Search engines used to take in a question and then direct the user to some external data source most relevant to the answer.

Generative AI in speech, text, and images is a way of ingesting large amounts of information specific to a domain and then regurgitating synthesized answers to questions posed about that information.  This is basically the next evolutionary step of a search engine.  The main difference is, the answer is provided by an in-house synthesis of the external data, rather than a simple redirect to the external data.

This is being implemented right now on the Google search page, for example.  Calling it a search page is now inaccurate.  Google vacuums up information from millions of websites, then regurgitates an answer to your query directly.  You never perform a search.  You never visit any of the websites the information was derived from.  You are never aware of them, except in the case where Google is paid to advertise one to you.

If all those other pages didn’t exist, Google's generative AI answer would be useless trash.  But those pages exist, and Google has absorbed them.  In return, Google gives them ... absolutely nothing, but still manages to stand between you and them, redirecting you to somewhere else, or ideally, keeping you on Google permanently.  It's convenient for you, profitable for Google, and slow starvation for every provider of content or information on the internet.  Since its beginning as a search engine, Google has gone from middleman, to broker, to consultant.  Instead of skimming some profit in a transaction between you and someone else, Google now does the entire transaction, and pockets the whole amount.

Reproducing another's work without compensation is already illegal, and has been for a long time.  The only way this new process stays legal is if the work it ingests is sufficiently large or diluted enough that the regurgitated output looks different enough (to a human) that it does not resemble a mere copy, but is an interpretation or reconstruction.  There is a threshold below which any reasonable author or editor would declare plagiarism, and human editors and authors have collectively learned that threshold for centuries.  Pass that threshold, and your generative output is no longer plagiarism. It's legally untouchable.

An entity could ingest every jazz performance given by Mavis Staples, then churn out a thousand albums "in the style" of Mavis Staples, and would owe Mavis Staples nothing, while at the same time reducing the value of her discography to almost nothing.  An entity could do the same for television shows, for novels - even non-fiction novels - even academic papers and scientific research - and owe the creators of these works nothing, even if they leveraged infinite regurgitated variations of the source material for their own purposes internally.  Ingestion and regurgitation by generative AI is, at its core, doing for information what the mafia needs to do with money to hide it from the law:  It is information laundering.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and there are often ways to leverage imitators of one's work to gain recognition or value for oneself. These all rely on the original author being able to participate in the same marketplace that the imitators are helping to grow. But what if the original author is shut out? What if the imitators have an incentive to pretend that the original author doesn't exist?

Obscuring the original source of any potential output is the essential new trait that generative AI brings to the table.  Wait, that needs better emphasis:  The WHOLE POINT of generative AI, as far as for-profit industry is concerned, is that it obscures original sources while still leveraging their content.  It is, at long last, a legal shortcut through the ethical problems of copyright infringement, licensing, plagiarism, and piracy -- for those sufficiently powerful enough already to wield it.  It is the Holy Grail for media giants.  Any entity that can buy enough computing power can now engage in an entirely legal version of exactly what private citizens, authors, musicians, professors, lawyers, etc. are discouraged or even prohibited from doing. ... A prohibition that all those individuals collectively rely on to make a living from their work.

The motivation to obscure is subtle, but real.  Any time an entity provides a clear reference to an individual external source, it is exposing itself to the need to reach some kind of legal or commercial or at the very least ethical negotiation with that source.  That's never in their financial interest.  Whether it's entertainment media, engineering plans, historical records, observational data, or even just a billion chat room conversations, there are licensing and privacy strings attached. But, launder all of that through a generative training set, and suddenly it's ... "Source material? What source material? There's no source material detectable in all these numbers. We dare you to prove otherwise." Perhaps you could hire a forensic investigator and a lawyer and subpoena their access logs, if they were dumb enough to keep any.

An obvious consequence of this is, to stay powerful or become more powerful in the information space, these entities must deliberately work towards the appearance of "originality" while at the same time absorbing external data, which means increasing the obscurity of their source material.  In other words, they must endorse and expand a realm of information where the provenance of any one fact, any measured number, any chain of reasoning that leads outside their doors, cannot be established.  The only exceptions allowable are those that do not threaten their profit stream, e.g. references to publicly available data.  For everything else, it's better if they are the authority, and if you see them as such.  If you want to push beyond the veil and examine their reasoning or references, you will get lost in a generative hall of mirrors. Ask an AI to explain how it reached some conclusion, and it will construct a plausible-looking response to your request, fresh from its data stores. The result isn't what you wanted. It's more akin to asking a child to explain why she didn't do her homework, and getting back an outrageous story constructed in the moment. That may seem unfair since generative AI does not actually try to deceive unless it's been trained to. But the point is, ... if it doesn't know, how could you?

This economic model has already proven to be ridiculously profitable for companies like OpenAI, Google, Adobe, et cetera.  They devour information at near zero cost, create a massive bowl of generative AI stew, and rent you a spoon.  Where would your search for knowledge have taken you, if not to them?  Where would that money in your subscription fee have gone, if not to them?  It's in the interest of those companies that you be prevented from knowing. Your dependency on them grows. The health of the information marketplace and the cultural landscape declines. Welcome to the information mafia.

Where do you suppose this leads?

So my sister and I were discussing a switch between cell service providers, because of recent billing shenanigans. I was wondering what the Verizon coverage map looked like. The base map they use for their coverage overlay is "Open Street Maps."

