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[ by Charles Cameron — my latest, written for a mil scenario-planning audience ]
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Think of the cognitive humility I propose in this piece as prepping your attitude to the future. My black swans themselves aren’t the point — it’s your attitude that counts.

My opening paras, from Assessing Black Swans and their Pre-Incident Indicators at Divergent Options:

Watching a black swan take off is instructive. It starts, invisibly, on the lake of time, skeeting with wing-flaps to gain speed, achieves lift-off, after quite a while, and whang, whang, whang, ups itself to optimal speed and altitude – at which point we, in our hide in the marshes, recognize “Hey, there’s a black swan here,” and note where on the lake of time the occurrence occurred. National security analysts often opine on Black Swan Events, which are events that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and are often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. Equally if not more important than the Black Swan Event are the pre-incident indicators of the event, the flaps of the swan’s wings if you will, that enabled the Black Swan to take flight.

A first flap might have been Ramon Llull’s devices for calculating all possible knowledge by means of wheels and tables. As History-Computer.com suggests, “One can ask ‘What exactly is Ramon Llull’s place in the history of computers and computing?’ The answer is Llull is one of the first people who tried to make logical deductions in a mechanical, rather than a mental way.” On the lake of time, that preliminary wing-flap occurs around 1275 CE. Llull, a Franciscan, was called Doctor Illuminatus, and beatified by the Church in 1514 CE.

Skipping a few possible Renaissance wing-flaps…

Read the rest here>

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FYI, a black swan in flight!

By JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4763688

[ by Charles Cameron — actually, I think the IC keeps its eyes fixed on threats, foreign and domestic, as required ]
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Five Eyes is, as most Zenpundit readers will know, the intelligence-sharing arrangement between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US. Well, at the moment it’s squinting. From the day before yesterday:

The Independent, It’s like nothing we have come across before

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The attorney general is focusing on the theory, aired on far-right conspiracy sites, and raised by Trump and Giuliani, that Ukraine framed Vladimir Putin over the US election in a complex triple-cross operation by impersonating Russian hackers.

Trump and Barr have also been asking other foreign governments for help in investigating the FBI, CIA and Mueller investigators. The US president has called on the Australian prime minister Scott Morrison for assistance, while the attorney general has been on similar missions to the UK and Italy.

And the information being requested has left allies astonished. One British official with knowledge of Barr’s wish list presented to London commented that “it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services”.

Something to ponder.

[ by Charles Cameron — can’t think why you’d need three stunners, or two six-shooters for that matter — stun once and done, sez I ]
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My first stunner is from an LRB piece about Margaret Atwood, it’s opening paragraph invoking PD James instead, and what a powerful description of what I think I’ll call a Falling Curtain Event — an event such as climate change which offers so great a threat that arguably we should drop all other activities to attend to it.

For a quick dystopia, then — this:

In P.D. James’s strangest novel, The Children of Men (1992), humans stop being able to get pregnant, and no one can figure out why. Scientific research comes to nothing. Years pass without a newborn child. All the nurseries close, then all the schools. With no hope of posterity, landowners let their estates rot; scholars take up golf. Only the richest or best-connected are able to get a place in one of the increasingly rare care homes, run by increasingly senescent carers. Without children or grandchildren, people dote on their pets, and envy them for still being able to reproduce. When a small deer wanders into an Oxford chapel, the chaplain rushes at it, hurling prayerbooks: ‘Christ, why can’t they wait? Bloody animals. They’ll have it all soon enough. Why can’t they wait?’

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Second, a no less stunning foretaste of our current actual situation politically, from the dialog of episode 7 of the TV series, The People v. O.J. Simpson:

I mean, we have hard evidence, and they razzle-dazzle a bunch of conspiracy nonsense into big moments. Now, we need to make our own big moments that land with the jury. That is how we beat the nonsense. Now, can we focus on that?

Do I hear a prophecy here, life about to imitate art? Beware the Jabberwock, my son..

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Let me close with another stunning Falling Curtain Event, this one from a Dylan live performance:

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there — how’s that for a curtain falling?

On the one hand, it’s night falling, any night. But that’s the lyrics, the musical delivery is fatigued, so, so very weary: as the lyrics say, Time is running away.

More lines that, in their diverse ways, tell you of that fatigue, that flesh, bone, mind, soul weariness:

There’s not even room enough to be anywhere
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes
Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain<

So many ways, running down..

