“Oopsie… too late. 😂”

mockingly posted the President of El Salvador Nakib Bukele.

   

An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison

 

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up…

… attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring Abrego Garcia back now that he is in Salvadoran custody…

Trump-administration attorneys told the court to dismiss the request on multiple grounds, including that Trump’s “primacy in foreign affairs” outweighs the interests of Abrego Garcia and his family.

“They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief,’’ Sandoval-Moshenberg told me. “If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless—all of them—because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, “whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”…

OK, SHOULD THIS COMFY WASP SENIOR CITIZEN JUST PRUDENTIALLY STFU? RECALL DR/ FRANKS et al...

Improper Ideologies.

I am a 79-year-old natural born U.S. citizen from western Long Island, New York (Floral Park, bordering Queens borough, to be precise). I now live in Baltimore, Maryland. I recently renewed my passport and was shortly thereafter granted a Global Entry Pass by TSA. My Maryland driver’s license is Real ID compliant. I have no criminal record, and have had an FBI background check (replete with fingerprinting) pursuant to my 2000-2005 tenure as a bank credit risk officer.

I have never wanted nor owned a firearm (never had a tattoo either). The totality of my experience with physical violence comprises one absurd schoolyard fistfight when I was a sophomore in high school. It lasted perhaps 30 seconds and didn’t resolve anything (beyond confirming my not even coming close to being the cinematic adolescent badass I’d assumed I was).

My wife and I have been together since 1974. We raised three children, and are now retired doting grandparents / great-grandparents. Across my wife’s career as an increasingly senior quality assurance executive, she underwent numerous federal security clearance investigations, and repeatedly held what is known as (always project-specific) “Q clearances” (for her worldwide work in DOE nuclear waste remediation and DOD contractor engineering and construction, much of it classified). She has performed QA audits at all of the federal National Laboratories. She has forgotten more about classified information security protocols than our Marvel Comics SecDefBro Pete Hegseth ever knew.

Notwithstanding the breadth and depth of our dispositively documented loyal U.S. citizen histories, it would not surprise me one whit were we to be detained and perhaps renditioned by Donald Trump‘s ICE thugs the next time we return from visiting abroad.

The unacceptable offenses? Hmmm… suborning Woke Leftist Secular Globalist MAGA/Project 2025-averse “alignment” with “Improper Ideologies?”

RELEVANT PRIOR READINGS

   

Scroll down to recent prior posts. Better yet, buy the books and study them closely.

 

Trump DHS Secretary flies down to el Salvador on your dime to pose for a photo-op.

Is this a great country, or WHAT?

Well, "Liberation Day" certainly made it to Wisconsin, 'eh?

The world's most overrated man.

Donald Trump's April 2nd "Liberation Day"

BobbyG's Libation Day...

 

 

All this Trump "tariffs" gaslighting is way beyond old.

 

 

"Good, good, GOOD, good libations... Good, good, GOOD, good libations... "

 

OK, ENOUGH YUKKING AROUND

 

Heard this on NPR today while on our way to pick up our grandson Calvin this afternoon.

"Empathy, the act of understanding and sharing the feelings of others, has long been the underpinning of religious, humanitarian, and philosophical teachings.

Now, there's a new perspective increasingly heard in conservative circles: Empathy isn't always a good thing. Elon Musk, for example, recently said that we have to fight against "civilizational suicidal empathy," something he believes is weaponized by Democrats to 'import' as many immigrants without legal status as possible. It's also being preached from right-wing pulpits by pastors who say empathy's OK but that not everyone's deserving of it..."

I continue to be irritated with the apparently indelible conflation of "empathy" with "sympathy."

 

 

Above: that's how I learned it. Percieving the shared world as others do (or might). "Affective" is perhaps closer to "sympathy." Grifters like Donald Trump have finely-sharpened cognitive empathy acumen, in the Time Share Closer sense (can you say "Trump Baja Ocean Resort"?) "Somatic"? "I feel your pain." Yeah, perhaps to a lesser or greater degree.

