There has been quite some kerfuffle over Vice President Kamala Harris’s recently published “election memoir”. At the Guardian Nasrine Malik laments VP Harris, the Democrats, and the chronic self-delusion she sees, characterizing it as “high on their own supply”:

This was not the intention, but 107 Days is a hilarious book. The kind of “you have to laugh or else you’ll cry” type of hilarity. As the second Trump administration unfolds in ever-more disastrous ways, Harris and the other timeline that was possible had she won take on a calamitous, mythical quality. Here she comes, alerting us to the fact that her defeat was no fateful tragedy, but a farce. There was no hidden, better version of Harris that was muzzled and limited by circumstance. There was only a woman with a formidable lack of self-awareness and a propensity to self-valorise.

The book reveals a politician who is all about the machinery of politics, rather than one with conviction spurred by a sense of duty, or a coherent and specific set of values that differentiate her. The “not a thing that comes to mind” answer she gave when asked during the campaign if there was anything she would have done differently to Biden was not caution, but the truth. There is no sign here that she would have liked to meaningfully diverge on Gaza, for example, other than to introduce more parity in the rhetoric of compassion. Or any indication that she would have liked to grasp the nettle on economic policy and make more of her accusation that Donald Trump’s economic agenda “works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers”.

This dearth of a unique Harris agenda explains why she often seemed so vague, skittish and rambling. How does she receive the news she will be the candidate? By reminding herself (and us) that she had the best “contact book” and “name recognition”, as well as the “strongest case”.

She goes pretty easy on Joe Biden by comparison with what others have written:

Biden pops up often, a self-involved and petty figure, snapping at her heels and distracting her. But she is loyal, she tells us – often. So loyal that she couldn’t disparage him in the way that people needed her to (“People hate Joe Biden!” she is told by a senior adviser). But not so loyal that she doesn’t more artfully disguise that she wants you to know the man was a real drag who mentioned her too late in his speeches, and then called her before her big debate with Trump to unsubtly threaten her if she bad-mouthed him.

From my point of view the saddest aspect is that not a thing she writes about President Biden hasn’t been apparent for 40 years. “Self-involved and petty” encapsulates the way Pat Lang, who was personally acquainted with Mr. Biden, described his interactions. And I believe those are when he was a senator.

In a sort of companion piece Nate Silver muses on the memoir, focusing on VP Harris’s remarks about Pete Buttigieg and gives us a present of a new bit of terminology:

Harris is showing why she was a mediocre candidate

Every excerpt I’ve read from Harris’s book so far and every clip from her media tour seems to reflect either Veep-like clumsiness or that she’s suffering from an acute case of Demthink.

What is Demthink? It’s what you’d end up with if you trained a large language model solely on the inner monologue of people who either work in Democratic politics or watch MSNBC for eight hours a day.

Being fluent in Demthink can be helpful for navigating the internal currents of the party, something Harris is adept at. After all, she managed to become the vice presidential pick in 2020 after what was one of the worst performances relative to “expectations” in the history of the nomination process, dropping out two months before Iowa despite idiots like me having declared her to be one of the frontrunners.

The problem with Demthink is not merely that it tends toward cynical triangulation. No, it’s that it tends toward triangulation that isn’t even politically effective because it’s so finely tuned for the in-group that it comes across as uncannily out-of-tune to everyone else.

Read the whole thing. Some of it is paywalled so I couldn’t read it in full.

One factor on which neither Ms. Malik nor Mr. Silver touch is something I believe cuts to the heart of VP Harris’s failed presidential campaign. She, apparently, continues to believe that her identity (as a black and Asian woman) was sufficient to elect her to the presidency. Her actual accomplishments in the offices to which she had been elected over a period of 30 years were meager if any. She continued to fail upwards. That is a characteristic she shares with Mayor Buttigieg. She was never a particularly skilled campaigner or politician or officeholder and continued to fail upwards. IMO there is no greater indictment of “Demthink”.

I have attempted, repeatedly, to articulate my own views as clearly as I could. I don’t think we need more or less government. We need better government and I don’t believe we can achieve that without measuring and evaluating results.

I wanted to point out that in the most recent post on his Substack James Marriott covers a lot of the same territory I have over the years here on the cognitive, social, and political implications of the abandoning of reading. I’ve categorized it as “Visualcy”. He refers to it as “post-literacy”. He cites many of the same sources I have for the last 25 years on the subject. Highly recommended.

If you don’t like the vapid, agonistic, and all-too-frequently pointless character of our present politics, a lot of what we’re seeing can be explained by the cognitive and behavioral impact of not reading.

I materially agree with Daniel Costa’s op-ed at MSNBC in reaction to President Trump’s announced $100K fee and other measures to reform H-1Bs. Here’s the meat of the op-ed:

First, U.S. employers are not required to advertise jobs to U.S. workers and recruit them before hiring H-1B workers. Employers claim there are labor shortages of skilled workers — often despite evidence to the contrary — but are ultimately not required to test the labor market to see if this is true. Instead, they can completely bypass the U.S. workforce.

