Something to Know - 15 February

Something funny happened after I had lunch and was on my way to read some stuffy book on the History of Western Philosophy.   I was going to clear my inbox and settle down with my book and read it over the next two days of predicted alluvial drama.   Then, this dropped into my inbox, and I decided to pass it on to you.   It is written by Daniel Pinchbeck.   The subject matter is something way beyond the current problems of authoritarianism.   High-level Artificial Intelligence is destroying the basic principles of labor, employment, and careers, which is not good news for our future.   For more about the author   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pinchbeck

Just in the last few months, the development of Artificial Intelligence has reached a new stage. We appear to be at an inflection point for humanity and for the immediate future of post-industrial civilization. Perhaps this sounds hyperbolic, but I do not think it is. People throughout the AI industry are calling the release of GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 (as well as Claude Code and Cowork) as harbingers of a massive shift: AI is on the verge of becoming self-recursively self-improving. This means it may quickly accelerate beyond human capacity not in a single domain like chess or mathematics, but in all domains at once.

As I explore creating AI videos, I am finding that this resonates. The tools are getting better week by week, almost day by day. I have this vertiginous sense of limitless possibility which also gives me this burning desire to move as quickly as possible. I understand why employees who are working with AI are suffering from burn-out. You have this sudden sensation that anything you ever wanted to do—in media, software, product design, and so on—is now possible. The rush is dangerously addictive.

I am grateful that, in my first books, I carefully explored the ideas around the Singularity developed by Terence McKenna as well as the ideas around the Noosphere that Jose Arguelles explored, following thinkers like Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky. It gives me some theoretical and even emotional preparation for what may be coming, although I think it remains very unpredictable and difficult for any of us to fully fathom. Elon Musk posted on X recently that we have entered the Singularity. If we are not there quite yet, we are very close to it.

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and CEO of Microsoft AI, recently told the Financial Times that, within 12 to 18 months, AI will achieve human-level performance (or better) on most white-collar tasks. This includes the potential automation of professions such as lawyers, accountants, project managers, and marketing professionals. As Sam Harris discussed in a recent podcast, if this prognosis is accurate, our society is standing on the precipice of total disruption, with almost no preparation for what is coming. Personally, I find it ironic—and, also, as I will explore, amorphously hopeful—that the first jobs getting programmed out of existence are white-collar jobs. The robots are not coming for the janitors, plumbers, or nurses. At least initially, they will be fine. Instead, AI poses an immediate existential threat to high-status, high-income professions.

We are already seeing a collapse in entry-level positions in white-collar professions. A Stanford study found a 13% decline in jobs for early-career workers, and the real figure may be considerably higher, depending on the sector. Young people—who may have just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an advanced degree and put themselves into serious debt—are finding themselves stuck. The whole point of that education was to reach the first rung of the corporate ladder. But if the cognitive tasks they were trained to master are now automated, those degrees will be essentially worthless. And even beyond that, the entire ladder may be evaporating.

Software engineering is the current "proof of concept" for this transition. The role of a software engineer has fundamentally shifted in just the last six months. Rather than writing code line-by-line, engineers now function as "architects" or "debuggers," scrutinizing and strategizing over code produced by AI. This meta-function allows a single individual to do the work that previously required a team, effectively signaling the end of the traditional coding hierarchy.

Just a few days ago, Matt Shumer, a 26-year-old AI CEO (co-founder of OthersideAI and HyperWrite), published a short essay, "Something Big Is Happening," that went viral—racking up over 60 million views on X. Shumer believes we are no longer in the phase of "incremental improvement." Instead, we have entered a new era of an intelligence explosion. He noted that AI has crossed a threshold and everything has shifted over the last months, writing:

For years, AI had been improving steadily. Big jumps here and there, but each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster. And then faster again. Each new model wasn't just better than the last... it was better by a wider margin, and the time between new model releases was shorter. I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise.

Then, on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch... more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

With the latest Codex model, Shumer notes, the AI was instrumental in its own creation. It debugged its own training, managed its own deployment, and diagnosed its own failures. When intelligence is applied to the development of intelligence, the feedback loop accelerates beyond human control. What this implies for the broader economy is a "general substitute for cognitive work."