Out of curiosity I went browsing around other places. Japan, etc. Check out this map of North vs South Korea:



Unsurprising, I guess. In North Korea, you gotta keep a tight lid on information to preserve a dictatorship, and cellphones are a nuisance for that. But then I zoomed in closer on North Korea...



This feature, at the end of a road called "Gulag 16 Rd" does not appear on Google or Apple Maps. It must be too politically embarrassing, or maybe just unsavory. Mega-corporations don't want their map users to get bad vibes. (On the other hand, absolutely zero people are going to ask for driving directions to a freaking gulag, so...)

Googling that road reveals it to be the Hwasong Concentration Camp.

We know it’s there, we know there are ~20,000 people being slowly murdered there, and it’s apparently nobody’s problem.

Meanwhile I’m here worrying about "I wonder if I can save a few bucks on my cell bill"...

Sure, it's apples to oranges. For one, that place is over 5,000 miles from me, across an ocean so large that 100 years ago, people only crossed it when they were going to war. And of course there’s the mountains and the cultural and language barriers and so on.

I guess what’s really startling to me is that I can know about it. When I was in college there was a famine going on in North Korea, but I was ignorant of it, along with everyone around me. Now it’s almost too easy to find out about atrocities happening on a global scale.

Hey, did you know that Michael Palin did one of his travelogues about visiting North Korea? Apparently it's quite an interesting series, but not nearly as popular as his others, for obvious reasons. He does his best to get people alone and away from his handlers and have real conversations with them, but he’s thwarted almost all the time.

History is not objective. The general idea of revising history is no more inherently threatening than the march of science as it revises a theory. And yet, both can be weaponized. E.g. social darwinism, and Nazi indoctrination. So if morality and accuracy are not crucial in the defining of history, what is? How about utility.

The history that persists is the history that is useful to someone.

I think we could categorize "revisionist history" more narrowly, as the attempt to change the current understanding of history to hide, or to justify, immoral acts. The most immediate version of this is what we could call propaganda. Russia is currently attempting this in Ukraine, in real-time, by using revised laws, threats, new textbooks, and so on, to effectively erase Ukrainian identity. In a move that is either astoundingly ironic or completely unsurprising - I can't decide which - the Russian government is doing this under the cover of a justification that they are "fighting Nazis" in Ukraine.

The more free and open a society is, the more resistant it is to the use of "revisionist history" as a tool for its own ends. I bet if you showed one of those revised history books to the average Russian citizen, they would either agree with what's inside, or shrug their shoulders and say, "Truth is flexible. This doesn't target me, so why should I care?"

Assuming you believe that a ground invasion with the aim of permanently subjugating a population or just driving it out and taking their land is a bad thing, ... you need to ask, how does the country conducting the invasion justify it? What's in the heads of the people rattling the metaphorical sabres, to say nothing of the ones swinging them? And so, in this case, what are we going to do about Russia? What are we going to do about the Russian people, who have been hunkered down inside a kleptocracy, permanent outcasts from most of the Western world due to ideological and economic warfare and a language barrier, for generations, and primed by all this to bankroll the annexation of Ukraine, or at best, ignore it?

I think most of us are just getting on with business and hoping that the Russian government will collapse again, and that the internal chaos will neutralize them as a threat for a while, and that's it. And as the saying goes, it's not paranoia if they actually are out to get you. What are the Russian people supposed to think, when they peek out from behind the censorship and propaganda and discover an entire Western world that is rooting for them to descend into chaos, again? Are they supposed to laugh and say, "yep, we sure do suck"?

(Because yeah, their government sucks.)

Let's assume that Trump gets re-elected back in the US, and that about six months later he strangles off all remaining funding for Ukrainian resistance, and about two years after that Ukraine agrees to a really gross deal with Russia and cedes about a quarter of its territory, everything east of the Dnipro river. Everyone unfortunate enough to be stuck on that side of the line will see their language and most of their local history viciously eradicated and replaced with Russian glorification, and their exploitation at the hands of Moscow will begin all over again. The rest of Ukraine will be too weak to do anything but build a defensive line along the river and complain about genocide to deaf ears.

Western Europe for its part will offer economic integration but very little in the way of reconstruction aid, and will refuse to bring Ukraine into NATO, cynically believing instead that what remains of Ukraine should continue to serve the purpose that Ukraine has already served once: As a sacrificial meat shield against Russian aggression. Ukrainians will sense their second-class status and resent it.

Here's an interesting question: How will (what remains of) Ukraine revise its history then? Caught between an aggressor in the east and indifference in the west, what will they choose to put in their history books and teach their kids?

The following is a long, semi-structured rant about parenting.

One of the weird cultural artifacts that I grew up with was a vision of the way people were supposed to raise their children. It was preserved, or to be more accurate, reconstructed, from the era of the 1950s a few decades before. It's still in force today, across large parts of America.

Women were supposed to stay at home and cook and clean and shop and be mothers to the kids, which generally took the form of dressing and feeding them and policing them and being nurturing -- an interesting word with a slippery definition. Men were supposed to have one foot out in the world, working some kind of career in order to bring home money, and their approach to children was more distant, instructive, and punitive. They could teach and protect, but they didn't cook, change diapers, or wipe away tears.

