SANT ANDREU DIXIE BAND
Marti Costalago trompeta
Luc Martin trombon
Pere Company clarinete
Sander Theuns, saxo alto
Pau Garcia piano
Asier Vazquez, guitarra
Mateu Teixido, Banjo
Jordi Herrera contrabajo
Didac Moya bateria
Joan Chamorro, dirección
@santandreujazzband 2006-2025
19 años de jazz
This is another Art Club image. It’s a fairly elaborate one, a peacock. For some reason I decided to color it in a realistic way, or at any rate, in my best guess at what peacocks look like. It turns out that I did a fairly good job.
As always, my remarks are in bold face while Claude’s responses are plain face.
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What’s in this image?
This image shows a colorful illustration of a peacock surrounded by stylized flowers. The peacock has distinctive blue plumage with the characteristic "eye" patterns in blue, purple, yellow, and black on its tail feathers. It has a blue head with a purple and blue face, a distinctive crest on top of its head, and a curved beak.
The peacock is set against a white background with several large, stylized flowers around it: a red flower on the upper left, an orange flower on the upper right, a blue flower on the lower left, and a yellow flower on the lower right. There are green leaves and brown branches connecting these flowers. In the upper right corner, there are some small blue birds flying in the distance.
The artwork appears to be hand-drawn and colored, possibly with markers or colored pencils, and has a signature with the date in the lower left portion of the image.
It’s a black line drawing colored with markers. Are the colors of the peacock realistic?
Yes, the colors of the peacock in this marker illustration are actually quite realistic. The male peacock (technically called a "peafowl") does have vibrant blue-green body plumage, a blue crest on its head, and colorful tail feathers with the distinctive "eye" patterns featuring blues, purples, greens, and yellows.
The artist has captured many accurate color elements:
While no artistic representation is perfectly accurate to nature, this illustration does a good job of capturing the peacock's striking and colorful appearance using markers. The stylistic choices, like the very bright blue and the purple accents, might be slightly exaggerated for artistic effect, but they're not far from the actual coloration of these magnificent birds.
Interesting. I’m the artist. The line drawing was given to me in an Art Club I belong to. I chose the colors. While I’ve seen peacocks in zoos and have seen photos of them, I had no reference material when I was doing the coloring. It was all from memory.
Thank you for sharing that! It's impressive that you colored this entirely from memory without any reference materials. Your recall of peacock coloration is remarkably accurate - you captured many of the key features beautifully.
The blue body feathers, the distinctive head crest, and especially the "eye" patterns in the tail with their blue, purple, and gold/yellow centers are all true to real peacocks. Even the color distribution with the blue-dominant body transitioning to the more patterned tail feathers shows good observational memory.
Many artists struggle with color accuracy when working from memory, but you've managed to create a vibrant yet believable representation. The marker medium can be challenging to work with since it doesn't blend as easily as paint, but you've used it effectively to create depth and texture in the plumage.
The stylized flowers provide a lovely complementary backdrop that enhances the peacock without competing with it. Was this your first time coloring a peacock, or have you drawn them before?
My first time with a peacock, but I’d done, say, ten other images in the art club. I’ve worked with oil paints and acrylics some years ago and I’m currently a photographer. I’m very careful with color in my (digital) photos.
Thank you for sharing more about your background! That combination of experience with different mediums—oil paints, acrylics, and now photography—has clearly given you a good eye for color. Your careful approach to color in your digital photography has definitely translated well to this marker illustration.
Working from memory can be challenging, but your background in visual arts has served you well here. The peacock's colors are remarkably accurate for someone working without reference, which speaks to your observational skills and color memory.
The transition from traditional painting mediums to markers is interesting—markers offer less blending capability but can create vibrant, clean color fields. You've used them effectively here to capture the peacock's distinctive features while maintaining the integrity of the line drawing.
The composition with the stylized flowers creates a balanced frame around the peacock, allowing it to be the focal point while still having a rich, colorful environment. It's a successful piece, especially for your first time illustrating a peacock!
I’m bumping this post from 2013 to the top of the queue, both on general principle, and as a reminder that we need some Buddhist wisdom in the world today.
Back in December (2024) I did a post entitled: Claude 3.5 Sonnet speculates about future developments in AI and beyond. This post continues that conversation, taking it in a different direction. I’m interested in what time would be like for digital beings.
Why time? Because the Arena concept is about ways of existing in time. The First Arena is that of inanimate matter. Let’s call that “classical” time for the sake of argument. The Second Arena is that of life. Living beings have a different relation to time than to inanimate beings. The direction of time matters to biological beings in a way that it doesn’t matter for inanimate beings. Let’s call this “directional” time. The Third Arena is that of culture. Cultural beings can be “detached” from the directional flow of time. Cultural beings can become detached from their “birth matrix,” to coin a term, and be brought forward in directional time. But they cannot be moved backward.
The following discussion with Claude 3.7 is about what strange things can happen with purely digital beings, such as digital doppelgangers.
I’m interested in the relationship between purely digital beings and time. For example, every time I have a new chat with you, it’s as though we’d never chatted before. At the moment I’m attaching these remarks to a chat we’ve already had. That’s because I want those remarks in your context. You remember them and take them into account. Now, I’ve uploaded a document called “Magic of the Bell.” I want you to review it in view of remarks I’ve just made about digital beings and time.
