From Guardian:
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Thursday, September 28, 2023
If the Republican fumblers and Bumsteads shut the government down as looks likely, does it mean they will have to suspend their impeachment bleating for the duration?
That is today's big question, not who won/lost among the seven contestants.
Things are getting very dicey. The shutdown, the impeachment thing, so far without any "show me the money" against Joe; Hunter being a different person.
And for a trifecta. Hunter is suing Rudy Guiliani and Bob Costello, while Bob Costello is suing Rudy Guiliani. With those examples, is it a surprise the Senate faces a backlog of judicial nominees. Suit happy people. Roy Cohn was the lawsuit champ, but now he is dead. Trump had Cohn as his lawyer, and learned. Now Hunter is stepping up to the plate.
Civil complaints. Criminal indictments. It keeps justice in contention.
Is it The New American Way?
("Fumblers and Bumsteads" is, I am told, a term Bobby Hull used in once describing Chicago Blackhawks management personnel. In too many places the term fits.)
___________UPDATE__________
As to fumblers and Bumsteads, Marcy Wheeler, who has a better grasp of facts and a better sense of irony than Crabgrass, writes of Republican impeachment leadership intentions:
Republicans Plan to Declare Trump’s Entire Business Model a High Crime and Misdemeanor
Wheeler does a tightly written compare-and-contrast of Trump family Chinese dealings with Hunter Biden's "trading on the brand" in Chinese dealings. Not that it makes Hunter look good for what he did while Joe was out of office, but it shows Trump, himself and kin, did comparable stuff while Trump was in office. Go figure.
Having not watched the second Republican Trumpless event, a look toward who you might trust as having worth-the-time online coverage.
First, the lens used for this image makes all but the center three look portly:
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| Breitbart homepage image |
Only three got both feet on the Presidential seal flooring, making them front runners.
None stepped on the eagle. My observations, before reading anything but headlines and search return blurbs. Six dark suits and a red dress. Ramaswamy looks taller than DeSantis. Ramasamy looks to be waving at people in an airplane.
While the seven (you said "Magnificent," I didn't) were doing their thing Trump and offspring in his businesses were getting a partial summary judgment against him/them for fraud against banks and insurers. Everyone earned what they got?
But who got what, at the seven-fest? What do the pundits say?
Donald Trump sang the praises of American autoworkers in a speech in the battleground state of Michigan Wednesday night, creating a stark contrast between the former president and rivals for the Republican nomination who were debating in California.
“I want to begin this evening by saluting these truly great Americans who do not get the credit they deserve,” Trump said.
The tone of Trump’s discussion of autoworkers was very different from what listeners heard from the Republicans at the official GOP debate in the Reagan Library in California.
At the opening of the GOP debate, Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) was asked about the strike by the United Auto Workers union seeking better wages and working conditions for its members. He recently praised Ronald Reagan for his decision to fire air traffic controllers in 1981, drawing a parallel with the current UAW strike. One of the debate moderators asked in Scott would fire the striking autoworkers.
“Obviously the president of the United States cannot fire anyone in the private sector,” Scott said.
Rather than leave it at that, Scott took the opportunity to criticize the strikers.
“One of the challenges we have in the current negotiations is that they want four-day, French work weeks but more money. They want more benefits working fewer hours. That is simply not going to stand,” Scott said.
The language deployed oddly echoed the words of President George H.W. Bush who responded to Iraq’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait by declaring: “This will not stand.” Eight years later, the character known as The Dude used the phrase in the film “The Big Lebowski.”
“I do mind, the Dude minds,” the Dude said. “This will not stand, ya know, this aggression will not stand, man.”
Trump’s remarks stayed away from criticizing the benefits and wages for which the workers are negotiating.
Trump addressed his remarks to the “welders, assembly line workers, machine operators, forklift drivers, pipefitters, tool and dye makers, mechanics, electricians, technicians, and journeymen.”
“We love being with you,” Trump said. “You love this country. You built this country. And you are the ones that make this country run.” [Breitbart]
The implication is Lebowski won the event. (The welders are all robots, and the UAW built automobiles, not "this country.") And tell Breitbart it's "tool and die," not "tool and dye." On a parallel Breitbart post, throwing more shade:
Many critics on social media pronounced the debate “unwatchable,” after the anchors failed to control the candidates and asked questions that once would have been expected on a left-wing network, not on a Fox platform.
