It Can't Be Real

This feels like an AI simulation. As if we’re all living in an edit created by the reprobates hiding among us, with their finite sense of civility and unlimited access to video-generating software.

Did that happen? Is this real?

That video that circulated across the algorithms of Texas Longhorns fans was clearly fake. The one with Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian backhand slapping sideline reporter Holly Rowe — deplorable “entertainment” that only those wallowing in the gutter of society would find amusing.

But was that really a scion of the Manning family and a room full of credentialed reporters laughing at that trash?

Yes, unfortunately. That was real.

Also, though the savagery depicted in the video was created by artificial intelligence, did the current face of a billion-dollar football enterprise actually disrespect an ESPN/ABC Hall of Fame broadcaster who won the Curt Gowdy Award in 2023, as though she were a YouTuber holding one of those budget wireless mics?

Unbelievable, but facts. That, also, was real.

“I saw the AI Edit of (Sark) slapping Holly Rowe.”

I asked Arch Manning if he’d seen any edits on TikTok or Twitter after the game, and his answer is gold. pic.twitter.com/70FnNCVEHb

— Evan Vieth (@EvanVieth) September 14, 2026

There was a time when meatheads would giggle at off-color jokes only while in the locker room, or at least in the sanctity of the group chat, because at least good sense would prevail and remind them that some punch lines aren’t suitable for public consumption. It wasn’t that long ago, either, when head coaches jacked up on adrenaline would fulfill their social contract by spitting out a couple of nothings to a sideline reporter — or, at least, express regret when they didn’t.

That kind of human decorum, however, is fading faster than someone can hit “send” on the latest AI-generated nonsense. And plummeting deeper than even Arch Manning’s likability.

I can’t tell which is worse: the phony clip depicting violence against a woman, or the real-life behavior displayed by Sarkisian, then Manning and a room of media members? Before they could edit themselves and add a glossy filter to their apologies, they showed the sordid bits of their individual characters for all to see.

What a weird couple of days in Texas. It’s almost as if the state’s content creator said “Screw it” and mixed a superedit of slop.

It started immediately after the No. 4 Longhorns’ 24-23 comeback victory over then-No. 1 Ohio State, their first home win over a top-ranked team in 76 years. Stunning! So stunned was Sarkisian that the 52-year-old coach completely forgot how to form big-boy words with his mouth. Instead of respecting the postgame interview process, Sarkisian blew off Rowe’s attempt to toss him congratulatory softballs.

Rowe was trying to do her job. Sarkisian, using the excuse of technical difficulties despite ABC’s production appearing ready for his on-field interview, did not do his.

pic.twitter.com/6ZVqJmIP2v
— Holly Rowe (@sportsiren) September 15, 2026

Yes, Sarkisian is contractually obligated to perform this duty — TV deals help fund his $11 million salary — as required by his conference’s multibillion-dollar media agreements with the networks that broadcast its games.

And no, just no: Screaming “Texas fight!” into the camera, and then leaving the reporter in the dust, does not satisfy this responsibility. Nor does it make for good television. More than anything else, it’s just not a good look.

Holly Rowe is not happy with Texas HC Steve Sarkisian

pic.twitter.com/L6etAq1k4Q
— Pick 6 Pack (@Pick6PackFB) September 13, 2026

Sarkisian makes too much money, has been around big-time college football too long to get annoyed when the TV reporter doesn’t hurry up and ask him the two questions. On the greatest night of his greatest coaching feat, Sarkisian acted without grace or a shred of tact. College coaches aren’t diplomats, but they can choose not to act like jerks. [...]

Bo French, a Republican running for Texas Railroad Commissioner, couldn’t get past all those pesky brown-skinned men invading the stands. Not just college kids, but Others cheering for Texas’ football team and snatching up Texas’ degrees. The sight of so few blond and blue-eyed coeds made the politician forget all about the Longhorns’ big night, and it instead made him thumb out his outrage and xenophobia on X.

“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” a post from French’s account read.

Thank goodness plenty of non-cretins exist across Texas, including some within his own political party, and those folks spoke out against the post.

Then, after all of this, after the head coach was rude and the GOP candidate couldn’t mask his racism, the college quarterback found some low-vibration content to be, heh heh, so hilarious. As did some of the reporters on hand, who presumably confused a press room for an out-of-control frat house.

During a Monday media availability, a reporter asked Manning if he had seen any of the TikTok edits done off the game. Arch, the 22-year-old Manning whom the public truly knows little about other than that he plays quarterback like his famous uncles, offered that he saw “an AI edit of Sark’s interview.”

Immediately, a loud laughter from reporters.

“Y’all seen that one?” Manning asked.

More laughter.

“That’s a good one!” Manning said, smiling and then pointing at someone off camera in solidarity with the joke.

Again, laughter.

“Of him slapping Holly Rowe,” Manning confirmed.

Still, laughter in the room.

“Yeah, it’s hilarious,” Manning concluded, and somewhere his family’s public relations firm probably asked for a raise.

When a colleague sent me that clip Monday night, my reaction was disbelief: “Are we sure that arch video isn’t AI?”

I asked genuinely because never would I have thought that a Manning, no matter his age, would so clumsily stumble into such an unnecessary mistake. Rarely an hour goes by without Peyton and Eli filling our screens. Even Cooper, Arch’s father and the lesser-known Manning brother, presents well in commercials and interviews. The Mannings understand media. They are a media company in and of themselves. So, five-star Arch must have had a measure of training before entering the mainstream. He can read the line of scrimmage, but clearly the kid can’t read a room. Or maybe he was lured into his thoughtless comments because of the jocularity inside that room full of reporters.

Most likely, they were grown people with jobs who represent various media companies. So-called professionals. Disregard for one second the lack of judgment by those reporters, however, and consider: In what reality does an adult cackle over the depiction of a man assaulting a woman? 

By Tuesday, the desensitized reactions to a fake video led to some regrets in the real world. The reporter who asked the question and posted the video of Manning with the caption: “… his answer is gold,” issued an apology. He said he acted too hastily in trying to get the video up and made a mistake in judgment. Also, Manning posted his remorse with humility. He apologized to Rowe for what “she has personally had to deal with because of my comments.”

Manning’s apology post was indeed real. So was the very real disrespect Rowe faced from the moment she placed a microphone near Sarkisian, as was the actual post from a politician mistakenly trying to score points with the wrong people. All of it was real, which means AI isn’t ruining our world. Real people are doing just fine in that role.

by Candace Buckner, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: X/Twitter
[ed. The widespread crudeness we see these days can be attributed to one source, and it isn't AI. Let's Go Brandon! People who'd normally keep such low feelings to themselves, or share only with like-minded friends, now feel empowered to let their inner freak flags fly. From the comments:]

Stop making 22 year old men apologize to 60 year old women for goofing around

Hahahaha they made him talk to you? I feel so bad for this guy.

Are you gonna apologize now for storming off the field like a little baby when you didn't get your interview?

This is so sad. It was a cartoonish joke that was funny. The kid finally shows a little personality and you women attack him. Our society sucks.

[ed. "Our society sucks". Yes it does. In some places and with some people.]

Lost Child

He said, Come with me! Take Daddy’s hand.

