Music: Abdullah Ibrahim — ‘Maraba Blue’
I watched Orbán destroy Hungary’s democracy. Here’s my advice for the Trump era
Gábor Scheiring writes: Many believed that after his first term as president, Donald Trump would end up in the dustbin of history. Now Trump is back, and the United States is about to be ruled for the second time by a right-wing populist. Trump’s goal this time is to remake the American government to enhance his power. He isn’t the first modern right-wing populist to attempt this — he is following a playbook pioneered by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. I lived…
Sebastian Gorka and his hard-right views on Islam head back to the White House
The Washington Post reports: Sebastian Gorka, the pugilistic commentator who leveraged fears about Islam as a threat to Western civilization into a short-lived role in the first Trump administration, is poised for a second run inside the White House. Gorka was tapped to serve as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism, president-elect Donald Trump said Friday night. Previously, Gorka was an adviser on national security matters for Trump for seven months until his abrupt exit. The…
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s intel pick, was placed on government watch list for overseas travel and foreign connections
CNN reports: Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the intelligence community, was briefly placed on a Transportation Security Administration list that prompts additional security screening before flights after her overseas travel patterns and foreign connections triggered a government algorithm earlier this year, three sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Gabbard was quickly removed from the list, a little-known program called “Quiet Skies,” after going public with claims she had been added to a “secret terror watchlist.” A federal…
Elon Musk cyberbullies a federal worker while showcasing his own ignorance
Futurism reports: Elon Musk has it out for federal employees. He’s promised to fire them en masse in a bid to cut down government spending by trillions of dollars, and he plans to do this through DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, a commission that will be formed as part of president-elect Donald Trump’s administration. That much is old news. But as The Wall Street Journal now reports, Musk has taken his animus to another level by cruelly singling…
Team Trump is furious Hegseth hid sex assault claim: ‘This is the f–king Pentagon!’
Rolling Stone reports: Matt Gaetz may have withdrawn his name from consideration to become Donald Trump’s attorney general over sexual misconduct accusations — but alleged sexual abuser Pete Hegseth is still fighting to persuade Republican senators to confirm him to one of the most powerful positions in government. Hegseth was already facing an uphill confirmation battle to become the Secretary of Defense given that he is best known as a Fox News host with no government experience. The emergence of…
Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s pro-labor pick for labor secretary
The Associated Press reports: President-elect Donald Trump on Friday named Oregon Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer to lead the Department of Labor in his second administration, elevating a Republican congresswoman who has strong support from unions in her district but lost reelection in November. Chavez-DeRemer will have to be confirmed by the Senate, which will be under Republican control when Trump takes office on Jan. 20, 2025, and can formally send nominations to Capitol Hill. Here are things to know about the…
Transhumanism: The AI death cult ruling Silicon Valley
Àlex Gómez-Marín writes: In 1963 there was an exhibition at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. It was entitled “The Most Dangerous Animal in the World”. In it, next to a window with bars, the following text could be read: “You are looking at the most dangerous animal in the world. It alone of all the animals that ever lived can exterminate (and has) entire species of animals. Now it has the power to wipe out all life on…
Music: Nine Horses — ‘Atom and Cell’
Trump 2.0: This time the stakes for climate are even higher
Michael Gerrard writes: The November 5 election was the worst-case outcome for climate regulation. The return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office and Republican control of the Senate and the House of Representatives will halt federal progress and lead to a reversal of most of the climate initiatives undertaken by the Biden administration. Such a rollback occurred after Trump first won election in 2016, but this time the stakes are even higher. Trump has promised to halt spending under…
Trump’s Pentagon pick Hegseth wrote of U.S. military taking sides in ‘civil war’
The Guardian reports: Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, has written in a book that he could imagine a scenario in which the US armed forces would be used violently in American domestic politics. Hegseth, a former elite soldier turned rightwing Fox television personality, is Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon which controls the gigantic American military – by far the largest armed force in the world. In one of his five published books he wrote that in…
Trump won less than 50 percent. Why is everyone calling it a landslide?
Michael Schaffer writes: Is it newsworthy that Donald Trump’s share of the 2024 presidential vote has fallen below 50 percent? You wouldn’t think it’s a big deal based on the relatively few headlines triggered by the milestone, which passed quietly last weekend as California and other states continued their glacially slow vote counts. And maybe that’s as it should be. After all, Trump’s 49.9 percent (for now) is still more than Kamala Harris’ 48.3 percent. When the counting is done,…
Republicans put Marjorie Taylor Greene in charge of new ‘DOGE’ subcommittee
HuffPost reports: House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) announced Thursday that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) will chair a new subcommittee named after an internet meme from the early 2010s. President-elect Donald Trump tapped entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head an advisory panel called the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, that’s tasked with identifying trillions in government waste. Not wanting to be left out, Republicans on Capitol Hill this week created a caucus (an informal group…
Gallant: IDF ‘securing aid distribution’ is a ‘euphemism’ for military rule in Gaza
The Times of Israel reports: Ousted defense minister Yoav Gallant said Wednesday that Israel’s taking security responsibility for the distribution of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip would set it down the path of military governance in the enclave at an unacceptable cost to the lives of soldiers. “The discussion about ‘distributing food to residents of Gaza by private companies with IDF security’ is a euphemism for the start of a military government,” Gallant wrote on X. “The price will…
Here’s why turning to AI to train future AIs may be a bad idea
Science News reports: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and other AI tools whip up impressive sentences and paragraphs from as little as a simple line of text prompt. To generate those words, the underlying large language models were trained on reams of text written by humans and scraped from the internet. But now, as generative AI tools flood the internet with a large amount of synthetic content, that content is being used to train future generations of those AIs. If this continues…
In the quantum world, even points of view are uncertain
Anil Ananthaswamy writes: Imagine standing on a railway platform watching a trolley go past. A girl on the trolley drops a bright red ball. To her, the ball falls straight down. But from the platform, you see the ball traverse an arc before hitting the trolley floor. The two of you observe the same event, but from different reference frames: one anchored to the trolley and the other to the platform. The idea of reference frames has a storied history…