Month: June 2024

Okay, panic

This isn’t politics. Or is it?

A single phrase made my head snap around during the intro to a morning economic report on the radio Tuesday. A show sponsor (I missed the name) during the intro touted its “hallucination-free AI” product.

Hallucination-free is a selling point now? You recall the unsettling encounter last year with Microsoft’s Bing chatbot written up in the New York Times:

As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead. (We’ve posted the full transcript of the conversation here.)

Kevin Roose fretted:

These A.I. models hallucinate, and make up emotions where none really exist. But so do humans. And for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion — a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same.

Take a stress pill, Dave

Could the onset of dystopia be like the boiling frogs tale happening under our noses? A significant segment of the U.S. population is prepared to believe a demented former president when he says that, due to alleged rampant flight delays in our “failing nation,”stranded travelers, like the homeless, are erecting tent camps on the concourses.

One imagines a near-future in which friendly jingles from the marketing division of Sirius Cybernetics announce “Your Digital Pal Who’s Fun to Be With.”

Clinically depressed Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide, with his Genuine People Personality furnished by Sirius Cybernetics, turned out just a bit too genuine. Yes, hallucinatory AIs are real enough that programmers must advertise that they’ve got the bugs worked out.

Introducing the First Hallucination-Free LLM

Exclusive: Alembic debuts hallucination-free AI for enterprise data analysis and decision support

BMW showed off hallucination-free AI at CES 2024

These boasts aren’t very reassuring.

How do we know we won’t be the first up against the wall when the cyber-revolution comes? Or Project 2025? And Congress hasn’t a clue what to do about them. Members were that close to being up against the wall on Jan. 6 and have done little to prevent a recurrence.

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A bunch of Nobel prize winning economists have some thoughts on Trump’s “economic proposals”

Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists signed a joint letter Tuesday warning of what they see as economic risks if former President Donald Trump were to serve a second term, including reheated inflation.

“While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we all agree that Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s,” the economists wrote. Axios was first to report the letter.

“There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets,” wrote the group of politically progressive academics.

Trump has so far proposed making his first-term tax cuts permanent, imposing universal tariffs on all imports, with a China-specific tariff rate between 60% and 100%, and pressuring the independent Federal Reserve Board to cut interest rates.

Economists and Wall Street analysts alike have predicted that any or all of those proposals could reinflate prices, which remain vulnerable despite cooling slightly in recent months.

[…]

“Nonpartisan researchers, including at Evercore, Allianz, Oxford Economics, and the Peterson Institute, predict that if Donald Trump successfully enacts his agenda, it will increase inflation,” the economists wrote.

They weighed in because they were concerned about polls which showed that mosty Americans think Trump would be better than Biden on the economy (mostly because he’s a liar…)

The Trump campaign responded with a serious riposte defending his policies:

“The American people don’t need worthless out of touch Nobel peace prize winners to tell them which president put more money in their pockets,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to CNBC.

She called them “worthless Nobel Peace Prize winners.” She’s almost as smart as her Dear Leader.

I guess most people “do their own research” these days so I’m sure they’ve come to their own conclusions about the possible effects of Trump’s proposals. The media might take note, however and consider this when they are writing their hundreds of pieces about how Americans are economically suffering more than any time in human history. I’m not sure they will though.

Another MAGA kook planning to hijack the US House and there’s nothng Mike Johnson can do about it. (That’s assuming he wants to.) The aptly named Ann Paulina Luna from Florida is going to force a vote to have the House sergeant at arms to take Merrick Garland into custody. Seriously:

“It is imperative that Congress uses its inherent contempt powers and instructs the Sergeant at Arms to bring Attorney General Garland to the House for questioning and compel him to produce the requested evidence,” Luna wrote to her colleagues in a letter on Monday.

“This power is not a mere formality, but a vital tool for us to carry out our legislative responsibilities. It is not enough to issue a subpoena; we must also have the power to enforce it,” she added in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO.

Inherent contempt hasn’t been used in 90 years. But whatever.

Get a load of this:

Luna’s resolution requires that Garland be brought “before the bar of the House of Representatives” to answer questions and that he be kept “in custody to await the further order of the House of Representatives.” One GOP lawmaker questioned, under the scenario, where the House would hold Garland and if there was actually a much-rumored Capitol jail.

There isn’t, to be clear. But the Capitol Police have holding facilities at their headquarters — and Luna noted in her letter they could also hold him in the Capitol building itself.

That’s right. She wants to have the Attorney general arrested and held in the Capitol to “await the further order of the House of Representatives.” Will they bring out their gallows?

