Thursday, December 19, 2024

Democrats Still Aren’t Listening. Plus. . . - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Democrats Still Aren’t Listening. Texan Sheriffs vs. Mexican Cartels. Plus. . . - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

For most Democrats, Trump’s win was a shock. For Ruy Teixeira, it was unsurprising. A political scientist and lifelong Democrat, Ruy has been warning for years that the party was prioritizing ideological purity over popular appeal.

His 2023 book with John Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, could have been a wake-up call for the party. One wonders how the election might have gone if the Harris campaign had read it carefully.

Ruy’s writing has been prophetic on the exact questions Democrats are grappling with as they try to find their way out of the political wilderness. Questions like: Why did so many working-class Americans abandon the party? What happened to the promise of a multiracial Democratic majority? And how should the party pick itself up, dust itself off, and put together a winning coalition again?

These questions are set to be a major theme of our politics in 2025 and beyond, and we can think of no better guide than the man who saw so much of it coming. That’s why we’re thrilled Ruy is now joining The Free Press as a contributing writer.

Every other week or so you can find Ruy right here, helping us make sense of the future of the Democratic Party and the left as they try to figure out how to handle a second Trump term—and how to win in 2028.

Today, Ruy argues that Democrats are still in denial about why they lost the election. In fact, he writes, many of today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues, such as trans athletes in women’s sports and critical race theory taught in schools, to be real issues. But voters disagree. In one postelection survey, the top reason among swing voters not to vote for Harris was the perception that she was more focused on cultural questions like transgender issues than helping the middle class. Another poll tells a similar story.

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

🗞️ Axios AM: Geothermal's massive untapped potential - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

🗞️ Axios AM: Washington Post scoop - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

2. 🌋 Geothermal's massive untapped potential
 
an illustration of a lightning bolt made out of glowing magma rock

Illustration: Tiffany Herring/Axios

 

Geothermal energy — steam or very hot water from underground reservoirs — eventually could meet up to 15% of the growth in global power demand. But a lot has to break right, Axios' Ben Geman writes from a new analysis.

  • Why it matters: Technological advances — including horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking, honed through oil and gas breakthroughs in North America — could help geothermal to shed its niche status, the International Energy Agency says in a new report.

🔬 Zoom in: Making geothermal competitive means greater government policy support, specialized labor and major cost declines.

  • "Up to 80% of the investment required in a geothermal project involves capacity and skills that are common in the oil and gas industry," the report notes.
  • IEA finds that with the "right support," next-generation geothermal could get 80% cheaper by 2035. That could make costs on "par or below hydro, nuclear and bioenergy."

Reality check: Geothermal currently provides 1% of global electricity, and is concentrated in a few countries — the U.S., Iceland, Indonesia, Turkey, Kenya and Italy.

Mysteries at the Top of Sky and at the Bottom of the Swamp: Drones, Barbarians and Gatekeepers (Part Two) - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Mysteries at the Top of Sky and at the Bottom of the Swamp: Drones, Barbarians and Gatekeepers (Part Two) - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

(….Continued from Part One)

There are other hints that NHI (what Congress now formally calls Non-Human Intelligence) is in play, such as the many reports of electronics behaving oddly wherever these “drones” appear. As a former manufacturer of drones, I know it’s usually the other way around. Drones are affected by external electronics more than they create external electronic reactions. UAPs, in contrast, are rather famous for making lights and electronics go on and off and for interfering with radio waves.

This new “Patriot Drones” strategy also neatly deals with the tricky problem of wreckage. The US proudly showed the wreckage of the Chinese balloon last year but then said nothing about the wreckage from the other three Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) that showed up that same week. Just recently, reports began to appear again that wreckage from one of these shoot downs was recently discovered from last year’s anomalous craft incidents. This means there’s a need to explain that. This new strategy is easier. Flood the sky with diverse, brightly lit drones, and nobody will be able to tell a UAP from a man-made drone. If you have to shoot it down, few humans would detect that a shootdown had even occurred. Voila. Problem solved. Boys in engineering, could you make our government drones look a lot more alien devices going forward please? That will confuse everybody even more, thanks. It’s clever, eh?

