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[ by Charless Cameron — frankly, waiting for a return to wisdom, or at least something closer to it ]
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In the White House there’s an inscription over the mantel of the State Dining Room which reads:

I Pray Heaven To Bestow The Best Of Blessings On This House And All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof.

That’s from our first president, John Adams, in his letter to his wife, Abigail, but it resonates down to our day.

How do we recognize wisdom?

I don’t believe we can legislate that only the honest and wise can attain the presidency, though we might do well to have Robert Bolt‘s Thomas More in A Man for all Seasons at the head of the Justice department — Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor of England who famously said, answering Roper who said he’d cut down all the laws to offer the Devil no protection:

Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

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Thomas More was, no doubt a man with his own flaws, and the flaws of his times. Flaws, okay.

Where is a true sense of justice? Of honor? Of integrity? Where is a man for all seasons?

[ by Charles Cameron — on the East Coast at least, this can pass for a Thanksgiving greeting ]
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I’ve been away sick for a while, with no notes on form, paradox, quincunx etc — but on my return, couldn’t resist this medieval ouroborus of a cat, courtesy Emily Stein

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On the games politics gets compared with, we’ve seen various dimensions of chess, go, and also multi-game mixes such as Alasdair MacIntyre‘s assessment that we’re in a game where “moving one’s knight to QB3 may always be replied to by a lob over the net” — or CalvinBall.

At the opposite end of complexity is simplicity, and there’s no simplicity to compare with PacMan, surely. and as WaPo noted a short while back:

One Republican operative in frequent contact with the White House described Mueller’s team “working through the staff like Pac-Man.”

That’s pretty cool — but is it as cool as Trump’s own use of Hillary-PacMan from a while ago:

— and note that Trump also used PokemonGO in his campaign.

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And myself? I’m hoping to return to form, too, slowly. It’s great to have a computer after a year without.

I expect David Ronfeldt has noted the increasing usw of “tribal om MSNBC and elsewhere, though I’ve mainly seen it on TV without time to rewind & verify, take notes, etc. It has seemed quite remarkable to me, and I wonder whether Jim Gant or David have seen the same.

Greetings, all, Happy Thanksgiving — let’s talk, let’s stir the pot!

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As sea levels rise, so also..

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I am truly sorry to say this, but as
the globe warms, so warms the cube..

A heatwave emanating from a black stone
sweeps the desert:
will hit and kill pilgrims, is
already hitting and killing handfulls
among the millions of pilgrims
as they approach the stone,
but there will be –
I am truly sorry to say this,
may God forfend it —
there will be disasters at the stone,
hundreds, thousands dead of sheer heat exhaustion,
and the government will order
stricter controls on pilgrims,
that they be in best health,
physician verified,
that they carry much water
against dehydration,
wishing the sun itself were other
than it is, under the mercy,
where no legislation can forestall it,
attempting traffic control
against a myridad photons, light
in the niche for lights.

Pilgrimage is compulsory, thus
after the city has been shut down,
the last strays and hiders
pried from their places by special police,
some few from around the gasping
globe still will strive
with devotion
to make their way toward Mecca
and the cube on the globe,
the black stone,
some, after the last police have withdrawn,
still arriving, circling the stone,
holding tight to the thought that Ali
was born within the cube,
athirst with devotion, with dehydration
ablaze, pressing in to die
where Ali was born,
and one, one shall be the last to die there.

I grieve for that last, now,
some few decades ahead of the obvious,
to which we are oblivious —
the oncoming, blasphemous, wave.

[Mark Safranski/ “zen”]

Dr. Robert Bunker emailed to alert me that the Strategic Studies Institute has released his monograph Armed Robotic Systems Emergence: Weapons Systems Life Cycles Analysis and New Strategic Realities. From the synopsis:

Armed robotic systems—drones and droids—now emerging on the battlefield portend new strategic realities not only for U.S. forces but also for our allies and future potential belligerents. Numerous questions of immediate warfighting importance come to mind with the fielding of these drones and droids that are viewed as still being in their experimental and entrepreneurial stage of development. By drawing upon historical weapons systems life cycles case studies, focusing on the early 9th through the mid-16th-century knight, the mid-19th through the later 20th-century battleship, and the early 20th through the early 21st-century tank, the monograph provides military historical context related to their emergence, and better allows both for questions related to warfighting to be addressed, and policy recommendations related to them to be initially provided.

