Last night was very odd

 Let me explain.

My sweetheart and I had just concluded our dinner and we thought we would turn to the TV just for a few minutes to see if there was any news. Bad choice. We turned on Fox first. And OMG - there was a hand-wringing, a bleating, a moaning and a groaning like never before. We turned it off. Later we sat down to watch a hockey game and during the intermission went online to see what is new, or to get some ideas for future threads. And OMG - there was more bleating, more moaning and groaning, and on different political debate forums (yup, I visit a few of them from time to time) there was a wave of anger worse than ever before, some serious mud-slinging, and near suicidal hysteria. All I could thing of was....

Did something happen to Trump last night??  😕

The radical right's ongoing love affair with Hungarian dictatorship

Radical right Republican activist Christopher Ruffo writes:

Budapest Diaries

Can Hungary’s state-driven cultural policy serve as a model for American conservatives?

In recent years, Hungary has become a hub for conservative intellectuals. The government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has established a constellation of right-leaning university programs, think tanks, research centers, and even a café franchise named after the British philosopher Roger Scruton. Orbán has proposed an alternative to the Brussels consensus, devoting significant resources to reforming the education system, revitalizing the country’s religious institutions, subsidizing healthy family formation, and reviving the classical architectural style.

This is not popular with everyone. The European Union has punished Hungary for bucking the trend of liberal technocratic governance, turning the small, landlocked nation into a scapegoat, much in the same way that America’s elite institutions have denigrated working-class conservative voters in the country’s heartland. Because of this, there is an immediate affection between Hungarian and American conservatives, both of whom feel besieged by the establishment and in need of a new strategy for managing the relationship between state and society.

That touches on a lot of what America's anti-democracy authoritarian radical right claims to see, feel and want. It claims to see and feel disrespectful liberal technocratic governance. It claims the democracy killing and dictatorship that Orban has established in Hungary as a role model for what authoritarian radical right Americans want to do to American democracy. That is clear.

It is also clear that elites like Ruffo know they are lying through their teeth. They know they are pro-dictatorship and anti-democracy.

So who is besieging whom here? Does real or imagined disrespect justify the overthrow of democracy and its replacement with a corrupt dictatorship-Christian theocracy-plutocracy? What about all that disrespect, lies and slandering the radical right routinely hurls at the left?[1] Does that justify the overthrow of democracy? (no, it doesn't)

Who is the more hypocritical group here, the radical right or the center and left, radical or not? 

Also note the standard propaganda technique that Ruffo relies on. He does not call Orban a dictator and he does not say that Orban destroyed democracy, which he in fact did. Ruffo does not call his radical right movement anti-democracy or pro-tyranny. Instead he blandly but falsely refers to his dictatorship movement as being merely "conservative" and "right leaning." Ruffo and his ilk are far merely conservative or right leaning. They are full-blown radical right authoritarians and Christian theocrats, fascists in my opinion.

Footnote: 

1. For example, Vox writes: The right’s moral panic over “grooming” invokes age-old homophobia -- “Groomer” accusations against liberals and the LGBTQ community are recycled Satanic Panic.

Bloomberg Law writes: Combative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones doubled down on his claim that defamation lawsuits filed by the families of 26 children and educators gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School are part of a liberal plot to destroy him. “I think this is a Deep State situation,” Jones told jurors Thursday during the second week of a civil trial in Connecticut. When asked if his credibility is the most important thing to him, the Infowars host replied: “No, crushing the globalists.”

The New York Magazine writes: Why Republicans Are Smearing Everyone As Pedophiles Now -- Conspiracy theories work on different levels.

News bits: GOP continues election rigging campaign; GOP sabotages the rule of law

One of the most obvious actions that proves the inherent anti-democracy authoritarianism that dominates the radical right GOP is its endless push to rig elections so that Republicans can vote, but Democrats can't.  It's hard to get it right, because some GOP votes get suppressed, which is not what the Republicans want to do. So, we get to witness the GOP's trial and error effort to subvert elections. The NYT writes about the ongoing subversion campaign:

Republicans Face Setbacks in Push to Tighten Voting Laws on College Campuses

Party officials across the country have sought to erect more barriers for young voters, who tilt heavily Democratic, after several cycles in which their turnout surged

Alarmed over young people increasingly proving to be a force for Democrats at the ballot box, Republican lawmakers in a number of states have been trying to enact new obstacles to voting for college students.

In Idaho, Republicans used their power monopoly this month to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification.

Even in Texas, where 2019 legislation shuttered early voting sites on many college campuses, a new proposal that would eliminate all college polling places seems to have an uncertain future.

