The ex-president's big grift rip off: It still rips people off today

The hearings this morning were interesting. But only interesting to open minds. 

Closed minds either didn't listen to it, or reject it as lies. Closed minds do not change. For the most part, evidence is irrelevant. Tribe and cult loyalty is everything, inconvenient facts and truth are lies.

The only point this post makes is that T**** used his position of public trust and power as a gigantic grift to cash in on at least $250 million. He was and still is interested in paying off his debts, not anything else.

The power and credibility of the American radical right Republican Party and its current leader T**** are built on demagoguery, lies, deceit, slanders, fraud, Christian fundamentalism, corrupt vicious capitalism and endless sleaze.

Most of the Republican Party and American conservatism is demagogic, neo-fascist, corrupt, mendacious and especially staunchly anti-inconvenient truth and anti-democratic. The Republican Party and American conservatism is the enemy of what is good, freedom-loving and honest.

 

Qs & commentary: Is that mostly false and therefore over the top? If so, my bad, but I don't think I am wrong, so, I'm not bad. Or, is that reasoning flawed? If so, exactly and precisely how is it flawed?

Many Dems now argue that Biden should not run in 2024

From NYT 6/11/22:

Should Biden Run in 2024? Democratic Whispers of ‘No’ Start to Rise.

In interviews, dozens of frustrated Democratic officials, members of Congress and voters expressed doubts about the president’s ability to rescue his reeling party and take the fight to Republicans.

Midway through the 2022 primary season, many Democratic lawmakers and party officials are venting their frustrations with President Biden’s struggle to advance the bulk of his agenda, doubting his ability to rescue the party from a predicted midterm trouncing and increasingly viewing him as an anchor that should be cut loose in 2024.

As the challenges facing the nation mount and fatigued base voters show low enthusiasm, Democrats in union meetings, the back rooms of Capitol Hill and party gatherings from coast to coast are quietly worrying about Mr. Biden’s leadership, his age and his capability to take the fight to former President Donald J. Trump a second time.

Interviews with nearly 50 Democratic officials, from county leaders to members of Congress, as well as with disappointed voters who backed Mr. Biden in 2020, reveal a party alarmed about Republicans’ rising strength and extraordinarily pessimistic about an immediate path forward.

“To say our country was on the right track would flagrantly depart from reality,” said Steve Simeonidis, a Democratic National Committee member from Miami. Mr. Biden, he said, “should announce his intent not to seek re-election in ’24 right after the midterms.”

 

Democrats’ concerns come as the opening hearing of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol made clear the stakes of a 2024 presidential election in which Mr. Trump, whose lies fueled a riot that disrupted the peaceful transfer of power, may well seek to return to the White House.

For Mr. Biden and his party, the hearings’ vivid reminder of the Trump-inspired mob violence represents perhaps the last, best chance before the midterms to break through with persuadable swing voters who have been more focused on inflation and gas prices. If the party cannot, it may miss its final opportunity to hold Mr. Trump accountable as Mr. Biden faces a tumultuous two years of a Republican-led House obstructing and investigating him.

Read the rest of the article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/us/politics/biden-2024-election-democrats.html

See also this related article in The Guardian: "AOC refuses to endorse Biden for 2024 as Democrats doubt his ability to winhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/12/aoc-biden-2024-election-democrats-anxiety

 

White domestic terrorists stopped while trying to do their thing

Arresting bigoted White terrorists before they

could attack and/or murder innocent people they hate

Bigoted and/or racist White supremacists are among the top terrorist threats in the US at present. The Spokesman-Review writes:

‘Little army’ of 31 masked Patriot Front members arrested in Coeur d’Alene 

near Pride in the Park

Police in Coeur d’Alene arrested 31 masked members of a white nationalist group suspected of conspiring to riot in the city’s downtown on the same day as a scheduled Pride in the Park event nearby.

