What an AR-15 bullet does to a person

A WaPo article provides images of what a .223 caliber bullet from an AR-15 does once it hits a person's body. The GOP wants to make the AR-15 the national gun. Here's why.

Warning, this is unpleasant.

Democracy under attack: Comparing Israel to the US

A NYT opinion piece compares the rise of radical right authoritarianism in Israel to the US counterpart. It's an interesting analysis:

The Kohelet Policy Forum is a libertarian-leaning think tank reportedly funded by at least one American billionaire that has emerged as the ideological architect of the proposed overhaul [radical right attack on Israeli democracy]. The plan’s intellectual backers have routinely pointed to the American model of elected leaders nominating and confirming Supreme Court justices as their inspiration. By invoking the forum, Mr. Bar-David touched on a key aspect of Israel’s social and judicial crisis that has been too often overlooked: American influence.

In many ways, the fight over the future of the judiciary marks the culmination of the Americanization of Israeli society. A segment of Israeli society has always admired the United States and has striven to reimagine itself in its image. Over the past few decades, though, it hasn’t been America’s grand traditions of democracy and multiculturalism that have infiltrated the psyche of many in the Jewish state but rather its less admirable attributes.

As in America, many on the Israeli right have stopped defining themselves based on policies and have resorted instead to nativism and resistance to democratic norms. The political wedge issues in Israel are no longer questions around Palestinian statehood but rather the independence of the courts, good governance and plain decency. It’s no surprise, then, that the heirs of Israel’s earlier generation of conservatives can no longer find their place in the ruling Likud party. They’ve become Israeli versions of so-called RINOs, or Republicans in name only.

Without the demarcation of the ideological rivalries of the past, Israel’s political map is now defined mostly along identity lines, with the ultra-Orthodox, nationalist settlers and working-class Mizrahi voters on one side (the “red” Israel) and the wealthier, mostly Ashkenazi, educated class of the coastal Tel Aviv and Haifa regions on the other (the “blue” Israel). Despite the socioeconomic gaps between them, the main points of contention tend to revolve around matters of decorum, tradition and grievances.  

An example of Israel’s echoes of the United States can be found in the changes to the socialist kibbutz movement that helped shape the country’s identity and fueled its growth, which has been all but overrun by privatization and rabid capitalism that has contributed to the country having among the highest rates of inequality among nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Israel’s collective and pioneering spirit has been ravaged by consumerism and commercialism.

Like America, Israel now finds itself hopelessly polarized along numerous societal fault lines: religious and secular, rural and urban, educated and not, traditional and progressive, hawks and doves.    

Before Mr. Netanyahu attempted this power grab, Donald Trump tried it. Before Israel’s Channel 14 peddled some of its propaganda and misinformation, Fox News was doing the same.  

There is a distinct taste of Americanism to this fresh conservative Israeli persona. Mr. Netanyahu, the country’s biggest panderer to identity politics, is Israel’s most American-style politician. He spent many years in the United States, and many of his pollsters and strategists, not to mention his inner circle, came straight from right-wing Republican campaigns. 

Make no mistake, Israeli politics has always been a blood sport. But only in recent years has this hyperpartisan discourse taken hold, one that transcends ideology and instead revolves around a wannabe strongman’s cult of personality.  

Israeli militancy has always existed. But it was the immigration of the Brooklyn-born rabbi Meir Kahane in the 1970s that helped introduce an American-tinged racism to it. Arabs were no longer just adversaries to overcome in war; they were vile enemies who had to be expelled or killed.

Note the reference (i) to being hopelessly polarized along numerous societal fault lines, (ii) a wannabe strongman’s cult of personality and (iii) American-tinged racism. If that feels sickeningly familiar, it should. That's where America is right now. We are hopelessly polarized and our democracy, pluralism, civil liberties, the rule of law and inconvenient facts and truths are all under a vicious attack by a radical right cult and its wannabe dictator. Decades of dark free speech is mostly responsible for this, ~80% in my opinion.

In the US, old-fashioned, pro-democracy and pro-civil liberties conservatives are now dead RINOs. They are either out of power or cowed into silent submission and complicity with corrupt, radical right Republican Party authoritarianism and its polarizing identity politics. The same phenomenon has occurred in Israel. 

