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Gov on the Rocks

Heated Diplomacy, Telegram CEO Arrested

Dave Pell

Aug 26

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As I've mentioned on occasion, I do not disrobe in public. I rarely disrobe in private. I put on socks and shoes when I first wake up and I don’t take them off until I get back into bed at night. I often sleep in my jeans. In middle school, while playing basketball, a kid grabbed the area just above my waistline and said, “Look, Pell’s got handles.” That was the last time I played shirts and skins in any sport. If I were to stand on a crowded street corner and pull open my trenchcoat, the most likely thing you'd see is another trenchcoat. (In the Bay Area, we're taught to dress in layers.) So sharing a wood paneled hot box with a fellow world diplomat is an activity for which I have no naked ambition. But apparently, such interactions are all the rage among DC diplomats who often pull strings (including the ones on their robes) to get invited to let it all hang in the Finnish Embassy Sauna. "Diplomacy takes shape in different ways: formal meetings in the Oval Office and state dinners in the White House’s grand East Room; casual receptions at embassies; and one-on-one meetings over martinis in the lobbies of five-star hotels. And then there is the way the Finnish government prefers to conduct business. They like for their networking and meetings to happen in the sauna and, for the most part, in the nude." (I think I'll settle for the natural temperature rise caused by climate change.) NYT (Gift Article): ‘Whatever Happens in the Sauna Stays in the Sauna’: Diplomacy, Conducted in the Nude. "'When you are half-naked or even sometimes completely naked, it allows for deeper discussion,' said Mikko Hautala, the ambassador of Finland to the United States. 'You talk in a way that doesn’t happen when you are sitting around a table with a tie on or at some formal thing.'" Just thinking about this has me sweating; and a sauna is a dry heat.

2

The Future Will Not Be Telegrammed

The worldwide debate over how much responsibility those who run social media companies have when it comes to what is shared on their platforms hit a new point of inflection as Telegram’s Pavel Durov has been arrested in France. WaPo (Gift Article): Telegram’s Pavel Durov held in France for alleged distribution of child sex abuse material. "Durov was being temporarily detained on suspicion of involvement with distributing child sex abuse material and drugs, money laundering and working with organized crime."

+ "Durov, the elusive founder of Telegram who was detained in France over the weekend, cuts the figure of a mysterious, globe-trotting tech bro with Mark Zuckerberg’s prodigiousness, Jack Dorsey’s bizarre lifestyle habits and Elon Musk’s libertarian streak – plus a similar obsession with pronatalism and fathering children. Durov said in July that he had fathered more than 100 children thanks to sperm donations he had made over the past 15 years." Meet Pavel Durov.

3

Shrinking Network

"'The way to look at mental health care from an insurance perspective is: I don’t want to attract those people. I am never going to make money on them,' said Ron Howrigon, a consultant who used to manage contracts with providers for major insurers. 'One way to get rid of those people or not get them is to not have a great network.'" ProPublica with one of the reasons it's so hard to find a therapist. Why I Left the Network.

4

Junior High

"Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy—as I’ve referred to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. since we met freshman year at Harvard—have always had many features in common as well. Both are entitled playboy sons of northeastern wealth; both (in Michelle Obama’s words) were 'afforded the grace of failing forward' as misbehaving, underachieving adolescents admitted to Ivy League colleges thanks to 'the affirmative action of generational wealth'; both were reckless lifelong adolescents, both attention-craving philanderers and liars, both jerks ... On the subject of reckless-adolescent entitlement, I’ve got one Bobby Kennedy anecdote to tell." Kurt Andersen has been saving this story for a while. The Atlantic (Gift Article): RFK Jr. Was My Drug Dealer.

5

Extra, Extra

Talking Thru It: "Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah pulled back after an exchange of heavy fire over the weekend that briefly raised fears of an all-out war." Interestingly, the planned ceasefire talks went on as scheduled in the hours after the exchange. In WaPo, David Ignatius says the momentum for a cease-fire is building. "What was striking about this past weekend was that what the region had feared most finally happened — and yet the momentum toward peace continues." (From everything I've read, it seems like the Americans are more bullish about progress than the other negotiating teams.)

+ Gov For Sale: Money can't buy you love. But it can buy you gov. "The 50 biggest donors this cycle have collectively pumped $1.5 billion into political committees and other groups competing in the election." WaPo: Meet the megadonors pumping millions into the 2024 election. "The vast majority of money from top donors has gone to super PACs, which can accept unlimited sums from individuals and often work closely with campaigns despite rules against coordinating their advertising."

+ Debate and Switch: "We're thinking about it. We're thinking about it. They also want to change the rules. You know, the deal was we keep the same rules. Now, all of a sudden they want to make a change in the rules because she can't answer questions. ... Why doesn't she do something like I'm doing right now? She can't talk. We can't have another dummy as a president." It's starting to look like Trump wants to back out of the presidential debate. (The only thing that would be more humiliating to Trump's campaign than dropping out of the debate would be actually participating in it.)

+ Floating an Idea: "The captain of a luxury yacht which sank in a storm off the coast of Sicily last week, killing the British tech magnate Mike Lynch and six others, has been placed under investigation for charges of manslaughter and shipwreck, Italian media have reported." And in a truly bizarre coincidence, Stephen Chamberlain, Mike Lynch’s co-defendant in US fraud trial that just ended, was fatally struck by car while jogging.

+ Kept in the Loop: "A.I.-generated information can make it harder for us to know what’s real. And it also poses a problem for A.I. companies. As they trawl the web for new data to train their next models on — an increasingly challenging task — they’re likely to ingest some of their own A.I.-generated content, creating an unintentional feedback loop in which what was once the output from one A.I. becomes the input for another." NYT(Gift Article): When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself.

+ Straight and Arrow: "She raises the bow with her right leg, pulls back the string using her right shoulder and releases the arrow using the strength of her jaw." The Indian archer without arms shooting for a gold.

+ Course Corrections: "A state prison in northeast Ohio says that for the first time in the state’s history, a five-course meal has been served to members of the public with food prepared by incarcerated men from fruits and vegetables grown in the prison garden." Ohio prison holds first-ever five-course meal open to public on facility grounds.