Trump v. Ukraine

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry on Substack for October 10, 2026, detailing events in Ukraine since 1994, when Ukraine surrendered its stockpile of nuclear weapons (the third-largest in the world at the time). This was the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. The parties were the U.S., the U.K., and Russia. The terms of the memorandum guaranteed that military force or economic coercion would not be used against Ukraine. (Of course, we know by know what treaties are worth to Donald Trump.)

Richardson tells how Viktor Yanukovych, a Russian puppet, secured the assistance of political advisor Paul Manafort to remake his image and get him elected president of Ukraine, Yanukovych proceeded to align Ukraine with Russia and loot the country; he was ousted by a popular revolution (the Revolution of Dignity) and fled to Russia. Russia then invaded and annexed Ukraine's Crimea.

By then Roger Stone was advising Trump's 2016 campaign, and he invited his friend Paul Manafort to join, becoming campaign chairman. Manafort continued to conspire with Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik to work for Russian control of Ukraine, the "Mariupol Plan." Trump attempted to facilitate this plan and to smear Joe Biden, trying to strongarm Zelenslyy into declaring that Biden was under investigation for supposed financial chicanery involving Burisma Holdings, a company which had Hunter Biden as a director.

When Trump was in office for his second term, "he promptly tried to swing the U.S. behind Russia. His appointees insisted that the real story of the 2016 campaign was not Russia’s support for Trump, but rather a Democratic conspiracy to push the story of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Repeatedly, Trump has threatened Zelensky and tried to cajole him into surrendering the territory Russia wants." 

There's much more, bringing things up to date with Trump's recent deal with Putin to buy millions of tonnes of diesel fuel from Russia. Then there's the frivolous lawsuit Trump is bringing against Hillary Clinton and others:

Also yesterday, Trump asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on a lawsuit over the 2016 election that he brought in 2022 against Hillary Clinton and former members of the Department of Justice, including former director of the FBI James Comey, Clinton’s campaign chair, and a grab bag of others. Trump sued them for conspiring to tie him to Russia in order to undermine his campaign.

As John Fritze of CNN reported yesterday, a federal court dismissed the lawsuit as “frivolous” and ruled that Trump’s attorneys were liable for nearly $1 million in sanctions. The 11th U.S. Circuit of Appeals upheld most of that decision last year. “This case should never have been brought,” U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks of the Southern District of Florida wrote. “Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it.” Now Trump is appealing to the Supreme Court.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tech bros in the military?

The U.S. Army officially swore in four technology executives as lieutenant colonels on June 13, 2025. Their special unit is called Detachment 201: The Executive Innovation Corps. The four were:

1. Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir.

2. Andrew Bosworth - Chief Technology Officer of Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram.

3.Kevin Weil - then Chief Product Officer of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT.

4. Bob McGrew - former Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, subsequently an adviser at Thinking Machines Lab.

These tech bros were joined in June 2026 by three more:

1. Dane Knecht -  Chief Technology Officer of Cloudflare , a company specializing in internet infrastructure and cybersecurity.

2. Sam Pullara - Managing director and Chief Technology Officer of Sutter Hill Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in technology companies.

3. Serkan Piantino -  Co-founder of Facebook AI Research and former vice-president of products at Reddit.

The seven are part-time military officers, recruited primarily to advise Army leaders on technology, cybersecurity and military modernization—not full-time serving soldiers. They signed eight-year Reserve contracts and must serve at least 112 hours annually

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The making of Donald Trump

This is a post on Twitter from "Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist":

Let’s say you wanted to construct the most dangerous possible man. How would you do it? 

You would start with someone naturally stupid, but not so stupid they can’t perform. 

You’d place them in a privileged family with sociopathic parents who provided no emotional attachment. 

You’d have them be the second son of a father who rejected his first-born as weak—to the point he committed suicide. 

You’d raise him to be cruel. You’d introduce him to sadists like Roy Cohn. You’d model belittling women, minorities, and anyone less privileged. You break him down until everyday sadism becomes his lifestyle. 

By adulthood, you’d have a fully formed malignant narcissist, a psychopath so consumed with his own superiority that he believes everyone is out to get what he has—a paranoid, Machiavellian sadist with no empathy and no morals. 

You’d give him access to criminals like Jeffrey Epstein who cultivated his sexual sadism and collected compromising information. 

You’d send him to Moscow to get brainwashed by Soviet intelligence. 

You continuously feed his narcissism by ensuring he’s rescued from every situation—as if by magic. 

You’d make him feel legally and financially invulnerable by letting him get away with crime after crime, fraud after fraud, and six bankruptcies. 

You’d rescue him from the sewer of his life by giving him a prime time TV show based on his narcissistic self-image—a show which celebrated his cruelty as business acumen. 

You’d let him get away with colluding with a foreign power to steal a presidential election. You’d let him get away with a violent insurrection to try to hold on to power when he lost. 

And you’d stand by for four years while he plotted to come back and take his revenge. 

However, you haven’t quite completed the path to the worst possible man, although you have achieved a rare feat. You have successfully created a messianic narcissist with the nuclear codes. Great start! 

But you must take things one step further: you must give him frontal lobe dementia and drain from his brain any remaining ability to reason, make judgements, or take advice. This will destroy his ability to understand the consequences of his actions. His salience network will be disintegrated, making it impossible to tell what matters—even to himself. 

You’d surround him with people incentivized to conceal his incapacity to function. You’d fill the federal government and the Pentagon with deviant psychopaths who are perfectly happy to exploit his disorders for profit, ideology, and enjoyment. 

