AI for the love of lucre

Yesterday I ran across a polling finding that stopped me cold. According to the Pew Research Center: 

About four-in-ten U.S. adults believe humanity is ‘living in the end times’.

Apparently the sense that some kind of radical break is imminent is very powerful among us. (For the record, for myself, I doubt this. History records societies and the species evolving over time, not through genuine disjunctions. We're stuck in time, and not going to escape.)

But the notion of a coming apocalypse does seem to have become the norm among our tech overlords. And their vision seems a combination of vicious and silly. But what would you expect from a bunch of emotionally crippled white men unleashed by their wealth?

Timothy Noah is a New Republic staff writer who investigates one of the core questions of this time:

How the Tech World Turned Evil 

... The talk may be of a literal or figurative God, but what’s really at stake—as usual—is Mammon. Tech lords’ ferocious opposition to government interference reflects a collective financial investment in AI that’s quite literally unprecedented within the private sector. In February, The Wall Street Journal reported that the $670 billion to be spent this year developing AI by Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Google) represents 2.1 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. 

That’s slightly more than what the United States spent to build the railroads in the 1850s (2 percent of GDP), and considerably more than the amount spent to build the Interstate highway system (0.4 percent) or to put a man on the moon (0.2 percent). The only national investment the Journal could identify that represented a larger slice of GDP was the Louisiana Purchase (3 percent), which nearly doubled the size of the United States. That was in 1803, when GDP was a puny $488 million, not today’s $31 trillion. And unlike these earlier infrastructure projects, this year’s $670 billion investment in AI draws entirely on private-sector funds.

There's a good deal of Greek mythology about what happens when humans think we are as gods. If their educations were a little wider, the bros might have heard of Icarus. 

Peter Theil of Palantir has made himself the spokesman for tech hubris. Noah goes on: 

... Palantir, of which Thiel is co-founder and board chair, is the most obviously sinister of these firms, because, among other things, it supplies surveillance technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which, according to one contract award, provides “increased efficiency in deportation logistics, minimizing time and resource expenditure.” A 2020 Amnesty International report concluded that “there is a high risk that Palantir is contributing to serious human rights violations of migrants and asylum-seekers by the U.S. government.” To this a Palantir representative replied, “We will not allow our software to be used for immoral or illegal purposes.” 

But at a February videoconference with shareholders, Palantir’s T-shirted, wild-haired chief executive Alex Karp could scarcely contain his glee as he said, “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them” (italics mine). By early March, Palantir was doing just that, picking bombing targets in the Iran war and seeing its stock climb 15 percent.

... Tech’s final descent into unambiguous villainy was the result of three events during Joe Biden’s presidency: Lina Khan’s appointment as Federal Trade Commission chair in 2021; the advent of ChatGPT in 2022; and the election of President Donald Trump in 2024. Amazon and Meta lobbied against Khan’s nomination because she sought to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement, and after she was confirmed, both companies sought unsuccessfully for Khan to be recused from cases concerning them. 

ChatGPT’s introduction in November 2022 set off the arms race among Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other tech companies that resulted in tech throwing $670 billion this year at AI. And Trump, three days after his second inauguration, issued an executive order reversing what he later called “my predecessor’s attempt to paralyze this industry.” 

Trump also eased up on antitrust enforcement and within a year drove away the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Gail Slater, not long after Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks hired two Trump allies to go over her head and settle an antitrust lawsuit on favorable terms.

Seems pretty evil to me, though evil rich guys are a dime a dozen in history. There's not as much novelty here as they like to think. Noah insists that human beings need to do an intervention to stop these boys and their toys.

... to succeed, regulating AI will require standing up to a class of plutocrats more fanatically opposed to public accountability than any in history. The robber barons of the Gilded Age have gone down in history as the epitome of private avarice, but at least they believed in democracy (albeit as something to buy or sell). 

The tech lords, who match the robber barons’ greed, are weakly committed to democracy at best—and at worst, they’re millenarian nutcases who would dispense with government altogether. Suggest we slow the march to Singularity, and they’ll peg you as a literal or figurative devil. They’ve invested too much cash in their digital Second Coming to think otherwise.

Taming the tech lords won’t be a battle on the scale of Armageddon. But the stakes will surely be higher than we’re able right now to know. Democrats, and indeed all humankind, should prepare for a long and bitter fight, because this enemy is at least as crazy as it is rich—and it’s really, really rich. 

If our societies can't figure out how to intervene, I suspect material reality will. Climate apocalypse seems more likely than the bros' Singularity. 

On lockdown ... behind the plastic gates

Suppose you need a bottle of dish soap. You can buy one at the Walgreens around the corner ... if you can find a clerk to unlock the plastic case where the item is confined. Good luck with that. You push the call button and sometimes a harried employee appears to unlock the soap. And sometimes no one responds. Usually you give up.

Walgreens has taught you to take your business elsewhere. (I get such items at Costco where the quantities are excessive, but you can put what you need in your cart without plastic hindrance.)

The plastic barriers are supposed to deter shop lifters. Makes you envision an old person who who slips a bar of soap into a purse or a kid who pockets a candy bar. I'm sure that happens all the time, but that's not the significant shoplifting problem. That's not what inspired retailers to adopt the plastic lockdown.

Where I live, organized retail theft at scale was happening. I've seen swarms of young males sweep products into laundry bags and run out the door. Those commodities will soon appear on blankets in front of street sellers around the corner. I doubt either the thieves or the street sellers are making much, but it's an economy of sorts. 

I sympathize with Walgreens needing to break the cycle to thrive. I sympathize also with people who get by in the informal economy, much of it extra-legal.

But plastic land isn't working. The only part of the Walgreens store that is crowded is the line for the pharmacy. 

Shopping without plastic barriers is becoming a luxury experience here in the inner city.

• • •

Another kind of plastic gate now collects fares and allows entrance and exit to the regional underground rail system, BART. We used to see groups of young people who jumped the waist high barriers at the fare stations. But no more. In my experience, the gates work reasonably smoothly and are not particularly daunting even to San Francisco's many tourists. 

I hope the gates have improved the BART experience; riders are way down since folks started working from home during the pandemic. This thing was designed to carry the region into downtown San Francisco. Now the system is gaining riders for Saturday events, though business traffic is still sluggish -- as is revenue.

Transit activists in San Francisco and also the five other BART counties are collecting signatures for November 2026 ballot measures to put the public systems on a firmer footing. This is something I can support.  Please do sign on!

Friday cat blogging

 

Today, let's give Mio pride of place. Here he is, being magnificent, while over looking the room.

Here he is, bathing actively. Perhaps he'd prefer not to be observed. But when you are Mio-sized, you don't worry about being interrupted. Always those eyes!

Popularity discontents

This morning while dipping into the endless stream of punditry, this from Obama's communications guy Dan Pfeiffer caught my eye: 

The best way to protect democracy is to punch fascism in the mouth. ... If there’s one lesson of the Trump era, it’s that moral victories aren’t really victories at all.

This definitely makes me sad. Pfeiffer's boss, Barack Obama, the very election of a Black president (who was rather good at the job), was a moral victory. We need more of those, more demonstrations of the positive potential of the American story.

But Pfeiffer is also certainly correct. Trumpism needs a punch in the kisser. 

Polling guru G. Elliot Morris has been investigating Democratic discontent. His national findings: 

Democrats are not unpopular. They’re unsatisfying.

What all of this suggests is that Democrats do not have the problem many political narratives say they do. The party’s core weakness is not that voters see it as elitist or too extreme; it is that too many voters, including their own, see Democratic politicians as unmoored, passive, and ineffective. Republicans, by contrast, still project the kind of strength and clarity that voters often reward — though their extremism is a huge drag on votes.

More Americans see the GOP as extreme, out of touch, and worthy of intense dislike. That is why Democrats can be underwater on their favorability and still in a stronger electoral position overall.

His research leads him to conclude that Dems currently really do have strong chances going into the 2026 election, despite how little most of us thrill to their candidates.

The California gubernatorial race seems to have all the worst features of this moment. 

Nobody sane or decent wants this war

War, huh (good God y'all)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing

This lyric, performed by Edwin Starr and later The Temptations, hit the top of the charts in 1970. After eight years of the American war in Vietnam, almost 60,000 US killed and perhaps a million Vietnamese, most of us knew what we thought of wars.

Donald Trump's idiotic Persian adventure isn't yet causing carnage on that scale, but the longer it goes on, the more death and destruction that results, the more vehement the opposition will likely grow.

 

Dozens of veterans and military family members protesting the Iran war were arrested by U.S. Capitol Police on Monday after they occupied the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. 

U.S. Capitol Police said 66 people were arrested during the demonstration, which was organized by several veterans groups including About Face, the Center on Conscience and War (CCW), Veterans For Peace, Common Defense, the Fayetteville Resistance Coalition, Military Families Speak Out and 50501 Veterans. (The Hill) 

Military historian Phillips P. O'Brien is frankly aghast at what he is seeing of Trump's war:

The Most Corrupt War In US History

All wars are horrible and this is no exception. However the US-Iran War of 2026 will never be the most horrible war in US history, the longest, the most destructive, etc. That is a good thing. However, something pretty horrible is unfolding in front of us. The US government is being used as a tool to corruptly enrich certain people, to a tune of billions of $’s. And that means US service personnel and Iranian civilians (the people who are suffering the most in this war) are being sacrificed so that others who have enriched themselves through their loss can enrich themselves further. 

For the US military, this has to be a devastating situation. Soldiers sign up to defend the Constitution of the USA, on the assumption that when they are put in harms way, it is being done for the greater good of the country. To understand that they are now tools for corruption of their masters, not for the country at large, has to destroy the whole idea of serving the country. 

For the Iranian people, whom Trump encouraged to rise up for their freedom, with no intention of actually helping them, the effect is something similar. They might have had hope for a while, even with Trump’s track record, that the USA would help them. Now they know the US cares not at all for them, used them for what Trump had hoped to be his political advantage, and has now abandoned them to a worse version of their original government. 

 So those who serve or want freedom get nothing. However, the corrupt at the top seem to be using every opportunity, even manipulating the course of the war, to cash in wherever and however they can. ...

O'Brien goes on to recount how Trump's gyrations, whether intentionally or not, seem to encourage gambling on the price of oil by traders with inside information. Perhaps these are some of his inner circle? This is a leaky bunch; we'll eventually find out who benefited.

Though the Israel's attacks on Iran and concurrent invasion of Lebanon, are popular with many on the home front, Israelis sure know how to denounce the motives of politicians. Israeli journalist Alon Pinkas is scathing.

Trump and Netanyahu Have Royally Screwed Each Other Over

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu share a lot of traits. They are both solipsistic, mendacious, narcissistic, and paranoid megalomaniacs who perceive themselves as victims of a cabal of elites. Now they share something else: They have lost a war together. Driven by vanity and hubris, the U.S. president and Israeli prime minister miscalculated Iran’s mettle, and now their mutually inflicted failure is causing them considerable political harm at home. What started as a Smith & Wesson partnership has degenerated into a Thelma & Louise ending.... 

... [There will be no conqueror's statues for these two.] Trump and Netanyahu, in their infinite delusions of grandeur, expected this to be a quick win that would buoy their respective political fortunes. They probably envisioned being showered with praise by their countrymen and the media, and relished the thought of rubbing the victory in their opponents’ faces. The exact opposite has happened instead, and they have no one to blame but themselves—and each other.

So ... here we are. President Barack Obama's national security aide Ben Rhodes [gift link] is trying to figure out how the idealistic country he thought he worked for came to spread stupid, unnecessary carnage around the world. He shares some insights from listening to thar very damaged, but very thoughtful, veteran of our Wars on Terror, Graham Platner, an aspiring Democratic Senate candidate in Maine. 

... “We are so broken emotionally when it comes to our politics that we’ve literally created this story that it’s inherent in being a competent political leader to kill civilians,” Mr. Platner told me. “If you’re not willing to do some hard things and drop some bombs, then you’re not up to the task of power. I think it’s the opposite. You’re not up to the task of being in power if you do not think about the cost of violence. If that’s not at the front of your mind, then I don’t think you are morally in the right place to be in positions of power.” 

We like to frame our wars as virtuous, but they are not. Instead, they resemble a declining empire sowing chaos along its periphery as a matter of strategy: Economic and political elites profit while the Americans who fight suffer along with the places they attack. 

“The only way we change that is by talking about it publicly,” Mr. Platner told me. “If we start to revisit the morality of military conflict and how we use violence, that’s going to have a direct correlation to what is good for America.” 

With the decline of American empire which is certainly underway, proven every day by the ascendancy of the Orange Toddler, maybe yet another generation can teach us that war is not the answer.

Defeated by arithmetic

Los Angeles basketball great Kareem Abdul Jabbar is disgusted by the current California primary election kerfuffle: five quasi-plausible aspirants whose self-serving continuation of egotistical campaigns might give this blue state a MAGA governor. He calls bullshit.

The California Democrats have pulled off a rare feat: they’ve turned a massive home-court advantage into a self-made crisis. In sports, we call this “hero ball.” It’s what happens when a team has all the talent in the world, but five guys are trying to drive to the hoop at the exact same time. The result is usually a turnover, and right now, the Democratic party is handing the ball directly to the opposition.

Seven Democratic candidates are currently splitting the vote. None will drop out, no one will pivot, and two Republicans are watching the whole thing fall apart from a very comfortable lead.

The problem is the “jungle primary.” It’s a rule that sends the top two finishers to the general election, regardless of their jersey color. It works fine when you’re organized, but it becomes a trap the moment you splinter. Strategist Paul Mitchell calculated the odds of an all-Republican November at 27% back in March. In the NBA, if you have a 27% chance of turning the ball over on every possession, you aren’t going to win many championships.

Every Democrat left in this race has convinced themselves they are the “chosen one.” Matt Mahan actually said, “I plan to be the one,” while polling in the low single digits. That’s either extraordinary confidence or a complete break from basic arithmetic. Nobody wants to be the first to head to the bench, so they stay on the floor, and the combined result is that they all lose together.

Then there is Tom Steyer. He’s spent over $130 million on ads and he’s still tied at 14% with a county sheriff. I’ve seen this before, owners who think they can buy a championship by just throwing money at the roster without checking if the players actually fit the system. Steyer spent $345 million on his 2020 presidential run and walked away with zero delegates. He’s currently on track for a repeat performance. The most jarring part? He told a reporter he hasn’t followed Governor Newsom’s record “closely enough to give him a grade.” Imagine walking into a locker room and telling your teammates you haven’t bothered to watch the game film. You’d lose the respect of the room before you even laced up your sneakers.  ...

Let's applaud former state Controller Betty Yee (a controller oversees the state accounting) who can read numbers and did have the decency to get out! How about some more of them taking one for the team -- that is, the people of California.

Kareem looks to Gov. Gavin to lead Dems out of this dead end alley. Gavin has never been much of a team player, but Kareem is probably right that Newsom is the only one in the party who might be able to knock some sense into this field of ambitious infants. We've already got an Orange Toddler in DC;  California should be able to do better.

Thought for a rainy Monday

Back to the fray on Tuesday.

Religious follies among American Christian tribes

Of course I've been following with some combination of horror and amusement Donald Trump's foray into demeaning Pope Leo while play acting Jesus. The President is outmatched. 

But hey, this is a political blog, mostly, so I thought I'd pass along two contradictory interpretations of whether the needy Orange Toddler might derive electoral benefit among Catholics from his latest round of religious posturing.

First off, JVL from The Bulwark. He looks at the electoral record and brings receipts: 

... It looks to me like Trump is accelerating the move of Christian nationalists away from Christianity and towards pure Trumpist nationalism—even among Catholics. ... I have said for several years now that my general sense is that American Catholics are walking down the same path that evangelicals trod in the 1990s when they consolidated behind the Republican party and became more of a political bloc than a religious movement.

... Catholic voters have become more Republican over the last eighteen years and this trend accelerated when Donald Trump—the least Christian presidential candidate in history—appeared on the scene.

During that period we saw something similar happen with white evangelical voters, who were +50 R in 2008 but grew to +66 R in 2024.

That 16-point swing looks pretty big. But during the same period, Catholics swung even harder. Catholics went from -9 R in 2008 to +12 R in 2024—a 21-point shift.

A decent and intelligent Catholic himself, he hates what he sees happening in his tribe.

This is what I mean when I say that Catholics look to be on the kind of curve that white evangelicals went on in the ’90s. 

Maybe Catholics will turn away from this road, but I’m not optimistic. If anything, Trump’s open blasphemy seems likely to accelerate the trend by forcing these people to make a choice between the teachings of the Church and the demands of a nationalist political cult. 

From where we sit in 2026, I’ll be surprised if most Trumpist Catholics end up choosing Catholicism in such a showdown. 

At the Tesla Takedown, San Francisco

To my slightly jaundiced eye, JVL is a classic American Catholic of the white sort who used to define Catholic culture in this country and no longer do. 

Aside from the Irish and some Germans who came even earlier, white Catholic immigrants from Europe of the late 19th and 20th were hard working folk who crossed the ocean for a better life. They were often exploited by longer established and richer white mainline Protestants (my tribe) who didn't much want to share. This set of Catholics retained considerable cultural distance from Protestant Americanism; in particular, often had their own schools, sometimes in home country languages, up through World War I. The closing off of immigration between 1922 and 1945, followed by national mobilization in World War II, finally enabled this wave of white migrants to assume a place in the political and cultural center. 

It was time ... some cultural distinctions remained where large white Catholic populations still lived -- fish sticks for school lunch on Friday, anyone? -- but white Catholic America became more and more just ordinary America.

Obviously JVL's got a point about the rather horrible political trajectory of this, most visible, segment of white Catholics -- but these folks are not the only Catholics. 

The sociologist Robert P. Jones thinks the Orange Toddler is too dumb to understand the implications of his religious antics in nationalized elections.

What’s the Political Risk of Trump’s Fight with Pope Leo?

I don’t believe President Trump understands the political risk of picking a fight with Pope Leo XIV. My best guess is that he believes that the unquestioning submission demonstrated by his fawning white evangelical followers exists among all of his Christian followers. But Catholics are not white evangelical Protestants.

While white evangelicals have voted more than 80% for Trump every time he has been on the ballot and have held strongly favorable views of Trump through every controversy and outrage over the last decade, Catholics have been more measured in their support. 

Most notably, there is a strong racial and ethnic divide among Catholics: six in ten white Catholics supporting Trump each time he has been on the ballot, but six in ten Latino Catholics have supported his Democratic opponents.

... If his support falls further, it could be game over for Republican candidates in competitive midterm elections and for the next Republican presidential candidate. While Trump and Republican candidates might be able to weather a 5-10 point drop in support among white evangelical Protestants, given that they largely live in safe deep red districts and states, the GOP would not survive such losses among Catholics—both because of their size and their location. Overall, Catholics comprise 22% of Americans, nearly double the size of white evangelical Protestants (13%). Most importantly, Catholics are much more numerous in swing states ...

In the midterms elections, there are only a handful of competitive races, and they are nearly all in states with significant Catholic populations. For example, the competitive House races are largely confined to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, New Jersey, and Texas. Competitive Senate races are confined to Michigan, Maine, North Caroline, Georgia, Ohio, Alaska, and New Hampshire. ...

In these competitive states for the midterm elections, the Catholic vote looms large... In California and Texas, Hispanic Catholics (reminder: Trump favorability at 25%) outnumber white Catholics by around four to one. ...

Jones, an escapee from a white southern evangelical background, thinks alienating a few white Catholics and a lot of non-white Catholics could be devastating to Republican prospects. Trump's attacks on the pope will exacerbate anti-Trump trends. His analysis is plausible. I guess we'll see.

• • • 

Click to enlarge

Kevin Jones, an ex-evangelical, pastor, and author, writes a truly delicious takedown of current Trump pretensions from within a Bible-centric frame. Do enjoy: 

Meet the original Trump: Herod the Great  ...

... Herod ruled Judea from 37 to 4 BCE. He was not Jewish by lineage; his family was forcibly converted to Judaism not long before Herod’s birth. He held his throne not by popular mandate or ancestral right, but because the Roman Senate appointed him. He was, in every sense, an outsider. Herod was a man whose claim to power was conferred by an empire, not earned by belonging.

Sound like anyone?

To compensate for this legitimacy deficit, Herod did two things simultaneously. First, he built. Relentlessly. Obsessively. He constructed the harbor city of Caesarea from scratch. He erected palace-fortresses across the desert. He raised an artificial mountain (Herodium) and built a palace on top of it to serve as his own monument. And in the ultimate power move, he rebuilt the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem on a scale so staggering that the rabbis later said, “He who has not seen Herod’s Temple has never seen a beautiful building.”

Herod put his name on everything. Caesarea. Herodium. Towers named after his brother, his friend, his wife.

If Herod had access to gold leaf lettering, you’d better believe it would have been on the front of every building.

Second, and this is the part that should make every American Christian sit up straight, Herod weaponized religion. Not because he believed in it, but because he understood that in Judea, religious legitimacy was political legitimacy. You couldn’t rule the Jewish people without the blessing of the religious establishment. And so Herod set out to acquire that blessing … by any means necessary....

There's much more. Don't miss it.

• • •

Have to say as an Episcopalian, it was nice to see the Archbishop of Canterbury sticking up for the Pope in this kerfuffle, even though he may not quite know what to do with support from a girl.

Archbishop of Canterbury backs pope’s calls for peace amid Trump feud 

We must not accept that the Trump's regime is as good as it gets

Let's have a little delight. Sometimes things still work.

Glover and his crewmates — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — were the first people to launch aboard NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule. Tensions were especially high during their final descent because the spacecraft had a known design flaw in its heat shield; NASA is still investigating the details of the shield’s performance.

“I could tell we were in a fireball,” Glover said, describing the plasma outside the spacecraft during atmospheric re-entry. He admitted his first thought was, “Is it supposed to be that big?”

When the hatch opened after they splashed down, Koch said, “I was completely overcome.”

“I just screamed. I was so happy,” she said. “It was just pure elation and just a visceral, emotional reaction to not only being home, but people there coming to us and bringing us out — just unspeakable joy.” NBC News

The time of demented Don has robbed us of much simple pleasure in the realization of what human beings can do when we work together. Artemis reminded us of all of that potential.

Jay Kuo described this well:

... Americans watching Artemis II carry four astronauts around the Moon feel something they didn’t expect: the deep satisfaction of watching something difficult done well. The same could be said for the compelling educational success story unfolding in the Deep South, driven by disciplined and evidence-based methods rather than ideology. And it could be said about a 34-year-old democratic socialist mayor of New York City, who is governing by filling potholes while securing child care funding, elevating it all into a political philosophy.

This hunger for competence is something newer and more demanding than just nostalgia. It’s a refusal to accept that this is as good as it gets. It’s also a rejection of the pre-Trump order that failed too many for too long. There is a growing recognition that government can actually work, that planning and expertise and execution are not elitist but democratic, and that when systems fail, ordinary people suffer most.

What we owe ourselves, and each other, is an insistence on holding leaders to a standard of competence. This standard can and must replace the current, destructive emphasis on performative loyalty, disruption, entertainment and optics.

It’s the standard that demands showing up, doing the work, and delivering real results — with the bonhomie and camaraderie of a shared mission, while trusting that the experts have prepared well so we don’t burn up when we plunge back down to Earth.

I admit to not being a devoted NASA fan. I watched the first moon landing in 1969 with small-minded horror; damned if the first thing astronauts did when they got there was discard some no longer needed equipment. That is, we humans thoughtlessly littered a pristine environment. 

But I've since come to appreciate our capacity to work in groups, most especially to organize ourselves in support of humane values. At our better moments, together, we can do the work and create great things.

Friday cat blogging

 

I don't know whether Mr. Mio has any idea how silly his twenty pound body looks when he rolls over and plays charming like this. Obviously he's confident in his safety and I'm glad of that. For a monster cat, he came to us a little timid.

Meanwhile, Ms. Janeway explores any available box. She had never been timid about exploring.