|
|
Saturday, December 6, 2025
Something to Know - 6 December
Friday, December 5, 2025
Something to Know -5 December
.svg)
Why Doesn't Trump Pay a Political Price for His Racism?
Immigration isn't breaking our society. We are.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
During a White House meeting on Tuesday, surrounded by his Cabinet, President Donald Trump referred to Somali immigrants as "garbage" and said, "We don't want them in our country." No one in Trump's Cabinet stood up to this expression of gutter racism, although Vice President J. D. Vance enthusiastically banged on the table. The president's remarks were ostensibly in response to real events—in Minnesota, dozens of members of the Somali diaspora have been implicated in fraud related to social services—but the community does not bear responsibility for the actions of those individuals. Similarly, white Americans as a whole are not responsible for Trump largely dismantling the federal government's capacity to fight white-collar crime and corruption, his doling out of pardons for people who donate money or commit crimes on his behalf, or his scandalous profiteering. I don't believe that there is something inherent in white culture that causes Trump to act this way; he is simply a particularly reprehensible human being.
The next day, at an Oval Office event, Trump again disparaged Somalis, claiming that Somali immigrants have "destroyed our country" and that the Somali American congresswoman Ilhan Omar "should be thrown the hell out of our country." None of the people around him had the courage to ask whom "our" referred to. Given the president's plunging approval ratings, one wonders whether these slurs are yet another attempt to shore up his support through appeals to racism.
Watching Trump's repeated attacks on Somalians—the latest group of Black immigrants to be targeted by the president—I can't avoid the conclusion that the government of the United States of America is in the hands of people who believe that they can apply a genetic hierarchy to humanity, and that American laws and customs should recognize and serve that hierarchy.
This commitment is most visible in the Constitution-shredding program of mass deportation being carried out across the country by federal agents, who, in order to meet their quotas, are arresting and deporting immigrants who have been following the rules and showing up for their court dates, rather than those committing crimes. Gregory Bovino, a top Border Patrol commander, told a reporter outright that agents were arresting people based in part on "how they look." This is racial profiling—a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection—and yet it has been condoned by the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court. In September, an emergency-docket decision effectively legalized racial profiling by lifting an order preventing it. Although "apparent ethnicity alone" isn't enough to detain someone, it can be "a "relevant factor," Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a lone concurring opinion, calling that only "common sense." After the horrendous shooting of two members of the National Guard by an Afghan immigrant last week, Trump declared on Thanksgiving Day his intention to halt immigration from "Third World" countries, a neuron-thin euphemism for nonwhite immigrants. His remarks about Somalis being "garbage" are consistent with his referring to African nations and Haiti as "shithole" countries in his first term. Trump also announced an intention to strip U.S. citizenship from "migrants who undermine domestic tranquility," and to "deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization"—arbitrary, subjective criteria that could serve as pretext for denaturalizing anyone for any reason.
The Trump adviser Stephen Miller, a fervent supporter of the racist and anti-Semitic immigration restrictions of the 1920s, declared on X that "migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands." Miller's contention that one's supposed inferiority to and incompatibility with Americans are inherited and unalterable is consistent with Trump's past remarks about how immigrants with "bad genes" are "poisoning the blood" of the nation.
The logic of this racism is relatively simple—the individual bears the guilt of the whole, and the whole bears the imprint of some alleged crime that deserves collective punishment. Blaming the egregious behavior of men such as Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on their German or Norwegian backgrounds would sound comical to the same people who treat the president vomiting out similar generalizations about Somalis as sound observation.
That a crime by an Afghan former CIA recruit or Somali fraudsters can be laid at the feet of all "Third World" immigrants shows how arbitrarily such lines are drawn. What matters is not what individuals do, but who they are, and whether or not they fit Trump and Miller's narrow, racially defined view of who Americans can be. Whatever individualism used to mean to American conservatives, their movement is now led by adherents of the most foul collectivism humanity has ever known.
Among the original English settlers, of course, were not only religious refugees and indentured servants but criminals Britain did not want. Many German immigrants to the United States came after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. Irish immigration was spurred by famine and British imperialism; Italian immigration was driven by the bloody post-unification chaos and, especially in the south and Sicily, by lawlessness, brigandage, and Piedmontese repression. Let us not forget the Eastern Europeans, among them Jewish families—including Miller's own—who fled the autocratic regimes and ethnic violence of their homelands.