How all the stories begin. A large hand lowered, your small hand lifted.

She isn’t sure, she admits, exactly what happened.

Or when. She knows that she was little.

Maybe four years old. Maybe three.

Just guessing. Mists of time, thinly whitewashed wall of memory . . .

No. Katherine does remember something about when. For today—Thursday, March 12, 2026—is an anniversary of that day.

It was, Take Daddy’s hand but hurry. Something was going to happen—unless it had already happened.

For, with Kit’s father, something was always either going to happen or had already happened, and it was either too late to stop it from happening or too early to even imagine it happening, but, in any case, Hurry, sweetie! God damn.

Not used to dressing herself. The new rosy-pink raincoat, crookedly buttoned, but maybe Daddy wouldn’t notice.

Hours later, at the hospital, parking at the rear—a high-rise garage, which Kit’s father hated because it slowed him down, Fucking God damn.

Kit cringed a little when Daddy spoke in a harsh voice, but she understood: Daddy was not talking to her.

When they were alone together—which was often now—Daddy joked that the two of them were practically living in this shithole car. Daddy was rarely silent; he was too nervous, edgy, to be silent. He seemed to be addressing Kit, but Kit knew that he would be annoyed if she interrupted him to reply.

Crucial to Kit not to annoy her father. If she was sweetly quiet, obedient, Daddy smiled at her with the radiance of Daddy love, and Kit basked in his love like a cat stretched out in the sun.

Kit’s fear was that Daddy’s smile would disappear. Like a light switched off.

You would have to have known him to understand, Katherine says.

Cursing as he made his way up through the parking garage, turning the wheel sharply, row after row of vehicles, nowhere to park, though the sign at the entrance had said “Open.”

True that Daddy was in a hurry, but true, also, that, when Daddy at last found a parking space, on the top level of the garage, he did not drive into it head first but took time to maneuver the vehicle around so that he could back it in. Daddy felt compelled always to back into a parking space; here, an alarmingly narrow gap between two large vehicles which required many excruciating minutes, Daddy grimacing as he peered into the car’s side mirrors, easing back a few inches, then forward again. His breathing came fast. His forehead glistened with moisture.

Rainwater in puddles on the garage floor. Slow-drifting fog, mist.

The smell of her father’s breath, like fumes.

In the back seat of the car, a potted plant, its blooms wrapped in crinkly cellophane, amid random newspapers, napkins, coffee cups. Also, a small suitcase so stuffed that one of the compartments was only partly zipped.

C’mon, silly. Nothing to be afraid of.

Kit smiled uncertainly. For Daddy was smiling. Nothing to be afraid of? It had not occurred to Kit that there might be something to be afraid of.

by Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Holly Andres

The Incredible Journey of a Migratory Shorebird

On a sunny June morning, in a bog outside Beluga, Alaska, I met a Hudsonian godwit. She had inky eyes and a long, slightly upturned beak that was pinkish-orange at its base and brownish-black at its tip. The feathers on her back were of mottled sepia tones, and those on her belly were rusty brown and painterly white. Her legs reminded me of the slender inserts of spring-loaded ballpoint pens, and her feet were refined pterodactyl claws. Her name (among humans) was A34, and she was about the size of a city pigeon. She was in the hands of Nathan Senner, a conservation biologist, who removed and replaced her geotag; measured her head, beak, wing, and leg; weighed her; and took two tail feathers and a sample of her blood. From that small number of data points, he can deduce where she’s been, how her feathers have grown, what genetic subgroup she belongs to, and her degree of exposure to mercury.

Senner leads a research laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, that is largely focussed on how migratory shorebirds, such as godwits, respond to environmental change. He grew up in Anchorage, where school loudspeakers announced the street corners on which moose had been sighted. In high school, he wrote an occasional “Birding with Nathan” column for the Anchorage Daily News. Senner’s father, Stanley, has devoted more than five decades to the conservation of migratory shorebirds. Starting in the nineteen-seventies, Stanley and his colleagues have been sounding the alarm on the vulnerability of shorebirds and working to protect key habitats, such as Alaska’s Copper River Delta. “Back then, no one was even talking about climate change,” he told me recently. Since 1980, roughly half of migratory shorebird species’ populations have declined by more than fifty per cent.

Migratory shorebirds are usually not a person’s first bird crush. They lack the supernatural aura of the resplendent quetzal, and they don’t go in for outlandish mating displays like that of the prairie chicken. As the Princeton University biology professor and shorebird-lover David Wilcove put it, migratory shorebirds can give an impression of being “little brown guys, buzzing around in the mud, not too big and not too small, and, whether one is a stint or a phalarope or a knot or a godwit, they’re just kind of there.” And yet, Wilcove told me, they are a birder’s kind of bird. Once people get to know them, they tend to fall in love. [...]

Migratory birds in captivity develop Zugunruhe, an agitated fitfulness, at certain times of year. Scientists don’t know precisely what provoked A34 to set off northward one spring afternoon, with a flock of her fellows, though, if they did, they might better know how her species will be affected by the shifting seasons of our changing climate. Godwits cannot soar like hawks or glide like albatrosses. They migrate by continuously flapping their wings. They must navigate crosswinds and headwinds, storms and maybe an occasional hurricane, continuing on day after day, night after night. As best as we can tell, they do not, while flying, eat or drink or sleep (at least not with more than one hemisphere of their brain at a time). After a journey of hundreds of hours and thousands of miles, they descend on a snow-covered shore at the Cook Inlet of southern Alaska or another favored breeding ground. They land considerably lighter than when they took off. “Many arriving shorebirds seem to be tired,” the ornithologist and conservationist Joseph Archibald Hagar wrote, in his foundational monograph, “Nesting of the Hudsonian Godwit at Churchill, Manitoba,” from 1966. In a field-diary entry, Hagar describes a group of birds that “within a minute or two dropped into some sunny spot out of the wind, tucked heads into scapulars, and went to sleep, not to move again for as long as we watched.”

In 1976, the young ornithologist Robert Gill took a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage. He was dispatched to the Alaska Peninsula to do biological inventories on public land that was up for lease to private companies. During those long-lit Alaskan summer days, walking across salt marshes and through the foothills of the mountains, Gill encountered thousands upon thousands of migratory shorebirds. He told me, “In Alaska, where the seasons are so prominent, it’s very dramatic. It feels like all the birds turn up over the course of one weekend in May.” Along with godwits, the peninsula was a summer home to yellowlegs, dowitchers, sandpipers, Arctic terns, and other species. But almost no one was aware that so many birds relied on this land. How the birds managed their journeys, where they might stop along the way, even how many of them there were—no one knew for sure. “In the vast expanses of wetlands and coastal tundra, you could see why,” Gill said.

The extinction of the once common passenger pigeon, famously described by the naturalist John Muir in his memoir (“I have seen flocks streaming south in the fall so large that they were flowing over from horizon to horizon in an almost continuous stream all day long, at the rate of forty or fifty miles an hour, like a mighty river in the sky”), was part of the impetus behind the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Godwits are protected under the act, so killing them or holding them captive, even for scientific purposes, is highly regulated. Also, they’re difficult to capture. Gill’s means of learning more about them was limited, he said, to “the kind of observational work done by old-school naturalists.”