 

Whatever.

 

INTERVIEWEE STANFORD PROF JAMIL ZAKI

Interesting guy. Add more books to the pile.

    

 

FOLLOW-UP BOOK NOTE

 

Finished this one yesterday.

 

Cross-reference with Mary Anne Franks' books, in particular her riffs on the 1st Amendment (see prior post).

ONE MORE

 

This one dropped tpday. I'd forgotten that I was on pre-order.

 

 

Goes to this dopey, now moribund idea of mine.

 

More on this one in a bit...

I am compelled to be Franks with you

The “censorship industrial complex” operates like other thought-terminating cliches such as “the woke mind virus” or “cancel culture”: as a way for powerful people to invert reality as well as First Amendment doctrine. This victim-claiming tactic seeks not only to distract the American people from the efforts of the government to engage in actual censorship, but to disguise these censorship efforts as free speech.

But the American people can see what is happening. The current President of the United States is ordering lawful residents to be kidnapped and expelled from the country because of their speech. He is dictating what words people are allowed to use, what educational institutions are allowed to teach, what values businesses are allowed to promote. He is declaring any person he disagrees with to be a criminal. He is calling for critics and dissenters to be imprisoned and assaulted. He is threatening journalists, students, judges, lawyers, religious leaders, governors—anyone he deems insufficiently loyal and insufficiently obedient. Trump’s message could not be clearer: you either bbow down to him, or you will be punished. This is what censorship looks like.

You are members of the United States Senate, government officials tasked with the sacred duty of serving the American public—not a self-professed king and not his wealthy jester—and honoring their constitutional rights. This is a president who has declared himself above the law, including the First Amendment. Those who truly wish to fight censorship should start with him.

Dr Franks' conclusion of her opening statement during this weeks' testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

 

Following up on a prior review post.

 

Fundamentalism is as alive and well in law as it is in religion. I have seen firsthand how often people use the Constitution the way religious fundamentalists use the Bible—selectively, self-servingly, and in bad faith.

Much as the evangelical community I was raised in focused on verses about homosexuality or women’s inferiority while ignoring the Golden Rule, constitutional fundamentalists focus on individual rights of speech and bearing arms while disregarding the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment. This is not just a tactic of conservatives, whose affinity for Christian fundamentalism is no secret, but also of self-identified liberals. I was not particularly surprised when National Rifle Association supporters and Breitbart readers denounced my work on gun violence as an attack on the Constitution; I was more taken aback when American Civil Liberties Union representatives and self-identified liberals made similar claims about my efforts to protect intimate privacy rights.

As I have fielded e-mails, phone messages, and social media posts threatening me with job loss, rape, and death, I have been struck by another parallel between religious and constitutional fundamentalism: the tendency to engage in a tactic I call victim-claiming. Often used in conjunction with victim-blaming, which attempts to deprive victims of sympathy, victim-claiming attempts to generate sympathy for perpetrators. Victim-claiming is a reversal technique that puts the powerful in the the space of the vulnerable, the abuser in the space of the abused. It is the theme that disturbed me as a young reader of the Bible, which often portrays powerful men as suffering at the hands of their supposed inferiors. The point of such passages seemed to be the justification of the use of violence by the powerful against the vulnerable.

The fundamentalist reading of the Constitution, especially of the First and Second Amendments, produces the same effect. The most powerful and privileged people in America—white men—cast themselves as an underclass engaged in a protracted struggle against the women and minorities seeking to censor and disarm them.

I was moved to write this book because I believe that good faith can conquer bad. I believe that good faith in the Constitution, in particular, is both possible and necessary. I wrote this book to make the case against fundamentalism and for the principle of reciprocity expressed in Christianity’s Golden Rule, Kant’s categorical imperative, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. I wrote this book to advocate for the position that the only rights any of us should have are the rights that all of us should have. If only some of us are saved, all of us are lost…

Franks, Mary Anne. The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech (loc. 108-133). Kindle Edition. 

