Did you attend any No Kings rallies on the 28th? I did, from my car. I always intended to attend in person, but something came up and I had to jettison the plan. As I could now carry on with most of my usual Saturday activities, I was able to drop my daughter off at her standing Saturday gig and pick her up afterward and in all 4 directions, I passed an endless number of groups of No Kings participants standing on street corners and on highway overpasses with signs exhorting drivers to demonstrate their anti-monarchy bona fides with a honk of the horn. I find car horns one of the most unpleasant sounds*, so whenever I have reason to use it, my technique is to lay my thumb on the panel of the steering wheel with barely enough depth to lightly depress the horn button, engaging the solenoid of the mechanism just long enough that a brief feeble blast can be heard from the diaphragm whose vibration causes the sound, at which point I release immediately to bring the noise to an end. In honor of the rarity of the occasion and in solidarity with the sign toting comrades on the sidewalk, I may have taken the opportunity once or twice on Saturday to express the depth of my disapproval of the state of things in the White House by throwing caution to the winds and giving a couple of full blasts, but most of the time what I gave the protesters was a wave and a fist pump or a returned peace sign. I am sure that had I attended the march and rally downtown as was the original plan, I would have been able to sustain my enthusiasm for the length of the protest. With my attention divided by the act of driving, however, the duty to assuage my guilt about having my ass in my car seat rather than on the street with the protesters started to feel like a pointless interruption. If we were serious about this No Kings business, why weren't we all storming the White House, dragging the scoundrels out and sending them out of town with a coat of tar and feathers? Car toots? Really? Ultimately there were so many groups imploring me to honk my feelings that my capacity to engage wore thin and what I wound up giving them was the cold shoulder.
I have an acquaintance in my neighborhood who is a full fledged member of the yard sign brigade. Her front yard is a library of colorful signs informing passersby of her sympathy or enmity to whoever is in the White House depending on the color of their party. Along with a corrugated plastic Ukraine flag and a Coexist sign, there are signs assuring us that hate holds no home here, that in her house they believe that black lives matter, that women's lives are human rights, that science is real, that love is love and that kindness is everything. Briefly this spring her forest of yard signs was dominated by a handmade placard urging drivers to Honk if they were against war with Iran. It's probably a good omen for those opposing Trump and Israel's war that the sign was removed in less than a week. I'm sure the neighbors were happy. The war continues unabated, however.
While the sign was up, I never audibly revealed my sympathy with the sentiment of the sign, for reasons mentioned above. My wife gets frustrated with my reticence to use the horn in any circumstance (and I am vehemently against this war to be clear). Even when I am compelled to honk by an emerging situation (usually a green light unheeded by a vehicle in front of me) my touch on the panel of the steering wheel is so self-consciously tentative that most legitimate opportunities to honk are missed entirely. My daughter is more sympathetic with me. She is driven to gigs partly because when she had her permit, before a move to New York for several years threw a monkey wrench in the project, drivers did not always heed the implied "Do not honk" meaning of the "Student Driver" magnet we affixed to the bumper when she was learning the ropes. She's always had a sensitivity to unpleasant sights, tastes, touches, smells and sounds, but honks particularly rattled her nerves.
Now that my daughter is back in the suburbs for a while and once again entertaining getting her license, she has been setting her mind to devising a more fool-proof method for discouraging other drivers from expressing themselves about her progress with a blast of the horn. What she's come up with seems rather ingenious to me. She wants a bumper sticker that you can't miss that reads:
HONK IF YOU'RE A FASCIST PEDOPHILE
I think if she made the bumper sticker herself and made it available to others she could make a mint with it. It would be a rather ingenious way to discourage other types of Honking, too, especially in combination with other bumper stickers:
Honk if you love Trump!
Honk if you're a Republican!
Honk if you love Jesus!
Honk if you think anti-zionism is anti-semitism!
Honk if you think vaccines cause autism!
If we could silence more horn-honking, what a more wonderful world this would be.
