Notes and Essays -- John Brown

image (not from below-cited dialogue/article) with the caption:  Silhouette Of A Thinking Person Bret to Gail Collins (also a NYT Opinion columnist) during their conversation: "You’re reminding me of the story, probably apocryphal, of the supporter who told Adlai Stevenson, during one of his presidential runs in the 1950s, that 'Every thinking person in America will be voting for you.'  'I’m afraid that won’t do,' he supposedly replied. 'I need a majority.' " From: Gail Collins and Bret Stephens, "OPINION [:] THE CONVERSATION ..." The New York Times , Feb. 27, 2023; below Collins/Stephens image from

Overheard in Washington DC: Russia giving up Crimea would be like the US of A forever [?] giving up total access to Cuba [as it "unwillingly" could?)  ...

February 26, 2023 1:17 PM UPDATE February 26, 2023 2:45 PM VOA News [original article contains additional links/illustrations] image from article:  FILE - White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Oct. 26, 2021 The United States declared Sunday that the Crimean Peninsula remains a part of Ukraine but said the more immediate concern is for Kyiv’s forces to retake lands that Moscow has seized in its yearlong war. The comments came on the ninth anniversary of Russia illegally annexing the territory. “The United States does not and never will recognize Russia’s purported annexation of the peninsula. Crimea is Ukraine,” the State Department said in a statement. At the same time, Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that it is up to Ukraine to decide what constitutes victory or an acceptable diplomatic outcome, even though no peace negotiations are occurrin...

Generative artificial intelligence presents a philosophical and practical challenge on a scale not experienced since the start of the Enlightenment. By Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, The Wall Street Journal , Feb. 24, 2023 2:17 pm ET  ( illustration by Phil Foster from article ) For a less pessimistic view on Chat, see Andy Kessler, " How ChatGPT’s AI Will Become Useful [:]  It still needs to go through new versions and have its flaws exposed to be good," The Wall Street Journal ,  Feb. 26, 2023 4:36 pm ET   A new technology bids to transform the human cognitive process as it has not been shaken up since the invention of printing. The technology that printed the Gutenberg Bible in 1455 made abstract human thought communicable generally and rapidly. But new technology today reverses that process. Whereas the printing press caused a profusion of modern human thought, the new technology achieves its distillation and elaboration. In the process, ...

Russia’s domestic political repression contrasts with flourishing competition and a strong civil society  image (not from article) from Martin Sandbu,  Financial Times   [2/26/2023] President Joe  Biden’s speech in Warsaw was thickly coated in the kind of idealistic rhetoric many western Europeans discreetly roll their eyes at. Of Vladimir Putin, he said: “He thought autocrats like himself were tough and leaders of democracies were soft . . . And then, he met the iron will of America and the nations everywhere that refused to accept a world governed by fear and force.”   Certainly, there are reasons to view this channelling of Ronald Reagan with scepticism. Hypocrisy is one — the US often props up leaders governing by fear and force. Biden himself went to Riyadh as a supplicant for oil only last year. But as Europeans with experience of Moscow will tell you, the Manichean language matters. It matters — as Reagan’s rhetoric did — because it speaks to the ex...

The initial reluctance of the U.S. and its allies to help Kyiv fight Russia has turned into a massive program of military assistance, which carries risks of its own By Yaroslav Trofimov , The Wall Street Journal , Feb. 25, 2023 12:01 am ET Two days before the Russian invasion of his country, on Feb. 22, 2022, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba was welcomed to the White House. As he greeted President Biden and senior administration officials, Mr. Kuleba later recalled, he felt like a patient surrounded by doctors presenting him with a diagnosis of stage-four cancer  The  consensus among the U.S. and its European allies was that there was nothing they could do to prevent the inevitable. Their intelligence services predicted a Russian takeover of Kyiv and a collapse of the Ukrainian state within days. The U.S. by then had already closed down its embassy and evacuated all American  personnel. A year later, the war in Ukraine has become, to a large extent, the West’s own...