Bunker correctly explains the degree to which this topic has already been overhyped and that Ai that could operate even at the level of “a trained animal” is at best a prospect for the near term future. To use an aerial analogy, autonomous combat droids today are not in the era of the fragile WWI biplane but really something closer to Orville and Wilbur Wright’s bicycle shop before Kitty Hawk. Bunker’s use of a historical, evolutionary framework for armed robotics is apt.

Nevertheless, the subject continues to captivate the media and our think tanks. Here for purposes of comparison was the 2014 CNAS report Prepare for Robotic Warfare by Robert Work, later Deputy Secretary of Defense under Presidents Obama and Trump, and CNAS VP Shawn Brimley. There are other similar studies to be found online. Driving this is the logical inevitability (which tech is far from catching up to) that robotic warfare systems, if done to economies of scale, would be effective force multipliers, especially for smaller powers or deep-pocketed private entities and insurgent groups.

Someday.

[Mark Safranski / “zen“]

 “Jack Hays“.  Mr. Hays has considerable experience in a number of political and policy positions inside government and out and shares with the ZP readership our appreciation for history, strategy and other things further afield. He wrote this brief essay elsewhere and gave permission to share it freely.

Nearly the entirety of American history resolves to an argument over whether the Declaration of Independence is true. If all men are created equal and the sole legitimate purpose of government is to secure liberties conferred by a Creator, then those premises yield a series of imperatives that tend inexorably to the expansion of the American promise to all men of all origins.

This is not a new observation: to the contrary, it has been the engine of our life as a free people. To paraphrase Ferling in his epic 2015 “Whirlwind,” the American Revolution did not end monstrous injustices like slavery — and by implication every societal oppression rooted in a denial of man’s nature — but it made inevitable their end. Throughout the history of the republic we see Americans return again and again to this: that however awful the circumstantial particulars of America, the only hope is the fulfillment of the aspirational idea of America. So we see Frederick Douglass, a former slave at the apogee of the slave power, nonetheless declare the Constitution a “glorious liberty document.” So we see Abraham Lincoln conclude that the Declaration inexorably moves his governance to the end of enslavement. So we see Jose de la Luz Saenz, a south-Texas schoolteacher in a decade when the Texas Rangers waged a campaign of murder and terror against Mexican-Americans like him, respond with enthusiasm to his draft notice to serve in the First World War — and exhort his students to remember George Washington and Valley Forge in his farewell. So we see Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ascend the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and declare that he has come to redeem the “promissory note” of the American Founding.

So we see my father, who attended a (de facto) segregated elementary school in the Rio Grande Valley and was told as a child that as a Mexican, he should be “realistic” about his prospects in life, join the United States Air Force and serve America in war and peace.

On the one side, you have these Americans. They see America and her imperfections with immediacy and pain. But they also see the ideas and symbols of America, and they understand that these things are for them too. And they know their only recourse is the “appeal to heaven” — and the appeal to America’s promise.

On the other side, you have the others: those across nearly two and a half centuries who have argued, implicitly or explicitly, that the Declaration of Independence is a lie: either because its core assertions are false, or because America is so corrupted by its nature that those assertions are effectively fiction, un-fulfillable and kept vital as an opiate to the masses. There have been many of these too.

So, on the one hand you have the American Founders, Lincoln, Douglass, King, Saenz, and every single man and woman who saw the flag or read the Declaration and believed that this too was for them and their children.

On the other hand you have His Majesty George III of Great Britain, John C. Calhoun, the Confederate States of America, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the alt-right, and all the Pittsburgh Steelers save one.

Choose your side.