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Firebird, or Phoenix, as you prefer. The Firebird brings bad luck to those who try to catch it.  The Phoenix is reborn from the ashes of the fire.

Digital, Artrage.

Dedicated to the brave people of Ukraine.

We’re not predicting. It is possible to give some shape to the future. The mainstream media studiously ignores the chemo tracks on Putin’s hand, and other obvious medical issues. These are key to 2023, far more deterministic in effect than anything else, save the Ukrainian ability to fruitfully stymie the Russian military. See  Putin Disappears; Illness a Factor?

Here in the U.S., we’ve had recent exposure to the authoritarian mindset, of both the leader and the follower. This is a quasi-personal relationship. When the leader  suffers political eclipse, his loyalties are not transferable. The obedient masses become the querulous masses.

So it is in Russia. Putin’s  popularity results from deep authoritarian tradition. Stalin said, “What can I do? The people want a czar.” When Stalin died, executions followed, not on the scale of the purges, but as a political part of the succession process. We see this now, an accelerated rate of extrajudicial executions, as hardliners attempt to “shape the battlefield” for the succession struggle.

The hardliners authored Putin’s expansionist ideology; he didn’t do it himself. He represents both an asset and a hindrance:

• Putin is the irreplaceable conduit to the masses.
• Compared to some of the hardliners, such as Aleksandr Dugin, who espouse out-and-out extermination of Ukrainians, Putin is a moderate.

Thus far, the logic is  a clockwork. Now we come to the first question:

• As  Putin weakens, will he acquiesce to the hardliners, removing the tension?
• When physical, and possibly mental incompetence becomes manifest, will the hardliners visibly depose Putin?
• Valuing his conduit,  will they keep him as a figurehead as long as he can be made presentable?

The clockwork resumes; the murky interregnum is followed by Putin’s absolute disappearance. His legacy becomes subject to interpretation and appropriation. In life there have been at least three Putins:

• Creator of wealth and provider of welfare.
• Author of a  nationalist cultural ethos orbiting the dark double stars of Spartan militarism and religion. See Russia, the new Sparta; Putin, Lycurgus & Oswald Spengler.
• Warmonger and destroyer of wealth.

The factions that emerge will be free to edit Putin’s image. The universal question will be “How did we become so poor?” The hardliners will be blamed for massive destruction of wealth. And they will have no good answer, because they don’t know how to run a country. Many of those who do have already fled Russia.

Pretenders to the throne will have a hard time acquiring legitimacy from Russians who miss their czar.  In other countries, the military have often stepped in. In Russia, there are few visible candidates untainted by debacle. Surovikin is a possible exception. Prigozhin is an alleged ally, which may be a highly temporary arrangement. Or, as suggested in Power Transition in Russia? Revolution? Part 1, colonels could revolt. See also Power Transition in Russia? Revolution? Part 2.

The effect on the Russian military will be profound. In the event of an unseemly succession of Prigozhin, some officers may recant their oaths. The military may in fact crumble. The blood lust between factions, with practiced lethality, will be huge. In this environment, it is natural for Russians, cultural heirs to the Purges, for the sake of survival, to mask their thoughts.

Will a “Party of Wealth” vanquish the “War Faction”, so adroit at political murder? This cannot be assured in the first round. But Russia will always have the capacity for rebirth as a civilized nation, as celebrated by  Igor Stravinsky.

***Firebird Suite***

(CNN) Head of major Russian shipyard dies suddenly, no cause given.

Espionage/execution is likely. There is significant possibility he sold the noise signatures of the improved Kilo class submarine.

More later.

At the height of World War II, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, sailed across the Atlantic, hazarding U-boats, to address Congress on January 8, 1942:

Winston Churchill Addresses Congress

Thank you Zelenskyy, for reminding us of the price of freedom. Today, we are all Ukrainian.

(Wapo) No conclusive evidence Russia is behind Nord Stream attack.

Russia did not do this. They own Nordstream, and are the only ones who can put gas into it, or make money from it. They would sabotage adversary assets. See (9/28) Who Sabotaged Nordstream Pipelines?

The popular misattribution results from the intrusion of the habit of  the political “blame game” into the sphere of security. It’s a bad habit that could be costly in  the future. There are enough reasons to hate Russia without it.

Were the perpetrators found, they would deserve medals. They likely will not be.

All watched over by machines of loving grace.

…Richard Brautigan

In the days of the Soviet Union, the opacity of the Kremlin gave rise to the specialty of Kremlinology. The tools of the trade were politics and personality. The health of the subjects was addressed in the most general terms.

