Does anyone miss pro sports?

I see baseball plans to start up again on July 23.  Basketball will restart its suspended season on 7/30. Seems like a bad idea to me, corona-virus-wise.

But apart from that, I have to wonder how die-hard sports fans are doing.  They don't have that daily (in the case of baseball) rush of whether their team won or not, how good the pitching was, and which batters are hot. 

I'm a recovering pro-sports addict.  From the ages 10-21 I cared very deeply about pro baseball and pro football.  But I got busy with real life and at first reluctantly parted with that daily or weekly rush, and then eventually embraced the separation.  I've saved countless hours -- possibly amounting many months of time, over the decades -- by not watching or otherwise seriously following pro sports. 

Nowadays I follow only barely, and simply because of the social pressure.  Since nearly everyone else (even women) seems to care about sports, I look at the standings every once in a while, and try to get a sense of who some of the players are -- as opposed to the old days, when I literally could name just about every player on every team and give you his approximate batting average and home run count.  And I make an effort to know who will be in the World Series and the Super Bowl (and sometimes even the playoffs) just so I won't be caught completely empty-handed in a water cooler conversation about sports.

I get no real pleasure out of it.

Part of it is because this is just one more manipulation by a bunch of mega-rich, super-big corporations who are trying to make money off of us at all costs.  They've got literally the corporation's dream -- customers who are insanely rabid fans, who go around trying to convert others, who regularly buy themed merchandise and pay for subscriptions and tickets and absorb all the advertising that the teams can throw at them.  Baseball somehow gets to be called "America's pastime" and intelligent people study it like a science -- or like a treasured history -- and write book after book about it.  Football, in its season, dominates whole weekends -- college on Saturday and pro on Sunday -- plus Monday nights.  And every time, fans are on the edge of their seats, rooting for their team, hoping for the right series of little miracles (the amazing run, the acrobatic catch) will occur that will enable their team to prevail.

And Superbowl ads cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per second:

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I don't deny that watching a football or baseball game (well football especially) with a group of like-minded friends is a fun thing, and perhaps a socially good thing.  And I don't have any immediate suggestions for replacement -- except having the same people act out, or at least read out, a Shakespeare play.  Or else do volunteer work.  Or else spend quality time with their children or spouses.  I will work on my suggestions.

Anyway, it all disgusts me because it's another example of artificially intelligent corporations using humans to essentially extract money and time and (amazingly) loyalty from other humans.  Maybe I'm wrong to feel this way, but it disgusts me all the more because all the humans involved -- the players, coaches, and fans -- seem to feel so good about it and are having such a good time.

It's also interesting to watch the same artificially-intelligent motivations and responses to actual events.  Major League Baseball was painfully slow to react to the juicing scandals, with the result that many of the greatest records are held by people who were on drugs.  Major League Football has been painfully slow to react to the obvious damage that it has caused and is causing to so many of its players.  But they all did react, and sure enough -- because they are so intelligent -- have emerged as strong as ever.

Until now, that is.  Basketball had to be suspended, and baseball has been totally shutdown by Covid-19.   They have plans to start back up, but given the way things are going in this country, I sort of doubt they actually will.  Wouldn't it be great for people to learn to use this time for other, more productive activities, so that when the sports come back, nobody will want to watch?

Theory of Everything Part IV: Russian Bounties

To be clear, the Russian bounty thing -- the administration's knowledge that the Russians were offering and paying bounties to Taliban militants for killing US soldiers, and its continuing to talk nice to the Russians even while that was happening -- is yet one more reason to want Trump out of office.  This post is merely to explain how we got here, and remind us that we should not be the least bit surprised.

My "theory of everything" is set forth here.  In short, it is that corporations and other groups -- including political parties and nation states -- achieve a kind of "artificial intelligence" such that their goals can no longer be viewed and judged in strictly human terms. Yes, these organizations are "led" by humans, but in the end, those human leaders are merely tools that the organization uses in striving to achieve its own ends -- which are simply to survive and to grow.  The idea of businesses surviving and growing is not necessarily a bad thing -- that's what capitalism is all about.  (footnote:  capitalism provides some justification for a laissez faire approach to businesses, but it's hard to see any such justification for not checking the growth of various other kinds of organizations).

