Opting out of facial recognition ends 30 Sept 2025...... Enjoy your flight.

The OMB control number for CBP’s collection is 1651-0138, which expires on September 30, 2024.

In the end, CBP hopes that travelers will choose to enjoy the many benefits of biometric facial comparison, including the time it saves and how easy and smooth it makes the travel experience.

We are being led by people trying to convince us to see the world in terms of enemies. This “politics of the enemy” leads to vast self-destruction and destruction of others. It routinizes hate. It makes us worse people.

The only way to counter a politics of hate is with a politics of love.

That does not require pretending that enemies don’t exist.

It requires meeting everyone—friends, strangers, and enemies—with love.

That’s the only way to actually win.

We win not when the enemy is destroyed but when calling them an enemy no longer makes any sense.

In his response to Marc Andreessen, Yuval Levin of the @AEI and @tnajournal points out that what humanity needs to become the builders Andreessen calls for is a "fuller anthropology":

"an understanding of the nature of the human person and the character of human flourishing that could help [the builder] see that what we most need to build are families and communities, and that technological progress ultimately cannot be sustained without the kind of cultural confidence that makes itself evident first and foremost in a commitment to the next generation."

Levin repeats throughout his essay that many Americans today don't know how to be good ancestors: how to build for future generations who will enjoy the world after them. He calls this blindness characteristic of all "decadent" societies--and I think this is an astute observation.

There is an important extension of this thought: those who don't know how to be ancestors also often don't know how to be inheritors. I have witnessed this in many American universities: confusion over canon, a desire to reject or cancel thinkers who were instrumental in building the institutions we now inhabit, a desire to change things that have been working well just to put one's own "individual mark" on the institution. There is a kind of graceless lack of charity toward past generations which mirrors the difficulty of caring about future generations. The general result is that students suffer. They are not only robbed of their own inheritance, but they learn socially destructive attitudes, which they often go on to mimic later in life.

Kinship is one of the oldest concepts in anthropology--and one of the oldest social technologies on Earth. The anthropological discipline was born, during the 19th century, largely through the comparative studies of kinship around the world.

Kinship is the most fundamental way that human beings imagine their world and their place in it. Every human infant comes to know itself first in relation to its mother or father--the primary caregiver who is most closely in sync with the provision of its basic survival needs. As the child grows, it builds out its model of the world first in terms of kin, and that becomes a kind of "scaffolding" for everything else.

A crisis of kinship--defined in terms of Levin's essay as the incapacity to be good inheritors and good ancestors--is a crisis of humanity. Here it is important to remove some of the value judgments that often accompany crises. A structural crisis is no particular individual's "fault," although a cascade of irresponsibility is often both a cause and a result of human-generated crises. Rather, crisis points to the fact that something that was previously working (or seemed to work) no longer does. We must ask what about the previous arrangement was unsustainable and adapt our institutions for the future--in light of *who we want to be, as individuals and as a people.*

This means that learning to be good ancestors and good inheritors requires something of us beyond simply "returning" to past models of kinship that may have worked, provisionally, for other human societies. As L. P. Hartley said, "The past is a foreign country." The answer to any society's ills cannot simply be importing the cultural practices and values of another--including those of its own society in the past. Such importation simply cannot be done, because the past no longer exists.

Rather, we must be in integrity with who we are today--and that means admitting and accepting the particular challenges that afflict us as well as the particular opportunities we have that are ours to seize. Levin quotes Ecclesiastes:

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what was planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to tear down, and a time to build. (Ecclesiastes 3:1–3)"

Becoming a good inheritor and a good ancestor thus requires, first and foremost, recognizing what is *ours*--who and where *we* are in relation to our past and future kin.

The questions we must ask mirror this ancient text:

What is *our* season?

What is *our* purpose?

What is *our* time to live, and *our* time to die?

What shall *we* plant, and what shall *we* harvest?

What shall *we* kill, and what shall *we* heal?

What shall *we* tear down, and what shall *we* build?

Every individual person must answer these questions for his or her own life. And every community--that collective of shared will and action--gets to answer them for itself as well

Crazy week - Miami for Core Scientific Board meeting, now landing in Lisbon, then Geneva, Madeira, and Mexico City in next 6 days. Lots of people learning/working on #Bitcoin.

Coming in a couple months.