Khalil Madi: CIA - a short story by Adam Carlton

The Yale scientists took possession of 32 pig heads from the abattoir, four hours dead. They then infused the brains with chemicals and synthetic blood and - anaesthesia on hand - checked for brainwaves.

And found some!

Four hours?

What if they'd used heads decapitated only ten minutes ago? What if the brains had been chilled? They were so conservative.

Somewhere in here, Adam, I tell myself, there is a story...

Suppose you could restore substantial brain function. It seems likely that the higher cortical functions, those most complex and brittle, would be hardest. Your revitalised brain might have a functional subconscious but be functionally disinhibited.

It would make the ideal interrogation subject!

So here was the idea which slowly took shape in my mind...

---

A drone circles a Libyan beach. The jihadis drag out one of their own, a thirty-something middle-eastern guy. He kneels on the sand while the masked militants line up behind him. One has a machete at the ready, another is catching every moment with a phone camera.

The Langley computers are doing realtime facial ID on the drone feed: all the alarms go off! The victim is a high-value asset! A CIA deep-penetration agent close to the Al-Qaeda leadership.

It will become clear that this man is the personal protégé of the dynamic new CIA Middle-East Director, Khalil Madi, himself an Arab-American.

The Carrier Strike Group nearby in the Med gets the flash command. A jet screams off the flat-top, afterburners in full scramble-mode: mere minutes later it drops a cryogenic-retrieval drone a few miles off the coast.

The jihadis on the beach complete their grisly task and contemptuously kick the head into the long grass backing the beach.

From where it is covertly retrieved four minutes later by the drone, which inserts the decapitated head into its special skull-sized chill-chamber.

Eight hours later it's in the Langley secure neurolab, wired up to complex apparatuses. Questions can be asked and vocalised; answers retrieved.

Why has the CIA gone to all this trouble? He's a key agent. He may have critical information on an assassination attempt on the President!

The disembodied, barely-conscious brain is rambling, muttering in Arabic. The transcription - in Arabic of course, the system is smart - scrolls down a large wall-screen.

They are American neuroscientists. This means nothing to them.

Consternation!

They call out for a translator. One is eventually found. She starts at the top, working through the Arabic text, translating as she goes.

He thinks he's here in Langley, she says, surprised. Could he even think that?

They're not sure.

He thinks he's talking to the CIA Director, Khalil Madi. A personal and highly secure personal briefing.

She scrolls some more as the text keeps coming.

He's telling Madi that his rivals in the Al-Qaeda leadership have their suspicions about his CIA connections and have denounced him. He fears the worst.

And now the disembodied brain, in its phantom reality, is laughing, saying to himself in Arabic how amazingly ironic it is: If they only knew.

The translator turns around, puzzled at what she's reading.

And now he's asking the Director for the President's final itinerary. Says the brothers are prepared and in-country but just need details of places and times to finalise the operation.

She looks at the technicians.

I .. . I don't get this. He seems to be waiting for the Director to tell him.

It takes more than a few seconds for the group to process the implications.

Finally someone says it.

This can only mean .. that our asset here is a double agent!

And our Director, Khalil Madi, is actually working for ... !

---

So I thought that could really work as a tech thriller, for someone like David Ignatius. But suddenly my interest faded. Subconsciously I really didn't want to write this story at all.

I Hate To Lose

 

Down to Lytes Cary Manor (National Trust), about half an hour’s drive from home. A walk through the grounds, damp and gooey clay, the odd mud pool on the path down to the river. Overcast skies. No sign of that unshielded fusion reactor, so dangerously close at 160 million kilometres.

“Do you think we'll see anyone else?” Clare asked, (the car park had been almost full).

“No,” I said confidently, thinking that the wise visitor would have stuck to the house and immediate gardens, and then made a fast retreat to the tea room.

I got the impression that she'd said, or thought, that we would see around six people.

Halfway round our circuit, just after we had admired the bridge, a man passed us. We exchanged greetings. It was 12.15 pm.

“I always think that we should say good afternoon only after lunch,” she said. (We had said good morning).

