I’m not in favor of assassinations; I’m especially not fond of sloppy wet work.

Fortunately I’m not in that business, and my only contact with that world stopped talking to me after he made different life choices following 9/11. In my view, and this is a key philosophical point, those in power or government are not more competent, or laudible, or careful, or even smarter than those who aren’t. Nor are they more duplicitious, clever, sneaky, mercurial, or subtle.

That’s one of the reasons I am disinclined to think that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators are particularly impressive. To be blunt: they are up against Joe Biden not Julius Caesar. And lost. Now they are up against Chuck Schumer, and we may be fucked.

I only see that as unfortunate because, were it so, Caesar would make sure we all got to see him impaled. Were it Cassius, I am sure the celebration would be private.

That’s the kind of minds I believe govern the United States, right now, and will for the future. If you want a historical context to situate against, we are in the early stage of the collapse of the republic, before it becomes an empire. In a roundabout way, I am saying Matt Gaetz is no Sulla. The problem we have, which I refuse to play, is one that can roughly be described as “grand strategy on the edge of a crumbling cliff.” It is “mate in 3 but a bomb goes off next turn.” Well, don’t complain about all my fine strategizing if everything gets blown to hell before I can tilt the table. I was not even here, giving advice about the climate crisis, until the late 1980s and once disco wore off, and I was done my stint in uniform, I thought I’d step back and let the smart kids run the show while I worked for a decent retirement. I even remember when CFCs came on the screen, and dutifully stopped using those but honestly I was busy writing the software that came to control the internet’s security stack. Sure, I could have done something but I honestly thought it was in train. I stopped using CFCs and leaded gasoline and even got a car with a 4-cyl engine. I thought it was OK. I thought someone was on it.

I thought someone was on the nuclear war thing, honestly, and, whoah that was complicated but it turns out that was mostly irrelevant marketing puffery and I spent all my effort and brainpower in the wrong place.

I trusted that the guys who were worrying about fuel efficiency and OPEC had their hands around the problem, and drove a fairly efficient motorcycle, a Honda CRX HF that got 55mpg in 1986 and I really didn’t think much more about fuel efficiency until talk about “carbon footprint” and hangon I’m a jet-set traveller, WTF?!

I didn’t understand that the same pencil-neck creeps we tried to chase away in high school were going to come charging back, take over the planet, and try to turn the remains into a bad episode from Star Trek. This planet started out as an ideal sort of garden, except for the mosquitoes, and we’re well locked-in to turning it into a fucked-over wasteland.

The point of all this is that each generation does not appear to figure out what the next one needs, in order to survive, until after we have thoroughly fucked up/dominated/resource constrained/etc the situation. In this case, we all should have started screaming about the climate crisis back in the 80s – and, I swear, we could have done something about it. We might have, or probably even would have, except that we operate on an insanely tight time-window and can actually drive ourselves extinct in one generation. Also, prolonging the lives of boomers was a bad idea. Too late!

Whups, bad idea, evolution! Better luck next time!

Don’t worry, I’ll get back to the AI stuff soonish. I am still coming to terms with what is going to happen.

Ok, whups, I completely shanked that into the weeds. What I was actually supposed to be writing about what something cheerful. Yeah, that’s it. The cheerful thing I wanted to write about is the serious hanky panky Aaron Burr got up to after shooting Alexander Hamilton. I was (and am) amazed – he actually tried several paths to starting his own insurrection/secession movement – and it doesn’t really look like he had any particular ideology it was just him collecting power to himself. The reason that this piece spun out of controll and went bouncing into the weeds is because I have a tremendous amount of trouble connecting emotionally with people like Burr. It wasn’t enough to be famous and respected? Didn’t he realize that Lamborghinis hadn’t been invented yet, and neither had cocaine. There is something notable and horrifying about his story – that  he appeared pretty openly to be a scalawag, a flibustier, a bad card, a trouble maker and so forth, but a lot of responsible people just sort of stood around and watched him openly plan to start his own country in the middle of the US. (Pro tip: you are not supposed to do that) but like some of history’s other great scalawags, he was remarkably energetic. From the sound of it he was able to create new problems faster than those stuck around him could clean them up. That was what made me realize that there’s only one good solution for such people and that’s for someone to shoot them before they make a big smoky trail and it’s relatively small. We have to remember that Julius Caesar was not a documentary but thinking about all of this makes me sympathetic for the plotters, who realized, “holy shit this Caesar guy is not going to stop!” and someone had the idea of ganking him while he was between bouts of manipulating everything. There have been times I have declared loudly (you may have heard it in the wind!) that humanity has a bad habit of putting the very worst examples of ourselves in charge of the heap. These people like Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin come along and announce that they’re going to reform agriculture and make the trains run on time, or deal with the CFCs and you turn your back and by the time you turn back, some jackswipe has built panzers and bombers and they are deployed everywhere as far as you can see. And, of course, it’s too late to do anything about it. There is where I started: Hamilton would have been a better show if it had opened with Doc Holliday making a canoe out of Burr’s head. But that would not have ended well, either. We need to somehow take into account the Doomey Microsecond* and somehow slow ourselves down. For example: Mamdani – seems OK to me. I’d have voted for him. But what do we really know about the guy? He could be worse than the charlatans running the show now. Or is this a race to the bottom? I do not know. I hope that if he turns out to be a pirate, someone just pushes him out a window, Russian-style.

Recommended listening: 3 or 4 episodes of detail about a genuinely amoral, sociopathic, uh, guy.

FAN FAVORITE: The Insurrection of Aaron Burr • Season 86 Episode 1 • Aug 6, 2025 • 39 min
https://wondery.com/shows/american-history-tellers/episode/5279-fan-favorite-the-insurrection-of-aaron-burr-an-affair-of-honor/

There are similarities to today’s situation. The whole time I kept thinkinig that all the problem needed was another lead ball from another pistol. But Jefferson, the great man, just sort of piddled around trying to be fair. Meanwhile, Burr set off on a trail of trouble-making that lasted nearly 40 years, trying to trade this part of the country to the british, and that to the Mexicans, etc. “Energetic Shitweasel” comes to mind. It all struck me as odd because Burr’s plans were almost as stupid as this other guy who tried an insurrection on Jan 6, 2020. Again, that show should have ended when the police rounded everyone up and all the hyper-energetic crimers got put up against a wall. As I write this, I know some of you are thinking “but what if a government is actually doing well, and is legitimate, and it ruins itself by putting the wrong jackass up against a wall?” I’m going to go out on a limb and observe that generally shooting troublemakers is cheaper than letting them develop fully. Ask the French about the little Corsican, speaking of energetic shitweasels.

It’s amazing how many sensible people stood around watching Burr, thinking, “someone should shoot that guy” and nobody did.

(* defined as “the time between which not enough is known about a problem, and everything is set in stone)