If AI Is So Great, Why Do I Get So Much Spanish- And Chinese-Language Spam?

Generations ago, IBM was the dominant player in tech. It was said that you couldn't be fired if you went with IBM, but within a few years of when I started, people definitely began to be fired for going with IBM, and I was never much of a fan. But when I started thinking about this post, I found this piece at IBM's website that tries to give an overview of artificial intelligence, or AI. It's as good a start as any.

I decided I needed to update my own understanding of AI, because the tech billionaires who've lined up with Trump want to influence AI policy. It seems to me that there are two main fields within AI, massive database search and machine learning. Massive database search involves things like searching huge numbers of phone calls or e-mails for keywords or other associations to identify targets. Machine learning involves teaching computers to underatand, translate, and generate natural language, produce original text or works of art, or self-drive automobiles.

Massive database search really isn't new. One of my first tech jobs in the 1970s was with a company that produced a newspaper publishing system. One of its features was keyword search of the AP feed. You could put in a word like "food", and you'd get every incoming AP story that mentioned food, which would make the food editor's work that much easier. But at the time, the company had a hush-hush contract with one of the three-letter agencies to do a much more comprehensive search, maybe of all phone calls all over the world, that mentioned two or more particular keywords in the same message.

(At one point, I believe my sister, a highly capable linguist, had a contract to review the output of such a system, but I know little beyond that.) But this was all being done in the 1970s, it's nothing new. But let's keep in mind that for generations, the three-letter agencies, as well as their Russian, Israeli, and other counterparts, have been running these searches. Find all the phone calls that have the words "infidel", "martyr", "bomb", and "airplane" in any of eight languages. Find all the e-mails that have "Trump", "schedule", "AR-15", and "scope". Sort by relevance and pass it on to the appropriate agency.

And hey, they were doing that in the 1970s, right? Think how good they must have gotten with it by now! Think of Moore's Law, the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every two years with minimal rise in cost. Computer power has long since gone through the roof! With these sorts of tools, we no longer are caught by surprise with sudden invasions, terrorist attacks. or assassination attempts! They're all a thing of the past!

As far as I can see, the main concerns the tech billionaires like Musk, Mark Andreesen, or David Sacks have with AI are related to this sort of massive database search. Keep in mind that in the 1970s, the three-letter agencies were already able to do mass searches of phone calls, and that was before text messages or e-mails. Computer power has grown to keep up with that, as well as bank and credit card tranactions. If you buy a gun, the agencies know it, and they can put you on a watch list at will.

They can track your movements by phone and GPS. They know when you check in and out of your hotel, and when you go in and out of your room. AI just makes these searches faater and easier. The frontiers at this point are facial recognition and DNA. At least theoretically, it's just a matter of time before we have the DNA profiles of everyone, we'll be able not just to track, but to predict, their facial features, and if you say the wrong thing in a phone call, they'll know who you are and where to round you up.

This is part of what concerns Musk and the others, although they're more worried that the government will decide who gets the contracts to do all this and who's frozen out of the market. There are also legitimate concerns about privacy, but I'm just not sure if these aren't overrated.

For instance, let's take the case of the so-far unidentified perp who assassinated United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan: New York police use facial recognition as they work to identify suspect in killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO. How's that working out? They've got a cell phone, bullet shells, a backpack -- maybe he fled on an electric bike (which proably has a GPS tracker). Maybe he's in Atlanta. Maybe a camera caught him in a taxi. So far, he's still on the lam. Maybe they know his name, maybe not.

For that matter, think how AI can track my computer use. It must certainly know I'm white, over 65, my income, my health status, my address, my e-mail, my interests (railroads, history, politics), I speak German pretty well, because I have German correspondents and Facebook friends, as well as small Latin and less Greek. In fact, my German Facebook friends are mostly AfD. The agencies know all about me, and I'm sure about them as well, as does the BND, as does Google, as does Meta

So why do I get so much Spanish- and Chinese-language spam, but no German? That's my puzzle. Why can't they locate the guy who shot the healthcare CEO? Why couldn't they predict the nut jobs who tried to shoot Trump?

Almost from the day I started working in tech, I thought the whole thing smelled of boondoggle. IBM struck me as a yuge boondoggle at the time. AI, at this point, strikes me as the same thing.

What Does This Say About Their Judgment?