The new Kremlin affords more access to all but the most guarded sanctums. Yet Kremlinologists ply their old trade, taking advantage of only part of the new cornucopia. One obstacle remains;  Kremlin players now wear masks of concealment. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book,  Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, quotes Beria at the death couch of Stalin. “Comrades, I have saved us all!” anticipates scenes of what may soon occur.

On May 30, I wrote Is Putin Seriously Ill? Then regarded as almost baseless speculation, his illness has gradually migrated towards respectable opinion. On July 25, Parkinson’s disease or Parkinsonism was identified as possible in CIA Bill Burns (Putin) & CNN (NY Polio).  Since then, visible motor problems are indicative of actual Parkinson’s disease.

Yet this has little play among Kremlinologists and the media. Among  practitioners, illness is something that happens to you. When it does, you consign your fate to physicians. Among physicians, it is strongly taboo to diagnose without seeing the patient and ordering standard-of-care tests. This results in severe bias of exclusion among historians, and their contemporary counterparts, analysts.  Ebola, Rats, Lice, and History, and Hans Zinsser Part 1, provides a capsule of Zinsser’s thought:

Historians seem to keep within the perspectives of personal comfort; no successors have taken Zinsser’s mantle. Disease is merely noted as coincident with events political and economic, when more than occasionally, it has been the prime driver. Disease has driven civilizations into decline, and exterminated primitive populations.

In a YouTube video, a British analyst, noting that Putin recently drove the Kerch bridge, pronounced his health adequate for the annual year-end media events. Having disposed of health, he offers conventionally political reasons for his disappearance, reprising the error of historians. His medical judgement is wrong. He should have found an oncologist willing to give an anonymous opinion.

The media bias replicates the above, with an addition. Juridical circumspection is a linchpin  of a respectable free press. It is misapplied here. Putin is not protected by HIPAA, due process,  right to privacy, or presumption of innocence. He is the valid subject of the almost-facts that dominate intelligence work. Here’s one: Putin is dying. This estimate is based entirely on public video.

What is he dying of? The tabloid press is full of contradictions. It is impossible to extend the estimate based on contradictory purported diagnoses. One new symptom, coughing, suggests wide metastasis of whatever it is. Metastasis to the tissues surrounding the lungs frequently results in malignant pleural effusion.

During his disappearance, Putin may receive a variety of treatments, some temporarily disabling, advisable only for a ruler for whom there is no alternative:

• If  the tumor is in fact solid, in contrast to a blood cancer, repeated laparoscopic surgery to debulk and remove obstructions.
• Pleural aspiration.
• Intensive chemotherapy.
• External beam radiotherapy.
• Radioactive implants.
• Nerve blocks.
• Coley’s toxins.

Unlike infectious disease, every cancer is unique, the result of the myriad forms of genetic damage, unique to the individual.  The cough, if confirmed, collapses the timeline. Previously, the WAG was 3 years. Now, 6 months.

The Kremlin players, with masks of concealment, have a difficult choice, to watch and wait, or hasten. They are not friends; they are rivals.  When they drop their masks, they may be unrecognizable. Who strikes first has the best chance of neutralizing the others, but at a price.

What price legitimacy?

We continue from Twitter and Elon Musk Part 2.

(CNN) Musk suspends journalists from Twitter. Quoting,

Elon Musk suspended several journalists who cover him from Twitter, alleging they violated his new policy against disclosing his jet’s location.

Doxing is hate speech, wishing ill for a group or individual; hate speech requires the same sanction.  We could hope that, personally touched, Musk will come to realize this. The principle obstacle is that Musk, like many who are supremely talented in a concentrated way, may think  the world is populated by minor versions of himself. If Musk realizes, what are his options?

Part 2 discusses bot detection, which stands in front of the far more difficult problem of post moderation. Let’s finish and carry the wisdom forward. The Turing Test is pass-fail. If your silicon interrogator is well trained, it may work pretty well. False negatives, “not a human”, are inevitable; an idiot may be mistaken for a machine. Likewise, a bot that pushes the state  of the art may appear witty, urbane, sophisticated, backing out of a carefully laid trap with a conversational gambit of its own.

It gets harder. A bot can have a human component. This is likely to be the case when a bot solves a pictorial  CAPTCHA, a “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. You know these as the 3×3 board with “Click on each square which contains a traffic light.” This is very hard for a computer to solve, and trivial for a human. Poor people in Third World countries solve these as piecework, a few mils/CAPTCHA.

This works for bots because the pictorial CAPTCHA is independent of culture. Now our problem becomes “Is the subject a Francophone?”  Our silicon interrogator must be recast in multiples, one for each culture.. There are many. In the Battle of the Bulge, not knowing baseball trivia could get you shot.