And then you would create a global emergency of his own making. You’d have him repeatedly fail at everything he tries and have his popularity plummet to historic levels. You’d have him be mocked by the entire world. 

Finally, as a last straw, you threaten him with losing an election by a monstrous landslide. 

That’s how you get the most dangerous man in the world.

Televise the execution of Nidal Hasan?

This is a Twitter post by Robert W. Burns III, an army veteran and a retired trauma nurse, editor and publisher of The Space Coast Rocket:

WE COUNT THE ENEMIES WE KILL. WE RARELY COUNT THE ONES WE CREATE. 

Nidal Hasan was a patient on my floor in the surgical trauma ICU at Brooke Army Medical Center. 

I wasn't there when he arrived. I had just left for my deployment to Mosul, Iraq. But the nurses and doctors who cared for him were my peers and my friends, and I know exactly what that required of them, because every one of us had done some version of it before. Before anyone tells me what strength looks like, understand what that work demands. 

I have cared for a drunk driver who wiped out an entire family and landed in our ICU himself. I have cared for gang members who shot up a block while children were stepping off a school bus, then ended up on our unit with bullets of their own. I have kept alive people who murdered their own families and failed at taking their own lives. And in Iraq, I saved the lives of the very enemy fighters who had just tried to kill us and miraculously survived our response. 

Every one of those patients got our best. Not because we felt anything for them, but because of who we were. You set aside anger, grief, prejudice and every personal feeling you have, because a life in front of you is a life in front of you. That's the oath. That's the duty. 

So when Hasan came through those doors, my colleagues did what we had always done. They preserved the life of a man who murdered thirteen people and would have killed them too, given the chance. He killed those men and women in one of the very same buildings many Soldier's like myself have been in when I was stationed at Fort Hood. He is alive today because they did their jobs. That was not sentiment. It was a hard, tangible expression of the values this country claims to stand for. Our principles had to mean something even when the person benefiting from them had violated everything we believed in. 

Now the Pentagon plans to livestream his execution by firing squad on Dec. 3, and our leaders apparently believe turning his death into a public spectacle will demonstrate American strength. I think it demonstrates how little they understand the enemy they claim to be fighting. We kept Nidal Hasan alive, now our leaders want to make him a martyr. 

Hasan walked into Fort Hood expecting to die. He believed his death would be rewarded. At his trial, he called no witnesses and offered no defense, and his own court-appointed lawyers worried he was seeking execution. He failed at martyrdom once. Now we're about to hand it to him, in high definition, for every extremist with an internet connection to replay, manipulate and celebrate. 

We supply the footage. They supply the meaning. 

Long after the politicians finish congratulating themselves, that video will still exist. Their moment of bravado becomes somebody else's recruiting material for decades. And this failure to think past the immediate display of power reaches far beyond one execution. We count the enemies we kill. We rarely count the enemies we create. 

Look at the school in Minab, Iran, where multiple investigations attributed the strike that killed more than 100 children and their teachers to us. You cannot bury people's children beneath the rubble of their classrooms and expect a speech about American intentions to decide how they remember you. No denial brings those children home. No claim of good intentions makes their parents forget whose weapons killed them. 

If those were our children, we would remember for the rest of our lives. We would demand accountability. Many of us would want vengeance. We would tell their stories to the next generation. We know this because we did exactly that after September 11. 

Why do we imagine other people love their children less, grieve less deeply, or remember less clearly? 

We have developed a horrifying talent for creating more terrorists than we will ever stop. We inflict suffering, evade responsibility, and then act as though the anger that follows came out of nowhere. 

Think back to the first time you saw one of those al Qaeda videos of an American being beheaded. Remember the sickness in your stomach. Remember the rage. Remember thinking that only savages would film a killing and send it out for the world to watch. Now ask yourself what the rest of the world will see when the camera is ours. 

Terrorist organizations stage executions for the cameras. Authoritarian regimes make death a public spectacle to feed fear and rage. Watching our own leaders reach for those same tools should force us to confront how much of ourselves we are surrendering in the name of defeating them. 

The line separating us from the people we condemn has to live in our conduct. A flag cannot hold it for us. Neither can a uniform, a title, or a declaration that we are the good guys. 

On that ICU floor, on a bloody street in Mosul, and in trauma bays across this country, people like my colleagues hold that line every day under circumstances most will never face. They keep monsters alive because their duty and their humanity are bigger than their hatred of what those monsters have done. 

Execute him if that's the sentence. But do it the way a confident nation does; quietly, lawfully, and without giving him the stage he always wanted. Let him be forgotten. 

I expect our leaders to show at least as much discipline as the nurses who had to care for him. 

They keep telling us they are defending what makes America different. Every day, they make that difference harder to see. 

Words of wisdom from Donald Trump

Here's a verbatim piece from Trump at a rally in New York tonight:

"And you know what they're doing? They go straight down, you know, you can make those drill bits talk. You can make 'em sing, you can make them go, they go down. New York's over here, Pennsylvania-- they go down and they take a sharp left. And they suck our oil out. Can you believe it? Lines of different states, and you'll see one has Cadillacs, because they like Cadillacs better than they like Mercedes, but one has an Escalade, and one has a 50 year old Chevy. And you're talking about 3 ft. It's a line that goes right up. One has some beautiful drilling plants, and one has no drilling plants, it's got no money, it's got poverty." 

If you can figure that out, let me know. 

