Music: Tigran Hamasyan — ‘Postlude’
Silicon Valley has been moving toward ‘technofascism’ for decades
Becca Lewis writes: An influential Silicon Valley publication runs a cover story lamenting the “pussification” of tech. A major tech CEO lambasts a Black civil rights leader’s calls for diversifying the tech workforce. Technologists rage against the “PC police”. No, this isn’t Silicon Valley in the age of Maga. It’s the tech industry of the 1990s, when observers first raised concerns about the rightwing bend of Silicon Valley and the potential for “technofascism”. Despite the industry’s (often undeserved) reputation for…
Musk is treating the U.S. like a startup where he’s the CEO
Brian Barrett writes: It feels like no one should have to say this, and yet we are in a situation where it needs to be said, very loudly and clearly, before it’s too late to do anything about it: The United States is not a startup. If you run it like one, it will break. The onslaught of news about Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government’s core institutions is altogether too much—in volume, in magnitude, in the sheer chaotic…
Vance and Musk question judges’ authority over Trump, pushing U.S. towards constitutional crisis
NBC News reports: Legal and constitutional experts warned Sunday that the United States could be headed toward a “constitutional crisis” or a “breakdown of the system” after Vice President JD Vance suggested judges don’t have jurisdiction over President Donald Trump’s “legitimate power.” “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also…
The recruitment effort behind Elon Musk’s DOGE wrecking crew
Wired reports: The establishment of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) relied on a recruitment campaign carried out, in part, by young software engineers fanning out across online chat groups and Discord servers, according to three sources and chat logs reviewed by WIRED. Some of the engineers are associated with data analytics firm Palantir or its cofounder and board of directors chair—and Musk ally—Peter Thiel. As DOGE staffers—many of them young and with little or no government experience—continue…
Trump’s gutting of foreign aid is a threat to global health
Jeremy Youde writes: In its chaotic first few weeks, one of the new Trump administration’s many targets has been global health. With a few strokes of a Sharpie, President Donald Trump halted nearly all U.S. foreign assistance programs, including those for global health, and started the process of pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization. Trump made a range of false claims about foreign aid to support his moves, including spreading the lie that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sent…
Trump enrages Christian MAGA by hiring ‘prosperity’ pastor for White House
The Daily Beast reports: President Donald Trump angered some of his Christian supporters on Friday when he named a televangelist who even some conservative evangelicals have labeled a “heretic” as part of his White House administration. The president signed an executive order establishing a White House Faith Office and chose Pastor Paula White-Cain, his ally and spiritual advisor, to lead it. White-Cain, 58, is a megachurch preacher from Florida who has endorsed biblical interpretations that some evangelical Christians believe go…
Former OpenAI safety researcher brands pace of AI development ‘terrifying’
The Guardian reports: A former safety researcher at OpenAI says he is “pretty terrified” about the pace of development in artificial intelligence, warning the industry is taking a “very risky gamble” on the technology. Steven Adler expressed concerns about companies seeking to rapidly develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical term referring to systems that match or exceed humans at any intellectual task. Adler, who left OpenAI in November, said in a series of posts on X that he’d had…
Music: Hvalfugl — ‘Krusninger’
Ultimate goal of Musk’s blitzkrieg on govt: machines replace humans; technocrats replace bureaucrats
The Washington Post reports: Billionaire Elon Musk’s blitzkrieg on Washington has brought into focus his vision for a dramatically smaller and weaker government, as he and a coterie of aides move to control, automate — and substantially diminish — hundreds if not thousands of public functions. In less than three weeks, Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service has followed the same playbook at one federal agency after another: Install loyalists in leadership. Hoover up internal data, including the sensitive and the classified….
Kansas’ Sen. Moran, Rep. Davids sound alarm on delay of USAID food aid to starving people worldwide
By Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector, February 7, 2025 TOPEKA — U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas said a freeze on federal funding and change at the U.S. Agency for International Development left $340 million in lifesaving food grown in the United States sitting at domestic ports awaiting delivery to locations around the world where people were starving. On Friday, President Donald Trump said he wanted to shut down USAID, which served as the federal government’s primary provider of development and…
Trump’s talk of a Gaza takeover masks a more immediate disaster
Neil Hicks writes: The most important outcome of President Donald Trump’s White House press conference this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not Trump’s lawless and immoral musing that the U.S. would “take over” Gaza to create a new “Riviera of the Middle East.” While Trump’s outrageous comments, as they so often do, ignited dutiful praise from his supporters and instant condemnation from his opponents, the intense focus on the U.S. occupying Gaza and forcibly displacing its entire…
Teen on Musk’s DOGE team, Edward Coristine, graduated from cybercriminal social network, ‘The Com’
Brian Krebs writes: Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant…
Trump delights in being attacked because it keeps him at center stage
John R MacArthur writes: Two weeks into the Trump administration, I’m still being asked by foreigners about the new president’s “political vision”. Some of them, especially the French and the British, might be excused for excessive politeness toward a country that in many respects they still envy and admire. But on most of the news programs and podcasts to which I’ve been invited, I’m still encountering earnest interviewers struggling to understand Trump from a conventional political perspective, no matter how…
Tesla Cybertruck appears to be more deadly than the infamous Ford Pinto, according to a new analysis
Futurism reports: A new analysis by independent automotive blog FuelArc suggests that fire fatalities are 17 times more likely in a Cybertruck than in the infamous Ford Pinto — the posterchild of deadly cars if ever there was one. The site arrives at that conclusion by comparing the total units sold so far — 34,438 for the Cybertruck, compared to 3,173,491 for the ill-fated Pinto, discontinued in 1980 — and comparing reported fire fatalities for both. At the current rate…
Gambling firms secretly sharing users’ data with Facebook which it uses to promote gambling
The Observer reports: Gambling companies are covertly tracking visitors to their websites and sending their data to Facebook’s parent company without consent in an apparent breach of data protection laws. The information is then being used by Facebook’s owner, Meta, to profile people as gamblers and flood them with ads for casinos and betting sites, the Observer can reveal. A hidden tracking tool embedded in dozens of UK gambling websites has been extracting visitors’ data – including details of the…