It would bring the House to a complete halt (which may not be a bad thing actually.)

Experts on House process and procedure warn that an inherent contempt vote could trigger months and months of deliberations, from hashing out separation of powers authorities governing the initial arrest to a makeshift trial on the House floor. Adding in another curveball, Garland has a security detail due to his attorney general title, and it’s unclear how bringing a sitting Cabinet official into custody would play out, particularly given Biden’s assertion of executive privilege.

“Inherent contempt has been described as ‘unseemly,’ cumbersome, time-consuming, and relatively ineffective, especially for a modern Congress with a heavy legislative workload that would be interrupted by a trial at the bar,” according to a report on the process and history by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

I’m surprised Marge doesn’t want a piece of this.

Luna is indeed a lunatic. But she isn’t alone. The MAGA bubble has dozens of them convinced that they have a Trump-given right to punish anyone who doesn’t do exactly what they want them to. And then they wail like tired toddlers when anyone tries to hold them to account for anything.

Divorce of course

They’ve got so many plans:

Some prominent conservative lawmakers and commentators are advocating for ending no-fault divorce, laws that exist in all 50 US states and allow a person to end a marriage without having to prove a spouse did something wrong, like commit adultery or domestic violence.

The socially conservative, and often religious, rightwing opponents of such divorce laws are arguing that the practice deprives people – mostly men – of due process and hurt families, and by extension, society. Republican lawmakers in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Texas have discussed eliminating or increasing restrictions on no-fault marriage laws.

Defenders of the laws, which states started passing a half-century ago, see legislation and arguments to repeal them as the latest effort to restrict women’s rights – following the overturning of Roe v Wade and passage of abortion bans around the country – and say that without such protections, the country would return to an earlier era when women were often trapped in abusive marriages.

“No-fault divorce is critical to the ability, particularly the ability of women, to be able to exercise autonomy in their own relationships, in their own lives,” said Denise Lieberman, an adjunct professor at the Washington University School of Law in St Louis, who has a specialty in policies concerning gender, sexuality and sexual violence.

Before 1969, when then California Republican governor Ronald Reagan, who had been divorced, approved the country’s first no-fault divorce law, women, who are more likely to experience violence from an intimate partner, were often forced to stay in marriages. If they could not prove that their husband had been abusive or persuade him to grant a divorce, they would not be able to take any assets from the marriage or remarry, according to a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Of course they want to make sure that women are held prisoner in abusive marriages. That’s kind of at the heart of patriarchy.

When they liberalized the divorce laws there were some consequences that these throwbacks just can’t stand:

Between 1976 and 1985, states that passed the laws saw their domestic violence rates against men and women fall by about 30%; the number of women murdered by an intimate partner declined by 10%; and female suicide rates declined by 8 to 16%.

It’s not just the far right evangelical nuts either:

Conservative commentators such as Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder and lawmakers such as the Republican senator JD Vance of Ohio have argued that the laws are unfair to men and hurt society because they lead to more divorces.

The divorce rate in the United States increased significantly from 1960, when it was 9.2 per 1,000 married women, to 22.6 in 1980. But by 2022, the rate had fallen to 14.5.

On the increase in divorces, Vance said in 2021: “One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace” is the idea that “these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term”.

I think Vance is going to be a force in politics for a long time to come and may be the heir apparent after this election. He is a dangerous piece of work. But he isn’t alone.

This is the world that real Christian nationalism will be seeking once the libertine imbecile is off the stage. I’m not sure America really wants this but if the Project 2025, Opus Dei weirdos have their way, they aren’t going to have a choice.

Dr Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute wrote this in the NY Times this week:

Recent headlines suggest that our nation’s business leaders are embracing the presidential candidate Donald Trump. His campaign would have you believe that our nation’s top chief executives are returning to support Mr. Trump for president, touting declarations of support from some prominent financiers like Steve Schwarzman and David Sacks.

That is far from the truth. They didn’t flock to him before, and they certainly aren’t flocking to him now. Mr. Trump continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party.

I know this because I work with roughly 1,000 chief executives a year, running a school for them, which I started 35 years ago, and I speak with business leaders almost every day. Our surveys show that 60 to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans.

The reality is that the top corporate leaders working today, like many Americans, aren’t entirely comfortable with either Mr. Trump or President Biden. But they largely like — or at least can tolerate — one of them. They truly fear the other.

The money talks, as you can see by the chart above. And that’s extremely weird considering that the Republican Party has been the party of Big Business for the last century. Not anymore.