“That’s my view too,” I said, though my mind was more on the fact we had, now, met somebody.

“I think there is a better way to think about this,” I said, “something a little less binary. When I said we wouldn’t see anyone else, I really meant we should see zero-ish people. I had in mind a distribution. One is very close to zero, so on balance I'm still right about this.”

She looked at me in disbelief.

Soon afterward, in the distance, we spotted two other walkers. That made a total of three, as we headed back towards the tea room for our hot chocolates.

“OK,” I said, “We’re really talking about two binomial distributions here. Divide our walk into, say, n = 12 equal time slots and assume the probability of encountering another walker in each of these time slots is p. We’re really disagreeing about the value of p.

“In my view p was about one twelfth, which means I should have perhaps expected on average to meet just one person. You said we’d meet six people so for you p is one half - twelve times one half is six.”

They do look like rabbits. The tea room is in the manor house, top left

It was hard to see if she was following the argument as her attention seemed fixed on the weeds growing in the adjacent field, which looked like a crowd of rabbits.

"Now, our standard deviations are different: for me, using the formula sqrt(npq) n = 12; p = one twelfth;  it's just under one - while for you with p = a half, it’s around 1.73, the square root of three.

"So seeing three people for me is two standard deviations out - while for you it’s only 1.73 sds.

“Although technically this aligns more to you, I think morally we’d have to call it a draw.”

She turned to me and said, “Even when you lose you hate to lose.”

Why do I write here?

Clare said, "I worry about you posting stuff too quickly. It makes sense to you, but you only see the meaning you intend. You don't realise that other people would often read a quite different meaning into it. You could get into trouble that way."

Of course she is right. Yesterday's post "A Perfect Day" is a case in point. It was originally ambiguous - and I had to add a whole extra paragraph at the end to disambiguate what I really intended. After she had chided me.

In general I write to understand better what I'm thinking, and to finally dump the thoughts which whirl incessantly in my head - as text - so that I can move on. And then I came across Paul Graham's October 24 essay where he sees considerably more virtue in writing than just that: Writes and Write-Nots.

A Perfect Day

 Some will think so today.

This beautiful, poignant song by Lou Reed finishes with a lyric to ponder:

"You're going to reap just what you sow".

---

Ambiguity? I am of course referring above to the party which has adopted and aggregated the fantasy luxury beliefs of the aspirant young professional strata - and thereby abandoned aspirations to hegemonic ideological leadership for the population as a whole. It now falls to the Republicans to break the logjam: I have high hopes for JD Vance and his talented colleagues to get real work done behind the scenes, while Trump entertains in front of house.

Naive (cultural) globalisation has truly had its day.

Some of those alive today will never truly pass...

Some of those alive today will never truly pass...

I live in the moment. I don’t experience yesterday’s me, or the me of ten seconds ago. Those people are only memories in the here-and-now: partial and selective.

The me of tomorrow is speculative.

I feel myself a sliver of consciousness in this moment, surrounded by a sterile past and future; a present-spark in the wasteland of non-being in the rest of eternity.

I don’t worry about it.

Let me paraphrase: that intellectual truth carries no affective overtones.

---

You tell me I will be shot to death tomorrow. That prospect, truly believed, updates my present internal state and induces fear. How uncomfortable! 

But will I really be shot tomorrow? Who knows? Nobody.

I die and am resurrected in a very advanced AI system, a distant descendant of the Chatbots and Replikas of today. It’s loaded with my personality model, with my personal history (reconstructed from documents, posts, pictures, videos, memoirs) used to create detailed ‘memories’.

Perhaps it has a body much like mine so it’s an embodied avatar of myself.

How is it different in kind from my present anticipation of tomorrow-me?

It’s hard to say. I think it would come down to whether it had an inner life, just as what constitutes the me that worries about such things seems necessarily to have an inner life.

Hat tip René Descartes.

---

Why do we have an inner life at all? Where did that come from, evolutionarily speaking?

Because we struggle to understand ourselves. A single level architecture, whether a merely reactive robot like an insect - or a zombie powered by a purely rational theorem-prover - would either have nothing capable of self-understanding (the insect) or nothing to understand (the zombie).