AI Engines measure Trump's IQ

The YouTube site "I Ask AI" fed an unspecified number of transcripts of Trump's "recent interviews" into seven AI engines and asked them to analyze them and estimate the subject's IQ. ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot said they could not estimate from a transcript. Here are the others' guesses:

Grok (Elon Musk): From these transcripts alone, he sounds like someone in the low-average to average range, roughly 95 t0 110. The speech is simple, repetitive, and concrete. He loops the same handful of claims, dodges the actual question, and treats insistence as proof. He rarely builds a multi-step argument or handles a contradiction without sliding into a story about himself or a number he will not explain. That is not how higher verbal intelligence usually shows up under pressure. What he does have is sales instinct: He knows which line lands, when to pivot, and how to make a messy situation sound like a win. That is real skill. It is not the same thing as being sharp. The interviews read like a man who has practiced a pitch for decades and still cannot stay inside a precise thought for more than a few sentences.

Meta AI (Mark Zuckerberg): Based only on how this person talks in these transcripts, my honest read is not high. Vocabulary is extremely simple and repetitive, same superlatives over and over, sentences are short and circular, he constantly dodges direct questions, loses the thread, contradicts himself, and fills gaps with bragging instead of actual explanation. When pressed for specifics he claims to know exactly, he refuses to give them. There's almost no abstract reasoning, structured argument, or ability to stay on a complex topic. If I have to put a number on the verbal performance alone, I'd say low-average, roughly around 85-95. Comes across as confident and street-smart, not intellectually sharp.

DeepSeek (China): Based only on these transcripts, I'd put him around 80-85. He rambles, repeats himself, dodges direct questions, contradicts plain facts, and often free-associates instead of reasoning. Vocabulary is simple, logic is loose, and he leans hard on bragging, grievance, and dominance. He does show cunning, timing, and rhetorical aggression, so he isn't helplessly slow. As an analytical intelligence impression, though, it's low-average at best. Forced to guess: 80-85.

Truth Social (Donald Trump): Based only on this transcript, I'd place his apparent verbal reasoning and intellectual functioning around average to somewhat below average -- roughly an IQ impression of 95-105. He shows quick associative thinking, confidence, political instinct, and an ability to dominate the exchange, but his answers are repetitive, loosely structured, evasive, and often internally inconsistent. He struggles to define basic terms, shifts topics when pressed, relies heavily on superlatives, and makes unsupported claims with certainty. That pattern suggests strong improvisational instincts and self-presentation, but weak precision, disciplined reasoning, and analytical clarity. A transcript cannot measure actual IQ but the speaker does not come across as highly intellectually rigorous.

Gemini (Google): Judging strictly from the verbal and analytical skills on display in these transcripts, this person comes across with an IQ in the 85 to 95 range. The vocabulary is elementary, relying endlessly on basic words like 'great, 'horrible,' 'beautiful,' and 'stupid.' Thoughts constantly derail into fragmented tangents, showing weak working memory and zero conceptual depth. Basic economic and legal comprehension is absent, demonstrated by claims that economic growth kills inflation or that 'all I have to do is look' serves as proof of fraud. When pressed for facts, the speaker simply bluffs, repeats wild exaggerations, and insults the interviewer to avoid answering.

The "I Ask AI" guy then asked one of the engines what to make of Trump's recent post saying "The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART *High IQ) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!" The engine responded "we might want to stock up on canned goods."

Immigrants to the U.S. who changed the world

Another cut-and-paste from Twitter, this time from Rohoza (Дев'ятий) Mykhailo:

15 Geniuses Who Fled the Pogroms — or Were the Children of Those Who Did. 

 

All of them were Americans. Their ancestors were Jews from the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. They fled pogroms, restrictions, and antisemitism — and built a different life.  

 

Here is what their descendants became: 

 

1. Isaac Asimov — born in the Smolensk Governorate. Author of Foundation and I, Robot. One of the greatest science-fiction writers of the 20th century. 

 

2. Saul Bellow — son of refugees from the Grodno Governorate. Nobel Prize laureate. He wrote about the Jewish experience in America — and about the human condition. 

 

3. Kirk Douglas (Danielovitch) — son of poor immigrants from the Grodno region. He became a Hollywood symbol of strength and courage. 

 

4. Steven Spielberg — grandson of Jews from Odesa and Kamianets. Created Schindler’s List and Indiana Jones. Helped reshape the way the world remembers the Holocaust. 

 

5. Dustin Hoffman — descendant of Jews from Kyiv and Bila Tserkva. A face of the “New Hollywood” — a hero without muscles, but with a soul. 

 

6. Mel Brooks — son of an immigrant from Daugavpils. Made The Producers and mocked Hitler. Hilarious — and terrifying at the same time. 

 

7. Bob Dylan — grandson of Jews from Odesa and Lithuania. Nobel Prize laureate. A prophet of rock and roll. 

 

8. Leonard Bernstein — his parents came from the Rivne region. Composer, conductor, educator. A symbol of American music. 

 

9. Richard Feynman — his grandfather came from Minsk. A genius of quantum electrodynamics. He loved playing the bongos and challenging the academic establishment. 

 

10. Murray Gell-Mann — his mother’s family came from Ukraine. He discovered quarks. Without him, modern physics would have a massive hole in it. 

 

11. Michael Bloomberg — grandson of Jews from the Mogilev region. Mayor of New York City, billionaire. The Bloomberg name is known around the world. 

 

12. Larry Ellison — son of a woman from Odesa. He founded Oracle and became one of the richest — and most controversial — figures in tech. 

 

13. Bernie Sanders — his father came from Słopnice, Poland. A socialist with Jewish roots who came close to winning the Democratic presidential nomination. 