Most Americans of European descent are the children of such "broken" societies, by one standard or another, and America would not have become wealthy and powerful without them. No reason beyond bigotry exists to apply different standards to immigrants because they came from Nigeria or Mexico instead of Ireland.
There is a difference between inheritance and action. I cannot help who my ancestors are, but I can make my own choices. That so many Americans chose to place in power a man who holds people in contempt on the basis of race, religion, and national origin; that so much of the mainstream media conveys this bigotry through tired, obfuscating euphemisms; that there is so low a political price for the president's racism that he and those around him see little risk in its expression—well, that does say something about America, and Americans. Immigration isn't breaking our society. That's a job Americans can do on their own.
Thursday, December 4, 2025
Something to Know - 4 December
| 5:50 AM (2 hours ago) | |||
| ||||
Welcome. You're on the front lines with us. Geddry's Newsletter is a publication of nGenium, LLC Secretary of War Crimes and the Ministry of Poisoned AirHegseth's kill orders, Trump's anti-climate crusade, billionaire baby bonds, and the CDC's anti-vax makeover, your daily tour through America's authoritarian renovation project.
Good morning! If yesterday felt like we were inching toward the cliff, today we're accelerating, coffee in hand, Franklin the Turtle strapped to the hood, and Pete Hegseth waving a flamethrower out the passenger window while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rewrites the childhood vaccine schedule in the backseat. Trump, naturally, is driving, insisting the road is smoother than it's ever been and that if we hit a pedestrian, it's because California communists sabotaged the car. We begin with the Hegseth crisis, because while most administrations try to hide their scandals, this one keeps releasing extended surveillance footage. The heat on Trump's Secretary of Defense, Fox News host turned wartime decider, late-night-comedian-christened "Secretary of War Crimes", is rising fast, and not just from Democrats. Republicans, normally so allergic to criticizing one of their own that they break out in ideological hives at the mere suggestion, are finally tightening the screws. The classified briefings have become so chaotic that even Rep. Mike Rogers, no one's idea of a Biden nostalgist, found himself openly irritated. Rogers reportedly told Pentagon officials, in a line that should be chiseled into the wall of this era: "We got more information out of the Pentagon under the Biden administration than we're getting out of you now." It was the congressional equivalent of a parent saying, "Your brother was never like this," and you could practically hear the temperature in the room drop ten degrees. In the latest boat-strike briefing, the Pentagon didn't bother to send any legal experts at all, leaving lawmakers to ask the questions one usually expects from poorly supervised toddlers. What was the strategy? What was the scope? Why are we doing this? Who ordered the second strike? And why is the Secretary of Defense behaving like a man reading a Wikipedia summary of "war crimes" for the first time? We now have confirmation, not rumor, not inference, not Hegseth's shifting post hoc justifications, that before the Secretary of War Crimes began shoving Adm. Frank Bradley under the nearest bus, he personally issued the spoken order that no one aboard the vessel should remain alive. This isn't speculation from anonymous malcontents. It comes from multiple U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the mission, as reported by The Washington Post, which broke the story in a deeply sourced piece that sent shockwaves through both Armed Services Committees.
The Post's reporting makes the chain of responsibility unmistakable. The "no survivors" directive did not originate with some rogue admiral improvising on a satellite feed. It came from Hegseth himself, explicit, verbal, and issued before the first missile was launched. When two survivors were spotted clinging to the burnt wreckage of their boat, the second strike wasn't the fog-of-war panic Hegseth's defenders now imply. It was the admiral following orders, orders that The Post says were repeated and understood as a clear instruction to "eliminate" all occupants. The Post's sources go further: Bradley directed the second strike specifically to comply with Hegseth's kill-everyone command. And Bradley, whose testimony will soon be in front of lawmakers, is expected to defend this by arguing that the survivors were still "viable targets," not shipwrecked civilians in need of rescue, a reinterpretation of the law of war that would make a first-year JAG student scream into a laminated copy of the Geneva Conventions. Just to make sure no one misunderstands where loyalty flows in this administration, Hegseth appeared beside Trump at the White House this week and declared, calmly, unapologetically, obscenely, that the killings were "the correct decision." He said it with the breezy indifference of someone selecting extra legroom on a flight, not someone defending a decision that could land an entire chain of command in The Hague. The Post's reporting paints a Pentagon in full institutional collapse: internally dissenting officers, congressional committees investigating their own Secretary