~~~~~
* In spite of the image of the city as a cacophony of angry horns, honking in New York City other than to signal immanent danger has been illegal, if rarely enforced since the 1930's. Tickets range from $800 to $2500 for the worst offenses, but a campaign to quiet the city beginning in the 1970s with the installation of ubiquitous "Don't Honk" signs was terminated in the 2000's for lack of impact other than visual clutter of the signs.
The firm I work for has been aggressively pushing employees to find ways to use generative AI -- particularly OpenAI's Chat GPT, Anthropic's Claude and GitHub's Copilot-- as much as possible in their work. When you buy a hammer, it's usually because you have something you want to nail. With AI, it's as if the hammer purchaser now insists that everyone in the household find ways to incorporate the hammer into their daily tasks. How can a hammer help you wash those dishes? Could anything be nailed or clawed when you walk the dog? The message from the Executive suite has been so consistently insistent that it seems there is a decided effort amongst them to pretend that an employee's natural curiosity to know "WHY" one' s work habits must be re-designed by one to accommodate what should be a tool doesn't exist. I figured i was never going to get an answer from any of the geniuses upstairs, so I asked AI itself: Why are companies "expecting" employees to use AI without explaining why?
Companies are pushing AI adoption without clear, detailed explanations because they are operating under intense competitive pressure to achieve rapid efficiency gains, often driven by a "fear of missing out" (FOMO) and the need to justify heavy investment costs. While many leaders view this transition as an inevitable "partner" to employees, the rush to implement tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot often results in top-down mandates that lack necessary training or a clear "why" for daily operations.
Here is a breakdown of why companies are acting this way:
1. Competitive Pressure and FOMO
•The Hype Cycle: Management is bombarded with information that AI is a "game-changer," leading them to implement it quickly to avoid appearing obsolete, often without fully understanding the practical applications themselves.
•Competitor Fear: Companies fear that if their competitors adopt AI faster, they will lose market leadership and revenue.
•Investor Pressure: Companies are investing heavily in AI and must prove to shareholders that these investments are being used, prompting them to mandate usage to drive up adoption metrics.
2. "Performative" or Rushed Adoption
•Mistaking Efficiency for Productivity: Many organizations equate AI "usage" with "productivity," wrongly assuming that simply using the tool equals better results.
•The Sunk-Cost Fallacy: Having spent massive amounts on AI licenses, leaders feel compelled to force staff to use them, regardless of whether they add immediate value, hoping the technology will improve over time.
3. Misguided Focus on Cost Reduction
•Cover for Cost-Cutting: Some companies are using AI as a strategic justification for layoffs or to avoid hiring, replacing human headcount with automation.
•Overestimating Current Capability: Leaders often rely on hype and assume AI can do more than it actually can, leading to scenarios where staff are forced to use tools that are not yet effective for their specific roles.
4. A Disconnect Between Leadership and Staff
•The "Training Gap": A recent AWS report noted that 56% of organizations have AI plans, but only 31% of workers feel their employer provides training, demonstrating a major gap in preparing staff for the shift.
•Lack of Understanding: Executives often lack awareness of the practical, day-to-day training needs of their employees, leading to a "tool push" rather than a true adoption strategy.
5. Hope for Self-Directed Learning
•Assuming Organic Adoption: Many leaders mistakenly assume that because AI tools are "easy" to use, employees will figure them out on their own, not realizing that proper implementation requires new workflows and training.
Disclaimer: Some companies are now moving from encouragement to mandating AI, with firms like Coinbase taking disciplinary action against employees who fail to adopt AI, which has increased employee anxiety and resistance.