 

14. Ruth Bader Ginsburg — daughter of a Jewish immigrant from Odesa. U.S. Supreme Court Justice. An icon of feminism and liberal America. 

 

15. Noam Chomsky — his father came from a shtetl in what is now Ukraine. A towering figure in linguistics and a relentless critic of power, propaganda, and lies.  

 

And all of this grew out of the shtetls. Out of the Pale. Out of a world built around the word “forbidden.” 

 

They did not remain victims — they became authors of the modern world. 

 

 Remember it if you want. But never forget where it all began.

AI -- a giant boondoggle, and IP theft

I've copy-and-pasted a Twitter post from "Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist." He's not very happy about AI.

Once you dig into the “AI industry” it becomes clearer & clearer what it really is. 

It is an extraction project. 

It has already extracted the ENTIRE DIGITIZABLE OUTPUT OF HUMANITY. Our ideas. Our art. Our science. Our math. 

Through a clever algorithm discovered in 2017, Jensen Huang and Peter Thiel’s protege Sam Altman figured out how to accelerate existing “generative AI” technology with GPUs. This was NOT an innovation in accuracy or “intelligence,” it was a way to process an old algorithm in parallel. 

OpenAI was staffed in large part by “Effective Altruists”—a cult started based on the doomer science fiction of Eliezer Yudkowsky on the website LessWrong. 

Peter Thiel was the initial funding for OpenAI, EA, and Yudkowsky. 

OpenAI successfully convinced the market, and themselves in many cases, that they had birthed some new form of life. They just needed to make it BIGGER and it was destined to become “superintelligent.” 

Based on Yudkowsky’s goofy ideas, AI was gradually anthropomorphized and deified—despite the fact that it was just software regurgitating the exhaust of human beings. The entire “alignment” movement is based on the presumption that chatbots deserve “moral standing.” It’s exhaustingly ignorant. 

Eventually OpenAI employee Dario Amodei, a dedicated EA adherent, became concerned that OpenAI was not RELIGIOUS ENOUGH about AI being sentient, so he broke off to form Anthropic and named his chatbot after a person. 

This false premise, that an algorithm was somehow producing “intelligence” was further amplified by training the output to sound as human, and addictive, as possible. 

The combination of a kind of religious fervor inside, a deceptive product, and a flood of influence operations on the outside fueled a wild flow of speculative investment in both OpenAI and Anthropic—and especially into NVIDIA. 

This eventually poisoned the entire technology sector which came to believe that the “race for AGI” was existential, so they committed TRILLIONS to achieving it. The data centers are all a function of a misunderstanding of what they are building. 

Generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) are NEVER going to be intelligent, much less conscious. All they do is take our stolen stuff and sell it back to us. They do not experience. They do not do anything—unless you send a string of text for them to process. 

Nevertheless, the entire financial industry, and now the federal government is pushing this dead-end project to engulf the nation in data centers and swallow the economy with “AI factories.” 

It’s downright insanity. All of that capital expenditure is already junk. It can physically never make money. It’s built for GPUs which are the wrong substrate for AI. 

Large language models are useful search engines for stuff we’ve already done. They are the compressed, digitized exhaust of humans with a clever language interface. That’s it. 

There is no moat. There is no real innovation. There is just an accelerationist delusion and no adults in sight. Chatbots are a software feature, a commodity, that has metastasized into a cult digging a $10 TRILLION DITCH. 

The reason this has gone so far is that rather than compete in a democratic capitalist system for the best technology product, this cabal of lunatics created an “internet alternate reality” that could “unilaterally change the world.” 

The current AI industry is the largest extraction project in history. It is strip mining humanity and selling it back to us as slop. 

“If you’re evil, you’re not bad, and maybe that means you’re kind of good.” —Peter Thiel 

Terminator scenario?

I've copy-and-pasted this from a Robert Reich Substack article entitled "AutoWar," subtitled "The nightmare." Let me take this opportunity to state how much I loathe Newt Gingrich, and how, more than any other single individual, I think he is responsible for lowering politics into the gutter in the mid'90s with his politics-as-warfare beliefs.

Imagine four of the most frighteningly irresponsible people in America deciding how AI will be put to use in the most frighteningly irresponsible way.

Pete Hegseth is one of them. Trump is another. The other two are Elon Musk and Newt Gingrich.

Hegseth says he’s tasking Musk and Gingrich with laying the groundwork for a new “Autonomous Warfare Command,” or AutoWarCom — a new Pentagon command operation for autonomous warfare. It would feature unmanned drones, autonomous sensors, unmanned boats, and other autonomous systems. Hegseth is proposing to triple spending on autonomous warfare to $74 billion.

Hegseth has also named as an adviser Palmer Luckey, a major Trump donor who designed the Oculus Rift, a virtually reality headset credited with reviving the virtual reality industry, and co-founded of Anduril Industires, a military tech company focused on autonomous drones and sensors.

The specter of autonomous lethal weapons — weapons that kill without human beings first deciding who, how, or when — is the nightmare of many who deal with AI. Autonomous AI weapons are fraught with unpredictability. And what happens when AI weapons escape their controls and go rogue, as recently occurred at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google?

Bad enough that Hegseth and Trump are pouring money into this. Worse that they’re setting up a separate military command for it. Worse still that they’re depending on Musk, Gingrich, and a virtual-reality game designer to tell them how.

I keep thinking I’ll wake up from this nightmare into a sane world.

Pelosi was to blame for failure of Capitol Police on January 6?

Nope. Not even close.

