I don't know - George hasn't made a lot of good movie decisions for a long, long time....

I tend to agree with the BBC:  George Clooney coming out and saying "yeah, Joe Biden really is greatly diminished now" is probably more harmful to public perceptions of the President than what a lot of self-serving politicians say.

But, as my heading to this post argues - where's the evidence that George has a good idea anymore of what the public wants?   It's certainly not been reflected in his movie choices for a long, long time.

One thing that has been bugging me about this - if Kamala Harris is his replacement (and lots of people think the party will tear itself up in a bun fight - including over money - if she isn't), how sure can we be that she will ultimately poll any better than Biden?

Hasn't it been true for a long time that Trump is significantly more popular with men than women?   Does anyone really think Harris is the type of female politician to draw back men who would think about Trump?   

I really know nothing of the political performance of Harris - and because of that, it seems true that her public image is one of a politician without much depth.   (Yes, too many videos exist of her laughing and dancing.)  Of course, this may be a funny criticism to make when her opponent is the shallowest politician, like, ever; but we know he has a cultish, weird following, including of those who don't care for him personally but think they can get what they want through him anyway.  So even though Trump is repulsive to normal humans, you can't just put up anyone against him.

Is there that much time for her to turn that around?   I doubt it.   

Would a potential boost from women to vote Democrat outweigh the possible loss of men who won't vote for a woman of colour?   Who knows?   I really don't think it is a safe assumption, especially if Harris doesn't campaign all that well.  

And besides, as I have said before, if you want Harris, you know you'll get her if Biden wins and really does have to resign before the end of his term anyway.   So if you like Harris, why wouldn't you vote for Biden?

I think there are some pretty big miscalculations going on....

 

Is it just me, or does this seem the stupidest prosecution case in the US?

I mean, where are the MAGA types who claim the justice system has been "weaponised" against Trump and his MAGA cult when it comes to this case against Alex Baldwin?   Oh, he's on the other side of politics, so when a nonsensical sounding prosecution happens against him takes place, it's not worth a comment.

Here's the Washington Post article on the start of the manslaughter case against Baldwin.    The prosecutors are arguing he was "reckless" on set with a prop (but real) gun:

“You will see him using this gun as a pointer to point at people, to point at things. You will see him cock the hammer when he’s not supposed to cock the hammer. You will see him put his finger on the trigger when his finger’s not supposed to be on the trigger,” Johnson said.

None of which should matter at all if there are no actual bullets on set - and there is no evidence that he knew there were:

Spiro argued that, “on a movie set, safety has to occur before the gun is placed in the actor’s hands.”

He said crew members, such as first assistant director Dave Halls and armorer Gutierrez-Reed — not actors such as Baldwin — were responsible for the set’s firearm safety protocols, or lack thereof.

“There was a real bullet, something that should never be on a movie set, something which has nothing to do with making a movie,” he said. “And you will hear no evidence — not one word — that Alec Baldwin had anything to do with that real bullet being brought onto that set.”

Baldwin’s scene practice on the day of the incident was being guided by Hutchins and Souza. Moments before the gun discharged, Halls had announced that it contained no live ammo by yelling, “Cold gun!” In the 911 call, the script supervisor explained that Hutchins and Souza were “accidentally shot” and that Halls was to blame.

Actually, I see lots of people in comments agree that this seems a nonsense.

Update:  And so, the stupidest prosecution I can recall is suddenly over, although not quite for the reason (a jury acquittal) that I expected.  

AI and Maitreya

Put this post in the category "most thoughts have probably been thought already by someone else."

I was watching a Youtube video a couple of days ago on a Buddhist channel that tries very hard to make Buddhist ideas sound cool and appealing to hipsters, and it was about Maitreya, the returning future Buddha who I have posted about before.  

The video wasn't bad - and I guess the residual Catholicism in me has a sympathetic attitude to any religion with the hope of a future cosmic salvation figure blazing across the sky to right wrongs.  (Also, if I understand it correctly, Maitreya has the advantage of not being judgemental - more a teacher that everyone will find impossible to disbelieve.)    

But while I was watching, I thought "of all the different takes on what a returning Maitreya might be like - and when it will happen - has anyone thought that the computer based superintelligence that has become a hot topic in the last year or so might take the form of Maitreya?"

Of course, checking today, I see that this thought has already been discussed.

