Sunrise — 5:21, 5:41.

"He had scored 167 on an I.Q. test as a boy and entered Harvard at 16. In graduate school, at the University of Michigan, he worked in a field of mathematics..."

"... so esoteric that a member of his dissertation committee estimated that only 10 or 12 people in the country understood it. By 25, he was an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Then he dropped out — not just from Berkeley, but from civilization. Starting in 1971 and continuing until his arrest, he lived in a shack he built himself in rural Montana. He forsook running water, read by the light of homemade candles, stopped filing federal tax returns and subsisted on rabbits."

From "Ted Kaczynski, ‘Unabomber’ Who Attacked Modern Life, Dies at 81/Alone in a shack in the Montana wilderness, he fashioned homemade bombs and launched a violent one-man campaign to destroy industrial society" (NYT).

ADDED: The story at the link has been updated. It now gives a cause of death — suicide — based on "three people familiar with the situation." It also reflects on the soundness of ideas in the manifesto — as seen today:

His manifesto accorded centrality to a healthy environment without mentioning global warming; it warned about the dangers of people becoming “dependent” on technology while making scant reference to the internet. To young people afflicted by social media anomie and fearful of climate doom, Mr. Kaczynski seemed to wield a predictive power that outstripped the evidence available to him.

In 2017 and 2020, Netflix released documentaries about him. He maintained postal correspondence with thousands of people — journalists, students and die-hard supporters. In 2018, Wired magazine announced “the Unabomber’s odd and furious online revival,” and New York magazine called him “an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes.”
Becoming ‘the Unabomber’

If you click on my "Kaczynski" tag, you'll see that in 2015, I posted about the manifesto and said:

Ted had a lot to say about leftists in his manifesto. Let's look. It's worth reading if only to see how surprisingly similar it is to things you may be seeing every day on the internet....

I have some long quotes from the manifesto, including: "The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call 'feelings of inferiority' and 'oversocialization.'"

"Who gets a federal indictment with 100 years potential jail time and comes out to do an event?! The man is titanium!!"

Says one person in the live chat that accompanies this live stream of Trump speaking at the Georgia GOP Conference:

"Four children, including a 12-month old baby, have been found alive after they survived a plane crash and then managed to fend for themselves in a remote jungle..."

"... in Colombia for nearly six weeks. The siblings, who showed signs of severe insect bites and dehydration, are believed to have sustained and protected themselves by gathering fruit and building small shelters. A search force of almost 150 people, including special forces commandos and indigenous volunteers, had spent a month searching the impenetrable rain-soaked terrain. They were close to giving up when the remarkable discovery was made. 'Miracle! Miracle! Miracle!' rescuers said they shouted when they found the children."

 
The London Times reports.

"In a world where widely available AI thingummies such as ChatGPT can generate a 90,000-word 'thriller about a bloke with a tough British name racing against time to cut through some red tape'..."

"'... about something vaguely nuclear, written in the style of Sir Michael Caine' at the touch of a button, it is terrific to know that Sir Michael has gone to the trouble of writing such a thing himself, with his own hand. His publisher says he is 'bursting with ideas for fiction' which is good news, because when a chap is 90 years old and at the start of a seven-book deal then you want him at least to have the ideas for each one ready as soon as possible (talk about 'race against time')."

Writes Giles Coren in "Why I won’t stoop to celebrity authorship/Michael Caine has written a thriller, despite not being a 'literature person,' and he definitely did it all by himself" (London Times).

"The charges are a destructive intervention into the 2024 election, and the potential trial will hang over the race."

"They also make it more likely that the election will be a referendum on Mr. Trump, rather than on Mr. Biden’s economy and agenda or a GOP alternative. This may be exactly what Democrats intend with their charges. Republicans deserve a more competent champion with better character than Mr. Trump. But the indictment might make GOP voters less inclined to provide a democratic verdict on his fitness for a second term. Although the political impact is uncertain, Republicans who are tired of Mr. Trump might rally to his side because they see the prosecution as another unfair Democratic plot to derail him. And what about the precedent? If Republicans win next year’s election, and especially if Mr. Trump does, his supporters will demand that the Biden family be next. Even if Mr. Biden is re-elected, political memories are long. It was once unthinkable in America that the government’s awesome power of prosecution would be turned on a political opponent. That seal has now been broken."

 
Writes the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal in "A Destructive Trump Indictment/Do prosecutors understand the forces they are unleashing?"

"He intended to overthrow the government and replace it with an authoritarian regime fueled by Nazi ideology."

Said Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Schneider, quoted in "Man who crashed U-Haul near White House planned other attacks, prosecutor says" (WaPo).

[19-year-old Sai Varshith] Kandula... repeatedly rammed a U-Haul truck into security bollards that protect Lafayette Square north of the White House on May 22, prosecutors allege. Kandula then exited the vehicle and unfurled a red and white flag featuring a Nazi swastika, according to charging documents. Prosecutors also revealed Friday that Kandula asked officers on scene whether the media would cover what happened....

