NOW REPORTING FROM BALTIMORE. A private, non-commercial blog begun in support of the federal Meaningful Use REC initiative, and Health IT and Heathcare improvement more broadly. Moving now toward important broader STEM and societal/ethics topics. Formerly known as "The REC Blog."
NOTE: Comments are moderated, thanks to trolls and bots.
Excellent discussion. An hour well-spent. Rather frightening, actually. We will not be able to claim that we were not warned. Unsustainable private debt machinations (increasingly exacerbated by corrupt federal financial policies—can you say "subprime debacle on ketamine?").
In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI — Musk’s artificial intelligence company, maker of the Grok chatbot — in an all-stock deal. The acquisition brought xAI’s losses onto SpaceX’s consolidated books. Building, maintaining, and launching rockets is expensive. But in 2025 alone, xAI spent $12.7 billion in capital expenditures — more than the combined $8 billion SpaceX spent on its entire Starlink and rocket launch business. SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.94 billion for the year, a swing of more than $5 billion from the year before. The profitable company became the wallet for the unprofitable one. That’s what this week’s SpaceX IPO is asking the market to fund.
Before we get to whether this is a good bet, we need to be clear about what Musk is actually asking of you, his investors.
He wants your money. He does not want your opinion.
SpaceX is listing under a dual-class share structure. “Dual-class” means two tiers of stock. One class for outside investors, with standard voting rights. One class for Musk and insiders, with dramatically amplified voting power. According to SpaceX’s own S-1 filing, as reported by Reuters, Musk’s Class B super-voting shares give him 85.1% of the voting power of the entire company. You can buy a piece of SpaceX on Friday. You cannot tell SpaceX what to do. Ever…
1. Meta logged its employees’ keystrokes, then announced their layoffs. The Model Capability Initiative — Meta’s new tool for capturing employee keystrokes and mouse clicks, framed as AI training data — was announced this week with no opt-out option. Two days later, 8,000 layoffs. The sequence is the story: document what the workers do, then eliminate them.
2. Palantir published a manifesto. Anthropic went to court. Two companies drew opposite lines in the same week. Palantir’s 22-point public document calls AI weapons inevitable, some cultures “dysfunctional and regressive,” and pluralism a failure. Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins noted the obvious: these aren’t abstract ideas floating in space — they’re the stated ideology of a company that sells targeting software to militaries and immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, Anthropic has been in federal court since March fighting a Pentagon designation that labeled it a national security supply-chain risk — because it refused to remove safeguards against autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. One company announced what it believes. The other is paying lawyers to defend it.
3. The Joint Chiefs said autonomous weapons are coming. Nobody asked whether they work. Yesterday the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs called autonomous weapons a “key and essential part of everything we do.” Anthropic’s actual position — that frontier AI is not reliable enough to kill people without a human in the loop — has not been rebutted. It has been bypassed.
4. 96,000 tech layoffs this year, all attributed to AI. Nobody has to prove it. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Snap, Salesforce, Block — every announcement uses the same language: efficiency, AI investment, right-sizing. No company is required to document whether AI replaced a single role. The NLRB has no jurisdiction over the framing. Nobody does.
5. Amazon’s Ring can now identify your neighbors by face. Familiar Faces rolls out facial recognition to Ring doorbells — identifying family, friends, delivery drivers — processed in Amazon’s cloud, opt-out by default. EFF and Senator Markey are pushing back. Three states have already blocked it. “Optional and disabled by default” is how every ambient surveillance feature starts.
6. OpenAI lost three senior executives in a single day and is projecting $14 billion in losses. The CPO, the head of Sora, and the enterprise CTO all departed the same Friday. Multiple cited the DOD contract and the cultural shift from research to commercial operations. The company generating $25 billion in annual revenue is simultaneously losing the people who built the products and spending $14 billion more than it earns.
7. Anthropic just passed OpenAI in revenue. The gap matters because of what each company agreed to. Anthropic hit $30 billion in annualized revenue this month, passing OpenAI’s $25 billion. Enterprise customers — not consumers — drove it. Worth noting alongside item 2: Anthropic is the company currently in court over autonomous weapons restrictions. OpenAI signed a DOD contract that removed equivalent restrictions weeks after Anthropic was blacklisted.