Her March 25th Senate Judiciary Committee Testimony was riveting

 

GOP senators picked on the wrong woman. David Newhoff nails it:

If [Louisiana GOP] Sen. Kennedy had an ounce of guts or a modicum integrity, he would argue either that Franks misstates the law or, perhaps, that she correctly states the law, but misstates the facts alleged about the “censorship industrial complex.” Instead, the senator and the cyber-mob he incited could not have more ably proven Franks’s critique of First Amendment history if they had read her book and tried intentionally to do so.

Like many examples in the book, this powerful office holder, while whining that he’s being “censored,” whips up a hate-storm of violent threats designed to silence a citizen whose only power is her voice. Also, the optics are hard to ignore. If Kennedy’s five minutes were a movie scene, the Southern White male throwing his weight around while acting offended that anyone would suggest that white male privilege exists, would be panned by critics as too on the nose. The only things missing were a fan and a Mint Julep…

Read all of it. David is spot-on.

 

Below, more Franks:

 

_____

"Fundamentalism is as alive and well in law as it is in religion. I have seen firsthand how often people use the Constitution the way religious fundamentalists use the Bible—selectively, self-servingly, and in bad faith."

Hmmm... ring any bells?

 

   

"White Christian Nationalism," anyone?

 

My irascible take:

 

I would pay good money to attend a live discussion featuring Mary Anne Franks, Danielle Citron, Katherine Stewart, and Matthew Taylor.

 

Much more shortly...

The Classified Signals-to-Emojis ratio

The comedy of [Atlantic Editor Jeffrey] Goldberg’s reports resides, at least in part, in the discovery that the Vice-President and the heads of the leading defense and intelligence bureaucracies deploy emojis with the same frequency as middle schoolers.
  
—David Remnick

Live! From DC! Senate Intel Committee!

The #PeeWeeHegseth Signal Show!

   

 

Oopsie...

 A WILD COUPLE OF DAYS

The T-47 MAGA stealth battle tank.

BACK TO THE REAL WORLD

 

I'd finished Mary Anne Franks' fine new book, and, though I had stuff in the queque to get on to, I was compelled to read her prior book as week. So I did.

 

Wow.

 

She is hardcore. Read both of these carefully. Her books are materially altering my take on my current read

 

The "Cult of free speech."

Gonna have to look into this stuff in more detail in a subsequent post. Stay tuned.

Jasmine Mooney

was told by an ICE officer before she was detained that she “looked shady.”

 

"Then there is the case of a Canadian, Jasmine Mooney, who was detained by ICE for two weeks. She wrote in an opinion piece for the Guardian, “There was no explanation, no warning. One minute, I was in an immigration office talking to an officer about my work visa, which had been approved months before and allowed me, a Canadian, to work in the US. The next, I was told to put my hands against the wall, and patted down like a criminal before being sent to an Ice detention center without the chance to talk to a lawyer.”

Her situation seems unprecedented, and her courage in speaking out, which likely means she’ll be unable to reenter the U.S. to work as she had hoped, really matters. Democracy does die in darkness; it’s important that we understand just how far the excesses in this administration go. Moody said no one would answer her questions about what was going on while she was held in a cell for two weeks—someone with a visa, who instead of being returned to Canada because customs had questions about the validity of her documentation, was held in custody in what she characterized as a freezing cell where she was given an aluminum blanket to cover herself. This sort of treatment of people who enter the country without documentation is appalling. Now, even people who believe they have a legal right to enter are at risk. Moody told me over the weekend, “I choose to use my voice — because remaining silent will never bring progress to this world. Change begins when we dare to speak the truths others are too afraid to say, especially when they challenge the system.”

 Yeah, she certainly looks like a South American gang member.

 

Saw this at Jovce Vance White's Substack.

