Month: March 2025

Our new administration’s economic policies have resulted in a precipitous decline in stock prices. Someone pointed out to me that in just that single day, the decline in the value of X stock caused Elon Musk to lose about $7.06 Billion.

My first thought was “Wow, he could have gotten more than 28 presidents elected for that money!”

Claude Malhuret’s speech on March 6 to the Senate of France may go down in history as one of the defining moments in democracy’s defense against fascism. As a patriotic American, faced with the current attack from within against our own democracy, I feel an obligation to repeat it here in its entirety:

“Europe is at a critical juncture of its history. The American shield is slipping away, Ukraine risks being abandoned, and Russia is being strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero: An incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service.

“This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.

“The king of the deal is showing what the art of the deal is lying prostrate. He thinks he will intimidate China by capitulating to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but China’s President Xi Jinping, faced with such wreckage, is undoubtedly accelerating his plans to invade Taiwan.

“Never in history has a president of the United States surrendered to the enemy. Never has one supported an aggressor against an ally, issued so many illegal decrees, and sacked so many military leaders in one go. Never has one trampled on the American Constitution, while threatening to disregard judges who stand in his way, weaken countervailing powers, and take control of social media.

“This is not a drift to illiberalism; this is the beginning of the seizure of democracy. Let us remember that it only took one month, three weeks, and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.

“I have confidence in the solidity of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.

“Eight days ago, at the very moment when Trump was patting French President Emmanuel Macron on the back at the White House, the United States voted at the UN with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.

“Two days later, in the Oval Office, the draft-dodger was giving moral and strategic lessons to the Ukrainian president and war hero Volodymyr Zelensky before dismissing him like a stable boy, ordering him to submit or resign.

“That night, he took another step into disgrace by halting the delivery of promised weapons. What should we do in the face of such betrayal? The answer is simple: Stand firm.

“And above all, make no mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to the Yalta Agreement, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.

“The countries of the Global South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe, or whether they are now free to trample it.

“What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

“This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations.

“Greenland, Panama, and Canada are mine. Ukraine, the Baltics and Eastern Europe are yours. Taiwan and the South China Sea are his.

“At the Mar-a-Lago dinner parties of golf-playing oligarchs, this is called “diplomatic realism.”

“We are therefore alone. But the narrative that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russia is doing poorly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country with about a quarter its population.

“With interest rates at 21 percent, the collapse of foreign currency and gold reserves, and a demographic crisis, Russia is on the brink. The American lifeline to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.

“The shock is violent, but it has one virtue. The Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in a single day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands, and that they have three imperatives.

“Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that Ukraine can hang on, and of course to secure its and Europe’s place at the negotiating table.

“This will be costly. It will require ending the taboo on using Russia’s frozen assets. It will require bypassing Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself through a coalition that includes only willing countries, and the United Kingdom of course.

“Second, demand that any agreement include the return of kidnapped children and prisoners, as well as absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia, and Minsk, we know what Putin’s agreements are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

“Finally, and most urgently because it will take the longest, we must build that neglected European defense, which has relied on the American security umbrella since 1945 and which was shut down after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The task is Herculean, but history books will judge the leaders of today’s democratic Europe by its success or failure.

“Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is a recognition that France has been right for decades in advocating for strategic autonomy.

“Now, it must be built. This will require massive investment to replenish the European Defense Fund beyond the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate EU membership for Ukraine, which now has the leading army in Europe, rethink the role and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, and relaunch missile shield and satellite programs.

“Europe can become a military power again only by becoming an industrial power again. But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.

“We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and above all in the face of Putin’s collaborators on the far right and far left.

“They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump say is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of a de Gaullian Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain under Putin’s thumb.The peace of collaborators who for three years, have refused to support the Ukrainians in any way.

“Is this the end of the Atlantic alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky’s public humiliation, and all the crazy decisions taken over the last month, have finally stirred Americans into action. Poll numbers are plummeting. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.

“The Trumpists are no longer at the height of glory. They control the executive branch, Congress, the Supreme Court and social media. But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They are starting to raise their heads.

“The fate of Ukraine will be decided in the trenches, but it also depends on those who defend democracy in the United States, and here, on our ability to unite Europeans and find the means for our common defense, to make Europe the power it once was and hesitates to become again.

“Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of great sacrifice. The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century. Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.”

Not all technology is good. Maybe we were better off back when it was easier to avoid the incessant barrage of the news cycle.

This seems particularly true now, when a kleptocracy is working very hard to destroy the United States of America from within, and take much of the rest of the world down with it.

In the future, we will have the option to wear unobtrusive blended reality glasses. As a user interface, these glasses might largely replace our phones, which will stay in our pockets, mainly functioning to help our glasses with computation and communication with the Cloud.

Those glasses will be equipped with cameras and microphones, and will use A.I. to help us navigate the world. Which means that they will serve as companions in helping us to build the latent spaces that will turn into useful memories.