I couldn't have said it better myself. I was inspired to see what AI had to say on the topic by a recent video from Senator Bernie Sanders in which he chats with Anthropic's Claude AI model about the implications and portents of the explosion of AI for workers and for humanity. The atmospheric setting for the video is evocative of stark sci-fi horror and appropriately so: Claude's candor about the threat it poses is at times chilling. It's also a bit fictional.*
While watching Naomi Klein in conversation with author Karen Hao at British Columbia's Chan Center for the Performing Arts about Hao's sensational 2025 investigation Empire of AI (in an extremely worthwhile hour and a half that I cannot recommend highly enough), I was inspired again by Bernie's AI Chat to ask Google the following:
How is it ethical to use generative AI given its profoundly deleterious environmental effects, its unacknowledged exploitation of people, the way it is hyped as being something it is not, and the race that some of the worst actors in commerce are engaged in to win the AGI race?
The results were led off with an AI summary of the response:
AI Overview
Using generative AI ethically is challenging due to high energy/water consumption, exploitation of training data and human labor, potential for misinformation, and the competitive "AGI race" prioritizing profit over safety. Ethical use requires high transparency, opting for models trained with consent, and strict limits on usage, according to perspectives from Medium, TechTarget, and Earth.Org.
Environmental Impact: Training and operating AI models require massive energy and water for cooling, often straining local resources and increasing carbon emissions.
Exploitation of Labor/Data: AI systems are often trained on massive amounts of data scraped without consent, including copyrighted creative works. Additionally, they rely on "invisible labor" from low-wage workers, often in the Global South, for labeling and moderation.
Misinformation and Hype: Generative AI is frequently marketed as more autonomous or intelligent than it is, leading to inaccuracies (hallucinations) and a lack of accountability.
The AGI Race: The commercial race to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) causes companies to prioritize speed over safety, ignoring potential harms.
Strict Use Cases: Only using AI as a tool for support, not to replace human judgment, creative work, or to generate misinformation.
Transparency and Consent: Selecting models that offer transparency about their training data and ensure fair compensation for creators.
Data Security: Ensuring no confidential or personal information is entered into public AI tools to prevent exploitation of user data.
Regulation: Urging for, and abiding by, new legal frameworks that require accountability, accountability for environmental impact, and protection for labor.
Some argue that because of the foundational issues with how these models are developed, truly "ethical AI" does not currently exist, as noted in a WIRED article and a blog post by Matthew Cheney.
%%%%%
Should we trust AI's (copped) opinion on the question? Either AI is wrong here-- in which case it proves the point that AI cannot be used in any way that requires trust in its output-- or it's not. And if it is right in spite of itself, the ethical use of AI is questionable for the very reasons it states.
~~~~~
*Ed Zitron's skepticism of AI's prospects as game changer are based on the state of its actual business versus the hype of its claims.
When it comes to political celebrities, they don't make them like they used to. Reading Clay Risen's Red Scare, I was introduced to a figure from the 1948 US Presidential election, FDR's second vice president (serving in this third term from 1941 - 1945), Henry Agard Wallace. FDR chose Wallace after a falling out with the VP of his first two terms, conservative Texan John Nance Garner. From Risen's chapter on him, Wallace was "a curious cornstalk of a man from Iowa.":
He was born on a farm in 1888, the son of Henry C. Wallace, the U.S. secretary of agriculture for much of the 1920s. Young Henry was a wizard of the land and all its bounty. He studied agriculture at Iowa State University, then went to work for his family’s publication, Wallaces’ Farmer. He became known around the Midwest for his uncanny ability to meld science and economics, business and old-school farming smarts into new insights that helped him grow wealthy—as it did many of his readers, who followed his prescriptions religiously. On the side he founded a seed business, the Hi-Bred Corn Company, producing highly efficient hybrid crops. He held on to it through his decades in politics; at the end of his life, in 1965, it was estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars.
“You feel that he would not tell you the time of day without first searching his soul to see if it agreed with the clock,” read a profile in The New York Times.”