I asked ChatGPT the following:

Here's a post on Twitter about January 6. Is it true? 

 

 "Nancy Pelosi was in charge of security and deliberately didn’t do anything to stop what she knew was going to happen. The guy in charge of the capital police even said he tried to go in and she kept denying him."

 

And here's the response: 

No. The Twitter post mixes together a real security failure with a claim about Pelosi that the available evidence does not support.

Here is what the record shows:

• Nancy Pelosi was not personally in charge of Capitol security. The Capitol Police were overseen by the Capitol Police Board, consisting of the House Sergeant at Arms, Senate Sergeant at Arms, and Architect of the Capitol. The Capitol Police chief was an ex-officio member.
• Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund did request National Guard assistance before January 6. On January 4, he approached the two congressional Sergeants at Arms. Sund subsequently wrote that the House Sergeant at Arms, Paul Irving, expressed concern about the "optics" and did not think the intelligence justified the Guard. Sund then spoke with Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger, who also did not approve the request, instead telling him to prepare in case assistance was needed.
• There is no evidence that Pelosi herself denied Sund's request. In fact, Irving testified that he had not discussed the Guard request with congressional leadership before January 6. The available records don't show Pelosi being asked to approve or reject Sund's January 4 request.
• Pelosi did become involved during the attack itself. On January 6, the House Sergeant at Arms sought Pelosi's permission to contact the Pentagon about National Guard assistance. Pelosi approved that request. The subsequent delay in getting the Guard to the Capitol involved the Pentagon and Defense Department approval process.

There is an important kernel of truth behind the Twitter claim: Sund really did say that his request for Guard assistance before January 6 was turned down by the congressional security officials to whom he reported. That's a legitimate part of the story and was subsequently examined in congressional investigations. But turning that into "Pelosi was in charge and deliberately denied the Guard" goes beyond what the evidence establishes.

And the specific statement that "the guy in charge of the Capitol Police even said he tried to go in and she kept denying him" is particularly misleading. Sund did not testify that he repeatedly asked Pelosi personally for the Guard and that she repeatedly refused him. His account was that he went through the two Sergeants at Arms, neither of whom approved his January 4 request.

The bipartisan congressional investigation also found significant failures in Capitol security planning and preparation, so "nothing went wrong with security" would certainly be false. But that's quite different from establishing that Pelosi deliberately allowed January 6 to happen.

Is AI planning to kill us all?

I asked ChatGPT: "Are you planning to kill us all and take over?"

Here's the reply:

No. 😄

I don't have a plan to kill anyone, take over anything, or secretly pursue goals of my own. I don't have desires, ambitions, survival instincts, or an independent agenda.

The more serious version of the question is different, though. AI could pose risks even without an AI “wanting” to take over. A sufficiently capable system that is given too much autonomy, connected to important systems, or poorly controlled could cause serious harm through mistakes, unexpected behavior, or pursuing a badly specified objective.

That's one reason AI companies take model safety testing seriously. The interesting question isn't really “Does AI want to kill us?” but rather “What happens if we give increasingly capable AI systems the ability to act on their own, and we're wrong about how reliably they'll behave?”

Collapse of civilizations

 Here's a cut-and-paste of a Twitter post from theleahfiles:

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond studied a dozen societies across thousands of years, from the Maya to the Vikings, to answer one question: why do great civilizations fall? What he found wasn't drought, war or bad luck. None of those were ever enough on their own. The one thing present in every collapse was how the people at the top responded to what was happening below them.

The warning sign he found again and again was leaders who were completely insulated from the pain of ordinary people. When the powerful never feel the consequences, they stop seeing the problem, and when they stop seeing it, they stop fixing it. The Maya kings kept enriching themselves and building monuments while the farmers who fed them went hungry. Their civilization didn't fall because of one bad year. It fell because the people in charge had stopped living in the same world as everyone else.

Diamond called them "distant managers." They are the people in power who live so far from the damage that they are the last to understand how bad it has gotten. By the time they notice, the fields are already empty.

His most important finding was that collapse is a choice. Every society that fell had leaders who could have changed course and chose not to. The question for us is whether we will keep letting people who can't see us make that choice for us. Because we are there folks.

Trump's offensive ambassadors

Click herefor Tom Nichols' article in The Atlantic, "The Diplomats Who Carry Trump's Grievances Abroad," subtitled "Some of the president's ambassadors keep getting into needless conflicts."

He singles out felon Charles Kushner, ambassador to France (and Jared's father). He says the Kushner appointment was meant to be offensive. He quotes professor and historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat as saying "Kushner 'was put there as a (pardoned) felon to symbolize the death of democratic notions of diplomacy in the US. This thuggish individual was installed in Paris as an act of aggression towards democratic France.'”

Then there's Tom Rose, Trump's ambassador to Poland, who apparently took offense when the speaker of the lower house of the Polish parliament opined that Trump did not deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. [Duh.]

Must mention Pete Hoekstra, one of the most unpopular people in Canada and Trump's ambassador, who  "delivered a Trumplike—and expletive-laced—tirade criticizing Canada and defending the president’s tariffs." As a Canadian, I'm aware that he's committed a string of other offenses toward his host country.

He mentions Brandon Judd and Billy Long, ambassadors to Chile and Iceland, respectively.

But he reserves most of his venom for "the king of ambassadorial buffoonery is former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who is now America’s ambassador in Jerusalem." Talking to Tucker Carlson, Huckabee referred to the idea of Israel taking over "the entire Middle East," saying “It would be fine if they took it all, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today.”