But that makes sense. If authoritarians want dictator-style wealth, power and control, democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties need to be sharply curtailed or completely controlled by the dictator, theocrats, kleptocrats or plutocrats. About the same situation applies in Russia, China, North Korea and all or nearly all other current dictatorships or plutocracies.

Israelis protest after the tyrant wannabe

fired his Minister of Defense for opposing

the radical right slow coup to kill democracy

Tech news bits: ChatGPT improves rapidly; Cat videos are crippling war material supplies

This post ushers in a whole new universe of content here at DP, tech stuff!! Yeah, well, tech stiff is not new here. Whatever.

From the Computers Are Going To Take Your Job Files -- ChatGPT rapidly gets a lot smarter: One could have reasonably believed that ChatGPT would get better over time. But this fast. Insider writes:

A professor says he's stunned that ChatGPT went from a D grade 

on his economics test to an A in just 3 months

An economics professor said the progress ChatGPT made — it improved its score from a D to an A on his economics test in just three months — has stunned him.

when ChatGPT-4 debuted, its progress stunned Caplan. It scored 73% on the same midterm test, equivalent to an A and among the best scores in his class.

ChatGPT's paywalled upgrade sought to fix some of the early issues with the beta version, GPT-3.5. This purportedly included making ChatGPT 40% more likely to return accurate responses, as well as making it able to handle more nuanced instructions.

For Caplan, the improvements were obvious. The bot gave clear answers to his questions, understanding principles it previously struggled with. It also scored perfect marks explaining and evaluating concepts that economists like Paul Krugman have championed.

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From the Sucking The Juice Out Of The War Files: Insider writes:

Weapons firm says it can't meet soaring demand for artillery shells 

because a TikTok data center is eating all the electricity

• An arms manufacturer complained that TikTok's data center is using all the electricity in the region.

• As a result, the company cannot keep up with the surging demand for artillery rounds.

• The CEO told the FT the company's growth is "challenged by the storage of cat videos."

"We are concerned because we see our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos," said Morten Brandtzæg, the CEO of the Norwegian arms manufacturer Nammo, in an interview with the Financial Times.

Brandtzæg said the demand for artillery rounds was 15 times higher than normal — a trend driven by the war in Ukraine, which has featured heavy artillery use.

Ukraine, for instance, would like to increase its daily usage of rounds from 6,000 to 65,000, he said.

Ukrainian soldiers fire at Russian positions from a U.S.-supplied M777 howitzer 

(my favorite artillery piece) in Kherson region, Ukraine, Jan. 9, 2023

Actually, multiple sources are reporting that there is a huge gap in what US arms manufacturers can produce and the vast demand for arms and supplies from Ukraine. Lots of stories had come out saying that the Russian could not keep up with demand, and so far that has not made much noticeable difference. But the US military is now reporting that its reserves of all kinds of modern arms and ammo are being rapidly depleted and manufacturers cannot keep up.

Does anyone else get a sense that the wheels have come off the cart in America, or is that just my paranoia speaking? Remember when America could not even make simple cloth. M95 and N95 masks in the early days of COVID? America feels significantly broken and mostly not fixable, especially if brass knuckles capitalism gets much more control of commerce and government than it already has.

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Making an updgrade by downgrading it: Insider writes on a trend that many consumers are noticing. If I recall right, I first started noticing this about 25 years ago.

Google, Amazon, and Meta are making their core products worse — on purpose

In recent years, Google users have developed one very specific complaint about the ubiquitous search engine: They can't find any answers. A simple search for "best pc for gaming" leads to a page dominated by sponsored links rather than helpful advice on which computer to buy. Meanwhile, the actual results are chock-full of low-quality, search-engine-optimized affiliate content designed to generate money for the publisher rather than provide high-quality answers. As a result, users have resorted to work-arounds and hacks to try and find useful information among the ads and low-quality chum. In short, Google's flagship service now sucks.  

All of these miserable online experiences are symptoms of an insidious underlying disease: In Silicon Valley, the user's experience has become subordinate to the company's stock price. Google, Amazon, Meta, and other tech companies have monetized confusion, constantly testing how much they can interfere with and manipulate users.