In yesterday's post, we saw how accounts suggest that Kamala Harris had the inside track for nomination as Joe's running mate in 2020, as well as a lock on designation to replace Joe as the Democrat nominee once he withdrew from the race last July. While some accounts attribute this influence to James Clyburn, I think the evidence points much more strongly to Nancy Pelosi, and to a slighly lesser extent, Barack Obama.

Numerous accounts have reported that Joe is angry at both Pelosi and Obama for forcing him out of the race, for instance:

Pelosi and Biden have not spoken since he stepped away. And the president’s anger flashed to the surface during a televised interview that aired this weekend when he namechecked the former speaker as he explained why he quit the race.

“And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic,” Biden told CBS. “You’d be interviewing me about why did Nancy Pelosi say, why did so — and — and I thought it’d be a real distraction.”

Biden also harbors some resentment that Obama — his friend and former boss — did not call him directly to voice his concerns about the campaign in the aftermath of the disastrous Atlanta debate in late June.

While Obama tweeted in support of Biden immediately after the debate, he then went publicly quiet. The former president did not try to stir up a movement to dislodge Biden from the top of the ticket, but he also didn’t quell one, much to the dismay of some of those closest to Biden, according to the three people.

This glosses over whether they also worked to install Kamala as Joe's replacement, but the references I've used for the past several days indicate that the near-immediate consensus in favor of Kamala wouldn't have taken place without their consent. But we still have the problem of Kamala's track record as a candidate in the 2020 primaries and what it said about her likelihood of success in 2024. Yesterday, Real Clear Politics linked to thois story from Roll Call, Kamala Harris lost, but how weak of a candidate was she?

Harris underperformed across the country, according to the Vote Above Replacement, or VAR, standard. And the dynamic wasn’t limited to critical battleground states but spread over Democratic and Republican territory alike.

Harris finished ahead of a typical Democratic candidate in just 13 states, ran even in Connecticut and underperformed the average Democrat in 36 states.

. . . The VAR metric measures the strength of political candidates relative to a typical candidate from their party within the same state.

. . . Harris’ performance mattered most in the key states that effectively decided the presidential election, and she didn’t do well.

The vice president underperformed a typical statewide Democrat in six of the seven preelection battlegrounds, including Michigan (-2.7 VAR), Arizona (-2.4), Nevada (-1.2), Pennsylvania (-1.2), North Carolina (-0.9) and Wisconsin (-0.9). The only battleground state where she overperformed was Georgia, where the new Democratic Baseline is 47.6 percent and Harris received 48.5 percent of the vote.

The Democrat establishment, presumably led by Obama and Pelosi, already had Harris's track record in plain sight in front of them -- yes, she was potentially an attractive candidate, but faced with bad poll numbers that made donors hesitate, she was forced to end her 2020 primary campaign in Decemvber of 2019, even before the Iowa caucuses. What was her appeal to the kingmakers, who despite her record as a campaigner, wired her in as the 2020 vice presidential pick and then the 2024 presidential candidate?

Let's recall, as I outlined yesterday, that the Democrat establishment promoted Harris despite her electoral record, first as a vice presidential candidate, but then they made her the presidential candidate in 2024 after discouraging any serious primary contests that spring. I think the only explanation is that they were aware of how far left she was, not just as a 2019 campaigner but as a US senator, and they thought it wasn't a bug, it was a feature:

Vice President Kamala Harris served in the Senate between 2017 and 2021, providing a legislative record that allows her to be located along the left-right continuum that dominates legislative behavior in the Congress. Based on her roll call voting record, Harris is the second-most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the Senate in the 21st century.

The obstacle, at least to conventional minds, was that she'd eventually have to get elected, but she'd lasted as far as she had as a national candidate by avoiding elections with the help of Obama and Pelosi. In August of 2023, I noted,

the Democrats can't dump Biden, because as an old white guy who isn't Bernie Sanders, he's the last vestige of the New Deal coalition, and any successor will inevitably be just an unelectable front for one or another leftist splinter faction of the old party.

I brought this up in the context of the "Götterdämmerung strategy", that if yuou know the world is going to end on a date certain, for instance the giant asteroid is going to hit the planet, you run up your credit cards in the weeks and months before in the knowledge you'll never have to pay them off. They were going to put a leftist in, no matter what, and the results were actually predictable. They probably knew the likely outcome themselves.

If you look at Kamala this way, she was the Götterdämmerung candidate, certainly Mrs Pelosi's last hurrah. But Götterdämmerung isn't a governing strategy.