But the problem arises when something gets in the way of the organization's drive to survive and thrive.  At that point, the organization does whatever it can to remove the obstacle, and the only constraints on its action are whether the consequences will, in fact, hinder its efforts to survive and thrive.

In other words, these organizations are not stupid.  A corporation will not seek to eliminate a competitor by violating antitrust laws that the Department of Justice cares about, because it knows that doing so will result in a lawsuit and penalties that will impede its goals.  It will not pollute the planet to the point that the EPA takes notice and files an enforcement action.  It will avoid taking positions on social issues that might offend potential customers, but if it sees an opportunity to gain customers by speaking out on one particular issue, it will do so.  In the meantime, the way it really "speaks" is with its donations, which it makes for the sole purpose of making the legal environment as profitable as possible for its activities.  As I recently learned from an Adam Ruins Everything episode, the only reason that the government doesn't simply do our taxes -- or provide us software for easily doing so -- is that Turbotax and Taxcut have lobbied them not to.

So how does this relate to Russian bounties?

First, remember that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are the kind of organization that I am talking about.  Each of them consists of a set of human beings that the organization has made loyal to them by a combination of rewards and religious principles.  Disaffected, prospectless young men are drawn to the organization because it satisfies their social, spiritual, and material needs.  The individual humans in the organization come and go -- many are killed in the line of "duty" -- but the organization goes on.  When the leaders are killed, others fill the leadership roles until they too are killed and then replaced.  The organizations wish to expand, and what better way to do so than knock over some extremely important skyscrapers in an infidel and satanic nation?    

And the "United States" is also such an organization; in fact, let's call it a super-organization (footnote: not to be confused with "super-organism" which is another metaphor for the kinds of organizations we're talking about).  It's got over 300 million people in it, including a lot of wealthy people, and, much more importantly, a large number of intelligent organizations that wish to influence its behavior for their own surviving and thriving.  The 300 million people are more or less irrelevant, since the organizations have long since taken control of the super-organization.  What organizations are we talking about here?   It's a combination of political parties, businesses, religions, and other groups, all of which work "together" -- albeit not necessarily in harmony -- to select candidates that will be presented to the public in the elections, and then work tirelessly to maximize the chances that the candidates that are elected pass laws that either help or do not hinder them in their surviving and thriving.

Political parties are also super-organizations in this sense, in that their survival and thrival (surthrival?) depends very much on how well they please business organizations.

Let's pause just for a second to discuss the concept of a super-organization, or, perhaps in the case of a nation state, a super-duper organization.  The point is just that these organizations -- while made up of people --primarily need to satisfy other organizations (mainly businesses but also religions and other interest groups) for their survival.  So they are already twice-removed from their individual constituents.  In other words, while it is always possible that in a given organization, a single extraordinary human being or small group of human beings is able to steer the organization on a new course, this is all the harder for a political party.  The members of the political party are almost completely powerless to change things absent an external stressor; really the only thing the party reacts to things that are relevant to its surthrival.  To give a concrete example, if the Republican Party suddenly starts endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement, it will be doing so because IT -- the artificially intelligent organism -- has determined that doing so is best for its surthrival.  It won't be doing it because it's the "right thing to do," even if some individual human members believe that.

And of course Russia is such an organization as well. The current Russian government needs to quell dissent in order to surthrive, and, since it can get away with murder, that's the means it chooses.  It's true that Putin has put a strong human face on top of the organization that controls Russia, but in the end, it is he that is serving its surthrival, not the other way around.  He will be gone one day and the anti-democratic ruling party will almost certainly continue to rule.  That is its goal, in any event, and it controls a lot of resources that will help it achieve that goal, even after Putin is gone.