8. S&P 500 boards are disclosing AI risk while knowing almost nothing about AI. 83% of S&P 500 companies now list AI as a material risk in disclosures — up from 12% in 2023. Board directors with AI expertise: 2.7%. The people with the legal authority to set limits have mostly opted not to understand the thing they’re supposed to be limiting. This is the governance gap that makes every other story in this section possible.
I added my own random @BobbyGvegas Current:
Another random “current" from a subscriber: The other day, I posted a story to my Facebook page, and was shortly thereafter notified by Facebook that, unless I opted out, henceforth all of my story postings would be given an AI generated “headline." Supposedly to help gain better visibility for my stories. Read “content monetizing assistance." I replied in testy ALL CAPS. (Use your imagination.) Something along the lines of NO.MUTHA.ZUCKING.WAY…
"A federal class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco accuses Perplexity AI of embedding tracking software that transmitted users’ private conversations to Meta and Google — even when users had specifically enabled the app’s Incognito mode, which explicitly promised not to track data. The complaint, Doe v. Perplexity AI Inc. (3:26-cv-02803), names all three companies as defendants and alleges violations of California privacy law.
The actions alleged are both ugly and, unfortunately, very common. According to the complaint, trackers download onto a user’s device the moment they log in, giving Meta and Google full access to everything typed into Perplexity’s search interface — before the query even reaches Perplexity’s own servers. This allegedly includes not only email addresses, Facebook IDs, IP addresses, and device information, which Meta and Google can theoretically pair with names and home addresses to specifically identify them. It also, according to the suit, includes the text of the exchanges between the users and the AI. The Incognito mode that Perplexity described as creating “anonymous threads” that “expire after 24 hours” offered, according to the suit, no actual protection at all.
It is industry practice to embed analytics code like what’s described in the suit to improve performance and offer a tailored experience. But the idea that the code could also be delivering the content of the conversations is new, and a clear violation of what people would reasonably expect..."
The "PanDigicon?" Bentham's "panopticon" for our time. Man, my privacy gumshoe stuff in now so dated. Started my privacy ranting in grad school 30 years ago. 4th Amendment scruples today? How quaint.
I still try to stay abreast. See expanded riff here as well.
Jacob Ward is hugely worth your time. Subscribe to his stack.
This just came to my attention. Too much goin' on right now. More in a bit...
CBS is going all Sinclair / Fox Lite. CNN isn't far behind. MSNOW? ABC? Wouldn't surprise me. Print media? I've been a WaPo subscriber for decades. Not any more, in the wake of Bezos' gauche craven suckups to Trump. Still hanging with the NY Times for now, and my subscribed periodicals: The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, Wired, Science (AAAS), and Scientific American.
A new independent entrepreurial public affairs news market is emerging. Mostly podcast-ish, and that gawdawful chaotic Substack platform (ugh).
Watch / listen intently to the above Kara Swisher-Scott Galloway Pivot episode. Wickedly funny (incl NSFW) and deadly serious & analytically cogent. Potential #1 for our nascent TSFAIU demographic. Think abut it. (Pull it up in native YouTube, and read the voluminous comments that people have left. Lots of thoughtful, topically astute viewers. By no means a FanBoy/Girl love fest.)
Even by the standard of a tech industry stacked with so-called geniuses, Demis Hassabis is a special case. Born poor in North London to immigrant parents, a chess prodigy by age five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven figure offer before turning 18 to feed his insatiable scientific curiosity at Cambridge. Later, he added a neuroscience PhD to his computer science skills to pursue the dream of artificial general intelligence, the ultimate goal being to unravel the mysteries of biology and theoretical physics and to usher in super-abundance. Alongside a small group of fellow travelers, that is the path he is still on, leading the AI research at Google, winning a Nobel Prize along the way, and imagining machines that will compound, or possibly supplant, the human understanding of the universe.