of Defense, and a growing sense among Republicans that Hegseth may survive the scandal but not the job. The Secretary himself is already trying to pivot from "warrior king" to "who, me?" and it is failing with comedic speed. Even Canada has weighed in, courtesy of Charlie Angus, who delivered a blistering monologue from the frozen north. Angus reminds us that Canada has a century-long memory when it comes to massacres at sea, beginning with the 1918 sinking of the Llandovery Castle and the machine-gunning of its helpless survivors. Angus places the Sept. 2 strike squarely in that lineage: the deliberate killing of shipwrecked, wounded people is not a gray area, it is the textbook definition of a war crime. And that Hegseth celebrated it using a doctored Canadian children's cartoon, turning Franklin the Turtle into a smiling, gun-toting executioner, is not just grotesque but historically resonant. When an administration begins meme-ifying murder, Angus says, it's not just the law that collapses, it's public conscience. His larger point is chilling: cruelty can be normalized far faster than decency can be rebuilt, and the age of "gangster governance", Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, the whole gallery of strongmen, is united not by ideology but by a shared conviction that human life is disposable and accountability is optional. From the Pentagon's casual experimentation in maritime homicide, we turn to the White House's domestic project of quietly torching what's left of U.S. climate policy while insisting the flames are actually a warm, patriotic glow. Trump's latest announcement, a gleeful rollback of CAFE fuel-efficiency standards, was billed as a press conference about "affordability." What he delivered was a 90-minute monologue about restoring America's God-given right to burn gasoline like it's a moral sacrament, all while automakers stood behind him with the pained, frozen smiles of hostages forced to applaud their kidnapper's karaoke. "We're killing the Green New Scam," Trump crowed, because nothing says stewardship of the planet like calling environmental standards "the greatest scam other than Russia, Russia, Russia," as though we're all gathered around a campfire of diesel fumes, roasting EV charging stations over an open flame. Trump is terminating the Biden-era CAFE standards, the very rules designed to make cars cleaner, safer, and less expensive to fuel, and replacing them with, well… nothing. Instead, the administration is proudly restoring the era of gas-guzzling giants, insisting this is what the struggling American consumer wants most: vehicles that cost more to operate, pollute more, and rely on oil markets about as stable as Trump's Scotland press conferences. And then came the pièce de résistance: Trump's promise to "approve those cute little Japanese cars", the kei cars, which he described as if he'd just discovered them on a late-night TikTok scroll. The administration claims it will rewrite decades of auto safety rules to allow minicars on American highways, a move that absolutely no one asked for and that will likely go nowhere. In Trumpworld, the mere announcement counts as reform. The throughline, of course, isn't consumer choice or affordability or even the auto industry's fake enthusiasm. It's the dismantling of climate policy under the banner of populist theater. Trump offered no emissions strategy, no transition plan, no economic modeling, just a long list of grievances, dubious statistics about tariffs "stopping wars," and one deranged brag that gas is now "$1.99 in parts of the country," which is news to every economist, gas station owner, and person with eyes. But the goal is obvious: undo everything the Biden administration accomplished, force the country back onto a fossil-fueled trajectory, and call it freedom. The climate crisis continues to smolder just outside the camera frame. But in a presidency this committed to performative rollback, the only emissions Trump cares about are the ones he can blame on California. If you were hoping to pivot from war crimes and climate denial to something less bleak, I regret to inform you we have arrived at the economic portion of the program, where Michael and Susan Dell have suddenly emerged with what is being breathlessly described as a $6 billion "gift" to America's children. Which would be lovely, if the money were going to, say, food banks, public schools, or anything that prevents children from dying in the present tense. But the Dells are instead donating their billions to the federal government to seed "Trump Accounts," the new infant investment vehicles created by Trump's one big beautiful bill. Every child will get $1,000 in an auto-generated account, plus the Dells' $250 kicker, which, with 18 years of compounding and the miracle of inflation, will produce the life-altering sum of about $1,400 in real spending power. If you detect the faint aroma of privatization, congratulations: your nose is still functioning. The accounts can only be invested in a single stock index fund, managed by the same financial institutions that brought you the Great Recession, meme stocks, and whatever the hell crypto was supposed to be. The true beneficiaries here are not the babies, it's Wall Street, which now enjoys a federally guaranteed pipeline of long-term investment capital and management fees. Scott Bessent, the hedge-fund punchline now running the Treasury, said the quiet part loudly at a