Power And Decency

I'm sure it didn't originate there, but a neat trick in the post-9/11 era was all of biggest ghouls in America convincing themselves that they were the brave humanitarians, and opponents to war were The Real Racists Who Love Fascist Tyranny. Similarly, that the slogans and signs of random protesters were of greater importance than the leading politicians of the most powerful nations in the world.

On one hand we have a guy with a sign with a rude slogan, on the other hand we have Lindsey Graham saying "we" are in a "religious war."  I know Lindsey is wrong, but the guy with the intemperate sign left me no choice but to embrace him.  This is on you, guy with a sign.

Inverting the realities of power is a trick of fascists, embraced by dipshit centrists. And what do we conclude from that?  

Similarly, the biggest threats to Freeze Peach are college students complaining about the cafeteria banh mi and people calling me, a person with a million followers and a column in a major newspaper, a shithead on twitter, and not, you know, people with actual power (state or otherwise) to control the microphones and dole out consequences for deviations.

I joke that I hate everybody these days, and while that's not quite true, the degree to which The Discourse is populated by indecent people who imagine they are decent, who think we should like them, repulses me.

I'll give Dick Cheney this much (no you don't have to hand it to him): he didn't expect us to like him.

Morning

Some days there's a massive river of bullshit and I admit I don't have the energy to wade through it.

Late Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Enjoy.

Like Us

I regularly think about the scene in the film version of Catch-22, when Cathcart and Korn are offering to send Yossarian home.

We will issue orders sending you back to the States and there's one thing  you have to do for us in return.

What would that be?

Like us.

Like you?

Like us.

You'll be surprised how easy it is once you begin.

Brain Worms

There was always some pushback against my repeated reference to Trump's brain worms. It is true that they've been chomping a bit more slowly than I expected, but younger Trump, whatever his flaws, had it together in ways older Trump didn't. And the worms are still chomping.

Sounds Bad

Probably is!

NEW YORK (AP) — Federal prosecutors have rewritten their indictment against U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and his wife to charge them with conspiring to have him act as an agent of Egypt and Egyptian officials.

The superseding indictment, filed in Manhattan federal court on Thursday, accuses Menendez of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires people to register with the U.S. government if they are acting as “an agent of a foreign principal.” As a member of Congress, Menendez was prohibited from being an agent of a foreign government, even if he did register as one.

Lunch

Shop while you eat!

License To Do Anything

Just like any other messianic cult leader. Think of all the big brains he duped!

Sassoon also asked Ellison about Bankman-Fried’s philosophy on rules. According to Ellison, “He said that he was a utilitarian and he believed that the ways that people try to justify rules like ‘don’t lie’ ‘don’t steal’, under utilitarianism didn’t work.”

As Michael Lewis said, his whole life was wrapped up in Effective Altruism, a very sophisticated philosophy that told him he could do whatever the fuck he wanted to do.

Objectivism for even bigger dorks!

America's Worst Democrats

Josh Gottheimer.

Big Brained Boys

I won't claim "smart" people are easier to con (and by "smart" I mean people whose self-conception is that they are smart), but I suspect that once you hook them they stop wriggling and let you reel them in. Can't fool me, I'm a big brained boy! No way I can be conned!

I probably relate too much back to the Iraq war era - we all have our formative experiences- but it is why most of the Iraq war mea culpas were not really apologies to all the dead people, but instead  reflections on how I, a big brain, could have possibly been fooled? How did my big brain let me down? Almost unthinkable.

The most hilarious one was Will Saletan's. His big regret was not that he helped unleash mass death, but that in letting himself be fooled, he had unwittingly contributed to the current crisis facing us: our unwillingness to go to war with Iran.

Consider the opportunity cost. The problem with dumb war isn't that it's war. The problem is that it costs you the military, economic, and political resources to fight a smart war. Everything Bush wrongly attributed to Iraq turns out to be true of Iran. But we can't confront Iran with the force it probably requires, because we wasted our resources in Iraq. Americans, having been suckered in Iraq, won't accept evidence of Iran's nuclear program. Countries that might have supported us in a strike on Iran won't do so now, since we led them astray. Our coffers have been emptied to pay for the Iraq occupation. Our troops are physically and spiritually exhausted. In the name of strength, Bush has made us weak.

For reasons (made up or not) I can't even remember at the moment, the Usual Suspects were talking up scary Iran, just like they did with scary Iraq, except without 9/11 to boost them.  Big Brain Boy Will was eager to get conned once again!  

