The Mad Mick

Martial and Pastoral Education, continues

If you misspell ‘education’ you might spell ‘eduaction’. If you ask me what’s wrong with America today, I would say that in part that there is too much education and not enough eduaction. Action speaks as well. Where is the educated action?

For me, about 8 or nine years ago, I began overthinking my relationship to guns and to life and death decisions. I had to compile all of my experiences and have them tell me what I actually knew. Some of that I have documented in variations of an essay called The Moment of Death. You can read one of those variations here.

These days, I have practically exhausted my enthusiasm for the practice of honing my skill with firearms. There has been no particular shift in my thinking, only a change in priorities. In that regard, I am kind of locked into a mode of thinking about heroic violence. The current evolution of that lies in two places that are both related to SERE.

Survival Evasion Resistance & Escape
As an inveterate hiker kid, my family did more shopping at the Army surplus stores than at Ohrbachs. So when I was a poor college freshman, I supplanted my wardrobe with fatigues. I also picked up the Army manual on SERE. In 1982 you could get that book for about $3. Now they go for about $50. Consider the premise. Fighter jets are easily replaceable. Fighter pilots are not. So here is the advice of the most powerful nation on earth instructing you on how to survive behind enemy lines. I’d say that’s fairly valuable - even if you foolish enough to believe that unarmed black men are being hunted to extinction in America.

I also found one book, and I wish I knew where it went, which was a manual to show how to subvert the management of companies. It went into detail about what to how to make meetings absolutely unproductive. I remember reading it on a cross-country flight. It had me cracking up in recognition of some of those very practices I had witnessed personally. It also detailed how to plant explosives, so I had to hush in case the passenger next to me read the cover. It may have been the Army Signal Corps report on Subversion & Espionage - that’s the only one I could find in a brief search of AbeBooks.

At any rate, I have kept my eye on the ball of misinformation and disinformation pretty much all of my career in Business Intelligence, and especially since learning to understand semiotics, even though I still haven’t finished my study of George Steiner.

Militarized AI
I am under no illusions that we Peasants are going to be denied AI. But similar to the way we get a dumbed down bit of GPS, and similar to the way we can only use limited bands of the airwaves with our incessant cell-phone blather, we’re not going to get the really good stuff. This is the kind of vast inequality that social justice warriors don’t seem to be fighting for. I’m far from being Andy Ngo or any expert journalist focused on what the unfriendly opposition is actually doing on a day to day basis, but I can use good quality fiction to exercise my imagination. So when it comes to the sorts of post-apocalyptic survival we might be faced with I have a couple of authors who keep me infotained. The latest of these is Franklin Horton, and his series is The Mad Mick.

The simple premise of the Mad Mick series is that a series of 9/11 quality terrorist attacks have taken place in the US and that there has been a rapid collapse of the rule of law. The power is out and people are out of gas. We are introduced to Conor Maguire who is trying to survive the meltdown of society. He lives with his daughter in the hills of Virginia coal country which is ravaged by petty thieves and warlords. It turns out the Maguire is something of the archetypal John Wick, capable of raining hell on his enemies. Conor is not cool. He doesn’t have fancy gadgets. He is the son of IRA bombers, a scrappy mercenary bastard with a heart of stone. Except he isn’t. He has a god’s eye view of humanity and a gut that tells him who is courageous trustworthy and who is cowardly or despicable. It is his humility and resolve that save his sorry ass time and again, and it is his daughter Barb who is in constant leavening and loving rebellion that keeps him in check. Their love for each other gives them all strength against all odds. You could call them preppers with heart and soul. But author Franklin Horton’s series goes far beyond their exploits into an extraordinary reading of the heart and soul of America.

Unlike any of the Bond books, which I don’t think I’ve read, and unlike the Sherlock Holmes books which I have, the escalating nature of the conflicts illustrated by Horton gets deep into the bloody consequences and unforgiving nature of human territoriality. Horton’s rogue hero and his eventual associates represent the unpredictable nature of human fallibility and capability in extreme situations. Surely Bruce Wayne should be dead but his show must go on so the moral stories can continue to be told, but his world never goes beyond Gotham City. The Mad Mick goes far beyond the hills and woodlands to conflicts of national and ultimately, international significance. After all, he is an off-books contractor for the CIA, or sorta like that, with experience all over the globe. Conor Maguire is a world-class assassin. He is a wildcard. He is, like Bond, a deniable asset - a fictionalized version of the legendary Ground Branch operator Billy Waugh. Beware the old man in the field where men die young.

I bring this up in the context of militarized AI because there is an important lesson to learn in what might conceivably be my own personal nightmare scenario. To make ourselves anti-fragile to that scenario, there are important things to consider.

Farm Dogs
It happens to be that some of my favorite people in life, the ones I almost instantly bond with, are those who grew up on a farm. There have only been a half-dozen which is a small sample set, but not in a full repertoire of friends. Most of us only have a couple dozen at most. Remember when you knew all of their phone numbers by heart? Do we remember anything by heart? Well, the best of us do. The rest we leave to our silicon slaves and mechanical serfs. Anyway one thing we never backup to the cloud are our dogs, or if we own them, our cattle

The author tagging beef.

