discomfort with a fire init & first ascends
I found myself listening to the new podcast by Jessie Ennis and Brie Larson at the local Anytime Fitness on Saturday (finally; my podcast app seemed to have been on the fritz in my rented apartment), asking myself a question:
Who is Jessie Ennis?
We know who Brie Larson is. She’s not hiding anything. You can just tell.
But as I settle in to learn about these two women between squats and bench presses, I found myself suddenly launched into a fascinating conversation about heroics of virtuous authenticity and the resonance of the human spirit.
But what I didn’t hear…
On National Security, Economic Models, and Democracy: 2021
David Bernat, March 5th, 2021
There is no question society before us is fracturing.
National security carves barriers through our society of States and politics, and our friends and citizens carve, unknowingly, invisible lines between us.
Artificial intelligence is the most transformative sector non-specific cross-domain technology to be born out of human ingenuity since the steam engine.
Many of these national security barriers of which I speak are considered to be necessary safeguards for preventing any one political faction, authoritarian, or terrorist enclave from attaining too much power, or leveraging its data, or building an insurrection against the norms of our democracy or civil liberties.
…
Repairing the lost souls of the coronavirus pandemic.
Dear Elon Musk,
Nearly every civilization and culture has had a different story for the stars of the Milky Way to shine upon us from the vast ocean of contemplation above.
The stars are the first signs we receive as children that we live our lives, so powerful and yet fragile, enduring over great unknowns and yet fleeting, as members of a group that has persisted for eons and yet are contained here by what magical forces separate us from the immense infinities of the universe.
We live our lives under this umbrella of recognization, a blank open canvas to…
The Center for Political Democracies
“How are we going to pay for it,” I imagine FDR asking, to his aides.
“Sir?”
“They are going to figure it out.”
“Sir.”
“They are going to figure it out; and I am going to be running for re-election.”
“For your fourth term.”
“I… I just have a premonition about it.”
“Would you like us to look into it, Sir?”
“…”
Social Security
My father, who grew up entangled in the debates of the Vietnam war draft before volunteering to serve for the 101st Airborne, often described the Government to me like this: they don’t build things, Dave, they don’t make…
Masters of Dispute Resolution & Masters of Legal Study
David Bernat, February 7th, 2021
There is no question our country is at a crossroads.
World affairs have suddenly and dramatically shifted courses, a pandemic has ravaged lives across the world and further diminished the prospects of the millennial generation, and political discourse seems to have both disintegrated into the hands of a few and become weaponized.
In the skies above, storm clouds have assembled on the horizon of previously sunny day seas, and climate change seems to be coursing through the air like the energy of a marvel on a mysterious white steed. A brand new branch of the…
Starlight will be building and introducing a new feature on the information it sources from news and other text based documents. We will be deploying this feature for natural disaster prevention operations with an initial sector use in wildfires. We will start with reputation based veracity confirmation of text documents in the news domain, but quickly scale up efforts to begin what will become cross-modal geospatial data confirmation of a distributed platform.
How does it work?
We have a small internal service for education called WritersBloc which allows teams to program one or more personalized-information bots to search Twitter on their behalf to collect…
Preparing for the post-AI work of the world.
My friend Thomas Fletcher and I tried to enjoy Big Bang Theory one afternoon in his Pasadena apartment. He was two years out of Caltech with a law degree and a fiancée and offer at a prodigious D.C. law firm. I was waiting for my gap year to end between my two years watching Goldman Sachs and waiting for my graduate career at Cornell University to begin. He was nostalgic for his years of intense Chemistry and the uncomfortable discover that out in the rest of the world nobody knew or particularly cared about smart people.
With me watching from…
We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together
Taylor Swift has gotten me through a lot of hard times. I remember the early days of my life in California, when my relationships from back home in New York City had fallen apart, and driving windows-down through the western Redwood forests, rain drenching the wildfire prone regions, listening to her Shake It Off as I handled the curves. The smell of fresh, wet redwood mixing with open California landscapes still feels like personal romantic freedom.
When Taylor Swift sings she feels intimate and personal to me, as though she is singing as the quintessential cultural American womanness I have…
The greatest insight of western law is that the rights of the individual supersede the rights of the State.
The greatest insight of western law is that the oppression of the individual must be fractionated down to the individual, so sovereignty of the individual means the individual has the intrinsic meaning. This meaning transcends the rights of the State, leading to the consequences: innocent until proven guilty.
Intersectionality is a branch of modern sociology that transcends former well systematized theories of Normativity, most notably in psychology. These theories break apart the engine of western thinking that a singular structure ought rule all of social behaviorism. …
David Bernat
Starlight. Making better satellite analytics possible.