So, why is the idea that these things involve NHI so terrifying? The real key to the lights in the sky problem has been found at the bottom of that swamp that President Trump and his team seem so intent on cleaning up. There is a dark secret at the bottom of the swamp. Eric Weinstein suspected it. But, recently Marc Andreesen stumbled headlong into it. As he explains here, we have had a government that has been actively assassinating startups and classifying technologies, perhaps from Non-Human Origin, to keep the information and capabilities out of the public domain. Yes, Andreesen says the US Government and, by implication, other allied governments, have been effectively killing tech startups in the cradle. Andreessen says he was definitively told that only a few startups would be allowed to survive in any given technology, whether AI or fusion or anything else, and only if they agree to be controlled by the government. This isn’t exactly what they teach at Harvard Business School. It’s not just bad industrial policy. It’s anti-competitive, and, frankly, it’s ...

Mysteries at the Top of Sky and at the Bottom of the Swamp: Drones, Barbarians and Gatekeepers (Part One) - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Mysteries at the Top of Sky and at the Bottom of the Swamp: Drones, Barbarians and Gatekeepers (Part One) - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

There are strange lights in the skies of Earth. It’s worldwide, not just in New Jersey over the President-elect’s property in Bedminster New Jersey, or over his hometown of NYC. It’s everywhere: MissouriMinnesotaCaliforniaAlabamaArizonaNew MexicoOregonHawaii, and Washington DC but also BrazilRussiaFranceIndiaGermany (over US airbases like Ramstein Airbase), Slovakia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Japan, China, Vietnam, and at Israel’s Dome of the Rock. The “drones” are also present over Area 51, for Hollywood value and their presence has now closed the UFO conspiracy world’s favorite spot, Wright Patterson Airbase. The drones and orbs and lights have been present around nuclear sites, whether where nuclear weapons either being deployed like RAF Lakenheath in the UK, or over nuclear power plants in places Oyster Creek MarylandDuke nuclear sites in South Carolina, and South Ukraine and the (perhaps non-nuclear) Picatinny Weapons Arsenal in New JerseyNew Jersey political leaders have been begging the Federal Government to shut down the airspace over two nuclear power plants.

The idea that the US government has no imagery and no idea what these unidentified flying objects are is beyond absurd. Maxar satellites have a resolution down to 2mms. The US has been placing warheads on foreheads in the Middle East from control rooms in the Midwest with great success for decades. Yet, nobody knows who is flying over America’s most secret military bases? They can’t figure out what frequency these drones are operating onThe National Reconnaissance Office must know. They can spot a terrorist’s license plate from space. Their operational capabilities have vastly improved after record investment in space assets by the Pentagon. The question is, how can the US Government be so calm and so seemingly clueless at the same time? Why are they not saying or doing anything? Here are some possibilities.

It could be that these drones really are Iranian, Russian, or Chinese. If yes, then we have the Norwegian problem. To remind you, that’s when you know say the Russians did it (cut the cables or damaged an undersea asset) but saying so will provoke WWIII. So, you have to say, like the Norwegians, “we have no idea who did it”. This makes sense. After all, the world is literally in the midst of a modern Cuban Missile Crisis. The Russians are launching IRBMs (Oreshniks) and there are rumors that they are moving nukes into Belarus while the Americans are seemingly moving more nukes into the UK and Western Europe. We are in a DEFCON world now. But even if we can’t or won’t say who it is, normally, flying a drone anywhere near a military base an airport or a nuclear site would get you arrested pretty damn quick anywhere within the US or a NATO country. But, today, nothing happens at all when drones are flying over LaGuardia and shutting down runways at Stewart International AirportLangley Airbase (for 17 days), or RAF Lakenheath in the UK.

It’s absurd. It’s illegal to fly drones beyond the line of sight in the US unless you have a full pilot’s license and even then you need to file flight plans. You can’t fly drones over people’s homes or private neighborhoods without permission, let alone over such critical infrastructure sites. When the FAA granted Amazon permission to test flying drones for home deliveries they specifically excluded night flying and flights above 400 feet. Everybody else gets less leniency than Amazon.

One can understand that nobody wants to tell the American public that we are at war with our adversaries and this war is not over there somewhere but right over here, at home, above your backyard. If these drones are being launched off of ships, then why doesn’t the all-seeing eye of US Naval intelligence see it and act upon it? The Coast Guard? Drug traffickers get a quicker and harsher response than this. Has the US really lost control of its own airspace? Who could admit this after decades of wars where air power was the consistent key to military success? But the response is all wrong if that’s true. No, there must be other factors to consider.