Second, the rules for H-1B visas require that those workers be paid a fair wage according to U.S. standards. However, in practice, the rules allow the majority of H-1B workers to be vastly underpaid, earning less than the true market wage for their occupation and location.

Third, the way visas are allocated is problematic: As Bloomberg reported last year, staffing companies that pay the lowest wages allowed by law easily exploit the random lottery system that allocates H-1B visas and eat up a large chunk of the 85,000 visas that are subject to the annual cap. (Another 56,000 visas were issued last year to firms that are not subject to the cap.)

Fourth, lack of federal enforcement has allowed companies to underpay H-1B workers by tens of millions of dollars. While some H-1B workers do possess rare skills that benefit the U.S. economy, most who are admitted are classified as filling entry-level jobs that do not require advanced skills. Because of visa rules, H-1B workers are placed in working arrangements akin to indentured servitude. H-1B rules ultimately subsidize the outsourcing and offshoring of U.S. jobs and even incentivize firms to directly replace their U.S. workers with H-1B workers, who can be legally underpaid compared with the market rate for local workers. Just this week, two prominent senators — Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois — penned a letter calling out the biggest tech employers for laying off thousands of U.S. workers while simultaneously hiring thousands of H-1B workers.

The emphasis is mine. He continues:

There are several clear and simple steps that the Trump administration can take to fix H-1B, if this White House is serious about improving the program and protecting workers. None of these steps involve announcing a large fee that creates chaos and uncertainty: The fee is already in effect, for instance, even though there isn’t even a process or a form yet allowing employers to pay it.

The good news is that the administration is implementing or considering two regulations that could go a long way in curbing employer abuses of the visa. One is mentioned at the end of Trump’s proclamation, which directs the Department of Labor to craft a regulation to raise wage rates for H-1B workers. If a rule is ultimately proposed and the final version requires that H-1B workers be paid at least the local median wage for their specific occupation, it would go a long way to fixing the program.

No reform of the program will succeed without enforcement and companies employing H-1B visa cannot be trusted to follow the rules on their own. My modest proposal for remedying the present debacle would be to a) pay substantial bounties to individuals who reveal H-1B workers who weren’t hired, paid, etc. in conformity with the rules; b) don’t require intent to be proven to find a company in violation; c) increase the penalty for employers violating the rules. I suggest that any employer who skirts the rules should be barred from hiring H-1B workers for five years.

None of that will be enough, either. We really need to start monitoring the use of offshored workers. We have no real notion of the scope of the problem.

I only have one question about Jason Willick’s most recent Washington Post column. Here’s the opening of the column:

President Donald Trump wants his Justice Department to stretch the criminal law to target political opponents (such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James B. Comey). President Joe Biden’s Justice Department stretched the criminal law to target political opponents, including Trump himself.

Trump’s administration pressured a company (ABC) to suppress First Amendment-protected speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing. Biden’s administration pressured multiple companies (including Facebook and YouTube) to suppress First Amendment-protected speech during the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump’s supporters, when confronted with this administration’s depredations against civil liberty, often argue that Democrats did it first. The tit-for-tat debate is a dead end; this is all part of the same circling of the political drain. But it’s worth highlighting one systemic difference between the “liberal” version of political repression that occurred in the early 2020s and the populist version Trump is attempting now. The liberal version was veiled and superficially neutral, while the populist version is overt and undisguisedly political.

He elaborates on it a bit but that’s the gist of the column. Here’s my question: is there actually a “lesser evil” here? Is “veiled and superficially neutral” somehow better than “overt and undisguisedly political”? I think the lesson is clear: elect more virtuous leaders who actually believe in liberty and the rule of law.

I just finished reading a transcript of the address President Trump gave to the UN General Assembly yesterday. If you are so inclined you can find it here.

I’m glad I read it rather than listening to it—it was nearly an hour long. I thought it was pretty much what I would have expected. A lot of blowing his own horn and exaggerations. A lot that was contentious, some of which I believe to have been false, some true.

Rather than fisking it, I’ll just ask some questions. First, what do you think of what he said?

Second, what do you think of the United Nations? I think that Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s characterization is even truer now than when she said it 40 years ago. The General Assembly is a “Third World debating society”. The Security Council is obsolete. At the very least four new permanent members should be added: China, India, Brazil, and Nigeria. That would make accomplishing anything through the Security Council even less likely than it is now.

Third, do you think the multiple SNAFUs were deliberate?

