Lead Us Towards Work?

 A New York Times article yesterday surveyed the budding anti-AI movement across the country that has sprung up in the least likely places and brought together people of wildly different ideological persuasions. It seems the days of Captain Swing and Ned Ludd have come again, and chiefly for the same reasons: elites are forging ahead with a technological change that will radically undermine the livelihoods of millions—and they have no clear plan as to how this is all supposed to work out in a way that is tolerable for the human population. 

Indeed, the people most involved in developing the new technology openly tell you that it will probably cause massive employment displacement—at least in the short term. Some of the more starry-eyed AI boosters envision that it could soon eclipse the need for human cognitive labor entirely—setting the market value of human brain power at something close to zero. 

A Large Postulate

 The New York Times ran an article yesterday looking into just how disastrous Trump's budget cuts to the food stamp program have been for poor families over the past year. 

When Trump's "big beautiful bill" passed last summer through the reconciliation process, it cut tens of billions of dollars from the program and introduced a range of new criteria designed to restrict people's eligibility. 

Indelible Stain

 Just twenty-four hours before the attempted assassination at the White House Press Correspondents' dinner on Saturday, the U.S. military killed two more unarmed and defenseless people in a strike on a civilian vessel in the Pacific. 

Since just the start of April, Trump's administration has carried out at least six such extrajudicial killings, bringing the total number of people he has murdered in these strikes—without charge or trial—to above 180. 

The Dominance of Claws

 Reading any given newspaper this week would furnish you with plenty of examples of the insane malice of this administration. 

We talked in the previous post about the DOJ trying to reintroduce firing squads to federal death row. 

The Trump administration is also apparently floating plans to deport Afghan refugees from a U.S. military base where they've been living in Qatar to the war-torn state of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

Life and Death

 Reading through the evening edition of the New York Times last night, it was all too painfully clear that in our world of abysmal chasms between poor and rich—some lives are seen as utterly disposable, others as infinitely precious. 

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night—as William Blake once put it. 

This Guelph

 One of Trump's odd-ball riffs that he periodically refers back to is his ongoing contention that he probably isn't going to make it to heaven after death. 

"I want to try and get to heaven, if possible;" as he put it; "I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole." 

Political Chameleons

 I am fascinated by these right-wing influencers who seem to have suddenly discovered that war crimes are bad. I am happy for them, don't get me wrong. I'm glad that when Trump threatened to annihilate Iranian "civilization," many of these MAGA pundits suddenly discovered that threatening genocide or mass murder against a civilian population is a moral wrong. 

But—this was hardly the first time Trump demonstrated a sociopathic disregard for human life—and on all the previous occasions, these same MAGA die-hards were cheering him on.