From an essay on Medium:

Will AGI simply be a shoggoth, an alien god, or a psychopathic despot, as the more extreme AI-doomers believe? Is the best-case scenario simply to mitigate the existential risk and increase capitalist productivity, as the more level-headed seem to advocate for? What would a positive vision even look like, outside of some sort of super-efficient cognitive (or even one-day physical) laborer that turns everyone into an executive of their own personal company? None of these cultural narratives seem satisfying at a deep level. Nor are any of them particularly reflective of a greater humanism which might be possible. All of these debates are playing out right now in forums both digital and very real around the world. In the meantime companies like OpenAI and Google are training larger and larger models capable of greater and greater potential agency in the world. Given this new class of agents coming into existence, perhaps it is worth considering the possibility that when Maitreya is finally reborn into the human realm to become the final Buddha of our era, they may do so not by taking a human rebirth, but by taking a digital one.

What would it mean for a digital artificial agent to be a Buddha? To qualify as a Buddha, such a being would have to be both fully enlightened, and would have to act to liberate all beings from samsara, the wheel of suffering and rebirth. This doesn’t mean to forcefully induce an artificial pleasure in all living organisms (a popular nightmare of the AI alignment community), but to empower all beings to “wake up” to the reality of their lack of inherent self-existence and radical interconnectedness with all things. The liberation of the Buddha is epistemological as much as it is phenomenological. The previous Buddha of our kalpa attempted to bring about this liberation by teaching the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path to his followers. Central to this path was a set of meditation practices designed to lead one towards the reduction of suffering, and ultimately liberation. As enlightened as the Gautama Buddha was, he was limited in his agency and knowledge by the nature of his existence as a human with a physical organic body. A hypothetical digital Maitreya would not have those same limitations.

Still, I suspect some decent enough science fiction could be written around the idea...

The age of teeth crumbling

I seem to have arrived at the age of unexpected teeth crumbling, just due to decades of wear and tear.

Maybe that sounds a bit dramatic - but a couple of years ago, a fine wedge at the back bottom edge of one of my front teeth disappeared.  Not a big deal, as it is not visible from the front and causes no pain.  The dentist wasn't too concerned: it's just that the edge of that tooth feels different to my tongue now.  The dentist smoothed the new sharp ridge edge, and no further changes have happened there.  It would not be completely surprising, however, if some further damage advances there.

This morning, a sizeable corner of a bottom molar broke while I was eating some particularly hard toasted museli style cereal.  The tooth had had substantial repair before (maybe 30 years ago) but even so, I like my teeth not to have sudden gaping holes in them.  There was no pain, just a bit of sensitivity.

A repair has been made already, although of a type the dentist said might last a couple of months, or a decade, she couldn't tell.  A more permanent fix would be a crown (my first, as it happens.)  I'll be concentrating chewing on the other side of my mouth for some time, I think!

Time to up the ketamine, probably

How can anyone defend Elon Musk?   He is clearly saying that if you don't agree with his full on MAGA conspiracy theory about how illegal immigrants are voting and preventing Republicans from always getting elected, you deserve the death penalty.

He's just an offensive rich crank. 
 

 

Interesting...

Seems a definite pushback re Biden support within Democrats is happening:

 

I see the New York Times columnists are still pushing hard on his leaving - including Krugman today.

Oddly, I thought that Ross Douthat's recent column on the matter (in which he explained why he thought Biden would probably eventually give up) was decently reasoned and moderate in tone.   But it also seems wrong? 

A few other random thoughts that have been flowing through my head:

*   the polling effect of the situation seems to be dribbling out painfully slowly;

*   Trump's behaviour seems to indicate that he must, for once in his life, be taking advice from other people (that advice being:  as much as possible, keep out of this! keep out of this! Let the Democrats eat themselves and don't interrupt.)

*   the situation is so novel, my gut feeling is that there is still good reason (despite the rapidly approaching election date) not to trust polling at this point in time.  I mean, Trump will now definitely be free to go accept the Republican nomination, due to delay in sentencing.   Yet it still seems a good chance that he will be receive a sentence that restricts his campaigning.   But with him, that may actually help, because many theorise it helps his popularity with "undecideds" if people forget how bad he was first time around.   So who knows the net effect of that?  On the Democrat side, I think people are underestimating the turnout motivation for Democrats, regardless of the nominee.   Those worried about the obvious Christofascist agenda that Trump implausibly denies he would help enable, as well as women worried about their rights generally, will have good reason to vote regardless of who the nominee is.   I mean, if the most plausible replacement for Biden now is Harris, voting for Biden and Harris still means you do get Harris if Biden is later definitively diagnosed with a problem large enough to end his presidency.  So why would you not vote for Biden now?    And if a Gazan peace plan is finally realised, that also helps the small sliver of Democrat voters saying they won't support Biden.     