If you wanted a good explanation of why I have never voted for Donald Trump and don’t like him as a president, you don’t need to go much farther than his remarks at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service. Consider this passage:

He understood. He really did. He understood what was right, and he was right about that. A lot of it was based on common sense, by the way, Charlie wrote back to the staff member saying, I’m not here to fight them. I want to know them and love them, and I want to reach them and try and lead them into a great way of life in our country. In that private moment, on his dying day, we find everything we need to know about who Charlie Kirk truly was. He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika. But now Erika can talk to me and the whole group and maybe they can convince me that that’s not right. But I can’t stand my opponent. Charlie’s angry. Look at that. He’s angry at me that he wasn’t interested in demonizing anyone.

The emphasis is mine. Perhaps Mr. Trump was just employing a rhetorical device (it’s called a “dichotomy”) but I take him at his word. I believe he hates his enemies.

I don’t hate anybody. Anybody. Not only does my religion forbid it but I believe that hatred makes you that much less of a human being.

I don’t oppose people. I oppose ideas. I don’t hate the people who advocate policies with which I disagree. I hate the policies and the ideas behind them.

I seriously doubt that Tylenol is responsible for the increased number of diagnoses of autism. I do think it would be interesting to know if there were a correlation between maternal headaches during pregnancy and autism in their children. That would probably be quite difficult to determine.

As I’ve written multiple times here I think that autism is multi-factorial, i.e. it doesn’t have just one cause, and I suspect that the increase in diagnosed cases has more to do with how and why it’s being diagnosed than any factor in the environment.

If pressed I would list genetic factors, selective breeding, and, broadly, environmental factors including chemicals in the food we eat and beverages we drink, the air we breath, the things we touch, and in the soil, and social factors like early childhood upbringing. It’s a complicated subject and I don’t believe there’s any “magic bullet” solution to it.

In a press conference during his visit to the United Kingdom President Trump said something that was, at the very least, provocative. Alex Gangitano reports at The Hill:

President Trump said he is aiming to regain control of Bagram Air Base, which has been under Taliban control since U.S. forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021.

“We gave it to them for nothing. We’re trying to get it back, by the way. That could be a little breaking news, we’re trying to get it back because they need things from us,” Trump said Thursday of the base.

“We want that base back but one of the reasons we want the base is, as you know, it’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons,” he added.

I think this is an excellent example of how just because something your predecessor did was stupid does not necessarily mean that doing the opposite is smart.

Bagram Air Base, built by the Soviets, came under the control of the U. S. in 2001 during the U. S. invasion of Afghanistan. The U. S. held it until President Biden withdrew U. S. forces from Afghanistan in 2021.

My own view is that invading Afghanistan was stupid (a punitive action would have been smart) so occupation of Bagram was stupid. That didn’t make President Biden’s withdrawal smart. The invasion of Afghanistan was already a sunk cost by that time as, arguably, were the ongoing costs of the continued occupation. Withdrawal was stupid—it threw away any benefits realized by the invasion and occupation including improvements in the education of Afghan women for no apparent strategic purpose.

Why would U. S. reoccupation of Bagram (assuming the Taliban approves of such a thing) be smart? It would not only be a foothold; it would be a target.

There is a reference to Greek mythology which describes it neatly: piling Pelion on Ossa meaning performing a difficult and, ultimately, futile task. Does President Trump actually believe we could reoccupy Bagram at a low cost and without ongoing daily danger to our troops? Does he not think that the Chinese would find it provocative?

Contrariwise, I had some problems with this post at Open Culture, “40,000-Year-Old Symbols Found in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language”:

We may take it for granted that the earliest writing systems developed with the Sumerians around 3400 B.C.E. The archaeological evidence so far supports the theory. But it may also be possible that the earliest writing systems predate 5000-year-old cuneiform tablets by several thousand years. And what’s more, it may be possible, suggests paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger, that those prehistoric forms of writing, which include the earliest known hashtag marks, consisted of symbols nearly as universal as emoji.

The study of symbols carved into cave walls all over the world—including penniforms (feather shapes), claviforms (key shapes), and hand stencils—could eventually push us to “abandon the powerful narrative,” writes Frank Jacobs at Big Think, “of history as total darkness until the Sumerians flip the switch.” Though the symbols may never be truly decipherable, their purposes obscured by thousands of years of separation in time, they clearly show humans “undimming the light many millennia earlier.”

The symbols may be communication, they may store knowledge, and there may be commonalities among such inscriptions worldwide but these abstract signs and geometric symbols are emphatically not “written language”.

The commonality and wide distribution can be explained as what’s easy to do using stone implements and commonality in human experience and perception. I know of no evidence indicating that the drawings are representations of spoken language or intended to communicate abstract ideas.

That is, after all, how “language” differs from signing—sounds put together in novel ways and with a grammar to communicate ideas including abstract ideas as opposed to imitating animal calls, sounds, etc. They may be “proto-writing” as old inscriptions in China, Europe, and Africa are sometimes characterized but they aren’t “written language”. That was first developed, probably from one of more of these proto-writing systems, around 6,000 years ago give or take.