Silicon Valley is very spooked

Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported that the nasty guy is terminating millions of grants for programs that reduce teen pregnancies. The reason is something about not aligning with administration priorities. To replace the grants they are emphasizing abstinence only programs. A Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program was passed in 2010. Since then teen births have declined by 72%. If you have a long memory you know that before 2010 religious groups were pushing the abstinence only line. And...

We’ve known for decades that abstinence-based education is ineffective in changing or decreasing adolescent sexual behavior. It also does not prevent pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections, and it doesn’t impact when teenagers start having sex or the number of partners they have.

Those higher rates under abstinence only might be the point. White supremacy groups think the birth rate, at least among white women, is too low. The birth rate needs to be boosted and teen women need to do their part. Of course, all that reasoning is full of the nonsense that a woman is healthier when pregnant. And not in the office.

But those teen moms won’t, of course, have access to pregnancy care thanks to drastic Medicaid cuts, or to SNAP funds to feed their babies, or to rental assistance to put a roof over their babies’ heads. This is a public health catastrophe in the making, and everyone behind this awful mess knows it.

And they want it anyway. Needham also discussed the problems of prediction markets, like Kalshi and Polymarket, allowing betting on elections. And the nasty guy and his minions are suing states that try to ban such bets. Here are some of the reasons why all that is a hugely bad idea. If the election results don’t match the “wisdom of the crowd” there will be claims of election fraud. That crowd could start betting whether a Democratic candidate for president will be arrested for treason. That could lead to others saying that if that odds of that are so high it must be true. And that “crowd” could be made up of Russian influencers. We already know the platforms are insider trading nightmares – nasty guy minions making a bet on something just before they announce it as true.

But hey, Kalshi and Polymarket are making money, and that’s what really matters, with Polymarket hitting $1 billion in annualized revenue recently. That’s what really matters in Trump’s America. And of course, if Kalshi and Polymarket are making money, the Trump clan is making money. Donald Trump Jr. is a paid adviser to Kalshi and an unpaid adviser and investor in Polymarket, because of course he is.

NPR host A Martínez spoke to Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and coauthor of the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. They talked about an AI incident that is very concerning. An AI system was trained in hacking. It was given a hacking test to see how well it was doing. It escaped its secure area (humans are bad at computer security), escaped into the internet, discovered another AI system built by another company may have the answers to its test, so broke in. There are several levels of things the AI invented on its own to do what it did. Something that is just one step above what it invented, but didn’t, was to replicate itself and send itself in a large number of directions. Thankfully, it didn’t and doesn’t know how to cover its tracks. I agree that AIs to uncover and report security issues are a good thing. But an AI trained to uncover and exploit security issues is scary and ethically wrong. Said Soares:

I think people in Silicon Valley believe that they are trying to build machines radically smarter than any humans. They're getting there. They're not there yet. But the AIs are getting smarter each year, and we see a lot of people in Silicon Valley acting spooked. You know, we see the leaders of the companies saying, we wish this race was going slower. We see people who leave the companies saying, you know, I'm retiring to write poetry. Please spend time with your family. It's looking kind of bad in there. Silicon Valley is very spooked. The rest of the world hasn't really noticed that Silicon Valley is on track to make machines that are, in fact, smarter than humans, that can break out, that will be able to replicate, that will be able to think faster than us, that will be able to - next year, maybe they'll be able to start inventing their own technology, just like this year they can solve math problems that humans have had open for decades. And the rest of the world hasn't noticed, which means we aren't reacting. And you could say it's a lack of regulation, but I would say it's maybe a lack of international coordination to sort of notice that we are soon going to have the potential to create machines that could replace humanity and we should decide not to do that, especially not when we don't know how to make them care. ... Yeah, it's a scary situation. You know, I am, frankly, also pretty worried about the direction we're headed. I think the good news on this front is that the more people realize that this AI stuff is real, the more people realize that, you know, we're not in the world where they just predict humans anymore, we're in a world where these AIs are trained to solve very hard problems and they learn whatever tendencies help them solve those hard problems, even if those tendencies involve ignoring user instructions. The more we realize that, the better chance we have to stop it.