I was a step ahead of those "many critics online" because I deemed it unwatchable before it happened, without watching. That second Breitbart item mentioned only Burgum, among the seven, as if declaring him winner, while most people would ask, "Who?" A third Breitbart item, second on the unwatchable theme, where all pictured except Pence have a hand in things:
Haley's dress looks purple in that image. Getting into the more interesting "who won" punditry; Politico: Christopher Cadelago Scott won. Sally Goldenberg Scott won. Steven Shepard Haley won. Adam Wren: Nobody had a great night. Are we supposed to recognize those names as pundits we trust? Anyway, South Carolina did okay, seems the trend.
Vox, give credit for a clear headline, "1 winner and 3 losers from Fox’s dud of a second GOP debate." Read it, if you know and trust: " Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau." He wrote it, hence winner. Subheadline: Vivek lost.
It is difficult to keep at it, so, winner/loser commentary links: WaPo, NYT. The Hill. [correction, the intended The Hill link, is supplemented by that first given]
Without exhaustive search, nobody was found to write, "Donald and the Seven Dwarfs," or "Convicted Adjudged Fraudster and the Seven Dwarfs," so it is likely here is the first place you see that. ("Convicted" would only apply in a criminal trial.)
Opinions can differ, but Don v. Joe seems everyone's conclusion, with lip service to anything else. There, Joe gets the Crabgrass vote - of that pair.
Joe only faces Republican banter and theater. Finger pointing and clucking about bribe-taking. Trump's now an adjudged fraud, in a civil action, while facing four indictments with countless counts. Best and brightest.
Are Hunter Biden paintings selling at a discount?
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
Hunter Biden has now sued Rudy and Rudy's lawyer. EmptyWheel has the story sufficiently structured (with links) so that linking there, rather than posting detail fits reader interests best.
source: https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Biden-laptop-Teddy-845x684.jpeg
EmptyWheel - with that above image of copies of the Hunter laptop hard drive spreading like a contagion; an epidemic.
The latest Hunter Biden lawsuit: online here.
Readers are encouraged to simply log onto https://www.emptywheel.net/
Then simply read sequentially the posts there, one about the computer store owner's description of intereaction with FBI personnel before they had a warrant to examine the laptop he'd turned over to them. Searching before having a search warrant to search being bad practice. All the recent EW posts are worth the time it takes to read.
The more one sees about the circus show handling of "the laptop" the more one can see why DOJ was eager to cut a plea deal - as they did, covering all the mis-tracks they'd left, FBI personnel and all, swept under the carpet away from prying public eyes.
The Hunter Biden position is that the deal DOJ cut still binds them, regardless of the one judge calling it into question. That it ties their hands. The judge would not go along, but they proposed the deal, negotiated, and drafted the paperwork defining what the deal terms and conditions would be. And the thing is moved from that judge's court.
Without the House Republican screeching, things would have been so much cleaner. For everybody. The feeling here is Weiss should be bound by the deal his DOJ folks cut.
And does anyone believe that the handling of "the laptop" does not destroy its admissibility as credible chain-of-custody evidence of anything? Or that FBI handling of it should not result in suppression of it and all contents as evidence?
"The larger issue for AI in terms of copyright law is likely to be the concept of fair use, particularly as it applies to the training data used to create the large language models (LLMs) underpinning generative AI."
The headline is a single paragraph from Computerworld -
Readers likely have seen the question in one form or another, AI bumping into copyright, primarily by LLMs (large language models) crawling the web for content to feed to a model such as OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot in order to train it to probabilistically generate content for users. A second dimension, AI created "art" or content, can it be copyrighted, is a focus of ArsTech, here.
The ComputerWorld item is a generic example, where readers can surely search and find a host of items on point, e.g., Ars again, here. (websearch returned items)
Crabgrass will not try an exhaustive review - instead this brief post is flagging the concerns for those who may be unaware of issues, or unfamiliar with what is at stake.
The initially cited CW item, from the headline paragraph, continues -
Fair use, in brief, is a defense to copyright claims written into federal law. The four factors that courts have to consider when deciding whether a particular use of copyright material without permission is “fair use,” are the character and purpose of the use (educational or other not-for-profit use is much more likely to be deemed fair than commercial use), the nature of the original work, the amount of the original work used, and the market effect on the original work.
Copyright a stumbling block for AI model training
Given those factors, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the lawsuits against companies like OpenAI have already begun. Most notably, a group of authors that includes comedian and writer Sarah Silverman sued OpenAI and Meta in July over the company’s use of their books to train ChatGPT.