I’ve been looking for a video, with no luck so I’ll write about it, that shows a woman who trains affluent suburbanites how to help their dogs herd goats and sheep. The dogs have the muscle memory, even the ones that have been spayed or neutered, they just never get far beyond the dog park Karens. Here she takes the owner and explains something about the co-evolution of dogs with people with the fact in mind that all dogs used to be wolves. Domestication of dogs was not done for the purposes of flirting with other dog walkers in Runyon Canyon. It was for the purposes of yelping out alerts for wild beasts and corralling cattle and other meat on the hoof. Alas poor Fido is a rescue Frenchie with bad ankles. Great for date bait, but not for actually being a dog. He has been de-dogified for the purposes of genteel urban companionship. Honestly anyone with multiple housecats is worse. Only a lonely desperate human actually herds cats. Cats don’t actually want to be there.

The best dogs of course are the hunting, herding and ratting kind. Their humans understand. BTW, there’s another great YouTube video about a tottering old coffin dodger who finds a bat in his kitchen. The dog wants to bite its head off but the bumbling old codger keeps shooing the mutt out of the way. So dumbass get bit by the bat. This video is more eduactional. The very definition of a terrier.

I tend to prefer people who understand animals and farming. That’s the pastoral education I got late in life. But, like the poor pooches, it didn’t take me long to get acclimated to the new environment. Ah but there’s the rub.

The New AI’d Normal
In a sort of perverse way, I’m pleased to have had a Sputnik moment upon the drop of Deepseek. At least people are starting to get an idea that the future acclimation of society in the new era being stuffed down our consuming throats might not be coming from their favorite overlords. It might be those wicked Chinese! Still, the fact is that everyone is preparing to look towards a new set of ‘normal’ conveniences leads to several hideous probabilities.

1. Mids Revenge
   One of the things I didn’t say explicitly in my recent AI Don’t Dance, is that there is an Orwellian aspect to the capture of intelligence and intelligent work that is inherent in this blitz on white collar labor. That is that the administrative midwits are going to get crushed and the only way they can fight back is through politics.

2. Kafka’s Bureaucracy
   When AIs pile digital hallucination on top of human hallucination, the truth will be more deeply illusive than midwifery in a Trappist monastery. If you think it’s impossible to audit the overly compartmentalized government bureaucracy now, wait until the next whistleblower stumbles upon an entirely believable conspiracy that no one can either prove or disprove.

3. The Unscanned
   What I meant to say about Black History and Secretaries Day is that obeisance to such invented observances can and do substitute to a deeper, more accurately nuanced appreciation of the complex subjects of civil rights and labor laws. So what are the chances at AI will not embargo proactively for {economic / political / ethical} reasons? Of course this goes for every academic subject offered by retail AI. Better hoard some hardcovers.

We can look to the legacies of 20th Century Romania and the tender mercies of Nicolae Ceaușescu to inform us as to what happens when individuals tell us that the new thing they are building will remake society. So I want you to think very carefully about the following:

“We are changing the nature of the work of intellectuals. There’s going to be a revolution.”

That is the inescapable subtext of everything AI. How far will it go? Are you ready for a purge? Is somebody proposing a post-scarcity economy?

My gut tells me that some very smart unmarried and childless dipshits who probably own de-dogified dogs are taking Iain M. Banks a little too seriously. But what’s worse is that they have monetized the Effective Altruism excuse machine as their moral escape clause. Some of us remember Sam Bankman-Fried who helped fund this regime. Perfect storm of prosocial idiocy bankrolled by narrow interests. (Maybe I’ll find a better way to say this.)

I really hate when people start talking about infinity.

All this is why reading up on the post-apocalyptic is a Stoic and reasonable response to the threatened revolution. Sure little writers in this Substack corner of Al Gore’s Information Superhighway speak up to disconfirm the utopian promise, but internet porn is still more profitable. We didn’t imagine spearfishing. We didn’t imagine deep fakes. We didn’t imagine 4Chan or a host of other criminal activities in that glorious vision back in the days when AOL floppy disks invited you into the future.

Lockdown or Letdown
Letdown is the better option. Lockdown invites rebellion. I have to say that reading the Mad Mick has provided a very good set of scenarios in which a self-effacing wisdom, despite the artifice of fiction itself, has expanded my sense of puzzling through life or death choices. A man whose profession is assassination learns a great deal about who needs to die and how. That is not very surprising given my understanding of those better than average martial arts combatives. I rather thought the gradient between lethal and less than lethal was more sharp, like a quantum leap. I think I have learned that killing has spin.

I say all this because I know that Wall Street traders leapt to their deaths when the market crashed before the Great Depression. While the AI revolution may edge in slowly, its pervasiveness will enable preference cascades at remarkable speeds if we allow it to be ubiquitous. In my world it looks like everyone is trying to use it to prolong their own lives - only the most perversely unusual applications will be that thing nobody else thought of. Who knows what will show up? Look at the recording industry. The same capitalists produce orchestras and mumble rap.

How long will AI allow us to laze about in our own bubbles with studied indifference to the memes of the day? Will it accelerate everything? I hope not. I hope it will deepen a few good things, but futures of hopium have low yields. Idea volatility is high.

So either way, we need to understand our Martial and Pastoral educations better. These are two areas in which there won’t be large incursions by the Broligarchs and the Ivy Cabal. For better or worse, animals and plants are our future. At least most of them are not engineered.