According to Sonnenfeld, business didn’t like his “populist” image in 2016 but gave him a chance. (They liked the tax cuts, of course.) But he didn’t endear himself to them otherwise:

Several chief executives resented Mr. Trump’s personal attacks on businesses through divide-and-conquer tactics, meddling and pitting competitors against each other publicly. Scores of them rushed to distance themselves from Mr. Trump’s more provocative stances, resigning en masse from his business advisory councils in 2017 after he equated antiracism activists with white supremacists. Dozens of them openly called for Mr. Trump’s impeachment in 2021 after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

They aren’t all that fond of Biden either. They don’t like antitrust enforcement and his attacks on corporate greed. On the other hand, they like the infrastructure investment and CHIPs Act and they are giddy, as one might expect, over the roaring stock market and the US’s new status as the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer.

They’re very nervous about the fact that Trump will have MAGA extremists running things in the next administration and really hate some of his new policy proposals:

Mr. Trump and his team are doubling down on some of his most anti-business instincts, including proposing draconian 10 percent tariffs on all imports; unorthodox monetary and fiscal policies, including stripping the Federal Reserve Board of its independence; possibly putting in place yield curve control to force interest rates lower; and devaluing the dollar — all of which would drive inflation much higher. These Trump positions have more in common with Karl Marx than Adam Smith.

I don’t actually think Karl Marx has anything to do with it, but setting that aside, these execs seem to be sane enough to recognize that Trump is totally inept:

As such, it was hardly surprising that just as when Mr. Trump faced a chilly reaction from hundreds of top executives when he spoke at my Yale Chief Executive summit in 2005, he appeared to face a similarly frigid reception when he spoke to the Business Roundtable this month, with no noticeable applause at any point during his “remarkably meandering” remarks, according to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, and with Mr. Trump assuming a subdued, if not hostile, posture. Chief executives are not protectionist, isolationist or xenophobic, and they believe in investing where there is the rule of law, not the law of rulers.

These are not my people, obviously, and I don’t look up to them as paragons. But they are practical enough to see that Trump is bad for business, just as he’s bad for the country as a whole. I appreciate any signs of GOP sanity wherever I can find it these days. It’s rare.

Since the wingnuts actually have the nerve to promote the psychopath Trump as an anti-war hero , John Fugelsang helpfully supplies a corrective:

Since the right wing MAGA guys are pulling the “There Were No Wars Under Trump” lie, let’s quickly cover this propaganda you’ll be hearing that Trump was the “Peace President.”

Because the same angry white guys who berated us for opposing the Iraq War, now berate us for not appreciating Donald Trump’s incredible commitment to world peace. And being blindly obedient, true MAGA males view critical thinking skills as “woke.”

1. Once in office, Trump massively increased the U.S. defense budget. He quickly escalated our existing wars in multiple theaters, which led to skyrocketing casualties.

2. Trump sent MORE troops to Afghanistan, ordered missile strikes on Syria in 2017 and 2018 & abandoned our Kurdish allies to slaughter.

3. In Afghanistan, the star of “Celebrity Apprentice” substantially increased the airstrikes, leading to a 330 % increase in civilian deaths. He bragged about dropping of the “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB), the largest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal, on Afghanistan in 2017.

4. Trump also tore up a peace deal with Iran, which our own generals uniformly maintained Iran was honoring (I know, Real Christians love tearing up peace deals when it’s w/countries they’re allowed to hate).

5. Trump pardoned convicted war criminals, assassinated Iran’s top general, and was the 1st POTUS to order an attack on the Syrian govt.

6. Trump sent troops to take Syria’s oil — openly admitting he wanted to give the reserves to ExxonMobil. “We’re keeping the oil. I’ve always said that. We want to keep the oil. Forty-five million dollars a month? Keep the oil.” Oh, FOX didn’t tell you any of this? Did wee Ben Shapiro’s serious journalists at Daily Wire somehow forget to convey this info? Breitbart failed to bring this information to you as well? I’m shocked. Well, Hunter Biden affects your life more.

7. In Iraq and Syria alone, Trump’s drone strikes killed an estimated 13,400 civilians.

8. Trump carried out more airstrikes against Somalia than Obama did; Trump sold unguided “dumb” bombs to the Saudis to use against Yemen.

9. Trump negotiated to give Afghanistan to the Taliban, & freed 5,000 Taliban terrorists, which turned out great!

10. He even established “Space Force” so we can have war in brand-new places.

11. Donald Trump is so anti-war he put on a cheerleader skirt & pom poms for Putin’s murderous imperialist invasion of Ukraine, which Trump called “genius” & “savvy” you amoral knob. Trump called the invading army, killing children & raping women, “peacemakers.”