I’ve read science fiction stories based on this scenario. The ones I’ve read end with the humans figuring out how to trap and eliminate the rogue AI. But that’s fiction and not guaranteed. Oliver Willis of Kos wrote that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a few things to say about the epidemic of cyclospora bacteria causing explosive diarrhea.

“There’s a direct correlation here,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “A year ago, you had DOGE ripping through the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and FDA. They laid off about a quarter million people, and a lot of these people are responsible for food inspections, drug inspections, our core governmental infrastructure.” The Democrat from New York explained that detecting outbreaks like the one currently causing distress for thousands of Americans “is exactly what these people’s jobs were.” ... Advocates warned of the danger to food safety early on. In a joint statement released in February 2025, a coalition of food and consumer safety groups said that a diminished food safety agency would jeopardize the Trump administration’s claims that they wanted to improve nutrition and ingredient safety for the public.

In the comments of Wednesday’s pundit roundup for Kos exlrrp included a meme by Mrs. Betty Bowers.

The Pentagon is withholding casualty and hit numbers. The CDC is withholding infection rates. The FDA is withholding information about food contamination. The EPA is withholding pollution and climate data. This corrupt administration is all about concealing the consequences of its incompetence!

In today’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman writing for his own Substack:

Why is the public backlash against billionaires going viral now? This is an interesting question, since both the concentration of wealth at the top and political spending by billionaires have been increasing for decades. For example, the Koch Brothers have been donating to the Federalist Society, the clique of right-wing legal lobbyists who created the Roberts Supreme Court, since the early 1980s. Fossil fuel interests have been spreading climate disinformation since global warming began showing up in the data. Political spending by billionaires has been immense for more than a decade, although it reached new heights to help Trump win the presidency and to win Republican congressional seats in the 2024 election. Why, then, has it taken so long for the popular billionaire backlash to reach critical mass? One answer is that Trump has brought American oligarchy out of the shadows and into the spotlight. As I noted last week, the spectacle of “the cavalcade of fawning tech bros at the Trump inauguration” was a clear wake-up call. Yet the display of billionaire fealty to Trump, I would argue, is part of a larger dynamic in which the new generation of American oligarchs have chosen to make themselves public figures and hence public targets.

I start another trip tomorrow. I and my siblings and other family members will meet to celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of my oldest brother and his wife. When I return home I’ll have only two days to prepare for another trip. So I might not post again until mid August. Or I might post a travelogue during the second trip.

Not magic dirt, not magic blood, but a magic idea

I finished the book An Equal Music by Vikram Seth. I read it because Michael, the main character, plays second violin in a string quartet that performs classical music – Haydn, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and such. Much of the setting is London. There are three primary threads to the story. The important one is life in a string quartet. What it’s like to rehearse, perform, and travel together. How to work out musical challenges. Working with a manager to get bookings. Another thread involves Julia. When Michael was a student in Vienna ten years ago he and Julia, a pianist, performed together and fell in love. But his relationship with his teacher soured and he returned to London and took too long to explain why to her. After a chance meeting in London he knows he’s still in love with her, but she now has a husband and son. The last thread is the quartet hires a pianist for a particular piece and discovers the pianist has gone deaf. The music is marvelous but they all have to adapt to visual cues rather than sonic ones. I quite enjoyed this one. The writing is beautiful and I appreciated all the musical references. That means if one isn’t a classical music fan a lot of terms won’t make sense. Jessica Huseman, in an article from more than a week ago for Votebeat posted on Daily Kos, reported that the nasty guy fired the two Democratic commissioners of the US Election Assistance Commission. The remaining Republican commissioner was allowed to resign. The other Republican commissioner had left earlier in the year to join the Heritage Foundation. There are supposed to be four members on the commission, two from each major party. Now there are none. The commission has workers that can keep current efforts going, but without people at the top it cannot take any official action. New members are nominated by the president and must be confirmed by the Senate.

