The Catcher In the Rye. You may be a lover, Adam, but you ain’t no dancer.)

Crooks’ choice of weapon (an AR-15–style rifle ) indicates a weapon of convenience. He didn’t have the time or means to get something that was more suited to the task. This fits more the profile of a radicalized civilian than a trained operative.

When Al-Qaeda wanted to attack a target (or CIA, or IRA, or any other active group trying to influence a theater of conflict) they’d look at the suicide demographics. What young people are killing themselves in high numbers. Then, in the internet age, it’s a matter of finding people who are self-radicalized, who want to express their outrage violently. And then its a matter of grooming that person (in this case very much the way predators groom children) to see the target of interest as the site / VIP / venue of the terror action. The rampage killer / saboteur / terrorist never knows who he’s working for or what his cause is, only that by suicide bombing at this site, he’ll be heard and known.

Is this to say Crooks was pointed at killing Trump by CIA? Not at all. Trump is an easy viable target, and there are plenty of reasons to be pissed off at him that make sense. But the reason that Crooks had to express his discontent violently has likely very little to do with Trump directly, and whether he’s left-wing and wants to stop the US’ descent into one-party autocracy, or he’s far-right wing and thinks Trump is selling out isn’t why he’s shooting.

There are however, droves of pre-radicalized war boys in the US, silver paint in hand wanting an opportunity to be witnessed all shiny and chrome into Valhalla. A lot of them can be seen in the alt-right, the incels, the MGTOWs the alpha-male wannabes who have been entirely disregarded since they were teens without explanation or education, and are expected by society to either magically turn into high-paid salarymen, or suffer as losers in a single-occupant dwelling in a dead-end job where they’re overworked and underpaid. This lot tends to be a bit dissatisfied with their lot in life.

I’m not saying Crooks is one of these guys, only that it’s a big circle on the Venn-diagram, and not a difficult target to fall into. This circle not only has a higher-than-average male suicide rate (which is already high in the general population) but also is where pro-trump militants and the transnational white power movement gets its recruits. And they tend to register Republican.

Again, we don’t know, only this might inform our guesses.

So which of us are p-zombies? We’ve encountered the same problem by suggesting that human beings have consciousness or self awareness, or get what qualia are, except we can’t prove that anyone has any of these things. The difference of AI consciousness within its development community is a sorites paradox. Large AI packages like GPT-4 have more awareness than previous versions, but not as much awareness as humans. But it Chat GPT4 does exceed human control subjects in the Turing test.

Mind you the Turing is only one of several tests we use to rate how advanced AI is, but we can’t be sure even when an AI can make coffee given a machine and supplies, and construct flat-packed furniture given the IKEA visual instructions, that this counts as AGI, or is sentient.

Right now, there are artists who use generative AI to create art, and it is as much really art as photography was really art when illustrators were complaining they are just using a machine to replicate a real scene. As much as music production and music synthesis are art.

Now yes, I get that AI presents risks of workers losing income and their capacity to survive, but every time we toss our sabots into the gearworks to break the machines, we’re kicking overthrow of the system down the line, until we’re where we are today, not only looking at the dissolution of our democracy so that industrialists may continue to exist, but also the destruction of our habitat, because we can’t address what makes them money.

So capitalism is going to end you either way, unless you end it first. And I expect if you actually tried to make a fortune on your art, you would eventually find yourself selling out all your rights to one of the big corporate controllers, and they would own everything you did, and pay you a pittance for it… Unless you are James Hetfield kind of skilled and lucky. Somehow I doubt you are.

What is it that humans are expressing when they are arting?

Copyright gives the copyright holder exclusive rights to modify the work, to use the work for commercial purposes, and attribution rights.

Copyright remains a system of abuse that empowers large companies to restrict artistic development than it does encourage artists. Besides which, you’re failing to consider transformative work.

As it is, companies like Disney, Time Warner and Sony have so much control over IP that artists can’t make significant profit without being controlled by those companies, and then only a few don’t get screwed over.

There are a lot of valid criticisms about AI, but the notion that training them on work gated by IP law is not one of them… Unless you mean to also say that human beings cannot experience the work either.

Distinctly!

American police. I know that Scotland Yard is willing to bash journalist faces when the MPs are upset with the news. France has brutality problems similar the US if not so extremely common.

