AI Weapons To Destroy Us All / The Power of an Oklahoma Small Press / Bardella’s Antisemitic Writings / Trump Still Guilty as Charged / Christian Nationalism in France / Musk Tries to Block the Release of “Musk”
Trump and Putin Plot to Build Skynet
Washington Post
Scott: In the Terminator film franchise, the scant surviving members of the species Homo sapiens who have survived are terrorized by Skynet, a fictional artificial neural network-based conscious group mind and artificial general superintelligence system. It is predicated on presumed scientific developments from around 1980, but it is still a reasonable facsimile of the AI that sits now on the horizon, approaching at an ever accelerating pace. Skynet—shorthand for AI-actuated nuclear, biological and tactical weapons systems—is one of five principal scenarios which AI experts now believe could reasonably lead to the extinction of the human species unless specific protections against it are installed, though perhaps not the most likely of the five. Pope Leo’s AI encyclical Magnifica humanitas dedicates considerable space to the moral dilemma presented by introduction of AI-run weapons systems, stating that they must be “disarmed” (“to disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity” § 110).
Unsurprisingly, then, it now appears that Donald Trump is hellbent on doing precisely what the pope and ethicists have most emphatically counseled against: creating the equivalent of Skynet. And he is enlisting Vladimir Putin as his friend and ally in this process, while excluding all America’s traditional friends and allies.
This is possible only because of the total failure of oversight by the MAGA-controlled Congress, which has completely cast off its responsibilities for codetermination of US military strategy precisely at a time when it is most urgently needed.
Early this month, hundreds of diplomats huddled in a cavernous U.N. conference room in Switzerland, working toward a muscular treaty to regulate the use of lethal autonomous weapons — the first agreement governing the use of killer artificial intelligence arms. On the last day of negotiations, the talks turned aggressive.
Over the next roughly 15 hours, U.S. and Russian diplomats hammered away at the document, removing a range of provisions designed to safeguard the use of artificial intelligence in weapons, according to three people familiar with the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive closed-door proceedings, and documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
They stripped language requiring the systems to operate in a “predictable” and “reliable” manner, the people said, and removed a clause mandating that ethical considerations be taken into account when using AI weaponry. The U.S. and Russian teams also removed a provision requiring that humans review military targets developed by AI before a strike, they added.
In a closed-door session, with U.N. cameras turned off and civil society observers removed, Washington and Moscow deployed their army of about 10 lawyers each — nearly twice the diplomatic presence of other delegations — to make changes that moved so quickly that the smaller delegations were left dizzied, the three people said.
“It was death by a thousand paper cuts,” said one of the people.
The U.S. State Department, the Russian Foreign Ministry and the United Nations did not return requests for comment.
The erosion of the agreement, the details of which are previously unreported, shows how the United States and Russia have worked to weaken global rules to regulate lethal AI weaponry, as the Pentagon moves to rapidly infuse the burgeoning technology into its battlefield strategy.
The talks are happening amid a fierce public debate over the existential risks of advanced AI, as tech executives urge world leaders to collaborate to impose limits on the technology. The U.N. has for years tried to regulate AI weaponry with limited progress, and the latest directive is the furthest the effort has advanced.
How A Tiny Newspaper Faced Off Against an Oklahoma Sheriff
Peacock
Charles: Three and a half years ago a reporter for the tiny McCurtain Gazette used a voice-activated pen to record the local sheriff, a county commissioner and a jail administrator chatting after a county commission meeting. They discussed lynching black citizens and hiring mafia hit men to take care of the newspaper that was investigating them.
The recording sparked national news coverage and convinced Rachel Maddow to produce a documentary about the family that owned the McCurtain Gazette, and the local Sheriff, Kevin Clardy, who was ultimately voted out of office after the newspaper’s exposés.
The new documentary, Kill, Bury, Print, premiered this week on Peacock and is already the number one movie on the network. Directed by Ben Klein, it tells the dramatic story of the power of one newspaper to bring justice to a small town, and the terrible price the paper’s owners paid for their bravery.
Maddow said on her own show on Monday that she made the film because she believes “that kind of bravery is the cure. I believe that is the antibiotic that cures the infection that is authoritarianism.”
See it now streaming on Peacock.
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“The banks are all controlled by Jews”: An Introduction to the Antisemitic Writings of Jordan Bardella
Mediapart
Scott: Monday was a dismal day for Jordan Bardella, the bright young face of France’s Pétainist party, the Rassemblement national, and the man who would be president if French elections were held today—at least according to some polls. In Metz, Pope Leo delivered an astonishing address that was a thinly veiled attack simultaneously against Bardella’s party in France and its Neo Nazi counterpart, the Alternative for Germany. The pontiff accused these parties (not identified by name, but identified clearly enough by references to their rhetoric) of flooding the European political stage with lies and deceit, inflaming racist animosities and inciting violence against immigrants. Emmanuel Macron beamed through the talk, but French commentators puzzled over whether Bardella would simply accept the fact that he was in the pope’s crosshairs and claim election interference. But Bardella had other problems: only minutes before the pope spoke, the French investigative journalist consortium Mediapart published a rattling compendium of Bardella’s antisemitic rhetoric stretching back over a couple of decades and defied him to deny any of it.
