…it’s not the sort of good news that actually involves the underlying news being good…more your news we can call good because at least the bad shit didn’t get smoothed right over so it could happen some more

Marvel Studios and the Walt Disney corporation have ended their relationships with actor Jonathan Majors shortly after he was convicted of assaulting and harassing Grace Jabbari, his then girlfriend, the Associated Press reports.

…but…given the money involved

The former couple met in 2021 on the set of Marvel’s Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which was released a month before Major’s arrest. Jabbari was working as a movement coach and Majors was playing the time-travelling villain He Who Remains, AKA Kang the Conqueror.

The film was meant to be the jump-off point for a new cinematic era for the studio and lead to more projects between the actor and Marvel, including both seasons of the Loki series and Avengers: The Kang Dynasty set to come out in May 2026, according to Deadline. The feature is still in the script phase and had not begun filming, said a report from the Hollywood Reporter. No director is currently attached.

It remains unclear whether the character of Kang will be recast (a la Terrance Howard and Don Cheadle in the Captain America series) and remain in future films or if the studio will scrap future projects based around the character altogether and steer the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a new direction.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/dec/18/marvel-disney-drop-jonathan-majors-guilty-assault-harassment-verdict

…&…I’m enough of a geek to be able to tell you at length (& with no shortage of spoilers) why that’s not nothing…& also why if you ask me they can get out of the whole kang arc without a narrative stumble based on the end of that second season of loki…& pick up some slack they dropped where the criminally underused character of sylvie is concerned in the bargain…but…it’s not what a lot of people would call important…though…granted…not exactly a reliable gauge, that

Abbott Signs Law Allowing Texas to Arrest Migrants, Setting Up Federal Showdown [NYT]

…uh huh…that…uh…tracks

US to suspend rail operations on the southern border due to migrant surge [CNN]

…uh huh…that’s the problem with US rail

…sorry…where was I?

You can’t get here from there. That’s the increasing problem facing around 60 million people who depend on intercity buses.

Intercity bus lines like Greyhound, Trailways and Megabus, an overlooked but essential part of America’s transportation system, carry twice the number of people who take Amtrak every year. But the whole network faces a growing crisis: Greyhound and other private companies’ bus terminals are rapidly closing around the country.

Houston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Tampa, Louisville, Charlottesville, Portland, Oregon, and other downtown bus depots have shuttered in recent years. Bus terminals in major hubs like Chicago and Dallas are also set to close. Greyhound and other companies have relocated their stops far away from city centers, which are often inaccessible by public transit, switched to curbside service or eliminated routes altogether.

These stations built decades ago are shuttering because of high operating costs, government underfunding and, surprisingly, the entrance of an investment firm buying up Greyhound’s real estate for lucrative resale.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/17/business/greyhound-buses-transportation-cities/index.html

…don’t get me wrong…oh, so many moons ago the first time I took a train in the US was after weeks of spending more than my share of time on greyhound buses…& when I took a seat on the upper deck I remember thinking it was bigger, comfier, better appointed & with a whole hell of a lot more leg room than I’d had on the plane…so I was pretty much fully prepared to be impressed with the trains…but…the distinct impression I’ve had since is that people sleep on the train thing (…pun only sort of intended…but those suckers were decades ahead in offering seats that turned into full-length flat beds…just sayin’) & unless they don’t have a choice…pretty much stay away from the buses & their stations…but…being as I am of alien origins to that whole context…maybe I’m missing something…but…to me it’s akin to the reasons I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of doing away with cash money…sure, for some people it’s a way to do stuff without the attendant trail of digital traces & that stuff you can argue wouldn’t be bad to shut out…but…there are a lot of “just trying to live in the world” reasons to be stuck with it as the best or only option & if you’re in that position chances are pretty good your taxes aren’t covering the tab for big ticket items…but…that’s a whole other thing

An agency created 54 years ago to bolster minority-owned businesses is fighting for its existence amid a legal challenge from White entrepreneurs who contend its mission is misguided and unconstitutional.