My own parents took this vision and applied modifications to suit their tastes, but still accepted its harshest compromises. For example, both of my parents had established careers before they married but when children started coming along, they could get by on a single income, and my father forcefully argued that since he made more money, he should be the one to keep the job while my mother stayed home. And so, for years, Mom had kids glued to her side all day, until the evening when Dad came home and she could, as she called it, "make the hand-off for a while," which usually meant just a short break before she had to put dinner on the table.

We all have multiple visions of our future clamoring in our heads, and for my mother the battle was intense, because she genuinely loved her work. It stung to have the choice seemingly made for her, not just by my father, but by the expectations of society, acting on that 1950s blueprint. Then there is the additional insult of the wage gap: The choice was only obvious because she was making less money even though they both had the same career. (They were both teachers.)

Over the years, when I've asked her how she felt about this, my Mom has given a range of answers, touching on the different ways it played out. She's said "I was as happy as a clam staying home with you kids; I loved being a Mom," but she's also said "I felt like I was being railroaded when it came to major decisions, and losing my work was one of them. I did substitute teaching but that was much harder."

I didn't become aware of this disconnect between the suburban-ish world I grew up in and the needs of the people who populated it, until I was in my mid-20's and trying to visualize my own destiny, as a romantic partner or a father. At the time I was still ready to buy into the traditional gender role and nuclear family, and if I'd met someone who also bought into it, I think I would have gotten married and had at least one child not too long after leaving college. That would have cemented things. By my reckoning, if that had happened, my kids would be grown and out of the house by now.

Instead I met a series of people who were questioning their future as much as I was, and I developed a strong feeling that traditional parenthood would require me to give up some part of my identity that I wasn't willing to lose. It wasn't something as selfish as "freedom" or "spare time", though there were plenty of people eager to tell me I would lose both. It was all the ways I felt and behaved that didn't fit into the box labeled "suburban American guy". And for decades, though much less so nowadays, the things I liked most about myself were not welcome in that box.

As my romantic journey has continued for all these years I've also met plenty of women who felt the same. In fact, I can now say, with confidence, that I have had a rich and varied dating life well beyond that of most people from my era. And there has no doubt been a lot of self-selection in the partners I stayed with, and the people I only dated briefly, but I have learned there are a lot of women in the world who not only do not want children, but are certain they would make bad parents to their own children or others.

They do not lead lives of loneliness or suffer from a lack of direction. They are often the most accomplished, interesting, and well-rounded people I meet. In part because raising kids simply takes time over the long haul and they're spent that time doing different things, but also because you have to be a bit of an iconoclast at heart just to push that far outside the expectations of your gender. There are still very few narratives for women without children in popular culture even now, rendering these people invisible. It’s as if that vision from the 1950’s is creeping around like a fog, obscuring entire sections of society. Without a cultural scaffolding, this group has had to re-invent itself with every generation, every time as outsiders. Likewise, from the other side of this mirror, women who are parents sometimes find themselves asking, "What else can I be, once this parenting gig settles down and I have time again? Is there anything out there I would be welcome in trying?"

I have intimately known plenty of women who had ambitions to start a family, and then, upon starting one discovered that they were embarking on a war with the infrastructure of society around them, to preserve their individuality. When you have a child, everyone around you, especially other women, suddenly has strong ideas about what you are doing with that child. Especially the amount of attention you are paying to them, and the degree to which you are bending the structure of the rest of your life to do that. Under this lens of judgement you make compromises, between what's expected, what your partner wants, what your child needs, and yourself. The pressure from the outside world is always on the side of the child, and second to that on the side of the partner for the sake of preserving your partnership. Your needs come dead last. Whatever you want to be that doesn’t fit in that box, as woman or man or person, is chopped at until the lid can close.

Pushing back against that pressure doesn't win friends. Doing something for your own sanity that has no visible benefit to your kids doesn't win approval. It’s true that once you have a child, your life generally should not be all about you anymore, but it’s just as true that your life should not be all about the kid, otherwise, why are you bothering?

Faced with the pressure to relinquish their identities, some of the women I know simply cracked under the pressure and wandered away from their children, and the partnership they were birthed into. None of them are proud of this. But for all of them, the choice felt as stark as leave and survive, or stay and die. Wide-eyed people ask, "How could a woman leave her own child?" With luck, those people will never have to learn how. But the frequency of this question illustrates how invisible this group is: No one wants to believe a woman can abandon her kids even in theory.

It seems obvious that if a person knows they won’t enjoy parenting, they should be respected for choosing to avoid having kids, rather than shamed. Less obvious is the need to examine all the frivolous restrictions and baggage that come with parenting, that make the role seem so thankless that people are driven from it.

That weird 1950s stereotype of a woman staying home evolved directly out of a previous situation, where a woman stayed on the farm. She wasn’t somehow insulated from the danger or complication of a career, she was just too damn busy working on the farm like everyone else - which had plenty of its own dangers - and patriarchal power structures like the Catholic Church used the idea of protecting her and protecting the family as an excuse to keep her anchored there. When suburbia came along, with handy slots for appliances and vehicles, the farm miniaturized into a kitchen, and women were transplanted into it, drawn by the promise of convenience.

And if they weren’t comfortable with that transition, there was suddenly something wrong with women. No one blamed suburbia -- it was too convenient and futuristic and safe. You didn't need to slaughter hogs, dig endless rocks out of the soil, chase chickens around a yard, or scare off coyotes with a shotgun. But what you did need to do, since you no longer had land, was make a living somewhere away from the house. And that was really all it took to split men away from women and start the construction of two entirely different pink and blue lives.