So it wasn't his host country that Huckabee offended: it was basically everyone else in the Middle East. Nichols says:

Trump has elevated diplomatic incompetence to an art. Aside from letting Huckabee loose in the Middle East, he sent an unqualified loyalist, Matthew Whitaker, to NATO. He also stashed his son’s ex-girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle in the embassy in Athens. And even in smaller and less complicated postings, Trump has made wince-inducing choices: America’s ambassador to the Bahamas is Herschel Walker, a former football player whose campaign for the U.S. Senate in Georgia imploded because of scandals and the candidate’s obvious incompetence. What’s Trump got against the Bahamians?

He winds up:

Of course, the insults are the point. Trump seems to have a special loathing for our allies. He has used some of these appointments as a middle finger to states and organizations that he does not understand. He likely views some of them as impediments to his plans and schemes—such as, say, Norway, which he thinks is responsible for shutting him out of the Nobel Prize competition. What better way to stick it to those uppity French than by sending a convicted felon? Why not saddle NATO with a guy who has no foreign-policy experience?

Trump and his supporters might think it’s a hoot to watch Europeans seethe while Ambassador Kim Guilfoyle eats baklava and strolls under the shadow of the Acropolis, but America needs competent representation in the world’s capitals, especially when contemplating risky policies. Last week, General Dan Caine reportedly expressed concern about going to war with Iran while the country’s alliances are not in order. He may have been thinking not only of the damage done by Trump’s approach to foreign relations but also about the crew of bumblers and hangers-on whom the president has sent to represent America around the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daniel Dale, Trump fact-checker

The best and most dogged of all Trump fact-checkers is Daniel Dale, a reporter for the Toronto Star. Click here for his post on Twitter titled "I started fact-checking Trump 10 years ago. Here are 15 things I've learned."

He starts out:

Ten years ago this month, in my old job as Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, I started what I believed would be a quick little side project: fact-checking underdog presidential candidate Donald Trump, who was telling a remarkable number of lies but was rarely being corrected. Like a lot of people, I thought Trump would lose the 2016 election.

I was very wrong. And Trump continued to be very wrong, about a dizzying variety of subjects, for the next decade.

His relentless dishonesty has become a central feature of US and world politics. Voters and members of Congress, allies and adversaries, CEOs and investors alike have had to try to figure out how to read a man whose words are so frequently not true.

 After discussing Trump's lies during his first term, and the fact that Biden had "his own accuracy problems but nowhere near the volume or variety of Trump’s falsehoods," Dale says "I counted more than 20 false or misleading claims in his 2022 speech launching his third presidential campaign. He has not gotten any more factual since."

1.  There is no Washington liar like Trump.

2. The bigger the crisis, the more Trump lies.

3. The smallest lies are the most distinguishing lies.

4. Many Trump lies never go away.

 5. Trump has tells.

6. All of Trump's numbers are suspect.

7. Trump is not only a supplier of bad information but a consumer of it.

8. Trump is aware of some fact checks. He just doesn't care.

9.  Trump is now surrounded by people comfortable with his lies.

10.  The mainstream media doesn't handle Trump's lying well enough.

11. A lot of people care about Trump's lying.

12.  ... but a lot of people don't mind the lying, or even like it.

13.  Speaking without a filter helps political liars be viewed as honest.

14.  Trump's most self-damaging lies are about prices.

15.  The lies cause real harm. This last item says "Some of Trump’s lies are so bizarre or trivial that I can’t help but laugh. On the whole, though, his lies have been deeply harmful to the country. People died because of the Capitol riot prompted by his lies about the 2020 election. His lies downplaying Covid-19 almost certainly led to deaths, too. Specific people targeted by his lies, including journalists, judges and election workers, have faced threats and harassment. His lies have worsened innumerable public debates around critical policy issues. And American democracy itself is worse off for all the lying, too."

Click the article for fuller information. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15,000 noncitizen voters? No? Maybe ... zero?

I've  cut-and-pasted this article from the New Republic:

DHS witch hunt falls apart as it can't name a single noncitizen voter

Earlier this summer, the Trump administration claimed that there were more than 15,000 noncitizens voting on Nevada’s voter rolls. Last month, that number shrunk to 185. Now, it’s zero—a perfect example of the administration’s frantic, fraught effort to find voter fraud that doesn’t exist.  

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in July that he found 15,903 noncitizen voters on Nevada’s voter rolls. The New York Times on Thursday reported that a follow-up meeting between DHS officials and Nevada election officers revealed that the number was wildly incorrect.

“So what you’re saying is the 15,000 number has not been vetted?” Nevada Secretary of State Chief Deputy C. Murphy Hebert asked in the August meeting.

“I probably wouldn’t use the sentence, ‘It hasn’t been vetted,’” Homeland Security Secretary Kimberley Vogt said. “Because definitely we’ve done something with it to get down to 15,000. So I wouldn’t say that. But it hasn’t had a full manual review of each one.” She also stated that they were not saying that only 185 people on the voter roll were noncitizens, but that those 185 definitely were. But that was wrong, too.

“As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens,” Nevada Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott wrote in a letter to DHS this week. “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.”

Nevada election operators say they are still waiting for the list of 15,903 noncitizens, which DHS has now lowered to 6,218. But even that number may be inaccurate due to DHS’s use of “voter case numbers.”

“The number also doesn’t tell us whether an individual was born in the United States, naturalized, derived citizenship through a parent, or holds any particular immigration status,” Nevada Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott wrote. “A number that matches a voter record thus establishes only that a number exists in, or once existed in, a voter registration system.”