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

Superb performance of a great song– and to m=y mind, apocalyptic without ever saying so explicitly — just that sense of thr curtain, falling .

[ by Charles Cameron — online community member for 20 or more years, usenet user before that, made good friends and happy overall ]
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There’s FaceBook vs Twitter — and then, well, Reuters has the stories:

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On the one hand:

Sources familiar with WhatsApp’s internal investigation into the breach said a “significant” portion of the known victims are high-profile government and military officials spread across at least 20 countries on five continents. Many of the nations are U.S. allies, they said.

The hacking of a wider group of top government officials’ smartphones than previously reported suggests the WhatsApp cyber intrusion could have broad political and diplomatic consequences.

WhatsApp filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against Israeli hacking tool developer NSO Group. The Facebook-owned software giant alleges that NSO Group built and sold a hacking platform that exploited a flaw in WhatsApp-owned servers to help clients hack into the cellphones of at least 1,400 users between April 29, 2019, and May 10, 2019.

The total number of WhatsApp users hacked could be even higher. A London-based human rights lawyer, who was among the targets, sent Reuters photographs showing attempts to break into his phone dating back to April 1.

While it is not clear who used the software to hack officials’ phones, NSO has said it sells its spyware exclusively to government customers.

Some victims are in the United States, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Mexico, Pakistan and India, said people familiar with the investigation. Reuters could not verify whether the government officials were from those countries or elsewhere.

Some Indian nationals have gone public with allegations they were among the targets over the past couple of days; they include journalists, academics, lawyers and defenders of India’s Dalit community.

On the other:

The U.S. government has launched a national security review of TikTok owner Beijing ByteDance Technology Co’s $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.ly, according to two people familiar with the matter.

While the $1 billion acquisition was completed two years ago, U.S. lawmakers have been calling in recent weeks for a national security probe into TikTok, concerned the Chinese company may be censoring politically sensitive content, and raising questions about how it stores personal data.

TikTok has been growing more popular among U.S. teenagers at a time of growing tensions between the United States and China over trade and technology transfers. About 60% of TikTok’s 26.5 million monthly active users in the United States are between the ages of 16 and 24, the company said earlier this year. [ … ]

“With over 110 million downloads in the U.S. alone, TikTok is a potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore,” Schumer and Cotton wrote to Joseph Macguire, acting director of national intelligence.

TikTok allows users to create and share short videos with special effects. The company has said U.S. user data is stored in the United States, but the senators noted that ByteDance is governed by Chinese laws.

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Sources:

Reuters Oct 31 2019, Exclusive: Government officials around the globe targeted

Reuters Nov 1 2019, Exclusive: U.S. opens national security investigation into TikTok

Not bad for a two-day haul.

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BTW, Twitter vs FaceBook:

Guardian 31 Oct 2019, Twitter’s canny political ad ban costs it little – and piles pressure on Facebook

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The Twitter co-founder and chief executive, Jack Dorsey, has turned a weakness into a strength, cutting off a minuscule revenue stream in order to heap pressure on his main competitor. In the hours since Twitter’s announcement, support has come from voices as diverse as the US-based campaign group Muslim Advocates, the Open Knowledge Foundation thinktank and the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. [ … ]

Sorkin, writing in the New York Times, criticised Mark Zuckerberg for enabling the “crazy lies pumped into the water supply that corrupt the most important decisions we make together”. The screenwriter behind The Social Network, a film about Facebook’s early years, joined in a chorus of criticism of the site’s policy of explicitly allowing misinformation in political adverts.

“Right now, on your website, is an ad claiming that Joe Biden gave the Ukrainian attorney general a billion dollars not to investigate his son. Every square inch of that is a lie and it’s under your logo. That’s not defending free speech, Mark, that’s assaulting truth,” he wrote.

Go Twitter!

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Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, TikTok — just lining up some ducks..

[ by Charles Cameron — this story of the “Nunes acolyte” is too timely to miss, too singular to loom large in the so-called greater picture ]
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I’ll let Laura Walker have the first word of the White House worm called Kashyap Patel:

Nunes acolyte misrepresented himself to Trump as Ukraine expert

Natasha Bertrand, brilliant Politico writer, gets the next bite, writing the original story that Laura opened with:

Nunes acolyte misrepresented himself to Trump as Ukraine expert

And I’ll close with Laura‘s closing link, backgrounding Patel:

Trump admirer Kashyap ‘Kash’ Patel lands important White House position

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Follow Laura. Follow Natasha

That’s it for today.