Tag Archives: history

my “top 10 U.S. political/geopolitical events of the 21st century”

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This Silver Bulletin post is called “The 51 biggest American political moments of the 21st century”. I liked it because it made me think. I found that the non-chronological nature of it threw me off a little bit. So I decided to come up with a “top 10 (U.S.) political/geopolitical moments of the 21st century” of my own. I picked some events off Nate Silver’s list, thought of a few extra of my own, and then put them in chronological order. Limiting it to 10 forced me to really think about what was most important, although like Nate I occasionally cheated by putting things together. I leaned towards events that were true “watershed moments” in the sense that they could have gone differently and the outcome for the U.S. and possibly the world might have been very different. I also leaned towards events where I remember where I was or what I was doing at the time, because I suspect those are important. I included 2000 as Nate did.

  • December 12, 2000: Bush v. Gore. I remember literally falling on my knees when CNN “called Florida for Gore” (the floor of my rental apartment in New Jersey was carpeted). Where would we be if this had gone differently? In general, you may see a theme below that I see Democrats as basically protectors of the pro-big-business, pro-low-profile-foreign-wars center-right consensus in the U.S. George W. Bush was on the right edge of this consensus, while Gore likely would have been on the left edge. I suspect 9/11 and the Afghanistan invasion would still have happened exactly as they did, but I don’t think the Iraq invasion would have happened. Who knows if other aspects of the 20-year “war on terror” would have unfolded as they did? We would have seen more action and progress on climate change and more standing up to fossil fuel industry propaganda for sure.
  • September 11, 2001. I was in my office building in Philadelphia. My mother called me on my desk phone (I didn’t yet have a cell phone) and told me what was happening. We turned on a small black and white TV with rabbit ears we had in our conference room at the time and watched the events unfold. The streets filled with panicky people and you couldn’t get on a train or highway for hours. There were rumors of additional planes in the air over Pennsylvania (which turned out to be true), but in the end nothing happened to us in Philadelphia directly. When I finally got back to my apartment in New Jersey, there were highway signs saying all roads to New York were closed.
  • March 20, 2003: Iraq invasion. A weird thing I remember is Dan Rather updates on the invasion during halftime of NCAA basketball tournament games. We aren’t used to mixing sports and serious news like that.
  • September 15, 2008: Lehman Brothers collapse. This is a stand-in for the larger financial crisis, surely one of the most important world events of my life time (I might pick the Berlin Wall as the single most important, but now we are going back to a previous century). The sub-prime mortgage derivative collapse might have been inevitable, but letting a major institution collapse was a key decision by the Bush administration that led to panic. It certainly played a large role in the Obama election. Obama understood that however distasteful, avoiding panic was the single most important thing he had to do, and he did it. I am an Obama fan, as I was a Bill Clinton fan and fan of the first 2-3 years of Joe Biden. He was just an effective keeper of the pro-big-business, pro-low-profile-foreign-wars center-right consensus. All these leaders pushed to accomplish the most incremental progress that was politically possible in their moments without blowing up the system.
  • January 21, 2010: Citizens United decision. No, I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing. I probably wasn’t even aware of this in real time. But this was crucial and the U.S. and maybe the world could be different without it. Maybe a marginally less corrupt election system would have delivered different results in 2016, and climate change and health care among other issues could be on a very different track.
  • October 28, 2016: the “Comey letter”. I picked this to represent the catastrophe of the 2016 election (which took place on November 8, 2016). The situation was on a knife edge, and without this “October surprise”, which turned out to be a complete hoax, maybe history would have unfolded differently.
  • November 4, 2016: Paris climate change accord takes effect. Obama really pushed and deserves a share of credit for getting this one done. It could still be in effect if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders had won the 2016 election, OR if the U.S. Congress ever did its job of considering and ratifying treaties. Because none of these things happened, the U.S. never gained any momentum on climate action, and generations of our descendants are going to suffer as a result.
  • Friday, March 13, 2020: Covid shutdown. I picked this date because it is the date the Philadelphia public school system, where my son was in first grade at the time, insisted it would not shut down, and then announced late morning that it would shut down for two weeks, which turned into about a year. It was also the day my employer told me I wouldn’t be coming back to the office on Monday. I picked this date to represent the Covid-19 pandemic as a whole, but I could also have picked the date the first vaccinations were approved by the FDA, which was December 11, 2020.
  • November 30, 2022: Chat-GPT goes public. Not on Nate Silver’s list, but seems important no?
  • June 27, 2024: Biden-Trump debate. Of course, the real watershed moment was whenever Biden and his team decided he would run for re-election. Had he announced sometime in 2023 that he would be walking off gracefully into the sunset and allowing a real primary process to play out in 2024, maybe history and our present moment would be very different.