…oh FFF-ingS…miss me with this tired fucking chorus…it’s the rhetorical equivalent of dividing by zero…& once you can get away with that I can literally show you how to make 1=2 so it ought to fall apart a lot fucking quicker than it seems to…not cause this sort of damage

The Minority Business Development Agency, housed within the Commerce Department, is one of several federal programs under siege over a fundamental assumption ingrained in Washington policy: that certain racial and ethnic groups are inherently disadvantaged in American society and therefore entitled to preferential treatment.
[…]
Experts say the federal programs may be uniquely vulnerable: The categories of disadvantaged minorities were drawn up in the early 1970s with little research or debate — and sometimes based on naked politics — creating a patchwork in which some programs presume a minority group to be disadvantaged while others do not.

There was “never really a logic to it,” said John Skrentny, a sociology professor at the University of California at San Diego who has researched the origins of the federal government’s presumptions. “It’s a lot of important policy built on a house of cards.”

Of the targeted programs, the Minority Business Development Agency is the most imminently imperiled. Established in 1969 by President Richard M. Nixon by executive order, the agency seeks to remedy past and ongoing discrimination in the business world. It runs more than three dozen centers across the country that help minority-owned businesses secure financing and navigate the federal contracting process. The agency was made permanent in 2021 under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which greatly increased its funding to $550 million over five years.

Earlier this year, three White male business owners sued the agency, alleging they were excluded from federal assistance because they don’t identify as Black, Latino, Native American, Asian, Pacific Islander or any other eligible minority group. The plaintiffs seek to invalidate the government’s presumption that certain races suffer inherently from social and economic disadvantage.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/18/minority-business-programs-racial-disadvantage/

…I just…fuck it…I know it’s the festive season & all…& I don’t mean to be some self-appointed grinch…but…have any of these people ever so much as bounced off the idea that there can be things worth having that aren’t about them? …that it could be nice to have all sorts of assistance for all sorts of things but that some sorts of things for some sorts of folks are stacked so fundamentally at odds with success that “we” owe “them” some very different sorts of “assistance”…the sort that…not to put too fine a point on it…these assholes not only benefit from but get to elide clear out of the frame but which the mere acknowledgement of which makes their whole insidiously strident whinge collapse in a soggy pile of “but I’m entitled”…so…remind me again why it’s not considered a public service to treat “slap down” as a literal instruction?

For some liberal observers, Mr. Trump’s resilience confirms that many Americans aren’t wedded to democracy and are tempted by extreme ideologies. Hillary Clinton has described Mr. Trump as a “threat” to democracy, and Mr. Biden has called him “one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history.”

In a different spirit, some on the right also take Mr. Trump’s success as a sign that Americans are open to more radical forms of politics. After Mr. Trump’s win in 2016, the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin crowed that the American people had “started the revolution” against political liberalism itself. Richard Spencer declared himself and his fellow white nationalists “the new Trumpian vanguard.”

[…obligatory]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2017/jan/31/the-punch-a-nazi-meme-what-are-the-ethics-of-punching-nazis

…anyway

To be sure, Mr. Trump’s wild rhetoric, indifference to protocol and willingness to challenge expertise have been profoundly unsettling to people of both political parties. His term in office was frequently chaotic, and the chaos seemed to culminate in the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. In the current presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has promised to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Mr. Biden; he continues to argue that the 2020 election was stolen and that America does not have “much of a democracy right now”; his fondness for incendiary language has not abated.

But it is worth remembering that during his presidency, Mr. Trump’s often intemperate rhetoric and erratic behavior ended up accompanying a host of moderate policies. On matters ranging from health care and entitlements to foreign policy and trade, Mr. Trump routinely rejected the most unpopular ideas of both political parties. Voters seem to have noticed this reality: When asked whether Mr. Trump was too conservative, not conservative enough or “not too far either way,” 57 percent of voters in a recent poll picked “not too far either way.” Only 27 percent of voters regarded him as too conservative.

Such characterizations may baffle Mr. Trump’s detractors. But even his most provocative comments since leaving the White House — that he would be a “dictator” for the first day of his second term; that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserves to be executed for “a treasonous act” — likely matter less to many voters than how he governed while in office. Inured to his braggadocio, they see him now as he was then: less an ideological warrior than a flexible-minded businessman who favors negotiation and compromise.
[…]
How does one square Mr. Trump’s moderation with his frequent rhetorical excesses? In his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal,” he offers a clue. He describes his approach to negotiation with a story about preventing a bank from foreclosing on a widow’s farm. When Mr. Trump’s initial pleas are ignored, he threatens to accuse the bank of causing the suicide of the widow’s late husband. Faced with this unpleasant prospect, the bank relents. Mr. Trump observes, “Sometimes it pays to be a little wild.” Whether or not this story is perfectly factual, it illustrates what Mr. Trump aspires to be: a canny negotiator whose outrageous statements help to achieve reasonable settlements.