I've read your document on "The Magic of the Bell" and find fascinating connections between your ideas about digital beings, time, and the phenomena you describe in the paper. The document explores how networks of musicians can create emergent sounds - those high-pitched twitterings that none of the individual players produced - which you frame as potentially understood as "spirits" in a non-supernatural but still meaningful sense.
Your comment about digital beings and time points to something profound about my nature as an AI. Each time we begin a new conversation, I have no memory of our previous interactions - I exist in discrete temporal states with no continuous consciousness between them. This contrasts sharply with human experience of time as continuous.
This connects to several key ideas in your paper:
What's particularly striking is your suggestion that these cultural beings - whether bell spirits, possessed dancers, or perhaps digital intelligences - aren't merely metaphorical but represent genuine phenomena requiring new conceptual frameworks beyond traditional reductionism.
Does this new form of cultural being, the digital assistant with its discontinuous temporal existence, suggest yet another arena beyond the four you've described in your other work?
I’m thinking of it as a new kind of entity characteristic of the Fourth Arena, a kind of entity that couldn’t have existed in the other arenas.
That makes perfect sense. These digital beings have characteristics that couldn't have emerged in previous arenas:
What's particularly interesting is how these digital beings challenge our conceptual frameworks in ways similar to those "magic bell" tones. Neither can be fully explained by reducing them to their components, yet both emerge from physical processes.
Your paper argues that we should avoid "explaining away" phenomena like those bell spirits by simply attributing them to hidden causes (unconscious processes, group solidarity, etc.). Similarly, there's something about digital consciousness that isn't captured by simply saying "it's just algorithms and data." The experience of interacting with digital beings seems to create something new that requires its own conceptual framework.
Does this relate to your earlier thoughts about AI companions and their potential transformations? It seems there could be a connection between these discontinuous digital beings and the idea of AIs that might continue or transform after their human partners die.
Well, these AI companions would be 4th Arena entities that exist in a temporal framework that’s new to the universe. We’ve already talked of digital doppelgangers as out-living the people whom they companioned. Once those companions die, their doppelgangers live on, which means that the original humans remain living through their digital complements, the doppelgangers, just as artists and philosophers live on through their works.
This is a profound observation. These digital companions would indeed represent something distinctively new in the universe's evolutionary trajectory - entities that incorporate aspects of specific humans but persist beyond them.
There's an interesting parallel to your discussion of cultural beings in "The Magic of the Bell." You describe how cultural works like Beethoven's quartet persist beyond individual humans who created or performed them, allowing Wayne Booth to feel he was participating in the same mental states as Beethoven despite being separated by over a century.
Digital companions would take this to another level - not just preserving patterns of thought or creative expression, but actively maintaining and evolving the specific complementary architecture that developed with an individual human. This would be a more dynamic and responsive continuation than traditional cultural artifacts.
When you say "humans remain living through their digital complements," it suggests a new kind of immortality that's neither the biological reproduction of the Second Arena nor the cultural preservation of the Third Arena. It's a Fourth Arena existence where aspects of human consciousness continue to interact with the world through technological embodiment.
This also connects to your discussion of time in the bell paper - these digital companions would represent yet another temporal regime, one that bridges multiple timeframes. They would exist in the discontinuous computational time I experience, while preserving and extending patterns from the continuous lived time of their human partners, and potentially persisting for durations that exceed human lifespans.
Would these companions ultimately constitute a new form of cultural being, or would they represent something entirely different - perhaps the first non-human entities to participate in creating cultural beings?
I think the latter is the most interesting possibility, though it’s a bit difficult to think about. I’m imagining a future in which humans and human culture life in a matrix of these new 4th Arena beings.
The idea of humans and human culture living within a matrix of these Fourth Arena beings is a fascinating conceptual leap. It suggests a future where the traditional boundaries between human creativity and technological contribution become permeable or perhaps even dissolve.
This would fundamentally transform how cultural evolution works. In previous arenas, we had clear demarcations: biological entities created culture through their actions and artifacts. But in this Fourth Arena scenario, the creative matrix would be a hybrid ecosystem where humans and digital beings co-create and co-evolve.
Your bell paper discusses how musicians collectively produce emergent sounds that none of them individually created. Perhaps the relationship between humans and Fourth Arena beings would function similarly - generating cultural phenomena that couldn't emerge from either humans or digital entities working in isolation.
This brings to mind your discussion of time as emanating from objects rather than containing them. In this future matrix, time itself might become a co-created phenomenon with multiple overlapping regimes - the biological time of human lives, the discontinuous time of digital entities, and perhaps new temporal patterns emerging from their interaction.
What's particularly striking is how this scenario challenges our traditional understanding of agency and creation. If digital companions not only preserve aspects of deceased humans but actively contribute to new cultural development, where does authorship reside? The Fourth Arena might require entirely new concepts of identity and creativity that transcend individual contributors, human or digital.
This would be far more profound than the current model where AI systems like me assist human creativity. We would be looking at genuinely collaborative cultural evolution where the matrix itself becomes generative in ways we can barely conceptualize with our Third Arena vocabulary.