So, wind this forward 50 years, and multiple generations of families have organized their entire lives by a collective hallucination of gender roles, which were based almost entirely on that specific convergence of post-agrarian consumer goods and services we call suburbia. The more you stare at it, the more arbitrary and senseless it appears. And as we're all finding out, it's not sustainable. You can't take every child in a generation, break them into pairs along sex lines, and build each pair a single-family home with a garage and a yard connected to a highway system. What's more, why would your children want that by default? Any part of it?

Suburbia wasn’t a step in a progression towards an ideal. It was a massive experiment in standardization, including the standardization of parenting. Things that men and women were supposed to embrace, and project into their children, were invented from whole cloth by advertisers. Even sexuality had a binary range clamped down upon it, with men and women placed on opposite ends, created for - and then reinforced by - the products and stories targeting them.

And of course there's the church. This was a two-handed operation, with consumerism as one hand, and religion as the other. There is an obvious unbroken line, connecting the dictates of a church to go forth and multiply, with the celebration of marriage as a bond that is only legitimate for bearing children, with the unreconstructed desire of parents to compel their own children to reproduce in turn, with the absurd and extremely damaging efforts to punish any social behavior that blurs the imposed gender duality, and reject sexual or romantic behavior that does not directly result in a fertilized embryo and a home for it to mature in. That line is easy to trace, from the heads and books of the colonizers that appeared in America 500 years ago, to the homophobia and hatred of my current day.

Even my own father admitted, late in life, that if I had grown up as gay, or as outwardly effeminate, he would have handled it badly and probably ruined our relationship. "I just know I would have screwed it up," he said. "I wouldn't have understood you."

That was one of the things that deeply bothered me about suburban culture and its emphasis on procreation: The existential panic over men being sexually interested in men, and on top of that the existential panic over men not naturally wanting to stay inside the lane labeled "masculine", which included stoicism and football and beer and cowboy hats and war, but didn't include earrings and heels and caretaking and poetry and whimsy. Who drew these lines? Even my Dad, who was too old to be afraid of most things, only dared to push outside the lines a little. He seemed to have an admiration for those who pushed further, but he personally couldn't. He held a lot of the toxic masculinity of male culture at arms length, shielding me from it in the process, but to him a boy still had to become a man, or he was somehow lost at sea.

More than once I've heard perfectly liberal-seeming parents lament that their children, if they "turned out gay", would be doomed to a life of misery because they would never get to participate in parenthood. Once I was alone with the mother of a woman I was dating, and she confessed that she was glad her daughter was with me, because her daughter was bisexual and "could have just as easily ended up with a lesbian and then I wouldn't have grandkids." To avoid a nasty argument, all I said was, "We'll see," when what I wanted to say was, "Why the hell do you think a lesbian can't be a mother, or even a perfectly good father figure? How many lesbian parents do you know? Or do you think they're such abominations they shouldn't even be around children?"

Sex hormones can be strong, but they don't have the ultimate say in our route to happiness. I've met women who have told me: "My ovaries are screaming at me that I should make little carbon copies of you, but thankfully, they're not in charge." I've also heard: "I'm sex-positive and really into sex, but just the thought of someone putting a baby in me turns me off like a light switch." And I've heard: "Sometimes I get this visceral hunger for the particular smell of an infant. Ever since I smelled it, I sometimes get this ache for it, filling my whole body. Like the thing I want the most in the whole world is a little baby. But, at the same time, children are just terrifying to me and I don't want them around, ever." All these people are threaded into the world, finding their way, and modern culture is still pretending that they're curiosities at best. They all have the same equipment, but because they're not using it to make babies, the classic suburban vision has no place for them.

I’ve met and enjoyed my time with women who were taller than me, hairier than me, louder than me, stronger than me, less nurturing than me, far less interested in children than me, and in some cases significantly more violent than me. Society has labeled them as deviants, and the difficulty they have had is not from being different, but from the label. Many of them are also parents, and have had to struggle to come to terms with the difference between the way they want to parent, and what the world expects. The majority of them are not comfortable accepting a role at the head of a stove, spending their time for years upon years constantly being the sole minder and guardian of infants who are - let’s be frank - terrible conversation, and often quite gross.

Having gotten to know these different people in succession, and understanding how they work, my own perspective about my own role as a parent - or something adjacent to that - has also evolved. I have two sisters with six children between them, and among my closest friends, there are six more children to attend to. I take pride in being an uncle to them, according to a definition of "uncle" that I've had to hammer out on my own, and sometimes the support I provide them is a kind that their own parents are unable to, mostly because they lack perspective, or a necessary amount of detachment. One could say I operate a sort of finishing school for the kids in my life. Their parents let me take them off their hands for a few days, or in some cases, weeks or months. We travel together, we get up to various hijinks, and then I return them with additional perspective. I find it great fun and I have noticed positive changes in the lives of everyone involved.

And meanwhile, society at large is screaming at me that, because I have not impregnated a woman and brought several children to term, and then purchased a single-family home with enough plastic toys and shiny appliances to raise those kids unassisted by friends or extended family, that I am failing my parents, failing society, and failing as a human being.