12. Trump wanting to remove our troops from Germany & S. Korea wasn’t “anti-war” – it was Donny’s most passionate hobby, “doing what Putin wants”

13. He withdrew from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement & the Open Skies Treaty.

14. Oh and he’s already asked advisers for “battle plans” to invade Mexico so US troops can fight cartels. Having surrendered their critical thinking to a reality TV landlord with an addiction to too-much makeup, MAGA dudes know none of this. Donald Trump stole from US vets with a fraud online University. Stealing from vets – along with sexual assault – was not a dealbreaker for these good Christian folk.

The notion that Trump is a peacenik is a one of the most preposterous ideas they ever came up with.

They’ll turn back the clock more, then break it

A reminder from April 2003 (The Nation):

The [conservative] movement’s grand ambition—one can no longer say grandiose—is to roll back the twentieth century, quite literally. That is, defenestrate the federal government and reduce its scale and powers to a level well below what it was before the New Deal’s centralization. With that accomplished, movement conservatives envision a restored society in which the prevailing values and power relationships resemble the America that existed around 1900, when William McKinley was President.

[…]

Looking back over this list, one sees many of the old peevish conservative resentments—Social Security, the income tax, regulation of business, labor unions, big government centralized in Washington—that represent the great battles that conservatives lost during early decades of the twentieth century. That is why the McKinley era represents a lost Eden the right has set out to restore.

Oh, they won’t stop there.

Holy sh*t have you seen this video???

Spread this like wildfire. #VoteDemToRestoreRoe pic.twitter.com/KLvRnwruQU

— Nick Knudsen 🇺🇸 (@NickKnudsenUS) June 24, 2024

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If only

Everybody’s got advice for Joe Biden on how to slay Donald Trump at this week’s debate. Obviously, don’t play Trump’s game and be sure to throw him off his.

Monica Alba and Carol E. Lee of NBC News suggest Biden should be prepared for whichever version of Trump takes the stage:

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is preparing to face a few different Donald Trumps on Thursday’s debate stage: the more bombastic and “unhinged” one known for his grievance-filled, stem-winding rallies, and a fairly disciplined version who largely refrains from tirades and sticks to policy.

If it’s more sedate than incensed, the goal for Biden will be to elicit what his aides see as “the true Trump,” according to three people familiar with Biden’s debate prep. 

[…]

“If I were advising Biden, I’d try to make fun of Trump,” former Republican vice president Dan Quayle told NBC News in an interview. “Try to ridicule him. That will get him mad.”

Obviously. The Great Manipulator melts into a puddle when flattered by an autocrat, but he’s also so thin-skinned you could slice him open with a butter knife. Insulted well, and with a smile, he’d have another sort of meltdown.

Oh, for the one Nicolle Wallace recommends. Punch him in the face with his own boasts.

Nicolle Wallace's debate advice for @POTUS Joe Biden is spot-on. 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/xzmMPhgd9C

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) June 24, 2024

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Holy sh*t have you seen this video???

Spread this like wildfire. #VoteDemToRestoreRoe pic.twitter.com/KLvRnwruQU

— Nick Knudsen 🇺🇸 (@NickKnudsenUS) June 24, 2024

Today is the 2-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision. Today one third of American women have lost their rights.

It looks like CNN is planning to let Trump lie at will and they’ll only correct him after the debate is over. Great.

The role of a moderator is often in dispute, and David Chalian, CNN’s political director, said that Thursday’s live debate “is not the ideal arena for live fact-checking.” Instead, Ms. Bash and Mr. Tapper would focus on “facilitating the debate between these candidates, not being a participant in that debate,” he said, noting that CNN analysts would assess the veracity of the candidates’ comments immediately after the telecast.

Most people will tune out after the debate because the panel conversation is always tedious for anyone but the most addicted political junkies. The result will be that Biden has to correct the record and will spend most of his time doing that (and probably getting his mic cut because of the sheer volume of lies) and won’t be able to get his own message out effectively — or the lies will stand uncorrected.

It appears that CNN is simply planning to enable a freak show instead of doing its job as journalists. I hope the Biden campaign is fully prepared for that.

CNN knows Trump is playing games:

Trump is scared of President Biden. So cringe. Trump is humiliating himself. Sort of like pathetically begging for votes.

First clip, Trump says he will lose debate on purpose

Next, says President Biden will be a worthy debater

Then, wonders if he should obstruct debate pic.twitter.com/MQCaB5lMdM

— RiotWomenn (@riotwomennn) June 24, 2024