“When these ideas are first floated, people are aghast,” said Chad Dunn, the co-founder and legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. But he cautioned that the lawmakers who sponsor such bills tend to bring them back over and over again.

A wild card in the 2024 presidential elections will be the effectiveness of Republican election subversion laws. This could be a necessary factor in who wins and loses in 2024. This adds to the mountain of evidence of radical right Republican Party animosity toward two-party rule, democracy and the free and fair elections needed to keep democracy meaningful. 

Students at the University of Texas at Austin lined up to cast their ballots 

on campus during the 2020 primary. A new proposal would eliminate 

all college polling places in the state.

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From the Corrupt Republican Politics Files: Daily KOS writes:

House Republicans demanding Bragg's evidence against 

Trump have been coordinating with Trump himself

CNN is now confirming what we've all suspected for a while now: House Republican caucus and committee leaders have been in regular communications with the coup-attempting Donald Trump, keeping him personally up to date on the status of committees and investigations launched to help cover up Trump’s suspected crimes.

"Not only are Trump, his aides and close allies regularly apprised of Republicans’ committee work, they also at times exert influence over it," reports CNN. And those communications have "emerged as a crucial method for Trump to shape Republicans’ priorities in their newly-won House majority."

CNN's report puts a new spin on it, however. It's not just that House Republicans have volunteered themselves as Trump's personal saboteurs. They've been coordinating with Trump himself, even two years after Trump left office following his attempted coup.  

So, yes. Jim Jordan and other Republicans have been in constant touch with Trump as they formulated their attacks on Bragg. And yes, it does appear that there's a direct pipeline in place that will feed whatever confidential information about Bragg's case to Trump's lawyers and Trump himself. It's not obstruction of justice if Jordan does it!

This adds to the existing mountain of evidence that the GOP is completely morally corrupt. Radical Republicans in congress constantly tell us they are just investigating crimes by the Bidens and merely vindicating the rule of law. Instead, they have nothing but open contempt for the rule of law as it applies to Republican elites. For GOP elites, both the Christian nationalists and the brass knuckles capitalists, the rule of law is just a political tool to attack enemies and reward allies and the elites themselves. The GOP is authoritarian, not pro-democracy. This is solid evidence of that truth.

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About the 2024 election: Newsweek writes:

A poll showing 61 percent of Americans don't want Donald Trump to be president again has been displayed on Fox Business.

The survey, conducted by Marist National Poll for National Public Radio and PBS NewsHour, found only 38 percent of U.S. voters want the New York business tycoon to have another term in the White House.

Despite that, it seems clear by now that as long as Trump is healthy enough to run for president again, The GOP will nominate him in 2024. His core base remains loyal. No other contender has yet made major inroads. Republicans who say they would prefer Trump not to be president again will nonetheless vote for him against any evil socialist Democrat deep state tyrant. It does not matter who the Democrats run, the Dem candidate will be relentlessly and viciously smeared and slandered into a terrifying vision Satan's incarnated evil on planet Earth in 2024. 

Really, who could vote for Satan?

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From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism (BKC) Files: Ars Technica writes about Google destroying inconvenient evidence in a lawsuit:

You can't do that! --

Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly gave false info to court

Google in trouble for auto-deleting chats needed as evidence in Epic Games case

"After substantial briefing by both sides, and an evidentiary hearing that featured witness testimony and other evidence, the Court concludes that sanctions are warranted," US District Judge James Donato wrote. Later in the ruling, he wrote that evidence shows that "Google intended to subvert the discovery process, and that Chat evidence was 'lost with the intent to prevent its use in litigation' and 'with the intent to deprive another party of the information's use in the litigation.'"  

"The Court has since had to spend a substantial amount of resources to get to the truth of the matter, including several hearings, a two-day evidentiary proceeding, and countless hours reviewing voluminous briefs. All the while, Google has tried to downplay the problem and displayed a dismissive attitude ill tuned to the gravity of its conduct. Its initial defense was that it had no 'ability to change default settings for individual custodians with respect to the chat history setting,' but evidence at the hearing plainly established that this representation was not truthful."

Apparently, Google gambles that its is better to take lumps from a judge than lose its defense case in court. By intentionally destroying evidence, Google evinces an poor, condescending attitude toward the rule of law that far too many BKC elites hold and act on. No senior executive at Google is going to go to jail. That's the beauty of the liability shield that routinely protects elite corporate criminals. All bad acts here are by the legal person named Google. That's Mr. Google to you, you puny human citizen.  

What can the court do? No real humans are responsible. Send Google's official documents of incorporation to jail? That's who is responsible in the eyes of the law. The law blinded and neutered by BKC elites.

This is more evidence of how tenuous the rule of law can be and too often is. This is what the slow fall of the rule of law looks like in real time.

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?