The core issue in that lawsuit is the use of a data set called “BookCorpus,” which, the plaintiffs say, contained their copyright material. OpenAI and Meta are likely to argue that the market effect on Silverman’s and others works is negligible, and that the “character and purpose” of the use is different than that which prompted the writing of the books in the first place, while the plaintiffs are likely to highlight the for-profit nature of Meta and OpenAI’s use, as well as the use of entire works in training data.
Precedent, however, may be on the AI companies’ side — the Google Books case, which was a fair use action brought by the Author’s Guild of America against Google’s mass book digitization project in 2005. The case’s history is complicated, including appeals went on for a decade, and was ultimately settled in Google’s favor.
Whether that’s likely to be predictive, however, is debatable, according to Loengard, and much could depend on a judge’s willingness to challenge a large, profitable industry.
“By the time it ended, Google Books had become a tool of many researchers,” she said. “So there’s this idea that the cat’s out of the bag — and of course, the court wouldn’t say this out loud, and I’m not saying this is what they did, but they could look at it and say that once something has entered mainstream commerce that it’s harder to reel it back in and regulate it.”
Obviously derivative works could be another copyright battleground for the AI industry, given that the technology has already been used to produce convincing imitations of popular singers and songwriters. The right of publicity — a different legal concept covering the rights to a person’s name, image and likeness, could become a cause of action for the performance itself — i.e., the sound of Taylor Swift’s voice. But copyright could still become an issue if the underlying song is sufficiently similar to one written by Swift.
That flags the questions, so that as the judiciary fleshes out a law of do-and-don't, the matters reported will not be unfamiliar to readers. Enjoy, as things sift through the filters of the law. It will affect the World's Highest Standard of Living. And the EU will have its own say. And hackers will attempt to figure how to throw a sabot into the machine, in a profitable way or for the hell of it, where ransomware has recently flourished as a way to make money. In parallel to cryptocurrency flourishing as a way to be defrauded. Not that all in that arena are fraudsters, but once legal tender gets put into the system, it is sometimes hard to get it back, unregulated crypto exchanges and all. A video. From before the FTX bottom dropped out.
UPDATE: Fads come. Fads go. Currently crypto seems on the wane. LLM products are the rage. Aside from playing around with ChatGPT and its use in Microsoft's Bing search product, I have discovered no compelling reason to focus on them. To the extent there is behind the scene assistance given search engines better performance, the LLMs are great, and not in the way nor the primary driver of what list a particular search engine returns for a particular choice of wording in a search.
Aside from each being a fad, crypto and LLMs share little, one being a place to lose time and money, the other being a place to lose time and to face yet more of an intrusive Gestalt affecting personal data privacy. (Personal data privacy being something affecting Hunter Biden now more than affecting me.)
___________UPDATE__________
A while back, "data mining" was a buzz term. An enterprise has much data, the buzz was how to maximize the use of it. Now the buzz will be AI models as "data miners."
It may not be phrased that way, but it will be the direction of effort.
The CW item linked to this CIO post, giving a flavor of how opportunists are pouncing onto the new thing, how to use it, how to monetize usage knowledge of a specialist boutique to sell expertise to large enterprise IO departments.
In a sense, same as it ever was. The man in the blue suit coming from IBM to straighten out things will evolve more and more toward independent specialist service providers, as has happened in advertising and PR, and in political consulting, where some poll, some do video half-minute positive or negative specialized products, some do booking, some scout influential sub-market talent and allied entrepreneurs, same party, or opposition research.
Remember MySpace? Gone, while Facebook is still there. Sorting out will be the next phase. Winnowing. Remember Netscape?
Hungry people with ideas, competing with one another, and the big firms and deep pockets will keep control, keep calling the shots, with teams of consultants available, and teams of AI products to select from, to tune to specific enterprise needs.
FURTHER: The last paragraph, in a concrete embodiment; 155p worth;
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4
- Sébastien Bubeck ,
- Varun Chandrasekaran ,
- Ronen Eldan ,
- Johannes Gehrke ,
- Eric Horvitz ,
- Ece Kamar ,
- Peter Lee ,
- Yin Tat Lee ,
- Yuanzhi Li ,
- Scott Lundberg ,
- Harsha Nori ,
- Hamid Palangi ,
- Marco Tulio Ribeiro ,
- Yi Zhang
Tucker Carlson interviewed by an Eastern European online outlet.
https://weltwoche.ch/daily/theyre-all-afraid/
Hat tip to ZeroHedge for reprinting the item.