So here is the chain of causality for the Russian bounty issue:

• Extremist organizations provide spiritual, social, and material support to disaffected young men who can be persuaded to learn how to fly planes and then hijack and fly planes into buildings.
• Super-organization reacts to the attack not by seeking to understand and deal with the cause (e.g. by working hard to provide disaffected young men in middle-eastern countries a different education and outlook) but by invading another sovereign nation, and then (essentially at the behest of oil companies and government contractors), taking advantage of the pro-war frenzy to invade a totally different sovereign nation, which had nothing to do with the attack.
• These two wars, by killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocent civilians, naturally create more disaffected young men who look to militant extremist organizations for spiritual, social, and material support.
• Having started the war in Afghanistan without considering how to end it, and having essentially created out of nothing a powerful recruiting tool for extremist organizations, the U.S. finds itself unable to leave.  Human beings who were innocent babies when the invasion began are now disaffected and recruitable young men.
• For strategic reasons -- its own surthrival -- Russia wants the US out, and they want to be on the Taliban's good side when the US leaves.
• But declaring war on the US or openly providing its own troops or even material support would not be good for Russia's surthrival, which in part depends on the good relationship that Putin has fostered with Trump, after having worked so hard to get him elected.
• Just like in Syria, where the US interests and the Russian interests found themselves at odds, and they each chose a different side and essentially paid members of "their" side to kill members of the other's side.
• So Russia does the next best thing -- it covertly taps into the same recruiting tool used by the extremist organizations and offers the disaffected young men additional incentives for killing Americans.
• This is not much different than the way the US has waged many wars -- by providing arms or other material support to those who are bent on overthrowing regimes that the US disfavors.  (Think the Iran-Contra affair -- there, the US government channeled money and guns to the Contras, with the idea that they would kill Sandanistas in Nicaragua)
• It's a bit different than openly supporting a cause.  Here, part of the idea was probably to cause more US soldier deaths, with the hope of turning US public opinion even more against the war, and with the hope that this would cause the US to then leave, and the Taliban would view the Russians as friends.  But it's the same basic principle -- the artificial organism is thinking strategically about what is best for its surthrival, and it comes up with a very logical plan.
• And of course, there is the ironic fact that Russia here is reacting EXACTLY the same way the US did when RUSSIA invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s.  Back then, the US government funneled about $20 billion to the Mujahideen, with the obvious idea that the Mujahideen would use that money to kill Russian soldiers so that the Russians would leave, thereby leaving the US on friendly terms with the Afghans.  Whether or not the Mujahideen directly gave rise to Al Qaeda and/or the Taliban is a bit beside the point, although if so, it would increase the irony to laugh-out-loud levels.

Anyway there you have it.  It's no surprise that Russia would support the Taliban against the US.  And the particular mode of doing so should not be a surprise either -- it's just an inexpensive way to support Russian surthrival, just as supporting the Mujahideen was in the US's surthrival interests.

Of course, Trump should have reacted to the news with outrage and condemnation, but Trump is Trump, so what do you expect?  If it hurts his chance of reelection, it's a good thing.

Theory of Everything Part III

The theory also answers the question "Why did the United States Elect Donald Trump President?"

One does not have to spend a lot of time analyzing Donald Trump's twitter tweets or unscripted meanderings to realize that one is dealing with a person who is distinctly below average in many respects, even for a politician.  People in other countries are understandably appalled at how we managed to elect him.  Consider the reaction of Englishman Nate White from last summer:

"Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. . . . For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace . . . . while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever . . . . And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully . . . . That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a sniveling sidekick instead."

The answer to the lead-off question, as the alert reader will readily have suspected, lies in the fact a political party is an artificially intelligent superorganism; i.e. an aggregation of people that has a consciousness that transcends that of its individual constituents, and yet uses those constituents to further its amoral aims.  In 2016, this came to a head the nomination processes of both parties yielded a field of two nominees who were both extremely unlikeable and borderline corrupt.