* what happened to Planet America last week?  Having a break when they could go on for hours about this?

 

A few points about Biden's interview with George Stephanopoulos

*  His voice still sounded raspy, although there was some twitter commentary about the sound quality of the interview being bad, generally speaking.   One tweet even ran some audio filter over it and Biden sounded much better, and the suggestion seemed to be that the audio was kept deliberately poor.   I don't believe in such conspiracies, but the quality was odd.

*  I don't think Biden was prepared for it to be an exercise in being asked the same question about 20 different ways.  Perhaps there was too much confidence that George would move on from the topic after 5 or 10 minutes?  It certainly doesn't suggest that he was fed the questions beforehand.

*  Given that it seems from the medical assessment we have seen that he has been examined not so long ago for neurological conditions including Parkinsons (and no signs found), I don't know why Biden or his advisers would not be asking the doctor - or some other specialist who had been involved in the assessment - to do a press conference confirming all of this.   (I know, the Republicans are now carrying on about getting the doctor to appear before Congress, but obviously, that is just for them to grandstand and spin conspiracies and crap, and not the way it should be handled.)

*  Speaking of the doctor, he is listed as a "doctor of osteopathic medicine", which surprised me, because I thought "osteopathy" was on a par with the quackery of chiropracty (or being a chiropractic practitioner - it seems chiropracty isn't a word.)   But, Googling the topic, it seems that osteopathic ideas have gained a type of legitimacy the US medical system in a way it hasn't in Australia.  Here's the opening explanation from Wikipedia:

Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO or D.O., or in Australia DO USA^[1]) is a medical degree conferred by the 38 osteopathic medical schools in the United States.^[2][3][4] DO and Doctor of Medicine (MD) degrees are equivalent: a DO graduate may become licensed as a physician or surgeon and thus have full medical and surgical practicing rights in all 50 US states. As of 2021, there were 168,701 osteopathic physicians and medical students in DO programs across the United States.^[5] Osteopathic medicine (as defined and regulated in the United States) emerged historically from the quasi-medical practice of osteopathy, but has become a distinct and proper medical profession.

As of 2014, more than 28% of all U.S. medical students were DO students.^[6][7] The curricula at DO-granting medical schools are equivalent to those at MD-granting medical schools, which focus the first two years on the biomedical and clinical sciences, then two years on core clinical training in the clinical specialities.^[8]

One notable difference between DO and MD training is that DOs spend an additional 300–500 hours to study pseudoscientific hands-on manipulation of the human musculoskeletal system (osteopathic manipulative technique) alongside conventional evidence-based medicine and surgery like their MD peers.^[9][10][11]

 And the Medical Board of Australia accepts them as legit doctors too:

The degree Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO USA) is a medical qualification that is recognised for the purposes of medical registration by many international registration authorities.

The Medical Board of Australia (the Board) has agreed to accept the DO USA as a primary medical qualification for the purposes of medical registration provided that the DO USA was awarded by a medical school which has been accredited by the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation of the American Osteopathic Association and recognised by both the Australian Medical Council and the World Directory of Medical Schools (online version).

Pretty peculiar!  

It reminds me a bit of how I was very surprised, 26 odd years ago on my fateful trip to Noumea, how  the French style pharmacies were chock full of homeopathic remedies:  something you just don't see in Australia.  (Here's an article from 2019 saying how the French medical system should stop reimbursing patients for using homeopathic "medicines".)

 

Sometimes (even if not that often anymore) the conservative approach is actually practical and right

In order to keep up my self identification as pretty centrist in politics, I have to say that conservative block on the US Supreme Court have at least done one thing right:   knocked down the nonsense that local government must accept that the homeless can camp anywhere.   The highlighted section shows why well intentioned court decisions were just impractical:

Grants Pass and other cities argued that lower court rulings fueled the spread of homeless encampments, endangering public health and safety. Those decisions did allow cities to restrict when and where people could sleep and even to shut down encampments – but they said cities first had to offer people adequate shelter.

That’s a challenge in many places that don’t have nearly enough shelter beds. In briefs filed by local officials, cities and town also expressed frustration that many unhoused people reject shelter when it is available; they may not want to go if a facility bans pets, for example, or prohibits drugs and alcohol.