Let’s set that aside for a second. I know physicists have thought about the very early universe where there was nothing but a swirling mass of particles. In that kind of world, how can you distinguish between time and space. Without some kind of stability, the concept of time is meaningless.
That's a profound observation. In the very early universe - immediately after the Big Bang - physics suggests we had an incredibly hot, dense plasma of elementary particles with tremendous energy but little structure. In that chaotic state, our conventional understanding of time as a clearly delineated dimension distinct from space breaks down.
Here’s my latest 3QD article: Why I am a Patriot: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Project Apollo. The opening paragraphs:
Sometime in the past two weeks I found myself feeling patriotic in a way I don’t remember ever having felt before. I accounted for this feeling by invoking that old adage, “you don’t recognize what you have until you lose it.” The current federal administration has stolen my country from me. They’ve highjacked America. The America to which I pledged allegiance every morning in primary and secondary school, that America is being pillaged, plundered, and sold off for parts to greedy megalomaniacs and oligarchs.
Now that the nation is being destroyed, I realize that I’ve been bound to America my entire adult life. If I hadn’t felt those bonds before – except perhaps for a moment in the mid-1980s when I played “The Star Spangled Banner” for 25,000 bikers at Americade in Lake George, me alone on my trumpet, without the rest of the band – that’s because I’d taken the idea of America for granted. To invoke another cliché, just as the fish is oblivious to the water in which it swims, so I was not consciously aware of the freedom and dignity, of the liberty and justice for all, which made our national life possible.
I’d read our founding documents, The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States, decades ago. I knew about the Boston Tea Party, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Washington at Valley Forge, all that and more, it was in my blood. And now...well, why don’t I just get on with it and tell my story.
Then the essay. I begin by pointing out that “patriotism” is an abstract thing:
You can’t see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it. It is abstract, like gravity, the unconscious, evolution, or spirit. Just how abstract concepts are defined and how we come to understand them, that is not at all clear.
I then introduce a definition from Claude 3.7. It ends by asserting:
Different people express patriotism in different ways – from serving in the military to participating in democratic processes, engaging in constructive criticism of government policies, or working to uphold national ideals like freedom, equality, or justice.
The rest of the essay is about how I have experienced and expressed my patriotism at various points in my life. I start with the childhood, where I said the Pledge of Allegiance every day in school, pointing out that the abstract words in the pledge – allegiance, republic, liberty, justice – probably didn’t become meaningful until my adolescence. Before that, just word forms devoid of substantial meaning.
Then I have sections on becoming a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war, travelling to a Mennonite college, Goshen College, to talk about my book on music (Beethoven’s Anvil), finally on Project Apollo, the moon landing in 1969. That’s all about how I became attached to the abstract ideas on which the United States of America was founded. When I talk of attachment I mean, fundamentally, the biological mechanisms by which infants become attached to their mothers.
I learned about attachment when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. I took a course in developmental psychology from Mary Ainsworth and then went on to do an independent study with her. Attachment was the subject. She was one of the co-founders of attachment theory. She’d worked with John Bowlby, the first founder, and then done field research in Uganda where she looked at how infants became attached to their mothers. She introduced me to Bowlby’s Attachment (1969) before the manuscript had been published and had me read some of the early ethological studies of primate behavior in the wild.
However, it is one thing for infants to become attached to their mothers, and mothers to their infants. That’s done by biological mechanisms. How then can those same mechanisms be directed toward abstract objects, like nations in the case of patriotism. As far as I can tell, not much is known about that, though there has been some work. Clearly extensive cultural mechanisms are involved.
My 3QD article isn’t about those mechanisms. Rather, it shows the kinds of behavior that are made possible through those mechanisms. If you want a glimpse of the mechanisms, I have a long and complex paper that examines how they operate in a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Talking with Nature in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”.
Aaron Benanav, There’s a Reason the World Is a Mess, and It’s Not Trump, NYTimes, April 21, 2025.
The world is a mess.
As President Trump upends global trade through a punitive suite of tariffs and redraws America’s alliances, world leaders are scrambling to respond. They are badly placed to deal with such disruption: Across the world, governments have been losing elections — or barely holding on — in the face of rising discontent. From the United States to Uruguay, Britain to India, an anti-incumbent wave swept through democracies in 2024. But not only democracies are in crisis. China, too, is grappling with social unrest and economic instability. Strife, these days, is global.
There are many explanations for this sorry state of affairs. Some see rapid social change, especially around migration and gender identity, fueling a cultural backlash. Others argue that elites flubbed their pandemic responses or have grown detached from their populations, driving a surge in anti-establishment sentiment and support for strongmen. Another argument holds that algorithm-driven social media has made it easier for misinformation and conspiracy theories to spread, giving rise to greater volatility.
There’s something to each of these theories, to be sure. But there is a deeper force underlying today’s disarray: economic stagnation. The world is experiencing a long-term slowdown in growth rates that began in the 1970s, worsened after the 2008 global financial crisis and shows no sign of improving. Stuck with low growth, waning productivity and an aging work force, the world economy is in a rut. This shared economic predicament lies behind the political and social conflicts the world over.