So, Again, Why Did Joe Pick Kamala For VP In 2020?

We saw yesterday that, although the conventional wisdom says Joe made a deal with Rep James Clyburn to choose an African-American woman in return for Clyburn's endorsement in the South Carolina primary, Clyburn's version of events was that before the primary, his only ask was that he commit to nominating a black woman to the Supreme Court. CBS News gave another Clyburn account in August 2020, after Joe announced Kamala as his pick:

"I was part of the vetting. Then they were doing polling and I said to him, when all of that's over, you let your head and your heart take a look and you go with that" Clyburn told CBSN anchor Anne-Marie Green. "I spoke to him the day before he reached his conclusion and he said to me at the time, 'I am having a little war between my head and my heart. When that is reconciled, I will give you a call and let you know what my decision is.'"

Clyburn, a close ally of one of Biden's VP candidates Representative Karen Bass, said he supported all 12 women on the short list, including the four African-American women who were "seriously considered."

Again, there's no reference to any specific tit-for-tat here. On March 17, 2020, Politico reported on the early selection process:

Joe Biden’s confirmation of the biggest open secret in politics — that he would pick a woman as his running mate — was just the start of a thorny selection process that touches not only on gender but race, geography, experience and personal chemistry.

The array of choices in play, according to Biden advisers and allies, reflects the competing forces bearing down on Biden as he looks to the general election. Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren are top names. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto are also in the mix.

There’s a powerful current of thought in Democratic circles that Biden needs to choose a black woman after African American electorate indisputably revived his campaign in South Carolina and the South. But it’s by no means a certainty.

“I think it’s necessary for it to be a woman and I prefer an African-American woman. That’s my preference,” Majority Whip Jim Clyburn told POLITICO in an interview. Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden before South Carolina’s Feb. 29 primary was a transformative moment for the Biden campaign.

But it's hard to avoid thinking the list of all those potential candidates was mostly for public consumption. After Joe annouinced Kamala as his choice in August, CNN had this analysis:

Harris, who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year, had been the front-runner to be Biden’s pick for months because, well, she simply made sense.

It goes on with a list of blah-blah reasons, she's experienced, she's from California, she has national exposure, young, historic, blah blah blah. But it continued,

See, if you are Joe Biden, making your third run for president and ahead in virtually every swing state and nationally over President Donald Trump, every day between now and November 3 you want to do nothing that threatens to change the underlying dynamics of the race.

. . . What Biden did is make the pick that maximized his chances of continuing to make the race a straight referendum on Trump while also selecting someone, in Harris, whose resume suggests will be ready to step in if and when Biden decides to step aside.

Reports from that time, though, all suggest Kamala had been the front runner all along. The references to Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, or Gretchen Whitmer were never anything but polite. I also think that in his interviews later in the selection process, Clyburn is probably giving himself more credit than he deserves for influencing Joe's decision -- what we know about Joe at this point is that he's not very smart, and with what intelligence he has, he's not an independent thinker.

In particular, according to Forbes, Kamala had a 20-year alliance with Barack Obama:

Harris endorsed Obama in his primary against Hillary Clinton and volunteered for his campaign, including knocking on doors for him in Iowa, according to multiple outlets.

Days before Obama’s inauguration, comparisons between Harris and Obama gained national attention when journalist Gwen Ifill appeared on the “Late Show with David Letterman,” and said Harris “has a bright future and they call her the ‘female Barack Obama.’”

. . . Harris is floated as a potential replacement for Holder after he announces he’s stepping down; though she publicly said in 2014 she wasn’t interested in the job, Holder told the Post Obama discussed her in 2015 as a possible successor, and the then-attorney general called Harris to “gauge her interest” in the role.

. . . Harris met with Obama twice during her first presidential run in the 2020 primaries and spoke with him by phone, according to CNN, though Obama never formally endorsed a candidate in the race until now-President Joe Biden became the presumptive nominee.

The alliance between Nancy Pelosi and Kamala isn't as clear, but according to USA Today, they both came up through the California Democrat machine:

San Francisco, like many cities, has core political families that shape the political landscape. Harris and Pelosi would both come through what locals call the “Burton-Brown machine.”

Former Democratic Rep. Phil Burton organized a coalition made up of labor, civil rights leaders, and gay and Asian voters to win control of the city from Republicans in the 1950s.