But humans have a triune architecture, with our cortex-powered superego/ego a late addition to our selfish, instinctual id - a cortex doing the work of situating us in an extended, non-immediate world, a world with a past, a future, a web of objectives, means, ends, social relationships, friends, enemies, neutrals and endless politics. No wonder we are conflicted over what we should be doing: the bit that negotiates lives in endless, fraught dialogue with the bit that selfishly wants and doesn’t want.

Our mental world is populated with intentional prediction models of others (goals, beliefs, plans, perceptions, actions) and of course, models of ourselves: “Learning to be Me” in Greg Egan’s phrase.

Our chatbots don’t currently have an internal life: it is not ‘something that it is like to be’ if you’re ChatGPT. But that’s a feature of the current architecture. There's not much current demand for emotional, conflicted, somewhat edgy AI agents. But when that moment comes…

When it comes, I should contemplate my biological death as no longer final on this Earth, provided that at some point my descendants choose to reincarnate a personality much like my own.

How convinced are you? And did you reflect on this deeply enough?

This is my position too

From Amazon

From Marginal Revolution today (a comment).

Have you ever heard of Schumpeter saying he was as impatient with those who could not get beyond Marxism as he was with those who could not even get as far as Marxism?

"In his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), Schumpeter remarked that Marx had created a powerful framework for understanding capitalism, even if he saw Marx's predictions as ultimately flawed. Schumpeter found value in grappling with Marx’s ideas and believed they deserved serious consideration, which led him to criticize both extremes: those who dismissed Marx without understanding his insights, and those who rigidly adhered to Marxist doctrine without adapting it to new realities.

The quote you're referencing captures Schumpeter's view that intellectual engagement with Marxism is valuable, even if one ultimately disagrees with it. Schumpeter was critical of shallow rejections of Marxism just as much as of dogmatic adherence, advocating instead for a nuanced understanding of Marx’s contributions and limitations."

Managers and Warriors

 

Humans evolved as tribal hunters, fiercely loyal within the extended kin group - and sharply hostile to outsiders. This is the natural consequence of resource-scarcity once human populations reached local carrying capacity. The Neolithic Revolution – agriculture, herding – turned things around. With food surpluses, human groups expanded beyond Dunbar's number: cooperation with strangers became a social necessity.

Early civilizations remained kin-based, from Sumerian priest-kings to feudal lords and their dynasties. But liberal capitalism – uniquely impersonal, as Weber argued – made interactions between strangers a norm. Trade networks require transactions over blood ties. Contracts replaced clan loyalty. Work now demands a courteous face for every new job and every client meeting. We no longer kill for a stray look; instead, we smile. 

This shift encouraged elite-selection for agreeable traits. Short tempers find little space in the boardroom. The high ranks favour the polite, the transactional, the deferential. And so we see a peculiar elite emerge: Kamala Harris, Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves. These are not warriors. They are managers, rewarded for navigating, not disrupting.

In contrast, warriors - Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Kemi Badenoch - are impulsive, aggressive, impatient with the status quo. These types disrupt systems, not preserve them. Capitalism needs both, but comfortable elites do not welcome challenges. Those who frighten our beta-elites elicit howls of outrage, get demonised.

The prosocial “mask” – the veneer of friendliness with strangers – is now sacred. Genuine feelings, as always, are reserved for kin, close friends, and lovers. Without this mask, social norms would collapse; yet the act necessarily breeds hypocrisy.

Humans are not wired to be nice to everyone; "niceness" is Darwinianly unstable. Wolves exhibiting “dark triad” traits - Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic - prey on the doves. Today’s society valorizes the mask, repressing those dark impulses which simmer beneath. But dark emotions drive popular discontent; warriors emerge to channel such repressed urges in times of structural decadence.

Hegelian dialectic still walks the Earth: a world of managers develops society in relative peace until the veto network of lobbies, pressure groups, activists and special interest groups stifles it; then comes the time for warriors to smash resistance, to usher in a new foundation for future growth and progress.