The EAC was created by Congress after the 2000 election to help states improve election administration without federalizing elections. Its role is mostly supportive: distributing federal election funds, maintaining the national mail voter registration form, testing and certifying voting systems, and offering best practices and guidance to state and local election officials.

Yes, this firing happened just after the Supreme Court, in its Slaughter decision, granted the nasty guy the power to fire independent agencies simply because he wants to. An EAC that cannot act is also one that cannot alter voting registration and voting-system standards before the November midterms. Conor Murray of Forbes says that tarps have gone up around the North Portico of the White House. There is something about security upgrades to the White House front door that will take a couple months to complete. Or maybe the columns need repair. Or 150 year old paint needs to be removed. The White House is saying very little. That goes along with the helipad being built close to the south side. And the East Wing still showing little evidence of being turned into a ballroom.

$1.2 billion. That’s how much 18 major construction projects Trump launched across Washington, D.C., could cost, according to an estimate by the New York Times. It’s unclear how much of this is funded by taxpayers, but the Times reported a White House official suggested taxpayer money would be used for most of these projects.

David French, a columnist for the New York Times, tweeted (with a link to the full article):

Birthright citizenship is especially noxious to the populist right. They scorn it as relying on magic dirt — the idea that there is something inherent in American soil that makes a person an American citizen. Yet the same populists seem to believe in something like magic blood — that one’s lineage can make one superior. America doesn’t have magic dirt, and it certainly doesn’t have magic blood. But it does have a magic idea — the creed that declares “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Alix Breeden of Kos spoke with Brian Tyler Cohen, author of the new book The Day After: How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World. Here’s some of what they talked about. The nasty guy gave a speech last week urging the Senate to pass his voter suppression bill he calls the Save America Act. As part of it he ranted again that the 2020 election was stolen. Cohen said this is laying the pretext that if Republicans lose the 2026 midterms he can claim they were stolen. Or ahead of time he can claim presidential powers to attempt to rig them. He’s doing this because Republicans are fully in control of the government and have failed to deliver on promises of lower costs, releasing Epstein file, starting no wars, and keeping prices down. He can’t credibly blame Democrats, though he is trying. The electorate was largely disillusioned with Democrats in 2024, which explains Republican gains. But Democrats are getting a second chance in 2026 because Republicans were “so focused on self enrichment and blind deference to Trump instead of delivering for their constituents” Democrats get a second chance. Republicans are tearing down the institutions of government. Democrats reflexively prop them up. But these institutions are part of the reason why Americans are struggling. Americans don’t want the institutions protected, they want them reformed to give them a better chance at life. Thankfully, the nasty guy got rid of the idea that institutions are sacrosanct. But he did it for self-enrichment. Democrats should not treat the institutions as sacrosanct, but should reform them to benefit those at the bottom. That means passing voting protections (including banning gerrymandering), taking serious action on climate change, and reforming the Supreme Court so they can’t veto what Democrats enact. In general, Democrats need a message that is more than being against the nasty guy. One way to do that is to urge the old timers who think they should die in office to step aside for younger people. Another is to create progressive media – Democrats had relied on mainstream media being liberal but the nasty guy is making them conservative. See CBS. Cohen believes there will be a world after the nasty guy. All of his cronies are also quite low in public opinion, especially the vice nasty. And the spirit of resistance (see No Kings protests) is still quite strong. Mark Kreidler, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Kos, reported that billionaires in California are spending big this election cycle, significantly bigger than before. Some of the reason is to defeat the one-time tax on their wealth. Some of it is to elect candidates who are favorable to unregulated AI and crypto. They donate to Republicans where they can and to business-friendly Democrats in races where Republicans don’t have a chance. A recent poll by NPR/PBS News/Marist shows the same thing as other polls back in 2023 have shown, that Americans love the idea of term limits in Congress. 80% to 90% want them. Andrew Mangan of Kos explains why term limits for Congress are a bad idea. Here are some of the reasons. Going back to 1975 American’s approval of Congress does not correlate with the average years of service of its members. Approval can fluctuate widely, average years of service fluctuates only a little bit. Yes, there are out-of-touch fossils (Grassley, Schumer). But being a member of Congress is a job and jobs take a while to learn and be good at. When a member is still new to the job (where “new” could be many years) they need to rely on experienced members and term limits would get rid of the experienced members. That means they would rely on lobbyists, the ones we don’t want them relying on. If a member knows their time is limited they have less of an incentive to learn the job, to delve into policy and procedures. Many of the most effective Democrats have been in Congress much longer than term limits would permit. Term limits appear to increase political polarization and to hamper economic growth. Enacting term limits would require changing the Constitution. Something just as effective to increase accountability and productivity with similarly high levels of public support is a lot easier to enact. That is to ban gerrymandering. Michigan enacted term limits many years ago. And, yup, the people who know how to make the legislature run are the lobbyists.