The Secret of Trump’s Appeal isn’t Authoritarianism [NYT]

…do they teach a whole class on how to radically miss the entire fucking point or did I miss some sort of a memo…because that is (apologies as ever to godwin) that is some “hitler was a vegetarian so actually from a carbon-footprint perspective if you discount the output of those gas chambers of his he’d actually appeal to moderates if you think about it” bullshit & apparently my habitual ability to roll with the “who says what how says as much if not more than what they say” of it all is insufficient to the task of not swearing about it this morning…which I try to avoid for the most part on account of otherwise I’d do little else & these are unpleasant enough to wade through as it is…ummm…trust me?

Americans trust friends and family more than media for election information [WaPo]

At this point, it should no longer be surprising that Donald Trump’s supporters are unfazed by anything he says, no matter how outrageous.

My colleague Marianne LeVine talked to audience members at a Trump event in Iowa last Wednesday about the former president’s promises that he would govern as a retribution-seeking authoritarian if he returns to the White House. They shrugged it off, and more disturbing, some said they would welcome a strongman who tramples democracy.

To some, this was just Trump being Trump. They said his repeated vow to govern as “a dictator for one day” was a joke or something to send the mainstream media into a frenzy, which it did. Others echoed Trump’s claim that it is President Biden who is the real threat to democracy.
[…]
But take a step back from the tactical question of how much all of this will matter next November and consider a different one: How much do Americans really care about democracy?

The disturbing answer: Less and less, especially among the young, whose engagement is crucial to Biden’s prospects for reelection.

…for real? …they’d have to be pretty fucking different from the ones I’ve met…because those are less by way of not caring about democracy than not inclined to feel like they’ve been given a functioning one to inherit…& tend to be pretty fucking motivated to get some needles moved that have been stuck in the red for longer than they’ve been alive while democratic leaders of the nations they’re told are the ones whose lead others follow talk the talk through talks after talks without much by way of shuffling their ass in the direction of the steps required to walk the heavily implied walk…so…feels like some lost in translation generational divide kinda deal…but…what do I know…I’m not the one getting paid to write this stuff up…which is probably important but I haven’t had enough coffee to figure out why exactly

Over the past few decades, there has been “a small but steady erosion of support” for the ideal of democracy, not only in the United States but also around the world, says Eric Plutzer, the political scientist who directs the Mood of the Nation Poll for Penn State University’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy.

…again…feels like those data points would probably be consistent with people feeling ill-served without jumping to the conclusion they’d prefer not-democracy…but…see above

Plutzer notes that this comports with polls that have asked similar questions, going back to the 1990s. “Young people have always been less enthusiastic about democracy,” he said. “But the generation gap has really exploded.”

Part of the explanation is that younger voters did not live through World War II or the Cold War, when authoritarianism seemed to threaten the survival of the planet. Instead, they have experienced a gridlocked political system that has been incapable of delivering solutions to the problems that most affect their lives, whether it’s climate change or school shootings or the fact that many are not able to buy a home with the ease their parents did.

…1990s? …you sure you didn’t mean 1900s…since when is it a new idea that the newer generations aren’t impressed by how the hand-off from the older ones looks like from their end…& what the actual fuck about a lifetime’s awareness of the oppressive threat of authoritarianism makes it logical to suppose it would instill a distaste for democracy?

That said, we have also seen recently how concrete issues can bring younger voters to the fore. In Ohio’s November elections, a CNN exit poll found they gave far stronger support than their elders for making abortion a protected right in their state constitution and for legalizing the recreational use of marijuana.

