Glenn Kirschner – Tape made by Trump’s attorney, Evan Corcoran, now in hands of prosecutors. Is any of this normal?
MSNBC – Trump’s ‘panic’ on display when asked about docs case audio tape
Farron Balanced – Roger Stone Caught On Tape Explaining How He Manipulates Donald Trump
Robert Reich – What a Vietnam War Riot Says about Today’s Culture Wars
Watch This Sassy Cleft Palate Puppy Argue With His Mom
Beau – Let’s talk about the debt deal and what’s in it…. (Since filming, it has sailed through the Senate and been signed, but the points made are still valid)
Yesterday, I learned that the Smithsonian has three meerkay pups (aand also that the collective noun for meerkats is “mob.” Boy, does that ever fit!) They don’t have a live cam, but they do have a short (32 seconds) video. The parents are named Frankie and Sadie. The pups won’t be named for a while, because they have not been sexed (hey, this is America) and won’t be for a while because the keepers are staying out of the meerkats’ business. They do offer several photos for download in case anyone is looking for a new wallpaper.
Cartoon – 06 0606Cartoon.jpg
red
Short Takes –
The Conversation – US Army Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas’ journey from enslaver to Union officer to civil rights defender
Quote – Hundreds of thousands of African American Southerners supported the Union by escaping slavery and serving in the Union army. But there were thousands of white Southerners who also supported the Union. George H. Thomas, known to history as “the Rock of Chickamauga,” is the most prominent of them…. When the Civil War broke out, nearly all the Southern career officers left the U.S. Army to serve in the Confederacy. But, as his adjutant and first biographer wrote in “The Life of Major-General George H. Thomas,” Thomas viewed his oath as an army officer to defend the Constitution as more binding than his feelings of loyalty to his native state. Click through for full story. Transformations like this one are not common, but they do happen – perhaps it’s partly because they are rare that we are drawn to their stories.
New Mexico Political Report – Former GOP candidate faces federal charges for shootings of homes of prominent Dems
Quote – In 2022, [Solomon] Peña ran for the state House District 14 seat against incumbent Democrat Miguel Garcia. Garcia won the race with 74 percent of the vote to Peña’s 26 percent. “Refusing to accept his electoral defeat, Peña organized a shooting spree that targeted the homes of four elected officials and their families,” court records state. The shootings took place between Dec. 4 , and Jan. 3. Click through for details. From a true-blue hearted General from a red state to a blood-red hearted ex-candidate in a blue state. Democrats, progressives, believe that everyone is a hman being and should be treated as such. But in today’s political climate, sometimes even we forget that – especially when it comes to red and blue states.
Yesterday, My drive was pretty uneventful except for some pretty heavy rain on the way down. It didn’t last long, but it gave the wipers a challenge on their highest setting while it lasted, and affected visibility. We played four games of Scrabble, not competetively, but with the aim of using allt he letters legitimately – and succeeded on all but thelast one. We were left with 8 vowels between us and the poard so tight that there was really no place to put any of them. He returnes all greetings. Today, both short takes are from substack – I apologize for that, but both of them include Tulsa (the Greenwood massacre) in their contents, and that anniversary is already a few days old.
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
The Good in Us – Black Wall Street
Quote – Since the end of the Civil War, the thing most likely to incite white violence against emancipated Black citizens was their success. Giving Black Americans full rights, beyond the freedom that had so grudgingly been granted to them after the Union prevailed, proved to be a bridge too far for many whites—even Northern Republicans…. In retrospect, it seems self-evident that the driver behind the essential re-enslavement of Black people after Reconstruction was Black prosperity. Click through for full column. Even before I realized how horribly many massacres there have been in the US, I had begun to realize that, although the impulse for anyone in a marginalized group is to demonstrate their own worth, that is often unsuccessful at best and dangerous at worst. But she says it better than I can.
