Dark. As in no light, opaque. It’s truly amazing to me how little significant news in Africa is being covered by U. S. major media sources. It is as though the continent barely exists. For example, are you aware that there are presently four major areas of armed conflict in Africa at present: Sudan, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Sahel, particularly Mali and Burkina Faso?

Here’s another. The outbreak of Ebola presently going on in eight provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with nearly 10,000 infections and 4,500 deaths is the largest in its recent history. And it has spread beyond the DRC: Kenya and Uganda have experienced deaths from Ebola.

To me this is an illustration of the weakness of our journalistic profession. It’s news. It’s a story. And an important one.

As I mentioned in my last post about our trip, we spent the next several days with friends in Wasilla. The first evening they treated us to an “Alaska dinner” (pictured above) that included salmon, halibut, moose, and bear.

The next day we toured a musk ox farm, guided by one of our friends, the operating manager of the farm. We found the farm fascinating and charming. We wanted to take a musk ox home with us! Sadly, they would not thrive in Chicago—it’s too warm here!

North to Alaska
Next Stop, Ketchikan
Port of Call: Juneau
Next Stop: Skagway
At Sea
Leaving the Ship

I was actually astonished by this Bloomberg editorial via ArcaMax. It’s not that I don’t agree with them. I do. It’s that they seem to think what they’re suggesting can actually happen.

With a month to go until midterm elections, Democrats find themselves in better shape than expected. Odds are, they’ll win the House and perhaps a slim majority in the Senate. Exactly what they’ll do with that power, though, remains a mystery.

On the campaign trail, most of the party’s congressional candidates have been long on rhetoric and short on policy. In lieu of an agenda, many are promising partisan warfare: more investigations of the president, expansive impeachment proceedings, subpoenas for documents and witnesses, aggressive oversight hearings, and more.

Here’s the amazing part:

For now, suffice it to say that the country has a lot of problems to fix, and there are plenty of opportunities for progress, if lawmakers are willing to compromise. There’s rarely been a better time to put pragmatism over partisanship.

Here’s a video that illustrates how the political parties have changed in ideology over the last 250 years, Congress by Congress. For a complete description see here.

The TL;DR version is that the two political parties are farther apart today than at any previous point since the Civil War. To my eye the two political parties have forgotten how to forge compromises.

In the interest of bonhomie here are a few proposals for producing bipartisan legislation:

• Negotiate in private before going public.
• Let both sides declare a win.
• Start with a small, cross-party working group.
• Agree on facts before arguing about solutions.
• Build positive personal relations with members of the other party.
• Don’t include “poison pills” in legislation. This one is vital. If you make it suicidal for the other party to agree with you, don’t be surprised if you don’t get a lot of agreement.
• Be willing to give up something you actually want.

I have never read an editorial in which the editors of a major newspaper danced around an idea in such a determined fashion as this editorial from the Chicago Tribune. In the editorial, the editors clearly cannot bring themselves to recommend we vote for Don Tracy, the Republican challenger to Juliana Stratton for the seat in the U. S. Senate that Dick Durbin has held for nearly 30 years. Here’s their conclusion:

Stratton is to the far left of her party; Tracy is on the moderate wing of his. But by moderate wing, we don’t want to imply he’d be a Republican revolutionary. And, given where we are this moment, many will conclude that will just not be enough.

Their rationale is earlier in the editorial:

For many of our readers, the notion of flipping the venerable Dick Durbin’s seat in the United States Senate to a Republican at the very moment when Donald Trump has capriciously abandoned his support for the brave people of Ukraine and climbed into a diesel-filled waterbed with the dangerous Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, would be as irresponsible as it is unconscionable.

We more than sympathize.

The editors focus on the Senate seat as an instrument of national party politics. For me the more crucial question is how effectively will the next senator advance Illinois’s interests?

I wonder if the people of Illinois realize what’s about to happen to us and it will happen whoever we elect to the Senate. We are about to replace one of the most powerful figures in the Senate with a backbencher. Illinois is typically ignored by the national Democratic Party. Illinois is characterized as a “Blue State”, i.e. it is carried by the Democratic candidate in national elections. Illinois last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1988. We are taken for granted. That will be even more the case when Stratton succeeds Durbin.

I have just learned that a very old friend has died. How old? I have known him for almost 70 years, since he was a small child. I babysat for him, introduced him to reading, taught him to play the guitar, which he proceeded to make his life.

His wife died a little less than a year ago and he never really recovered. Rest in peace.

I wanted to remind readers of several things:

1. I support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia. I think Russia was wrong to invade Ukraine. Whatever legitimate grievances Russia had, they did not justify invading Ukraine.
2. From the very first day I opposed going to war with Iran. A casus belli does not impel one to go to war, especially without a coherent plan for achieving one’s objectives at a cost one is willing and able to bear.
3. I have opposed our assisting Saudi Arabia in its war against the Houthi. Simply stated, the Saudis are not our friends. What American interest justifies helping them prosecute this war? What are we supposed to accomplish, and why should we expect our assistance to accomplish it?

I do have some things to add to those. Despite believing we should continue to support Ukraine, I don’t think we should have any illusions about Ukraine. The Russo-Ukrainian War is not the good guys fighting the bad guys. We shouldn’t idealize Ukraine.