That voice is much quieter now, even as my own interest in being a parent has slowly grown over the years into the "uncle" role I have now. But it's still there. Sometimes I'm ambushed by this intense loathing for just the physical layout of suburban houses, with their rubber-stamped chunks of lawn and flawless sidewalks, their wall-to-wall carpet, and their giant television sets. The idea of living in such a place fills me with an existential dread. The idea of getting up at 7:00am sharp to drive a car through angry freeway traffic to a building 30 miles away, then reversing the journey at night, makes me want to die. It almost killed me once already. Yes I would do it if there was no other option; if it was a matter of survival. That's what it was for a while. But now that I've found a way to live outside that requirement, I don't ever want to go back. I have come to loathe an existence that revolves around cars.

Assuming it wasn't in that kind of house, the idea of being a stay-at-home Dad, with enough of my own finances sorted out that I wouldn't even need to lean on my co-parent, seems appealing to me. The loss of free time and of my identity through my career would be difficult and I would certainly feel adrift because of that, but I get the feeling I would compensate by pouring energy into the kids. But then the feeling of suburban isolation crowds around this vision and starts to strangle it. My siblings and friends are too geographically scattered to help or keep me company, and without the ability to go where they are, how long could I remain alone with a few beings who are - as I mentioned - terrible conversation and often quite gross, before I start to go crazy?

It baffles me that people consistently tell me that their happiest family memories come from times when the extended family was involved, whether for a holiday, or a vacation, or just an extended visit, and yet we have all convinced ourselves, that the only true route to creating the next generation is to hide exactly two people in their own structure, with a collection of personal appliances, located in some arbitrary location anywhere in the country regardless of how far it is from uncles, aunts, grandparents, and so on. As if, sure, it takes a village, but any old village will do, and what matters is the house with the fence and the driveway, not the presence of diverse and loving people who know your collective history and have charted a dozen different paths to happiness that you can draw from. Paths that include being an aunt or a godmother and so on, when not a parent directly.

Organizing society around the individual has a balance of pluses and minuses, but organizing society around the nuclear family seems to have a lot more in the minus column. If the definition of the family stops at the border beyond parent and child, we all make decisions by only considering the consequences up to that point, and the rest is easily pruned. If dad can make more money in a city 100 miles west, then clearly the wife and children should move, regardless of whether grandpa or grandma or aunt or uncle will remain close enough to be involved. Because more money means better appliances in the better house. This is the math people use in this nation of immigrants, where family legacy is often very short and there may seem like there isn’t even anything to preserve.

My own family was split apart by the pursuit of opportunity in distant parts of the state. My extended family suffered this fate to a lesser degree. Parents worked hard and drove great distances and arranged elaborate schedules to get the kids to socialize together, and it had a significant effect, but even a distance of five or 10 miles, just sufficient such that a car, and therefore an adult and a plan, needs to be involved, is enough of a wedge to split an extended family permanently into pieces, especially over the long haul of many years through adolescence and teenager-hood. I have lots of cousins and second cousins all over the state, but closer to the truth would be to say I had them, and comfortable silence eventually has become silence. I don’t think I would even recognize them on the street anymore. Or their kids -- most of whom are in college at least.

If being a parent means accepting this status quo, it's right to rebel against it. What if being a parent could mean helping to raise children that you didn’t give birth to or stick your genes in? What if supporting other parents was recognized as an important role worth acting to preserve in social structures? The term "godmother" has a religious origin, and is about taking responsibility for the religious education of a child. What if it meant more? What if taking an active role in the lives of your relatives' children as teenagers, even if you don’t like babies, had a name? All these options exist of course, and are taken up by a significant chunk of society, but they are nameless. They are vaguely seen as nice to have, but there are no rituals or holidays or even words to legitimize them.

I feel glad to have found some happiness and some ability to contribute. I still struggle with that frightening specter of suburban life and the 1950s vision of parenthood it has hauled into the present day. I fear being hemmed in by the father role and excluded from the mother role, and I fear starting a family with someone who is succumbing to pressure and will only become miserable in due time. I fear having every day reduced by some percentage of time trapped in a car, shuttling myself and passengers from one box to the next, in a loop that goes on for ten, fifteen, twenty years.

But at the same time I wonder, maybe there's a way I can do this that works for me. I imagine joining parenting groups and finding local help with new friends. I picture living in some place that doesn't have a stupid lawn but does have a nice park nearby, and putting a child in a seat on the back of a bicycle and riding out for a picnic. I can see myself forming some alliance with neighbors, or moving closer to family, to cooperate on meals and shopping in some negotiated schedule that always puts four or five people around a table to keep things interesting. There's some non-suburban, non-isolating, non-straitjacket version of this course that I'm sure people around me are charting and I could potentially move from "uncle" to something more direct.

But should I? Especially at my age? And with my tendency to want to go on bike trips for a month at a time? Is the fact that I can't decide, proof in itself that I don't have the dedication to make it work?

The two countries seem to have increasingly aligned interests. China is trying to engulf Taiwan, and Russia is trying to engulf Ukraine. What's the common strategy here?

It looks to me like the strategy is to exploit the badly regulated communications technology and dysfunctional government of the target country, astroturfing pro-Russian or pro-China support, then meanwhile find some thin excuse to build up military assets nearby. Wait for a particularly violent and confused election, then roll in the military assets, targeting the center of government and claiming that they are defending from a coup rather than staging one, since the country "voted" to join Russia/China.