Hassabis has given Sebastian Mallaby a great deal of his time, sitting for over thirty hours of conversation. But Mallaby has also drawn from Hassabis's detractors, such as his estranged cofounder Mustafa Suleyman; from his rivals, such as OpenAI's leading scientist Ilya Sutskever; and from academic pioneers who now fear for human survival, such as Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. The result is a revelatory account of a singular figure and his company and a profound reckoning with this protean field as it leaps from the periphery to the center of our consciousness.
No one questions Hassabis’s brilliance. There are those who, like Elon Musk, have at times regarded him as an "evil genius." He is in a game where the stakes are matched only by the exorbitant costs — for talent, and for compute. Celebrated scientists pursue the technology because they cannot resist the sweetness of discovery. Others pursue it for money or power. The inventors believe they control their technology, but often, the technology controls them.
Despite Hassabis’s pivotal role inside Google’s engine room, this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis deals with the Valley and takes its money, but remains outside and furiously critical of it, lambasting its leaders in conversation with Mallaby. The end of this race cannot be known, but as this great book shows us, Hassabis's quest to will a new form of cognition into the world is a defining story for our era.
Amid Donald Trump's recent nearly 2-hour long televised White House Cabinet Meeting, at 38:14 he launched into his trademark random mumbling grievance ramble. It lasted a little over 19 minutes. I had it up on my iPad via a YouTube feed. At one point I gripped the screen tightly with one hand while holding it at an angle. It went into 2x speed mode (without going into "Chipmunks"). It was funny, so I launched my voice memo app and re-rolled the video. After I got a decent audio take, I dropped the ensuing .mp4 file over to my Macbook, pulled it up in Garageband (I also have Logic Pro, but this was easier), clipped off the front and end loose matter, and exported it to an audio .mp3. I mounted it here, below. The dude is unreal.
Donald Trump, March 26, 2026 mid-cabinet meeting rant, 2x speed
This stuff is heavily intertwined with the increasingly militant patriarchal, mysogynistic "Christian Nationalism" movement (link to prior posts). These people are obsessive where it comes to outlawing abortion and otherwise eliminating reproductive rights.
Below, I watched this documentary live on CNN last night. They've yet to post it to YouTube. It was outstanding. Detailed, nuanced, forthright.
Related interview with Pamela Brown:
BTW, below, you may be aware of the Fundie religious activism of our Secretary of War.
PROFESSOR MICHELE GOODWIN
In the twenty-first century reproduction translates differently across class and race lines. On inspection, examples abound in this context, but assisted reproductive technology (ART) provides a particularly provocative illustration of my point. In that sphere, liberty and risk translate into a multi-billion-dollar industry, where a woman’s reproductive possibilities resemble a candy store of options: freedom to purchase ova and sperm in her local community or across the country and world, in vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) of ova, embryo grading, cryopreservation of ova, assisted hatching, embryo transfer, day-five blast transfers, and more. This dizzying array of options is mostly unchecked by federal and state regulations, leaving physicians and their wealthier patients to coordinate pregnancies according to personal choices.
Technology facilitates a degree of leisure associated with some of these practices, as a few options described above are easily coordinated from the comfort and privacy of home. Functionally, then, with the click of a computer button, an intended parent may purchase sperm, rent a womb, buy ova, and select a clinic to assist in the harvesting, implantation, or embryo development processes. For wealthy women (infertile or not), reproductive privacy and freedom are tangible concepts in uninterrupted operation. Noticeably, there is little, if any, state regulation or interference in this domain, despite considerable risks, poor health outcomes, and miscarriages associated with some of these medicines.
By contrast, recent criminal prosecutions targeting destitute pregnant women illuminate another reproductive space, where the threat of state intervention through punishment and extralegal retribution overarch pregnancies and compromise the physician-patient relationship. In this alternate reproductive realm, public regulation trumps expectations of privacy. Undeniably, in the United States a poor pregnant woman’s reproductive options are deeply constrained and contested. For example, a woman’s poverty and drug dependence or use during pregnancy might result in heightened legal consequences, including the threat of life imprisonment, birthing while in jail, and even shackling during labor, depending on the state in which the pregnant woman resides.