…uh huh…sounds totally like they’re disengaged with the democracy they’re disillusioned by…but…when you title your article “The young are losing faith in democracy. Here’s what to do about it.“…& the fulcrum you pick seems to be this

The latest survey, taken in November 2022 and published in January, found that 78 percent of those surveyed said democracy is “the best political system in all circumstances.” But among the Gen Z cohort, ages 18 to 25, nearly half answered either that it “makes no difference” whether they live under a democracy or a dictatorship (28 percent) or that “dictatorship could be good in certain circumstances” (19 percent). More than a third of millennials, ages 26 to 41, agreed with one of those statements.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/18/democracy-young-people-voters-trump/

…it sure as fuck seems like you don’t appear to understand much about the context you’re apparently happy to imply makes a hypothetical 2nd bite at the presidential cherry for team #yes-those-sorts-of-fucking-nazi the fault of the youngest voting demographics…& I’m not trying to claim the shit that’s wrong with the world is exclusively the provenance of old, white, male assholes

‘We live with a gun to our heads’: how Iran is targeting protesters in Britain [Guardian]

…but…they might be…how can I put this…”disproportionately over-represented”?

Federal database will track misconduct records of US law enforcement officers [Guardian]

…&…given how many different people I’ve heard utter this one phrase in the last few days

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today [Guardian]

…the shamelessness-is-our-superpower sunnovabitches sure do seem like they don’t hold with any agenda but their own

Supreme Contempt for Women [NYT]

[…I know we’ve had a few of the many links to this stuff already but I forget if anyone threw the propublica thing most of those drew on into the mix so…you know…we ringing some bells as we go…very possibly alarm bells]

The documents offer a rare glimpse of a race in which Russian traders have reliably stayed one step ahead of U.S.-led efforts to cut them off. Their success shows how difficult it is to stop the global movement of commercial technology, raising questions about the effectiveness of Western trade restrictions and whether tech giants should better control the destinations of their products — and if it is even possible to do so.
[…]
Understaffed government investigators in the United States and Europe cannot keep pace with the often shadowy flow of goods, said Elina Ribakova, an economist who has studied sanctions evasion at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a U.S. think tank. Major tech companies, she added, must do more to cut off supplies to Russia.

“It’s an endless Whac-a-Mole game,” she said. “There should be alarm, particularly among the policymakers, that we have announced a lot of sanctions and may believe they are working but in reality they are not.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/19/technology/russia-flouts-global-tech-bans.html

…uh huh…the systems will save us, though…they’re all about recognizing shit

AI is powering a revolution in policing, at the Olympics and beyond [WaPo]

…& they’re definitely about protecting shit

Google is rolling out new protections for our location data [WaPo]

…that shit does bear a remarkable resemblance to their profit margins…but…yay capitalism…so presumably that’s totally fine

‘I get to tell my story’: incarcerated journalists are making podcasts, going viral and winning awards [Guardian]

…well…some places, anyway

Courts halted seven judicial hearings on Monday “until [Navalny’s] whereabouts [is] established”, his lawyers said, further raising concerns that the Kremlin critic could be muzzled or even killed as Vladimir Putin has announced plans to extend his rule for a fifth presidential term.

Navalny, who has been sentenced to nearly three decades in prison, disappeared from a prison in the Vladimir region near Moscow last week, and was suspected to have been transferred into a “special regime” colony, where he could be held incommunicado under Russia’s harshest prison regime for years.

…talk about your quiet part loud

The Kremlin has not answered questions on Navalny’s whereabouts, with Putin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov saying his team had “neither the intention nor the ability to track the fate of prisoners.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/18/courts-halt-cases-against-alexei-navalny-after-disappearance-of-jailed-activist

[…OK…so my browser crashed & ate the end of the post…I’mma see if I can resurrect that…or put it back together again…but that might be a while?]

…damn…looks like I need to try to remember how the rest of this went…so…from here on out it’s probably not the post I thought I was about to post because I tend to wing it & I don’t have notes to work from…anyway…think the next bit drew from this?

Israeli security officials scored a major intelligence coup in 2018: secret documents that laid out, in intricate detail, what amounted to a private equity fund that Hamas used to finance its operations.

The ledgers, pilfered from the computer of a senior Hamas official, listed assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Hamas controlled mining, chicken farming and road building companies in Sudan, twin skyscrapers in the United Arab Emirates, a property developer in Algeria, and a real estate firm listed on the Turkish stock exchange.

The documents, which The New York Times reviewed, were a potential road map for choking off Hamas’s money and thwarting its plans. The agents who obtained the records shared them inside their own government and in Washington.

Nothing happened.