As has always been the case, we will become intertwined with our technology. In essense, the technology will become part of our intellectual, emotional and cultural identity.

Once upon a time we mainly did this through books. Then we incorporated movies, then television, then the internet, and more recently social media.

When we speak to one another in conversation, the things we remember, the associations that we make, will be subtly reinforced by information that we are getting in real time from our own latent space, via the A.I. in our glasses, in communication with the Cloud.

This won’t just be information about the world around us, but also about ourselves. The A.I. will be have been trained on all of our past conversations, our life experience, our emotional reactions to everything and everyone we have ever encountered.

To children who are born into a world where people have this capability none of his will feel like technology, any more than it feels like “technology” when you read a favorite passage from a cherished book, or can see because you are wearing your prescription glasses. It will just feel normal. It will just feel like us, being ourselves.

Once you start to see human perception and interaction in terms of latent spaces, the entire concept of memory takes on a different meaning. It would be easy to think of a memory as some kind of internal recording, like a tape in a tape recorder, or a strip of movie film. But it would also be wrong.

Memories are not literal at all. They are reconstructed from patterns of thought that we have spent our entire lives building.

Your memory of a person’s face is not a literal recording of their face, but rather an impression that you carry with you, which relates their face to all of the other faces that you have seen in your life. In this sense, there is no such thing as a “memory of someone’s face” in isolation from the rest of our lived experience.

This way of looking at things makes it easier to understand how our conversations fall into patterns. When we talk with another person, most of what we say is framing, using our memory of conversations past to scaffold new thoughts.

That’s not a bad thing. In fact, we can better understand the meaning and import of a conversation by how it uses those conversational memories as a launching point to travel into new territory.

Thinking in terms of latent space helps to understand the human condition. When we see the face of another person, we never see just that face in isolation. Instead, we see how that particular face relates to all of the faces that we have ever seen.

We don’t do this consciously — it’s something that happens in our brain far beneath the level of consciousness. And the same thing happens when we see a house, or a tree, or hear a guitar playing.

All of our lives, up until that moment, our brains have been busy classifying everything, and taking into account all of the variations within any given category. That range of perceptible variation is our internal latent space.

Similarly, when you have a conversation with somebody about romance, or politics, or sports, or movies, some topic of shared expertise, you are both exploring your shared latent space. There are unspoken rules for a discussion of any such topic, and we all know those rules so well that we don’t even think about them.

If you were having a heart to heart talk with a friend about relationships, and that person suddenly started talking instead about stamp collecting, you would be right to be worried. This is because the parameters of a conversation about relationships are generally unspoken, but they are also generally well known.

When it comes right down to it, every human dwells within the latent space that they have spent their life constructing. The external world is really only raw material for the construction of that latent space.

And we we spend much of our time discovering the ways that our respective latent spaces fit together. From those shared connections, we create meaning in our lives.

The latent space of any collection of objects is essentially the behind-the-scenes set of control knobs that you could adjust to create any given object in the collection. For example, consider all of the chairs in the world.

You might imagine a magic chair factory with a showroom containing a single generic chair, and a control panel that contains hundreds of knobs. You can’t manufacture your dream chair, but you can pick up a pencil and make a sketch of it.

When you enter the factory, the factory operator looks at your sketch and starts turning various knobs right or left. Every time a knob is adjusted, the shape of the chair changes.

If the factory operator is really good, after a while the chair in the showroom starts to look a lot like the chair in your sketch. When the process is complete, that generic chair has turned into your dream chair.

Basically, the knobs in that control panel represent the latent space of all possible chairs. And any particular chair corresponds to a particular setting of those knobs.

More tomorrow.

I have been thinking recently about latent space. It is the key concept behind modern A.I., but I think it is much more than that.

If you look at latent space from a philosophical perspective, there is so much there to unpack. More tomorrow.

I finally forced myself to watch the press conference with President Zelenskyy from the White House. It wasn’t easy viewing.

I was quite impressed by the dignity and restraint shown by President Zelenskyy, considering the circus he found himself in. It was as though the two other people in the conversation were trying to convince all of us that they are complete idiots.

Or maybe they really are complete idiots. It’s possible that they simply don’t understand how high the stakes are for our own country.

The U.S. hasn’t been supplying arms to Ukraine out of generosity. We’ve been supplying arms to Ukraine because if Russia actually gets away with destroying a sovereign European democracy on our watch, the negative consequences for the U.S., both political and economic, are profound, and potentially devastating.

It’s scary to realize that we have a president who doesn’t seem to know that. Or maybe our president, and his little pet attack dog, just have a deep hatred and contempt for the United States of America.

Has anyone else noticed how quickly the Whitehouse has declared the U.S. to be one of the bad guys? Europe is scrambling to reorder its priorities, because now it’s pretty much alone in standing up for decency and in maintaining a moral compass.

It’s as though our Federal government just flipped that old Google directive on its head, the one that went “Don’t be evil”. It seems as though our government’s new motto is “Be evil”.