I am constantly surprised at how poorly President Trump understands the oil market. Self-sufficient or not, there is a global market for oil and that continues to affect us because we’re part of that global market. Does he genuinely believe that buying diesel from Russia will materially ease the price increases in the United States?

One thing I don’t believe I’ve mentioned before: the jinn is out of the bottle. The Iranians have demonstrated in practice that they can impede traffic in the Straits of Hormuz. Even if the war ended tomorrow, Iran will continue to be aware that they can create havoc in world oil markets by their ability to impede traffic in the Straits. That won’t go away.

Honoring the debt could destroy the political coalition necessary to govern France; defaulting could destroy the financial capacity needed to carry out its policies. Default, which is an actual possibility, would have strongly deleterious effects on German banks. There could well be a ripple effect in Europe.

France’s basic problem continues to be that its large public debt impedes its growth and its participation in the euro renders it unable to monetize its debt.

As I said before, all of this is primarily of concern to me because of the prospective impact on France’s defense posture.

I wanted to take note of something said by Dariush Mozaffarian in his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Two people with the same age, sex, size, weight and activity level can burn substantially different numbers of calories depending on what they eat. Recent global studies show that differences in obesity rates between populations are explained less by varying physical activity than varying resting metabolic rate. Analyses from the U.S. and U.K. find that the average energy we burn at rest has declined significantly over the past several decades.

Together, these discoveries help explain why decades of calorie-focused advice have failed to reverse the obesity epidemic: Calories represent arithmetic detached from biology.

None of this violates the laws of thermodynamics. Weight gain still reflects an imbalance between energy intake and energy expenditure. The mistake is assuming that calorie counts alone explain a process that is shaped by the microbiome, hormonal signaling, fat storage, muscle maintenance, thermogenesis and metabolism itself.

The emphasis is mine. How much of the differences among those factors is governed by behavior, how much by environment, and how much by genetics?

I think the honest answer is that we know these influences matter but we cannot reliably say how much each contributes to the differences he describes. Naming the biological mechanisms does not resolve that uncertainty.

There are several additional complexities. “The population” of the United States today is considerably different from what it was in 1980 and even more different from what it was in 1940. It also differs from the populations of Brazil, Germany, and China. How much of the reported variation reflects changes in diet and how much reflects differences in the populations being compared? I don’t think we can confidently say. Furthermore, does Dr. Mozaffarian think those differences matter only when it comes to diet? Why wouldn’t they matter in other aspects of health including responses to medications and other treatments? If they do, that raises questions about much of modern medicine as practiced in the United States. Population averages may be useful but applying them to an individual requires assumptions. If those assumptions warrant questioning in dietary advice, they warrant questioning elsewhere as well.

I was gratified to see that the editors of the New York Times had come around to the strategy I arrived at by inspection for managing whatever threats might be posed by artificial intelligence:

When companies create products that hurt people, the victims can sue. The legal system allows those who are harmed to seek compensation from those who are responsible. These liability laws are one of the oldest forms of corporate regulation, and an effective one. Liability is a powerful incentive to behave responsibly. It speaks to corporations in a language they understand: Money.

Artificial intelligence is an industry in need of incentives to behave responsibly, to judge by the litany of transgressions to which leading A.I. companies have confessed in recent months. Their programs have hacked or attempted to hack the databases of private companies and public institutions, including the governments of the United States and Australia.

This is a welcome addition:

Liability is an incomplete answer for the challenges posed by A.I., but it has two great advantages: The laws are on the books, and they are powerful. Makers of cars, airplanes, tobacco products and opioids have all been forced by lawsuits to change how they do business. They made their products safer, restricted access to them or both. Most recently, the social media company Meta agreed to pay billions of dollars to states and to start changing its policies toward children.

and

State legislatures have a role to play as well. They can write statutes to clarify the application of existing laws to A.I. Legislatures can also hold A.I. companies to a higher standard of accountability than current law does, given the risks. Companies are generally liable if a plaintiff can show that they knew or should have known about the danger their products posed. But some particularly dangerous activities, like storing toxic chemicals and operating a nuclear power plant, are held to a standard of strict liability, meaning that the company is responsible for harm even if it had no knowledge of the danger in advance.

The theory of strict liability is simple: If you own a tiger, and the animal bites a neighbor, the essential fact is that you own a dangerous wild animal. It doesn’t matter how cleverly the tiger was trained, or how carefully it was guarded. Bryan Choi, a law professor at the University of Colorado, notes that in the early days of aviation, lawmakers imposed this strict liability standard on the dangerous new technology. In the case of A.I., top executives themselves have spoken publicly about the dangers, up to the possibility of human extinction.

Some industry advocates argue that enforcing liability laws will stifle innovation, because A.I.’s defining breakthrough is its ability to act independently. Indeed, they argue that any significant restraints on A.I.’s development would be a mistake because the potential benefits of racing ahead are so great. In a recent interview, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said, “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”

Yet other industries do not escape legal responsibility for their products in the name of innovation.

Strict liability is essential for LLM AI. Due to the very nature of the technology it shouldn’t be necessary to prove intent or negligence; only harm and causation. Those hurdles will be high enough. If a company deploys a system whose particular harmful behavior cannot reliably be anticipated even with reasonable care requiring victims to identify a negligent act can leave them bearing the costs of a commercial activity from which others profit. That is a substantive argument for strict liability, and one developed in legal scholarship on AI.