In October of 1987, Gill received a call about nine bar-tailed godwits that had crashed into a radar dome near Cold Bay, Alaska, and died. “They were greaseballs,” he recalled. “They made any Christmas goose look lean.” The carcasses were sent to a lab to be analyzed. Fifty-five per cent of their body mass turned out to be fat. Gill suspected that these chubby godwits were preparing to fly non-stop from Alaska to New Zealand, where this species wintered. However, at that time, the longest known non-stop migration flight was barely half that long. “But, if they were going to stop in French Polynesia, why carry all that baggage?” Gill reasoned.

The lab also measured the birds’ internal organs. Gill’s collaborator, Theunis Piersma, noticed something peculiar: the guts, gizzard, liver, and kidneys of these birds were very small—it was like cutting open a lion and encountering digestive organs the size of a house cat’s. Then, in March of 1992, some forty godwit carcasses were seized from a poacher in New Zealand. These were birds in a very different part of their migratory cycle, and their digestive organs, when analyzed, were of more normal proportions. In 1998, Piersma and Gill published their findings in a paper titled “Guts Don’t Fly: Small Digestive Organs in Obese Bar-Tailed Godwits,” concluding that the birds shrank their digestive organs to reduce their weight and their metabolic demands during a non-stop migration. And then, somehow, regrew them. [...]

A female godwit, E7, took off on March 17, 2007, from near the Piako River, on New Zealand’s North Island. She flew more than six thousand miles non-stop to a nature preserve on the Yalu River, near the China-North Korea border; she stayed there for a little more than a month; she arrived at her nesting area in Alaska on May 15th and spent the summer there. The tracker was still working on August 29th, when E7 started flying southeast, over the Pacific. Gill’s team was doing field work in western Alaska and had only spotty internet service; the team would gather around a laptop, waiting for the updates on E7’s location to come through. North of Kauai, she took a slight right turn and continued flying. On September 7th, after more than two hundred hours aloft, she landed at the mouth of the Piako River, back on the North Island of New Zealand, where Gill had first met her.

Before E7, the longest documented non-stop migratory-bird flight was that of a Far Eastern curlew who had flown about four thousand miles. E7 flew some seven thousand without a break. The flight defied reason. “I had an engineering professor at M.I.T. call me up and say he gave his students an assignment to compare the size and flight range of E7 to a 747 jet,” Gill said. 

by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ash Adams
[ed. Stan Senner was a friend and collegue. Didn't know Bob Gill personally but used his work frequently in my habitat protection efforts.]

Myud Myechev, “Autumn in Kosalma” (1967)

via:

via:

Just Stop the Anthropic IPO Already

[ed. At the risk of turning this into a full-blown AI-centric blog, I do think this is important information to process.]

I want to delve into the full scope of the Anthropic AI takeover of politics happening over the past week. Yesterday, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei came out and explicitly asked for antitrust laws not to apply to the biggest AI firms. His biggest rival, Sam Altman, quickly agreed. And they are suggesting this legal change just before Anthropic seeks to sell shares on the stock exchange, minting a whole series of AI millionaires and billionaires.

Why do they want to suspend antitrust laws for AI firms? Well these guys say they need the industry collectively “pace the frontier,” aka in their framing, slow development of this technology so as to reduce the probably of human extinction at the hands of autonomous swarms of AI bots. And they can’t do that, they argue, without suspending laws prohibiting price-fixing cartels.

Then the Information reported today that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have been having backchannel conversations about establishing an AI standards organization, which presumably would coordinate this cartel.

Let me start with a very simple point. It is already illegal to release products that hurt people. It is illegal to compete by releasing products that hurt people. If these guys are genuinely manufacturing things that kill innocent people, the FBI should be arresting them immediately. The idea that they would not only release such products, but also issue stock for the American people to invest in multi-trillion dollar initial public offerings for such ventures, as Anthropic is planning, is utter lunacy.

I wrote about this attempt to terrify us into giving away our liberties on Friday, in a piece titled “Stop Panicking About AI.” But the IPO is something I didn’t think through. Apparently they think we should all get rich building world-ending product lines.

All that said, whether Anthropic goes public isn’t just up to the people at Anthropic. I asked some former Securities and Exchange Commission officials, and they told me that the SEC effectively has the authority to block initial public offerings. Here’s how.

Every company, before it goes public, submits an S-1 initial registration statement to the SEC. And the SEC can refuse to clear it if the commission believes that it doesn’t adequately disclose the risks a corporation’s securities present to investors. Technically, the SEC could go to court and get an injunction to block the IPO, but it rarely comes to that - the lack of clearance for an S-1 is red flag for investors so companies won’t go public until they get it.

In a functional system, there would be a dozen accountants and disclosure experts with sector training going back and forth with the lawyers telling them to expand on this or that, etc. And the commissioners either themselves or on a delegated basis won’t clear it until they’re satisfied. Today, it’s more likely that Trump himself just decides. Regardless, if Anthropic goes public, it’s not just because of the corporate insiders, it’s because Trump explicitly allowed it.

If I were a member of Congress, I’d be screaming mad right now, and yelling at Trump and the SEC to stop this event which will bestow hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth on a strange doomsday cult. [...]

There is one more point to cover. There is an ongoing political campaign to do something about AI, with a large swath of elites demanding action. That includes Barack Obama, who rarely demands anything except the most banal conventional wisdom. So when he says “AI policy is critical’ to Democrats, you know that it has reached peak elite acceptance. Still, what is that ‘something?’

The basic fight is over framing, not risk. Everyone sees risk here, but the root cause differs based on your perspective.

The AI doomers want their systems to be imagined as rogue agents bent on civilizational conquest, or as some sort of inevitable new technological paradigm that needs an entirely new legal framework superseding existing inadequate laws embedded in those musty old nation-states. Amodei argued the industry should have self-regulation, some sort of antitrust exemption to collaborate across the industry, and a global agreement among AI firms within democracies on how to manage risks. These developments, to Amodei, are inevitable, no human is responsible, though we must all act quickly.

Generally, this side is winning the debate. For instance, Senator Jon Ossoff, a 2028 hopeful who generally echoes whatever seems to be the most appealing line of Trump criticism of the moment, has mostly adopted that frame. Bernie Sanders seems to have given up on his campaign against oligarchy to promote Dario Amodei’s ideas. And in the core of the Democratic establishment, this view has taken hold. For instance, here’s Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the likely successor to Chuck Schumer, praising Amodei.

Brian Schatz@brianschatz 

I am still studying this but it’s a reasonable start, and takes seriously the proposition that we need real proposals that can be enacted rapidly.

Dario Amodei @DarioAmodei 

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our
8:27 AM · Sep 12, 2026 · 42.7K Views

There are many calls to convene Congress in emergency session to act, and Trump’s advisors are trying to get him to announce immediate emergency action. Given that the big AI companies are already having discussions about coordinating their AI model development, it seems like they are just pushing for final legal permission to openly run AI as a cartel.

The debate, however, is not quite over. So what’s the alternative view? Well, the rule of law adherents look at these AI systems merely as unsafe products. As such, their request isn’t for new laws, but enforcement of existing rules. All products are subject to standard nuisance claims and other torts, unfair and deceptive practices laws, and so forth. Agents are, as Cory Doctorow notes, malfunctioning machines, or “autonomous malicious software” operated by reckless people at OpenAI and Anthropic. Moreover, it is actually illegal to build unsafe products as a method of competition, or to keep up with rivals by also creating unsafe products.

Former FTC Chair Lina Khan listed a bunch of laws that could already apply. And she let slip that state attorneys general are looking at potential criminal liability for AI CEOs.

Lina Khan@linamkhan 

Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books —…
11:31 AM · Sep 13, 2026 · 183K Views

(Khan did actually start enforcement against AI developers when she was Chair. And it notable that one of the very first things that Trump-Vance FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson did was set aside the penalty of an AI developer she penalized for creating unsafe and fraudulent tools.)

So who will win? Well I am fairly pessimistic, as the bludgeoning from the superrich works in crisis moments, especially when Bernie Sanders is on the side of the establishment.

But the debate doesn’t fracture on obvious partisan or factional lines. Much of the industry is going to be split on the matter. For instance, David Sacks, a generally malevolent crypto investor and technologist, is making cogent arguments, because his crew would be excluded in an OpenAI/Anthropic cartel world. He’s a die-hard Trumper and despised Khan when she ran the FTC, but he retweeted her argument here.

A lot of policymakers, such as Senators Richard Blumenthal, Rep. Ro Khanna, and others, see liability as an obvious way to shape the industry to be more safe. The Senate is also full of people who are used to blocking each others’ legislation; Maria Cantwell and Ted Cruz are trying to work together on AI safety, but are fighting over whether to preempt state laws.

There are a host of proposals out there, and the details will matter. And there is something of a stampede for an emergency session to take action. If Trump chooses to accept the need for action, then it’s likely the Anthropic/OpenAI/Google types will get what they want. If not, then the debate will continue, perhaps until the financial markets impose a different mental model.

At any rate, we can all agree that Anthropic shouldn’t go ahead with its IPO. Or at least, that’s something we should all be able to agree on.

by Matt Stollar, BIG |  Read more:

Image: via

Turn Yourself Into A 1985 Photo

[ed. Because everybody must have a secret urge to look like a Miami Vice character. Since this video is mostly about writing better prompts, see also: this link (not video) for travel planning.]

Gotta Serve Somebody

[ed. Unfortunately, not this country.]

Cheers and whistles accompanied President Trump’s prizefighter-like arrival in the House chamber to deliver his State of the Union address in February. While Republicans leaned into the aisle to shake Trump’s hand, several Democrats refused to turn his way, and their House minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, remained seated. From the rostrum, the president took in the peculiar mixture of sustained applause and stark silence with a lofty smile. Then he began, and nothing in his words or manner gave the impression that the legislative branch arrayed before him was intended to be his coequal.

In truth, they no longer were his coequal. The president now dictated what they did, what they didn’t do and even how they behaved. Trump saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
Announcing a new round of tariffs that he planned to implement on unspecified “countries that were ripping us off for decades” (to replace his previous tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down), Trump breezily said, “Congressional action will not be necessary.” He predicted that his executive orders on prescription-drug pricing would never be overturned by any future administration, but then he turned to Senator John Thune, the majority leader, and Representative Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, and casually added, “John and Mike, if you don’t mind, codify it anyway.”

About halfway into his record-setting 107-minute address, Trump challenged every member of Congress to stand if they agreed with the principle that America should first protect its citizens rather than “illegal aliens.” While the Republicans stood, clapped and hooted, Trump leaned over the lectern and glowered at the unanimously seated and stone-faced Democrats. “You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing up,” he told them. The Democrats, he declared later in his speech, were “pro-crime.” They were “sick people.”

A few House Democrats, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, openly jeered the president. Another, Representative Al Green of Texas, was escorted from the chamber by Capitol security officials for holding up a sign that read, “Black People Aren’t Apes!” (in reference to the president’s Truth Social post that month of a video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes). More notable, however, were the empty seats: Roughly half the Democrats in both the House and the Senate chose to boycott the address.

That so many members of Congress refused to take part in their one annual public event counted as yet another first of the Trump era. “I went because I’m an institutionalist,” Representative Terri Sewell, an eight-term Democrat from Alabama, later told me. “This body can still be a powerful voice for good. That’s the reason why I did it. But it’s increasingly harder to stomach, to be honest.”

The Republican members, for their part, dutifully issued statements praising Trump’s address. “Last night, President Trump highlighted the wins of his administration and the Republican-led Congress for the American people,” began the news release of Representative Dave Joyce, a seven-term congressman from Ohio and an appropriations subcommittee chairman. But Joyce offered a more somber assessment a few months later, when I asked him if he felt that Congress had assumed an overly submissive posture toward Trump.

“I think we have, unfortunately,” Joyce replied. He recalled the first State of the Union address he attended, in 2014, just after President Barack Obama had threatened to use his pen to sign executive orders and take other executive actions to pass his agenda if Congress failed to do so. “I was sitting next to a Democrat, and I said, ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ But we’re just as bad. We continually cede power to the executive. The president blows things up, and then we just go home,” Joyce said. On occasions when Trump has expressed displeasure over a legislative matter — as he did over the release of the Epstein files and the failure to pass voter restrictions — Republican congressional leaders have complied by going into recess rather than holding votes they knew would anger the president.

“At this point,” Joyce concluded, “there’s no will to overtake that.”

The question is whether that will has been permanently extinguished. On Nov. 3, American voters will decide which party controls the House and the Senate for the remainder of Trump’s presidency. In theory, at least, the outcome of their decision should be enormously consequential. If the Republicans somehow manage to defy the current ill portents — an unpopular leader, a sluggish economy and a costly war with no end in sight — then the president will have a final two years to place his indelible stamp on American life. Should the Democrats regain control of both chambers, or at least the House (as they are expected to do), then Trump’s opposition will possess the legislative and investigatory tools to bring the president’s agenda — and potentially the entire Trump era — to a decisive halt.

But the two scenarios rest on the assumption that Congress still functions as the founders planned when they devoted Article I of the Constitution to the legislative branch. Among those functions, described in Section 8 of Article I, are the exclusive power to impose taxes, fund government agencies, declare war, regulate commerce with foreign nations and, above all, “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing Powers.”

Few Americans — including members of Congress themselves — believe that the legislative branch is fulfilling its duties as the founders intended. As Representative Jim Himes, a moderate Democrat from Connecticut who has served in the House for 18 years, told me in June, “Congress is somewhere between dysfunctional and irrelevant — and is despised by the people.”

Congress was already unpopular decades before Trump became president. Since 1974, according to Gallup polling, its approval rating has averaged a dismal 28 percent. As of July, Congress has the lowest favorability ranking, 9 percent, of any institution in America. A low regard of this magnitude cannot be ascribed to one person.

Trump has nonetheless taken an already weak legislative body and made it subservient. He left office in 2021 only after his followers violently raided the Capitol on Jan. 6 in a failed effort to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results and keep him in office. The fact that a majority of House Republicans voted against certifying the election mere hours after the riot, coupled with the role of Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader at the time, in acquitting Trump of impeachment charges weeks later, created a permission structure for Trump’s eventual return to power. That ugly episode also left its mark on Congress, Himes said: “It’s a huge unhealed wound that continues to separate the two sides of the aisle.”

Trump’s deep thumbprints on the Republican-controlled 119th Congress are unmistakable. It achieved a near historic low last year in the number of bills passed, with prioritization placed on Trump’s tellingly named One Big Beautiful Bill tax legislation. This year, the president has strong-armed the House into funding an unpopular war in Iran after having vowed on election night, “I’m not going to start a war — I’m going to stop wars.”

At the same time, Trump has defied congressional authority through his tariffs and his National Guard deployments, by tearing down agencies and erecting new federal buildings — all with the barest of pushback by Republicans on Capitol Hill. Those in his party who have occasionally stood up to Trump — such as Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, by forcing him to agree to release the Epstein files, and Senators Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn, by, respectively, voting to impeach him and suggesting in 2023 that Trump’s “time has passed him by” — have been harried out of office.

“They’re just petrified of Trump,” said Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who served in the House for 36 years before voting to impeach Trump in January 2021 and subsequently deciding not to seek another term. “Name the issue. It’s just amazing. No one’s got a spine.”

Upton elaborated further on the fear among Republicans: “Look, I know the pressure. If you signal you’re going to vote the wrong way, leadership calls you in. Then the White House starts to turn the screws. Then you start getting threats on social media. I’ve had very serious threats to my home. We put in security cameras that connected directly to the Police Department. And now they have trackers who look for you in restaurants. Today it’s worse than ever. Remember, Trump has the command over the Republican Party in every state and county. There’s no anti-Trump Republican bastion.”

But Trump’s bullying influence on the legislative agenda, and on legislators themselves, does not adequately capture how he has shaped Congress. It is his pugilistic, attention-seeking conduct that now permeates the Capitol, and hardly by coincidence. Trump has backed candidates in his own image and has set off a state-by-state redistricting war of attrition in which centrist swing districts have been replaced by hyperpartisan ones. Most of all, Trump has reshaped Congress by example — by showing how bragging, lying and name-calling can amount to a formula for success.

“There’s a degree to which Trump has normalized disreputable behavior among people who’ve been here for a long time,” said Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who came into office two years before Trump’s first term and is now leaving after unsuccessfully running for the Senate. “But it’s also attracted disreputable people. Under Trump, the quality of my colleagues has noticeably decreased.”

Moulton made clear to me that he wasn’t just talking about Republican colleagues and that Trump’s lovers and haters alike have taken on his self-absorption. His view is shared by members on both sides of the aisle. “What you see now are too many people who come in viewing Congress as their green screen,” Joyce said. “And they’re going to make a name for themselves and don’t give a damn about anything else.”

In seeking to understand how Trump has left his mark on Congress, which I’ve been covering for more than a decade and a half, I interviewed more than 30 current and former members from both parties and chambers, as well as congressional aides from both parties. In response to a request for comment, a White House spokeswoman, Olivia Wales, wrote in a statement: “President Trump and the White House have worked closely with our partners in Congress to deliver on many important promises to the American people.” She added: “President Trump will continue working with Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, lower costs for working families and deliver on the commonsense, America First agenda that Republicans were elected with an overwhelming mandate to enact.”

Its current noisy state of brokenness is complicated to untangle. If Trump bears some responsibility, so do the lawmakers who have sublimated themselves to him — and so, for that matter, do the voters who maintain that they want Congress to work together to solve the nation’s problems but then send to Washington individuals who have no interest in doing so. “Internecine warfare is what has become vogue,” said Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who has decided not to seek another term after serving for 22 years. “You’re elected not to get along with the other side and get good things done for the country. You’re elected to fight and kill the other side.”

by Robert Draper, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Derek Brahney
[ed. I've got nothing against Republicans, some of my best friends are so afflicted (not many, but a few, haha)... and truthfully, there were once some very reasonable and honorable people in the party going all the way back to Eisenhower, Goldwater, Javits, Dirksen, Weicker and others (not to mention folks like Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol). But if you're voting for the Republican party as it exists today, or because that's the way you've always voted (or just hate liberals), then you're as complicit as the rest of these spineless jellyfish who move in whatever direction the tide tells them to. I actually have a somewhat shameful admission to make, and that is not being fully invested in the next election (stolen or not). If Republicans win, we'll get the Full Monty, and if democracy lives through that (and it's debateable) even true believers (and future generations) will be hard pressed to look back fondly on that particular hell. The party might get set back for decades. But if Democrats win they'll be cursed as always to come in after a Republican administration, try to clean up its messes and get blamed for those hard choices. Rinse and repeat. To be clear, I'm not a great fan of the Democratic party as an institution either, but at least it's composed of more people who respect reason, fairness, the rule of law, and actual governing on behalf of the wider public (not just corporations), even if they sometimes go off on crazy tangents (which the party inevitably falls for).]

Some Ways AI Could Kill Us All

[ed. Nearly everyone agrees by now that AI is an existential threat, but the hows and whys are often vague or imcomplete.] 

I don't think this is how it will actually play out. If you play a chess grandmaster, you can predict that they will beat you even if you can't predict how. I chose these examples because I don't think they require much imagination or accepting exotic assumptions.

It is important to note that if chimpanzees were to guess how humans would decimate them, they would get it wrong. Chimpanzees would not imagine guns. They would not foresee poison gas. They would not conceive of chemical castration. They would not imagine humans going around and intentionally infecting them with AIDS. They have no concept of these things; they would not see it coming.

Perhaps they might guess we'd be really good at throwing rocks. Amazingly good. Well, technically, that's what guns do: throw "rocks" really really well.

So how will superintelligent AI actually wipe us all out? Probably in a way I couldn't conceive of. Nonetheless, it's not hard to see how deadly they could be with what we already know about.

by Ruby, Less Wrong |  Read more:

Image: DALL-E via; and here. 

[ed. I wouldn't necessarily conflate super intelligence with ill-will. Most likely AIs will just be pursuing some unrelated goal and exploring every possible means by which to achieve it (including removing human barriers). That is, unless bad (human) actors are involved, which should not be discounted. See also: How My Students Think About AI (LW).]

Ellen Starr Lyon, Green Altar I, 2023

via:

Neil Welliver aka Neil Gavin Welliver, Winter Rainbow, 1983

via:

The Final Battle For Democracy

Forget November 3. It’s January 3 when Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans might bury our democracy once and for all. Here’s how.

Over the past year and a half since his return to the White House, Trump has exploited every conceivable unlawful means possible to rig the midterm elections in favor of the Republicans, and the federal courts have struck down as unconstitutional every one of these unlawful attempts. He will try every unlawful means over the remaining weeks to ensure that Republicans handily win the midterm elections in November. Those of us who oppose his illegality will look to the courts, but the federal courts will be institutionally incapable of checking his final unlawful rampage. [...]

***

This is how the crisis would unfold. The precursor of the crisis will come sometime before noon on January 3, when Speaker Johnson removes current House Clerk Kevin McCumber and replaces him with a person loyal to Johnson and House Republicans who they know will refuse to list on the statutory roll of representatives-elect to the 120th Congress any Democrat-elect whom Johnson and the Republicans direct him or her not to list. Under Rule II, Clause 1 of the Rules of the House, the Speaker of the House has the unilateral power to remove the incumbent clerk, and then the power under Title 2 U.S.C. § 5501(a) to replace him temporarily with whomever he wishes until the House elects a successor. McCumber is a Republican appointed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He is widely respected for his integrity and faithful adherence to the Constitution and is reputed to be unwilling to carry out orders he considers to be unconstitutional.

The first moment of constitutional crisis will come when, sometime before the 120th Congress has been gaveled into session, the loyal temporary clerk refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress. At that moment, interested members-elect and others will be forced to seek a writ of mandamus—a court order to a government official instructing him or her to perform a mandatory duty—from the federal court to the temporary clerk, ordering him or her to list on the clerk’s roll all members-elect who have been certified by the states as having been elected from their districts to the new Congress.

Members-elect will argue that the clerk has a ministerial duty under 2 U.S.C. § 26 to list all representatives-elect whose properly filed state certifications show that they were “regularly elected in accordance with the laws of his state or of the United States.” Because the clerk has no authority to omit any duly certified representative-elect, even if a representative-elect’s election is contested, the clerk unquestionably has a ministerial duty under law to list all duly certified representatives-elect. But this begs the question whether a court will issue the writ of mandamus to the acting clerk.

At first blush, a court will be reluctant to order the clerk to list all duly certified representatives-elect because of an instinctive belief that such an order would interfere with the constitutional process of the House to judge its own elections and returns. The wise and learned judge, however, will understand that rather than interfering with the House process, issuance of the writ will actually enable the House process to proceed to completion without judicial interference. Were that wise and learned judge to issue the writ, his or her order would immediately be appealed to the Court of Appeals, and from that court to the Supreme Court, while the country and the world wait in suspense.

The next moment of constitutional crisis will come if and when, after appeals, the court finally issues the writ of mandamus, and the clerk refuses to obey the court’s order to list the Democratic representatives-elect. At that point, it is possible there will be no further federal court involvement until such time as the 120th Congress officially convenes and votes not to seat representatives-elect. Then, that vote by the 120th Congress will be immediately reviewable by the federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States.

Judicial review of the House’s decision not to seat Democratic representatives-elect in the 120th Congress would take weeks, if not months, during which time the United States would be in the throes of a paralyzing constitutional crisis, helplessly vulnerable to all the world’s evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election. [...]

The House has historically claimed that its decision not to seat a member-elect because of fraud or irregularities in the elections is unreviewable by the federal courts. But its decision is reviewable. The Constitution unquestionably requires the House to seat a member-elect who was validly elected in a free and fair election. The Article 1, Section 5 power of the House to be the judge of its elections and returns does not give the House the power to deny a seat in the Congress of the United States to a candidate elected by the American people in a free and fair election on the mere assertion, pretextual or otherwise, by a simple majority of the House that the candidate’s election was tainted by fraud.

Thus, on and after January 3, if congressional Republicans were to determine that a Democratic member-elect was elected because of fraudulent voting and refuse to seat him or her, that determination would be scrutinized by the federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court.

It will never be a nonjusticiable political question whether the United States House of Representatives by simple majority vote can refuse to seat a member elected to Congress by the American people in a free and fair election on the pretextual and unsupported assertion that the member-elect’s election was tainted by fraud. Such is the very opposite of a nonjusticiable political question committed to the House of Representatives. For in the decision of this question lies the answer to perhaps the most fundamental question under the Constitution: Is the United States of America a democracy, in which “We the People” elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?

I don’t intend to be overly sanguine about this Supreme Court. This is the court that shattered the one constitutional truth in the U.S. since 1789 that “no man is above the law” and placed Donald Trump of all presidents above the law in Trump v. United States. This is the court that betrayed the Constitution by refusing even to decide whether Trump was disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his insurrection against the Constitution, which he clearly was. This is also the court that has cynically authorized Trump’s lawlessness for the past two years through its aptly named “shadow docket,” without so much as briefing, argument, or written opinion.

But surely by now this court must understand what it has wrought for the U.S. and the Constitution, and is aghast as we all are, even if it is not penitent. Surely, surely, it will understand the signal moment in American constitutional history that would be presented, and this time understand its supreme obligation to the nation.

by Michael Luttig, TNR |  Read more:

Image: Mark Harris; Getty (x6)

Cloudy With a Chance of Controversy

Somebody messed with Alaska’s weather last month. Before anybody checks the skies for black helicopters, relax.

On Aug. 23, a California company called Rainmaker Technology Corporation launched a drone near the head of Kachemak Bay and flew it into clouds cold enough to contain supercooled water. The drone released less than 1 pound of silver iodide. Rainmaker says the experiment coaxed about 19 million gallons of additional precipitation from those clouds over three hours.

That sounds dramatic. It wasn’t. Spread over roughly 100 square miles, 19 million gallons amounts to about one-hundredth of an inch of rain. If you had been standing underneath it, you might have noticed a drizzle. You also might have continued mowing the lawn.

Given the collective social media freakout, you’d be forgiven for thinking Rainmaker had pointed a weather-controlling laser beam right at Homer and hit “deploy” from a top-secret mission control bunker.

The experiment produced an impressive online meltdown after residents and local elected officials discovered it had happened without much advance notice. State Rep. Sarah Vance called on Rainmaker to cease operations in her district. Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Peter Micciche raised questions about why local residents weren’t informed. Social media did what social media does whenever the words “weather modification” appear together. Cue the chemtrail conspiracy theorists.

Cloud seeding isn’t science fiction, and it certainly isn’t a secret government plot. Scientists have experimented with it since the 1940s. The basic idea isn’t especially difficult to understand.

Some cold clouds contain tiny droplets of water that remain liquid even below freezing. Introduce particles such as silver iodide, whose structure helps ice crystals form, and some of those droplets freeze, grow and become heavy enough to fall as snow or rain. Some. That is the key word there.

Cloud seeding can’t manufacture a thunderstorm over a cloudless desert; it can’t steer hurricanes; and it can’t turn a passing cloud into Noah’s flood. It can, however, give the right kind of existing cloud a little nudge of inclement encouragement.

Research has become considerably more sophisticated, too. The 2017 SNOWIE experiment in Idaho demonstrated that scientists could detect and measure precipitation produced by silver iodide seeding under the right conditions.

Now, that doesn’t mean every question has been answered. A 2024 Government Accountability Office review found that studies estimated cloud seeding can increase precipitation anywhere from zero to 20%, depending on conditions, and said more research is needed to understand when it works best. The GAO also found that existing research suggests the amounts of silver iodide currently used do not pose an environmental or human health concern, while noting that the effects of much more widespread use aren’t as well understood.

In other words: We need to do more science, and Alaska is a pretty good place to do it.

Rainmaker came here because cloud seeding requires particular atmospheric conditions, including clouds cold enough for the process to work, which Alaska has. The potential applications extend far beyond producing an August drizzle near Homer.

Western states are staring at increasingly serious water problems. Reservoirs and rivers supplying farms, cities and hydroelectric projects are under pressure. Snowpack is, in effect, nature’s water-storage system. Even squeezing a few additional percentage points of precipitation from suitable clouds could matter enormously when repeated across the right watersheds.

Cloud seeding won’t solve climate change or replace conservation efforts, but if better engineering can help put more snow on mountains and more water into reservoirs, we should be rooting for the scientists trying to figure out how.

That brings us to the one part that beckons reasonable criticism.

Rainmaker says it notified the Alaska Department of Natural Resources before the test. DNR determined the drone research was a generally allowed use of state land, but the department says it has no jurisdiction over cloud seeding itself. The Department of Environmental Conservation is now reviewing what happened.

That’s a little bit of an awkward gap but despite the naive handwringing by elected officials, we shouldn’t be falling all over ourselves to make new laws here. Alaska doesn’t need to construct a regulatory fortress around every weather balloon, drone or scientific experiment, nor should every experiment become subject to the whims of pitchfork-carrying mobs at a town hall. Scientific questions aren’t settled by whoever draws the angriest crowd, and that needs to be balanced with residents knowing what’s happening in their communities — or, in this case, over their communities.

The state should consider a simple notification and oversight process. Tell local governments when these types of experiments are planned, and make information about the chemicals, quantities and science readily available. But any public process must not be allowed to be hijacked by petty naysayers.

Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant — even when we’re talking about making clouds. Then let the scientists do their science-y thing. Too often, good projects or experiments are derailed by irrational conspiracy theories shouted at public meetings (or by elected officials) and the result is that we don’t move forward. That’s a bad outcome any way you slice it.

by Editorial Board, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Image: Anne Raup/ADN

[ed. Another example of artifical intelligence gone awry.]

Loren Holmes, Alaska pollock trawl fishery (ADN)
via:

AI Goes Hollywood

via: (more at the link, podcasts, interviews, etc.)

James Taylor

[ed. Great barn concert. Full playlist here. History of the Frozen Man here (do watch untill the end).]

Carly Simon and James Taylor
via:

[ed. Everybody had the hots for Carly back then (and Linda Rondstadt). She actually came from a very wealthy family; you've heard of the publishing company Simon and Schuster? When she was young she thought her dad made shoes for a living (Shoe-ster). Hahaha...]

Outsourcing Mom

Worried About Your College Kid? Now You Can Hire a Local Mom. At some universities, parents can pay to make sure their children are cared for, the way they were back home.

Concierge companies offering student support have existed for decades. But in recent years, a new crop of upstarts — such as Horwitz’s company, MindyKnows; the Bama Mama in Alabama; the GA Mom in Georgia; and Campus Mom in Texas — have met additional demand from a new generation of worried parents.

Historically, college has been a time for young adults to gain a sense of independence. They run their own errands, do their own laundry, organize their own lives. That’s changing, according to Monteigne Long, a co-founder of Campus Mom, who said the parents of this generation of college students are much more involved in their children’s day-to-day lives.

“When I came to college in 1998, my parents dropped me off on a Saturday and were gone,” Long said. “Parents are staying much more tuned in and connected with their students’ college experience than they have in the past. When they can’t be here, they want someone who can be that stand-in for them.”

The arrangements, though, have drawn occasional criticism online and from experts who worry young adults won’t learn enough essential life skills with so much additional support.

“Sometimes people think that we’re coddling students,” Horwitz said, “and I just don’t think that anything could be further from the truth. They’re 18, 19 years old, and they’re just off independently for the first time. We’re just a support system.”

The specific services vary here and there, but share commonalities. Campus Mom offers “holistic wellness check-ins,” laundry services and sorority recruitment support packages, sent to the sisters to up a child’s odds of acceptance. Carrie Eckhardt, the Bama Mama, will clean students’ dorm rooms and check in if parents haven’t heard from their child in a few days (“just pop in and say hi, and take a picture and send it to their mom”).

This month, one parent told Eckhardt it seemed like her daughter was going out to a bar every night. But she had opted to stay in, and the mother wanted to celebrate the decision with a “stay-in basket” that included her favorite ice cream, cookie and socks.

Horwitz, for her part, brings students balloons on their birthdays and chicken soup when they’re sick, sits with them in the emergency room and picks up their prescriptions if they’re busy. She bakes homemade challah, coordinates with the bedbug exterminator, texts photos and updates to faraway parents and doles out recommendations on the best local doctors and landlords.

by Kristi Albert, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kate Munsch for The New York Times
[ed. Why not cut to the chase. Just hire somebody to take all their classes and summarize everything with AI. Of course, cheating on tests would be an optional additional expense.]

We Already Have the Tools to Regulate AI

I want to delve into the full scope of the Anthropic AI takeover of politics happening over the past week. Yesterday, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei came out and explicitly asked for antitrust laws not to apply to the biggest AI firms. His biggest rival, Sam Altman, quickly agreed. And they are suggesting this legal change just before Anthropic seeks to sell shares on the stock exchange, minting a whole series of AI millionaires and billionaires.. [...]

Let me start with a very simple point. It is already illegal to release products that hurt people. It is illegal to compete by releasing products that hurt people. If these guys are genuinely manufacturing things that kill innocent people, the FBI should be arresting them immediately. The idea that they would not only release such products, but also issue stock for the American people to invest in multi-trillion dollar initial public offerings for such ventures, as Anthropic is planning, is utter lunacy. ~ Matt Stoller: Just Stop the Anthropic IPO Already.

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These are for profit corporations taking in billions of dollars from the world. You can't ensure your product isn't dangerous? Then don't release it until you figure it out! ~ Comments section, Lina Khan post (below):

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Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books — a point @FTC emphasized repeatedly during my tenure.

1. There is an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products. For example, releasing unvetted AI models or agents can violate consumer protection laws. Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an “unfair or deceptive” act or practice under the FTC Act (and analogous state laws). And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity. 

2. Existing laws also prohibit “unfair methods of competition.” This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same. As the Supreme Court has noted: “A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the [unfair methods of competition] statute was aimed." 

3. The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We had started investigating these partnerships and cross-investments across the stack (and released a preliminarily overview of some findings: ftc.gov/news-events/ne…). Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and inter-dependencies. We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this — given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead. 

4. As AI tools dramatically change the landscape of cybersecurity risks and hacks, all businesses should be doubling down on having core security protections in place. Firms that fail to invest in adequate data security measures or fix known vulnerabilities can also be breaking the law. A recent analysis showed that around 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies do not even have a way to notify them about security issues. During my @FTC tenure, we sued firms for poor data security practices and held CEOs liable when they were personally responsible.

5. As policymakers consider new legal regimes, we should be looking to lessons from prior efforts to govern major sectors, such as banking and other networks, platforms, and utilities. Tools like structural separations, nondiscrimination, and supervision could be key, and there’s a rich history of what works and what doesn’t. But we can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws.

by Lina Khan, Former Chair, Federal Trade Commission 2021-2025 |  Read more:

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1) AI will not eradicate humanity. Humans survived an ice age, the Black Death, two world wars, and (so far) the advent of nuclear weapons. Anyone who is loudly warning of AI-caused human extinction should not be taken seriously. 

2) If you worked in a company where you anticipated a 10% chance that your product would kill ten people, let alone all people, the correct response would be horror, ceasing all operations, and likely contacting the police or other criminal authorities. I am obviously no Coxon booster but at least his behavior is in line with his stated beliefs. Any current AI company employees saying "yes, me too, the thing we are building and about to IPO may kill all humans" should, again, not be taken seriously. Their actions betray their actual beliefs. 

3) Antitrust law does not prevent AI companies from coordinating to make sure AI does not hurt people. It does not prevent companies working together to make sure it doesn't hack people; the DOJ and FTC made this clear a decade ago when they issued a policy statement saying that the agencies "do not believe that antitrust is – or should be – a roadblock to legitimate cybersecurity information sharing." The same principles apply here. See: justice.gov/archives/opa/p… 

4) Antitrust law does absolutely prevent AI companies from organizing to prevent the entry of cheaper, upstart rivals because the bigger companies are burning cash and failing to achieve sufficient profitability. The panic of individual employees may be sincere if misguided, but the moves by their CEOs to achieve some kind of broad "antitrust waiver" or "exemption" should be meet with deep skepticism in light of the economics of the industry and the threat they face from open models.

by Alvaro Bedoya, Former Commissioner Federal Trade Commission 2022-2025 | Read more:

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“It’s a hoax,” Mr. Trump said during the five-minute call, which Mr. Huang put on speaker. “The robots are not going to be taking over the world. That’s not going to happen.” ....

Mr. Trump made it clear that in Silicon Valley’s roiling debate over what to do about A.I., the president is very much on the side of executives who argue worries about safety are overblown and the government should avoid regulation. His disinterest in government involvement runs counter to pleas from leading A.I. companies like Anthropic. ~ Idiot in Chief (via NYT).

See also: Trump Says a Smart President Is All That’s Needed to Rein In A.I. [ed. Certainly useful, if we had one.]

Did 9/11 Really Change Everything?

One of the best firsthand accounts of the Sept. 11 attacks I’ve read is a short essay titled “Diary of Disaster” by Nicholas Spangler, at the time a 25-year-old journalism-school student and today a reporter for Newsday on Long Island. Spangler happened to be downtown that morning, close enough to the World Trade Center to arrive on the scene between the first and second planes. Like many early recollections of the first hours at ground zero, written before memories had been corrected to fit the dimensions of history, his is as strange as it is horrifying.

He hears the bodies of the north tower’s jumpers hitting the pavement, and also the easy-listening music still drifting out of the building’s outdoor speakers. Under a tree newly stripped of its leaves lies a severed leg wrapped in burlap. Barely an hour after the second tower’s collapse, onlookers enlist Spangler to take a souvenir photo of them posing in front of the wreckage with a disposable camera. It’s the end of the world, or at least of a world, and people have not yet figured out how they are supposed to act.

Days later, trying to make sense of what he has seen, Spangler writes: “I believe that our present way of life ended in those minutes or hours. The American ethos — the way we see the world and our place in it — fractured and will perhaps have to be discarded.”

When he revisits that passage three months later, however, it feels wrong to him. “Our way of life did not end so much as it was interrupted,” he writes, “and if there is such a thing as an American ethos, it has not been significantly altered. There are those relative few whose lives bear the permanent bloody brand of that day but most of us continue to be shaped by much more banal events.”

Did 9/11 change everything? For years, people who agreed on nothing else about the attacks’ aftermath would have agreed that the answer was yes. Arguing otherwise would have been an affront to the victims, to the war on terror’s civilian and military casualties and to the common sense of anyone who has had to take off their shoes at airport security. But question and answer alike have always been colored by the assumption that 9/11 was supposed to change everything: that in being attacked as it was, the United States was being presented with a test that it could pass or fail.

A quarter-century on, it is possible to consider the question with at least some critical distance. Far too much of our current reality stems directly from 9/11 for anyone to argue credibly that it was not a hinge point in our recent history: the ubiquity of surveillance technology, the vague open-endedness that all American military operations now acquire, the general up-armoring of everyday life. At the same time, considering the most dystopian facets of this reality, 9/11’s influence is not as singular as it might have once seemed. It is a middle chapter in the story of American fracture rather than the pyrotechnic beginning. [...]

Of course, in the end, the United States got neither self-awareness nor self-actualization. What it got, a decade and a half later, was Donald Trump, whose election in 2016 has often been cast as a culmination of what the journalist Spencer Ackerman, in his 2021 book “Reign of Terror,” describes as the “decadent phase of the war on terror.”

Trump’s path from reality-TV celebrity to the presidency ran through the Islamophobic fever swamps of the post-9/11 right — the ground zero mosque panic, Obama birth-certificate conspiracism — but also through an increasingly bipartisan discontent with the war on terror that had, by 2016, curdled into cynicism. Trump was the first Republican presidential nominee to break the formidable taboo against affirming what most Americans by then believed, that the country’s post-9/11 military adventurism had been a mistake. He also did little to seriously curtail it in his first presidency and has enthusiastically expanded it in his second.

It has long been tempting to view Trump’s presidencies as the logical conclusion of the folly of the post-9/11 era, and as support for the liberal contention that the right’s calls for patriotism in that era were always really about seizing domestic power. But Trump has also enabled a re-examination of history, and even recent history, that complicates the tale of 9/11’s primacy. [...]

Trump’s 2016 election “represented the crystallization of elements that were still inchoate” in the early 1990s, John Ganz writes in “When the Clock Broke,” his recent history of the period’s underappreciated malaise. In retrospect, 9/11 was paradoxically both a respite from and accelerant of polarizations and pathologies that were already well underway by then. It allowed Americans to ignore them for a moment, until they came roaring back with redoubled force. [...] [ed. So, explain Obama.]

If you do not remember the Berlin Wall but had an adolescence shaped by social media and cellphones, the brightest dividing lines in recent history are technological — and, with the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence, are becoming more so. This is clear in the borrowed nostalgias of Gen Z, the bits of the past that 20-somethings have recently pressed into service as emblems of a lost golden era: “Friends,” John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, ’90s high-school-class home videos, music videos and concert footage from bands like Alien Ant Farm and Puddle of Mudd.

These artifacts span the pre- and post-9/11 years, and the lost innocence they represent has nothing to do with the attacks. Their interest comes from their evocation of a period when people hung out with friends in person and sweated alongside strangers at clubs and music festivals; teenagers goofed un-self-consciously for cameras rather than posing for them like jaded celebrities; and popular culture could be loud and dumb and not picked apart in the digital panopticon for its social politics. The shape that looms ominously over them isn’t the Twin Towers. It’s the iPhone. [ed. lol...ok.]

by Charles Homans, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Chantal Jahchan
[ed. Nice words, but no. C'mon. 9-11 was our last opportunity to cohere as a country, and we whiffed it. Instead we got a war on terror, as stupid and amorphous as any initiative based on a feeling (War on Anxiety?). A Patriot Act that gave subsequent crimes a never-ending veneer of political cover. 'Homeland' security, a Nazi term repurposed for new times. Two stupid reactionary wars (neither won) that among other things validated torture as official US state policy. Guantanamo Bay. A newly militarized culture. An expanded surveillance state. And fear... fear everywhere of some 'other' where strength and self-assurance used to be.]