. . . When Burton died of heart failure in 1983, his wife, Sala Burton, succeeded him. Four years later, on her own deathbed, Sala Burton made it clear who she wanted to replace her: Nancy Pelosi.

. . . A few years later, Harris would begin making a name for herself in political circles. A prosecutor in the Alameda County District Attorney's office, she formed friendships and developed allies within the local political world. Those friendships led to a position in the San Francisco district attorney’s office and a short-lived romantic relationship with Brown, along with several state board positions and involvement in local campaigns.

Harris was elected California attorney general in 2010. Six years later, when Democrat Barbara Boxer retired from the U.S. Senate, Harris ran for that seat and won, placing her in the same office where she interned under Sen. Alan Cranston of California during college.

None of these steps would have taken place without Pelosi's approval as head of the California machine. It's hard for me to avoid thinking Kamala was both Obama's and Pelosi's choice for Biden's running mate in 2020, and this was transmitted to Joe, well before any public announcement.

As we've been seeing, Kamala was regarded by insiders as the front-runner to be vice president nominee in 2020, and she was the front-runner to replace Joe when Joe was forced out last July. Kamala was wired iin as Joe's replacement, as far as I can see, at least from the start of the 2020 primary season. But this raises its own question: Kamala was a disastrous candidate in that same priomary season. She withdrew from the race in December 2019.

Why was she so well-regarded by Pelosi and Obama that they'd wire her in as Joe's presumptive successor from the start?

I Haven't Seen Anyone Asking About The 2024 Democrat Primaries

I keep coming up with questions nobody else is asking -- for instance, although we hear leaks now and then about how insiders were getting worried about Joe's cognitive decline at least by early this year, why were the national and state Democrats working so hard to discourage serious primary campaigns for other candidates? For instance, Bobby Kennedy Jr originally planned to run as a Democrat in the primaries. Via PBS in October 2023,

Longtime environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday he will run for president as an independent and drop his Democratic primary bid, adding a wrinkle to a 2024 race heading toward a likely rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

. . . Kennedy has spent weeks accusing the DNC of “rigging” the party’s primary against him and threatening that he might need to consider alternatives.

In campaign emails and videos, he blasted the DNC’s decision not to host debates between Biden and other candidates and railed against the committee’s plan to give South Carolina rather than Iowa or New Hampshire the leadoff spot on the primary calendar this election cycle.

Dean Phillips was only slightly more successful with a primary campaign, suspending it on March 6 of this year following Super Tuesday. According to Wikipedia,

Phillips has objected to being left off the primary ballots of several states by their respective Democratic parties, including in Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

. . . On November 9, 2023, asserting that his campaign was hampered by ballot access policies and a lack of candidate debates, Phillips issued an apology to Bernie Sanders, regretting his previous disbelief towards Sanders's 2016 campaign's complaints of biased rules by the DNC governing the presidential primary. When asked for comment, Sanders responded, "He's changed his views now that he's a candidate? I'm not getting involved in this."

Phillips accused representatives of the Biden campaign of pressuring liberal media outlets to not platform him. Phillips also accused the Democratic National Committee of actively obstructing Democrats and Independents from ballot access — “bleeding campaigns dry” by handing out lawsuits against non-incumbent candidates and "absurd signature requirements["].

Phillips announced his candidacy in October 2023, only a short time after Kennedy decided to run as an independent. Here is ABC News's assessment at the time:

The congressman's campaign is motivated by concerns over Biden's electability given Democrats' apprehensions about the president's advanced age (he'll be 81 in November), poor approval rating (40 percent in 538's national average) and early general election polls that may foreshadow a difficult race against Trump.

Clearly some Democrats were looking at Biden's chances realistically, but thery were a small minority. ABC contniues,

Phillips has laid out one chief campaign goal: Ensuring Democrats defeat Trump in 2024. However, the two paths he's set out for how to do that don't seem especially viable — and are also somewhat incongruous. One route involves him actually winning the nomination and offering a stronger (and notably younger) opponent to Trump. But Phillips's path to defeating Biden in the Democratic primary looks vanishingly small. . . . Moreover, to have any shot at success, he probably should have launched his campaign much earlier in the election cycle.

The second option, according to Phillips, is that his challenge will push Biden with a tough primary campaign that better prepares Biden for the rigors of facing Trump. But despite his intentions, the little-known congressman may risk damaging Biden ahead of the general election by indirectly calling attention to the president's weaknesses.