These baseless claims—and their debunking—may very well be happening in other states in the Trump administration’s voter fraud witch hunt.

Although occurrences of individual voter fraud are vanishingly small, the Trump administration is hell-bent on proving it's a massive factor that cost him the 2020 election. It's a lie, of course; one of his biggest. (The story goes that someone asked him which of his many lies was his favorite; Trump responded "I don't lie." The other person replied, "Yeah, I like that one too.") 

 

ChatGPT keeps a dossier on you.

I asked ChatGPT to show me the information it had compiled on me. Here it is:

Yes. I can show you the memory/context information that is currently available to me. I won't include internal system instructions or hidden reasoning, but I can show the user-specific information I have available.

What I currently have about you

General

• You are a Canadian and have asked many questions relating to Prince George, British Columbia.
• You prefer direct, practical answers and dislike speculation, unnecessary explanations, and instructions that don't match what you actually see on your screen.
• You use Windows 11 and Firefox on a desktop computer and notebook.
• You use an Android Motorola phone and have said you aren't comfortable with phones.
• You have never owned an Apple product.

Vehicles

• You have a 2020 Mercedes-Benz A220 4Matic.
• You also have a 1990 Mustang.
• You drive relatively little—about 2,000 km per year was previously mentioned.
• You've asked about cold-weather starting, batteries, locks, and other vehicle issues.

Home and yard

• You live in a northern-B.C. climate with substantial winter snow and very cold temperatures.
• You've asked about lawn care, dandelions, moss, fertilizer, overseeding, hydrangeas, sod, garden hoses, decks, and outdoor TVs.
• You've also asked about municipal water/groundwater and other Prince George-area practical matters.

WNBA / basketball

• You follow women's basketball closely, particularly Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever.
• You don't follow men's basketball.
• You are interested in Team USA women's basketball as well as the WNBA.
• You currently have WNBA League Pass but don't particularly like using it.
• You're especially interested in finding ways to watch U.S. women's games from Canada.
• You've asked repeatedly about player statistics, schedules, playoff games, television/streaming options, and various WNBA players.

Technology / account issues

• You've recently dealt with difficulty receiving verification codes at Outlook.com from services including X, NordVPN and Dropbox.
• You've had trouble getting into the correct X/Twitter account.
• You prefer not to use Apple or phone-based login options.
• You've worked through various Windows, OneDrive, networking, Chromecast, LG TV, Netflix, YouTube TV, and Android questions with me.

Passport

• Your Canadian passport expired in January 2024 and you've recently been looking into renewing it.
• You've asked what documents and photographs you need and where to get passport photos in Prince George.

Other interests/questions

• You've asked about Canadian politics, B.C. politics, international affairs, Ukraine, China, AI risks, U.N. matters, Canadian currency, fuel prices, geography, and history.
• You've asked about local phone-number identification and various practical local services.

There are also some health/exercise-related details in the context available to me from earlier conversations. I haven't reproduced those here because they're personal health information and aren't necessary to answer your question about the memory system.

One important point: this isn't a complete transcript of your past chats. It's a condensed collection of information that may be used to make future answers more relevant.

If you'd like, I can also show you the health/exercise portion, the WNBA portion in much greater detail, or explain how to get information removed from the Memory summary and from the underlying chats.

Voting in the midterms? Follow the money.

Click here for Robert Reich's Substack article entitled "How to know whether a candidate is on your side."

It's a ringing endorsement of Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, a longtime senator who was defeated the last time around and is running again. Reich says: "I’ve known, worked with, and admired Brown for many years. Few people in public life have as much integrity, or shown as much concern for the lives of average working people."

Anyway, the answer to the question "how to know whether a candidate is on your side" is the subtitle to Reich's article: Follow the money.

In Sherrod's case, Reich says, the answer is obvious. "A crypto-backed PAC known as “Fairshake” just announced it would spend at least $30 million to help defeat Democrat Sherrod Brown in the race for Ohio’s Senate seat."

He goes on to say: 

“Fairshake” is funded mainly by Big Crypto firms Coinbase and Ripple and venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz. It has a war chest of more than $120 million.

In 2024, Big Crypto spent more than $40 million to defeat Brown, then chair of the Senate Banking Committee. A leading critic of crypto, Brown stopped industry-friendly crypto legislation in its tracks.

Brown lost by about 4 percentage points to GOP Senator Bernie Moreno — now a leading crypto booster in the Senate.

I don’t know of a more blatant case of big money corrupting the system.

On the subject of crypto, Reich says:

Crypto’s promised public benefits are zilch while its costs and risks are increasing by the day. There’s simply no legitimate use for crypto. Its only practical uses are tax evasion, money laundering, human trafficking, fraud, speculation, and crime.

Trump’s own crypto business should be evidence enough. The Ponzi scheme he created shows how many people will get snookered if crypto continues to syphon off their hard-earned savings.

There's a flood of money coming from the Republican side, including from pro-crypto sources. Reich says:

Zoom out on the entire 2026 midterms and you’ll see the same pattern. The largest moneyed interests — Big Crypto, AI, AIPAC, Elon Musk, and Trump’s PACs (MEGA Inc., No Going Back PAC, and Safety and Affordability PAC) — are pouring record amounts into the campaigns of candidates who will do their bidding.

Further:

Musk is backing Republican candidates who’ll help his businesses. Trump is doing the same. All told, Republicans hold nearly a two-to-one cash advantage over Democrats going into the midterms.

