The dealmaker makes another empty deal

I’ve mentioned the nasty guy made a deal with Russia to sell diesel fuel to the US. He made that deal because diesel prices are so high due to the war he started in Iran. Kos of Daily Kos explains how bad the deal is. Russia would supply 300,000 metric tons with another 500,000 tons in November and eventually up to 4 million tons sometime in the future. That sounds like a lot. But it isn’t. That first shipment is about 14 hours of American diesel consumption. The three shipments of 1.8 million tons will last about three and a half days. The grand total will cover less than ten days. The total amount is not enough to affect global prices. The deal is based on whether Russia has diesel to spare – and it doesn’t. Ukraine has so damaged Russia’s refineries it doesn’t have enough for domestic needs. Russia had banned exports and is importing from Iran and South Korea.

Trump doesn’t care about any of that. What matters to him is that 1) he could finally align U.S. policy alongside fascist Russia, and—this is particularly important—2) he could now blame Ukraine for high diesel prices. And his surrogates spent the weekend doing just that.

The nasty guy is also able to announce he made a wonderful deal to help out truckers and farmers. He won’t be saying anything about how empty the deal is.

Trump and Putin are fuming about Ukraine because their refinery strikes have emerged as one of its most effective weapons against Russia’s war machine. They damage Russia’s ability to fuel its military, disrupt its domestic economy, and deprive the Kremlin of revenue it needs to continue its invasion. So for Trump’s diesel deal to work, he needs Ukraine to stop doing one of the things that is actually working against Russia.

Thankfully, not many people are buying the BS the nasty guy is selling. That means he has no more leverage over Ukraine. And Europe has noticed and is working to replace American military and intelligence assistance. That leaves Ukraine to chart its own course through the war. The nasty guy announced an energy ceasefire. Zelenskyy said he would agree to it if Russia did. Russia hit some energy infrastructure – so Ukraine is back to attacking refineries. FischFry of the Kos community worked from a thread by progressive economist Gabriel Zucman to explain one of the ways the rich don’t pay taxes. The particular rich person in this story is Peter Thiel. He founded PayPal and got rich when he sold it. He’s gay yet a far right political player and anti-tax crusader. Back in 1997 the Roth IRA was created. It allows a person earning less than $110K to put up to $2K a year into a Roth account. When the person turns 60 he can withdraw from it tax free. At the time Thiel set up his Roth he was earning about $73K at PayPal. Thiel had his Roth invest in PayPal stock – 1.7 million shares at a price of $0.001 a share. A month later PayPal sold shares to investors for $500,000 each. Now there is speculation Thiel’s Roth is worth about $20 to $30 billion. And he can start withdrawing it – all tax free – in six months. FischFry wrote:

One can only begin to imagine the impact Thiel might have with that vast fortune, but we should fear so much of it will be used to further pollute political discussion, advancing the worst elements of our body politic.

Time for a wealth tax. Eleanor Beardsley of NPR reported that 500 to 700 grocery stores in France had their freezers and cold rooms hacked, turning them from coolers to heaters. Of course, all the food in them was spoiled. Strangely, the hackers didn’t ask for money. The freezers were hit because their security software hadn’t been updated (a reason not to connect freezers to the internet? – didn’t used to need to). One of the shopkeepers said incidents like this will only increase with AI able to sniff out hacking opportunities. My thermostat is programmable, but does not connect to the internet. I’m going to keep it that way. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman writing for his own Substack. By mid March of 1945 Hitler knew the war was lost. He didn’t believe he had failed, he had been failed by the German people. Yeah, the tyrant believed the people hadn’t sufficiently supported his tyranny.

So on March 19 he issued the “Decree concerning demolitions in the Reich territory,” which has come to be known as the Nerobefehl or Nero decree. It ordered the destruction of Germany’s own infrastructure — supposedly to deny that infrastructure to the Allies, but the obvious purpose was to punish his own country. […] Think of the Kennedy Center, a national icon that Trump is destroying because he can’t put his own name on it, as the model for what is all too likely to happen to America over the next two years. Can Democrats stop the coming reign of destruction?

Democrats won’t get any help from the Supreme Court or supine Republicans and the nasty guy has backing of billionaires,

with vast resources who will continue to enable his attack on democracy even if their billions in political spending aren’t enough to buy this election.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme from Tom Weinner.

Trump decided what to do in Iran by listening to Netanyahu. Now he’s deciding what to do in Ukraine by listening to Putin. The worst people in the world just lead him around by the nose from one catastrophe to another.

South Grand Prairie High School in Texas was told by their school board to shut down a production of Little Shop of Horrors. The reason: The lead character is Seymour, but not enough boys auditioned for the part. So it was given to a girl. That would mean when Seymour fell in love it would be with another girl. And that would violate Senate Bill 12. At least that’s the excuse the school board is giving. The version of SB12 prohibiting sexually-oriented performances on public property in the presence of anyone under 18 has been blocked by the courts. That provision isn’t in the current version of the bill. But Gov. Greg Abbott and AG Ken Paxton are pressing the ambiguity, prompting the school district to obey in advance. Thankfully, Abbott and Paxton are both in tight races.