But he was an obscure figure who started late and attracted little money, while the Democrat establishment's strategy of discouraging serious primary challenges to Biden proved successful. We must assume this strategy had the assent of other powerful Democrats, including Obama and Pelosi. But after effectively eliminating challenges to Joe during the regular primnary season, Pelosi had this to say once Joe was pushed aside for Kamala in July:

Former Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi insisted on Wednesday that her party's presidential nominating process after President Biden dropped out was "open," and Vice President Kamala Harris "won it," despite the absence of any such contest.

Prior to Biden stepping down as the Democratic Party's nominee in mid-July, Pelosi reportedly said she favored a competitive open primary process to replace him if needed. On Wednesday, Semafor’s Kadia Goba asked Pelosi if she had changed her mind after seeing all the "excitement" Harris generated when she was tapped to replace Biden.

"No, I didn't change my mind. We had an open primary and [Kamala Harris] won it. Nobody else got in the race," Pelosi said. "Yes people could have jumped in – there were some people who were sort of preparing, but she just took off with it, and actually it was a blessing because there was not that much time between then and the election and it sort of saved time."

So Pelosi's idea of primaries 2.0 wasn't much different from her idea of primaries 1.0, namely, no primaries. It's intriguing that Harris withdrew from the 2020 primary race in late 2019, before even the Iowa caucuses, yet Biden chose her as his running mate despite her lack of national stature. This brings us to another question nobody is asking: why, really, did Biden choose Harris as his running mate in 2020? Beyond that, why was she chosen, unopposed, to replace Biden as the nominee in 2024, having bypassed any primary process?

Here is the conventional wisdom behind the choices:

South Carolina’s most influential Democrat endorsed Biden just three days before the Palmetto State’s 2020 primary and changed the course of the election. It propelled Biden to victory after a dismal fourth-place finish in Iowa, a dreadful fifth-place finish in New Hampshire and a distant second-place finish in Nevada. Here’s the story behind it.

The day before Clyburn endorsed Biden was the day of a candidate debate. And the day before that, Clyburn made what the 2021 book “Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency” by NBC’s Jonathan Allen and The Hill’s Amie Parnes called a political “ask” — “the favor a politician requests in return when he is granting one” — of Biden.

“Find a way to say that you were a part of picking the first Latina woman member of the United States Supreme Court and you’re looking forward to making the first African American woman a member of the United States Supreme Court,” Clyburn told Biden the day before the debate.

Yet a full hour and 45 minutes into the debate at a Charleston concert hall, Biden had not promised to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Clyburn rushed backstage in a commercial break, found Biden and cautioned him privately, “I’m telling you, don’t you leave the stage tonight without making it known that you will do that.”

The rest is history.

But the rest isn't history. Even in this version, all Clyburn demanded was an African-American woman nominee to the Supreme Court, not a vice presidential running mate. And in this version, a promise to do the Supreme Court nomination was what got Joe Clyburn's must-have support in the primary the next day. The African-American woman running mate, at least in this apparently authoritative version, wasn't even part of the 2020 deal between Joe and Clyburn.

So this doesn't really explain how Kamala got the vice presidential nod, and that means it's even more puzzling that, as Pelosi put it, "nobody else got in the race" when Joe stepped down. Over the months before Joe dropped out, the front-runner for his replacement, Gavin Newsom, first failed to become a primary opponent and then slowly withdrew from the public eye, pledging his support for Joe all the way. I strongly suspect Nancy Pelosi was behind this -- I think she had been clearing the way for Harris long before Joe's health became a top issue.

I actuaally think the Clyburn story itself is a smoke screen, the Harris choice probably came from others in the Democrat establishment, primarily Obama amd Pelosi. That she was a poor candidate in 2019-20 didn't matter, they were going to byhpass elections fom the start, as they effectively did in 2020.

And Joe's health was never a decisive issue. Joe would be bullied out under the threat of the 25th Amendment at some point, just preferably after the election, but Kamala was always going to be in the plan. That was a big reason they didn't want primaries in 2024.

I suspect something like this will eventually come out.

"It'll Be Fine. . . "

The public dialogue has been all about Trump's cabinet nominees, but the question that still won't go away for me, and nobody's talking about, is why the Democrat leadership never came up with a Plan B over Biden before the time to reoplace him was long past. The suggestions we had last summer were that at least by the start of the year, insiders were shocked at Joe's cognitive decline, but as far as I can tell, nobody did anything about it.