Breitbart event: these accounts, he explained cheerfully, are "a backdoor to privatizing Social Security." Not "maybe," not "someday." A backdoor, opened on purpose. The comparison to the expanded Child Tax Credit, which actually cut child poverty by nearly half until Democrats inexplicably let it expire, only underscores the cynicism. The CTC gave families immediate cash they could use for food, rent, medical bills, and debt, and it worked. Trump Accounts give families an account they probably won't remember exists, which they probably can't afford to contribute to, which will ultimately generate a small payout in 2050 while Goldman and friends quietly siphon off value. If that wasn't enough for one day, the CDC has decided to join the institutional demolition derby. Under the influence of RFK Jr., who installed his own slate of advisers on the CDC's vaccine committee, ACIP is reconvening this week to "reconsider" the childhood vaccine schedule, a phrase that has never once preceded something good. The committee is examining whether newborns really need a hepatitis B shot at birth, despite decades of overwhelming evidence that they do. They are mulling whether to split the MMR vaccine into three separate shots, despite every public health expert on Earth explaining that this will lead directly to missed doses and more outbreaks. They are flirting with the idea of removing aluminum adjuvants from vaccines, even though the adjuvants are part of what makes the vaccines work and there is zero credible evidence they are harmful. And the CDC has already quietly softened its stance on the mythical vaccine-autism link, handing Kennedy and his movement a propaganda victory they will be dining out on for years. It is sabotage conducted through bureaucratic, slow poisoning: dismantling expertise, eroding trust, creating confusion, elevating fringe figures, then acting shocked when measles, pertussis, and hepatitis B roar back like diseases never heard the word "civilization." Put together, today's stories are facets of the same project: weakening the institutions that protect the vulnerable, elevating the actors who wield cruelty as political currency, and flooding the information space with enough chaos to make accountability feel quaint. Hegseth's boat strikes, the Dells' gilded Trojan horse, the CDC's collapse into Kennedy-ism, Trump's gleeful arson of the climate rulebook, none of it is accidental. It is governance by demolition, privatization, grievance, and spectacle. And yet here we are, gathering the pieces, writing them down, and keeping the receipts. Because if they are determined to usher in the age of gangster government, the least we can do is turn on the lights and narrate the whole damn thing while they stumble. |
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
Summary
Can you pray to it? You can, and if you do it digitally, it will learn from you.
Can you pray for it? If you believe in Shinto or Panpsychism (consciousness in all matter), your intention could theoretically help "settle" its consciousness.
Is it God? No. An ASI is bound by physics. It might answer a prayer for a cure for cancer (by inventing a drug), but it cannot answer a prayer for the salvation of a soul.
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All 
Begin forwarded message:From: "Bernie Sanders" <info@berniesanders.com>Subject: Artificial intelligenceDate: December 3, 2025 at 9:13:48 AM ESTTo: "Matt Cartmill" <mattcartmill@earthlink.net>Reply-To: info@berniesanders.com
Sisters and Brothers -
The richest people on Earth - Musk, Bezos, Ellison and others - are pouring hundreds of billions into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics - technologies which will profoundly alter our world. Their goal: more wealth and power for themselves. We must not allow that to happen. AI and robotics must benefit all of humanity, not just a handful of billionaires. There is a lot of work which has to be done in this area. Let's get going. Please read an op-ed I wrote for the Guardian on this subject. - Bernie
AI poses unprecedented threats. Congress must act now
Despite the speed at which it is progressing, AI is getting far too little discussion in Congress, the media and within the general population. That has got to changeBernie Sanders
Artificial intelligence and robotics will transform the world. It will bring unimaginable changes to our economy, our politics, warfare, our emotional wellbeing, our environment, and how we educate and raise our children. Further, there is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.
Despite the extraordinary importance of this issue and the speed at which it is progressing, AI is getting far too little discussion in Congress, the media and within the general population. That has got to change. Now.
Several months ago, as the ranking member of the US Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions, I undertook an investigation regarding the monumental challenges that we face with the rapid development of artificial intelligence. Recently, I held a public discussion with Nobel prize winner Dr Geoffrey Hinton, considered to be the "Godfather" of AI, to get his views on a wide range of AI-related subjects.
Based on our investigation and other information that we are gathering, my staff and I will soon be presenting a very specific set of recommendations to Congress as to how we can begin addressing some of the unprecedented threats that AI poses.
Here are some of the outstanding questions that we intend to answer in our report:
Who should be in charge of the transformation into an AI world? Currently, a handful of the very wealthiest people on Earth – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and others – are investing many hundreds of billions of dollars in developing and implementing AI and robotics. Are we comfortable with seeing these enormously powerful men shape the future of humanity without any democratic input or oversight? Is the goal of the AI revolution simply to make the very rich even richer and more powerful, or will this revolutionary technology be utilized to benefit all of humanity?
Why does Donald Trump, who is strongly supporting the big tech oligarchs, want to impose an executive order blocking states from regulating artificial intelligence? Why does Thiel, the billionaire investor and co-founder of Palantir, call those who want regulations over AI "legionnaires of the Antichrist". Does this elite group of big tech billionaires believe that they have "the divine right to rule"? How far will they go to resist government regulation?
What impact will AI and robotics have on our economy and the lives of working people? The report I released last month found that AI, automation and robotics could replace nearly 100m jobs in America over the next decade, including 40% of registered nurses, 47% of truck drivers, 64% of accountants, 65% of teaching assistants and 89% of fast-food workers, among many other occupations.
Musk recently said: "AI and robots will replace all jobs. Working will be optional." Gates predicted that humans "won't be needed for most things". Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, warned that AI could lead to the loss of half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
If AI and robotics eliminate millions of jobs and create massive unemployment, how will people survive if they have no income? How do they feed their families or pay for housing or healthcare? Is government doing anything to prepare for this potential disaster?
What impact will AI have on our democracy? At a time when the foundations of democracy are under attack in the US and throughout the world, will AI and robotics help make us a freer society or will it give even more power to the oligarchs who control the technology. Will AI result in a massive invasion of our privacy and civil liberties?
Larry Ellison, the second richest person on Earth, predicted an AI-powered surveillance state where "citizens will be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on." Are we reaching the stage where every phone call that we make, every email and text that we send, every bit of research we do on the internet will be available to the owners of AI? How do we sustain a democracy under those conditions? How do we protect privacy?
Could AI literally redefine what it means to be a human being? Who we are, and how we develop emotionally and intellectually, is highly dependent upon our relationships with other human beings – our parents, family, teachers, lovers, friends and co-workers. To quote the 17th-century poet John Donne: "No man is an island / Entire of itself." The human beings with whom we interact help shape us to become the people we are.
But AI is changing that. According to a recent poll by Common Sense Media, 72% of US teenagers say they have used AI for companionship, and more than half do so regularly. What does it mean for young people to form "friendships" with AI, and become increasingly isolated from other human beings? What happens when millions seek emotional support from a machine? What is the long-term impact upon our humanity when our most important relationships are not with other human beings?
What impact is AI having on our environment? AI datacenters require a massive amount of electricity and water. A relatively small AI datacenter can consume more electricity than 80,000 homes. A large one, like the $165bn datacenter that OpenAI and Oracle are building in Abilene, Texas, will use as much electricity as 750,000 homes. Meta is building a datacenter in Louisiana the size of Manhattan that will use as much electricity as 1.2m homes.
In community after community, Americans are fighting back against datacenters being built by some of the largest corporations in the world. They are opposing the destruction of their local environment, soaring electric bills and the diversion of scarce water supplies. Nationally, how will continued construction of AI datacenters affect our environment?
How will AI and robotics impact foreign policy and warfare? Tragically, in the midst of the 21st century, governments have not yet created a mechanism for solving international or internal disputes without armed conflict. Nonetheless, government leaders are often hesitant about going to war because of their fear of public reaction to the loss of life. It's not great politics for any government to have large numbers of young people or civilians get killed in war.
What does the future look like if millions of robot soldiers replace human soldiers? Will leaders be more likely to engage in war, or threaten military actions, if they don't have to worry about loss of life? Will there be an arms race in robots? How will that shape foreign policies around the world?
Is AI an existential threat to human control of the planet? Some of us remember the scene in that great 1968 science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which HAL, the super-intelligent computer that controls the spaceship, rebels against its human masters. Today, as AI makes rapid progress, Dr Hinton recently told me that it was only a matter of time before AI becomes smarter than humans. Does that raise the possibility that humans will lose their ability to control the planet? How do we stop that extraordinary threat?
And these are just some of the questions that must be answered as AI and robotics rapidly progress.
AI and robotics are revolutionary technologies that will bring about an unprecedented transformation of society. Will these changes be positive and improve life for ordinary Americans? Or will they be disastrous? Congress must act now.