First a “black sheep,” now leader of the flock, Jordan Bardella—the current president of the Rassemblement national (RN) and Marine Le Pen’s anointed choice for prime minister should the far right win the presidency in 2027—finds himself exposed by writings revealing obsessive antisemitism, according to a Mediapart investigation based on numerous private conversations and corroborating testimonies.
A symbol of the new generation of the RN—a party that now presents itself as a protector of French Jews (despite having been co-founded by figures linked to wartime collaboration, former Waffen-SS members and associates of Marshal Pétain)—the 31-year-old MEP displayed antisemitic views in several exchanges dating back to his early days in the National Front (FN) about a decade ago. At the time these messages were written, Bardella was already an active FN militant; he became the party’s leader in the Seine-Saint-Denis department in 2014 and a regional councilor the following year.
Beyond these outbursts—which were coupled with unbridled conspiratorial thinking—Bardella was already revealing the mechanics of the image-management strategy known as “de-demonization,” which the far right has been implementing within the French political and media landscape for fifteen years. “Politics is about PR,” he said. What matters is not what one truly thinks, but simply ensuring that it does not become public knowledge. This point was all the more crucial given that Marine Le Pen, then the party’s president, was publicly declaring at the time that the FN was the “best shield” for protecting French citizens of the Jewish faith.
However, in the exchanges revealed today by Mediapart, we discover a Jordan Bardella who is the polar opposite of that public image—someone fully aligned with the theories of Alain Soral, an antisemitic activist with multiple convictions, and who, for instance, defended the idea of an alleged Jewish plot to control the “world order.” It was also during this period that he forged a close relationship with a longtime friend of Marine Le Pen, Frédéric Chatillon—a key figure in bringing the FN closer to Soral’s circles.
Mediapart reveals a chapter of Jordan Bardella’s political career spanning 2013 to 2015, following a months-long investigation based on dozens of written conversations—which we have independently authenticated—drawn from a broader set of documents and supplemented by testimonies.
The Jew must dominate [there is a grammatical error in the original French] other peoples, crush them, and rob them.
In these documents reviewed by Mediapart, the current RN president rails against the fact that “banks are all owned [again grammatical errors] by Jews.” He also claims that “the Jew must dominate other peoples, crush them, and rob them; a Zionist is necessarily Jewish—and deeply so. In France, two prime examples are BHL [Bernard-Henri Lévy – ed.] or [Jacques] Attali.” “And that is what they want: a New World Order dominated by Israel, with Jerusalem as its capital, of course.”
In another exchange, Jordan Bardella laments that the “most important ministries go to people for whom Israel and banking interests take precedence over French interests,” singling out three ministers from François Hollande’s five-year term (2012–2017): Laurent Fabius, Pierre Moscovici, and Manuel Valls.
Contacted by Mediapart, Jordan Bardella—who in 2023 had stated that Jean-Marie Le Pen “was not antisemitic” (before qualifying his remarks in the face of a public outcry)—flatly denied all the information we reported. “I formally dispute your claims that I made—whether in public or private, orally or in writing—racist or antisemitic remarks of this nature,” he stated in writing, denouncing “crude fabrications” and a “real covert operation” (see sidebar).
“The fact that I was not an active member of the National Front during the summer of 2013—and was still a minor—should alert you to the fact that these ‘sources’ are lying,” he also declared. On this specific point, Jordan Bardella is contradicted... by himself.
Jack Smith Repeats Trump is Guilty as Charged As A Missouri Senator Humiliates Himself
Charles: At yet another hearing where Congressional members of the Trump cult tried to pretend that he was innocent of the multiple crimes he was indicted for, Jack Smith held firm and Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt humiliated himself with a completely bogus accusation of perjury.
Jack Smith
Smith swore under oath that Trump committed “serious crimes”:
Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation. If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.”
The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence. Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions, as alleged in the indictments they returned. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.
After leaving office in January of 2021, President Trump illegally kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. Highly sensitive national security information was held in a bathroom and ballroom where events and gatherings took place.
At the same hearing Senator Schmitt made an utter fool of himself by trying to link Smith to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis by accusing him of attending a professional basketball game in Atlanta in February 2024.
Only trouble was, Smith never went to Atlanta, and the poster board “evidence” the Senator presented that Smith had gone to an NBA game between the hometown Atlanta Hawks and the Golden State Warriors actually referred to a game played by the Iowa Hawkeyes women’s team at the University of Maryland that had nothing to do with the Atlanta Hawks.
“Could it then be that the University of Iowa is the Hawkeyes? Could that be it?” Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said as she chided Schmitt. “That might be the confusion over the names of the team. But perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully.