Oscar? Golden Globe? Nobel Peace Prize?

Donald Trump, Producer-in-Chief

   

What does it mean to have a President who views his time in office as the biggest, bestest Andrew Lloyd Webber theatrical ever?

On Monday, Donald Trump attended his first board meeting at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts since installing himself as its chairman and firing its leadership. During the session, he surveyed board members about which musical was better—“Les Misérables” or “The Phantom of the Opera”—and reminisced at length about seeing the 1982 Broadway première of “Cats” from a fourth-row seat that he’d been given. “They were treating me good because I was a young star,” he theorized, while strongly implying that he had attended the play with someone other than his wife. He fondly recalled the “gorgeous” young dancers lying onstage and the brilliance of the star singer, Betty Buckley. “Is Betty Buckley still alive?” he asked, mid-soliloquy. (She is, and is not a Trump fan.) The point, such as it was, seemed to be that he wanted to have a lot more “Cats”-style shows at the Kennedy Center, and a lot fewer of the “totally woke” modern productions that one of his fellow maga board members complained about during the meeting. Getting down to business, Trump volunteered to host a revamped version of the Kennedy Center Honors, minus the “radical-left lunatics” who had been given the prestigious award in recent years. This, he assured the board, would be good for the center, since he is “the king of ratings, right?”

We know the President of the United States said all this because someone had the presence of mind to secretly tape this inanity and send it to a reporter at the Times. As scoops go, the news value might have been minimal, but the illumination value was high—this is Trump as he sees himself, a brilliant showman who once dreamed of being a Broadway producer, an avatar of middle-brow theatrics indifferent to the arbiters of good taste and trapped in a vision of America rooted in his nineteen-eighties heyday. If the crowd loved it, then so did he. The great Times photographer Doug Mills captured Trump during his Kennedy Center visit, standing on the balcony of the Presidential box, staring down at the orchestra below in a pose that evoked his all-time favorite Andrew Lloyd Webber show, “Evita.” This was no accident. C-span footage shows that Trump produced the shot himself, directing Mills and others to come and get it. “Do you want a little picture like this?” he called down to the journalists. “Perfect,” one responded… 

- Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker

Overbooked yet again.

It's how I roll...

 

This book has jumped the queue as I've been pressing to finish Christopher's riveting new work on LLM AI technology, These Strange New Minds. Mary Anne Franks rocks. I'd hoped to finish her and Chris's books today...

Then I opened my inbox this morning when I got up.

I'd forgetten that Who Is Government was on pre-order (I am a long-time insatiable Michael Lewis FanBoy).

After Donald Trump won his first presidential election, I had one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had as a writer. The federal government had set aside a big pot of money for the candidates of both parties to staff their presidential transition teams. Trump and Hillary Clinton had both built massive teams of people ready to enter the 15 big federal departments and hundreds of smaller federal agencies to learn whatever was happening inside. A thousand or so Obama officials were waiting for them, along with briefings that had taken them six months to prepare. But then, days after the election, Trump simply fired the 500 or so people on his transition team. “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves,” he told a perplexed Chris Christie, who’d assembled the team.

Then he appointed Rick Perry as his secretary of energy. In his own presidential campaign, Perry had called for the Energy Department’s elimination—and was forced, at his Senate confirmation hearings, to acknowledge that he’d had no real idea of what went on inside the Energy Department, but now that he’d spent a few days looking into it, he really did not want to eliminate it. At that moment, it became clear that none of these people, newly in charge of the United States government, had the faintest idea what it did. (The Energy Department, among its other critical functions, manages our nuclear weapons.) And they weren’t alone! I didn’t really have any clue what went on inside the department, either. People capable of ruining panel discussions and dinner parties with their steady stream of opinions about American politics were totally flummoxed by the simplest questions about American government…

Our government—as opposed to our elected officials—has no talent for telling its own story. On top of every federal agency sit political operatives whose job is not to reveal and explain the good work happening beneath them but to prevent any of their employees from embarrassing the president. The PR wing of the federal government isn’t really allowed to play offense, just a grinding prevent defense. And the sort of people who become civil servants—the characters profiled in this book—tend not to want or seek attention.