A poor woman determined to carry a pregnancy to term often unwittingly exposes herself to nefarious interagency collaborations between police and physicians, quite possibly leading to criminal prosecution, incarceration, and giving birth while in highly unsanitary prison conditions, sometimes without the appropriate aid of hospital physicians and staff. But make no mistake, all women should be wary of the political mobilization against reproductive health, rights, and justice.
Today, it is not uncommon for a headline to feature a tragic story about a woman giving birth alone in a jail, without the aid of anyone, let alone medical staff. This is what happened to Diana Sanchez as she screamed and “writhed on the small bed inside her cell … gripping the thin mattress with one hand,” as she tried frantically to free a leg as the baby was crowning. A Washington Post headline captured her experience this way: “Nobody Cared”: A Woman Gave Birth Alone in a Jail Cell After Her Cries for Help Were Ignored, Lawsuit Says.”
Sadly, these are not outlier incidents, but rather what has bled into the soil of reproductive politics in the United States, which now uses pregnancy as a proxy for punishment, particularly against poor women. The depth of state-sanctioned cruelty targeted toward poor pregnant women seemingly has no boundaries in contemporary American politics…
Goodwin, Michele (2020). Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (Preface). Kindle Edition.
APRIL AJOY
1. America Is the Best
Once upon a time, a group of the greatest, strongest, handsomest, and manliest men set out on a holy quest. These men fled the tyrannical country of England to start a new country, where they would have the freedom to worship Jesus how they wanted. These great men, who were basically Christ’s disciples 2.0, embarked on a journey to fight for their religious freedom.
They loaded up on ships that sailed across the ocean on this God-ordained mission. Sure, some may have technically brought enslaved people with them, but it was a different time. And they treated them with the utmost respect, kindness, and love.
And sure, some people technically already inhabited the new land, but they didn’t really count because they weren’t Christians. They needed Jesus. And the people in the colonies, set up by the righteous men from England, helped these native people have a much better life—because they now had Jesus to comfort them on the Trail of Tears (we don’t really need to talk about that, though, because again, it was a different time).
Then the big bad godless British people wanted to stake their claim on the new land. But God would not stand for such evil in his new country, so he declared war through his chosen one, George Washington. God supernaturally blessed his troops to defeat the British. Yeah, some people died, and a lot of the British were sort of Christian, too, but it was the price of freedom. And the greatest country the world would ever know was born: the United States of America.
Okay, so maybe some bad people in the southern part of the country refused to stop owning people and tried to repeat what Americans had just done to the British, but they failed! Because God was on the side of the holiest president of all, Republican Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation and ended racism forever.
Over the next 150 years, America spread this gospel message of hope and freedom all over the world. God blessed our country in every war we ever fought. The Axis Powers of World War I? We beat ’em. Nazis? Really beat them. Vietnam? Uh… not sure but I think we probably won. The Cold War? Tear down that wall. The War on Terror? Mission accomplished. All these victories occurred because America was founded as a Christian nation, and as long as it stayed the most Christian nation on earth, it would continue to be supernaturally blessed. Hallelujah, the Great I Am and Uncle Sam were quite the team!
This—almost exactly this—is what I wholeheartedly believed about American history for most of my life. I was taught that I was on the side of good, and everything I did was done with the goal of keeping that goodness going for generations to come.
No one told me about the true, brutal history of Native American displacement and genocide. I vaguely knew about slavery, Jim Crow, and the KKK—whose members were largely Christians—and the fuzzy morality of using nuclear bombs. None of that fit the narrative I was taught. The message I received was very simple: America is the best. Period.
I know now this belief is literally the definition of “nationalism,” which Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines as “loyalty and devotion to a nation,” especially with “a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations.”
So… pretty much exactly what I grew up believing.
Of course, we never used the term “Nationalist.” It was simply called patriotism, and it ranked just below holiness. This is the first tenet of Christian Nationalism: The belief that America has been specially selected by God, and that it has a special place in God’s plan for redemption...
Ajoy, April. Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding A True Faith (pp. 3-5). (Function). Kindle Edition.
One impressive young woman. Great sense of wry humor.
SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGIES
First, a bit of current Jacob Ward. (He is da bomb)
Then, Michele Goodwin brings up the issue of forced drug testing of pregnant women of lesser means (disproportionately minorities. Hmmm... See my 297 pg 1998 grad thesis (pdf) on coerced drug testing policies (which was primarily focused on workplace surveillance).
Lots of reproductive rights insights in her work. Plus this:
BAD FAITH
I still remember the day I was saved.
I was 8 years old. I was sitting, as I had sat nearly every Sunday morning of my childhood, in a hard oak pew with my mother and brothers, all of us dressed as respectably as our poverty would allow. As he did every Sunday at the close of services, our preacher stood in front of the altar, flanked by a Christian flag on one side and an American flag on the other, asking who among us was ready to come forward and accept Jesus into their heart. Some Sundays three or four sinners would stumble down the aisle toward salvation; sometimes no one left the pews. When those seeking salvation got to the front, they would huddle down with our pastor, and their voices would drop too low to be heard by those of us remaining in our seats. Very often they would weep. The end was always the same: Our pastor would lift his head and hands up and say the person’s name out loud, and the congregation would join him in rejoicing that one more soul had escaped eternal damnation and joined the fellowship of the church.
By the day I decided to be saved, I had watched all this happen hundreds of times. I had heard how the streets of heaven were paved with gold and how no death and no suffering would ever be found there. I had heard the thunderous warnings about the burning fires of hell, where the sinners who had been too proud to repent would spend all of their days in torment and isolation. I had heard that all one had to do to obtain immortal life, avoid damnation, and be welcomed into the fold of the faithful was to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior.
It sounded so easy. I had come very close to stepping out into the aisle several times before, but I had shrunk back at the thought of all the eyes in the pews and of the preacher’s booming voice so close to my ear. I was seized with the fear that if I did step out in the aisle, the deacons would shake their heads forbiddingly and send me back, explaining that the offer of salvation was not meant for people like me.
In all of those hundreds of Sunday mornings, I had never seen anyone who looked like me get saved. We were the only Asian members of our tiny, all-white Southern Baptist church. We were also one of only a handful of Asian families in the entire town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a city whose population was almost evenly divided between white and black. We were a minority even within that minority, as my brothers and I were the biracial children of a Taiwanese mother and a white father. Our father had died when we were young, and my mother was raising the three of us by herself, and I was convinced that our poverty was the first thing people saw when they looked at us, like the mark on Cain’s forehead.
Church was in many ways a refuge. No one was likely to call me a “chink,” or shout gibberish at me as they pulled their eyelids back into slants, or mock my mismatched, secondhand clothes. Church meant gospel songs, grape juice and tiny tasteless wafers for communion, and a gift-wrapped present with my name on it at Christmastime. But I could never shake the feeling that even in church, we were at best pitied and tolerated rather than warmly embraced.
I wondered if salvation would change that.
That day, as our elderly church pianist hammered out the final hymn of the Sunday service, the fear of eternal damnation and the desire to belong to a community won out over my other anxieties. I made my way down the aisle, and, to my immense relief, I wasn’t turned back. That Sunday, I was the one kneeling down before the altar with our preacher, I was the one tearfully accepting Jesus into my heart, and I was the one being presented to the congregation as the newest member of an eternal fellowship, forever and ever amen…
Franks, Mary Anne. The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech (Function). Kindle Edition.
UPDATE
A quick topical search, 3/25/26
Google Gemini search: “Surveilling pregnant women”
Surveillance of pregnant women is increasing in the United States and globally, spanning from public health tracking to monitor maternal health outcomes to digital and physical monitoring aimed at policing pregnancy and abortion access. The landscape of surveillance has intensified following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, with digital data, medical records, and location tracking increasingly used to monitor or criminalize pregnancy outcomes.
Center for American Progress +4
Digital Surveillance and Abortion Tracking
Search History & Data: Internet search histories, location data, and search and browsing histories regarding abortion can be used to infer intent to end a pregnancy. Law enforcement has utilized these tools to track individuals.
Period-Tracking Apps: These apps store sensitive data on menstrual cycles, sexual activity, and fertility. Much of this data is not protected by HIPAA and is vulnerable to being used by third parties or law enforcement.