Isn't that where the history of the 2024 campaign should start? But that means we should go back to 2020. From February of that year:

Former Vice President Joe Biden's poor showing in the New Hampshire and Iowa primaries this week — and Bernie Sanders' strong performance in both — are terrifying the Democratic party's top managers and fundraisers.

We got to taste that fear when Obama-era Secretary of State John Kerry was overheard on a phone call in a hotel lobby in Des Moines, Iowa, telling someone that voters "now have the reality of Bernie" and it would lead to "the possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party — down whole."

At that point, the Democrat establishment focused on Joe as the best alternative to Sanders. By March,

The Democratic empire is quickly aligning its forces to strike back at Bernie Sanders.

First, billionaire Tom Steyer dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination after former Vice President Joe Biden romped to victory in the South Carolina primary Saturday.

Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., exited in quick succession Sunday and Monday and were expected to endorse Biden at a rally in Texas on the eve of the Super Tuesday contests that will pick roughly one-third of the delegates to the Democratic convention. Amid the candidate dominoes, a legion of current and former party officials threw their weight behind Biden, who had all but been left for dead by party elites a couple of weeks ago.

"It reflects the urgency of what we’re going into on Super Tuesday," said Adrienne Elrod, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton's bids for the presidency. "That's a big show of force that the left-of-center wing of the Democratic Party is consolidating around Joe because they understand what’s at stake, they understand the urgency, and they don’t want this to be handed to Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday."

This narrative suggests that Democrat insiders were fully aware of Joe's weaknesses, but the alternative was Sanders. The problem wasn't that Sanders was a red diaper baby -- they were all for that -- the problem was that the voters knew it, and Sanders couldn't win in November. In fact, it would be a repeat of 1972 or 1988; it could put the party's future in jeopardy.

So they decided to dress Joe up as a centrist and use Covid as an excuse to run a basement campaign. while also using the health scare to curtail Trump's ability to hold rallies. This covered up Joe's weaknesses as a campaigner while limiting Trump's strengths. Meanwhile, the deep state was used to discount issues like Hunter's laptop while planting the idea Trump was a Russian agent.

Finally, the Democrats could rely on big-city machines to manipulate the vote counts in key districts. This put Joe over the top, barely, that November. Once he was in, the people who really ran things could implement a program that was little different from anything Sanders could have imagined.

What puzzles me is that the Democrats on one hand were fully aware of both the weaknesses of their platform and the weaknesses of Joe as a candidate, but they never seem to have seen the need to adjust their strategy from the 2020 model, especially to find a replacement for Joe.

By 2024, Covid was no longer an excuse either to run a basement campaign or to claim Trump's rallies were a health risk. The Republicans had also learned a major lesson from 2020 and had teams of lawyers ready to challenge any attempts to delay counting, which paid off in places like Pennsylvania and Arizona, which had had those problems in 2020.

But the biggest question is still why Biden was allowed to run for a second term. It appears that behind the scenes, to make himself more attractive as the 2020 candidate, he was unofficially making it known that he would be a one-termer. According to The Hill, which was asking about this just this past June,

[T]he report most cited by those who believe a one-term promise was in place was from Politico in December 2019. “Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term,” reported Ryan Lizza. “While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.”

Lizza would go on to quote “four people who regularly talk to Biden” who said “it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024.” One “prominent adviser to the campaign” said explicitly, “he won’t be running for reelection.” That same advisor said that by signaling this one-term run, it would make the candidate a “good transition figure.”

That “transition” line is important, because it’s one Biden himself used publicly and on the record. “I view myself as a transition candidate,” Biden said at an online fundraiser in April 2020. In March of that year, at a rally where his eventual VP pick Kamala Harris was by his side, he used similar language: “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.”

As we now know, that turned into a bridge to nowhere. By March 2021, Biden was saying something entirely different. “My plan is to run for reelection. That’s my expectation,” he said shortly after he was inaugurated.

Well, this is the Joe Biden we've come to know, manifested most recently in his pledge not to pardon Hunter. But the question is still why powerful figures like Obama snd Pelosi allowed this to happen. After all, if Obama, Pelosi, and Harris could show Joe the door last June, they could just as well have done it a year earlier. They could have organized a donor strike in 2023 as easily as in 2024, for instance.

Barring other developments, I'll speculate about this tomorrow.

They're Shocked, Shocked!

