Music: Jazzanova — ‘Another New Day’
Americans hate AI — a massive, growing opportunity for Democrats to run with
Calder McHugh writes: It’s become a common occurrence: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer posts a light-hearted video on social media. She’s Christmas shopping, or she’s talking about her Michigan accent or she’s touting her administration’s accomplishments. And immediately, the comments start rolling in, all demanding the same thing: Say no to data centers in the state. Stop construction. “All I want for Christmas is legislation banning data centers in Michigan.” National figures in the party are beginning to notice the anger….
What America might look like with no immigration
The New York Times reports: One year into President Trump’s immigration crackdown, construction firms in Louisiana are scrambling to find carpenters. Hospitals in West Virginia have lost out on doctors and nurses who were planning to come from overseas. A neighborhood soccer league in Memphis cannot field enough teams because immigrant children have stopped showing up. America is closing its doors to the world, sealing the border, squeezing the legal avenues to entry and sending new arrivals and longtime residents…
How Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio’s agendas converged as Trump targeted Maduro
The New York Times reports: On a spring night in the Oval Office, President Trump asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio how to get tougher on Venezuela. It was just before Memorial Day, and anti-leftist Cuban American lawmakers whose votes Mr. Trump needed for his signature domestic policy bill were urging him to tighten a vise on Venezuela by stopping Chevron’s oil operations there. But Mr. Trump did not want to lose the only U.S. foothold in Venezuela’s oil industry,…
House Republican: ‘You cannot be America first and pro-Russia’
The Hill reports: Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said on Sunday that Russia’s strikes on civilian homes — including on Christmas — are a reminder to Americans that the war against Ukraine is at odds with America’s values. In an interview on ABC News’s “This Week,” the former House Intelligence Committee chair pointed to images of the destruction in Ukrainian cities and neighborhoods and said Russian President Vladimir Putin is “continuing to remind us that this is a war of aggression.”…
A wealth tax proposed in California has billionaires thinking of leaving
The New York Times reports: Billionaires including Peter Thiel, the tech venture capitalist, and Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, are considering cutting or reducing their ties to California by the end of the year because of a proposed ballot measure that could tax the state’s wealthiest residents, according to five people familiar with their thinking. Mr. Thiel, 58, who owns a home in the Hollywood Hills and operates a personal investment firm from Los Angeles, has explored opening an…
How rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is
Peter Brannen writes: Some 4 billion years after its creation, a small planet circling an unexceptional star in the outlying Orion-Cygnus spiral arm of the Milky Way enjoyed a brief and bustling season of complex life. The planet blushed with a breathable atmosphere, and for a few hundred million years it also hosted temperatures that somehow stayed within a surprisingly narrow window — one amenable to a biosphere that now teemed with energetic, multicellular creatures. For its entire prior history,…
What if our ancestors didn’t have feelings anything like we do?
Gal Beckerman writes: The historian Rob Boddice sat cross-legged on his couch in Montreal on a frigid day last winter and conjured for me the image of a medieval carpenter, hammering away in his workshop. “Imagine this guy; he’s building a table,” he said. Suddenly the carpenter misses the nail and bangs his thumb instead. “What did that feel like for him?” Boddice asked. I stared for a few seconds while Boddice smiled encouragingly, as if he’d just asked me…
Music: Jazzanova — ‘Lie’
Bankruptcies are exploding across the U.S. economy
Business Insider reports: Bankruptcies aren’t just rising — they’re suddenly everywhere. From billion-dollar giants to mom-and-pop shops to everyday individuals, bankruptcies are piling up across the US this year, with large corporate bankruptcies already hitting their highest level in 15 years. The surge in bankruptcies highlights the growing financial pressures facing consumers and companies as costs climb amid a tougher borrowing environment. “Rising costs, tighter credit conditions, and ongoing geopolitical volatility continue to exert pressure on households and businesses already…
GDP ‘nowhere near’ 4.3%: economist dismisses Q3 report as ‘fugazi,’ pegs real growth at 0.8%
Benzinga reports: While the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported a robust 4.3% annual increase in third-quarter real gross domestic product (GDP) on Tuesday, economist David Rosenberg is calling the headline number a “fugazi.” The president of Rosenberg Research argues that underlying economic weakness is being masked by government spending and depleted savings, calculating “true” growth at a meager 0.8%. The official BEA release shows widespread gains, with real GDP accelerating from 3.8% in the second quarter to 4.3%…
Marco Rubio is using real censorship to fight fake censorship
Mike Masnick writes: The U.S. government just banned five people from entering the country because it doesn’t like their speech. This ban, according to the State Department, is necessary to protect free speech. If that sounds insane to you, congratulations on your reading comprehension. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department announced the “Announcement of Actions to Combat the Global Censorship-Industrial Complex,” which will take “decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American…
Lobbyists close to Trump say their going rate to advocate for a pardon is $1 million
The Wall Street Journal reports: President Trump had just awarded a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom for Charlie Kirk in October when his son ushered friends toward the Oval Office. As a string ensemble played in the background, Donald Trump Jr. walked up with lobbyist Ches McDowell to chat with the president. Trump Jr. at one point pulled McDowell forward to shake the president’s hand, according to a livestream broadcast. After they went inside, McDowell took the president aside to…
‘It’s frightening’: How far right is infiltrating everyday culture
The Guardian reports: The two men chop peppers, slice aubergines and giggle into the camera as they delve into the art of vegan cooking. Both are wearing ski masks and T-shirts bearing Nazi symbols. The German videos – titled Balaclava Kitchen – started in 2014 and ran for months before YouTube took down the channel for violating its guidelines. But it offered a glimpse of how far-right groups have seized on cultural production – from clothing brands to top 40…
More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds
The Guardian reports: More than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are “AI slop” – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found. The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop. Together, these AI slop channels have amassed more than 63bn views and 221 million subscribers, generating about $117m (£90m)…
The next scientific revolution won’t come from scientists
Steve Fuller writes: The most influential work on the nature of science for at least the past fifty years has been The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962 by a young physicist-turned-historian, Thomas Kuhn. Although influential, the book has also been widely misunderstood. It is quite common to think—certainly based on the title—that Kuhn was providing a formula for producing scientific revolutions. On the contrary, he was arguing that revolutions only happen once scientists confront insurmountable obstacles in…