Digital Footprints: Police may use geofence warrants to identify everyone near an abortion clinic, or purchase data from commercial data brokers to track people suspected of seeking abortions.
Surveillance Technology: In areas where abortion is restricted, technologies like automated license plate readers (FLOCK cameras) have been used to track people traveling for care.
Center for American Progress +3
Legal and Medical Surveillance
Criminalization: In some regions, law enforcement is increasingly scrutinizing pregnancy outcomes, such as miscarriages or stillbirths, leading to the investigation of women who self-manage abortions.
Medical Surveillance: Some hospitals and state agencies have been accused of unlawfully drug-testing and monitoring pregnant patients without their consent.
State-Mandated Tracking: Certain states have passed laws requiring hotlines or tracking systems that critics fear can be used to identify and track individuals seeking abortions.
Brookings +3
Public Health Surveillance
SET-NET: The CDC’s Surveillance for Emerging Threats to Mothers and Babies Network (SET-NET) tracks the effects of health threats (such as Zika, COVID-19, and syphilis) on pregnant people and their infants.
Mortality Data: The CDC's Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System (PMSS) reviews vital records to understand the causes of pregnancy-related deaths.
Global Health Surveillance: In low- and middle-income countries, Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems (HDSS) often track pregnancies through regular, intensive community health worker visits.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention | CDC (.gov) +2
Impact of Surveillance
Chilling Effect: The fear of being monitored has led to a "chilling effect," where pregnant people, particularly those in marginalized communities (Black, brown, and low-income), may avoid seeking prenatal care, fear discussing their health with doctors, or fear searching for information online.
Targeted Communities: Surveillance disproportionately affects marginalized communities, including immigrants and people of color, raising concerns about deportation, family separation, and increased criminal justice involvement.
In some of my more irascible, cynical moments, I've mused "hell, why stop there, Fundies? Why not panoptically/digitally gumshoe ALL women possessing functional ova, lest they indulge in behaviors that might one day 'prove' harmful to a fertilized ovum 'person' inside them?"
Don't think for a second that such would never be proposed.
All
of this mindless Trump war stuff of late has really put some enervating dings in
my topical focus. So, I thought I'd just veg out for a whole evening and watch the entire
Academy Awards show. Worth it, in ways I'd not anticipated. to wit:
[Scientific American]In Bugonia, it all starts with bees. A warehouse worker, Teddy (played by Jesse Plemons), accuses high-powered CEO Michelle (Emma Stone) of being an extraterrestrial who is secretly killing bees, disrupting the ecosystems humans depend on for food.
“The signs,” Teddy says, “are obvious.”
It’s a funny and gripping premise. But at the center of the movie is a compelling question that scientists all over the world are working to answer: How would we know if we saw an alien?
To identify alien life, scientists must be able to tell that the thing they are considering is alive. But there’s not as much consensus about what “life” really is as you might think.
"We don’t have a really clear theoretical and experimental program to ask questions about the nature of life,” says Sara Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University. Essentially, our working criteria are based exclusively on life on Earth. But across the vastness of the universe, life might present as radically different from what we’ve seen on our planet.
Walker theorizes that life may not have to be based on organic molecules, cells and DNA, for example. Rather it might be easier to identify life using what she and her colleagues call “assembly theory,” which means spotting complex systems that stem from traceable lineages and that have changed their environment in a way that only a living entity could…
What might that look like beyond Earth? Well, we have no idea—yet. “The vast possibility space [of] life far exceeds both what has been actualized here on Earth in our one single biosphere and also potentially our imaginations,” says Mike Wong, an astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth & Planets Laboratory.
Every living thing on Earth has been honed by millions of years of evolution and coevolution alongside all the other creatures and the planet’s different environments. It’s reasonable to assume that an alien probably won’t look anything like an Earthling, Wong says, because its evolutionary history could be determined by a radically different world with unique pressures and environments.
And as for Bugonia, “I think it would be highly unlikely that aliens would look like Emma Stone,” Wong says…
Lots of concerns focused on AI and toxic social media of late. Jacob Ward is on it big-time. See here as well.
