Mel Conway

I once had an Evangelical business partner who considered the fact that I was Jewish a "lucky charm".

Letter from DOD regarding changes to officer higher education.

List of excluded colleges.

List of new partners.

This will be lost with what else is going on, but yesterday the Defense Department announced it was removing officers from degree programs at the country’s best universities and transferring them to places like Hillsdale College and Liberty University.

x.com/alex_prompte...

Exclusive | Altman Says OpenAI Is Working on Pentagon Deal Amid Anthropic Standoff Altman waded into the standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon over the use of AI on the battlefield, telling his staff that the company was working on a deal that might help solve the impasse.

It's creepy that they're now routinely calling it the department of war.
www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

Anthropic boss rejects Pentagon demand to drop AI safeguards Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth previously threatened to remove the firm from the department's supply chain.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

The Lewis Powell Memo: A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy - Greenpeace - Greenpeace Read the full text of the Lewis Powell Memo.

…to the business/capital reaction as expressed in the Powell memo in 1971, to its consequences, such as the creation of the Heritage Foundation, leading right up to Project 2025.
www.greenpeace.org/usa/democrac...
6/6

My general thesis has been that there is a causal through-line from the giant exhale (if you were there you can’t forget it) and the consequent baby boom at the end of WW2, to the consumerism and free-love period and political instability of the 1950s-1960s,
…
5/6

The focus of that thread was on income-inequality-related stress as a driver of political polarization. Notice in particular the graphic on page 15.
(Source: www.dallasfed.org/~/media/docu... )
4/6

I have my own views about this subject, and have been writing about it for over five years. While I wouldn’t have written this the same way today, here for the record is the source of a 56-tweet thread I posted in November 2020.
melconway.com/CBH/Historic...
3/6

A complete transcript of the conversation is at
melconway.com/Home/pdf/AIc... .
I found this impressive and illuminating in multiple ways. Notice, for example, how ChatGPT followed the changes in my line of questioning in Q2 (page 5) and Q4 (page 21).
2/6

Until the early 1970s, productivity and real earnings tracked each other as they both increased. After, earnings stagnated as productivity continued to increase.

Today I had a conversation with ChatGPT about the economic phenomenon shown in this graph.
My initial question of four was: “What was the reason that, in the early 1970s, average real earnings in the US stopped tracking the increase in productivity and leveled off?”
1/6

Until the early 1970s, productivity and real earnings tracked each other as they both increased. After, earnings stagnated as productivity continued to increase.

Will somebody please help me understand why this four-part thread produced ZERO responses?

🗽Robert Reich

How California Can Neuter “Citizens United” and Improve Democracy for Us All: The Sunshine State has an opportunity to save American democracy from big corporate money! robertreich.substack.com/p/how-califo...

There is a problem here, at least with respect to the students I taught twenty years ago: the assumption that each student has a concept of his/her own future, can see himself/herself in that future, and sees a connection between what happens in school and that future.
melconway.com/Urban_Teachi...

If we follow such reasonong we are quickly led to the idea of hidden "enforcement networks".

Where are all the investigative journalists building for us a public database of the far right's enforcement networks? Has anyone studied, in detail, the January 20, 2025 pardons in this connection?
4/4

OK, then, what's the pathway from Trump to that downstream proxy?

That very question would be the same response if the initial inquiry were not about individual threats, but about the lockstep behavior of every Republican Congressperson.
3/4

These responses typically fall into the "Trumpy people really really bad" category.

What I never see is the equivalent of "OK, what's going on here?"

That would lead to: If somebody were directly to hurt this person, it wouldn't be DJT the man; it would be some downstream *proxy* of him.
2/4

(This is a generic comment on the kinds of replies that appear to this underlying post. It is not a reply to that post's author, whose work I respect.)
* * *
Coming from an engineering/science background, I am appalled daily by the responses to posts about Trump's bad behavior.
1/4

Massachusetts Town Passes Resolution Urging State to Hold 'Lawless' ICE Agents Accountable | Common Dreams "I hope Amherst’s resolution kicks off a wave of similar resolutions in cities and towns across the state," said the measure's lead sponsor.

BREAKING: The Amherst Town Council in Amherst, MA is the first elected body to call on state + local prosecutors to enforce state criminal laws against federal agents when they commit crimes. Let this be a spark that leads to similar votes across the country. 1/
www.commondreams.org/news/amherst...

If there were a proxy stock for in-use COBOL applications, would it be IBM?

Mel Conway on X: "This is important philosophically. It needs to be seen as a canonical emergence pattern, and is an underlying constraint in political design. See the middle paragraph of page 2 of https://t.co/RgUwHUtJph ." / X This is important philosophically. It needs to be seen as a canonical emergence pattern, and is an underlying constraint in political design. See the middle paragraph of page 2 of https://t.co/RgUwHUtJph .

x.com/conways_law/...

Years ago, with a South African friend, we had a conversation about skin color. We agreed that she was brown and I was pink. All the rest is labeling.

Part of what makes weather what it is is the fact that air temperature varies with altitude.

I'm a retired Army logistics planner that wrote the logistics plan for Western Iraq that became Army policy. Here's what I think is happening by looking at the logistics of ICE: A nation wide network of enslavement camps, offices and warehouse enslavement factories are being put together under ICE. Contractors are the same ones that operate southern prison factories. Warehouses are also perfect for setting up water cremations. 90% less energy, no smoke stacks and easily set up in a warehouse. Sodium hydroxide is cheap and readily available. Just need water and sewer connections. We need to track sodium hydroxide purchases, test downstream water, and track water cremation equipment purchases.

Just like the '30s.

NJ ICE Video Portal Sparks Fury and Praise Across the Garden State. Here is how it works. New Jersey's new portal encourages residents to upload video of ICE interactions. Here is how the site works, and what it does and does not do.

We need this in Maryland.
nj1015.com/nj-ice-porta...

The government eliminated one holiday by combining Lincoln's birthday and Washington's birthday.

Mel Conway on X: "Here is an action item whose successful execution could break the MAGA-parasite deadlock: 👉Publicly document the dark *Reward-Threat-Punishment* network that is enforcing the right-wing agenda. For example, see this excerpt from CNN: https://t.co/KinVpWnrAm 1/2 https://t.co/WT19QP0K4r" / X Here is an action item whose successful execution could break the MAGA-parasite deadlock: 👉Publicly document the dark *Reward-Threat-Punishment* network that is enforcing the right-wing agenda. For example, see this excerpt from CNN: https://t.co/KinVpWnrAm 1/2 https://t.co/WT19QP0K4r

We the people could be using the same tools as part of a counterstrategy.
x.com/conways_law/...

Your question presumes good will on the part of the government; some of your replies show understanding that good will is absent.
What is also fatally absent, on our part, is a counter-strategy. Start with page 8 of
melconway.com/Home/pdf/Wha...