"The indictment also showcased the bedrock elements of the former president’s personality: his sense of bombast and vengeance..."

"... his belief that everything he touches belongs to him and his admiration of people for their underhanded craftiness and gamesmanship with the authorities. It recounts, for instance, how Mr. Trump had only praise for an unnamed aide to Hillary Clinton who — at least in his narration of the story — helped Mrs. Clinton destroy tens of thousands of emails from a private server. 'He did a great job,' the indictment quotes Mr. Trump as telling one of his lawyers. Why? Because, in Mr. Trump’s account, the aide ensured that Mrs. Clinton 'didn’t get in any trouble.'"

Write Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman in "Indictment Presents Evidence Trump’s Actions Were More Blatant Than Known/The accounts in the 49-page indictment provide compelling evidence of a shocking indifference toward some of the country’s most sensitive secrets" (NYT).

"I have now officially been accused of hate speech by YouTube."

"Let's be clear about this: that is a direct accusation conduct deemed criminal in many jurisdictions. This is absolutely not OK, @YouTube. Not OK."

Tweets Jordan Peterson. 

His podcast #287 — "Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality" — was deemed "Content glorifying or inciting violence against another person or group of people" or "content that encourages  hatred of another person or group of people based on their membership in a protected group."

The podcast title is the title of a book — described here at Wikipedia — and Peterson interviews the author.

"Ideally, we want guests to get excited, but this is one of the first times I've seen a guest get visibly excited."

"They love to look [these characters] in the eye. They love to be able to make a connection.... I see that sort of excitement in everybody's eyes."

Excitement and connection... as the character who is a tree come to life comes to "life" as a robot.

"He grew up in a small town in North Dakota and mortgaged a piece of farmland he inherited from his dad in order to invest in a company called Great Plains Software."

"He eventually became its CEO and sold it to Microsoft for $1.1 billion. But when he announced he was running for governor in 2016, most people still didn’t know who he was. But he wound up defeating the sitting attorney general 59 percent to 39 percent in the Republican primary. So he has experience winning primaries he wasn’t supposed to win.... His net worth is more than $1 billion, and he’s reportedly willing to self-fund his campaign...."

From "Who Is Doug Burgum, The North Dakota Governor Running For President?" (FiveThirtyEight).

ADDED: Burgum was once a chimney sweep.

Sunrise — 5:22, 5:30.

Even independents think our moral values are "poor."

 

From "Views of State of Moral Values in U.S. at New Low" (Gallup).

"As president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t," said Trump, on tape, in 2021.

Quoted in "Donald Trump admits on tape he didn’t declassify 'secret information'" (CNN).

CNN obtained the transcript of a portion of the meeting where Trump is discussing a classified Pentagon document about attacking Iran. In the audio recording, which CNN previously reported was obtained by prosecutors, Trump says that he did not declassify the document he’s referencing, according to the transcript.

Should we be hearing about a classified Pentagon document about attacking Iran?

"I loved early Democratic Socialists of America leader Cornel West. I loved author of the 1993 book Race Matters West."

"I loved everything about West until he supported spoiler Ralph Nader against then–Vice President Al Gore in 2000. A lot of my political friends supported Ralph Nader back then. And a lot of them have since apologized. Even Michael Moore.... West never apologized. He didn’t see a third party playing a spoiler role to Democrats as bad—obviously, since he’s about to do it again. He did support Barack Obama in 2008, but he turned on him fairly quickly, making criticisms that went way beyond Obama’s political decisions. Then he supported Jill Stein in 2016. More recently, West has gone off the deep end. He promoted his 2024 candidacy, on the fringe People’s Party line, with an appearance on former comedian Russell Brand’s Web show, now frequented by right-wingers.... This is a downhill spiral even for West, who also spiraled downward after Obama’s victory.... [C]alling the president 'a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats' was awful. West went on to claim that Obama was afraid of 'free black men' thanks to his white ancestry and Ivy League education.... What does West bring to the [2024] race?"

Writes Joan Walsh in "Cornel West Should Not Be Running for President/He doesn’t see a third party playing a spoiler role to Democrats as bad—and that’s inevitable" (The Nation). 

West was on Russell Brand's show? Let's take a look:

"If the limits of immigration are bounded by political psychology rather than by economic necessity, a series of uncomfortable questions arise."

"What moral weight, for instance, should be accorded to the human desire for cultural continuity? Taken to an extreme, it could legitimatize the sort of ethnic separation that white nationalists aspire to when they recite their credo known as the Fourteen Words: 'We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.'.... On the other hand, there’s the question of whether rich countries have Good Samaritan responsibilities to help poorer ones.... Modern political philosophers have largely found extreme limitations on people’s ability to migrate to be unjustifiable.... If humans all have equal moral worth, how can it be fair to let the dumb luck of birth determine opportunity to such an extreme degree?"

Writes Idrees Kahloon in "Economists Love Immigration. Why Do So Many Americans Hate It? In a democracy, a policy appraisal has to contend with political as well as economic consequences" (The New Yorker).