News bits: Trump in court, Musk in confusion, and an Armageddon update

Trump abuses the legal system in all possible ways

Law and Crime writes:

Trump Doesn’t Want Special Master to Hear Privately from National 

Archives,  Expresses ‘Deep Concerns’ About Leadership’s ‘Political Bias’

Former President Donald Trump’s attorneys asked the special master presiding over his Mar-a-Lago document review not to hear privately from the National Archives, an agency that he’s long vilified for supposed political bias.

After the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago home pursuant to a court authorized warrant, Trump went on the attack against the National Archives and Records Administration, which is typically seen as a bureaucracy of librarians, not a hotbed of partisanship. Trump sought to upend that image in a statement from his political action committee, Save America, which released a statement branding it “Radical Left-controlled.”

Trump’s attorney James Trusty continued that messaging in a Sept. 20th hearing in which he called NARA “highly politicized.” Trusty also repeated a claim, rated “Half True” by Politifact, that the National Archives placed warning labels on the U.S. Constitution and other founding documents. (NARA’s content warnings are on every page of the website, Politifact noted.)

This is how Trump has always litigated. He objects to everything one can possibly object to and also often to things that cannot be objected to. He endlessly delays, lies, slanders and often makes accusations based on (i) no facts, (ii) facts that contradict his lies, and/or (iii) facts he takes out of context and twists into lies, e.g., NARA’s content warnings. 

That shows how openly the leader of his corrupt, supportive and enabling fascist Republican Party shows his absolute contempt for the rule of law. When the law threatens or inconveniences him he treats it like scum. Of course, he loves the rule of law when it is turned against his enemies. His attitude toward the law is authoritarian, fascist actually, not democratic. If he had full-blown tyrant power, he would turn the rule of law into the rule of the despot. That is what Russia and China are today. That is what Trump clearly and undeniably wants to make America into if he gets the chance.

From the pulling head partially out of butt files

Elon Musk. What can a person say? For all of his brilliance, he sometimes thinks and acts with a level of understanding akin to a sack of bird seed. Or, maybe a pet rock. 

Anyway, he set up a real steal deal on his Twitter toy. People could get their account verified for a mere $7.99/ month. Immediately hoards of people rushed in to set up fake ‘verified’ accounts. That land rush included fake accounts claiming to be actual real people who already had real, verified Twitter accounts. One of the verified fake accounts was to a Mr. Mickey Mouse. As long as the $7.99 flew into Musk’s coffers, it was all good. ARS Technica writes:

Twitter quietly drops $8 paid verification; “tricking people not OK,” Musk says

Twitter usage is up, Musk says, as fake accounts wreak havoc.

When a wave of imposter accounts began using the verified checkmarks from Twitter's Blue paid subscription service to post misleading tweets while pretending to be some of the world’s biggest brands, it created so much chaos that Elon Musk seemingly had no choice but to revoke the paid checkmarks entirely.

“Basically, tricking people is not OK,” Musk tweeted, as some users began reporting that the option to pay $7.99 for a Twitter Blue subscription had disappeared, while others who had been verified previously found that their “Official” blue checkmarks had been reinstated.  

However, while Twitter has possibly never been funnier, Musk knows that not every user relying on Twitter Blue to sow confusion through brand impersonation has been posting “epically funny” jokes. One of the most disturbing fake posts yesterday was an account impersonating the pharmaceutical brand Eli Lilly, falsely telling people with diabetes that insulin is now free.

Fake claims of free insulin from a fake Twitter account claiming to be Eli Lilly just does not seem to be epically funny. I’m sure that if Musk had charged $8.00/month instead of just $7.99, all of this kerfuffle could have been avoided. 

Is tricking people really not OK? Heck, marketers, politicians, business titans, business pipsqueaks, professional public relations (propaganda) firms, the clergy and etc., do it all the time. 

From the Armageddon files: Serious deck 

chair rearranging is underway on humanity’s trip back to the Stone Age 

I really like this interesting topic. In my opinion it gets far too little attention. Safety tip: Always keep existential threats in mind. The WaPo writes:

How worried should we be, really, about killer rocks from space? He [Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer] said a major asteroid impact is rare but potentially catastrophic. He cited the Tunguska event of 1908, when either an asteroid or comet exploded over a remote region of Siberia and flattened 800 square miles of forest. It was, he said, “probably a once-every-200-years or so event, on average. But it’s entirely random. These can impact any time.”

Johnson explained that there are many asteroids lurking out there, still unidentified, that are bigger than the Tunguska object, and they “would devastate a multistate area — a natural disaster of a scale we’ve never had to deal with. That includes all the earthquakes and hurricanes that have ever happened in the past. It could be an existential threat to national well-being — an economic disaster as well as an environmental disaster.” He paused a beat and said, calmly, “So it’s not something you want to happen.”

We are not being paranoid when we recognize that human civilization has become increasingly complex and simultaneously armed with techniques for self-destruction. There are bad omens everywhere, and not just the melting glaciers and dying polar bears. We’re all still unnerved by the pandemic. Meanwhile, there’s this ancient threat called war. Vladimir Putin and his advisers keep rattling the nuclear saber. A nuclear holocaust is the classic apocalyptic scenario that never went away.

Not every doomsday scenario is a full-blown extinction event. There are extremely suboptimal futures in which our species straggles onward in a brutish, Hobbesian nightmare — back to the Stone Age. People who think about “existential risk” are focused on the collapse of civilization as we know it. One of their recurring themes is that there has never been a moment as pivotal as this one. “We see a species precariously close to self-destruction, with a future of immense promise hanging in the balance,” declares Oxford University philosopher Toby Ord in his book “The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity.” He gives us a 1 in 6 chance of “existential catastrophe” in the next 100 years.  

Ord is part of a new intellectual movement called “longtermism.” Proponents of the long view say we have moral obligations to the welfare of the trillions of people who might potentially follow us here on Earth, and on worlds across the universe. Highest among those obligations, of course, is to avoid destroying ourselves and our planet before those future people are born.  

This anti-doomsday sales job becomes even harder when we acknowledge that the climate crisis, pandemic viruses and the threat of nuclear war are only a few items on the long list of things that informed people should be fretting about. Optimism may prove delusional — a fatal flaw, in fact. But how you come down on existential risks may pivot on whether you think human ingenuity will outpace human folly. Do you believe, fundamentally, in the human race?

Hm, 16.7% chance of Armageddon within the next 100 years. Some will see that and say, see, told ’ya, there’s nothing to worry about. Some will yawn and go for a cup of coffee. A few of us will go: AHHHH!! Somebody do something!! Stop farting around with the deck chairs and get real!

I admit it, I'm a longtermer. I didn’t know it was a thing or had a name. But by golly, I’m probably near the cutting edge of whatever this longtermer thing is. Well OK, maybe in the general vicinity of the cutting edge.

Qs: Do we have any obligation, moral or otherwise, to the welfare of billions of people who might potentially follow us?

Do we have any obligation to avoid destroying (i) ourselves, (ii) modern civilization[1], and/or (iii) other species of plants and animals before future people are born?

Footnote: 

1. If modern civilization collapses, my estimate is that ~95% of all people alive would perish from exposure and/or lack of food or clean water within about 5 months. I am not aware of any survival estimate by an expert.