When Carlson says enough, it is easy to agree with part, disagree with part; and this is a lengthy interview.
Today is the 1-year anniversary of the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines.
So? Billions more? So?
ZeroHedge, here, (cited derivative item because the original Seymour Hersh item is behind a subscription wall).
At WashExaminer, "Hawley says Ukraine aid has no ‘end game’: ‘What about our nation?’" by Heather Hamilton, Trending News Editor --September 21, 2023. Not that Hawley is the world's foremost authority, but his claim has seen no cogent rebuttal.
"Push on," is not a rebuttal, nor is "spend more," and Hawley is correct that Ukraine is NOT about China/Taiwan. The Chinese are patient. The Chinese seeing our quitting it in Ukraine, bad idea not enslaved to sunk costs; should that actually happen; will conclude we are susceptible to rational behavior. In many ways it is not a bad thing to have them think of us that way. A negotiated settlement, land in exchange for peace, a non-NATO-expansion commitment to Russia, it is not too complicated to contemplate. Putin might be quite amenable. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, quite pliable -- accepting of a reality he could not alter should Russia and NATO want to settle.
Economist, Mar. 2022: "John Mearsheimer on why the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis -- The political scientist believes the reckless expansion of NATO provoked Russia." He dates things back,
THE WAR in Ukraine is the most dangerous international conflict since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Understanding its root causes is essential if we are to prevent it from getting worse and, instead, to find a way to bring it to a close.
There is no question that Vladimir Putin started the war and is responsible for how it is being waged. But why he did so is another matter. The mainstream view in the West is that he is an irrational, out-of-touch aggressor bent on creating a greater Russia in the mould of the former Soviet Union. Thus, he alone bears full responsibility for the Ukraine crisis.
But that story is wrong. The West, and especially America, is principally responsible for the crisis which began in February 2014. It has now turned into a war that not only threatens to destroy Ukraine, but also has the potential to escalate into a nuclear war between Russia and NATO.
The trouble over Ukraine actually started at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, when George W. Bush’s administration pushed the alliance to announce that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members”. Russian leaders responded immediately with outrage, characterising this decision as an existential threat to Russia and vowing to thwart it. According to a respected Russian journalist, Mr Putin “flew into a rage” and warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” America ignored Moscow’s red line, however, and pushed forward to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. That strategy included two other elements: bringing Ukraine closer to the eu and making it a pro-American democracy.
These efforts eventually sparked hostilities in February 2014, after an uprising (which was supported by America) caused Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to flee the country. In response, Russia took Crimea from Ukraine and helped fuel a civil war that broke out in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
The next major confrontation came in December 2021 and led directly to the current war. The main cause was that Ukraine was becoming a de facto member of NATO. The process started in December 2017, when the Trump administration decided to sell Kyiv “defensive weapons”. What counts as “defensive” is hardly clear-cut, however, and these weapons certainly looked offensive to Moscow and its allies in the Donbas region. Other NATO countries got in on the act, shipping weapons to Ukraine, training its armed forces and allowing it to participate in joint air and naval exercises. In July 2021, Ukraine and America co-hosted a major naval exercise in the Black Sea region involving navies from 32 countries. Operation Sea Breeze almost provoked Russia to fire at a British naval destroyer that deliberately entered what Russia considers its territorial waters.
It is a confrontation on Russia's border, not ours. It is a more immediate thing to them, as we'd possibly feel perturbed were Russia active in Mexico, up to mischief there. Moreover, they have a land bridge and Black Sea presence. Proximity favors their efforts.
Economist, this month, here, here and here.
Some might say that buying a proxy war is not a sound investment.
The Biden administration thinks otherwise. Having bought one, on payments.
Hawley is correct that more pressing things could be done stateside, with money and policy.
Is NATO expansion worth a long lingering distant loss of lives, both sides; a big weapons suck where only U.S. domestic arms manufacturers smile?
A test of wills? Why? What's it gain our citizens? Better jobs (outside of weapons plants)? A safer world? A bigger NATO, after Baltic area membership expansion, or is that a "So what?"
A fact: With both pipelines already blown up, there is no comparable easy thing.
After the recent coup, France is exiting Niger. Macron gets a brightness award for that one.
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