This makes perfect sense if one looks at it from the point of view of a brass knuckles capitalist. Why try to improve something that already works, when it is easier to break it and add some useless fluff to distract from what was broken? Why not stuff ads and sponsored links in a search result if it forces consumers to wade through the garbage to find what they want, thereby generating some extra profit when an ad snags someone?

I notice this most acutely now with Amazon, where searches are now loaded with crap I don't want and did not search for. Unfortunately, Amazon does not have much in the way of significant competition. When I try a non-Amazon source, the selection is usually poor and/or service bad or non-existent. 

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AI and human intelligence are becoming a gray area?: Vice writes about an alleged blurring of the line between humans and machines:

On Wednesday, Microsoft researchers released a paper on the arXiv preprint server titled “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4.” They declared that GPT-4 showed early signs of AGI, meaning that it has capabilities that are at or above human level. 

“We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting,” the researchers write in the paper’s abstract. “Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4’s performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.”  

Microsoft researchers observed fundamental leaps in GPT-4’s abilities to reason, plan, solve problems, and synthesize complex ideas that signal a paradigm shift in the field of computer science,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.  

With all this being said, it is clear that the “sparks” the researchers claim to have found are largely overpowered by the number of limitations and biases that the model has displayed since its release.

Although the paper's title is asserted to be more click bait than substance, the technology is improving rapidly. At some point fairly soon, there is going to be serious blurring of work by AI and humans in increasingly complex topics. One thing that makes improvements faster and better is learning what limitations and biases the AI has. Once those are known they can be improved and fixed.

One question this raises is what about jobs and job losses. A poll conducted 10 days after the first version of ChatGPT came out indicated that over half of employers who tested it, had started to lay people off and replace them with the AI software. Other questions are how far will AI make inroads into jobs and and how fast will it happen? 

Not Your Average JOE

 In case you haven't heard:

National Joe Day

National Joe Day is somewhat of a different holiday that falls on the 27th of March every year. It’s a holiday in which people celebrate the name Joe and all of the people they know with that name.

How To Observe National Joe Day

National Joe Day is probably one of the easiest holidays to celebrate. On this day, all a person has to do is to celebrate a Joe in your life, celebrate a famous Joe, or even change your own name to Joe for the day. People can also use the day to enjoy a hot cup of Joe or even a plate of sloppy Joes.

https://www.holidayscalendar.com/event/national-joe-day/

Now, which Joes should we celebrate?

Joe Biden? One of the most successful Presidents ever in terms of legislation passed during his first term, but still, for some reason, immensely unpopular? Any theories as to way?

How about Joe Manchin? Somehow, he always does manage to coming around to supporting the other Joe's agenda, though he likes to drag it out before he does and is still beholding to the oil industry. But, he does manage to stay popular in a red district. A pain in the butt? Or a surviver?

Of course we could go way OUT there and give some love to:

Joe Exotic

Such a handsome fellow, agree?

If you want more on politics, there is also:

The anti-Trump Republican, not the rock star. Mind you, has his star faded? I seldom see any more interesting news items on him.

SO, who are your favorite Joes, your least favorite Joes, or are there any Joes you know personally you want to give a big shout out to on this National Joe Day?

News bits: Zealots censoring tolerance; Tales from the free market

Insider writes about the radical right canceling a song about tolerance and accepting others:

Wisconsin 1st graders were told they couldn't sing 'Rainbowland' by Dolly Parton 

and Miley Cyrus because it was too controversial

"Rainbowland" includes the lyrics: "Living in a Rainbowland, The skies are blue and things are grand, Wouldn't it be nice to live in paradise, Where we're free to be exactly who we are, Let's all dig down deep inside, Brush the judgment and fear aside, Make wrong things right, And end the fight, 'Cause I promise ain't nobody gonna win."

That's just another example of the Christian Taliban in action in America today. They are going to crush tolerance, secularism and democracy or die trying.

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ProPublica writes about how one health care insurance company does business:

How Cigna Saves Millions by Having 

Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them

The vague wording [of his rejected medical reimbursement claim] made Dr. Nick van Terheyden suspect that Dr. Cheryl Dopke, the medical director who signed it, had not taken much care with his case.