In an initially active mode, the interrogator has these advantages:

• It initiates.
• It can choose the subject.
• It can guide the conversation.
• It can make demands.

Now we come to post moderation.  The above list is void.The  interrogator’s role is reduced to the passive, vigilant watchfulness of a monitor, more stress on the heuristics of AI post moderation. Here, the user is in control. The  test result is  more than pass/fail; there are choices. In  order of severity:

• Warning.
• Post annotated.
• Post deleted.
• User suspended.
• Call the cops!

This requires that our AI moderator actually know things. Suppose a user writes,

I hate pumpkins. I'm going to smash every pumpkin I see. Watch out, pumpkins. I'm coming for you. Your time is over! Big Pumpkin is taking a broomstick from Newark at XX:XX.

It could be a joke. Or “pumpkin” could be a recently minted code word of a hate group  or individual. How much does the monitor have to know to make the distinction? There are three answers, views of AI that have almost nothing to do with each other:

• Symbolic. The moderator is a conventional computer, in which the world is represented by symbols that can be manipulated with logic that we supply, can watch and understand. Rules, like a legal code,  are required.
• Neural. The moderator is a silicon neural net that can be trained on pumpkin-esque examples.  We do not supply the logic, and the neural net can’t tell us how it decides.  If it works, we live in happy ignorance. It is trained on examples, knowing nothing of rules.
• Miscellaneous pattern classifiers of lesser power.
  

Symbolic is precise and obtuse. Neural is imprecise, and what we think of as imaginative.  Neither is fit to steward human beings. I would like to think this horror lims the far future.

It’s not. It’s the sound of a freight train horn, when your car is stalled on a grade crossing.

(CNN) Anderson Cooper explores loss and grief in deeply personal new CNN podcast. People respond to loss in different ways.  I painted a painting, and wrote a eulogy.

(Click to enlarge)

Loss and Serial Immortality, oil on canvas, 48×36″

We are the Blue Men, infinite in the dimension of time.

 “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

…Isaac Newton.

We continue from Twitter and Elon Musk Part 1.

In 1950, the computers we know were science fiction. This did not stop mathematics, which tends to run 50 – 100 years ahead of actual need. So  40  years before Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing considered a hot problem of today: How do you detect a bot? His answer: Talk with it.

Since computer speech was neither anticipated or essential,  the Turing Test involves the use of a teleprinter by a person to converse with two hidden entities, one computer, and a second person.  If the hidden computer cannot be distinguished in conversation from the hidden person, the computer has  passed the test; it is intelligent.  This edges towards sentience, self-aware machine life. It may be the same thing.

As of 2022, though claims have been made, (BBC – Computer AI passes Turing test in ‘world first’),  prevailing opinion is that no computer has passed the Turing test. Yet there is strong motivation to deny the event. (CNBC) Google fires software engineer who claimed its AI chatbot is sentient. Google’s quest for perfection, with a chatbot powered by neural networks, may be at a level where the distinction is fuzzy.

Noam Chomsky’s deep structure linguistic theory argues that Google’s  LaMDA actually has to know things. And how much could it know without knowing about itself? Some AI researchers deprecate the Test, arguing it’s a test of deception, not intelligence. But  Turing’s intellect was great. His work, along with that of John von Neumann, is the bedrock of everything we do. Is it wise to be so dismissive?

To solve Twitter’s bot problem without expensive human employees, Musk’s software interrogator must run the Turing test. It must embody the intelligence of Turing’s human. If it does, Turing implies it’s possible to thwart any bot that lacks equivalent computing resources.  Something like LaMDA might fit the bill. But if the human brain has some secret sauce unavailable to artificial neural networks, then Musk’s LaMDA-esque bot interrogator lacks the unfoolable human advantage of Turing’s  human tester — unless he can find the secret sauce.

The secret sauce is the possibility that human brain is a quantum computer. The speculation is that a quantum brain has as yet unknown advantages against any silicon you could throw at it. To summarize:

• If the human brain is not a quantum computer,  an efficient artificial interrogator for Turing’s Test applied to bots is within reach.
• If the brain is a quantum computer, an artificial interrogator that fits Turing’s specification is not possible — unless Musk goes quantum himself. The technology for this does not exist.

The LaMDA chatbot and the Tesla autopilot use state-of-the art silicon neurons; neither use quantum computation. A Twitter interrogator based solely on silicon would be vulnerable to bots that share this technology. A bot war is implied. It might have entertainment value, like Saturday Night Wrestling.

To be continued shortly.

***Vengeance in Vegas***