But the problem started long before that, when, in each case, the party essentially chose its "field" of candidates, based primarily on only two criteria -- the ability to raise money and the willingness to come reasonably close to toeing the party line. 

In other words, you don't get to be a candidate unless you are willing to compromise whatever principles you have to be enough to be like other members of your party so that there's a reasonable assurance that if elected, you will help further the "goals" of the party.

(Larry Lessig gives a good talk on "Tweedism" [“I don’t care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.”] here, which I mostly agree with, but he veers off track when he tries to explain that the process is controlled by the 1%, because (true enough) the initial selection of a slate of candidates depends on donations from less than 1% of the people.  The problem is he concludes that the result is candidates who are responsive to the funders only, but that's not really right, because he keeps coming back to the 1%, which is a group of people that is not organized into a superorganism. In the end, the candidates are just tools of their political parties and the corporations who fund BOTH political parties; i.e. they are not truly responsive or accountable to any people at all).

To be clear, the "goals of the party" that I just referred to are not the same thing as the "goal" of the artificially intelligent organism that is the party.  The "goal" of the organism is simple -- survive and expand.  The "goals" of the party, by contrast, are the set of positions -- the party platform -- that the organism has determined will put candidates of the party in an optimal position to be elected, which will, in turn, cause "viable" candidates to join the party, which will, in turn, allow the party itself to survive and expand.

As mentioned, the other half of "viability" is money.  This makes sense, because political campaigns cost a lot of money.  The party thus makes sure that you only get to be a candidate if you have been able to raise millions and millions of dollars for your campaign.  That in turn works toward the party's survival -- it will not put candidates into the field who cannot finance their campaigns, since those candidates are (odds are) doomed to lose.

So at the outset, your field of candidates is extremely limited by these criteria.  What happens next is a months' long slugfest between mediocrities, where everyone tries to eliminate everyone else by shining spotlights on the others' flaws and past transgressions -- and with a field of mediocrities, that's easy enough to do -- with the result that in the end only one or two candidates are left standing, at which point it gets really ugly.  On the Republican side, this process yielded Trump, who was such a pathetically poor candidate that -- ironically -- all of the mud just slid right off of him, perhaps because he was all mud and slime to begin with.  But various bits of the mud he (and the others) were slinging at each other stuck on some of the others -- because most of it was true -- and one by one, they all folded.

At that point, the organism, for its own survival, needed to get the party to line up behind Trump.  And that's what it did.  People who had been called the worst possible names by Trump -- and who had been never-Trumpers -- realized that their political survival depended on switching sides and backing Trump after all.

Ted Cruz is just one of several examples.  After doing the "principled" thing and snubbing Trump at the Republican convention, Ted Cruz came to realize that Trump might actually win the election and turned around and endorsed Trump in September 2016.  During the campaign, had these things and more to say about Trump:

"This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth, and in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.”

“I say pathological because I actually think Donald, if you hooked him up to a lie detector test, he could say one thing in the morning, one thing at noon and one thing in the evening, all contradictory and he’d pass the lie detector test each time. Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it, but the man is utterly amoral.”

"He combines [dishonesty] with being a narcissist, a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen. Donald Trump is such a narcissist that Barack Obama looks at him and says, ‘Dude, what’s your problem?’’’

“Donald Trump is a serial philanderer, and he boasts about it. This is not a secret. He’s proud of being a serial philanderer.”

After a Trump attack on Cruz's wife Heidi, he called Trump a sniveling coward, a "big, loud New York bully, and a “a small and petty man who is intimidated by strong women.”

After Trump endorsed the theory that Cruz's father had helped assassinate JFK, he characterized the theory as "nuts" and "just kooky."

And then: “I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father.”

And yet, even before the election, Cruz was supporting a pathological liar and amoral bully who had attacked both his wife and his father.

You can find more details here.

Marco Rubio said:

"We are going to send a message that the party of Lincoln and Reagan and the presidency of the United States will never be held by a con artist."

