As recruiters note special skills of the blind I ask: can we learn better?

I have linked into three groups doing leading studies of future jobs and the growing challenge of fitting people and jobs together. One of the people in one of these groups (iiiij) recently posted:

Hi all,

Coolabilties are hot:) New research about enhanced-compensatory abilities of blind people.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20170323/Brain-makes-new-connections-in-blind-people-to-enhance-compensatory-abilities.aspx

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This particular coolability is interesting, not just because of political correctness, but because it may be a clue to another aspect of human potential.

Paying attention to nonvisual inputs can of course result in the organism learning more and doing better pattern recognition on them.

But even more can be done by conscious use of "shaping" or pathways in learning.

A few years ago, my family got "locked into" an interior cabin of a cruise ship, maybe as perfectly dark as caves are said to be. As an old man, I wanted to walk when others were sleeping and make minimum noise, above all not turning on lights. I could swear that the right kind of attention to that task was a very useful learning experience, in part because I was NOT totally blind, and the slight availability of the old visual inputs helped me boostrap-learn pattern recognition based on nonvisual inputs better than would be possible with simple pure blindness. [Addendum: it helped me that I knew what to be open to, and could "look down" on my brain enough to assist a little. I took the one and only neuroscience course at Harvard College in 1964.] 

I actually discuss bootstrap learning a bit, in my paper Neural Networks and the Experience and Cultivation of Mind, published in the journal Neural Networks, 2012.  

In my own view, this larger issue of human potential should be treated as coequal at least with survival of the species, when we define our ultimate "bottom line" of what we are trying to accomplish. So much work still needed, at so many levels... 

reply to question about US control of its ICBMs and IOT in general

One of my friends had a question about the US control of its ICBMs. Unfortunately, this is not just an academic question, given how various scenarios might play out with North Korea. My reply yesterday:
==================================

For about ten days, I am supposed to be in crash mode, thinking of nothing but the future of IT, for service to folks doing planning in Silicon Valley. (I am reminded of how www.werbos.com/Atacama.pdf resulted from a similar crash effort to be of service to Chile solar power people. How much did they really benefit? Not yet final.) 

But as I try to wrestle with those issues, I realize how much more sense it would make to be brainstorming WITH someone else capable of following the train of thought. So I am glad you asked a relevant question, but hope you don't mind if I bend it around a bit.

First, I should confess that I have no idea just what the connections are like between US ICBMs and the Internet. Maybe my daughters know more about that kind of thing than I do, but I probably shouldn't ask them. Is wireless any safer than internet? Is there an optimal way to combine the two, so as to enhance security vis-a-vis just one?

For any "thing" attached to internet, there are three main questions I have been asking:

(1) How secure is the operating system? Does it yet obey the impossible-to-recontrol but available-for-proper-observation approach I proposed in www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf? The need to forcefully and more perfectly get rid of ALL control back doors is an urgent need now for electric power generators (which I know about much more than ICBMs), but if the same leaks which suddenly now endanger generators also endanger ICBMs... well, that would make my recommendations a whole lot more urgent ... what was a tolerable risk before the leaks no longer is. (And in truth, it's not just leaks; it's the technology and infrastructure which lets people find backdoors.) 

(2) Ditto for the communication system. I have not written a proposal for the communication system parallel to the operating system proposal, for many reasons -- and I have not cogitated on what it would be or even written down notes. It is a huge issue, in part because there are more dimensions to communication system security. Levels of quantum computing and of quantum communication are part of the issue, but certainly not the only part. I certainly remember a hearing on power grid cybersecurity in 2009 at Senate Commerce Committee (probably still posted in video on the committee website) where the guy who runs AT&T wireless said basically "just forget it" if you were considering use of wireless and needed a high level of assurance. (By the way, I also remember how it was unpleasant for me to enter the hearing room, because of how strict the usher was about not letting people in the room who had coffee even with a proper lid; it is funny because that usher turned out to be nonpartisan committee staff, not just an usher, and I later worked with him a little for a few years, until the FBI imprisoned him for the crime of telling people it would help the country if they donated money to Democratic campaigns in Wisconsin.) 