Letters from an American – June 1, 2023
Quote – In other economic news, the Biden administration today announced actions designed to address racial bias in the valuation of homes. This sounds sort of in the weeds for administration action, I know, but it is actually an important move for addressing the nation’s wealth inequality…. Homeownership is the most important factor in creating generational wealth—that is, wealth that passes from one generation to the next—both because homeownership essentially forces savings as people pay mortgages, and because homes tend to appreciate in value…. There is a reason that the administration has centered its housing policies on June 1. This is the anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, Click through for full article. I’m very glad the Biden administration is doing this. I hope they stay on it when it comes to actually making it happen. For more than 150 years we have trusted people to do the right thing and, frankly, that doesn’t work.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
Artificial intelligence has been around for a long time. One can argue that mechanizing arithmeical calculation is itself a form of AI, and, if so, that takes it back to Babbage in the early 1800s. Or you can go back millennia and reference the abacus. “Teaching” machines words and concepts has been longer in arriving, but that still goes back more than fifty years. Terry Winograd published the program SHRDLU in 1972, and I doubt whether he was the first. But SHRDLU was essentially designed to open up possibilities. It was far from Watson (which defeated Jeopardy champtions) and even farther from ChatGPT, which has been said to have a tendency to make up the references which it cites and the facts cited. We already have more than enough live Republicans doing that. We don’t need machines for it.
==============================================================
How can Congress regulate AI? Erect guardrails, ensure accountability and address monopolistic power
IBM executive Christina Montgomery, cognitive scientist Gary Marcus and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman prepared to testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee. AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
A new federal agency to regulate AI sounds helpful but could become unduly influenced by the tech industry. Instead, Congress can legislate accountability.
Instead of licensing companies to release advanced AI technologies, the government could license auditors and push for companies to set up institutional review boards.
The government hasn’t had great success in curbing technology monopolies, but disclosure requirements and data privacy laws could help check corporate power.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman urged lawmakers to consider regulating AI during his Senate testimony on May 16, 2023. That recommendation raises the question of what comes next for Congress. The solutions Altman proposed – creating an AI regulatory agency and requiring licensing for companies – are interesting. But what the other experts on the same panel suggested is at least as important: requiring transparency on training data and establishing clear frameworks for AI-related risks.
Another point left unsaid was that, given the economics of building large-scale AI models, the industry may be witnessing the emergence of a new type of tech monopoly.
As a researcher who studies social media and artificial intelligence, I believe that Altman’s suggestions have highlighted important issues but don’t provide answers in and of themselves. Regulation would be helpful, but in what form? Licensing also makes sense, but for whom? And any effort to regulate the AI industry will need to account for the companies’ economic power and political sway.
An agency to regulate AI?
Lawmakers and policymakers across the world have already begun to address some of the issues raised in Altman’s testimony. The European Union’s AI Act is based on a risk model that assigns AI applications to three categories of risk: unacceptable, high risk, and low or minimal risk. This categorization recognizes that tools for social scoring by governments and automated tools for hiring pose different risks than those from the use of AI in spam filters, for example.
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology likewise has an AI risk management framework that was created with extensive input from multiple stakeholders, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Federation of American Scientists, as well as other business and professional associations, technology companies and think tanks.
Federal agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Federal Trade Commission have already issued guidelines on some of the risks inherent in AI. The Consumer Product Safety Commission and other agencies have a role to play as well.
Cognitive scientist and AI developer Gary Marcus explains the need to regulate AI.
Licensing auditors, not companies
Though OpenAI’s Altman suggested that companies could be licensed to release artificial intelligence technologies to the public, he clarified that he was referring to artificial general intelligence, meaning potential future AI systems with humanlike intelligence that could pose a threat to humanity. That would be akin to companies being licensed to handle other potentially dangerous technologies, like nuclear power. But licensing could have a role to play well before such a futuristic scenario comes to pass.
Algorithmic auditing would require credentialing, standards of practice and extensive training. Requiring accountability is not just a matter of licensing individuals but also requires companywide standards and practices.
Experts on AI fairness contend that issues of bias and fairness in AI cannot be addressed by technical methods alone but require more comprehensive risk mitigation practices such as adopting institutional review boards for AI. Institutional review boards in the medical field help uphold individual rights, for example.
Strengthening existing statutes on consumer safety, privacy and protection while introducing norms of algorithmic accountability would help demystify complex AI systems. It’s also important to recognize that greater data accountability and transparency may impose new restrictions on organizations.