Shumer believes this is unlike previous waves of automation. When factories automated, workers moved to offices; when the internet disrupted retail, workers moved to services. However, AI does not leave a "convenient gap" to move into because it is improving at every cognitive task simultaneously. From legal document review to medical diagnosis and complex software architecture, the "ladder" of white-collar advancement is dissolving—as Karl Marx once noted about Capitalism, "all that is solid melts into air."

Harris is usually a stable middle-of-the-road person—not someone I consider an alarmist. But even he realizes we have reached a threshold of imminent civilizational disruption with almost zero preparation for what's coming. In fact, we could not have worse leadership for this meta-crisis at this moment, with Trump and his avaricious lackeys and slavish apparatchiks. But I also doubt that Democrats would have any idea on how to handle this challenge.

Many have forecast a scenario where the economy bifurcates violently, with a tiny cohort of founders and tech leaders who become stratospherically wealthy, alongside a small layer of early adopters who manage to secure the last remaining positions. Below this elite tier, everybody else is left without much to do or hope for. The danger is not just that new jobs won't be created, but that the mechanisms for wealth distribution will fundamentally break down. Harris notes that a world where a single founder can run a billion-dollar company with barely any employees outside of AI agents is "totally untenable" without a radical redesign of the economic system. (But then you also have to ask who will be buying the products from that billion-dollar company if there is no consumer base).

If the timeline of 12 to 18 months is even remotely accurate, the time to anticipate this transition is now. The traditional link between labor and survival is likely to break—it may already be breaking down. If AI makes human labor "optional at best," we must rewrite the societal contract to ensure that the abundance generated by synthetic super-intelligence benefits the people as a whole.

That doesn't look likely at this point!

Harris concludes by noting that the scenario of economic upheaval—mass unemployment, the obsolescence of human cognition, and extreme wealth concentration—is what happens if everything goes right. This scenario represents the "success case" of AI development, where the technology works as intended. But this ignores the "failure modes" of AI, such as cyber-terrorism, engineered pandemics, or the hacking of critical infrastructure. The current emergency is not about AI going rogue; it is about AI doing its job so well that it breaks the economic foundations of modern society. Wild times!

I also appreciate David Shapiro's ongoing video investigation of the AI inflection point. In a recent video, Shapiro proposes that the coming of AGI will quickly dismantle the traditional hierarchies of knowledge elites. Once again, I see some very positive potential in this... (read the rest on Substack, see link in first comment)

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Juan Matute

CCRC

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Something to Know - 14 February

My advice to you is to go out and enjoy a blissful Valentine's Day.   If you are finding a sociable day a tough slog, and you want to get ill, go ahead and read the latest events according to HCR.   All of this ICE crap and authoritarian behavior is nothing more than an excuse to kill our Constitution, and corruptly soak taxpayers in the name of national security.   