And yet now he is one of Trump's closest confidantes.

You might wonder "who" is pulling the strings on puppets like Cruz, Rubio, and the rest.  But it's not a "who" -- it's a super-intelligent organism -- the Republican National Party.  It doesn't matter who occupied the various positions of power within that party (they were simply doing the bidding of the superorganism in any event), the result would have been the same:  Trump would have had widespread Republican support both before and after the election.

On the Democratic side, money and name recognition made Hilary Clinton the only viable candidate, and as a result, she got the nomination, despite lukewarm support from her supporters, and the outright dislike of "feel the Bern" progressives and independents.

The result was an election between two people who large swaths of the electorate actively disliked, and for most voters -- even more so than in most election years -- the choice was about figuring out who was the "lesser of two evils."

Theory of Everything Part II

Some time ago, I wrote a post called Corporations and Artificial Intelligence: Consciousness Achieved, in which I set forth what I now modestly call my Theory of Everything.  To review, the basic point is that something very much like what we now call "artificial intelligence" has been at work to enable various organizations to essentially become superorganisms that have -- sorry to be the one to break it to you -- more or less enslaved us.  Historically, while at least some of these organisms have been the driving force behind technological progress and all of the benefits that we have received from that, they also have been the driving force behind many of the things that are responsible for much of the misery in the world.  The opioid crisis is a perfect example -- the drug companies are motivated to create drugs that will save lives and relieve suffering and all of that, but that's simply because there is a demand for those sorts of drugs.  If there is also a demand for drugs that will destroy lives, they will produce those drugs too, and will, in some cases, work to increase the demand for them.

One might say that the German drug companies were "evil" for supplying the methamphetamines that enabled the Wehrmacht to blitzkrieg over Poland, Denmark, Belgium, and France in a matter of days, but that's not right -- they were just doing what corporations do best: creating markets and making money off of them.

Anyway, starting today, I'm going to pick a news story every day that can be reframed in terms of this theory.

Let's see -- Foxnews reports that the democrats are mad at Elon Musk who is pulling Tesla out of California because "he" views California's Covid-19 shutdown rules as too restrictive ("fascist" in his word).  Is Musk really speaking for himself?  He's a multi-billionnaire who can build his own rockets so obviously he has free will in this, particularly since Tesla was his brainchild and is his company right?  Well, yes and no.  Ask yourself whether any other CEO would have done the same thing in his position.  Money is being lost in California while there is money to be made by moving to neighboring Nevada or to Texas, which are basically begging you to move.  The corporation follows the money, that's all, and the CEO -- if he knows what's good for him -- follows the corporation. 

If anything, one might have thought that Musk's ownership of Tesla plus his social conscience plus his vast wealth would have been factors that might have pushed in favor of "doing the right thing" and staying in California, through thick and thin.   If he had done that, he would have been an "exception" to the rule, which I would have explained by pointing to those factors.  But even those factors were not enough to cause Musk to buck the corporation's thirst for profits and growth.  And it seems pretty clear that Musk thought he was doing the right thing in any event, which just goes to show that Tesla has gotten -- and maintained, in spite of the ill-conceived Musk tweets that got him fired as Chairman of the Board -- the CEO it wants, and that Musk is, in fact, doing the superorganism's bidding.  The fact that Musk "thinks" he is being the free-thinking business genius Elon Musk is beside the point -- if his sense of what is right happens to align with that of the superorganism, that only explains why the superorganism keeps him on as CEO.

Bill Gates Reviva Scam

Just ran across a fake business insider news story claiming that Reviva is what makes Bill Gates so smart.  It then goes on with a lot of the same text and pictures from the fake CNN stories captured in other posts here -- including the pictures of Stephen  Hawking  and Denzel Washington -- and notes that CNN broke the story first. 

So Reviva is just as fake as Neurocell and all the others.

Of course the "news" story wouldn't be complete without a link for buying Reviva.

Just don't do it.