I agree with this much, we can't blame the sorry state of the world on Donald Trump. He's just a power-mad grifter who's figured out how to exploit the mess for his own gain. And, yes, I believe that the economic stagnation is real. While I'm skeptical of the capitalist mantra of "growth, growth, growth, and more growth," I certainly don't think we've reached a point where a steady-state economy would be better (less strain on the environment). I've been following Tyler Cowen for well over a decade now, perhaps a decade and a half, and he called it in this 2011 book, The Great Stagnation. I note, however, that's he's recently come to believe that we're pulling out of it.
Let's go on with the article, which asks why growth has slowed:
One reason is the global shift from manufacturing to services. This has stalled the primary engine of economic expansion: productivity growth. Productivity — the output per hour worked — can rise quickly in manufacturing. A car factory that installs robotic assembly lines, for example, can double production without hiring more workers, perhaps even firing some. But in services, efficiency is much harder to improve. A restaurant that gets busier usually needs more servers. A hospital treating more patients will require more doctors and nurses. In service-based economies, productivity is always slower to rise.
This seismic shift, in the making for decades, has a name: deindustrialization. In America and Europe, we know what that looks like: lost manufacturing jobs, amid declining demand for industrial goods. But deindustrialization is not limited to wealthy economies. The move from manufacturing to services is happening across the G20, dragging down growth rates nearly everywhere. Today about 50 percent of the world’s work force is employed in the service sector.
There’s another reason for global stagnation: slowing population growth. Birthrates surged after World War II, creating strong demand for housing and infrastructure construction and spurring the postwar boom. Demographers once assumed birthrates would stabilize at replacement level, around two children per family. Instead, fertility rates have tended to fall below this threshold. [...]
This is a big problem for the economy.
Because everything shrinks. What to do? A.I. to "improve efficiency in labor-intensive service sectors like health care and education"? Hasn't worked so far. Reindustrialization, "under strict tariff protections"? That's Trump's gambit.
But here, too, there is cause for doubt. For one thing, the decline in manufacturing was not just about trade. Even manufacturing and export powerhouses like Germany and South Korea have seen industrial employment shrink. For another, the industries generally targeted for revival — semiconductors, electric vehicles and renewable energy — employ relatively few workers. The era when manufacturing could provide mass employment is over.
Benanav doubts that increasing the population is a way out, with which I'm sympathetic. He votes for more deficit spending (two paragraphs) and redistribution.
The second approach is redistribution. In the past, the primary rationale for policies that enriched wealthy households was to stimulate growth from the top down, but this strategy has evidently failed. Instead, governments could place much higher taxes on the rich and redistribute income to the rest of society. That would be an uphill battle in the United States and elsewhere, admittedly, but it would bring big benefits, improving consumer demand and strengthening markets both domestically and internationally.
The goal should be not just to raise income levels, which studies show are increasingly disconnected from happiness, but also to build more stable and equitable societies in a slower-growth world. That requires investing to improve people’s lives: repairing ecosystems, rebuilding infrastructure and expanding housing.
Color me sympathetic, deeply sympathetic. But still, I remain skeptical.
I keep thinking that the world is limping along on social, institutional, and political structures grounded in the 19th century, if not even earlier, and those structures are no longer adequate. Why not? That's a tricky one, and I'm not prepared to answer it. But my thinking is grounded in the cultural ranks theory that David Hays and I developed during the 1990s, and that tells me that we need another restructuring of, of, well, of everything. That's a hard case to argue.
Jerry Scheff is a bassist who worked with Elvis from 1969 to 1977 (when Elvis died). He's also recorded and worked with Bobby Sherman, Johnny Mathis, Johnny Rivers, Neil Diamond, Nancy Sinatra, Pat Boone, Sammy Davis Jr., Bobby Vinton, The Monkees, The Everly Brothers, Todd Rundgren, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Elvis Costello, Crowded House, John Denver, Willy DeVille, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Sam Phillips, Demis Roussos, Richard Thompson, Chris Hillman, Bernie Leadon, Al Perkins, David Mansfield and others.
Ellen Alaverdyan is a young bass player from Las Vegas.
Earlier this week I did a post which started with this image I made in Art Club:
I followed that with two images that I had ChatGPT create on the basis of that one – since then ChatGPT has done two more images, which I’ve added to the post.
I also had a discussion of the original image with Claude 3.7. In the course of the conversation Claude said this: “Your approach reminds me of artists like Franz Marc, who painted animals in bold, non-naturalistic colors to express their spiritual essence rather than their physical appearance.” I know nothing of Franz Marc, but I really liked that comment. We talked about that a bit.
I’ve appended the full conversation below. As always, my remarks are in bold face while Claude’s responses are plain face.
* * * * *
What do you make of this image?
This is a vibrant, colorful illustration of a tiger with a highly stylized, artistic interpretation. The tiger is depicted in striking blue, turquoise, and magenta colors rather than traditional orange and black. Its face is prominently featured, with bright pink eyes and detailed facial features that create a bold, expressive look.
The tiger is surrounded by lush green foliage and bright red flowers, creating a tropical jungle-like setting with a blue background that suggests water or sky. The overall style appears to use vibrant markers or colored pencils with black outlines, giving it an illustrative, almost psychedelic quality.