AI investment compared to railway boom

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The blog Urbanomics has a comparison of the current AI investment concentration to the 19th century railroad investment boom in England and the United States. In this particular case, the blogger neglected to provide the original source, which he or she normally does. Financial Times and Economist are typical sources. Anyway, here are some stats mentioned:

  • Peak “railway mania” in the UK was around the 1840s, and railroad investment accounted for around half of all investment at that time.
  • Between about 1830 and 1870 in the UK, railroad investment accounted for about 20% of all investment.
  • In the US, episodic railroad investment booms occurred in the 1840s and 1870s. Railroad investment at these times was around 40% of all investment. This accounted for GDP growth of about 6-10%.
  • The brief clip actually doesn’t tell us how much of total US investment in 2025 is directed to AI. But it accounts for GDP growth of around 2%.

These are interesting numbers, but I don’t think comparing 19th century and 21st century US GDP growth is a very good comparison. That is essentially comparing a fast-growing developing country to a slow-growing advanced economy. If I had to pick one or the other to live in, I would probably go with the one that has safe drinking water, antibiotics, vaccinations, relatively painless dentistry, and air conditioning.

what’s new in the JFK files?

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What’s new is evidence that James Angleton at the CIA was personally tracking Oswald, and (separately, really), extensive ties between Angleton and the nuclear proliferation project of Israeli intelligence. The historical backdrop at this time, also based on evidence, is that JFK was actively and vocally resisting said nuclear proliferation. None of which seems to be a smoking gun with fresh fingerprints, just another party with motive and opportunity.

Though Angleton insisted that the agency was inattentive to Oswald and unaware of the purpose of his activities leading up to Dallas, it has since been disclosed through unclassified JFK assassination records that Angleton personally maintained a classified 201 intelligence/surveillance file on Oswald for the four years preceding Kennedy’s assassination, strictly controlling which officials inside the CIA were permitted to see it through compartmentalization.

Angleton committed perjury before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, claiming he knew almost nothing about Lee Harvey Oswald before the shooting. In another, Angleton concealed the fact that Oswald had visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City—a visit the CIA publicly claimed it only discovered after the assassination. As Jefferson Morley, author of The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, explained, the  counter-intelligence chief “preferred to wait out the Warren Commission rather than explain the CIA’s knowledge of and interest in Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate” in Mexico…

At the very moment a U.S. president was seeking to restrict Israel’s nuclear ambitions and limit the political power of its lobby in Washington, the CIA official in control of the Oswald file was secretly sharing intelligence channels, assassination communications, and off-the-books operatives with Israel—and lying to both Congress and potentially some of his own CIA colleagues about it. The government spent 60 years redacting those facts and Americans have a right to know why.

I might ask how many agents (come on, yes, Oswald was a CIA agent/informant/collaborator of some sort) Angleton had files on. Hundreds? Thousands? or just a few? Did having a file folder with your name on it really make you special?

What was in the East Wing of the White House?

I admit to being ignorant of this. I know the Oval Office is in the West Wing of course. Yahoo has a rundown of the East Wing. The main thing it seems to have housed is official offices of first ladies over the years. But not Hillary Clinton, who insisted on being in the West Wing, or Melania Trump, who doesn’t seem to do office-y things. And there was also a theater with a really big TV where presidents and guests could watch movies and the Super Bowl. But given how busy I am as a normal middle aged working parent, I can’t imagine presidents are often able to sit down and dedicate a 2-3 hour chunk of time to watching a movie or sporting event.

The east wing “colonnade” was essentially a hallway.

East Colonnade

The iconic outdoor photos we often see of world leaders are typically taken in the outdoor West Wing colonnade.

West Colonnade

There are also the east and west porticos, which are basically covered porches. Photo captions online seem to mix up the porticos and colonnades at times.

revisiting the Hindenburg

I always assumed that everyone on board the Hindenburg when it exploded over new Jersey in 1937 died. But in fact, there were 97 people on board and 35 of them died. That’s a tragedy, but slightly less tragic in terms of loss of life than I thought.

The U.S. military made its own experiments with airships, and many of them went much, much worse than that. The American versions tended to use helium, so they didn’t explode, but they just couldn’t be controlled well in storms. Weather forecasting and communications were much less far along then than we take for granted now, so people trying to fly these things were often taken by surprise and a lot of them crashed with people dying horrifically from falls, impacts and drowning. This long article from a site called The Atavist goes through this disturbing history.

https://itoldya420.getarchive.net/amp/media/ymca-building-akron-ohio-ad735f

why the ruins of ancient cities are found underground

A common reason, apparently, was fire. When a city was largely destroyed by fire, people would just level out the rubble and start building again on top. This also helped protect from floods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyTOYEk_Z2Y&t=1s

We were still doing essentially this same thing in the U.S. even a hundred years ago. Philadelphia, for example, is a city built on originally swampy floodplain between two large rivers. Developers channeled streams into huge sewers in the valleys, cut off the tops of nearby hilltops, and filled in the valleys. This made a flat plain for development, as much as 30 feet above the original land surface in some cases, with sewers ready to go. The sewers were for both drainage and waste, in a time before flush toilets when people previously just tipped their chamber pots into the streets each morning. And remember that added to all that human waste was the waste of horses, the main form of transport. Then there were factories and slaughterhouses discharging all sorts of nasty things to those sewers and rivers. So there was a certain brutal logic to it at the time, but of course we don’t want to be doing this in new areas. It makes sense for people to use these areas where we have already sacrificed the environment more intensely, while greening them up with lots of trees and parks so they are actually nice places for people to live.