Van Terheyden was right to be suspicious. His claim was just one of roughly 60,000 that Dopke denied in a single month last year, according to internal Cigna records reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

The rejection of van Terheyden’s claim was typical for Cigna, one of the country’s largest insurers. The company has built a system that allows its doctors to instantly reject a claim on medical grounds without opening the patient file, leaving people with unexpected bills, according to corporate documents and interviews with former Cigna officials. Over a period of two months last year, Cigna doctors denied over 300,000 requests for payments using this method, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each case, the documents show. The company has reported it covers or administers health care plans for 18 million people.  

Before health insurers reject claims for medical reasons, company doctors must review them, according to insurance laws and regulations in many states. Medical directors are expected to examine patient records, review coverage policies and use their expertise to decide whether to approve or deny claims, regulators said. This process helps avoid unfair denials.

But the Cigna review system that blocked van Terheyden’s claim bypasses those steps. Medical directors do not see any patient records or put their medical judgment to use, said former company employees familiar with the system. Instead, a computer does the work. A Cigna algorithm flags mismatches between diagnoses and what the company considers acceptable tests and procedures for those ailments. Company doctors then sign off on the denials in batches, according to interviews with former employees who spoke on condition of anonymity.  

Within Cigna, some executives questioned whether rendering such speedy denials satisfied the law, according to one former executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because he still works with insurers.

“We thought it might fall into a legal gray zone,” said the former Cigna official, who helped conceive the program. “We sent the idea to legal, and they sent it back saying it was OK.”  

In a written response, Cigna said the reporting by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum was “biased and incomplete.”

It is OK to have a computer reject your insurance claim, legal said so. And so did the computer! Saying otherwise is just biased and incomplete.

So much for the rule of law and social conscience. If a law gets in the way of profit, just blow it off or get your lobbyists to get the law obliterated. That's just how brass knuckles capitalism works whenever it can. 

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Tales from Fauxlandia: NBC News reports:

Ex-Tucker Carlson producer files new claims Fox News lawyers 

coached her testimony in Dominion lawsuit

Abby Grossberg sued Fox last week, alleging she was coerced into giving misleading testimony about the network's election fraud coverage. She was fired Friday.

America Is Preoccupied

America Is Daydreaming

America Is Crackpotting

America Is Banning Books

America Is Not Concentrating

But Tucker the Liar is serious about getting 

to the bottom of the barrel, . . uh, . . story

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From the Let's Kill Them All Files, legal wizards, not lizards, have dreamed up a snagglepuss of a new legal theory. It's published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review in a paper entitled Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths. This one is a real gullywhumper. The wizards write:

Prosecutors regularly bring homicide charges against individuals and corporations whose reckless or negligent acts or omissions cause unintentional deaths, as well as those whose misdemeanors or felonies cause unintentional deaths. Fossil fuel companies learned decades ago that what they produced, marketed, and sold would generate “globally catastrophic” climate change. Rather than alert the public and curtail their operations, they worked to deceive the public about these harms and to prevent regulation of their lethal conduct. They funded efforts to call sound science into doubt and to confuse their shareholders, consumers, and regulators. And they poured money into political campaigns to elect or install judges, legislators, and executive officials hostile to any litigation, regulation, or competition that might limit their profits. Today, the climate change that they forecast has already killed thousands of people in the United States, and it is expected to become increasingly lethal for the foreseeable future. 

Activists and journalists declaim the executives of ExxonMobil, Shell, and other large oil companies as “mass murderers.” Lamenting that “millions of human beings will die so that they can have private planes and huge mansions,” they talk of “[d]ragging the corporate titans who profited from driving the world to the brink before a judge.” But as of this writing [Jan. 25, 2023], no prosecutor in any jurisdiction is bringing homicide charges of any kind against fossil fuel companies (FFCs) for even a single death related to climate change. They should. 

The case for homicide prosecutions is increasingly compelling. A steady growth in the information about what FFCs knew and what they did with that knowledge is revealing a story of antisocial conduct generating lethal harm so extensive it may soon become unparalleled in human history.

Woof! Lethal harm so extensive it may soon become unparalleled in human history? The FFCs are in big trouble now. That is gonna scare the jebus out of those feisty Huge Oil Co. executives and their lackeys in congress, the courts, etc. 