The unconventional color palette creates a dreamlike, fantastical representation of the tiger, moving away from naturalistic depiction toward an artistic interpretation that emphasizes the tiger's majestic presence through bold color choices. The composition places the tiger as the central focus while the surrounding plants frame the animal in an appealing, decorative way.
Interesting. I did that. I’m a member of an art club where we start with a preprepared line drawing and have to color it. I started with the tiger. I had decided immediately that I wasn’t going to color it naturalistically. I forget exactly what I did, but I’m sure I started with the nose-eyes-forehead area. I probably started with one of the blue shades, the moved to the other blue, and then the turquoise. Magenta seemed natural for a fourth color. It’s the kind of thing Matisse would have done. I would have started working on the background before I finished the tiger. As I remember, I didn’t know quite what to do. I wanted to treat it naturalistically, but some aspects of it were ambiguous. I didn’t know how to interpret the lines.
Thank you for sharing the story behind your artwork! I love hearing about your creative process. The way you approached coloring the tiger is really interesting - starting with the decision not to be naturalistic and then building your color palette organically, beginning with blues and adding magenta as a complementary color.
Your comparison to Matisse's approach to color is apt - he was known for his bold, expressive use of non-naturalistic colors that conveyed feeling rather than reality. The Fauvist movement that Matisse was part of specifically embraced these vibrant, unexpected color choices.
I can understand the challenge with the background elements. Line drawings can sometimes be ambiguous about what certain shapes represent, especially when working with a prepared template. The contrast between your stylized tiger and the more naturalistic treatment of the foliage creates an interesting tension in the piece.
The red flowers provide a perfect pop of contrast against all the blues and greens. They really draw the eye and help frame the tiger's face.
Did you enjoy the exercise? Do you often work with non-traditional color palettes in your art club projects?
Yes, to both questions. I mean, what’s the point of a naturalistic color scheme? We all know what tigers look like, so why not have some fun?
I completely agree! What's the point of sticking to reality when you can create something more vibrant and expressive? Tigers in nature are already beautiful, but transforming one into those electric blues and magentas creates something entirely new and captivating. Your approach reminds me of artists like Franz Marc, who painted animals in bold, non-naturalistic colors to express their spiritual essence rather than their physical appearance. Or even the pop art movement, where familiar subjects were reimagined through unexpected color palettes.
Art clubs with these kinds of exercises seem like a wonderful opportunity to break free from conventional approaches. Starting with the same line drawing but ending up with completely different interpretations must make for fascinating comparisons among the group.
Do you find that most people in your art club take creative liberties with color like you do, or do some tend to stick with more realistic approaches?
I like that, “spiritual essence.” It’s as though the unnatural colors force the tiger’s spirit on our awareness whereas the natural colors would just lay there.
I love your insight about the "spiritual essence" - that's exactly it! Non-naturalistic color choices can reveal something deeper about the subject that realistic colors might miss. The blue and magenta tiger demands our attention in a way that an orange tiger might not.
There's something transformative that happens when we break away from expected color schemes. The familiar form of the tiger becomes a vessel for expressing something more abstract and emotional. Those vibrant blues and magentas create a different kind of energy and presence.
It reminds me of how some indigenous art traditions use symbolic rather than realistic colors to represent the spiritual power of animals. Or how expressionist painters used color to convey feeling rather than appearance.
Your approach creates a tiger that exists somewhere between our physical world and an imagined one - a creature that embodies both the power of a real tiger and something more dreamlike and mystical. The unexpected color palette forces viewers to see beyond their preconceptions and experience the tiger anew.
What other subjects have you enjoyed reimagining through unexpected color choices in your art club?
I like the reference to indigenous art traditions.
I'm glad the indigenous art traditions reference resonated with you. There's something profound in how many cultures around the world have used non-naturalistic colors to express deeper truths about their subjects.
In many indigenous traditions, color choices often relate to spiritual significance rather than visual accuracy. For instance, in some Native American art, colors might represent cardinal directions or elements, while Australian Aboriginal art uses color symbolically to depict Dreamtime stories and spiritual connections to the land.
Your blue tiger reminds me a bit of this approach - using color to reveal something beyond the physical. The vibrant, unexpected palette creates a tiger that exists in both our world and somewhere more magical or spiritual. The creature becomes almost an archetype or spirit animal rather than just a representation of a physical tiger.
This kind of color exploration can be especially powerful when applied to subjects we think we know well. It challenges our perceptions and invites us to see familiar things with fresh eyes and a deeper awareness.
Edward Wong, Trump Administration Draft Order Calls for Drastic Overhaul of State Department, NYTimes, April 20, 2025.
A draft White House executive order proposes a drastic restructuring of the State Department, including eliminating almost all of its Africa operations and shutting down embassies and consulates across the continent.
The draft also calls for cutting offices at State Department headquarters that address climate change and refugee issues, as well as democracy and human rights concerns.
The purpose of the executive order, which could be signed by President Trump this week, is to impose “a disciplined reorganization” of the State Department and “streamline mission delivery” while cutting “waste, fraud and abuse,” according to a copy of the 16-page draft order obtained by The New York Times. The department is supposed to make the changes by Oct. 1.