Maybe you’re speaking of nations other than those. I assume Liechtenstein law enforcement are polite and professional.

Egg! — Dwarf on Hoxxes pointing at egg.

The scriptures are not univocal, not inerrant, not divinely inspired.

These remain the academic consensus and what is taught in seminary, which is to say ministers deliberately lie to the laity.

It still raises the question why God arranged the paradigm just so he’d have to have to sacrifice an innocent for the good of humanity in the first place. This practically admits He’s not so omniscient / omnipotent or that He’s not benevolent to humankind, certainly not all of humankind.

I would bet that most of us want him to step down because he’s not going to win.

It isn’t clear to me that Biden is simply not going to win. Historically, July polls are not particularly meaningful. Heck polls still count on people who answer their phones from strange numbers, which narrows it to boomers and my generation. (Except I tend not to answer familiar phone numbers, either.)

Also it was Trump who challenged Biden to that debate, and then started walking it back for fear he might get clobbered. (Trump’s rhetoric was also picked apart to include over 600 lies and false statements within his part of that 90 minutes, none of which was challenged by the format, in what is commonly known as a Gish gallop.)

Biden does have the Keys to the White House ( on Wikipedia ) Beau of the Fifth Column breaks it down on Youtube. So there are plenty of indicators that Biden is not going to lose the election. Not if it’s secure and fair, anyway.

Of course, the Keys didn’t account for the SCOTUS intervention of 2000, and may not account for cheating, coup attempts or civil war. Hopefully the US’ allegedly robust (and partially compromised) surveillance state, national-security state and anti-terror state are on top of these threats.

Ronald Reagan is when they figured out how to do the Wilson trick in the era of live television. George W. Bush was the next useful idiot and Trump followed.

I wonder if they’ll develop AI animation enough to effectively generate live videos of engagement with the press and at rallies so that his reign can continue after he dies, or before, while they disappear him into US equivalent of Ottoman Kafes

And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

— Old Pink

Hanging on in quiet desperation
Is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over
Thought I’d something more to say

– c/o The Funny Farm

After Carter lost to Reagan (with much thanks to the Religious Right, the early Christian Nationalist movement organized into a voting bloc by Jerry Falwell), both parties have been terrified a primary challenger to an incumbent president correllates to a loss of the White House, so Biden staying in is the default, and is a known quantity, since he has four years of being president on his rèsumè.

Anyone you replace him with loses the incumbent advantage, which is a significant number of people who vote for the incumbent regardless of party.

It’s greater hubris to assume we can safely replace him without losing votes than it is to keepmhim even if he was doing his Post-October 2nd 1919 Wilson impression.

According to Bob Woodward ( Fear: Trump in the White House the finalé of the book) Ty Cobb quit as Trump’s lawyer regarding the (still open) investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, because he realized that if Trump were not president, there would be a sound case that Trump had diminished capacity to be resposible. But Cobb couldn’t make this claim since that would mean admitting the President of the United States was mentally incapable.

Now I am down with the notion that we should have a system in which unconscious presidents and mentally unfit presidents are revealed and the chain of command is rapidly implemented. But that would assume the US is not run by an aristocratic elite, which it totally is. And hence no cabinet is going to admit that Trump neither can comprehend the job nor can be adequately controlled as a useful idiot.

So even if we assume Biden is daft like a domestic turkey, he’s a better choice than Trump.

And that’s before we confront the reality of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 which Trump is happy to facilitate, is intended to dismantle all remaining democratic feature (lower case) of the United States. It includes an Ermächtigungsgesetz (as much as an authoritarian president needs one after Trump v. United States (2024) ). A vote against Trump is a vote against Project 2025 and one-party autocracy, whether it’s Biden or whoever (or a sack of potatoes).

Yes, it may be King Log or King Heron yet again, but Biden has gotten more done than we typically can expect from neoliberal logs. And he (or his handlers) might recognize the mandate that obligates him that the US isn’t staring down the same threat in 2028.

Or, as the Republican party is looking not just to expand its usual election shenanigans of gerrymandering and voter suppression to include intimidation, violence and defrauding the Electoral College process, but is also looking to spearhead a barrage of procedural and violent coups d’etat, and may even incite civil war. So all our efforts to stop the Heritage Foundation’s offensive may be moot, no matter who is on the ballot.

I’m still voting blue regardless, because the outcome is not yet determined, only that Republican knives are out.