And, finally, there is the stereotype of “the government worker.” We all have in our heads this intractable picture: The nine-to-fiver living off the taxpayer who adds no value and has no energy and somehow still subverts the public will.

You never know what effect any piece of writing will have. Writers write the words, but readers decide their meaning. My vague sense is that most readers of these stories have come away with feelings both of hope (these civic-minded people are still among us) and dread (we’re letting something precious slip away). My own ambition for The Post series and this book was that they would subvert the stereotype of the civil servant. The typecasting has always been lazy and stupid, but increasingly, it’s deadly. Even as writers grow rich proving it wrong.

Given our current Trump/MAGA/DOGE shitstorm, this stuff is all acutely timely.

 

 

OUR FABULIST-IN-CHIEF THIS MORNING, WHINING ONCE AGAIN ON HIS "TRUTH SOCIAL" ABOUT OUR JUDICIAL BRANCH.

"This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President - He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING!" Trump wrote. "I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY. I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!! WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!"

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!
 

Saw this author interviewed on PBS Newshour last night.

 

This book is the story of a largely under-the-radar legal movement that is weaponizing the obscure field of libel law—a campaign whose growing momentum has closely tracked the country’s increasing flirtations with authoritarianism.

At first glance, libel law might seem an unlikely venue for a battle with high stakes for American democracy…

Yeah. At first blush, his book coheres nicely with Mary Anne Franks'.

 

ERRATUM
 

Been watching daily equities markets fluctuations lately (like a lot of folks). Found this a bit interesting.

 

Trump's "Truth Social" (DJT) and Musk's TESLA. I overlaid the dark grey negativeely sloping approximate "trendline" starting on Inauguration Day. Had I the raw data, I'm guessing I could compute a linear Pearson-R of perhaps ~ 0.9. These two DOGE BFFs fully deserve each other.

____

 

UPDATE

Her book is killer.

_____

 

UPDATE: THE DAY IN STUPID

 

 

Okeee Dokeee, then.

 

Stay tuned...

_________

  

Musk Rat Love

This one gets the full five violins.

Oaf of Office update.

Donald Trump tells "His" DOJ that ANY investigations or critical media coverage of him are presumptively illegal and must be aggressively prosecuted.

   

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Cognition in "Strange New Minds."

Are AI LLMs approaching true "sentience?"

   

Released today.
 

The Amazon blurb:

An insider look at the Large Language Models (LLMs) that are revolutionizing our relationship to technology, exploring their surprising history, what they can and should do for us today, and where they will go in the future—from an AI pioneer and neuroscientist

In this accessible, up-to-date, and authoritative examination of the world’s most radical technology, neuroscientist and AI researcher Christopher Summerfield explores what it really takes to build a brain from scratch. We have entered a world in which disarmingly human-like chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Bard, appear to be able to talk and reason like us - and are beginning to transform everything we do. But can AI ‘think’, 'know' and ‘understand’? What are its values? Whose biases is it perpetuating? Can it lie and if so, could we tell? Does their arrival threaten our very existence?

These Strange New Minds charts the evolution of intelligent talking machines and provides us with the tools to understand how they work and how we can use them. Ultimately, armed with an understanding of AI’s mysterious inner workings, we can begin to grapple with the existential question of our age: have we written ourselves out of history or is a technological utopia ahead?

 

SCIENCE MAGAZINE REVIEW

In These Strange New Minds, cognitive neuroscientist and artificial intelligence (AI) safety specialist Christopher Summerfield presents a wide-ranging overview of AI for nonspecialists, focusing on what the technology really is, what it might do, and whether it should be feared. We no longer live in “a world where humans alone generate knowledge,” writes Summerfield. Machines possessing this potential will soon occupy custodial positions in society, he maintains (1). His book takes on six broad questions: How did we get here? What is a language model? Do language models think? What should a language model say? What could a language model do? And, are we all doomed?