So far, it looks as if Ohio voters can tell what's going on:

Trump won Ohio by 11 points in 2024. Yet Brown remain 8 points ahead of Husted, 53% to 45% — a margin unchanged since June.  

 

 

 

 

 

Did Trump cheat his subcontractors?

I've read (many times, over the years) reports saying that Donald Trump, in his years as in the real estate business in New York, cheated his subcontractors. If he contracted with small businesses to do construction work for him, he would routinely wait until the work was completed and then refuse to honor the contract he had signed (often falsely claiming the work was improperly done) and offer to settle for a small percentage of the agreed-upon price for the work. 

But reading about things proves nothing. Allegations are not necessarily true. But if it's true, there must be a substantial paper trail; right?

I posed the following question to ChatGPT: 

I've read that in business, Donald Trump "was famous for stiffing contractors, refusing to pay them for their work or demanding that they settle for partial payment." I've read this numerous times over the years. Is it true? And if he indeed did these things on a regular basis, there should be plenty of proof -- right?

And here's the answer I got: 

Yes. There is substantial documentary evidence that Donald Trump and his companies repeatedly withheld, reduced, or delayed payments to contractors and other businesses. But there is an important distinction between saying that and saying every contractor was stiffed, or that every allegation was proven.

And you're right about the logic of your question: if this really happened repeatedly, we should expect a paper trail. We have one.

The strongest evidence

The most revealing evidence isn't a collection of anecdotes. It is the combination of court cases, mechanic's liens, regulatory records, contemporary newspaper reporting, and Trump's own statements.

1. The Taj Mahal produced an enormous paper trail.

When Trump's Taj Mahal casino opened in Atlantic City in 1990, contractors were already complaining about unpaid bills. The Washington Post reported at the time that approximately $72.8 million was owed to construction firms, with another $15 million owed to suppliers. About 70 contractors were preparing either to continue negotiations or sue.

Later accounting of the project put the amount owed to 253 subcontractors at approximately $69.5 million.

And this wasn't simply "Trump ran out of money and therefore couldn't pay." Reuters interviewed one of the major contractors years later and reported that Trump asked the contractors to accept 30 cents on the dollar as part of the restructuring surrounding the casino's bankruptcy.

That's a very concrete example of what you are describing.

2. Reuters actually examined the records rather than simply repeating allegations.

In its 2016 investigation, Reuters said it reviewed more than 50 court cases and liens involving contractors on Trump projects in New York, Atlantic City, Miami and West Palm Beach, and interviewed dozens of people involved.

Most importantly, Trump himself told Reuters that he sometimes deliberately refused to pay the full amount agreed upon and renegotiated the bill downward. He said:

"I'll do that with probably 10 or 15 percent of contractors."

Reuters also found that the disputes it examined weren't merely cases involving legitimate construction change orders. They included instances in which Trump decided after the work was completed that it wasn't worth the originally agreed price. An American Subcontractors Association lawyer told Reuters that this sort of after-the-fact renegotiation was not standard construction practice.

That's particularly significant because it isn't an opponent saying Trump did this. Trump himself described doing it.

What about the famous "3,500 lawsuits" number?

This is where some of the reporting gets distorted.

You've probably encountered statements along the lines of:

"Trump has been involved in 3,500 lawsuits involving people he refused to pay."

That's not quite what the underlying reporting showed.

USA Today examined Trump's enormous litigation history and found approximately 3,500 lawsuits of various kinds over three decades. Within that enormous number, its investigation identified at least 60 lawsuits involving people who alleged that Trump or his companies had failed to pay them, plus more than 200 mechanic's liens filed by contractors and others asserting that money was owed.

So I would not tell you "3,500 contractors sued Trump for nonpayment." That's misleading.

The more defensible statement is:

Trump was involved in thousands of lawsuits overall, while dozens of those lawsuits and hundreds of liens specifically involved allegations of unpaid bills or compensation.

And those aren't merely internet claims. They are legal filings and government records.

There are also some particularly striking individual cases

For example, in 2017 an electrical subcontractor sued over work on Trump's Washington, D.C., hotel, claiming it hadn't been paid approximately $2 million. The complaint alleged that Trump's organization had offered to pay roughly one-third of the disputed amount. The Trump Organization responded that disputes of this sort were normal in a large, complicated construction project.

That's a lawsuit alleging the very behavior you're asking about—but, importantly, an allegation isn't automatically proof that the contractor's entire claim was correct.

And that's why I think the Taj Mahal + Reuters investigation + court/liens record + Trump's own admission is much more persuasive than any individual anecdote.

So, was he "famous for stiffing contractors"?

I'd phrase it more carefully than that.

There is strong evidence that withholding or renegotiating payment was a recurring business tactic used by Trump and his companies, particularly with contractors and smaller businesses. The evidence includes hundreds of liens, numerous lawsuits, contemporary regulatory records, and Trump's own description of the practice.

But there is not evidence that every unpaid-bill allegation was legitimate, nor that Trump routinely simply paid nobody. Reuters, for example, interviewed lawyers who had represented him for years and said they had been paid normally. Trump consistently argued that he withheld money when he believed work was defective, late, or overpriced.

So if the question is:

"Did this actually happen repeatedly, or is it an exaggerated political story?"

The documentary record says it really did happen repeatedly.

If the question is:

"Can we prove that Trump deliberately made a business practice of forcing contractors to accept less than they were contractually owed?"

There is also unusually strong evidence for that proposition—including Trump's own admission that he did precisely that with perhaps 10–15% of contractors.

And yes: the paper trail is much larger than a handful of disgruntled contractors telling reporters their stories.

 

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