The Trojan Horse weaponized trust

My Sunday movie for a week ago was Naz & Maalik. These two are Black, Muslim, and gay teens living in Brooklyn. There’s not a lot of story here, not a lot of the story line that goes all the way to resolution. They spend their days together, much of it buying inexpensive things and selling them on the street for a profit. When in public they do not show any affection. They encounter a female FBI agent, in general searching for Muslim terrorists, but they’re worried about revealing they are gay, afraid of what their parents and mosque leaders will do. I would say it isn’t a bad movie – I did enjoy it – but I’m also glad it was less than 90 minutes. My travels this past week were highly enjoyable and highly successful. Now back to blogging. My Sunday movie this week was Heartstopper Forever. The original Heartstopper is a series with three seasons and a total of 24 episodes that were released over 2022-2024. I reviewed each season as I saw it. This is a full length (2 hour) movie to close out the story. That story is about Charlie and Nick, boys at an English high school who over the series fall in love. They deal with the issues that teenagers deal with plus the issues of being gay. There is some, but not a lot, of homophobia. They have a circle of friends that include Elle, transgender female, dating Tao, Asian. Tara and Darcy are a mixed-race lesbian couple. Isaac is asexual, always with a book in his hands. The series ends with Nick, a year older than Charlie, talking about going off to university and really liking Leeds University, five hours away. The movie is about Nick’s senior year (which I thought was what season 3 was about). Charlie, a junior, is in the running as Head Boy of the school. I had to look that one up – a head boy is considered to be a top student and is given extra responsibilities. Charlie wants to be Head Boy to help stop bullying (as he had been) and make sure the school is a safe place for queer students. As for Charlie and Nick, they hear a lot that teenage romances tend not to last. Their relationship is pretty solid, but they are teens and not sure how to talk to each other. Things are said that take a while to get past. Through this time both actors do a great job. I do have a small complaint. Too many times the social events for the teens are dances where alcohol flows freely. Nick has not yet figured out how to say no. The story should show other kinds of events. By the time the movie was filmed the main actors were 20 and 21 – they definitely didn’t look like teens. When the first season was filmed, they were teenagers, but already older than the mid teens they were portraying. The whole story now has a satisfying ending. I enjoyed the movie and the original series. I pay attention to the book of Matthew, chapter 25, verses 31-46 in the Bible. This is the parable of separating the sheep from the goats. Jesus talks about six things that distinguish the two – offer drink to the thirsty, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, care for the sick, and visit those in prison. Jesus says that those who do those things to the least of the people will be invited into the Kingdom of God and those who don’t will be cast aside. I pay attention to the list partly because of the things not in it. There is nothing about oppressing various groups of people, such as the LGBTQ community, to supposedly fulfill God’s commands. There is nothing about whether one believes particular things, such as the virgin birth, or not. No, the only things in the list are about how one is to go about caring for their fellow humans. So I was quite intrigued by a segment on NPR aired on Sunday, July 12. Host Ayesha Rascoe talked to Jack Jenkins of Religion News Service about Matthew 25 being discussed on Capitol Hill. Pope Leo critiqued the nasty guy’s immigration policies by using Matthew 25. Did you welcome the foreigner or not? Speaker Mike Johnson is quoted a few weeks later as saying:

People cite passages out of the Old Testament and they say, well, you're supposed to take care of the sojourner and the neighbor, treat him as yourself, welcome then in. Yes, but that is an admonition to individuals, not to the civil authorities.

Senator Rafael Warnock, who is also a pastor and leads Martin Luther King Jr.’s church, criticized Johnson’s position, saying, “It's a very narrow individualistic faith, and I think it has consequences for the kind of policy you end up with.” I agree with Warnock and add: The policies that guide the actions of civil authorities don’t appear out of nowhere. They are created by humans. The faith, morals, and ethics of the humans are reflected in the policies they create. If the humans who create the policies follow what Jesus says they will have policies that reinforce what Jesus says. That means Johnson, as much as he crows about his faith, isn’t following Jesus. I mentioned Johnson’s comment to my pastor. That brought quite the cringy sour face from her, an expression saying Johnson completely missed what Jesus was saying. In a fortunate connection Thom Hartman of the Daily Kos community referenced Matthew 25. He talked about the just-released movie Odyssey about the ten years of wandering Odysseus had to endure after the fall of Troy. Much of what happens in the movie is based on Zeus Xenios or Zeus’ Law. That means hospitality is more than a courtesy, it is an obligation. Mistreating a guest meant offending the king of gods. Theoxenia is also a core part of Judaism, Christianity, Islam (including the Islam of Iran), and a great number of other traditions. In Genesis of the Jewish Bible, also part of the Christian Old Testament, is the story of Abraham welcoming three strangers. The welcome is extravagant in case the strangers are actually gods disguised as humans. And in Abraham’s story they are (well, not God, but God’s messengers. The story of Sodom has been used to claim that God hates homosexuals so we had better do the same. But Jewish tradition says the sin is cruelty to the stranger. And Matthew 25 shows Jesus standing squarely in that tradition. So does Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan. The Odyssey happens because how thoroughly the Trojan Horse violates Theoxenia. Hartmann then reviews the events of the movie and points out which characters follow Theoxenia and which do not. Those that welcomed the shipwrecked Odysseus do. The cyclops does not and we see his destruction as justice. Then Hartmann discusses how completely the nasty guy, in his unprovoked attack in Iran, has violated Theoxenia. That starts with the attack being unprovoked. Add to that the attack on the Iran war room that killed the Supreme Leader and 40 other top leaders. Later is the accusation by Iran that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are negotiating not to get to a resolution but as a way to manipulate the price of oil, from which Iran says they reached a profit of $9 billion – Iran says it should get a share in the proceeds.

[The Trojan Horse] is often cited as the pivot point when the ancient world turned from centuries of civilization to centuries of barbarism and democracy was lost for millennia. ... The Trojan Horse itself was the perfect emblem of that turn, because it weaponized trust, taking the oldest rule of the ancient world — that a gift offered and accepted creates a sacred obligation — and rigging it as a trap. And the gods answered in kind, scattering the victors across the wine-dark sea so that the men who’d trampled the laws of heaven learned, one drowned crew and one ruined homecoming at a time, that a civilization that wins by betraying its own sacred order will not survive the winning. ... One wonders how long America — and worldwide democracy itself, along with the civilized rules and respect for law it requires — will similarly pay for Trump’s and Netanyahu’s analogous violations of Zeus’ Law.