If it’s Iran, as has been rumored, it’s a pretty impressive show of force, given that they must be pretty tied up these days in trying to avoid the overturn scenario that just unfolded in Syria next door. Maybe it’s Russian organized crime. They have a global reach, sleeper cells, and love to wreak havoc. Yes, technically, you can fly fleets of drones remotely from the other side of the world. But interference would generally generate more drone failures and we’ve seen very few of these things, whatever they are, falling out of the sky.

Meanwhile, local authorities in the US are so annoyed with the lack of a Federal response that they are sending their own drones up. They are getting some pretty weird data back. Ocean County Sheriff Michael Mastronardy said his force launched its drone after one of his officers saw “50 unmanned aerial vehicles”, 'coming off the ocean'. He alerted 911, the FBI, and the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard says they saw “13 drones following their boat, estimating that the devices had a wingspan of eight feet”. As a former manufacturer of commercial drones, I can say with confidence that these are not your everyday off-the-shelf drones. We no longer live in a world where you can just make your own drones anyway. Try ordering parts online. You’ll be visited by the authorities in a few days.

It could be that the US government doesn’t want to shoot down something over US territory, especially over residential neighborhoods. That’s why that Chinese balloon was allowed to just drift away until it was safely out over the Atlantic back in 2023. This lack of action helps confirm that the US airspace is not a warzone, an idea that defense media are trying to push right now. This stance might also relate to all the denials about the various suspicious events that keep occurring inside the US. The Panamax in Baltimore and the near hit to The Verrazano Bridge a week later. The fires that happen in the middle of the night at America’s 100 most valuable food production and food processing facilities in places like Lubbock Texas. We’ve all been told that these events are also just our imagination running wild. It’s just apophenia. That means “the propensity to mistakenly detect patterns or connections between unrelated events, objects, or occurrences. Psychologists call this a “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” or the “frequency illusion”, meaning “perceived trends like the food-fire epidemics are amplified by a related bias that operates across society. It happens when news organizations and other groups devote extra attention to incidents that seem to fit a meaningful pattern.” For those who don’t remember the Baader-Meinhof gang from the 1970’s, they were a West German far-left militant faction engaging in armed resistance against what they viewed as a right-wing fascist state.

This all amounts to the “it's all in your pretty little head.” The Federal Government and the White House are gaslighting us, telling the distressed Mayors, Governors, Senators and Congressmen, and women, that the problem is not the “drones” but that we the people are “hysterical”. Meanwhile, the media is trying to keep this as a local story. The news insists that this is only a New Jersey story. This is a classic control technique as Noam Chomsky famously pointed out: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion (it’s only in New Jersey) but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” But, it’s not just happening only in New Jersey or NYC or Connecticut but all over the country and all over the world.

There are darker theories. There are reports that it’s the CIA’s OGA. That’s the Office of Global Affairs, which was a branch of the CIA’s Global Science and Technology Directorate. Apparently, it’s got another name now. They are famous for looking for Broken Arrows (lost nukes), enemy nuclear subs, and, wait for it, “crashed vehicles of non-human origin.” This office was just recently outed to Congress by Michael Shellenberger as having a massive space-based surveillance program for Non-Human Intelligence (NHI). Some on X are speculating that the Russians have a nuclear-loaded sub on the loose. Others say OGA and perhaps NEST are using very specific sorts of drones to smell loose nukes, radioactive material, or gas leaks. Proximity matters. Drones can get closer to such targets than planes. That would explain the “do not approach warnings.” But, if we are really the plotline from The Sum of All Fears, then The White House and the Federal Government are being remarkably low-key about it.

But, as Matt Pines Noted, it is hard to imagine that the leadership of the Pentagon and pretty much the whole incoming cabinet happily meeting at the annual Army-Navy Football game a few days ago near Washington DC, knowing there was a WMD emergency in play. Nobody looked worried at the game. Instead, there was a lot of cryptic joking around. The President-elect sat side by side with The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs while the military crowd drove itself into a happy frenzy. President Trump had earlier launched the drone meme by showing an AI-generated image of an overweight Mike Pompeo (his former Head of the CIA, who is chowing down on McDonald’s brought in by drone deliveries. Is the implication that the former CIA Director is headed to Sing Sing and drones will be the closest he gets to McDonald’s going forward? Also, Elon was predicting drone wars and drone dominance back in September before all this started? Why did he see “drone wars” coming? Then, at the match, Palantir (Peter Thiel) dropped a very powerful video with drones. This makes sense since they just paired up with Anduril, America’s leading drone maker. In the slick advert, Palantir cryptically said, “Battles are won before they begin.” Clearly, everybody knew that the drones were coming except the public.