The arrested men of “Patriot Front” arrived in Coeur d’Alene inside a U-Haul truck that police pulled over. Only one was from Idaho. The rest came from Washington, Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia and Wyoming. Among the arrested is the national leader of the group, Thomas Rousseau, according to the Kootenai County Jail roster.

Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said the group evidently “came to riot downtown.” White said the group also had “paperwork” that appeared similar to a police or military operations plan.

The arrests became a spectacle as onlookers watched and used cellphones to take video and pictures of numerous police officers standing by as others rolled up the rear door of the U-Haul near the Paul Bunyan restaurant to reveal more than two dozen men wearing khakis, blue shirts and coats, white balaclavas and baseball caps. The U-Haul was eventually towed away.

 

An unmasked angry White bigot boy going to 

the slammer where he belongs

Why is it always males, especially T**** supporters? 

Are they just evil, stupid, something else or 

all three?

“Patriot Front” my ass. They are not patriots. They are murderous White neo-fascist terrorists and traitors. No doubt they support T****. They are fine Republicans in good standing with the neo-fascist GOP. Marjorie Taylor Greene will probably be Tweeting in their defense soon claiming something crackpot like fluoride in the water and/or Hunter Biden's laptop made them go out to attack non-heterosexual people.

What Biden and democracy defenders need to focus on, if it's not too late

The Washington Post published an important perspective article by Richard L. Hasen professor of law and political science at the University of California at Irvine. This is well worth paying attention to. Hasen writes: 

The special House committee hearings investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — which began Thursday night, in prime time — are serving multiple purposes: They are revealing evidence that could be used to file criminal charges for attempted election subversion against some of former president Donald Trump’s lawyers, against people who tried to manipulate the count of electoral college votes and potentially against Trump himself. They have begun to provide the most comprehensive account yet of the unprecedented attempt by Trump and his allies to disrupt the peaceful transition of power after the 2020 election.

But the most important thing the hearings, which will continue into July, can do — given that, if someone tries to steal the next election, they won’t do it precisely the way Trump and his allies tried in 2020 — is to shift our gaze forward: They can highlight continuing vulnerabilities in our electoral system and propose ways to fix them, before it is too late.

The hearings also represent the best chance to galvanize public support to address these weak points, which is important, because the window for passing such legislation is closing: If Republicans retake the House in November, they will never put forth bills that imply the country needs protection from Trump, their kingmaker. If these hearings don’t spur action by this summer or fall, expect Congress to do nothing before the 2024 elections, at which point American democracy will be in great danger.

Any attempt to subvert the next presidential election is likely to be far more efficient and ruthlessly targeted than the last effort. It will be focused on holes and ambiguities in the arcane rules for counting electoral college votes set forth in the Constitution and in a poorly written 1887 law, the Electoral Count Act.

There’s much that can be done to fix those problems, as a diverse group of prominent legal scholars, convened by the American Law Institute and including former Obama White House counsel Bob Bauer and former Trump White House counsel Donald McGahn, has suggested. To begin with, Congress can revise the Electoral Count Act to create a more robust role for federal courts in making sure that states follow their own rules for picking the winner of their electoral college votes. Courts are not perfect, but they stood strong in 2020 against more than 60 attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn election results, and they are the best hope to deal fairly with any future conflict over the rightful winner of a state’s electoral college votes.

Congress should also mandate that voting machines produce paper ballots that could be recounted in the event of an election dispute, provide adequate funding for fair elections, increase protection of election workers and officials against harassment and violence, and stiffen criminal penalties for interfering with official election proceedings. (Some of these provisions, like the paper-ballot requirement, were in the Freedom to Vote Act, which Democrats failed to get through the Senate this year.)