(3) But what of the overall integrative management/control system, the high level cybernetics? Probably that's all a rather fixed algorithm for these particular missiles,

but for the more general case ... there are various types of market model and teleautonomy model which would be better than the new [...] top vision trying to reinvent our stereotypes of the Red Army with one-actor control. But they have problems. Above all, could ANY IT design save us from ourselves when the people themselves go unstable to a hopeless degree? Autonomy and the higher level control structure also become more major issues when we think about autonomous drones, using neural networks to decide who is a proper target. 

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So I am struggling to try to think coherently about such things this week. If you have comments, or important points I should keep in mind, please don't hesitate...

Message from above

Yesterday, as I was watching the House hearings on intelligence investigations, there was a powerful moment when I was watching Comey intensely... and sensed very directly that I was not the only one watching, and I hoped he too might sense he was (and is) being watched and judged by someone a whole lot more serious than any of us normal watchers (including the political actors and billionnaires he usually worries about). "The watcher of watchers."

An interesting experience... but the next early morning period, after I tuned in... came a more interesting experience.

It is improper to describe all the details, but since nothing by ordinary email is secret anyway,
I might as well post precisely what I sent a friend and collaborator (coauthor of recent paper in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience):

===========================

Good morning, Yeshua!

A thought just occurred to me in meditation.

I naturally do not want to overburden you with technical details. Our work is so complicated and challenging enough already. When we started to discuss physics below 3 femtometers, Luda rightly urged me to work more exclusively with her, and she has to teach me some mathematics I cannot learn without also learning a little Russian. In your part of the world, the new important "baby toys" of either of the two new quantum optics experiments are very, very important in many ways.

But you too can have many tracks. For example, when you mention space, I should have mentioned some of our own work on space vehicles, and some important work also in China. At www.amazon.com, I even reviewed all three volumes of the Three Body Problem series, well worth reading, which shows some of their interests. (At that web site, it is easy to find all of the reviews of a reviewer, after you find one. Many people reviewed THree-Body Problem, but I also reviewed PCT, Spin and All that, by Streater and Wightman.)

As a Pacific nation, OTHER people in [your area] also have connections in the area, perhaps some even to China at some level.

The entire world is now rightly concerned about conflicts and mess just here in our neighborhood, but attention to problems here should not overly distract from  the quiet but potentially fatal problems brewing quietly in the Pacific. Even as Trump and North Korea both compete for 

raising and mobilizing people's fear, there is a huge unmet need for a kind of coalition of love, not putting energy into making the fear issues larger in any way, but in a kindly (and totally forgiving) way building a concrete open coalition to save the larger earth -- the Pacific especially 

before it is too late.

An essential starting place and tool for building such a coalition is the later part of www.werbos.com/Atacama.pdf. It is essential that a coalition of nations work as soon as possible to deploy aircraft over the ANTARCTIC... just the antarctic... to prove out the proposal for geoengineering developed by Ed Teller, Lowell Wood and Ken Caldeira of Lawrence Livermore DOE laboratory. Many environmental politicians decided not to push that proposal, a few years ago, because they did not want to distract from the world effort to change the means of production, the reliance on fossil fuel; that is a worthy effort, and my paper at Atacama supports that effort (in a way which does not attack the oil industry at all), but survival of earth is now such an urgent priority that we cannot afford to wait. It is not about climate change in general now; it is about a specific crack which has recently appeared in the Antarctic, likely to make Hansen's (and John Kerry's) worst fears come true sooner than expected, and also about trying to reverse the loss which has already occurred to the life-bringing ocean currents 

from the Antarctic to the deep Pacific. Probably it requires a few billion dollars, maybe a few every year, as well as many airplanes, and even maybe leadership from China and Germany, but someone must have the energy to speak up and start the process, or at least speak to

other people who might understand that loving soft power which saves people's lives can get better world support than lies and fear.    

So -- back to bed for me. And then IT and <3 craft.="" depends="" div="" femtometers.="" just="" little="" more="" my="" of="" on="" our="" own="" piece="" survival="" than="" the="">

Warm regards and hope..

============

And- addendum or clarification, sourced watcher of watchers. 