So, what is the one subject that nobody ever wants to talk about that could be in play here? It’s that pesky issue of what Congress now formally calls “Non-Human Intelligence” (NHI) and UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). After years of Congressional hearings involving highly credible witnesses and whistleblowers, some just two weeks ago, no one links the two subjects? Instead, The New York Times writes “A Bagel Shop Closed, and the Upper West Side Is Absolutely Losing It: The neighborhood reaction to the sudden closure of a Manhattan bagel shop was intense: “No no no no no no no no no no no!!” but it fails to mention drones flying over Manhattan and the President elect’s property in nearby Bedminster New Jersey? Really? This is not a random response. It is carefully though through.

Let’s remember what happened last time these UAPs showed up (that we know about). It was last year during the week that The Chinese Balloon drifted over the whole of the United States. The government promptly shot it down as soon as it was safely offshore and proudly displayed the retrieved wreckage. But, later that week there were three further shoot downs of UAPs that had no visible means of propulsion and no wings and which traveled at speeds and angles that modern physics does not allow for. No wreckage was found or displayed. All discussion of UAPs stopped. As I said at the time, if there is any chance at all that these are a form of intelligence, perhaps even higher intelligence than us humans, then maybe shooting at them is not the best way to open the conversation. Well, maybe that’s exactly what’s happened. The strategy has changed.

Maybe the new strategy is this: When UAPs show up, our officials launch a ton of these drones of varying types into the air worldwide. This muddies the waters and ...

Monday, December 16, 2024

The Warburg Library in London | Christie's

The Warburg Library in London | Christie's

The Warburg Institute: the Hamburg library that escaped the Nazis and was reborn in London

In 1933, with books being burned across Germany, a collection of 60,000 art-historical tomes was shipped to England by steamer. Now, ‘the world’s weirdest library’ has reopened after a £14.5-million transformation

Words by Harry Seymour
The reading room of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Hamburg, in 1926

The reading room of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Hamburg, in 1926. Photo: Warburg Institute

Inside an unremarkable 1950s red-brick building in Bloomsbury — London’s academic heartland — lies what has been described as ‘the world’s weirdest library’.

Little-known beyond art-history circles, it’s called the Warburg Institute, and it houses nearly 400,000 books dedicated to the study of the transmission of symbols from antiquity to the Renaissance — with a reputation for focusing on the esoteric. Had Dan Brown’s fictitious Harvard professor of symbology, Robert Langdon, been real, wrote Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, this is where you’d find him.

Rows of steel shelves underneath fluorescent lights are arranged over floors named ‘Word’, ‘Action’, ‘Image’ and ‘Orientation’. Each book is sorted according to a unique system called the ‘law of the good neighbour’, whereby the volumes above, below and on either side are supposed to inspire serendipitous paths of thought.

The library at the Warburg Institute in London, where books are sorted according to a unique system called the ‘law of the good neighbour’. Photo: © Hufton+Crow

For example, in the ‘Prophecy of Divinatory Practices’ section, books about fortune-telling are surrounded by texts on comets, monsters, dreams and chess. Others have labels such as ‘Pilgrimage’, ‘Cosmology’, ‘Magic’, ‘Monasticism’ and ‘Mysticism’.

‘Aby Warburg said the book you need is always next to the one you’re looking for,’ explains Bill Sherman, a professor of cultural history and the institute’s director since 2017. For the past six years he’s been overseeing a £14.5-million transformation of the Warburg — a delicate balancing act, he says, between maintaining the institute’s eccentricities and making it a centre fit for modern study.

Aby Warburg, the visionary behind the collection, in 1912. Photo: Warburg Institute

Aby Warburg was born in Hamburg in 1866. The scion of a Jewish banking dynasty, at the age of 13 he sold his first-born rights to his brother in return for all the books he ever wanted.

By 1888 he was living in Florence, scrutinising the pagan roots of Botticelli’s motifs. This study of decoding symbols and tracing their evolution developed into a field he named ‘iconology’. In 1904 he acquired an assistant to begin cataloguing his collection of 3,500 books, and within a decade — inside his Hamburg home — he had established ‘a working laboratory’ for scholars, which was listed on the country’s inter-library loan network.

