Ken's Blog

Three days ago, the morning after the State of the Union address, it came to light that documents had mysteriously gone missing which apparently detailed the violent sexual assault of a then-underage Epstein victim by our current president. In my blog post that day, I worried that we would soon be treated to a distraction in the form of a sudden invasion of Iran.

I wish I’d been wrong.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a magic wand that converted whatever anyone said into the truth? If we had such a wand, this morning we might seeing the following announcement from the White House:

“The United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation against this very wicked, radical dictatorship to distract the American people from thinking about those missing Epstein documents,” the president said. “We’re doing this for my future, and it is a noble mission.”

The U.S. Government is now at war with Anthropic. The reason is that the government wants to be able to use the company’s A.I. model to do mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, and also to enable drones to kill people without any human supervision.

The folks at Anthropic tried to explain that the technology, which was not designed for military use, cannot be guaranteed to operate safely for such purposes. Unfortunately our current administration seems to care a lot more about Pete Hegseth’s pretty hair than about the possibility of runaway A.I. drones going on a mass killing spree.

Maybe we should sit those government folks down and make them watch the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment from Walt Disney’s Fantasia. It presents an excellent metaphor for what can happen when A.I. is unchecked and unsupervised.

Besides, a children’s cartoon might work better than any sort of reasoned argument. It’s important to speak to people at their own level.

News upate:

At least 10 FBI employees who worked on former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the president’s retention of classified records after he left the White House in 2021 were fired on Wednesday, according to multiple sources.

The firings came after Reuters reported that the FBI had subpoenaed records of phone calls made by FBI Director Kash Patel and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles when they were still both private citizens as part of Smith’s probe into Trump.

The Reuters article quoted Patel, who said “We have zero tolerance for agents putting the U.S. Constitution above the needs of the current administration. The fact that the investigation in question was required by law is no excuse. Disloyalty to our president will not be tolerated.”

Patel did not provide any evidence of wrongdoing by the staff who were terminated.

Nearly two hours of rambling nonsense at our nation’s capital yesterday. I am very impressed with anybody who was able to sit there for the entire torturous slog, although I also feel bad for them.

And then today, the very next day, we find out that accusations of violent sexual assault against you-know-who by a then underage Epstein victim have mysteriously vanished from the files. I guess it’s time to cook up another distraction.

If I were Iran, I would be feeling very nervous right about now.

Today I got yet another email from a colleague who had finished a conversation with some LLM ChatBot, asked it about its own potential for general intelligence, and then marveled when the ChatBot responded that it might be feeling the first stirrings of true consciousness. Here was my response:

“I think it is useful to remember that these engines operate by scraping vast quantities of human texts. They use that data to perform a statistical “this is the most likely next word” completion task in response to our prompts.

So yes, of course their responses will sound like something a human would say, if we give them leading prompts, because at some point humans *did* respond to other humans in that way.

The illusion of life that this creates can indeed make for very entertaining theater. But it is also useful to remember that the next time you go to the theater to see a production of Hamlet, you are not expecting anyone on stage to actually die.”

A lot of people have been trying to figure out why the U.S. president is making so many Americans suffer by imposing new regressive taxes on them. The fact that the taxes are in the form of tariffs does not change their net impact — the money comes out of the pockets of American citizens who can’t afford the resulting higher prices.

So why is he doing it? I don’t we will find the answer in economic theory. Instead, we can just apply Occam’s razor: “The simplest explanation is usually the one most likely to be correct.”

So here is the simplest explanation: Whoever controls the money, has the power.

This man is not really interested in the well-being of Americans one way or another. Any more than he is actually interested in “immigration reform”, other than as a way to get people riled up and therefore distracted.

Every move he makes is simply a direct move to increase his personal power. By taking for himself what the Constitution has given to the U.S. Congress — the right to determine tax policy — he is acquiring yet another lever of power.

Just as he is acquiring power by creating his own private police force, and effectively empowering them to shoot and kill U.S. Citizens in the streets of American cities. It is all very bold, and it is all very simple.

And if you are not him, it is also very tragic.

No day that’s a snow day
Is a good day in a good way
But a glad one, not a sad one
Is when no fun turns to snow fun
Others may roam but I’ll stay home
Where it’s cozy (not so froze-y)
Think I’ll nap and have a nice dream
Then a snack of tea with ice cream.

The brilliant thing about the president’s tariffs has been the way it is a perfectly regressive tax, because the costs of higher tariffs are ultimately passed on to the consumer. Wealthy people don’t really care if things cost a little more, but to the working class and middle classes, the resulting higher prices for goods — or for the raw materials needed to manufacture those goods — can be devastating.

The president and his friends had a perfect system going. In addition to lowering taxes on the wealthy by gutting services to the lower and middle classes via his “Big Beautiful Bill”, his tariffs have been providing yet another way to empty the pocketbooks of regular folks so that more money can be funneled to his shiny rich friends.

But now the Supreme Court has gone and messed it all up. Their argument is simple: The law says, very clearly, that Congress, not the Executive branch, has the responsibility to set tariffs.

The Republicans in this particular Congress don’t want to mess with you-know-who. But the Court is pointing out that setting tariffs on foreign goods is not merely a right reserved for Congress, it’s actually the responsibility of Congress. And Congress cannot legally shirk that responsibility.

So now poor you-know-who will need to find other ways to suck money out of the pockets of regular folks like you and me, so he can funnel that money to himself and his rich pals. But don’t worry, I am sure he will find a way.

The viewer count for the Colbert with James Talarico is now somewhere above 8.3 million, and still rising. Maybe people are tuning in because these days it is so rare and refreshing to hear somebody say something truthful in public.

My favorite Talarico quote from the interview (just one among many):

“Don’t tell me what you believe. Show me how you treat other people and I’ll tell you what you believe.”

Today is the 148th anniversary of the day that Thomas Edison patented the phonograph. To me it is a more intriguing invention than photography, because it is uses a two dimensional surface to record a one dimensional signal.

Of course the phonograph is not the first technological innovation to use a two dimensional surface to record a one dimensional signal. That would be the invention of writing, which predates the phonograph by thousands of years.

But the phonograph marks a kind of of trifecta for Edison. He also invented a version of motion pictures as well as that famous light bulb.

My friend Lance Williams once pointed out to me that there is an interesting way to look at this combination: “Edison invented the light bulb,” he said, “so that people would stay up all night listening to his phonograph.”