And while the bill originally targeted drag queens, Texas Republicans have now made a new and vocal enemy: theater kids.

David Horsey posted a cartoon on Kos showing a large pizza with four people around it. The guy with a huge grin labeled “Top 1%” will get most of it. “Merely wealthy” with get a small slice. “Upper middle class” will get a thin slice. And “Lower 50%” will get crumbs. Horsey’s caption says, “This is not a joke.” Pedro Molina posted a cartoon on Kos appropriate for the Cornell 7 scandal. It shows a ball rolling downhill gaining size as it goes. Beside the small ball at the top is, “They’re just boys.” At the next larger ball is, “Their parents should teach them how to behave... I’m talking about the girl’s parents, of course!” After three more quotes, the one at the bottom is, “You know, I have this private island.”

Hurt some and offer their pain as a spectacle to everyone else

My Sunday movie was Tales from the Script, documentary about movie screenwriters. More than 40 writers talk about their work. Some of the famous ones are John Carpenter, Frank Darabont, Antwone Fisher, and William Goldman. They talk a bit about the writing process and needing to be willing to rewrite it 40 or more times. They talk more about: How competitive the business is and no one cares how good your previous script was, until you are a proven moneymaker. How hard it is to get an agent. How hard it is to pitch your story to a movie executive who loses nothing if he says no and might cause himself and his company a great deal of worry if he says yes. Costs are so high studios are very cautious. Or the producer says it’s a great idea but I want another writer to do it. Or they want changes – and if they want to add a chase scene it’s an indication there is a structural flaw elsewhere in the story. One must try to look lesser than the producer. What happens when the director and actors get ahold of it. They’ll say the character isn’t quite real and should say this instead. You must let them do it. This movie is divided in to chapters – talking about agents, producers, directors, actors – and at the start of each one is a scene from a movie about making a movie. And if you do end up with a hit the success can scare you so badly your writing freezes. So become a screenwriter only if your personality won’t let you do anything else. I enjoyed the film. Many of the stories are amusing or interesting. An example is Antwone Fisher working with Sidney Poitier. Fisher is so in awe in meeting his idol he can’t get coherent sentences out. I had previously written about documentaries about film composers and casting directors. I finished the book Packing for Mars, the Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach. One might think this is about what to throw in a suitcase and a rebuttal to the book City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith that is highly critical of the efforts to get to Mars and that the fundamentally difficult problems in getting there seriously question the benefits of going. I reviewed that one back in April. But this book is more of a companion piece. I think a more accurate title would be Packing a Body for Mars. Getting a robot to Mars now seems easy. We’ve done it many times. Getting a human body to Mars is significantly harder. Roach, with a humorous touch, explores the history of getting a body into space and to the moon, covering several of the issues: Can someone live in a can for the many months flying there would take? Can someone live with someone else in that same small can without going outside for a break? (The International Space Station shows we can, though an escape to earth is never far away.) What can the forces of liftoff do to a body? Of landing? Of the weightlessness between those two points? How to deal with the weightless equivalent of motion sickness? Why we need to bathe and can one adequately bathe in space? The main purpose of Gemini VII was to spend two weeks testing that. I learned a lot more than I wanted to about space toilets. I think the first two paragraphs explain the book well:

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You’re inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you’ll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. It’s structural elements don’t start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep. To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing. To take an organism whose every feature has evolved to keep it alive and thriving in a world with oxygen, gravity, and water, to suspend that organism in the wasteland of space for a month or a year is a preposterous but captivating undertaking. Everything one takes of granted on Earth must be rethought, relearned, rehearsed – full grown men and women toilet-trained, a chimpanzee dressed in a flight suit and launched into orbit. An entire odd universe of mock outer space has grown up here on earth. Capsules that never blast off; hospital wards where healthy people spend months on their backs, masquerading zero gravity; crash labs where cadavers drop to Earth in simulated splash-downs.

This is a fun and enjoyable read, and a great book for those into space exploration. On Monday Homeland Security obtained a warrant and raided the house of Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Even NPR saw that the raid was politically motivated. The reason for the raid was to look for evidence of illegal immigration – she came to the US from Somalia as a child, though is now a US citizen. The raid was to look for evidence that her father did something wrong on the immigration papers. Of course, the real reason for the raid is because Omar is Muslim and also an outspoken critic of the nasty guy. He’s trying to silence his critics. David Michigan of the Daily Kos community says there is another reason behind the raid. In the midterm elections (results should be known in three weeks!) Republicans will quite likely lose control of the House and could lose control of the Senate. Once in office Democrats will open (they’d better open – it’s one reason why we’re sending them there) investigations into the corruption of the nasty guy, his cabinet, and the other big people in his administration.