The coalition to be sought should be "open to all, waiting for none,"

at least once there is at least one partner with required size of economy.

The Antarctic+ocean problems are utterly urgent.

But from the trickster archetype... "hey, it's a jobs creator. Lots of airplanes too."

Back to bed yet again..

how people pushed back on that last Trump post

My latest post asked: if Trump is removed, won't he be replaced by someone worse? And I have supported the idea of trying to build something more like an alliance with Russia, in the face of many larger common threats.

People have pushed back in two directions.

First, they ask: what of morale and empowerment of the people? If they get rid of Trump, won't that encourage them to be more active? But contrariwise, if they accept the worst of what is going on, won't that encourage them to a path of just giving up? I won't say much about what they said; it is just that honesty demands I not ignore it. There are tricky issues involved, and things have already been complicated and tricky enough. I think that my bottom line effort to find a way out, at the end of my long discussion of problems in the last post, would give an alternative. By the way, there was also a counterpushback: just WHO will feel empowered when they get a taste of blood? If it is multiple groups will they be empowered to generate a bigger, bloodier conflict?

Second, they asked: "What does Putin really want anyway?" That's pretty serious. Would a new Russian-US alliance be able to stop the various threads causing real danger form some kind of radical islam or third caliphate movement, aiming at sharia for all the earth? Does Putin really want that, and does he have any idea how to be realistic about actually achieving the objective?

But today I will go back to travel planning and thinking about spin. Physical spin.

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Well, some spin, but the House intelligence hearing was interesting. Among the highlights: when asked to explain different approaches to Trump and Clinton investigations, Comey said :That's easy. we don't say anything at all when an investigation is not yet complete." Yes, and they all are wondering WHOM to investigate for links and suspicious outside connections. So why not deep investigation of the specific people within the FBI who successfully pressured Comey NOT to do what he said he always does, in the case of the last Hillary revelations before the election?
If they give in and agree to investigate THOSE people, enemies of ANY president, they might be able to catch them in time to turn them as state's witnesses, if they move fast enough.

It was also curious the folks who don't really understand the relation between Crimea and Ukraine proper. Now if only Putin would offer to trade, of much more diligent enforcement of Kerry's deal in Ukraine proper, in exchange for free hand and even US support for any Russian actions to take over or enforce anything in any way on North Korea. OK, maybe just wishful thinking. But it would be nice... and  a lot better for everyone except the Kim himself than other trends now plausible.. maybe even better for him if all aspects were to be considered...

If Trump drowns in the Swamp, will all earth drown with him?

If Trump drowns in the Swamp, will all earth drown with him?

I really wish people would see how all the rest of us are in the midst of a crisis, every bit as scary as what Trump himself is now facing – and not something which will instantly become better when and if he is impeached, or put into house arrest or a straitjacket. One week before that election many were saying “At least it will all be over, and life will return to normal.” Not quite. And even less normal if Trump retires to Florida or to Sochi or wherever, which for all I know could be tomorrow.

The move to get rid of Trump has become ever more emotional and intense. For example, I was surprised when a very calm stalwart friend, a lot like Kasich in spirit, passed on the address of a video

which might go viral:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QXUlhT3-r0c&sns=em

I can certainly understand how certain folks on the authoritarian right are cheering and carefully cultivating this movement, as they now stand to take over more completely and get rid of all but the lightest symbols of democracy, but it really puzzles me why folks on the left (and many folks on CNN) are letting themselves be conned into enthusiasm here. Of course they do not like Trump, but why be irrational about it, and above all – what do they think will happen AFTER he is gone?

I am also baffled by the sheer fuzziness and blinders of so many people hiding in “the bubble.” There is one guy on CNN, Van Jones, who has been doing a nice job of reaching out to SOME people... but he has systematically missed a large and crucial part of the US, and of the earth in general.

For example: why is it that so many people assume that authorized legal wiretaps are the only forms of surveillance in wide use today, and that Trump is not simply in a state of shock from having seen a transcript of his private conversations in circulation? Yet why is it that  even his own people cannot imagine an alternative beyond GHCQ? Didn’t Tillerson learn something from his discussions with the wikileaks people?