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>	Feb 13, 2026, 9:43 PM (13 hours ago)
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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more February 13, 2026 Heather Cox Richardson Feb 14   READ IN APP   At midnight tonight, most of the agencies and services in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will run out of funding, as popular fury over the violence and lawlessness of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol made Senate Democrats refuse to agree to fund DHS without reforms. And yet, because the Republicans lavished money on ICE and Border Patrol in their July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—those agencies will continue to operate. The 260,000 federal employees affected by the partial shutdown will come from other agencies in DHS, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), and the Coast Guard. A measure to fund DHS passed the House by a majority vote, but in the Senate, the filibuster allows the Democrats, who are in the minority, to make demands before the measure can pass. On February 4, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) sent Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) a letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure to appropriate more funds for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Those demands are pretty straightforward. The Democrats want federal agents to enter private homes only with a judicial warrant (as was policy until the administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials themselves could sign off on raids, a decision that runs afoul of legal interpretations of the Fourth Amendment). They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their names, agencies, and unique ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law enforcement officers do. They want an end to racial profiling—that is, agents detaining individuals on the basis of their skin color, place of employment, or language—and to raids of so-called sensitive sites: medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts. They want agents to be required to have a reasonable policy for use of force and to be removed during an investigation if they violate it. They want federal agents to coordinate with local and state governments and for those governments to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law. They want DHS detention facilities to have the same standards as any detention facility and for detainees to have access to their lawyers. They want states to be able to sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress members to have unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them. They want body cameras to be used for accountability but prohibited for gathering and storing information about protesters. And they want federal agents to have standardized uniforms like those of regular law enforcement, not paramilitaries. As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are commonsense measures that protect Americans' constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement, and should apply to all federal activity even without Democrats demanding them. Democrats said White House offers were insufficient to address their concerns, although the White House did not make its position public. Before they left Washington yesterday for a ten-day break, senators refused to fund DHS in its current state. Before the vote, administration officials appeared to try to soften the image of the federal agents who have terrorized Americans, arrested citizens and legal immigrants as well as undocumented immigrants, and shot people. Trump's immigration advisor Tom Homan, who took over in Minneapolis after Border Patrol agents acting under the leadership of then-commander Greg Bovino shot and killed a second American citizen in that city, told reporters yesterday that that administration will end its surge of federal agents into Minneapolis, saying it had achieved "successful results" including 4,000 people arrested. Agents will remain in the city, he said, but the surge of thousands of agents will end. Torey Van Oot of Axios adds that more than a dozen federal prosecutors resigned after the Department of Justice declined to investigate the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and support for Trump's handling of deportations cratered as Americans saw children tear-gassed and citizens shot. Acting director of ICE Todd Lyons told the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday that the agency is training agents adequately before they go into the field and that once there, they are properly enforcing U.S. immigration laws. "And," he added, "we are only getting started." But Lyons's claim that federal agents are adequately trained was belied on Wednesday when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) abruptly closed the airspace over El Paso, Texas, for what it initially said would be ten days. Such a closure would shut down all flights below 18,000 feet, including medical helicopters, and is rare enough that the comparison media used was to the closure of airspace after 9/11. Confusion reigned, since no one had notified even the mayor of El Paso, a city of 700,000 people. Shortly afterward, the FAA reopened the airspace. Administration officials immediately said the problem was drones flown into the area by drug cartels, though such drone flights are common. Then the media reported that the Defense Department had been testing out a new antidrone defense system without signoff from the FAA on danger to civilian planes. Then it turned out that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had permitted U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, to use an antidrone laser near Fort Bliss, where detainees are housed at Camp East Montana. Someone then used the laser without informing the FAA. And then it turned out that the "drones" agents used the laser to shoot down were actually party balloons. That the Defense Department is loaning a military weapon to CBP is itself concerning, but that a weapon powerful enough to cause the closure of El Paso's airspace was in the hands of someone who mistook balloons for cartel drones is also a problem. So, too, of course, is that the administration's initial impulse was to lie about what happened. In his testimony, Lyons maintained that ICE is indeed prioritizing the removal of undocumented immigrants with records of violent crime, enabling Republicans to claim that Democrats who want to rein ICE in are deliberately endangering public safety. Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News reported this week that documents from DHS itself show that fewer than 14% of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested in Trump's first year had either convictions or charges for violent crimes, with fewer than 2% either charged with or convicted of homicide or sexual assault. Leah Feiger of Wired reported today that ICE has been quietly and aggressively expanding across the United States in the past months. It has bought or leased new facilities in nearly every state, many of them outside of the country's largest cities, although they are concentrated in Texas. Feiger reports that DHS asked the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages government properties, to ignore competitive bidding rules and hide lease listings out of "national security concerns." Douglas MacMillan and Jonathan O'Connell of the Washington Post reported today that ICE officials are planning to spend $38.3 billion to buy warehouses across the country. ICE will retrofit sixteen of them to become processing centers that can hold 1,000 to 1,500 detainees at a time before funneling them into eight megacenters that can hold up to 10,000 detainees each. The administration has dramatically changed ICE policy to assert the right to imprison noncitizens until they are deported, even if they are applicants for asylum. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) made an unannounced oversight visit to the ICE field facility in Baltimore, Maryland, yesterday. He saw "60 men packed into a room shoulder-to-shoulder, 24-hours-a-day, with a single toilet in the room and no shower facilities. They sleep like sardines with aluminum foil blankets." Mike Hixenbaugh at NBC News today narrated the life of a Russian family in the U.S. seeking asylum. For four months, they have been incarcerated at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, where there is little medical care and the food is often spoiled with mold or worms. In a statement, a spokesperson for DHS accused the media of "peddling hoaxes" about poor conditions in detention centers. But DHS has lied about so many things that no one should take their words seriously. In January, when an ICE agent shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in Minneapolis, DHS claimed that he had driven away from a "targeted traffic stop," crashed into a parked car, and run. When an ICE agent caught up with him and Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, DHS said, the men had attacked the agent with a snow shovel and a broom handle. DHS said an agent had then fired on the men "to defend his life." The men escaped but were later captured and charged with assault. Yesterday, the Justice Department dropped the charges, saying "newly discovered evidence" suggested the allegations were false. Aljorna's lawyer explained: "It is my understanding that the video surveillance evidence that captured the incident was materially inconsistent with the federal agent's claims of what happened." Last night, in a deep expose of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her advisor Corey Lewandowski, Wall Street Journal reporters Michelle Hackman, Josh Dawsey, and Tarini Parti described a department in chaos. Noem and Lewandowski—who the authors say are having an affair and essentially run the department together—are using DHS for their own aggrandizement with an eye to elevating Noem to the presidency. The reporters detailed the focus on image, the decimation of ICE by firing or demoting 80% of the career field leadership that was in place when they arrived, the apparent steering of contracts to allies, and Noem and Lewandowski's excessive demands, including "a luxury 737 MAX jet, with a private cabin in back, for their travel around the country." DHS is currently leasing the $70 million plane but is in the process of buying it. DHS and the violence of federal agents have exacerbated rather than silenced opposition to the Trump administration, causing a crisis for it as the American people increasingly turn against it. Trump is adamant that Republicans must win the 2026 elections and so is calling for new election laws, claiming that Democrats can win elections only through the illegal votes of undocumented immigrants. This ties DHS and American elections together. Today Noem told reporters in Arizona that Congress must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE) America, measure to secure U.S. elections, lying that noncitizens are voting for Democrats and thus enabling them to win elections. This is an old saw Republicans have used since 1994, the year after the Democrats passed the Motor Voter Act, and it has been repeatedly debunked. Indeed, when reporters asked for an example of noncitizen voting, she said she couldn't point to a case but assumed it happened. The bill not only would require voters to show either a passport or a birth certificate with the name matching theirs in order to register, but would also require states to purge their voting rolls every month. The measure passed the House Wednesday but must overcome a filibuster to pass the Senate. Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune reported today that DHS has been using an electronic tool called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), previously used to check eligibility for public benefits, to find noncitizen voters in a database made up of confidential data from different government agencies. That information includes confidential data from the Social Security Administration, accessed by the Department of Government Efficiency. Republican secretaries of state in twenty-seven states have agreed to use SAVE to check their voter rolls. But Fifield and Despart report that the system makes "persistent mistakes," frequently assessing naturalized citizens as noncitizens. The system automatically refers those individuals to DHS for possible criminal investigation, and in certain states, individuals have had to prove their citizenship to be reinstated as voters. "This is not ready for prime time," county clerk Brianna Lennon of Boone County, Missouri, told the reporters. "And I'm not going to risk the security and the constitutional rights of my voters for bad data." And so Trump clearly thinks he must take matters into his own hands. Although the Constitution is quite clear that it is Congress, and Congress alone, that can make laws, today his social media account announced he intends to change the nation's voting laws all by himself. The account posted: "The Democrats refuse to vote for Voter I.D., or Citizenship. The reason is very simple—They want to continue to cheat in Elections. This was not what our Founders desired. I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP" Today, ICE protesters carried a giant U.S. Constitution through the streets of Minneapolis, demanding that federal agents honor the rights the Framers established with that foundational document. —