Yet despite being a gifted art historian, Warburg was plagued by bouts of depression and psychosis. In 1918 he was admitted to an asylum.

When he was released after six years, he returned to find that, under the direction of the art historian Fritz Saxl, his collection had tripled in size, and regularly hosted popular lectures. Two years later, he spent a small fortune creating a purpose-built, state-of-the-art home for it.

Panel 39 of Aby Warburg’s incomplete magnum opus, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Photo: Tobias Wootton. Warburg Institute/fluid

Director Bill Sherman with a visitor in the Kythera Gallery at the Warburg Institute, in front of a panel from the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Photo: © Hufton+Crow

Warburg died in 1929, before he could finish his magnum opus, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne — an attempt to synthesise the transmission of potent symbols through cultures by pinning networks of thousands of images across more than 60 giant wooden panels. Less than four years later, the Nazis rose to power.

Following book-burning rallies, and on account of the faith of the institute’s founder and scholarly circle, the Warburg Institute’s work became impossible. In 1933, with the aid of the industrialist and collector Samuel Courtauld, the building’s 60,000 books, together with its staff, were shipped by steamer to safety in London. In 1944, Warburg’s family signed the institute over to the University of London in return for securing — and funding — its future.

Fast-forward to 2014, as London rents spiralled, and a legal row about the fate of the library reached the city’s courts. On one side was the university, looking to clarify the terms of the deed, signed during the stresses of the Second World War. On the other was the Warburg Advisory Council (and members of the Warburg family), voicing a fear that the institute could lose its identity, swallowed up among the millions of books held nearby at Senate House Library.

The reception area at the Warburg Institute in London. The building has just undergone a £14.5-million refurbishment. Photo: © Hufton+Crow

After 10 days of deliberation, the judge ruled that the deed was iron-clad, and from that decision came £9.5 million, the core of the budget for the recent redevelopment.

Dubbed the ‘Warburg Renaissance’, the overhaul — led by Stirling Prize-winning architects Haworth Tompkins, whose previous clients include the Royal College of Art and the London Library — has seen the building’s old courtyard turned into a modern, climate-controlled reading room for special collections and the photography archive, alongside a futuristic, 140-seat auditorium.

On the ground floor, staff offices have made way for a public exhibition space, one end of which contains Edmund de Waal’s library of exile, a porcelain-bound installation of books dedicated to lost libraries, initially created for the 2019 Venice Biennale. Come January 2025, the other end will host a show examining the history of tarot, featuring designs by the occultist Aleister Crowley from the Warburg’s own archive.

A filing drawer from the Warburg Institute’s photographic collection. Photo: Matt Crossick. Warburg Institute

Upstairs, the stacks have been reworked to their original form. ‘We’ve undone a number of things that happened in the 1980s and 1990s. We had these long tunnels of books with no natural light, so they’ve been restored to the former layout, and in almost every case you can see a window now,’ says Sherman.

The library’s novel organisational system has also been tidied up. ‘As the collection grew, the integrity of the four floors was lost, and two got spread out over multiple floors. I’ve reinstated the purity of each.’

Similarly, the ‘law of the good neighbour’ has remained. As a result, readers are still free to roam — an increasingly rare feature of modern libraries — and discover recent publications sandwiched between centuries-old texts, some containing the original bookplates of Warburg himself, or other famous faculty members, such as Michael Baxandall, Frances Yates and Ernst Gombrich. Gombrich was director of the institute between 1959 and 1976, and his Grotrian-Steinweg grand piano still stands in a corner of the building.

Art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich at the Warburg Institute, where he served as director from 1959 to 1976. Photo: Pino Guidolotti

‘You want to keep the feeling of what made somewhere special,’ says Sherman. ‘But it was a very analogue institution.’

With as few as 2,000 current members, where is the new blood he hopes to draw to the Warburg going to come from? ‘It’s a research institute and most of its activities are academic, and those are still the core,’ he says. ‘But through areas of cultural activity, like residences, commissions and exhibitions, we’re hopefully introducing what the place has to offer to a much wider range of people.

‘Artists and curators have secretly used the Warburg for research for decades. I recently did an event at a gallery where an artist said to me, “I have to confess to you, I lied in order to gain access to the Warburg!” I don’t want people to have to lie anymore.