Last night I was stuggling thbough one of those dreams where I start to suspect I'm dreaming, but the dream keeps going on so long that I decide maybe I had it wrong, maybe this is real life after all. When I finally did wake up, I realized with a start how many of the quasi-realist Edward Hopper's paintings, especially those with people in them, are actually dream images. Forget Salvador Dali, check out Edward Hopper.

Then it occurred to me how many people seem to be reacting to Joe's pardoning his wayward son Hunter a little as though they're waking up from a dream.

It's been a strange six months.

First, Biden wasn’t “sharp as a tack.” He was sick and diminished. Next, Trump wasn’t a Nazi: He’s the president-elect of the United States with a majority mandate. Record numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and 65% of Native Americans supported him. Kamala Harris was a lousy candidate, wasted billions of dollars, and owes her #2 position to her ethnicity and gender. And finally, it’s now perfectly clear that Joe Biden was lying about never pardoning Hunter Biden.

But this neglects all the dream images that extend farther back, the Kafka-like prosecutions, the delusional E Jean Carroll having rape fantasies about Donald Trump in his younger days, Fani Willis and her boyfriend, the Red Queen penalties and the threats of Rikers Island, the Butler assassination attempt and the visuals of rebirth -- it's been quite a year, not just six monmths, and we're still assimilating it. This tweet comes a little closer to the issues:

There’s a ton to be said on the Hunter pardon, but for now:

The real worrisome part about the undeniable fact that the First Family (not just Hunter!) was so flamboyantly corrupt was that the entirety of the government legal and intelligence apparatus worked overtime to let it…

— Mike Howell (@MHowellTweets) December 2, 2024

There are other good questions:

The timing of the pardon is also notable. It comes before Hunter’s sentencing and hours before Joe exits the country for a few days with his numbskull White House Press Secretary who, just a couple of weeks ago, assured us Hunter would not benefit with a pardon.

. . . Joe obviously wanted to pardon Hunter before his sentencing. This trip to Africa was likely planned in advance to get Joe and his dim-witted press secretary out of the country at the same time. . . But here’s what I’m most curious about.

What about Joe Biden? What about Joe’s brother James?

. . . You see, by pardoning Hunter, Joe made himself and his brother even more vulnerable to prosecution. Because there is no longer any legal jeopardy for Hunter, Hunter cannot plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination.

. . . In less than a month, the media misinformed their residual customers on two of the biggest stories of the last few years: Trump’s comeback and this appalling pardon. Will these residual customers ever get tired of having absolutely no idea what’s going on or what will happen? Kamala’s in the lead. Joe will never pardon Hunter. The border is secure. Inflation is transitory. Violent crime has decreased.

There's a whole frammis that's collapsing here -- but there's even potentially a lot more. I've been posting that we know almost nothing about the discussions that took place among Obama, Pelosi, and Harris about Joe's cognitive decline -- not that it was any surprise to them, but that even with the help of the media, it could no longer be covered up.

It's hard to avoid thinking that for whatever reason, they planned on the basis that the coverup could continue as it had indefinitely, but maybe down the road, after Joe's re-election, they could invoke the 25th Amendment and put Kamala in without any fuss. That had probably been wired in for quite some time.

Once it became clear the coverup wouldn't work any longer, but it was too late to have primaries, they had to cobble up a whole new Plan B from scratch. I think Kamala was in on this, and she knew she was the planned successor all along. The need for an actual campaign and election caught everyone by surprise. Will we ever learn more?

Who was actually running the country while Joe was doddering at the beach? We know next to nothing about this. Who's running the country now, for that matter, once Joe has skedaddled to Angola?

By the way, what happened with that whole 2020 election? Seems lile a big part of the past year was almost a national recognition that we got things wrong in that election, and we got a do-over. Maybe the J6ers had a point, huh?

This is going to be a long process.

Conserative Treehouse And The Finpolity

I've been using Ferdinand Lumdberg's model of the finpolity that he outlined in The Rich and the Super-Rich (1968) as vehicle to understand this year's political developments. It turns out that Sundance, the blogger at Conservative Treehouse, has a parallel explanation that doesn't reference Lundberg or finpols, but it assumes a very similar theory of the wealthiest actors working to advance interlocking interests. He outlines what he thinks is the current state of the game in this post:

In late summer 2023 not only myself, but several insightful analysts in the world of high finance, had come to the conclusion that Musk’s financial effort with the purchase of Twitter was unsustainable, unless something changed.