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Juan Matute

CCRC

Something to Know - 13 February

Getting back to the nitty-gritty slime of the MAGA-Project 2025-Trumpy business of governance, let's dive in with HCR.  Her presentation of news and factual commentary helps us view our affairs from a helicopter perspective.    From Attorney General Bondi to Lumps of Trumpy coal awards, and all the soot in between.   We are also examining commentary suggesting that the destruction of oversight is enabling a truly international global mafia that will infect our markets, politics, and business practices.   

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>  Unsubscribe	Feb 12, 2026, 11:47 PM (8 hours ago)
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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more February 12, 2026 Heather Cox Richardson Feb 13   READ IN APP   In a ceremony at the White House yesterday, surrounded by coal industry leaders, lawmakers, and miners, President Donald J. Trump was presented with a trophy that calls him "the undisputed champion of beautiful, clean coal." At the event, Trump signed an executive order directing the Defense Department to buy billions of dollars of power produced by coal and decried "the Radical Left's war on the industry." Anna Betts of The Guardian noted that Trump also announced the Department of Energy will spend $175 million to "modernize, retrofit, and extend" the life of coal-fired power plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Kentucky. As Lisa Friedman pointed out in the New York Times last month, the United States has been the largest polluter since the start of the industrial era, but emissions of carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas, have been declining since 2007. Trump maintains that climate change is a "hoax" and has withdrawn the U.S. from the main global climate treaty. Since he took office in January 2025, U.S. emissions have increased 1.9% largely because of the renewed use of coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency revoked the scientific finding that has been the basis for regulating emissions from cars and power plants since 2009. That finding, called the endangerment finding, reflects the consensus of scientists that greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas endanger the health and general welfare of the American people. The Trump administration says scientists are wrong about the dangers of climate change and that the regulations hurt industry and slow the economy. It claims ending the rule will save Americans $1.3 trillion, primarily through cheaper cars and trucks, but it did not factor in the costs of extreme weather caused by climate change or the costs of pollution-related health issues. Last year, Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow of the Washington Post reported that at a campaign event at Mar-a-Lago in April 2024, then-candidate Trump told oil executives they should raise $1 billion for his campaign. In exchange, Trump promised he would get rid of Biden-era regulations and make sure no more such regulations went into effect, in addition to lowering taxes. Trump told them $1 billion would be a "deal," considering how much money they would make if he were in the White House. Tyler Pager and Matina Stevis-Gridneff of the New York Times reported on Tuesday that Trump's threats to stop the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, came just hours after billionaire Matthew Moroun, whose family operates a competing bridge, called Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Moroun has tried to stop the construction of the new bridge for decades. The $4.7 billion construction cost of the Gordie Howe bridge has been fully funded by Canada although the bridge is partly owned by Michigan and will be operated jointly by Canada and Michigan. The new bridge will compete with the Ambassador Bridge—the one the Moroun family operates—for about $300 million in trade crossing the border daily. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that "This is just another example of President Trump putting America's interest first." This afternoon, Dustin Volz, Josh Dawsey, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that the whistleblower complaint of last May involved another country's interception of a conversation between two foreign nationals who were discussing Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, issues related to Iran, and perhaps other issues. Kushner runs Affinity Partners, an investment fund that has taken billions of dollars in funds from Arab monarchies. He does not have an official role in the U.S. government but appears to be acting in foreign affairs as a volunteer. The Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of the whistleblower complaint on February 2, 2026, reporting that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had bottled it up for political reasons, taking it not to Congress but to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. On February 3, Gabbard released a highly redacted version of the complaint to the Gang of Eight, the top member of each party in the House and Senate and the top member of each party on the House and Senate intelligence committees. It may or not be related that in early April 2025, the administration abruptly fired National Security Agency director General Timothy Haugh and his deputy, hours after dismissing several staffers at the National Security Council. At the time, conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who is close to Trump, posted on social media that Haugh and his deputy "have been disloyal to President Trump. That is why they have been fired." In Talking