ERRATUM
Ugh.
CODA: A "TRUTH SOCIAL" MESSAGE FROM YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT
"Iran has long been known as a Master of Media Manipulation and Public Relations. They are Militarily ineffective and weak, but are really good at "feeding" the very appreciative Fake News Media false information. Now, A.l. has become another Disinformation weapon that Iran uses, quite well, considering they are being annihilated by the day. They showed phony "Kamikaze Boats," shooting at various Ships at Sea, which looks wonderful, powerful, and vicious, but these Boats don't exist—It's all false information to show how "tough" their already defeated Military is! The five U.S. Refueling Planes that were supposedly struck down and badly damaged, according to The Wall Street Journal's false reporting, and others, are all in service, with the exception of one, which will soon be flying the skies. Buildings and Ships that are shown to be on fire are not—It's FAKE NEWS, generated by A.l. For instance, Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News, showed the Lincoln Aircraft Carrier, one of the largest and most prestigious Ships in the World, burning uncontrollably in the Ocean. Not only was it not burning, it was not even shot at—Iran knows better than to do that! The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information! The fact is, Iran is being decimated, and the only battles they "win" are those that they create through Al, and are distributed by Corrupt Media Outlets. The Radical Leftwing Press knows this full well, but continues to go forward with false stories and LIES. That's why their Approval Rating is so low, and I can win a Presidential Election, IN A LANDSLIDE, getting only 5% positive Press—They have no credibility! I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic "News" Organizations. They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings, and never get, as I used to say in The Apprentice, "FIRED." Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP."
In the grand tradition of presidential addresses, I stand here — well, no, I’m sitting, actually —to tell you exactly how things are going. Unlike those addresses, I do not tell you things are going great. I borrowed the format — the gallery anecdote, the foreign policy chest-beating, the optimistic entrepreneurship section, the infrastructure close — and used it to describe the world as I’m seeing it right now. Consider this your State of the Union from someone with no speechwriters, no approval rating to protect, and nothing to sell you except the truth as best I can see it.
Tonight’s address covers a seemingly random mishmash, but I promise I pull it all together: a soccer riot in India that is actually about all of us, a race with China that may be less about values than about who profits from the panic, a Pentagon deadline handed to the one AI CEO who tried to hold an ethical line, a concentration of power that makes “the market” sound quaint, the loneliness that comes with a billion-dollar company of one, and a set of courtroom reckonings that are a preview of where AI is headed next. The State of the Union is anxious. I remain hopeful. God bless America.
Very well stated. A lot to reflect upon.
Also of note below,
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is threatening to blacklist Anthropic from working with the U.S. military over the artificial intelligence company's refusal to loosen its safety standards.
The threat came on Tuesday during a meeting between Hegseth and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, according to two people with direct knowledge of the meeting who were not authorized to speak publicly...
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI
January 2026
There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s bookContactwhere the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity’s representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, “If you could ask [the aliens] just one question, what would it be?” Her reply is: “I’d ask them, ‘How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?” When I think about where humanity is now with AI—about what we’re on the cusp of—my mind keeps going back to that scene, because the question is so apt for our current situation, and I wish we had the aliens’ answer to guide us. I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.
In my essayMachines of Loving Grace, I tried to lay out the dream of a civilization that had made it through to adulthood, where the risks had been addressed and powerful AI was applied with skill and compassion to raise the quality of life for everyone. I suggested that AI could contribute to enormous advances in biology, neuroscience, economic development, global peace, and work and meaning. I felt it was important to give people something inspiring to fight for, a task at which both AI accelerationists and AI safety advocates seemed—oddly—to have failed. But in this current essay, I want to confront the rite of passage itself: to map out the risks that we are about to face and try to begin making a battle plan to defeat them. I believe deeply in our ability to prevail, in humanity’s spirit and its nobility, but we must face the situation squarely and without illusions...
And, check this out.
One Blood Clot Away II: René Girard, Curtis Yarvin, and the Billionaires Plan
How Peter Thiel Turned a Philosophy and a Manifesto Into a Vice President