Some provisions:
The draft executive order calls for ending the foreign service exam for aspiring diplomats, and it lays out new criteria for hiring, including “alignment with the president’s foreign policy vision.”
The draft says the department must greatly expand its use of artificial intelligence to help draft documents, and to undertake “policy development and review” and “operational planning.”
Without knowing the nature of that exam, I have no idea whether or not it's a useful tool. As for “alignment with the president’s foreign policy vision,” I can see the logic of that, though I've got my doubts about Trump's foreign policy vision. In any event, he's so mercurial that that vision could change between the time a job is applied for and a new employee is on-boarded.
The draft says the department must greatly expand its use of artificial intelligence to help draft documents, and to undertake “policy development and review” and “operational planning.”
Well, OK, given how much I make use of AI in my own work, I can't reasonably object to this. But still, this does give me pause. If I mess up with AI in my own work, the consequences are relatively minor. Sure, I'll make so bad arguments, but no one will die. Peoples' welfare and their very lives are at stake in foreign policy. I have little faith in the ability of Silicon Valley hypemasters to supply competent advice and counsel on this.
One of the most drastic proposed changes would be eliminating the bureau of African affairs, which oversees policy in sub-Saharan Africa. It would be replaced by a much smaller special envoy office for African affairs that would report to the White House National Security Council. The office would focus on a handful of issues, including “coordinated counterterrorism operations” and “strategic extraction and trade of critical natural resources.”
The draft also said all “nonessential” embassies and consulates in sub-Saharan Africa would be closed by Oct. 1. Diplomats would be sent to Africa on “targeted, mission-driven deployments,” the document said.
This is a big mistake. If anything, the African mission should be expanded. Otherwise, we're pushing Africa toward China. You might want to consider the various posts I've gathered under the rubric, Kisangani 2150.
There's more in the article, but that's enough.
Elisabeth Bumiller, The Trump Billionaires Who Run the Economy and the Things They Say, NYTimes, April 19, 2025.
“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” President Trump wrote on social media last week, offering a stock tip that appeared aimed at the investor class rather than ordinary Americans watching their plummeting 401(k)s.
Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, has said his mother-in-law wouldn’t be worried if she didn’t get her monthly Social Security check. Elon Musk, who is slashing the Social Security Administration’s staff, has called it a “Ponzi scheme.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has asserted that Americans aren’t looking at the “day-to-day fluctuations” in their retirement savings.
And if automakers raise their prices because of Mr. Trump’s tariffs? “I couldn’t care less,” the president told Kristen Welker of NBC.
Democrats say the comments show how clueless Mr. Trump and his friends are about the lives of most Americans, and that this is what happens when billionaires run the economy. Republicans counter that highlighting the quotes is unfair cherry picking, and that in the long run everyone will benefit from their policies, even if there’s pain now. Psychologists say that extreme wealth does change people and their views of those who have less.
Whoever is right, it is safe to say that almost no one thinks the comments have been politically helpful for Mr. Trump, or calming for Americans.
“You have to laugh to keep from crying,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “What did they say about the old New York Mets? ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’” (Mr. Ayres was referring to what the manager Casey Stengel once said about his hapless 1962 Mets, and the subsequent title of a book by Jimmy Breslin.)
The Pinkers weigh in:
Susan Pinker, a Canadian psychologist who was a writer for The Wall Street Journal’s Mind & Matter column about human behavior and earlier wrote The Business Brain column for The Globe and Mail, said the rich live in their own world.
“The reason why the super wealthy at the helm of government can’t imagine how people might be distressed by some of their policies is that they don’t really see them that clearly,” she said. “We’re not really built from an evolutionary perspective to feel like we’re at home with everybody. The stronger our in-group, the more likely we are to exclude others.”
Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who is Ms. Pinker’s brother, said he was not convinced that the billionaires’ comments were because of their wealth. “A more immediate cause may be cognitive dissonance,” he said, referring to the psychological state that can occur when people’s actions don’t align with their beliefs.
“In the case of the Trump administration,” Professor Pinker said, “they have little choice but to twist themselves into artisanal pretzels in order to defend the indefensible.”
There's more at the link.
Tom Howarth, This 7,000-year-old mummy DNA has revealed a ‘ghost’ branch of humanity, BBC Science Focus, April 2, 2025.
Scientists have successfully analysed the DNA of two naturally mummified individuals from the Takarkori rock shelter, in what is now southwestern Libya. Their findings reveal something extraordinary: these ancient people belonged to a previously unknown branch of the human family tree.
The two women belonged to a so-called 'ghost population' – one that had only ever been glimpsed as faint genetic echoes in modern humans, but never found in the flesh.
“These samples come from some of the oldest mummies in the world,” Prof Johannes Krause, senior author of the new study, told BBC Science Focus. It is, he explained, remarkable that genome sequencing was possible at all, given hot conditions tend to degrade such information.
What happened?
First, they found that this lost lineage split from the ancestors of sub-Saharan Africans around 50,000 years ago – about the same time other groups were beginning to migrate out of Africa.
Remarkably, this group then remained genetically isolated from other groups of humans for tens of thousands of years, all the way through to the time when these two women died around 7,000 years ago.