For years, none of the companies named in the ledgers faced sanctions from the United States or Israel. Nobody publicly called out the companies or pressured Turkey, the hub of the financial network, to shut it down.

…something something…money talks?

“Everyone is talking about failures of intelligence on Oct. 7, but no one is talking about the failure to stop the money,” said Udi Levy, a former chief of Mossad’s economic warfare division. “It’s the money — the money — that allowed this.”

…sort of like a self-signed permissions slip that way…cost of doing business…regulation is bad…yadda yadda…I think I swore a bit more the first time…& possibly drew a tenuous parallel to “the money” in the disney/marvel kang quandry…& clarence’s tastes in recreational vehicles…among other pressing matters before the court…but…eh…lilies of the gilded variety positively abound as it is & I don’t have time to try to remember exactly how I went about that part

Even after the Treasury Department finally levied sanctions against the network in 2022, records show, Hamas-linked figures were able to obtain millions of dollars by selling shares in a blacklisted company. The Treasury Department now fears that such money flows will allow Hamas to finance its continuing war with Israel and to rebuild when it is over.

“It’s something we are deeply worried about and expect to see given the financial stress Hamas is under,” said Brian Nelson, the Treasury Department’s under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. “What we are trying to do is disrupt that.”
[…]
Mr. Levy recalled briefing Mr. Netanyahu personally in 2015 about the Hamas portfolio.

“I can tell you for sure that I talked to him about this,” Mr. Levy said. “But he didn’t care that much about it.”

…eh…that last part is maybe debatable…which is to say I’d for sure debate it…& did a bit…but luckily we’re all spared that by the ravenous maw of the ether…so…small victories

Former Harpoon agents grew so frustrated with the inaction that they uploaded some documents to Facebook, hoping that companies and investors would find them and stop doing business with Hamas-linked companies.
[…]
In the years that followed the 2018 discovery, Hamas’s money network burrowed deeper into the mainstream financial system, records show.

The Turkish company at the heart of the operation had such a sheen of legitimacy that major American and European banks managed shares on behalf of clients. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints invested tens of thousands of dollars before the company was placed under sanction.

…god save us from the pious…or possibly the godly…again…there was previously a good deal more profanity lacing this together & it really drew my mental room together so apologies if the “polite version” lacks sense & appears to be consistent only in the usage of non sequiturs…but…fuck it?

Israeli security and intelligence officials, working from a secure compound outside Tel Aviv, spent years tracking Hamas’s money. By 2015, they were on to what they called Hamas’s “secret investment portfolio.”

Terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State often use front companies to launder money. But here, Israeli agents saw something different, more ambitious: a multinational network of real businesses churning out real profits.

On paper, they looked like unrelated companies. But over and over, the Israelis said they identified the same Hamas-linked figures as shareholders, executives and board members.

There were people like Hisham Qafisheh, a white-goateed Jordanian who studied in Saudi Arabia and had a knack for finding political support. One of his companies won a $500 million highway contract in Sudan.

Then there was Amer Al-Shawa, a Turkish man of Palestinian descent who studied electrical engineering in Ohio and more recently spent five months under interrogation in an Emirati jail on suspicion of funding Hamas.

At the top was Ahmed Odeh, a heavyset Jordanian businessman with years of experience in Saudi Arabia. The Israelis learned — and the Americans now say much of this publicly — that Hamas’s governing Shura Council had given Mr. Odeh seed money to build and manage a portfolio of companies.

Hamas, the de facto governing body of Gaza, relied principally on Iran to fund its military wing. But Hamas wanted its own funding stream, too.

The Israeli security services operated a terrorism-finance investigative team at the time called Task Force Harpoon. It put people from across counterterrorism — spies, soldiers, police officers, accountants, lawyers — under the same umbrella and gave them a direct report to the prime minister. The task force even had an economic warfare unit within the Mossad intelligence agency that could covertly act on the intelligence it had gathered.

“We didn’t have any rivalries,” Tamir Pardo, the Mossad chief at the time, said in an interview. “No one got credit for any one operation. It just worked.”

Harpoon, he said, was “one of the most important tools the Mossad had.” It churned out intelligence to financial regulators, law enforcement agencies, politicians and allies in Washington, helping Israel win financial sanctions targeting Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah.
[…]
A 2014 war between Israel and Hamas had left Hamas’s fortifications in ruins and its arsenal depleted.

Hamas, though, was able to rebuild. In 2016, […]

Hamas had added about 6,000 operatives to its ranks since the war ended, and the military had learned that Hamas was developing plans to storm Israeli communities and take hostages.

By 2016, Mr. Netanyahu’s government had begun pursuing a strategy to contain Hamas by allowing the Qataris to send money to Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu says that money was humanitarian aid. Privately, he told others that stabilizing Hamas would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.

That same year, the new Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen, dismantled Harpoon as part of an agency reorganization, according to Mr. Levy and others.

[…] A new group of intelligence agents and specialists from a few other agencies kept chasing the money, only without the organizational structure and direct access to senior policymakers.

This new group soon made another alarming discovery.

Up until that point, members of the team told The Times, they had estimated that Hamas was taking about $10 million to $15 million annually from their companies’ profits.

Then they learned, based on sources and other intelligence, that Hamas had sold off some of the secret portfolio’s assets, raising more than $75 million. That money, according to an Israeli intelligence assessment, was sent to Gaza, where it was used to rebuild Hamas’s military infrastructure.
[…]
Exactly how Israeli intelligence obtained the ledgers — whether from an informant or a computer hack — remains unclear. But in 2018, the team got the proof it had been seeking.
[…]
The ledgers spanned 2012 to 2018 and contained entries and valuations for companies that the agents had been monitoring in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey and elsewhere. The records also contained familiar names, including Mr. Qafisheh and Mr. Al-Shawa.

The documents were hard evidence of what the Israelis had long suspected: Despite what public records said, Hamas was in control.

“It was a big breakthrough,” said one official involved in the investigation. “Hamas could hide behind frontmen and shareholders, but the money always talks.”

…that must be nice for it…the money, I mean…because I am fucking screaming & it pays me fuck all but lost time…so…I guess maybe I am jealous of money after all…ain’t that a bitch?

This discovery was quickly bolstered by intelligence from Saudi Arabia. In mid-2018, the Saudis arrested Mr. Ghazal, the Hamas accountant, and two other men who corporate records show held positions in 18 companies in the portfolio.

Under interrogation, Mr. Ghazal confessed that the portfolio existed to transfer money to Hamas, according to records related to the three men’s arrests that were viewed by The Times. He also said that, just as the Israelis had long suspected, Mr. Odeh directed where the money went.

The two other men told their interrogators that they were shareholders in name only. Their stakes were actually owned by Mr. Qafisheh, the goateed Jordanian who had also been on the Israeli radar screen for years. Mr. Qafisheh, the men said, was a Hamas operative.

…quiet in the back…the money is speaking

The Israeli team shared the ledgers and its intelligence with American officials in early 2019, hoping to encourage financial sanctions.

But then, nothing.

The Trump administration did not act. Treasury Department officials said that they did not delay any decisions. Issuing sanctions, they said, is a complicated process. And Israel, which was more focused on getting the Americans to issue Iranian sanctions, did not press for more urgent actions, both Israeli and American officials say.

“We have great people still who are trying to do this work,” Mr. Levy said. “But if no one at a high level is putting this as a priority, what can they do?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/16/world/europe/israel-hamas-money-finance-turkey-intelligence-attacks.html

OpenAI’s “Preparedness” team, led by MIT AI professor Aleksander Madry, will hire AI researchers, computer scientists, national security experts and policy professionals to monitor the tech, continually test it and warn the company if it believes any of its AI capabilities are becoming dangerous. The team sits between OpenAI’s “Safety Systems” team, which works on such existing problems as infusing racist biases into AI, and the company’s “Superalignment” team, which researches how to ensure AI doesn’t harm humans in an imagined future where the tech has outstripped human intelligence completely.

The rise of AI fake news is creating a ‘misinformation superspreader’ [WaPo]

The team will monitor how and when OpenAI’s tech can instruct people to hack computers or build dangerous chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, beyond what people can find online through regular research. Madry is looking for people who “really think, ‘How can I mess with this set of rules? How can I be most ingenious in my evilness?’”

I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1. pic.twitter.com/aq4wDitvQW

— Chris Bakke (@ChrisJBakke) December 17, 2023

…thank fuck for the folks in charge

“I really see this framing of acceleration and deceleration as extremely simplistic,” [Madry] said. “AI has a ton of upsides, but we also need to do the work to make sure the upsides are actually realized and the downsides aren’t.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/18/open-ai-preparedness-bioweapons-madry/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/18/artificial-intelligence-frequently-asked-questions/

The most popular fact checks of 2023 [WaPo]

…uh…I don’t even know who you’d be quoting on that if you quote me on that…but…I know if you quoted this bit by the last time I got here the radio edit would sound like a EKG flatline?

Trump has an advantage over President Biden in the polls, Short noted. And besides, “I think it’s highly unlikely that Donald Trump has ever read ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” Adolf Hitler’s 1925 manifesto. This had the effect of neutralizing a central focus of the criticism Trump has faced for his comments: that they echo Hitler’s rhetoric.

But that’s not the issue, in part because it’s relatively easy (as it was for Short) to otherwise differentiate Trump from the German dictator. The issue, instead, is that Trump’s language shows how much and how far hostility to immigration has evolved and grown in the United States — thanks largely to Trump himself.
[…]
The 2016 presidential election was a crucial pivot point in American history, not only because of Trump’s unexpected victory. It was a period in which the extreme right gained new power and prominence — again, not only because Trump won. That included extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric.
[…]
But this didn’t occur in a vacuum. It happened as violence in the Middle East pushed immigrants into Europe, stoking anti-immigrant sentiment there. It came at a point when the Republican Party was already facing backlash from its base in the form of the still-potent tea party, a backlash focused on undermining the party’s establishment. It also came as the establishment, trying to figure out how to respond to President Barack Obama’s unexpected 2012 reelection, was exploring taking a more lenient approach to immigration.

All of this occurred as Americans were newly cognizant of how the country’s demography was changing. The Census Bureau’s determination that White Americans would lose majority status in future decades “lit the fuse” on concerns about immigration, in one demographer’s description — a determination that overlapped with Obama’s election in the first place.

Trump didn’t generate hostility to immigration from thin air when he announced his candidacy in 2015; he was echoing and elevating what had already been burbling in right-wing media. Immigration was a clear dividing point between establishment and fringe Republicans, and Trump’s rhetoric was a clear message to that growing, powerful fringe. Post-election analysis determined that the news outlet that earned the most shares from Republicans and those on the right during the 2016 cycle wasn’t behemoth Fox News, which had long been closely allied to the establishment. Instead, it was Breitbart News.

…hey…so…that shit about hamas’ money & how letting it say what it pleased maybe looks lethally glib & apocalyptic-ally fucking irresponsible…you know…in fucking hind-sight & all…well…we fucking know how the quiet part’s loud-ass money is all over creation having a screaming fucking meltdown…&…if you wanted to get more of the kids I know to tell you they agreed with churchill about democracy…if you wired its god-damned jaws the fuck closed I guaran-fucking-tee you’d make a bunch of youthful friends who influence people…you know…if you happened to be of a mind to

This is what’s important. It’s not that Trump is saying things Hitler did, though he is. It’s that he is doing so as someone who has promised his heavily White base “retribution” and who has made obvious his intent to step outside the bounds of presidential power when he can. He’s using this rhetoric as he and his aides reportedly discuss how to deploy the military against immigrants, including building internment camps. He’s again reflecting the verbiage of the fringe, but that verbiage has shifted well to the right over the past eight years.

Trump fought tooth and nail to constrain and demonize immigrants as president but hit walls both internally and externally. Now he knows how to get around the internal barriers more easily, and the external debate is now unfolding on much friendlier, more extreme terrain.

It’s that, not simply the comparisons to Hitler’s rhetoric, that’s worrisome.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/18/trump-hitler-immigration-poisoning/

…that might even be true…as far as it goes…but it has this weird thing going on where somehow all that talking money that tells on his ass whether you’re left, right or center…is quaintly relegated to the subtext by the time you, as irony would have it, hit that bottom line

…which I have…for not my first time today…&…fuck if I know what tunes I went with…so…I’ll think of something, I expect…but…don’t be surprised if there’s swearing involved?

…sorry…turns out this post isn’t the only thing to have gotten away from me more than once so far today…but…pretty sure I owe tunes…along no doubt with a whole panoply of other varieties of atonement…so…let’s go with these?