Points Memo, editor Josh Marshall has been exploring the contours of what he calls the Authoritarian International, which he identifies as "a host of authoritarian governments around the world, the princelings of the Gulf monarchies, the sprinkling of European right-ravanchist governments, the rightward portion of Silicon Valley (which accounts for a larger and larger percentage of the top owners if not the larger community), the Israeli private intel sector, various post-Soviet oligarchs and, increasingly, the world's billionaire class." Marshall notes that those in this world are not just antidemocratic. They are constructing a private world in which deals are done secretly without any democratic accountability, mixing national interest with individual financial interest. The model operates in part by maintaining control over key figures thanks to compromising material on them. Marshall points out that the system can be oddly stable if everyone has something on everyone else. Marshall's description dovetails neatly with former Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller's 2011 explanation of the evolving organized crime threat. Organized crime had become multinational, he said, "making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement [and] cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder." He explained: "These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called 'iron triangles' of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat." To protect this system, transparency must be prevented at all costs. The administration seems to be illustrating this principle as it denies the right and duty of Congress to conduct oversight of the government. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has refused to release all the Epstein files to the public as Congress required when it passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Yesterday Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, but it was clear she was not there to answer lawmakers' questions or explain why she had not released the files. Nor did she acknowledge the survivors of Epstein's sexual assaults and sex trafficking, many of whom were in the audience and noted that she had not met with them. When Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) urged her to apologize to the survivors for the sloppiness of the release that had left many survivors's names, identifying information, and even sexually explicit photos unredacted while covering the names of perpetrators, Bondi accused Jayapal of theatrics and, as Glenn Thrush of the New York Times reported, of dragging the hearing "into the gutter." Instead, she came prepared with a book of insults to aim at Democrats and met questions with attacks on the questioners and praise for Trump. Republican Thomas Massie (R-KY), who has been instrumental in pressuring the White House over the Epstein files, posted on social media: "A funny thing about Bondi's insults to members of Congress who had serious questions: Staff literally gave her flash cards with individualized insults, but she couldn't memorize them, so you can see her shuffle through them to find the flash-cards-insult that matches the member." Bondi was not only stonewalling but also demonstrating the tactics of authoritarian power, turning her own shortcomings into an attack on those trying to enforce rules. Even more ominously, Kent Nishimura of Reuters captured a photograph of a page of the book with a printout titled: "Jayapal Pramila Search History." It appeared to be the files Representative Jayapal accessed after the DOJ made some of the Epstein files available at DOJ offices earlier this week. This is a shocking intrusion of the executive branch into surveilling members of the legislative branch and weaponizing that information. The top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), said he will ask for an investigation of this "outrageous abuse of power." Bondi's performance drew widespread condemnation from outside the administration, and even Republicans seemed to realize she was toxic: Scott MacFarlane of CBS News noted that in the committee hearing, Republicans didn't use all their time to question her but simply yielded their time allotted to ask questions back to the committee. But Bondi appeared to be playing to Trump, as she made clear when she veered into the bizarre claim that what the committee should be talking about was not the Epstein files but rather the booming stock market. Last month, Josh Dawsey, Sadie Gurman, and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was complaining to aides that Bondi is weak and ineffective. Yesterday's performance pleased him. This morning, Trump's social media account posted: "AG Pam Bondi, under intense fire from the Trump Deranged Radical Left Lunatics, was fantastic at yesterday's Hearing on the never ending saga of Jeffrey Epstein, where the one thing that has been proven conclusively, much to their chagrin, was that President Donald J. Trump has been 100% exonerated of their ridiculous Russia, Russia, Russia type charges…. Nobody cared about Epstein when he was alive, they only cared about him when they thought he could create Political Harm to a very popular President who has brought our Country back from the brink of extinction, and very quickly, at that!" An Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday shows that 85% of U.S. adults agree with the statement "There are powerful elites who helped Epstein target and abuse young girls. They protected him and need to be investigated." Only 3% of American adults disagree. Fifty percent of American adults think Trump "was involved in crimes allegedly committed by Jeffrey Epstein," while only 29% think he wasn't.