Scholars of data privacy and AI ethics have called for “technological due process” and frameworks to recognize harms of predictive processes. The widespread use of AI-enabled decision-making in such fields as employment, insurance and health care calls for licensing and audit requirements to ensure procedural fairness and privacy safeguards.
Given the lack of transparency in the training data used by these companies, AI ethics experts Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender and others have warned that large-scale adoption of such technologies without corresponding oversight risks amplifying machine bias at a societal scale.
It is also important to acknowledge that the training data for tools such as ChatGPT includes the intellectual labor of a host of people such as Wikipedia contributors, bloggers and authors of digitized books. The economic benefits from these tools, however, accrue only to the technology corporations.
Proving technology firms’ monopoly power can be difficult, as the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Microsoft demonstrated. I believe that the most feasible regulatory options for Congress to address potential algorithmic harms from AI may be to strengthen disclosure requirements for AI firms and users of AI alike, to urge comprehensive adoption of AI risk assessment frameworks, and to require processes that safeguard individual data rights and privacy.
==============================================================
AMT, at a time and in a nation where YouTube has decided to allow videos from election deniers (including election-denying videos), AI presents another clear and present danger. We may not have more than one chnce to get it right – and even if we do get a second chance, there will likely have been damage done. There are people in Congrss, both houses, whom I would trust to make informed decisions on this. There are just not enough of them. And maybe that’s the point.
Poverty in the USA sucks. It really does. But I shouldn’t have to tell you that.
Our current economic system is geared against the 99%. The Federal minimum wage has not risen in almost 15 years, even though the cost of everything has. People have been fighting tooth and nail for years to get it increased to at least a living wage. Some cities and states have raised it locally, but the national minimum is still an absurdly low $7.25 an hour. For tipped workers the minimum is $2.15 an hour, so they depend on tips to eat – literally.
And what happens when people scream at their elected officials, demanding an increase? The stooges of the 1% spew propaganda about robotized cafés, lost jobs and $20 hamburgers. Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish! Towns and cities that increased their local minimum wage have experience none of the above.
Poor people have a hard time keeping up with bills. Thus, they frequently get charged late fees that they really can’t afford. Some power companies allow customers to donate in order to help those having a hard time keeping up, but I doubt enough people do this. If a utility shuts you off for nonpayment, you have to pay another fat fee to have your water, electricity or gas turned back on.
Poverty hits children hard. Undernourished kids have lower IQs, receive scanty health care, learn fewer valuable skills, and are more likely to be swallowed up by the insatiable Prison-Industrial Complex. Some estimates place the cost of childhood poverty in the United States at over $1 trillion a year.That’s even more than the Pentagon’s bloated budget!
Unless you have a bank account, you must go to check cashers to get moolah – and they charge fees. If you’re late on your rent, your landlord can slap a penalty on you. If you get a traffic ticket, not paying on time leads to penalties. And if a collection agency gets its paws on your debt, fees can pile on fees for the most arbitrary reasons until a couple hundred dollars in debt balloons into thousands.
A few times I have read about workers who need heavy boots, but can afford only cheap ones. Quality boots last a long time, but they are quite spendy and thus out of the reach of the struggling. They buy cheap boots, which fall apart so they have to buy cheap boots again. In the long run, the expensive boots are cheaper because they last much longer; but the poor cannot afford them, so they end up spending more on footwear. I could go on and on and on and on with more examples of how the impoverished get screwed.
You may have heard the story about the man who suffered an ankle injury, and despite having health insurance he can’t get the surgery to fix it done. Why? His insurance has too high a deductible, which he can’t reach. With a bad ankle he can’t work and provide for his family. I like to think that his friends, coworkers and neighbors scraped together enough money to help him.
Do NOT get me started on education loans. Those companies have been given free rein to charge as much interest as they like, crushing graduates under boulders of debt that they are very unlikely to escape without a miracle.
All too often the poor get snark about pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. The old meaning of that phrase refers to something that is impossible to do. Poverty is very difficult to escape in the USA, and getting harder and harder as wages remain stagnant while prices increase. Millions are working multiple jobs but still barely keeping their noses above water.