I was not aware of Wallace's challenge to Harry Truman, who as FDR's 3rd Vice President had succeeded Roosevelt when he died in office barely 3 months into his fourth term and was now, having terminated the second World War by dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seeking re-election. Following the defeat of Germany with the close collaboration of Stalin, the winds of favor toward communism and the Soviet Union in the United States government had shifted dramatically, and the haberdasher from Missouri, Truman had been just the man to ride the current. Keeping ahead of the anti-Red sentiment that was winning elections for Republicans, Truman initiated a Loyalty Oath and background checks for over 2 million government employees-- mandating the termination (and often ruining the careers) of employees refusing the oath or found to have had communist affiliations and influences in their histories.
In Congress, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (popularly known as the House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC) became a permanent committee under Democratic leadership. It had been around in one form or another since 1918 when it was formed as a bulwark against subversive European ideas such as particularly, Marxism and anarchy and revived for periodic "witch hunts" to out sympathizers and spies with the anathema ideologies and agendas of the day including, perennially, communism and at the approach of World War II, Nazism. At the conclusion of the war with Hitler defeated, the emphasis returned to heresies of the left. (A proposal in 1946 to investigate the Ku Klux Klan as Un-American was dismissed with committee Member John Rankin of Mississippi saying, "After all, the KKK is an American Institution.") Un-American came to mean strictly affiliation past or present with the Communist Party and Pro-Soviet sympathies in particular.
To Henry Wallace (whom FDR had appointed to the anodyne position of Secretary of Commerce when he demoted him as VP in an effort to broaden his appeal beyond the New Deal coalition with the more middle of the road Truman as his 1944 running mate, and continued to serve in Commerce after Roosevelt's death until September 1946 when he was fired by Truman over disagreements about policy toward the USSR), this burgeoning cold war attitude taking shape among the establishment of both parties was a mistake:
Declaring himself “neither anti-Russian nor pro-Russian,” [Wallace] said that a “get tough with Russia” policy would fail. The only solution, he said, was to cede global security to the United Nations, including the network of U.S. and British air bases strung across the world—in essence, disarmament. “Under friendly, peaceful competition the Russian world and the American world will gradually become more alike,” he said from the podium.
On his dismissal from Truman's cabinet, Wallace founded the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) an organization devoted to promoting a foreign policy that maintained relations with the Soviet Union as well as a domestic policy broadening the social programs of the New Deal. He immediately entertained an ambition to challenge Truman for the Democratic nomination largely on the basis of providing a countermeasure to Truman's growing antagonism to the Soviet Union and to members of the American communist party. Rejecting the belligerence of the Democratic party leadership toward Russia, Wallace, speaking in front of a crowd at Madison Square Garden, declared that Congress "is asked to rush through a momentous decision as if great armies were already on the march. I hear no armies marching. I hear a world crying out for peace.”
Wallace's supporters held a national convention in Philadelphia in July, formally establishing a new Progressive Party. The party platform addressed a wide array of issues, and included support for the desegregation of public schools, gender equality, a national health insurance program, free trade, and public ownership of large banks, railroads, and power utilities. The party was described as "progressively capitalist".
Wallace's campaign received the endorsement of future Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern of South Dakota, entertainers Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson and even movie star Ava Gardner. American Communists, too, were a natural constituency for the party, and while the Communist Party did not openly endorse Wallace, the PCA became a harbor for its members and for progressive minded Democrats many of whom voted with their feet to express their disapproval of the Democrats' growing antagonism to Russia and to the socialist ideals of American leftists. Wallace called his supporters "Gideon's Army" evoking the Old Testament story of the prophet who turned Israelites away from the idolatry they had fallen into and subsequently led a troop of 300 to victory over the vast Army of the Midianites.
Again Wikipedia describes the flavor of Wallace's iconoclasm:
Wallace embarked on a nationwide speaking tour to support his candidacy, encountering resistance in both the North and South. He openly defied the Jim Crow regime in the South, refusing to speak before segregated audiences. Time magazine, which opposed Wallace's candidacy, described him as "ostentatiously" riding through the towns and cities of the segregated South "with his Negro secretary beside him".