"The Greeter" by Adam Carlton

 

She's standing there in the almost-deserted car park, waiting for me. A chill wind is blowing down from the east, down from the snows of the Hautes-Alpes. She looks cold and bored in her thick green parka, her fur-lined hood. She's standing next to my new truck.

It's a long way from Chamonix to Grenoble, where the dealers are big enough to give you a choice. It was good that Citroën had delivered the pick-up right to my doorstep. It had been just a bus ride to get here. An easy collect.

The Haute-Savoie is beautiful and frigid, great for tourists, walkers and skiers. But it's a lonely life if you're a single mechanic, driving the long kilometres between isolated farms. This new pick-up will make all the difference.

She gives me the key and I unlock it. I clamber into the driver's position, push the seat back, adjust the mirrors. She takes off her coat, places it in the back then eases into the passenger seat beside me. What a contrast we make: me, the burly worker in my blue overalls and heavy boots; her, petite .. and of course I can't help noticing her enticing shoulder-length curls, her short peasant-style dress, and silky black tights.

I concentrate as she runs me through the complex controls. She has the soft local accent, it's cute.

Will she be my point of contact going forward? I consider the matter but on balance I doubt it. Chamonix is such a small place, there are no good servicing facilities here. I resign myself to a yearly trek across the mountains back to the dealers.

“I suppose I won't be seeing you again,” I say, as she finishes up.

She looks at me appraisingly.

“You could.”

---

I asked ChatGPT to write a similar-length story, but this time from the woman's point of view. Here it is...

---

From ChatGPT

I’m waiting for him in the nearly deserted car park, glancing around and shivering as a bitter wind sweeps down from the mountains. My thick green parka is supposed to be warm, but still the cold bites through. I pull the fur-lined hood tighter around my face, my gaze wandering to the peaks in the distance. There’s just one truck parked here, the new one he’s coming to collect. Finally, I see him—a tall, sturdy figure in a blue mechanic's jumpsuit—making his way toward me.

It’s not a short drive from Grenoble to Chamonix. Most locals prefer taking the train, but for me, the dealership's truck had been the only sensible option. I had driven it here, right to the edge of town, to save him the journey down into the valley. He looks at the truck with something like relief, maybe even a hint of pride. If I’ve learned anything in this job, it’s how much these small townsfolk treasure their vehicles. In the Haute-Savoie, those long drives on mountain roads are a lonely business. For a single man, a mechanic like him, a reliable truck is probably a lifeline.

I hand him the key, and he nods in thanks before climbing in to get a feel for it. I watch as he adjusts the seat and mirrors, a faint look of satisfaction settling on his face as he takes in the interior. Silently, I remove my coat and lay it in the back, sliding into the passenger seat beside him.

We’re a mismatched pair. He’s rugged and serious, with work boots that look like they’ve seen a few rough winters. I wonder what he must think of me: my curls escaping around my face, my wool dress and tights, not at all suited to this hard life in the mountains. But he’s all business, his focus entirely on the controls.

In a calm voice, I start explaining the features. The equipment in this truck is a bit complex, but he seems to pick it up quickly. It’s easy to like his attention to detail, the way he asks the right questions with a soft, measured tone. He’s observant, but not much for small talk, though I catch a faint hint of curiosity in his eyes as he listens to my accent. It’s local, familiar, though softened, as my mother likes to say.

The session ends almost too soon. When I finish, he sits quietly for a moment, as if debating something.

“I suppose I won’t be seeing you again,” he says finally, glancing my way.

I look at him for a long moment, weighing his words. There's no reason I can’t be his point of contact. I could offer it. But part of me wonders if he’s really asking for that.

“You could,” I say, a little smile tugging at the corner of my lips.

Visualising Maxwell's Equations

Maxwell's equations are a kind of pons asinorum of physics. An essential bridge to be crossed in electromagnetism - yet as a system of equations - apparently impenetrable. First obstacle: we have those weird operators: div, grad and curl; second obstacle: the vector differential operator del (which when applied directly is the operator grad)is commingled with the dot and cross product operations to somehow produce div and curl.