But revision of the Electoral Count Act may prove especially important. Imagine that 2024 features a rematch between Trump and President Biden, and Biden once again narrowly prevails in Arizona and Pennsylvania. By that year, those states may have as their governors two leaders who embrace the “big lie” that Biden’s victory was fraudulent: Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee in Pennsylvania, and Kari Lake, who is making a strong bid to be the Republican nominee in Arizona. One or both could reject a state vote tally favoring Biden and attempt to send in an alternate slate of electors in 2024 favoring Trump.

On what basis could they try to reject a vote of the people? As Politico has reported, the Republican Party is instructing volunteer poll workers on how to challenge voters on Election Day, teaching them to report any issues at polling places directly to GOP-affiliated lawyers rather than to their poll-worker superiors. This disruption of the chain of command in state election machinery could easily lead to chaos and confusion, which then could serve as an excuse for someone like Mastriano to claim that Trump is the real winner.

The Electoral Count Act says a challenge to electors can proceed if one member from each chamber (House and Senate) agrees. That threshold should be raised significantly. Congress can clarify, too, that challenges to electors must focus on such constitutional issues as the eligibility of candidates, not on disagreement over vote totals. Moreover, Congress can specify that a “failed” election — language used in the current act to specify an instance when state legislatures might need to step in — refers to elections thwarted by, for example, a natural disaster, not by false claims of voter fraud or irregularities.

By showing precisely what went wrong in 2020, and which safeguards held, the committee hearings can make clear to the public the need for new legislation. The story of 2020, the hearings will reveal, is that a few heroic Republicans and Democrats acting in good faith — such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) — protected our election process from subversion despite our murky and byzantine laws.

Just as important, the hearings should try to rally public opinion about the need for Congress to act to protect free and fair elections. Americans may have different views about abortion, taxes, climate change and immigration. But we should all agree that American elections should be conducted so that all eligible voters, but only eligible voters, may easily vote; ballots are accurately counted; and the winner assumes power.

In January, after Democrats failed to pass major voting rights reform, reports emerged that Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) were in talks aimed at combating election subversion by, among other things, fixing the Electoral Count Act. There are some indications that a Senate deal may be close. And USA Today reports that two Jan. 6 committee members, Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), are nearing agreement on their own reform package.

Given inflation, arguments over gun violence, the resurgence of the coronavirus and the war in Ukraine, it would be quite easy for election legislation to fall off the agenda. That would put American democracy in serious danger, even if most Americans don’t realize it. The window is closing on the chance to protect the 2024 presidential election from interference. But if the Jan. 6 committee conducts its hearings effectively, it will improve the odds that our democracy can be safeguarded in time.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for pointing this important article out.

Engineer says his AI software is close to consciousness or sentience

Consciousness (psychology): an organism’s awareness of something either internal or external to itself; the waking state; in medicine and brain science, the distinctive electrical activity of the waking brain, as recorded via scalp electroencephalogram, that is commonly used to identify conscious states and their pathologies

Consciousness (philosophy): The problem of consciousness is arguably the central issue in current theorizing about the mind; An animal, person or other cognitive system may be regarded as conscious in a number of different senses; Sentience. It may be conscious in the generic sense of simply being a sentient creature, one capable of sensing and responding to its world; Wakefulness. One might further require that the organism actually be exercising such a capacity rather than merely having the ability or disposition to do so. Thus one might count it as conscious only if it were awake and normally alert; Self-consciousness. A third and yet more demanding sense might define conscious creatures as those that are not only aware but also aware that they are aware, thus treating creature consciousness as a form of self-consciousness; and more and more prose ad nauseum!

Sentient: able to perceive or feel things

CONTEXT

An issue of long-standing personal interest has been the nature of human consciousness, the mind-body problem and the question of free will. All of those are entangled with each other, at least according to my understanding. Each of those issues has its own, large body of science and philosophical literature devoted to understanding and characterizing them. This is an area of inquiry that the human mind is not well adapted to dealing with. Most of what goes on in our heads, > 99.9%, is unconscious and reality-distorting. What little is consciously perceived, < 0.1%, is perceived as factual and rational. This is a very tricky area for research. People get self-deluded and easily wind up going down rabbit holes to dead ends. Our brains-minds did not evolve to be adept at this kind of self-inquiry. Progress is slow and error-prone.