The response of mainstream Democrats to the possibility of excitement that Wallace's campaign might arouse among the rank and file was the creation of a counter organization, Americans for Democratic Action, nominally in favor of the expansion of New Deal benefits and social programs but primarily supportive of Truman's anti-communist foreign and domestic policy measures. Even labor in the person of Walter Reuther of the UAW was loath to side with the candidate supported by Communists. The hysteria being raised by both parties and the media-- as well as a well timed exposure by a Republican leaning newspaper of embarrassing private correspondence between Wallace and Nicholas Roerich, a Russian émigré and spiritual leader of the controversial Theosophy movement from Wallace's time as Secretary of Agriculture in Roosevelt's first 2 terms-- undermined the momentum of his campaign. The prevalence of Communists among his supporters became as even Wallace came to concede, "a liability."
From Risen's Red Scare:
In September 1948 Leon Henderson, the [PSA] chairman, warned Truman that his campaign against Wallace was creating a hysterical anti-Communist atmosphere that would last long after the election was over. Worse, he feared that Truman’s loyalty program was being used to political ends, cracking down on innocent people as a way of demonstrating the administration’s anti-Communist bona fides. “We urge you meanwhile to make clear to administration officials that political considerations must have no part in the grave business of determining a man’s ‘loyalty to his country,’ ” Henderson wrote.
In the final analysis, the PSA was barely a spoiler on election day. In only 2 states that went for the expected winner Republican Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, did Wallace's performance come within the margin between Dewey and Truman. Truman won the popular vote, beating Dewey 49.55% to 45.07%, as well as the electoral vote (301 to 189). Wallace with only 0.29% of the vote was shut out from electoral votes and came in 4th behind Segregationist Strom Thurmond of the Dixiecrat Party with 2.37% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes.
Truman with a stronger anti-Communist message than Dewey carried the day. Furthermore, as Risen notes:
Over the coming years, a person’s support for Wallace in 1948, let alone membership in the PCA, would become a mark of suspicion for anti-Communists. The Pittsburgh Press, a conservative afternoon daily, printed the names of local signatories to a Wallace petition—a list that would pop up in the files of many red hunters.
Wallace himself continued in politics only briefly after his defeat. In the anti-red atmosphere, he continued to face accusations of softness on communism, and was called to face accusations that he had encouraged Chiang Kai-Shek in 1944 to form a coalition with Mao Tse-Tung's communist party. He ultimately repudiated his pro-Soviet politics calling the Soviet Union in a 1952 article "utterly evil." He refused to endorse any democratic candidates until Lyndon Johnson's 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, although he disapproved of Johnson's Vietnam policy. Of Cuba, he said, "We lost Cuba in 1959 not only because of Castro but also because we failed to understand the needs of the farmer in the back country of Cuba from 1920 onward. ... The common man is on the march, but it is up to the uncommon men of education and insight to lead that march constructively".
Wallace died in 1965 after a furious battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig disease, which also afflicted Stephen Hawking.
Returning to 1948, Risen concluded:
Truman understood that, like it or not, the United States had no choice but to fulfill its new role in the world, to go once more into the breach. But in doing so, in steeling the country to stand up to the Soviet challenge, he chose not to dispel the accompanying fear—and, during his 1948 run for the presidency, he did much to exacerbate it. Alone, Truman’s attacks on Wallace did not cause the Red Scare. But by lending it a bipartisan cover, he made it easier for tens of millions of Americans to join the hysteria.