Interesting pictures and narrative on this process in Philadelphia are here and here.

record adoption rate for ChatGPT

I mentioned recently that I had couldn’t remember any technology being adopted into widespread commercial and public use as fast as the large language models. Here is some empirical confirmation of my impression, from Reuters:

ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study on Wednesday.

The report, citing data from analytics firm Similarweb, said an average of about 13 million unique visitors had used ChatGPT per day in January, more than double the levels of December.

“In 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app,” UBS analysts wrote in the note.

Websites and apps are not exactly technologies, and the large learning models are more than just websites or apps. What about cell phones themselves, or radio, or electricity, or toothpaste, or the plough, or the wheel, or fire? I think the adoption of all these critical technologies probably had a half life measured in years at least, probably decades or even centuries the further back you go. I’m sure there are many scholarly studies out there.

Turchin’s End Times

I got through Peter Turchin’s book End Times. It is definitely an interesting book. To summarize, organized human societies tend to develop a “wealth pump” whereby the wealthy and powerful influence the rules of the game to appropriate an ever larger share of a society’s wealth and power for themselves, at the expense of ordinary people. “Ordinary people” is not just the median or what we think of as the “middle class”, it is the bottom 90% of the wealth and income distribution. He shows hard evidence that the policies enacted in the U.S. represent the preferences of the top 10%. Not only are the preferences of the median citizen under-represented, they have NO statistical bearing on what is actually enacted. This situation tends to eventually reach a point of instability unless intentional and effective steps are taken to “shut down the wealth pump”, which happens occasionally. Instability can sometimes look like outright collapse into chaos, but it can also look like fracturing or breakup of a society into smaller entities, as happened with the “fall” of the Roman empire.

What makes the book a little different than other “cyclical theories of history” is first that he backs it up with statistical evidence gathered from many societies over a long period of time. Second, it is not the “immiseration” of the common people that leads to instability, but actually the growth of the “elites” due to the wealth pump. At some point, there are more elites that want to be in power than available positions of power. They fight amongst themselves, and their rhetoric may allow them to gain a following among the masses, but their preferences and interests still represent the rich and powerful class of which they are a part, and switching from one elite faction to another will not shut down the wealth pump.

Peter Turchin has a new book

His new book is called End Times but it does not appear to be about the apocalypse, but about a cyclical view of political history with some evidence to back it up.

When a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to turn in an ominous direction in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability.

Peter Turchin

I haven’t read the book, but I have officially added it to my queue of too-many-books-to-read-before-I die. (I’m not terminally ill that I know of, it’s just a long and growing list.) The queue is periodically randomized, so just because it already has too many books to read before I die does not mean I will never read this particular book.

Anyway, one disturbing implication just from the brief description above is that we may not be able to educate our society out of economic inequality. That seems to go against the data which clearly show that people with more education earn more than people with less education. So it’s a case where a dynamic model leads to a different, counterintuitive conclusion compared to a linear extrapolation of data from the recent past.

March 19, 2003

As I write this on March 19, 2023, today is the 20-year anniversary of the U.S. launching its attack on Iraq. This article in the Intercept reminded me of something I had forgotten – that in addition to the supposed weapons of mass destruction, which the administration probably knew was doubtful, part of the narrative to build support was the narrative that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks. This article tells a story where the CIA looked and looked for connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and was never able to prove anything despite the administration pushing the theory in public. Only when it finally and embarrasingly became clear that the evidence could not support case did the administration throw its full weight behind the “missing weapons of mass destruction” theory.

Tenet was so intimidated by the fallout from the fight over the intelligence on connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda that he was eager to cooperate with the White House on WMD. After all, there were plenty of old intelligence reports, dating back to the 1990s when United Nations weapons inspectors had been in Iraq, that strongly suggested Saddam had WMD. There was even a sense of guilt that still ran through the CIA over the fact that, at the time of the Gulf War in 1991, the agency had failed to detect evidence of Iraq’s fledgling nuclear weapons program. That the CIA had almost no new intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs since at least 1998, when U.N. weapons inspectors had been withdrawn from Iraq, was largely ignored by Tenet and most senior CIA officials; they didn’t want to admit that they had been dependent on the U.N. To account for a gap of at least five years in much of the intelligence reporting on Iraqi WMD programs, the CIA assumed the worst: that the weapons programs detected in the 1990s had only grown stronger and more dangerous.

Whenever intelligence was collected that countered this narrative, CIA officials discredited the sources or simply ignored it…

By contrast, any new nugget of information suggesting that Iraq still had WMD was treated like gold dust inside the CIA. Ambitious analysts quickly learned that the fastest way to get ahead was to write reports proving the existence of Iraqi WMD programs. Their reports would be quickly given to Tenet, who would loudly praise the reporting and then rush it to the White House — which would then leak it to the press. The result was a constant stream of stories about aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapons laboratories, and nerve gas produced and shared with terrorists.

Intercept

So maybe some people pushing the narrative understood that it was a lie, but many, it seems, fooled themselves with their own bullshit. They started a war that broke hopes for a peaceful world emerging from the Cold War.