Russia is in the midst of doing this to Ukraine and is beginning to target Kazakhstan with the same playbook. Next on the list is Georgia. Mongolia will remain a toothless buffer zone between Russia and China, but once Taiwan has been beaten into submission expect China to decisively eat North Korea - with almost zero resistance - as a prelude to their next move. Meanwhile they will continue to consolidate their ugly grip on their own populace, from east to west. I figure we've got about seven years for all this to play out.

So, what are the Western nations going to do about it?

It depends on how willing they are to stage a proxy war in any of these countries. Because once the civil unrest rises beyond a certain level, the only thing that's going to stop Russian tanks rolling in is the destruction of those Russian tanks before they roll in, with counterstrikes at or near the border, and a clear declaration that everyone is aware of what Russia is attempting to do. Destroying them after they roll in is going to turn a coup into an appalling slaughter, and Russia/China have already proven that they'll gladly incite such a situation by what they did by proxy in Syria. (Which everyone seems to have already forgotten about. That was fast.)

So are we ready for that? Is Western Europe going to build up and rattle its own sabre a bit in its defense? Or is it going to continue with its prideful economic slapfight, and ignore all external threats? Or is it going to continue to collectively sit on its hands and yelp for good ol' Johnny American to fly over with ballistic missiles and jets to blow up those Russian tanks? The US has very little to gain from such a move, and a lot to lose...

Right now, Republicans in all circles of power are talking quietly about how they can avoid another four years of the incompetent do-nothing disaster of a Donald Trump presidency.

In about a year the drum will start beating in earnest for a Republican presidential nominee who can "stand up" to the legacy of Donald Trump and drag the party forward into some new version of itself. Something less fettered to the diminishing returns of Rust Belt grievance and xenophobia. Donald Trump will still have a core base of followers plugged into his personal social media empire, but that base will be actively shrinking, rather than growing.

Eventually Republicans will hit upon a new presidential candidate. I have no idea who he will be right now. Nobody does. But I know he will be a fiery disser of Donald trump on the nomination trail. Trump will slander and belittle him and hold rally after rally across the midwest, and this candidate will pull from exactly the same playbook, holding equivalent rallies and firing equivalent volleys at Trump himself -- though never at his believers, whom he will instead openly court.

The Republican party establishment itself will also advocate intensely for the new candidate. Previous hardcore Trump devotees in the political system will simultaneously heap praise on Trump for "what he did" while also calling for a successor: A "Trump 2.0" candidate who has the same theatrical command but none of the smarmy playboy legacy and pig-headedness.

This will cause an eruption among Republican party voters and lead to a showdown at the convention. The conflict will suck all the oxygen away from the Democratic campaign, just as Trump suffocated it in 2016.

I don't know whether this new candidate will win the nomination.

If he doesn't, we will see 2020 Trump versus Biden all over again, and Trump and the Republicans will absolutely lose.

If this new candidate does get nominated, the next several months will be full of social churn as half the previous Trump supporters violently repudiate their chosen one, and the other half declare their ironclad refusal to support the nominee. This open warfare will appear to continue right up to election day and will disrupt everyone's ability to forecast the result. Nevertheless, the "only Trump" Republicans will fall in behind the new candidate and vote for him, mainly as a protest vote against Joe Biden. With enthusiasm for Biden at a low ebb, he will probably lose.

We'll have a Republican president again but it will not be Donald Trump. It will be someone at once more respectable and better equipped for inside-the-beltway negotiation, with the blessing of the establishment, and the Republican party will again be ascendant. Donald Trump's influence will drop precipitously and historians will declare the end of his chapter in presidential history. By then he will also be showing clear signs of senility. He probably won't even live to see the next Presidential election.

The Democratic party will wring its hands for four years, but it won't be the existential panic of 2016. It will be a more constructive housecleaning, and a number of far-left elements will get thrown under the bus - such as the anti-police and anti-capitalist movements - if they haven't already been crushed by Joe Biden himself. Four years later they will present a tastefully progressive female nominee who will vocally reject "identity politics"* as a tactic towards reconciliation with Republicans, and run mostly on a fiscal platform, promising to reign in ludicrous federal spending, which will be beyond a looming crisis by then and instead be an actively unfolding disaster burning through the economy.

( * "Identity politics" is almost entirely a fabricated bogeyman of the right. When one digs down to the ground-level influences that have given rise to the term, there is actually something else going on -- something wholly different than what Fox News talking heads and celebrity feuds on Twitter would have you believe. Nevertheless, this candidate will have to speak to Republicans on their own terms to court additional votes.)

We all project traits on groups of people. It's how we operate socially, on a large-scale level, and also on a tiny, day-to-day, individual level. If we did not have a personal stable of stereotypes established over many years of interaction, we would barely be able to interpret anything at all.

Modern example:

The defining trait of the group "people in Saudi Arabia" is their location, not their appearance. But is it bigoted to say that people in Saudi Arabia are highly religious? They sure are tolerant of theocracy there, though I bet if they were more connected to the outside world and less dependent on welfare from kings, they would rise up. If I meet someone from Saudi Arabia I am fully prepared to assume they pray to Allah five times a day, and are super into their religion, relative to me. Does that assumption make me more likely to cause a faux pas, or less?