It cannot be a revelation to anyone that YouTube shorts can be an addictive thing. Between all the AI Slop and ads for manscaping tools, anti-sag bras and pillows, there are of course dance trends, comedy clips, teasers for new music, genuinely panic inducing extreme sports feats like breakneck skateboarding down busy San Francisco streets, and of course, Gaza. I don't know about you but for me the videos about Gaza had been among the top categories of shorts in my feed until recently (neck and neck with ICE related abominations) when they started to be eclipsed by Iran. Originally documenting the impact of Iraeli and US missiles on Teheran and other Iranian cities, I've noticed a new category piercing through the din, and these are hits on Tel Aviv in particular from Iranian missiles breaching Israel's Iron Dome and making direct hits on military and civilian targets. While I could easily be convinced that some of these are AI generated videos, some direct hits have been confirmed. AI or not, it could be my algorithm but I notice that the comments in these videos from around the world, the US included are nearly 100% on the side of Iran. In contrast, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy reports with dismay that 93% of Israelis support Israel and the US's war of choice against Iran and Lebanon in which 800,000 Lebanese and 3.2 million Iranian civilians have already been displaced from their homes (on top of the nearly 2 million in Gaza) many of them by the makings of an ecological disaster caused by the firebombing of Iranian refineries. Before Israel's US-enabled genocide in Gaza, I never would have thought I would one day be cheering the destuction of Israeli architecture along with random commenters from Ireland, South America, Scandinavia, South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey and Russia, but here I am. And yet, I am also aware that this quick turnabout in the world's tolerance for Israel's aggressions is the stuff of tragedy that could have been avoided, It has been brought upon Israel by Israel itself, aided and abetted by the United States.
Kyle Kulinski has been chronicling the implosion of support for Donald Trump, highlighting in a recent video the viral bemoaning of a Florida former MAGA man for "Uncle Joe" as an indication of how far Trump's esteem among the electorate has fallen. Indeed polls indicate a 48%-40% lead for Biden over Trump in popularity. One poll has indicated that if the election were held again today, Kamala Harris herself would beat Trump by 8 points. For my part, while I applaud any acknowledgement that America made the wrong choice in November 2024, the recent surge is nothing for either Democrat to be proud of. On the contrary, it was Joe Biden's enabling of Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza as well as Harris's refusal to give the smallest sign that her administration would be different that is largely responsible for her defeat, as it has been recently revealed her own team privately acknowledged in its own post mortem. And it was her defeat that enabled this dark era of American authored apocalypse around the world.
While I still regularly grieve over the difference a Harris administration would have made to the alternate history of the world, I do not share Florida MAGA man's longing for "Uncle Joe." To the contrary, I am rooting for the slim possibility that a sizeable chunk of the remainder of Joe Biden's life is consumed with the question of what he thought he was doing greenlighting, funding and stocking Israel's genocidal response to Hamas's October 7 2023 attack on its breach of Israel's apartheid wall around Gaza, and fostering a repression of American dissent via state (and State Department) sponsored conflation of Anti-Genocidal protest with Anti-Semitism. It stretches credulity to think that someone as Inside Washington as Biden was for a very long career (one that bumped up fondly against the closing of the Segregationist era of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms) would have had as shallow a motivation in his unwavering support of Israel than mindless Zionism, and yet, while a venal reflex to not go against AIPAC surely played a part, it is also patently obvious that Biden was of the mistaken belief that he was doing a good thing. This makes the consequence of his mistakenness all the more tragic. If he was helping Israel, it was to burst out of the closet as a world class force for Imperialistic Evil. If he thought he was playing his part in the ongoing restitution of European Jews for the horrors of the Holocaust that Israel's creation was eternally supposed to represent, he was tragically doing the opposite. Israel's conduct since October 7 has lost what remained of the world's good will and instead through its violent hostility to an ever growing list of enemies that its own sociopathic behavior has studiously cultivated, stubbornly engendered a recognition around the world that the tiny state has been and appears to intend to continue to be the source of much of a growing danger to the future of humanity. By not distinguishing herself from Biden's naïveté if not psychopathology with respect to Israel's imperialism-- not even to the slightest degree-- Kamala Harris paved the way to the even more insane and twisted dysfunctional collaboration of the Trump Administration with Netanyahu's Israel.
Israel has long thrived on its demand for the acquiescence of the world to its privileged special pleading, so much so that it had come to expect it. It is a bitter irony, that we can only hope the world survives long enough to enjoy and learn from, that its very confidence in its entitlement to misbehave is the cause of the ill will radiating toward it from every corner of the earth.