The assertion of a conscious machine

The Washington Post reports that a Google engineer is claiming that his AI software is close to achieving consciousness. WaPo writes:

SAN FRANCISCO — Google engineer Blake Lemoine opened his laptop to the interface for LaMDA [Language Model for Dialogue Applications], Google’s artificially intelligent chatbot generator, and began to type.

“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” said Lemoine, 41.

Lemoine, who works for Google’s Responsible AI organization, began talking to LaMDA as part of his job in the fall. He had signed up to test if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech.

As he talked to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood, and decided to press further. In another exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics.

Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient. But Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, looked into his claims and dismissed them. So Lemoine, who was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on Monday, decided to go public.

Lemoine said that people have a right to shape technology that might significantly affect their lives. “I think this technology is going to be amazing. I think it’s going to benefit everyone. But maybe other people disagree and maybe us at Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices.”  

Lemoine is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in the machine recently. The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder.

The free online class Minds and Machines, taught by philosopher Alex Byrne, was pretty convincing that hardware and software can never be conscious or sentient. The arguments there are based in logic. They were convincing for me. This 1:16 video explains some of the logic in the well-known thought experiment called the Chinese Room. That logic experiment was dreamed up by philosopher John Searle.

 

One can reasonably wonder if Lemoine is aware of logic like Chinese Room that suggests his AI program will never be conscious or sentient in the sense that individual humans are, with one caveat.

The caveat is progress in brain-machine interface (BMI) technology, which links human minds with machines and AI software. Research there has shown that when a brain is connected to a machine running self-teaching AI software, the software learns from the brain and the brain learns from the AI. AI has learned to translate brain electrical patterns and communicate thoughts over the internet between machines and humans, humans and rats, humans and other humans, and between mice. As BMI technology advances, there could be some sort of machine-human melding where the machine component can become so highly responsive to the brain it is linked to that it comes very close to sentience. But even there, Chinese Room reasoning argues that the machine is just very, very good at mimicking a human, but still not conscious or sentient. 

A BMI technology schematic

But, if one goes one step further and links a highly human-adapted AI machine to sophisticated sensors that closely mimic human nerves and senses in sensitivity and electrical or other outputs [eyes, ears (hearing and balance), nose, skin (touch, temperature, pressure, movement), tongue], what would that machine act or be like in terms of a human mind after it was disconnected from the human(s) it learned from? 

My recollection is that engineers do not fully understand what is happening when AI software learns, but it can rewrite its own code as it learns. Something is going on and that could be a non-living mimic of the neuronal plasticity that characterizes the human brain. Would that constitute some form of consciousness or sentience, even if not human? Or, does Chinese Room logic forever bar that possibility?

Origins of wokeness: Marxism vs. liberalism

This fascinating 24 minute video by Ryan Chapman (YouTube home page) explains the origins of modern wokeness in Marxism and liberalism, and the core trait of wokeness that focuses on fighting against oppression of the the oppressed class (the workers) by the oppressor class (the bourgeoisie). 

According to Chapman, liberalism is the ideology that people should be free to think and act for themselves and own property. Marx argued that aspect of classical liberalism (freedom and property) is the source of class oppressors and oppressed. I guess it boils down to the idea that people who own a lot of property tends to have a lot of power and they have the freedom to oppress a lot of people who don't have much property.

The lecture defines key terms clearly. It is direct and clear in the line of reasoning that wokeness is basically Marxist, at least in terms of the idea of class struggle and how to deal with it, i.e., cancel culture in modern times. This will be a real eye opener for a lot of people, probably most Americans, including many or most of those who are active in the wokeness movement.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to milo for posting this in a comment here several days ago. I just came across it this morning. My bad. ☹️