"Americans," having been suckered in Iraq, are now stupid, unlike Will, who is incapable of learning.

Wednesday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Get happy.

All In

I remember when the internet became a thing and Microsoft went from Bill Gates dismissing it to deciding that (essentially) Internet Explorer now WAS the operating system.

Then, when tablets came out, Microsfoft decided no one would use a normal PC anyore and designed Windows 8 around the idea that everyone would use a tablet.

Now we have the stupid "AI" and Microsoft is sticking it in everything.

I dunno, I just don't think smart clippy needs to be in everything.

Some of this is just rebranding everything a computer does as AI, which is also extremely stupid, but while the clever chatbots might have their uses, I suspect not so many!

How My Apes Doing

Neato, but not necessarily useful and certianly no real business case!

For months, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Discord Inc. have run an invitation-only chat for heavy users of Bard, Google’s artificial intelligence-powered chatbot. Google product managers, designers and engineers are using the forum to openly debate the AI tool's effectiveness and utility, with some questioning whether the enormous resources going into development are worth it.

“My rule of thumb is not to trust LLM output unless I can independently verify it,” Dominik Rabiej, a senior product manager for Bard, wrote in the Discord chat in July, referring to large language models — the AI systems trained on massive amounts of text that form the building blocks of chatbots like Bard and OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT. “Would love to get it to a point that you can, but it isn’t there yet.”

“The biggest challenge I’m still thinking of: what are LLMs truly useful for, in terms of helpfulness?” said Googler Cathy Pearl, a user experience lead for Bard, in August. “Like really making a difference. TBD!”

Okay Another

Well MOST of the money might be there, so no harm, no foul, really!

Late in the book, you talk about trying to find where the lost billions of FTX customer deposits, before concluding that most of it wasn’t actually lost in the first place: “Where did all that money go? The answer? Nowhere. It was still there.” Can you explain this to me? If we are now at $8.6 billion in customer deposits lost, Mr. John Ray [who was brought in as FTX CEO after its collapse] has actually collected, as he claims, $7.3 billion of liquid assets. And he has not sold a lot of the VC [venture capital] portfolios. I’ve interviewed a couple traders who actually think they might get 100 cents on the dollar. I think this is a really interesting thing that has not gotten enough attention: how much of the money is still there.

The bestest boy might've only ripped off a billion bucks! ONLY A BILLION!

Lunch

Shop while you eat!

Ruh-Roh

His best hope is that Michael Lewis is writing a book about him.

Washington — Embattled New York Rep. George Santos was indicted on new federal charges on Tuesday in a superseding indictment — including conspiracy, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and credit card fraud — just days after his former campaign treasurer pleaded guilty and admitted to much of the conduct, according to court documents.

Okay One More

What an incredible view of our system of justice.

But Judge Kaplan explicitly advised prospective jurors the opposite of your advice. “You are to look at no newspapers, listen to no press accounts, do no internet research,” he said.

It’s a funny thing about the American criminal justice system, that they like people not to know very much. Historically, it wasn't always that way. There was once a sense that you should have a judgment by your peers who were kind of knowledgeable about the context and the situation.

Quibble with elements of it, sure, but I think we all understand the reasons behind limiting a jury's exposure to things!

I'm sure Lewis has written a critique of this at length elsewhere, and it isn't just something he discovered when his special little boy got in trouble!

The Bestest Little Boy

This Michael Lewis interiew in Time is just an amazing thing. I could pick like 20 things but I'll only do a couple:

Lewis: I’d love for the jury to read the book. Mark Cohen [Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyer] said this to me: “You get up, you tell one story, and they tell the other story, and the question is which story the jury believes.” I’m in a privileged position to tell a fuller story, without leaving out any of the nasty details. If I were a juror, I would rather hear my story than either defense or prosecution.

I'm just going to tell you the story as I see it, and then leave you the discretion that then you lynch him, acquit him, or don't know what to think of him. I don't want the jury thinking I left anything else they needed to know.

No one needs to know anything except for what I, Great Man, Great Journalist, observed.

You don’t mention the infamous Vox interview, in which Bankman-Fried says “f-ck regulators” and seemed to admit that his caring about ethics was at least partially an act.

First, I was there, so that was weird. He was zonked out. But if you think he wasn’t an Effective Altruist, or that he didn’t care about that, you’re out of your mind. His whole life was wrapped up in that. I sat through endless meetings with these people; endless discussions with his Effective Altruist colleagues.

Maybe they were performing for the easily fooled journalist?

Easiest marks in the world! 

Don't buy his book! (but click the link and buy something else)