Given all this, what does trump want to do, more than anything else? De-legitimize the very notion of accountability for public figures. Opening a blatantly corrupt investigation of a political figure may seem like a curious way of achieving this end, but work through the logic: Democrats and even neutral observers immediately picked up on the political implications of the Omar raid and denounced it as politically motivated. If an investigation of a Democrat is widely seen illegitimate because of the political motivation, then how could an investigation of trump or his minions by a political body be anything other than illegitimate? That’s the question they are working to plant in the minds of Americans, and especially in the minds of reporters and editors. Surely we must both-sides everything. Three months now, if (knock on wood) the Congress opens investigations into administration malfeasance, the media will be under intense pressure to compare the hearings to the blatantly illegitimate raid on Ilhan Omar. ... Yes, the Omar raid was blatantly corrupt. Such a clear violation of every norm that the norm-breaking itself made the front pages. That was the point.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community has a different and complementary take on the raid. It is the same terrifying tactic used by every dictator:

As every dictator on Earth can tell you, you don’t have to silence the entire country; all you have to do is shut up a few strategically-selected people visibly and publicly enough and the rest of the country will get the message and back away.

The tactic costs the tyrant little and can have enormous impact on public behavior. Hartmann explored some of the history of this tactic. King George II executed Admiral John Byng because he lost a battle. Voltaire included that in his novella Candide. Hitler threw a few thousand liberal commentators into newly opened Dachau. Stalin used it. Putin used against one billionaire oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and all the rest immediately fell into line. Joe McCarthy never sent anyone to prison but his hearings prompted thousands of people in the movie industry and elsewhere to shut up. Hartmann also lists the people the nasty guy has attacked in this or similar manner: James Comey, Letitia James, Lisa Cook, Adam Schiff, Jan. 6 testifier Cassidy Hutchinson, former CIA Director John Brennan, Olympian Davey Hearn who touched the Reflecting Pool paint, black journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, George Stephanopoulos and Jimmy Kimmel of ABC, reporters banned from the White House, and many more.

As former Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor told me on my radio/TV program when Trump went after him, Comey, and others, the raid itself is the punishment. To destroy a person financially, to traumatize them emotionally, and to scare the hell out of their colleagues in a way that will make them shut up you don’t need a conviction. Hell, you don’t even need a trial. Just a subpoena, a lawyer letter filled with threats, or a raid can lead to hundreds of thousands in lawyer bills and months of sleepless nights.

Right now judges are the only force capable of stopping the nasty guy. So, of course, he or his minions are attacking them too. If the legislature and the press are cowed the courts will eventually crack too.

Trump’s goal is a quiet country. A country where the prosecutor doesn’t bring the case against the powerful donor, the reporter doesn’t file the story, the professor doesn’t sign the letter, the grand juror doesn’t want the hassle, and the judge wonders about her family before she rules.

Another group that has a chance of stopping the nasty guy is Democrats in Congress. Vote to make sure they gain a majority in both chambers. In the comments of the pundit roundup for Kos from Wednesday a week ago exlrrp posted a meme of a message by Jon Stewart:

I just want to say this to Trump’s defenders. You don’t have to bend over backwards trying to make Trump’s authoritarian power grabs seem like the rule of law. He does not give a f--- anymore. He’s saying it straight up. Trump is saying the people like dictators. Trump is saying I hate my opponents and I want them punished. And Trump is saying I’ll use all the levers of government at my disposal to accomplish that goal. So you can get on board with that and say I’m with that or you can join the rest of us and fight like hell for this constitutional republic.

Another meme posted by exlrrp:

The liberal plot to make Republicans look stupid, also known as “Operation Just Let Them Speak,” is working splendidly.

In Sunday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Timothy Snyder writing for his own Substack about Hegesth saying the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan will be livestreamed. Hegseth says it will deter terrorism.

To livestream an execution will not deter terrorism. It will invite terrorism, as Mr. Hegseth no doubt understands. The deeper political consequence, however, is domestic. The basis of politics in the Trump regime is sado-populism. Rather than offer policy that benefits Americans, Trump uses the government to hurt some, and offer their pain as a spectacle to everyone else. To livestream a public execution is to take that politics to its logical extreme. The federal government would be instructing us to observe, and thus participate in, a public killing. This invitation to us is a major step towards seeing politics only as the pain of others. While execution by firing squad is the endpoint of a judicial proceeding, broadcasting it is to advertise killing is a political transformation. If Americans view, clip, share, and permanently enshrine an American public killing in a million ways on the internet, we will move towards fascist rituals of violence.”