Summerfield is a philosophical empiricist who argues that “the meaning of language depends on its evidentiary basis.” He is also a functionalist who believes that “it is perfectly possible for the same computational principle to be implemented in radically different physical substrates” and a materialist who sees the mind’s activity as identical to “neural computation.” But does he believe that AI machines think like humans do, or just that they appear to?...

...In the book’s final section, Summerfield turns to whether the technology will doom or deliver humankind. Here, he begins by discussing computer scientist Rich Sutton’s assertion that humankind should already be planning for the inevitable and great “succession” as AI machines “take over.” Neither AI successionists nor its antagonists have much to offer compared with those “whose core members are rooted in the AI safety community, [who] believe that there is an urgent need for AI to be tightly regulated precisely because it is so potent a tool,” argues Summerfield.

Existential risk groups have alternatively called for AI to be widely and publicly paused or for large government and private investments to design AI monitoring and countermeasures. So far, little headway has been made in either direction, but Summerfield’s book offers nonspecialists a good introduction to the issues and some hope that sound efforts in AI safety may see the light of day.

Just getting started. 

I'd like to get Shannon Valor's take on this book.

 

DR. SUMMERFIELD

 

MORE:

Whether or not we are on a pathway to building AI systems that figure out the deepest mysteries of the universe, these more mundane forms of assistance are round the corner. It also seems likely that the main medium by which most people currently seek information – an internet search engine – will soon seem as quaint as the floppy disk or the fax machine. ChatGPT is already integrated into the search engine Bing, and it surely won’t be long before Google and others follow suit, augmenting page search with conversational skills. As these changes occur, they will directly touch the lives of everyone on the planet with internet access – more than five billion people and counting – and are sure to upend the global economy in ways that nobody can quite predict. And this is all going to happen soon – on a timeframe of months or years, not decades. It’s going to happen to you and me.

The new world I’ve described might sound like quite a blast. Imagine having access to AI systems that act as a sort of personal assistant – at your digital beck and call – much more cheaply than the human equivalent, a luxury that today only CEOs and film stars can afford. We would all like an AI to handle the boring bits of life – helping us schedule meetings, switch utility provider, submit our tax returns on time. But there are serious uncertainties ahead. By allowing AI systems to become the ultimate repositories for human knowledge, we devolve to them stewardship of what is true or false, and what is right or wrong. What role will humans still play in a world where AI systems generate and share most knowledge on our behalf?

Of course, ever since humans began to exchange ideas, they have found ways to weaponize dissemination – from the first acts of deception or slander among the pre-industrial hunter-gatherer crew to the online slough of misinformation, toxicity, and polemic that the internet has become today. If they are not properly trained, machines with language risk greatly amplifying these harms, and adding new ones to boot. The perils of a world in which AI has authority over human knowledge may exceed the promise of unbounded information access. How do we know when an LLM is telling the truth? How can we be sure that they will not perpetuate the subtle biases with which much of our language is inflected, to the detriment of those who are already least powerful in society? What if they are used as a tool for persuasion, to shepherd large groups of people towards discriminatory or dangerous views? And when people disagree, whose values should LLMs represent? What happens if large volumes of AI-generated content – news, commentary, fiction, and images – come to dominate the infosphere? How will we know who said what, or what actually happened? Are we on the brink of writing ourselves out of history?

Summerfield, Christopher. These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means (pp. 7-8). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

 

 CHRISTOPHER SUMMERFIELD SPEAKS

 

BLASTS FROM MY BLOG PAST

 

 I searched back in the blog for a look at what I'd posted a devade or so ago on "Artificial Intelligence."

 

Fairly quaint.

 

Stay tuned...

_________