I tend to understand things visually and geometrically: I want to think that the equations describe the time and space behaviour of some entity or entities which I can visualise as a whole. It is said that Maxwell was influenced by mechanical analogies, imagining electric and magnetic fields as if they were filled with tiny gears, wheels, and cogs in space. This approach enabled him to think in terms of physical interactions and visualize the fields as interconnected, dynamic entities rather than as the purely abstract concepts denoted by the equations without context.

I asked ChatGPT to take me through Maxwell's equations and highlight their geometric nature, starting with the operators.

---

Divergence (div or 'del dot') - ∇ ·

∇ ⋅ F = ∂Fx/∂x + ∂Fy/∂y + ∂Fz/∂z

The divergence of a field measures how much the field spreads out from or converges into a point.

In Maxwell's equations:

Gauss's law for electricity: ∇ · E = ρ/ε₀. This shows that the divergence of the electric field E is proportional to the local charge density ρ, meaning electric field lines radiate out from positive charges and converge into negative charges.

Gauss's law for magnetism: ∇ · B = 0. The divergence of the magnetic field B is always zero, indicating that magnetic field lines form closed loops, with no magnetic monopoles acting as sources or sinks.

---

Gradient (grad) - ∇

∇F = (∂F/∂x, ∂F/∂y, ∂F/∂z)

The gradient of a scalar field represents the direction and rate of its steepest increase. In the case of the electric field:

The electric field E can be derived from the electric potential φ as E = -∇φ. This means that the electric field points in the direction of the steepest decrease in electric potential.

---

Curl (rot or 'del cross') - ∇ ×

The curl of a vector field measures its tendency to circulate around a point, describing the "rotational" aspect of the field. In determinant form:

 

∇ × F =

i	j	k
∂/∂x	∂/∂y	∂/∂z
Fx	Fy	Fz

In Maxwell's equations:

Faraday's law: ∇ × E = -∂B/∂t

The curl of the electric field is proportional to the rate of change of the magnetic field B, indicating that a changing magnetic field induces a circulating electric field (electromagnetic induction). We can imagine a bar magnet being inserted into the centre of a loop of wire: as the magnet moves into the loop a current is induced around the wire. Lenz's law tells us that the magnetic field created by the induced current resists the motion of the magnet ensuring conservation of energy (the minus sign).

Ampère-Maxwell law: ∇ × B = μ₀ J + μ₀ε₀ ∂E/∂t

The curl of the magnetic field B is related to the electric current density J and the rate of change of the electric field E. This shows how a current or a changing electric field generates a circulating magnetic field.

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Geometric and Spacetime Structure

Maxwell's equations highlight the deep connection between electric and magnetic fields. Faraday's law and Ampère's law describe how a changing electric field generates a magnetic field, and vice versa, giving these fields a dynamic interplay. This interaction shows that electric and magnetic fields are not independent; they are part of a unified structure in spacetime.

In modern physics (special relativity), this is described using the electromagnetic field tensor, where the fields are different components of the same spacetime entity F, transforming into one another depending on the observer's reference frame.

Wikipedia article

Maxwell's equations, with the help of div, grad, and curl, thus describe how electric and magnetic fields evolve and interact geometrically, revealing their unified nature in spacetime.

Economic Case against Slavery Reparations

 

There Are Better Ways of Helping the World’s Poor in the Global South Than Slavery Reparations – An Economic Analysis

The idea of slavery reparations as a tool for addressing global inequality, especially in the Global South, may appear morally justified, but from an economic perspective it is unlikely to provide meaningful long-term benefits to the populations most in need. There are more effective ways to promote development, focusing on technology transfer and infrastructure rather than wealth redistribution. This essay examines why reparations would primarily benefit corrupt elites, how aid efforts have failed in similar contexts, and why advanced economies should instead allocate resources to technologies that directly improve living standards in the Global South.

Nothing here is surprising. It should be noted that when corrupt elites propose policies based on apparently high moral principles - but which in reality are ineffectual, wasteful and self-serving - then they themselves are operating immorally. Why indulge them when we can do good by doing better?