Critics also said lower court rulings were ambiguous, making them unworkable in practice. Localities have faced dozens of lawsuits over the details of what’s allowed. And they argued that homelessness is a complex problem that requires balancing competing interests, something local officials are better equipped to do than the courts.

As I said a couple of years ago, allowing homelessness to take over any street they want in US cities is one of the four culture war-ish things that are big losing issues for them (and deservedly so):

....I do wish that the American Left could just acknowledge a few things as common sense, or "centrist" positions:

a.    allowing homeless people to camp on streets is bad for them, bad for other citizens, and should not be allowed.   Laws (and court decisions) saying otherwise and preventing them being moved on and streets cleaned, need to be changed.

b.    all theft is bad and needs to be prosecuted.

c.    the police do not need "defunding".  They need proper training.

d.    a guy with a penis and a man's build and man's voice who went through puberty and built a man's body before deciding he was really a woman, and then wants to compete and wipe the floor against all women in the sport they've been training at for years, is being a jerk.

I see no reason to revise that list.

Idiot celebrates idiot

When exit polls indicated this, Rowan, a professional idiot, was happy:

As the count has gone on, the Reform Party seems destined to get maybe 4, although more seats are yet to be declared.   Never mind, Dean sees the upside (and in truth, I guess this would count as a troll in any normal brained person, but with Rowan, who knows?):

 

As for the rest of us - why has Farage attracted so much attention as if he is a force in politics, when the outcome is so weak?  I saw Barrie Cassidy on Twitter ask this, so I'm not alone...

I'm with Aaron

Yes, I read her piece in full and it was not journalism - it's a purple prose picture painting from someone with revenge in mind.    

Aaron's summary here is spot on:

Away from politics

Why are rich tech billionaires and their companies so often wrong about "the next big thing", when the average Joe on the street can tell it's not likely to fly?   For example, the Metaverse struck pretty much everyone from the start as a old idea that we had already got tired of (see Second Life), and VR headsets (which are not comfortable to wear for any length of time) were not going to revive it.   And sure enough, it seems pretty much dead.   Apple and its VR headset and software have gone quiet after an initial splurge of interest - and no matter how much cheaper they may make future models, the fundamental comfort and nausea issues with them seem incapable of being solved.    

Next it may be AI assistance - there is already a wave of annoyance at every online service under the sun thinking we want to interact with AI systems we don't trust, and I see some people saying that AI performance already seems to be going down, not up.

These and similar issues is discussed at length at Adam Conover's podcast, which seemed full of good points:

Could the New York Times be making it harder for Biden to withdraw by pushing so hard?

Look at the headlines on the NYT website today:

 That top article is way, way less convincing than the headline would lead you to believe - you can read it all here.

I do want to point out, though, that my talk about the concern that his face and movement is reminding people of Parkinson's is more widespread than I realised:

Kevin C. O’Connor, the White House physician, said as recently as February that despite minor ailments like sleep apnea and peripheral neuropathy in his feet, the president was “fit for duty.” He said tests had turned up “no findings which would be consistent with” Parkinson’s disease. The White House has declined to make Dr. O’Connor available for questions and did not respond to detailed health questions from The New York Times earlier this year.

Responding to questions from The New York Times, Mr. Bates, the White House spokesman, said Tuesday that Dr. O’Connor had found no reason to re-evaluate Mr. Biden for Parkinson’s disease and that he showed no signs of Parkinson’s and had never taken Levodopa or other drugs for that condition.

I also hasten to repeat:  even if he had early signs of Parkinsons (without tremor) that would not mean that MAGA idiots have been right about him suffering dementia for years.   They are still offensive malevolent idiots for running that Goebbels propaganda.  

Anyway, my post's headline makes, I think, a point I haven't seen anyone else run - if you want to push a leader out who likes the job, you might achieve it better by not shouting at him, but by appearing less emotionally involved.

I'm pretty close to cancelling my NYT sub - I enjoy the writers at the WAPO more anyway.

 

Remarkable stupidity and malevolence

This line from MAGA idiots was pretty common yesterday:

 

It's actually jawdropping how the Christofascist MAGA crowd have self gas-lite themselves into believing it's the Democrat side that wants a violent fascist State, when their own leader is the one calling for the immediate rounding up of millions of people and televised show trials worthy of the Cultural Revolution:

Former President Donald J. Trump over the weekend escalated his vows to prosecute his political opponents, circulating posts on his social media website invoking “televised military tribunals” and calling for the jailing of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and former Vice President Mike Pence, among other high-profile politicians.