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Juan Matute

CCRC

Something to Know - 13 February

The demise of a once great news outlet is in my thoughts these days.   A victim of corporate alliance with the dark-side of politics.   Remembering the days of great commentators, programming, and leaders of the true sense of television journalism excellence.   It's all but gone now.   Robert Reich honors their past and their failure to honor journalistic standards.  Programs like 60 Minutes and CBS  Sunday Morning were my favorites for so long.   There is no point in tuning in to CBS anymore.

Robert Reich  Unsubscribe	9:49 AM (11 hours ago)
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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more The tragic end of CBS News Another trusted source of information bites the dust under Trump Robert Reich Feb 12 Friends, Producer Alicia Hastey departed CBS News Wednesday, saying the kind of work she came to do was "increasingly becoming impossible," as stories were now evaluated "not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of idealogical expectations." Whose ideological expectations was Hastey referring to? Would it be impertinent for me to suggest it's the sociopath in the Oval Office? Hastey's criticism came a little over two weeks after Bari Weiss, the anti-"woke" opinion journalist who became editor-in-chief CBS's News, unveiled her "21st century" vision at a town hall meeting. Weiss told producers and staff they were free to leave if they didn't like it. Since then, at least six out of CBS Evening News's twenty producers have accepted buyouts. At that town hall meeting Weiss also named a bunch of new contributors — including the anti-aging influencer Peter Attia. In the latest tranche of Epstein Files, Attia appears over 1,700 times, including an email in which he tells Epstein that "p—y is, indeed, low carb." In a missive to the newsroom, Weiss declared that "We love America" should be a guiding principle for the relaunch of the CBS Evening News. Meanwhile, Weiss has replaced Evening News anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois with Tony Dokoupil — who was best known for hassling the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for his "extremist" belief that apartheid is morally wrong. In one of his first broadcasts, Dokoupil accepted without question Israel's justification for violating the terms of the ceasefire when it killed three journalists in Gaza, reporting only that "Israel said it was targeting a group operating a drone affiliated with Hamas." Weiss faced blowback in December when she shelved a "60 Minutes" report about Venezuelans being deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison, hours before it was set to air. Sharyn Alfonsi, a long-standing "60 Minutes" correspondent who reported the segment, had accused CBS News of pulling it for "political" reasons. "Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices," she wrote in a note to the CBS News Team. "It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one." The segment later aired on Jan. 18, drawing in over 5 million viewers. The story CBS posted about Renee Good's killing in Minneapolis reported that "The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot Renee Good last week in Minneapolis, Jonathan Ross, suffered internal bleeding to the torso following the incident, according to two U.S. officials briefed on his medical condition." No identifiable source was given for CBS's assertion of "internal bleeding." A CBS News staffer reported "huge internal concern" that the source was an anonymous leak by the Trump administration meant for an outlet they could trust to run it, no questions asked. Weiss doesn't exactly report to Donald Trump, of course. Trump runs CBS News the way he runs Venezuela — with a widely-understood threat that he'll wreak havoc if it doesn't do what he wants. As Trump told Dokoupil recently in a rambling nearly 13-minute interview, if Kamala Harris had won the presidential election in 2024, "you probably wouldn't have a job right now." Perhaps CBS News didn't edit Dokoupil's rambling interview with Trump because, moments after it ended, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt conveyed Trump's threat that "'if it's not out in full, we'll sue your ass off.'" You see the way Trump now controls CBS News? Dokoupil is Bari Weiss's newly-minted anchor. Bari Weiss is David Ellison's newly-minted head of CBS News. David Ellison is his father's (Larry Ellison) newly-minted head of Paramount, which is the new owner of CBS. Larry Ellison is a pal of Trump's, who contributes to Trump's super PAC. And Trump? He has the power to take the prized Warner Bros Discovery out of the clutches of Netflix and deliver it to Ellison. Among David Ellison's first moves at CBS was to gut DEI policies, appoint right-wing hack Kenneth R. Weinstein to a new "ombudsman" role, and appoint Weiss. I'm old enough to remember when CBS News would never have surrendered to a demagogic president. But that was when CBS News — the home of Edward R. Murrow (who also revealed to America the danger of Joe McCarthy) and Walter Cronkite — was independent of the rest of CBS. And when the top management of CBS felt they had responsibilities to the American public that transcended making money for CBS's investors. America can survive without a "60 Minutes" it can trust, just as we can survive without trustworthy editorial pages of the Washington Post — which Jeff Bezos has censored, and whose newsroom he just gutted. But at some point, as Trump continues to repress criticism of him and his regime, American democracy is compromised beyond repair. ** Here, in contrast to the Trump suck-up CBS News has become, is the courageous CBS News's Edward R. Murrow, from April 13, 1954.

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Juan Matute

CCRC