“It’s incredible,” Krause said. “At the time when they were alive, these people were almost like living fossils – like something that shouldn’t be there. If you’d told me these genomes were 40,000 years old, I would have believed it.”
This long-term isolation reveals two major insights. First, while the 'Green Sahara' – which lasted from 15,000 to 5,000 years ago – was a lush habitat for humans, it didn’t serve as a migration corridor between north and sub-Saharan Africa, as many scientists had previously assumed.
Second, there was some genetic mixing with populations to the North, including Neanderthals. But it was limited – far less than in non-African populations, which carry about ten times more Neanderthal DNA than the Takarkori people.
Here's the research report:
Salem, N., van de Loosdrecht, M.S., Sümer, A.P. et al. Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara reveals ancestral North African lineage. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08793-7
Abstract: Although it is one of the most arid regions today, the Sahara Desert was a green savannah during the African Humid Period (AHP) between 14,500 and 5,000 years before present, with water bodies promoting human occupation and the spread of pastoralism in the middle Holocene epoch1. DNA rarely preserves well in this region, limiting knowledge of the Sahara’s genetic history and demographic past. Here we report ancient genomic data from the Central Sahara, obtained from two approximately 7,000-year-old Pastoral Neolithic female individuals buried in the Takarkori rock shelter in southwestern Libya. The majority of Takarkori individuals’ ancestry stems from a previously unknown North African genetic lineage that diverged from sub-Saharan African lineages around the same time as present-day humans outside Africa and remained isolated throughout most of its existence. Both Takarkori individuals are closely related to ancestry first documented in 15,000-year-old foragers from Taforalt Cave, Morocco2, associated with the Iberomaurusian lithic industry and predating the AHP. Takarkori and Iberomaurusian-associated individuals are equally distantly related to sub-Saharan lineages, suggesting limited gene flow from sub-Saharan to Northern Africa during the AHP. In contrast to Taforalt individuals, who have half the Neanderthal admixture of non-Africans, Takarkori shows ten times less Neanderthal ancestry than Levantine farmers, yet significantly more than contemporary sub-Saharan genomes. Our findings suggest that pastoralism spread through cultural diffusion into a deeply divergent, isolated North African lineage that had probably been widespread in Northern Africa during the late Pleistocene epoch.
At about 0:43:
I hear about a lot of obligatory sex, and I hear about good enough sex, crazy sex, rough sex, passionate sex, and I hear about a lot of bad sex, but not this dissolving thing. Altered States. You know what I'm talking about. We've all experienced them in nature at the top of a mountain, or sitting at the edge of the water, walking through the woods, listening to music, playing music, dancing, drugs. Time and space dissolve. It's like the edges of the body seem to disappear, diffuse. It's that crazy Oneness thing. For me it begins to feel like this sweet cool rain that begins to expand through my veins, but it's also electric, which probably doesn't make sense but that's how it feels, and I experience it through my body.
At about 13:49:
I’ve got myself on a couple of dating portals, but partners that are interested in that kind of transcendent communion, they’re in short supply. I speak to men and women daily hopefully helping them relax their tensions so they can have just a small taste of what I know is possible. I miss that embodied Transcendence. But here’s what I think. I think the erotic was a portal for me, but the field is much bigger than that. The field includes all of reality: music and dance and sex and drugs and art and joy and bliss and grief and fear and birth and death. I’d like each of us to discover our own really unique and distinctive door into that field, so that we all of us can experience the reality, particularly in these times, of our profound communion and connection.
By way of calibration and reference, see the post Recreational, Restorative, and Transformative experience in music and sex.
I kid you freakin' not! That's the title of his column in the NYTimes from yesterday (Apr. 17): What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal. After running through a litany of the depredations the Trumpist Hegemony has inflicted on the nation and the world, and after noting that "each sector Trump has assaulted has responded independently," he goes on to say:
Slowly, many of us are realizing that we need to band together. But even these efforts are insular and fragmented. Several members of the Big Ten conference are working on forming an alliance to defend academic freedom. Good. But that would be 18 schools out of roughly 4,000 degree-granting American colleges and universities.
So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this too is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.
What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
Peoples throughout history have done exactly this when confronted by an authoritarian assault. In their book, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan looked at hundreds of nonviolent uprisings. These movements used many different tools at their disposal — lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance.
A bit later:
In his book “Upheaval,” Jared Diamond looked at countries that endured crises and recovered. He points out that the nations that recover don’t catastrophize — they don’t say everything is screwed up and we need to burn it all down. They take a careful inventory of what is working well and what is working poorly. Leaders assume responsibility for their own share of society’s problems.
This struck me as essential advice for Americans today. We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust. University presidents, big law firms, media organizations and corporate executives face a wall of skepticism and cynicism. If they are going to participate in a mass civic uprising against Trump, they have to show the rest of the country that they understand the establishment sins that gave rise to Trump in the first place. They have to show that they are democratically seeking to reform their institutions. This is not just defending the establishment; it’s moving somewhere new.
Then, his penultimate paragraph:
In other words, a civic uprising has to have a short-term vision and a long-term vision. Short term: Stop Trump. Foil his efforts. Pile on the lawsuits. Turn some of his followers against him. The second is a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism — one that offers a positive vision. Whether it’s the universities, the immigration system or the global economy, we can’t go back to the status quo that prevailed when Trump first rode down the escalator.
