Peter Turchin, End times: elites, counter-elites, and the path of political disintegration, 2023.

Turchin is one of the founders of the new 'science' of cliodynamics, a discipline which coalesced in the 1990s, statistical juggling 'facts' from the past, stitched together from bare bones (literally) of archeology, climate, geopolitics, crimes, arrests/ executions, wine imports, lots and lots of numbers. There's probably even a case for kitchen sinks. Think: weather forecasting. My favourite historian, Arnold Toynbee, when asked by a critic what the secret of history was, answered: Just one damned thing after another. Well, it seems Turchin has finally trumped the great master.

In Harnessing human nature Part I, we saw how natural selection takes place not only on the individual level, but on the group level. No man is an island. We are who we identify with, we make alliances, good and bad. The high point of any civilization is when its state, warrior groups conquer others, loot and occupy, and build monuments to glorify it all. In rare exception to this, sometimes civilizations just coast along under wise leadership. Andalusia under Muslim rule from the 8th to 15th cc was probably humanity's high point, though it came to a typically nasty end with the reconquista.

But what about the family? What role does it play in civilization, in shaping individuals, before they move on to their adult groups?

What ever happened to Locke, Pavlov, Skinner, Marx-Lenin -- man as a clean slate at birth, moldable into whatever you like, a society programmable, made up of these programmable Boy Scouts and Girl Guides? Walden Two, communism? Revolution and a shortcut to communism sounds great, but founders on a million years of human evolution, confusing ought with is.

Well, Locke et al get an F. We're back to Plato, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Malthus, and Darwin.

Longer version of my Ames article, focusing also on Philip Agee, author of Inside the Company: CIA Diary (1975), founder of CovertAction, John Walker, even Bowe Bergdahl. Spying, traitors come in bizarre forms.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/04/20/aldrich-ames-will-go-down-in-history-as-a-traitor-who-spied-for-the-soviet-union-during-the-cold-war/ 

What ever happened to good old-fashion spying? The Saint? James Bond? Spy mania seems to have come (with 19th c imperialism) and gone (with the collapse of the Soviet Union). In our neoliberal age, with no monolith Bad Guy, spying is mostly about stealing money. Now a high school nerd in Rumania or a clever North Korean might decide to hack, say, banks.

Biden's Cyber Safety Review Board at Homeland Security's first spy-catching assignment was to investigate how Lapsus$, an international teen extortion racket 'impacted some of the biggest companies in the world, in some cases, with relatively unsophisticated techniques.'