Historical example:

The Vikings that inhabited Iceland for hundreds of years were socially conservative, environmentally destructive, and relatively violent in their settling of disputes. Written accounts all over Europe and from within Viking society, as well as clear evidence that Iceland was divested of 97 percent of its trees after they arrived, back these claims. The majority of male settlers came from the Nordic countries, largely Norway, but most female settlers came from the British Isles, kidnapped by swordpoint. One could make the case that half their genetic legacy is borne of rape. Their history is loaded with warring chiefs and raids, and only settled down after they decided to swear allegiance to a foreign king and take up Christianity, and basically stopped being Vikings.

If I was cast back in time to 900 AD and wandered around Iceland, assuming I could speak their language, would that knowledge help me? Probably not. Having no family affiliation, I'd be seized as a slave, and probably die of exposure or starvation in short order.

One might assume that all native Icelanders today are descended from Vikings, and that therefore the stereotypes apply. But since the time of Vikings, the population was ravaged by plague and volcanism and even plunder from English merchants, all multiple times. Genetically the current population is barely distinct from the rest of Northern Europe. And yet, I found that two of the three stereotypes held true when I traveled there: Icelanders are definitely not violent, but they remain socially conservative, and they continue to be environmentally destructive (though they have the grace to be ashamed of it and are trying to change course.)

Back in the day, everyone considered "race" and "geographical origin" interchangeable. And for understandable reasons, what with how limited travel was. In modern times we've driven a wedge between these things and started to whittle down the importance of "race" as a carrier of behavior and value. But there is still so much progress to make, clearly, because people with the same geographical origin but a different appearance are still treated very differently, within their own communities as well as beyond. The problem is not embedded in genes and skins, but in minds and media. To work against stereotypes you sometimes need to know in detail what they are, but by deciding to work against them, you are also forced to act upon them. It's difficult and complicated work.

If I meet a Black man on the street in Oakland, I bring to bear a decades-long accumulation of assumptions about how that man perceives me, how other people who look like me have treated him, and how I can present myself so as to show I am not bound by those assumptions and will treat him with dignity and camaraderie.

By moderating my behavior with this knowledge, am I engaging in racist behavior? Would it be better for both of us if I was completely unaware of any stereotypes held by society at large, like my young nephews generally are? I would love for there to be a clear answer to this, but: A little bit yes, a little bit no. My take on it is: It's very likely I can be more helpful to that man by knowing what we're both working against. And that we both need to be a little more self-aware than usual in our first meeting because of it all.

An important question to ask is, what's the victory condition here? Obviously, the stereotypes we want to fight in modern society are negative ones based on appearance alone, and second to that the negative ones based on place of origin. Even though, like in the examples above with Vikings and Saudis, they may even contain truth. Do we need to erase the distinction in order to erase the stereotype? Should we all aspire to "not see color"? Or should we aspire to make the color we do see irrelevant when it comes to opportunity and trust, perhaps by putting our thumb on the scales of justice?

Almost all the signifiers of the various Germanic and Danish and Irish origins of my motley family were rapidly crushed or abandoned in just a few generations, because they were a liability. No distinction, and there's nothing to hang a stereotype on, and that means safety. It would have been nice to keep those distinctions. It would have been nice to arrive in a land where there was a certain amount of embracing going on to complement the rejection. Somewhere in the middle is a territory called assimilation. How do we expand that territory?

I don't think it's a process of embracing everything. I don't think the answer is "accepting multiple cultures in one society". That's another way of saying "everyone stays in their assigned seating and doesn't get to make judgements or change." I think it's a process of sorting out the differences that matter from the ones that don't, which requires a collective agreement on the importance of principles over customs, and some relaxation in possessiveness over one's own cultural identity. Definitely not too much, but some. And damn right it's complicated, because people use external signifiers - like clothing, prayers, gestures, phrases, ceremonies of all kinds - to advertise and reinforce what they believe in, and those things are easily misinterpreted. Like the abaya for example. Or a prominently worn cross. Or saying "God bless you" to an atheist.

This is interesting to me because I suspect that people around my own political spectrum - left-leaning liberals in California - don't actually want multiple cultures coexisting. What they want, is one unified culture that embraces liberal principals, but also displays all the outward trappings of cultures - including far less tolerant ones - from all over the world. People wearing abayas and carrying prayer mats, happily standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people wearing long pants and kippot, right next to people wearing gold glitter mankinis and shouting "yas queeen!", with no sense of discomfort, because deep down they have all embraced the same liberal values, and keep their distinct appearance only because it feels fashionable or comfortable for them.

That's an odd sort of utopia, but not an unpleasant one. The trouble is that people around me seem to believe that liberal values are so self-evident and obvious, that all they need to do when faced with - for example - a militant Islamic fundamentalist, is make him as comfortable as possible in their midst, and then he will change his mind about wanting to beat any woman who walks in public without wearing a burqa, because isn't diversity wonderful?

If I am a guest in a Christian household and they take me to church on Sunday, and the morning sermon contains a dozen references to how misguided and shameful homosexuals are (true story), what is the better move? Stand up and walk out, embarrassing the members of the household that are hosting me, but making a powerful example to the congregation that people who would object to this treatment are in their very midst? Or sit there and say nothing, because I am a guest and must be tolerant of their religious ways? Because I must be accepting of their culture?

Conversely, to a Christian, is the solution to this dilemma, "we will live among these homosexuals even though we know they are sinful and gross, because slaughtering them would be worse?" That does not strike me as progress, but rather a dead-end.