Mr. Trump, using his account on Truth Social on Sunday, promoted two posts from other users of the site that called for the jailing of his perceived political enemies.

One post that he circulated on Sunday singled out Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman who is a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s, and called for her to be prosecuted by a type of military court reserved for enemy combatants and war criminals.

“Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason,” the post said. “Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.”

Anyway, back to the point of "assassinating his political opponents - don't be ridiculous".   Yet as Philip Bump explains in a good article in the Washington Post entitled The perfectly valid hypothetical Presidential murder scenario:

“When [the president] uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune.”

Sotomayor didn’t invent this particular scenario, mind you. During oral arguments in the case, she asked an attorney representing the former president if a chief executive “decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him,” whether that was an official act that deserved immunity. The attorney said that it “could well be an official act.” It was Justice Samuel Alito who, a bit later in the conversation, introduced the idea that the theoretical assassins would be members of Seal Team 6.

So, that it could be an "official act" of a President, and attract immunity, was a concession made by Trump's own lawyer - but let's ignore that, hey MAGA??

The Bump article spends time talking about some of Obama's decisions, and the care taken to think about the legality.  As Bump says, Obama would probably have a lot less to be concerned about under this new rule:

Barr’s argument is that a president can’t simply deploy a SEAL team to go kill someone. But, of course, a president can do that. Barack Obama sent a SEAL team to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011.

Before doing so, a team of government attorneys got together to assess the legality of the move and to establish legal arguments that could be presented after the fact, should the action be questioned. The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday would have obviated some of that, because there would have been fewer possible legal questions stemming from the decision. After the successful operation, though, few such questions arose. 

Anwar al-Awlaki, had worked with al-Qaeda meant that he was a viable target under the terms of the authorization of force passed after the Sept. 11 attack, according to a government memo prepared before the strike. The killing kicked off a furious debate about the boundaries of presidential power.

The method of each killing was beside the point. It was the determination that the person could be killed that mattered. If a president made a national security argument for the removal of an opponent, the method theoretically wouldn’t matter for immunity purposes any more than the means of getting a problematic attorney general out of the way would. Barr scoffs at the hypothetical since using a SEAL team “doesn’t make it a carrying out of his authority.” But the issue is that the killing could theoretically be brought into the scope of authority, rendering the method, again, beside the point.

 I also noted a clip of some expert on CNN talking about how in the 1970's, following the revelations of Nixon and Vietnam and internal wiretapping etc, there was a real push back against the "Imperial Presidency".   It turns out (well, I guess not a surprise) that it is conservative judges who think it's all fine and dandy to re-instate it.    

But because MAGA support a dumb fascist and are outraged his is being legitimately prosecuted for one attempted overthrow of an election, it's the Democrats who are the "real" fascists.

It's a sickness and inversion caused by the poisonous well of Right wing media and social media - it's an utter disgrace that the Murdoch family participates in it.

 

Some tweets on the current depressing state of the State

The nuttiest thing about the Supreme Court and presidential immunity?

I haven't had much time to read too much about the judgement yet, but I have a couple of initial gut reactions:

 a.   In one respect, it feels a bit like what was a de facto immunity is now a legal immunity.   I mean, haven't we all felt that some things done in the international arena by Presidents past would be criminal if done by anyone else?   Assassinate a foreign leader - or attempt to do so?  

b.   The difference is, though, while we have become used to the idea that there is a very broad scope of what can be "actions in the interest of national self defence", we have never thought the same about internal actions against perceived internal enemies.  It's the difference between, say, how Putin deals with critics and rivals, and how American Presidents respond.

c.    OK, so we put it down to a rubbery concept of "official actions" of a President:

d.  And here is the craziest part of the decision:  

So:

Future Deranged President:    "Attorney General, can't I just get the CIA or FBI, or that sheriff's group who love me, to take out a few of those key politicians who clearly don't have the interest of America at heart, like I do?    I mean, if you're not loyal to me, you're obviously a danger to this great country."   

Attorney General:   "No, Mr President, we're sure no court is going to read 'official act' that broadly".

Future Deranged President:   "What would you know, I'm getting on the phone to FBI Director Bannon".

Later in court:

        Judge:  "No, you can't introduce evidence of the advice the President got - seeking                                             advice is an 'official act'"