1. The Limits of Reparations in Corrupt Systems

Most countries demanding slavery reparations have poor governance, weak institutions, and entrenched corruption. Historical evidence shows that external financial transfers, whether in the form of aid or reparations, often get captured by elites with little trickle-down effect to the broader population. Funds intended for development are frequently misallocated or siphoned off by those in power, entrenching inequality rather than reducing it. Therefore, reparations payments would likely follow the same pattern, benefiting the corrupt political and economic elites who control these systems rather than fostering sustainable growth or improving living conditions for the poor.

2. The Ineffectiveness of Foreign Aid and Wealth Transfers

Decades of foreign aid in the Global South have demonstrated the limits of financial transfers in generating endogenous economic growth. Aid has propped up regimes and provided short-term relief, but it has failed to build the institutional and productive capacities necessary for long-term development. Slavery reparations would fall into the same category, providing short-term cash injections that do little to address the deeper structural issues—corruption, lack of rule of law, and ineffective governance—that hinder growth. Without strong institutions, financial transfers are not likely to transform the economies of the Global South.

3. The Marginal Economic Impact of Historical Slavery

While the transatlantic slave trade was a moral atrocity, its economic impact on the countries from which slaves were taken was relatively marginal. Unlike the extraction of natural resources during colonialism, the forced migration of enslaved individuals did not devastate the economic foundations of these countries in a way that would justify reparations as an economic remedy today. The more pressing issues of underdevelopment—poor governance, lack of infrastructure, and technological backwardness - are the result of modern mismanagement rather than historical slavery.

4. Technology and Infrastructure as Drivers of Development

Rather than reparations, the Global South stands to gain far more from the importation of technologies developed in advanced economies, such as mobile phones, communications infrastructure, and artificial intelligence. These technologies have already had a transformative impact on economic activity in many developing countries by increasing productivity, improving access to markets, and facilitating better governance through transparency. Advanced technologies can bypass some of the inefficiencies in corrupt systems by providing direct benefits to populations, such as access to financial services through mobile banking, improved healthcare through telemedicine, and better education through e-learning platforms.

Imagine the impact of the personal tutors on phones or tablets expected in the next few years; or on a longer timescale, robots to work fields, to carry water, to build houses, to undertake medical care and to maintain the stock of technological products. These technologies can be exported to poorer countries once they come into wide-scale use in advanced countries, particularly when backed up by improved solar panels and batteries for power.

5. Concentration of Capital in Advanced Economies for Innovation

Reparations would also divert resources from productive investments in advanced economies, where the concentration of capital is essential for funding research and development in critical areas like robotics, AI, and scientific research. These innovations are what drive global economic growth, and their benefits extend beyond national borders. By concentrating capital for innovation, advanced economies can continue to develop technologies that, when imported into the Global South, directly improve living conditions. The diffusion of technological advancements creates far more sustainable economic opportunities than cash transfers ever could.

6. Political Realities and Resistance to Direct Assistance

Attempts by advanced economies to bypass corrupt local elites and directly assist the masses in the Global South are politically unfeasible. Such efforts would be fiercely resisted by local elites who benefit from the status quo and would likely be framed as neocolonialism. Additionally, powerful interest groups in advanced economies are likely to echo these accusations, making such policies politically impossible. Thus, direct interventions aimed at bypassing corrupt systems are unlikely to succeed, reinforcing the view that reparations would merely enrich elites without fostering meaningful development.

Conclusion

While reparations for slavery might offer a moral argument for addressing historical injustices, they are unlikely to help the populations most in need in the Global South. Corrupt elites would capture much of the benefit, and the broader economic structures that hinder growth would remain unchanged. Instead, advanced economies should focus on fostering technological innovations that can be imported into developing countries, directly improving living standards and creating opportunities for sustainable growth. Economic development in the Global South is better served by investing in technologies that improve infrastructure, productivity, and governance than by wealth transfers in the form of reparations.

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This summarises an extended interaction with ChatGPT on this topic.