The money to provide living wages, affordable housing, affordable healthcare, and affordable – If not free – education is out there. This country spends obscene amounts on “defense” and maintains hundreds of unnecessary military bases overseas, while giving away billions upon billions upon even more billions in tax breaks for the super-wealthy and highly profitable mega-corporations. But when budget trimming time comes, those are the last items to be considered. If Washington had failed to raise the debt ceiling, you know that necessary programs like Social Security and SNAP would have felt the budget axe first, even though they account for only a sliver of the Federal budget.
The recent building collapse in Davenport, IA illustrates our society’s contempt for the poor. The building collapsed during the evening of Sunday, March 28th, and rescue operations ended on Monday the 29th. As of this past Thursday, June 1, three residents are still unaccounted for. How long did search and rescue operations go on after the collapse of the original World Trade Center in New York City?
We as a society view poverty in entirely the wrong way. We keep the poor out of the mainstream, ignoring the fact that just about anybody could wind up impoverished. 75% of all US residents will experience at least one year of living in or near poverty between the ages of 20 and 75. Also, poverty is not restricted to people of color – two-thirds of those regarded as poor are white.
Republicans – and false Democrats – serve the fat cats and mega-corporations. They don’t want the poor to have a voice, hence voter suppression in the forms of closing polling places, reducing early voting hours, halting vote by mail, and gerrymandering. We The People need to remind politicians that Mr. Moneybags may have a poop-ton of cash to donate to candidates’ coffers, but he has only one vote. The peons struggling to make ends meet have many – and they will use those votes, if they can. Angry people are much more motivated to vote than complacent ones.
Other countries provide for their citizens by paying living wages, providing affordable education and health care, getting the homeless into simple housing, mandating family leave, et cetera. Why can’t the United States?
Yesterday, the radio opera was Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (The Magic Flute). If you saw “Amadeus,” you probably have an idea what a departure this was from the symphonic and opera seria music on which Mozart had built his career. It was actually addressed to a different social class from the ruling class for whom most of his works had been written. It’s also quite progressive (at least if you can ignore the fact that it’s patriarchal) – it can be summarized: virtue and justice require concentrated effort to obtain, but witht them, the world can be paradise. It premiered just two years after the storming of the Bastille, so revolution was in the air. Of course it is also highly allegorical and includes multiple references to Freemasonry, but one doesn’t need to know that to appreciate it. I suppose everyone has heard “The Queen of the Night’s aria” (Actual title – “Der Holle Rache” and affectionately known to musicians as “The Holy Racket”). But there are many other charming melodies. It’s not necessary to know that the setting is suporsed to be ancient Egypt, nor that the name “Sarastro” comes from “Zoroaster” to appreciate it all. Well, I’m off to see Virgil. I’ll check in when I get back.
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
HuffPost – 5 Takeaways From The Debt Ceiling Drama
They are: 1. Joe Biden set the terms of debate.
2. McCarthy surprised everyone by taming the Freedom Caucus.
3. Democratic ‘grown-ups’ held their nose and saved the bill.
4. Republicans will take the debt ceiling hostage again.
5. The next big fight over spending is just around the corner. Click through for more on each. WRT #5, I would say “Be careful what you wish for.” Prior to there being a “debt ceilng, the President had to come to Congress every time he wanted to borrow any money. The debt ceiling was established to give him (it was always him then and so fr still is) some freedom to make borrowong decisions. If we abolish it, we need to make sure we don’t revert to that.
The Daily Beast – GOP School Board Members Bring Book Ban Debate to Newtown, Connecticut
Quote – But Republicans on the Newtown Board of Education sought to have Flamer by Mike Curato and Blankets by Craig Thompson removed from the local high school library as if Connecticut was some benighted red state. After the 20 youngsters and six staff members were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary school, there was a nationwide call for an assault rifle ban. Fools of the far right continued to insist that civilians should have easy access to such weapons of war even as another mass school shooting is followed by another and another and another. In recent years, those same fervent opponents of banning assault weapons have begun to clamor for banning books that professional educators have deemed appropriate for students. Click through for story. This is not your normal book ban (not that any book ban is or should be normal – but the GQP is trying hard to make them so.)
red