Something did change.

In early August of 2023, understanding the dynamic at stake, and also having a strategy for his own interests, Oracle’s Larry Ellison said, ‘he would not let Elon Musk fail with Twitter’.

Billionaire Larry Ellison, a Tesla Board member, already had invested money in place, but that wasn’t the motive on this move. In hindsight, Ellison was brilliant and intensely strategic.

Sundance linked to a Wall Street Journal article behind a paywall, Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Is Now the Worst Buyout for Banks Since the Financial Crisis. It begins,

The seven banks involved in the deal, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, lent the money to the billionaire’s holding company to take the social-media platform, now named X, private in October 2022. Banks that provide loans for takeovers generally sell the debt quickly to other investors to get it off their balance sheets, making money on fees.

Let's recall that Musk's takeover of Twitter prompted widespread efforts to boycott Twitter advertisers. Clearly there was a sense that Musk had misjudged this move, and it would fail. It looks like the banks that had made the loan weren't gping to be able to lay it off to the other investors. Sundance continues,

Ellison pumped money into the problem, relieving Musk of the cash flow problem created by his inability to divest shares (Musk was max-limited by Board). Ellison also helped make the $1.5 billion loan made by SpaceX, (unknown at the time) go away.

Ellison essentially positioned Twitter for the same dynamic reason that Bezos bought and used WaPo. This is the world of high finance, and these moves are all about influence, leverage and ultimately positioning. Ellison wanted a vessel for influence, a friendship and common ideological alignment therein just made sense.

Let's just back off and refer to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. As of November 22, it listed Elon Musk at number 1, net worth $347.8 billion; Jeff Bezos as number 2, net worth $218.5 billion; Larry Ellison as number 3, net worth $206.1 billion; and Mark Zuckerberg as number 4, net worth $198.1 billion. Over the past couple of weeks, Musk himself has been camped out at Mar-a-Lago, presumably keeping his silent partner Ellison abreast of developments. Zuckerberg came to dinner at Mar-a-Lago the day before Thanksgiving.

Earlier, Jeff Bezos notably told the hired help at the Washington Post that they wouldn't be making an endorsement in the presidential race. The wealthiest men in the world -- that is, the finpolity -- are adjusting to the changed conditions. Sundance continues,

Oracle, specifically Larry Ellison, is now positioned as the biggest benefactor of a second Trump administration, with a very specific group of technocrats in close alignment.

. . . It should be emphasized up front that no one is a bad guy in the framework of what took place; however, neither is this altruism.

These are essentially self-interests in a common alignment. As long as the alignment is for good purposes, then the network of billionaire allies is in a very cool place.

. . . In August 2023 President Trump understands that Twitter will survive. Ellison will not let Musk fail and will underwrite whatever is needed in order to ensure success. Everything candidate Trump does from that moment forth, carries that baseline.

Now, in August 2023 Larry Ellison was not saying, hey Trump I support you; instead, the reality of what the Oracle billionaire was saying was that Twitter would survive.

. . . In the spring of 2024, the broad outline of a technocratic team falls slowly into place. By summer 2024 we see Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, David [Sacks], Peter Thiel all in common alignment. The technocratic team bring in the RFK Jr element along with the Vivek Ramaswamy element, and Peter Thiel’s background seeding of Senator JD Vance blossoms. The rest, as they say, is now history.

However, it is important to remember, this is an alignment of common interests. Insofar as those diverse but intertwined interests are good for the USA, then this is an extremely powerful coalition. There is a great deal of commonality, but there is also the opportunity for some disparity – especially if the technocrats push the Office of the President too hard.

Thiel, by the way, is #146 on the billionaiure index, net worth $15.3 billion. David Sacks, not on the index, has a net worth of $200 million. Vivek Ramaswamy's net worth just recently reached $1 billion, but he doesn't yet seem to have been ranked on the index. We may definirtely assume, though, that these lesser figures are allgned with Musk and have interlocking interests with him, Ellison, and Zuckerberg.

None of these men is an altruist. They are finpols or finpol wannabes, looking to form political alliances as part of their goals for their own aggrandizement. This requires that they have access to the levers that control public life, and it's no surprise that Musk made a major (and very risky) investment in media, while Zuckerberg's wealth comes from media almost entirely. For now, it looks like their overall purposes may have a positive effect, but they are not primarily altruistic.

But John D Rockefeller, after all, saved the whales.