In the comments darthstar included a tweet by News Eye that says, “This is how you write a headline.” The headline appeared in The Telegraph for an article about Trump making a deal with Putin to buy diesel fuel. The headline and subhead:

Trump backstabs Zelensky for five minutes of midterm relief. Deal with Putin for Russian’s oil might soften the markets but Ukraine will pay the price.

And a tweet by the James Talarico campaign, running against Ken Paxton for the Senate. It’s a spoof of the easily debunked claim that Talarico wasn’t seen for several days, not because he was home with the flu, but in a mental hospital in Ohio.

I challenged Ken Paxton to a debate 85 days ago, but no one has heard from him. People are getting worried. I’ve received credible reports he’s suffering from a rare condition that causes clinical levels of cowardice. @KenPaxtonTx: I’m asking for proof of ability to debate.

Ways in which AI could seriously hurt humanity

Mark Sumner had been a writer for Daily Kos and over the years I referenced his articles many times. He has retired and is now just a community member, still writing occasional insightful posts. Like this one about five ways in which AI could seriously hurt humanity. 1. The AI companies have been talking about AI replacing workers. That has already started to happen. Many are run by people who have demonstrated they don’t like humanity. They are projecting the value of their companies to reach $50 trillion. That means they are “planning to absorb all the salaries and benefits paid to every worker, at every level, on planet Earth.” While they predict that AI is going to turn all of us into zillionaires, their spending to figure out how we get that money is zero. Elon Musk has said there will be universal high income checks from the federal government. That’s a weird thing for someone who plays close to zero taxes to say.

A world in which AI succeeds as planned is one in which everyone on the planet is dependent on the largess of a tiny faction that has demonstrated again and again that they regard empathy as a flaw. It may not be the worst outcome, but it’s certainly not great.

I wonder if everyone loses their job to AI who pays to use the AI products that are the source of income for these guys. 2. What if AI fails? There is a great deal of circular investing. What if outside investors close their wallets? Sumner thinks the current level of investing can’t continue indefinitely. The AI companies make up 45% of the total value of the S&P Index, without them the S&P would be 25% lower. So people who have their life savings in stock will be hit big if these companies fail. The entire economy would go into recession or depression. The country would be dotted with dead data centers. Yeah, we could return to a time before ChatGPT. But that would not be painless. 3. AI stays meh. Only some companies fail. Investors stop urging corporations to get with AI. If this happens wealth concentration continues. 4. AI is getting better at simulating human presence. Now on TikTok bots sometimes account for 97% of new activity. Internet traffic from bots and agents has exceeded human traffic. Bots create more bots by the millions, filling the compute power of all those data centers. Tools to detect what is a bot and what is a human are becoming worthless. A great deal of that compute power will be used to attempt to scam us humans. Finding and interacting with an actual human on the internet could be difficult. Keeping business transactions working could be impossible. AI could take over the internet, making it unusable for humans. 5. There are a bunch of violence-loving idiots – the nasty guy, Putin, Kim, Netanyahu, maybe a few more – who have access to red nuclear buttons. They don’t use them because of MAD – mutually assured destruction. No one has used those buttons in 80 years. People often give AI far too much trust. They believe what AI tells them, even when the answer is entirely made up. AI has Artificial Gravitas. AI has already nudged the US towards war with China and approved of the bombing of a girl’s school. What happens when humans are removed from the launch decision or the lone human is faced with a chorus of AI voices urging a launch? AI can bring methods of mass destruction to a lot more people than currently have red buttons. Some of them might be more excited about inflicting damage than worried about any return fire. Sumner says the list of ways AI could harm humanity is much longer than five. I have considered a way AI could cause harm. Bots could take over the computers that control our utility companies. A bot in an electric company could open the floodgates of a dam, flooding downriver sites and bringing the water level so low the dam couldn’t generate electricity. Kos of Kos wrote: ⁠

As reported by NPR and ⁠The Washington Post, a foreign influence operation used artificial intelligence to generate propaganda and publish it across American media platforms, including right here at Daily Kos. The result from the made-up persona was three stories/diaries published in the community. The operation evaded our existing automated safeguards and human moderation. That’s a failure we take seriously, and one we’re working to address. None of the stories attracted much attention. But that’s beside the point. The problem isn’t how many people read them. It’s that a fabricated identity was able to participate in our community without anyone realizing it.

Kos is more than a news service. It is also a community of liberals discussing, even arguing, amongst ourselves. The problem is...

Every disagreement can become another opportunity to question someone’s authenticity. Every unfamiliar voice can become a suspect, which is particularly damaging to us because we can’t survive without growing our community. ... So yes, this happened. But no, it doesn’t mean that someone you disagree with is a bot, a foreign operative, or even using AI. Disagreement isn’t evidence of deception.

Kos promises that he and his team will do everything they can to prevent bad actors from succeeding on the site, to make it so difficult they’ll look for easier targets elsewhere.