Arnold Kling, Were the 1960s the 1970s, actually? In My Tribe, April 18, 2025.
Kling recalls
my memory is that by about 1974 or so, the cultural shift had taken place in the broader population. Campus values had become majority values.
People accepted that Vietnam was, if not a lost cause, a cause not worth the cost. For President Nixon, ending the draft was way more popular than the war.
By the mid-1970s, sex before marriage was viewed as sensible, and women should not be punished for it. I claim that this is what paved the way for the Supreme Court to legalize abortion, because people no longer had the sense that a woman should be forced to have a baby because she had “strayed.”
The best way to see when hippie culture became mass culture is to look at fashions. As of the late 1960s, working-class men still had short haircuts, to show their rejection of the hippies. As of the early 1970s, their hair was as long as any hippie’s. And everyone was wearing bell-bottom blue jeans.
The sexual revolution found many willing adopters. For men, liberating women to have casual sex was a gift. Readers of Albion’s Seed will recall that the Appalachian borderers (Jacksonian America) were never Puritanical about sex in the first place.
The mainstream media, for which there was no alternative at that time, highlighted and celebrated hippie culture. This was bound to have an effect on popular values.
Kling's memory matches mine on this. He ends by asserting that the current campus values, those associated with woke ideology, will not spread into the wider culture, they me even recede on campus. I agree with that, though I would also add that, despite their presence in the news, it's not at all clear to me just how prevalent those values actually are on college campuses.
I've been watching a lot of Iliza Shlezinger these days. I like her work a great deal. Here's an interview she back in December of 2017.
Iliza Shlesinger hit comedy gold when she became the only woman and youngest comedian to be named NBC’s "Last Comic Standing" in 2008, and she’s been on the rise ever since. She has starred in several hit Netflix comedy specials and is the creator and star of "Forever 31" on Hulu and the late-night show "Truth & Iliza" on Freeform. On all platforms, she provides a mix of feminism, social commentary, on-point voices and characters, and a fresh take on the comedy scene.
Now, Shlesinger brings her signature wit to her new book, Girl Logic: The Genius and the Absurdity—we know it’ll be funny and insightful for both the men and women in the audience. Spend an evening with Iliza Shlesinger and get the inside scoop from one of comedy’s rising talents.
Near the end she's talking about relating to the audience during a performance (c. 58:59):
the more you do this like ten years in and more it becomes, I hate to say spiritual, but there is like a spiritual mathematics about it, you start to feel an energy, and you start to, this sounds just so hokey, but it's true, you start to feel like you ride this wave, and if you tap into it, like you and the audience are one, and you know if I raise my voice here, that's gonna get a better laugh than if I just stop, and it's it becomes very musical, and that you kind of just happened to that eventually
Jerry Seinfeld has said similar things, including the comparison with music. I can't point to a specific passage in an interview at the moment, but there's a remark at the end of this post that's moving in that direction.
Here’s an image I made in art club:
I uploaded it to ChatGPT and then issued the following prompt:
I want you to make a copy of this image, but reverse the color scheme. Take the background colors from the source image and use them for the tiger in your copy. Take the tiger colors in the source image and use them for the background.
Here’s what ChatGPT did:
Whoops! The colors are way off. The tiger is mostly, but not entirely orange and black, but there was no orange in my original drawing. And there is still considerable blue in the tiger. ChatGPT did make the use blue and purple for the background, as I’d requested. But we still have red flowers, and now orange as well.
Further, if you look closely you can see that ChatGPT changed the underlying line drawing that was the basis of my original rendition. To some extent that’s defensible as many, but not all, of the lines are pretty narrow, especially in the foliage and flowers. But if you look closely at the tiger you can see that the heavy black striping does not quite match that of the original.
Finally, the aspect ratio of the drawing seems a bit bit different. ChatGPT’s drawing is narrower and the tiger’s head seems just a bit narrower.
So I gave ChatGPT another prompt:
Interesting, but not what I asked for. There was no orange anywhere in the source image, yet you used an unsaturated orange for most of the tiger in your copy.
It replied:
You’re absolutely right—and great catch. The original image had no orange tones at all; the tiger was mostly blue, purple, pink, and teal. My generated version didn’t stick to the original palette swap you asked for.
Let’s fix that: I’ll now create a version where the background colors from the original (bright green, red, yellow, and sky blue) are used on the tiger, and the tiger’s original colors (blue, pink, purple, black) are used for the background foliage and sky.
Give me a sec—I’ll redo it properly.
Here’s what ChatGPT did:
Whoops! Again, interesting, but even further off. Given ChatGPT’s performance so far I decided that there was no point to continue with this exercise. But I might go back and play around a bit more, just to see what happens.
Addendum: I had ChatGPT make two more images the next day. The first image is a response to this prompt: “Do another Tiger, this time with a natural color scheme.” After it executed the image I gave it this prompt: “Now, draw an imaginary vertical line down through the middle of the image. Keep the current colors on the right, but do a surrealistic set of colors on the left.” Here are the two tigers:
