Artificial intelligence promises to diagnose baffling illnesses, design new drugs, solve mathematical conundra, and unravel a long list of puzzlements that have proven difficult for humans to fathom.

The savants of Silicon Valley take these promises a good deal further. They speak of bringing humanity into a new age of enlightenment, seeming to revel in their god-like intentions to create a superintelligence destined to make humans obsolete.
Formerly a cornfield, Amazon's data center for A.I. at New Carlisle, Indiana.

not hiringSam Altman, the most prominent voice of the A.I. universe and CEO of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, has written that a next step, artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., will usher in “massive prosperity”.

But Altman also writes that the superintelligence that "humanity is close to building” will lead to "whole classes of jobs going away". Silicon Valley barges ahead nonetheless, making A.I. ever more powerful, unconcerned that their endeavors are likely to put millions out of work.

A.I. is already killing the entry-level job. "The unemployment rate for degree holders ages 22 to 27 hit 5.8% this spring", reports Bloomberg Businessweek. For computer engineering majors, the unemployment rate is now 7.5%. Companies are “going to need less and less people at the bottom”, said one CEO, a grim outlook for new college graduates. One said, possibly not kidding, it's harder "to land an entry-level role at one of the big banks than it is to get into Harvard University". One tech company completely stopped hiring any engineers below a mid-level position "because lower-level tasks could now be done by A.I." Newly graduated economists, normally enjoying 100% job prospects, are now having trouble finding positions as A.I. affects the market for even… Read More »

A reporter asked President Trump, “Why did you fire the head of the bureau of labor statistics?” He answered, “Because I think her numbers were wrong”.

If you didn’t know already, now you know that the America you once knew is gone. It is now a dictatorship where the man we still call “president” must be served only with data that conforms to his vision that we are living in his “Golden Age”.

Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Dr. Erika McEntarfer was Senate-confirmed and is under a four-year contract. That is no impediment for a dictator.

Friday’s jobs report dropped from preceding months to only 73,000 net new jobs created in July. Daniel Koh, who was chief of staff at the Labor Department during President Biden’s tenure, knows how labor statistics come to be:

”There are thousands of people who put together this report every month from hundreds of thousands of input data."

But Trump, utterly ignorant of the ebb and flow of millions of jobs across the nation, thinks the data are wrong because they don’t fit his imaginary reality. He tweeted:

”In my opinion, today's job numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.“

Business and government need reliable data to make decisions. The monthly job number, eagerly awaited by the financial markets on the first Friday of every month, is one of the key economic indicators tracked by government agencies. Because the job numbers from… Read More »

Still, nine years later, Donald Trump is so in the grip of his malignant narcissism that he must somehow disprove – however falsely – that he won the 2016 election without any assist from Russian meddling. He simply cannot stand any implication that Russia might have helped.

So he has charged his intelligence appointees to show that the “Russia collusion hoax” was rooted in the conspiracy of a cabal at the top of government that election year.

He has had CIA Director John Ratcliffe order up a “CIA Note”, a short and redundant document that finds multiple faults with the CIA’s prior review in early 2017 of Russia involvement. Ratcliffe followed this up by delivering criminal referrals to the Justice Department on July 8 that the former directors of the CIA and FBI, John Brennan and James Comey, be investigated for illegal conduct such as lying to Congress.

Tulsi Gabbard and her treasonous Obama.

And second, just a couple of weeks later, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard did her part to win Trump’s praise with her study of intelligence communications in late 2016 which, she alleges, show the corrupt intent of bringing down the newly-elected president, Donald Trump.

Gabbard upped the ante. It’s not just Brennan and Comey. She is going after Obama. She claims documents show Obama rejected the intelligence community view that Russia was not trying to “hack the election in favor of either candidate” and called a December 6th National Security Council meeting on “a sensitive matter” in which he charged DNI James Clapper to produce “an intelligence assessment that detailed not if but how Moscow affected the outcome of the election”, Gabbard writes. She is saying Obama ordered intel to slant its view to say – well, she doesn’t quite say what she thinks Obama… Read More »

On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned a lower court's order that California's National Guard be returned to Governor Gavin Newsom's control, ruling that President Trump was justified in federalizing the state's Guard without Newsom's concurrence.

The three-judge panel, two of them Trump appointees, ruled unanimously that the protests over ICE agents seizing brown-skinned people off the streets of Los Angeles had become overheated enough that "affording appropriate deference to the president’s determination" is warranted, "that he likely acted within his authority (italics ours)".

President Trump exulted in the decision, insulting the governor in the process, tweeting:

"The judges obviously realized that Gavin Newsom is incompetent and ill prepared, but this is much bigger than Gavin because all over the United States, if our Cities, and our people, need protection, we are the ones to give it to them should State and Local Police be unable, for whatever reason, to get the job done. This is a great decision for our Country..." (capitalization his).

This has been his dream, not to govern, but to rule. The doctrine of states' rights is not for him. Trump has long desired to use the United States military against the American people. Restrained by advisers who told him he needed to wait for governors to ask for federal help, he has regretted not taking direct action against the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. "The next time, I am not waiting” to send in… Read More »