Long ago, Cheney announced a plan which could basically be called Ollie North on steroids. Outsource the core functions of intelligence and IT. Bypass all the “silly outmoded inhibitors” of the legal system and human rights, by putting things OUTSIDE the federal government, and “let the private sector take over.”  Of course, there are well-meaning pro-human agents active in private sector IT as well, but it doesn’t require a GHCQ to explain what Trump is frantically trying to explain. Ironically, both Trump himself and the folks on CNN need to get off the blinders, and understand that they may actually be missing a huge amount of objective reality by laughing too soon when Bannon talks about a “silent coup.”  It is sad and ironic, however, that Bannon himself declares he is proud that he worked with Cheney... but even so, a lot of the folks who have listened to Bannon did so after direct experiences with the silent coup, a very real problem (related to money in politics, but much bigger than what Hillary Clinton has allowed herself to imagine) becoming all the more visible in more and more government agencies.

By now, Trump is beginning to realize that “draining the swamp” (removing the most severe level of corruption in politics, like what Teddy Roosevelt did but requiring a lot more now)... is a whole lot harder than simply declaring a fig leaf of a new conflicts rule. He is starting to drown in the swamp, and anyone could see on his face how boxed in he begins to realize he is. Though I voted for Hilary, I did so with only half a hear, because I expected that by this time in her Presidency she would already be murdered by the swamp, unable to thrash and struggle as much as Trump does, but will even Trump survive? Does he realize how much he would need to engage a deeper level of collaboration with more trustworthy allies, capable of mounting more effective investigations and of maintaining confidentiality as flanks are guarded?

And should we call on bigger allies, like Jesus himself and his real people (not folks like Cruz), to try to save the day?

I was starting to think about that.... but then Trump gave a speech in Detroit, threatening to quickly get rid of the new mpg standards. It is a reminder of what can happen when wild kids start yanking out the circuit boards in the house. (And yes, I wish China would be more realistic about the chance of nuclear preemption, something which becomes MORE likely when a guy like Trump encounters certain kinds of protest. If only he could make a deal with Russia or China to just take that place over themselves, to eliminate the threat of what a guy much crazier and less predictable than Trump might do!)

Those circuit boards are there for a reason. Woolsey says “Mattis gets it, and Trump will listen to Mattis,” but even Woolsey has failed to appreciate key real-world technical/economic realities, without which economic survival of this planet as a whole simply does not compute. (See www.werbos.com/oil.htm for a peer-reviewed IEEE discussion of how to improve the circuit boards enough to give us SOME hope of survival – but even more is needed. As Lowell Wood might inform him, if he were head of OSTP.)  That sure enervated me, as seriously as I was enervated by seeing how poor Hillary might have suffered if she had been elected.

After that... between the devil and the deep blue sea, where is there any path of hope?

I did enjoy a video conversation last week with folks involved in the business side of IT management.

It seems there is a kind of valley of death between practical genesis of a new technology

and its arrival as a mass product. (There is another earlier valley of death, but this one is also important.) A speaker noted how morale and support seem to be less then that at the genesis or product stage, because about half the world drifts into dissillusionment and about half into delusional thinking,

neither of which solves real problems and results in real products in the end. (Though we discussed examples and fine points as well.) Progress at this stage depends really critically on the small group of people in the middle, resisting both delusional thinking and jaded disillusioned pessimism, remaining sane and pragmatic and doing what really needs to be done.   It seems that the whole earth is in that kind of condition right now; Trump is certainly not the only person engaged in quite a bit of delusional thinking right now; if he is removed, we may all learn how sneakier, more paranoid people engaged in delusional thinking are actually far more dangerous. Given a revolution and revulsion as real people suffer... well, it is true that folks on the left are also capable of delusional thinking and various types of bad stuff.

So – the challenge is sanity. Can we find enough sanity, and mobilize it enough, to restore democracy

(there HAS been a silent coup, really... enough that Comey still seems to feel disillusioned enough to have no choice but to follow their regrettable pressures until/unless circumstances change), and even enough intelligence to avoid the problems coming in objective reality, such as the very real problems with climate change in the oceans which do not follow the whims of Oprah, or Fox or even of Al Gore?

If we all die, who won?

It was great to have a serious discussion of sanity with these IT guys, who were clear enough to catch me in a fuzzy error in discussing that subject. In fact, there are multiple levels of sanity, more than I usually discuss, even in my paper published in Russia and posted at www.werbos.com/Mind-in_Time.pdf).

In discussing the delusional folks and the dissillusioned folks... I immediately thought first of folks in the field of space policy.

The space people rightly complain a lot about phobic, pessimistic and jaded cynical folks in Washington, who do indeed give up too soon, just as they totally gave up on the possibility of an airplane before the Wright brothers, and even gave up on the possibility of airplanes becoming relevant during the early years when they didn’t make money. They have lots and lots of quotes from famous powerful respected people declaring what is impossible, all of which look ever so silly in retrospect. (Hey folks, you look equally silly and nuts when we look back from the future!) But many of them are equally aberrated in an optimistic way, letting loose with euphoria about “Jesus saves,”  “Elon Musk saves” or even “SLS Mars program saves” – all without appreciating the need for very, very intense and serious (yet constructive and honest) technical vetting. No way to get to space without a lot of very hard very real work, especially work on the mind itself to get it right. (No coincidence that JFK was a student of Teilhard de Chardin, and was arguably the only president who really strengthened the US in space! And Barbara Hubbard and myself quietly helping a little years later... as I may someday recount, the backstories of NASP and Fresh Look study.)

In truth, even scientology (or scientology purified as proposed by Miscavage, the dissillusioned but wiser father of the current head of that organization) could understand these kinds of disillusionment and delusion. They basically learned it from Freud – and they hate Freud for the same reason that some people using backpropagation hate me.  They don’t like older, more complicated and more general original stories. Karl Pribram has an excellent, unique short book explaining the deep concepts of Freud, including the full neural network version of Freud’s theory of traumatic experiences, how they aberrate many human decisions. In essence, all mammal brains learn to respond DIRECTLY to bad experiences; if a criminal wearing a blue shirt hurts you as a child, that memory, buried in your “id” (little cells in the cerebral cortex and limbic system) will cause you to run away from people wearing blue shirts later in life... even if those are police men trying to protect you from the criminal threatening you now!! (This is similar to how Trump and Bannon salivate irrationally like Pavlov’s dog at the mere thought of Hilary Clinton.). Freudian psychiatrists help people express their natural ability to RELIVE such memories, and see them again in the fresh light of adult understanding which explains what happened... and discharges the aberration.   But I must give credit to scientology for noticing that the EXACT SAME kind of aberration can occur in the opposite direction... explaining how some people slaivate in a different way, equally irrational and equally interfering with rationality, when seeing Elon Musk or even (for some people) Donald Trump himself. (Though in truth, they are more likely to transfer the salivation to Ivanka. Forgive me for speaking truth to power, but this is very real.)

But – as I said to the IT people, this is all just one level of sanity. ANY mammal brain has the same pattern. Can you imagine what happened for the interesting minority of dinosaurs truly out of control like the guy in North Korea? It is real. And in truth, I see chipmunks in my back yard who are not only friendly but just as delusional and euphoric as the most extreme space people. Of course, the more extreme jihadis are also euphoric-aberrated, and drugs supplied from rich Saudis are part of that wing

of the Third Caliphate movement... supplied by people less myopic but equally aberrated, even as they know how silently and carefully to run folks like Lamar Smith and Ted Cruz and the folks Comey is intimidated by at FBI. (Again, I cite the last chapter of the very serious book “A G Man’s Journal”

for the early inception of the silent coup.)

In my paper, Mind in Time, I talk about two further levels of sanity, both uniquely human (on this planet), which are also necessary to deal with problems as what we face. And also necessary to real scientific and technical creativity. (Sorry. Lamar! Your new efforts may win new singing contests,

but not real products. The BO Xilai sort of songs, funded by your new corpsmen, the new young brown guards, are not compatible with mid-term economic stability let alone growth.)

In fact... Trump is thrashing hard, but the circuits he is pulling out are already a mess... it really is a case of the devil or the deep blue sea (worldwide)... so where is there hope?

An old colleague of mine said... it is like Asimov’s foundation trilogy, where we should put efforts into more realistic goals, like laying the groundwork for the next world civilization. (It was fascinating for me when I saw how some folks in Byzantium tried much the same, with interesting threads emanating from those efforts!). (I also recommended reading Orson Scott Card’s horrible but informative trilogy, Empire, which accurately reflects how some delusional people behind our own silent coup misunderstand what Trajan did to the poor people in the Eastern Roman Empire.) But I do not feel as optimistic as he does. If this world civilization goes, there is every reason to expect that the whole species goes with it, due to very concrete things.... so... well, sanity and truth and the struggle for more of them... at least those can be of value in a later existence... so long as we do not create a planet which is not only dead but a cost to other planets (like Terminator hazards to navigation in space).

“When you are up to your knees in alligators, it is hard to remember you came there to drain the swamp” – popular adage reflecting our best practical knowledge today about higher function of dorsolateral and orbitofrontal cortex, key vectors of human brain evolution;

“You are only worried because you don’t know all the facts. If you knew them all, you would be terrified out of your mind” – from Congressman Trent Franks, describing the challenging of adapting to his new role on the committee which thinks it has all the scariest, most secret information...

By the way... regarding what hope may yet exist for the American Republic (hope that Gaia and our Father in Heaven know something I do not)... I also think of what Kasich said yesterday: the way out would certainly require more cooperation across the aisle. Some creativity and moral highground that way. Duh. Also, it would require supreme court justice(s) committed to the Constitution, with the "new" interpretation that the words "people" and "citizen" refer specifically and only to human beings; when dark money likes someone too much, that worries me... just a worry... but there I do not know all the facts. It also matters where the money comes from, and how it flows, and that plays a core role in the systems analysis. With mpg standards, Barry McNutt of DOE proposed years ago that they should be mpg per passenger, at least, rather than naked mpg, to reduce the kind of bias Trump talked about in Detroit... but one would have to have a functioning brain to do such a thing; adding a denominator to that regulation would be so much simpler than the many, many things in our existing tax code!

Best of luck...

   

DC blindness on the wiretapping issue

I am mainly refocused now on some issues in physics, but as I briefly turn CNN on in the background I feel called to comment on the incredible blindness on display in this region at this time.

As I watched it, I realized: "They say Trump mainly watches CNN and Fox. IF ONLY he could occasionally switch to France 24." The difference between CNN/Congress and France24 was really especially graphic in the past 24 hours.

Here we are in DC, acting solipsistic as usual, as if we were the only creatures in the universe,
seeking truth only by posturing and talking to ourselves in local bars. For example, lots and lots of pious posturing about what we know about Wikileaks. Of course, there is also a lot of posturing about Steve Bannon. Being the weird lonely person who actually tries to take a more scientific approach, I tuned in before to CPAC to get more primary evidence about who Steve Bannon is (previous blog), and... well.. not SO weird... France24 also followed the commonsense approach of asking wikileaks for details on ITS view of who they are and what they are doing.

It was really quite interesting, and I am just sorry that the DC set didn't see the important debate I saw yesterday on France24. There was a familiar moderator (who reminds me a lot of the Celtic side of my own family, though the Donohues didn't have THAT much red hair)... a spokesman for wikileaks, a spokesman for a typical DC intelligence informed shrill viewpoint, and an AfroAmerican guy who came on later whom I mostly missed. The DC guy practically screamed that Wikileaks is an agency of Putin, and gave information on a guy whose name I forget... something like Nero... with   definite evidence on Russian connections. The wikileaks guy did not really argue; he clearly stuck with a more civilized type of dialogue, like the moderator himself. He agreed that he did not like Nero, but stressed that most of their people and sources are form the West, not from Russia, and that this explains the balance of what they cover.

He went on to mention how this new leak establishes definitively that the CIA has the well-mastered ability to just stamp any cyberintrusion with Russian fingerprints. Elementary logic would immediately tell anyone that this does insert some uncertainty into the issue of whether it was Russia under Putin's orders which hacked the DNC.   Certainly there are some Republicans working for CIA or CIA contractors or FBI who wanted Trump to win, after all. There are even some people working for FBI who were passionate about wanting the FBI to clobber Hillary, for God's sake, and Comey was quite open in the press about heavy pressures put on him by... who precisely?
The wikileaks guy mentioned this, but it should have been utterly and instantly obvious to anyone who learned about this new round of leaks, such as all the folks on the intelligence and oversight committees who have been appearing on CNN. Why are the questions posed by the French reporter and easily dealt with logically (albeit not with certainty at this stage)... but all the DC people seemed
totally and willfully oblivious to information they should be aware of more than the French are? This is a very interesting question in psychiatry, but let me not digress into such technical details, important as they are.

Another really obvious connection: Senator Feinstein commented that all three megaleaks
(1. Snowden; 2. last year's, discussed in detail with citations at www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.,pdf; 3. the new round this past week) came from CONTRACTORS.

Come to think of it, how would she know that for leaks 2 and 3? OK, she may have access to some information I don't. Or it may be another typical DC assumption or unquestioned PR effort,
another example of gullible folks just believing what a vested interest wants them to believe. I don't know.

Clearly everyone is excited here by plans to track down who, among the contractors, did the leak. That's reasonable, but another question comes to mind:

Why contractors? Could it be that folks OUTSIDE the government are in fact closer to the real new centers of power, what Bannon calls a "silent coup," and see more directly both what the bigger picture is and how seriously our constitution is being violated and how desperate the situation is for anyone who truly supports the constitution trying to figure out what to do to try to restore democracy? No, this is not about EPA regulations or about socialism; evidence is clear that the "gestapo" works to silence environmental whistleblowers, and has been doing so long before Trump took office.  Many months ago, I accidentally saw a netflix documentary, United States of Secrets, which does give details and background explaining why Snowden felt he had no other choice available to him; the consequences of his choice were deplorable in many ways, yet loss of our freedom would be even more deplorable. Am I arguing for clemency for the other two leakers, whoever they may be? No, my point is that we should not be so obsessed with the little guys that we ignore the big gorillas -- the folks outside the government manipulating us all (not only within the constraints of FISA laws but beyond them) via IT. YES, Senator Feinstein, do look at the contractors very closely... but consider doing a creative open effort, trying to sue both them and Comey as states' witnesses to unearth the REALLY dangerous criminals.  (The wikileaks guy also showed an awareness of the criminal things going on on a huge scale today...)

At www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf, I did discuss technical things required to restore some privacy to the great majority of us. It would take a major informed act of will, and act of intelligence in realizing we need to do that to survive at all. I was amazed that folks in France24 did seem to be aware even of those issues, far beyond the folks here who have troubles seeing so far as their own nose.

=============

It is curious that just after this came out, more news came:

The Senate voted 49 to 48 to eliminate the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule, which is aimed at federal contractors.

Some have compared the outsourcing of security and funding decision functions to use by the Roman Empire of foreign mercenaries. (That was one of the major factors contributing to the collapse of that empire.) Create a slave class, outside of legal protections, and try to control them by turning the screws ever more...  Not good. Not sustainable.

Wiretapping Trump: Is he going crazy, or not yet crazy enough?

He is right to worry a lot, but if he doesn’t catch on... he is in trouble, immediately...

Judging from what I see on CNN, people are now questioning Trump’s sanity more than they ever did before, because of his claim that Obama personally ordered a wiretap on his telephones.

People on CNN mostly said: “He is making a charge which is outrageous and impossible, with no evidence. It sounds like the birther fantasy all over again, but multiplied a hundredfold.”

Does he feel nostalgia for the brief time, between nomination and election, when Hilary Clinton was the only one who exercised the tactic of trying to drive Trump crazy? Actually, I have met serious professionals in international relations who have also studied that tactic in great depth...

I had a different idea about what was really going on when this story broke, but yesterday a friend who works for an organization heavily dependent on money from Charles Koch said: “They and Trump both need to get their story straight. It is perfectly simple. Trump has seen transcripts of one of his telephone conversations floating around, and he does not realize that they came from an approved FISA wiretap on the Russian ambassador.”

Clapper suggested on TV that it might not actually be Hillary Clinton tapping telephones here, but someone else. The righteous optimistic people at CNN said: “No, that can’t be the story. Who could do that? And wouldn’t that be a felony anyway?”

Ah, to live in that world of so much peace, freedom and honor that I thought I was growing up in before I went out to the real world... which so many of these folks are still shielded from!

These folks on CNN remind me of the old friends I have (mostly old indeed) who insist on discussing sensitive matters only by telephone, because they imagine it is ever so much secure than email!

I consistently tell them, "Look, I have some understanding of the new technology, and I have double checked with friends in intelligence agencies. If you use gmail with https always on and double identity verification, and control your own server, that is infinitely more secure than telephones! This way, yes, you can be pretty sure that NSA, google and certain folks in China will file what you write, but with phones the subscription list gets to be like a telephone book.” (Maybe it’s more than those three now, thanks to intelligence sharing and new stuff in Russia, and the leaks of 2016, but even so.)

They imagine that telephone conversations must be secure, because it takes a FISA order to get a legal wiretap, because no one on this planet could break the law, not if it was a felony. Like hacking. No hacking on this planet, right?

Or maybe they imagine that phone conversations are harder for computers to manage, store and sort than text data. But by now, even the lamest amateur should know that there exist things like cell phones with speech recognition, offering a kind of equivalency of speech and text. Some things make it easier with speech, but that begins to get towards sensitive proprietary data. (Does anyone imagine that it’s just governments out there doing stuff?)

For God’s sake, was it Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama who hacked the DNC? Is hacking voice any harder than hacking text email now?

So Clapper was doing a great service here by gently pointing something out.

In my view, the same folks who tried to hack Clinton to death, and get ready to throw her out of office (as Rousseff of Brazil was thrown out) are the same people working most effectively now to do the same to Trump, though they would accept a deal where he gets emasculated and behaves nicely like the Queen of England.  If he doesn’t wake up to that, and learn to work with folks like Mark Warner, Clapper and Putin first to restore due process and human rights in the US and get rid of the moles, he will be in very deep trouble, very soon. It has certainly already started.

There has been a lot of press lately about “silent coup.” Those guys are totally right on that point, as I have learned to my regret in tracking many government agencies. It is extremely serious. But it has nothing to do with a Communist revolution... and is closer to folks who are so obsessed with Communism of the 1950s that they have adopted its methods and worldview. They become what they hate and they fear. (Jesus would say: "I told you you are better off leading with love..")

I can still remember a conversation with a person I trust high up (still high up) in one agency.

“We agree that there is a gestapo out there now, and that it has already done things which we thought were impossible in getting away with illegal behavior and managing even the whistleblower system to their advantage. But, because of the deliberately stealthy fear-based tactics they use, we don’t know WHOSE GESTAPO is it? Is it Obama’s, or is it more from dark money on the right, ultimately from the Gulf like Halliburton's clients?”

Actually, I remember a conversation at Princeton, where they heard from a famous leader of semiconductor technology who had been purged from NSF  by questionable means, who actually thought it might be the same old gestapo. “You aren’t Jewish yourself, Paul, are you?” No, and people would have to be pretty crude and dumb to imagine I am, what with a Quaker paper trail, Catholic youth and lots of other data. Still, crude and dumb doesn’t rule that out. What rules it out is stuff I had from other sources. Obama didn’t really mean to eviscerate America’s advanced missile defense work, as has happened fairly recently. It’s true that he gave Kahlil his head in seriously evil misdirection of brain research, but what of the other stuff? And it was in national press, visible to everyone, how Lamar Smith bragged about directing the FBI agents (moles?) assigned to lead an all-out witch hunt on Hillary Clinton. The tampering with government computers does not trace back up the legal government chain of command. 

Does he really imagine that the moles were following due process in respecting his rights any more than they respected those of Hillary Clinton? Does he think it is all that hard? Does he think that Snowden’s revelations overstated what technology had already been deployed, or the implications of interagency sharing or of standing changes made initially by Cheney with Hayden there to implement, and strengthen extragovernmental mechanisms?

Whatever.

I do not plan to revisit this kind of subject in the near future. Rather, I plan to get back to hard core mathematical physics next... and other mathematical issues.