Liberal values are not just to be endorsed by example alone. They are to be insisted upon; transmitted through aid and commerce whenever possible. Just as a church proselytizes to the poor people who wander in to the soup kitchen, we should be pushing for equal treatment under the law, the acceptance of all consensual sexuality, free speech, and the liberation of the mind from the rule of gods and kings.

Four years ago, there was an eruption of protests in the Bay Area. I wrote about one at the time, threading in my views about social media exploiting such protests for ad revenue, and the bloviating of that recently-elected orange deadbeat in the White House.

Well over seven million people live around the San Francisco Bay, and the place has a reputation as a pressure cooker for radical and "liberal" ideas -- a word I need to put in quotes now, as a warning of how politicized it's become. News of protests here, often with yelling and fighting and smashing of windows, has leapt up the pages of web browsers and search engines and run loops around the planet at various times in the last decade. And while that happens, the view from here on the ground is something else entirely. In Oakland and Berkeley and other urban centers, people taking to the streets with placards and words and then some subset of them getting violent is something that we've been exposed to, or involved in, enough times to develop second and third thoughts about -- as opposed to the first thoughts that people reading occasionally about them from a remote place are prone to have, and then stop with.

In brief summary, the second and third thoughts are like so:

1. When we're out marching, making something heard, we generally do not think about how it plays in news channels a thousand miles away. The optics are not our main concern. As a political moderate, do you find that the broken windows look bad to you, and damage our cause in your eyes? Here's a hot tip: Not everything is about you.

2. The crowd sometimes looks way more unified than it actually is. A big part of the mass-demonstration is the way it conjures a dialogue and interaction within itself. There are uncountable conversations happening in that crowd. Minds are being changed within it as well as without, and some random Youtuber, newscaster, or blogger is guaranteed to only catch and respond to a tiny fragment of that. (And that's what you see.)

3. Way more often than not, coming out in support of a thing means you are out in fresh air among friends, with a big smile on your face, ready to present your ideas to those who are open-minded but not interested in engaging with people who want to argue. You bring a sign but the slogan has a cheeky, humorous spin. You bring a picnic lunch. It's not necessarily about anger and struggle in the moment; it's about safety and inspiration among friends. But you'd never tell that from the churning, silent videos of the masses that make the backdrop of every talking head with an alarming opinion about it online.

But anyway...

I've written before about why these protests become world-wide news, and how little sense that makes. It's just novelty: If you live in a neighborhood where mass gatherings of angry and/or civic-minded people never happen, it's pretty interesting to watch. It's interesting in a way that regular humdrum things - like murder - just aren't. But as your eyeballs devour it, I think it's wise to consider the reason why it's there in the feed for you to click on in the first place, when so many other things aren't -- and what that says about the way your perception of the world is being narrowed, not widened, by that feed.

(As an aside, 88 people were murdered in Oakland last year, and I guarantee you did not hear about any of those murders from the front page of Yahoo or the Apple News app or wherever you get your daily squirt of reward-center hormones.)

Nothing's changed with the way local protests are exploited, and I don't want to repeat myself here. But I'd like to point out what has changed: After the last four years of wallowing in all this outrage and conspiracy, day after day, the entire country - including chunks of our media apparatus - has begun to exhibit a sort of immune response to it.

COVID-19 is the natural and immediate comparison: The pandemic forced our society into a state of fragmentation and suspicion, and to begin re-integrating with each other we needed to first find a vaccine. I sense a similar thing has happened in our collective culture, and we are now so sick of disunity we are deliberately turning away from news and entertainment and celebrities and politicians who court our attention by trying to inspire it. We're sick of fragmentation. We want to come back together. We want it viscerally.

Now, it's still early days for the new American presidency, and even though we clearly elected the most non-controversial, un-threatening, boring old caretaker uncle of a president we could possibly have nominated this time around, and that fact stands as the single biggest piece of evidence for my belief, I could still be wrong about it. Perhaps this flourishing of calls for unity and calm is just a brief lull, in the onslaught of rage and exploitation that social media has choked us with like forest-fire smoke for years now -- a lull caused by the focus of so many people's angst suddenly being silenced, like cutting the head off a screaming Twitter banshee -- and as soon as the collective news media and its various cuckoo-bird imitators find a replacement - perhaps a whole chorus of smaller banshees - we'll all tumble into that smoke again.

But I hope not. Because there's lots of work to do, and it's good work as well. Remember good, uncontroversial work? Wasn't that nice?

Aren't you so done, with giving your attention over to extremists, conspiracies, social shaming, calls to hate and reject, and impotent wailing about the end of the world? So many of us are. At some future point, when you can walk outside and talk in close quarters with new people - which hopefully will be soon for us all - why not keep that hopeful feeling going, by adding to efforts that do good without needing to declare an enemy out-group? There are so many. Conservation efforts, for example. Waste and pollution reduction efforts. Improvements in energy efficiency, changes in our attitude about communal spaces, about material needs... Hoooly crap there is so much better stuff to do than getting upset over what some dingus-of-the-week said on Twitter, no matter how awful it was.

And now, I will leave you with something that you might use for that kind of inspiration, but it comes with a warning: It may inspire you to action, but it will do so by first absolutely breaking your heart. So, don't follow that link unless you're in a place you are ready to rally from.

If you're not, do take care of yourself. And, drop me a note. I'll send you bits of poetry and photos of Mira until you're feeling a bit better.