They are gonna stop polluting, killing and propagandizing real quick, right? Nah. They are going to yawn and buy black smokers for their employees to show their sincere support for the environment.

Take that, you evil socialist 

environment

A NYT interview with Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg (91) has terminal cancer, with about 3-6 months left to live. In 1971, he gave copies of the US military’s secret 7,000-page history of the Vietnam War to The New York Times and The Washington Post. The government tried to stop publication, but the Supreme Court defended the First Amendment right of a free press against prior restraint. That led to public anger at the government for lying about the conduct of the war. Ellsberg faced criminal charges, e.g., violating the 1917 Espionage Act, but government misconduct caused the charges to be dismissed. 

Here are couple of the Qs and As from the NYT interview:  

Q. As you look around the world today, what scares you?

A. I’m leaving a world in terrible shape and terrible in all ways that I’ve tried to help make better during my years. President Biden is right when he says that this is the most dangerous time, with respect to nuclear war, since the Cuban missile crisis. That’s not the world I hoped to see in 2023. And that’s where it is. I also don’t think the world is going to deal with the climate crisis. We’ve known, since the 2016 Paris agreement and before, that the U.S. had to cut our emissions in half by 2030. That’s not going to happen.

Q. The number of people with the security clearances to view classified material has expanded, perhaps exponentially, since the leak of the Pentagon Papers, and I wonder, aside from a few people like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, why haven’t there been more Dan Ellsbergs? Why aren’t there more people who, when presented with evidence of something that they find morally objectionable, disclose it?

A. Why aren’t there more? It’s a question I’ve often asked myself. Many of the people whistle-blowers work with know the same things and actually regard the information in the same way — that it’s wrong — but they keep their mouths shut. As Snowden said to me and others, “Everybody I dealt with said that what we were doing was wrong. It’s unconstitutional. We’re getting information here about Americans that we shouldn’t be collecting.” The same thing was true for many of my colleagues in government who opposed the war. Of course, people are worried about the consequences.

Before my case and the Obama administration’s prosecutions of whistle-blowers, they needn’t have been worried about going to jail. But apart from that, they fear losing their jobs, their careers, risking the clearances on which their jobs depend. People who have these clearances have often invested a lifetime in demonstrating that they can be entrusted to keep secrets. That trust becomes a part of your identity, which it is difficult to sacrifice, so that one loses track of a sense of higher responsibility — as a citizen, as a human being.

Q. We tend to think of the classification system as a system of protection. But you sometimes talk about it, and I think correctly, as a system of control.

A. That is what it is. It is a protection system against the revelation of mistakes, false predictions, embarrassments of various kinds and maybe even crimes. And then the secrecy system in its application is predominantly to protect officials, administrations from embarrassment and from accountability, from the possibility that their rivals will pick these things up and beat them over the head with it. Their rivals for office, for instance.

....

The media as a whole has never really investigated the secrecy system and what it’s for and what its effects are. For example, the best people on declassification outside the media, the National Security Archive, month after month, year after year, put out newly disclosed classified information that they have worked sometimes three or four years, 10 years, 20 years to make public. Very little of that was justified to be kept from the public that long, if at all. An expert estimated in Congress in 1971 that 5 percent of classified information met the criteria for secrecy at the time it was classified, and after a few years that decreased to half of one percent. 

....  

As I said, my work of the past 40 years to avert the prospects of nuclear war has little to show for it. But I wanted to say that I could think of no better way to use my time and that as I face the end of my life, I feel joy and gratitude. 

Ellsberg's arguments seem sound to me. The threat of nuclear war is frighteningly high, we're not going to deal responsibly and seriously with climate change, and the US government lies far too much to us by unwarranted opacity. Unwarranted secrecy threatens democracy and the rule of law. 

Ellsberg explains his fear of nuclear war by arguing that nuclear weapons have been used many times since 1945, including now by both sides in Ukraine.* Their use is threats of use akin to a bank robber threatening to use a gun. Even if the robber doesn’t pull the trigger one time, they might the next. Ellsberg comments on that: "But eventually, as any gambler knows, your luck runs out."

* I am unaware of Ukraine threatening to use nuclear weapons against Russia, but Russia has made the threat against Ukraine.