Notices by James Gleick (jamesgleick@zirk.us), page 7

If you didn’t already love Fani Willis, love her for this simple clause:

"In light of Defendant Donald John Trump’s other criminal and civil matters pending in the courts of our sister sovereigns ..." https://law-and-politics.online/@Teri_Kanefield/110901306376545526

Today in the Kleptocracy

Here is an important and well-reported piece about one oligarch seizing control of what should be a public commons. My only quibble is that the Times seems to think there’s some mystery about Musk’s political views. Surely not. He has made them clear. He is a right-wing extremist, anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/28/business/starlink.html?unlocked_article_code=5e0hHFN4VL8_1HluCoh1qpEzVEQXoF42IJnPGNC_ivFJwMvigrriG94S1HVQgwjHmhYOYZG4XM0FRsqucnnSRyp_RwS3UePmxxGrNHvIYAa0a0vq6Tw9sNMy3H0iupZgHZo-MClO5HNovZD1r--h6e1RbJJ0sJSFDHpNbmGpGamUqVbTHv0uVTk3i_D9MLf6y9LTXAaKeUVkdm-6yWvfOTvoccOvvVbx7eD2VicZsgTfVb0G3UdjxJ-etsKhWFD5-V9eyqYoHFWKcZlvj9cEg14073Ypg6ausNrCv2cn_1Fw6-6RvPSJ-3aersuj8IIo0qVkMBg5DjkQwhLZNvMM&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

I see people here asking us to follow them over to #Threads. I don’t understand that. I’m asking people at Threads to follow me over here, where we’re free from ads and algorithms.

Justice Kagan sounds the alarm: The Supreme Court is seizing for itself authority that it does not have under the Constitution.

It’s time for Biden and the Democrats to treat this as the constitution crisis it so clearly is.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/opinion/elena-kagan-dissent-supreme-court.html?unlocked_article_code=SEGldDkB2iNQNMTXvDt2dJFxeFCayl1_BwkQJBiEvm2m6PtU8SlGzDFCpuWNtBHcLx7l6IvTm7-uMHobtqWVlAE2Jv1auvKWoC_0DSZ9BOCP7FSRV6XcY9QD4y1AUB3oFcqynTDmr20_wKIyGbrcuu244d8UeMMxNFGkHuNLQbDV19ZqBGsgu7uujLm_0ThOWqCrCEi0j413t7XdEaXJ7xZCTB19ZBLV51Y0acpqV5QYjUXyDV6mYGci_wdJ3bLaEvNU6qFmHs6XteSRcScw4ApH8x8FKJGgFILHn7V_-8B0_3AT-FOmyyDCtTUv9yTjOa6J6DDYf5Lw4ip5F3VSAOKlra8lrP0&smid=url-share

#Scotus

The Supreme Court is barely mentioned in the Constitution. For a long time it had very little to do. Yet now we have reached a point the framers never imagined: where the final arbiter of everything the government does is a tiny panel of secretive extremists, openly disregarding the will of the people and their own precedents. And at least three of them are so corrupt that they can’t be bothered to correctly fill out basic paperwork about their finances. https://zirk.us/@JamesGleick/110577470369104403

I don’t know how to capture what it’s like in New York right now, but this is close.

“Tell them it’s unfair … SO unfair … the unfairest ever. What about Hunter? Put that in. And make sure you call me President—not ex-President or former President—I’m always President Trump. This is the worst in the history of our country—say that!”

The Clarence Thomas bribery scandal widens:

—Leonard Leo and his organization had business before the Supreme Court.
—They sent large sums of money to Clarence Thomas’s wife.
—They deliberately removed her name from the paperwork.

It’s time for the US Attorney to open a bribery investigation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/05/04/leonard-leo-clarence-ginni-thomas-conway/

Once again Ted Chiang has it exactly right. The immediate danger from #AI is not that it will become sentient and do whatever it wants. The danger is that it will do what it’s being designed to do: help rich corporations destroy the working class in pursuit of ever-greater profits and thus concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey

If you become a Supreme Court Justice and your spouse embarks on a new line of work collecting more than $1,000,000 a year from law firms doing business before the Court—that’s corruption.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jane-roberts-chief-justice-wife-10-million-commissions-2023-4

When you search for “Maxwell and the telephone,” does your AI-boosted search engine of choice point you to:

James Clerk Maxwell’s 1878 Rede Lecture at Cambridge, titled “The Telephone”? or,

“How is it that a train derailment caused by a major GOP-donating corporation, in a state run by a Republican governor, caused at least in part by regulations rolled back by Republican President Donald Trump … well, how exactly is that a story about Democrats not caring about people in ‘flyover country’?”

@joshtpm explains exactly what Democrats need to do now, and if they aren’t listening, they will be sorry.

(Gift link) https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/bring-it-the-fk-on/sharetoken/HD58VD2L9Ydm

New Elon policy: Pay us $11 a month or we’ll disable your security so people can hack your account.

Imagine if the NY Times take from the beginning had been:

Biden’s lawyers find classified documents on his premises!
By immediately notifying the authorities, returning the documents, and inviting further searches, they create a political problem for Trump: Highlighting the contrast between the right and the wrong way to treat the discovery of classified documents. Trump’s indictment for obstruction now seems inevitable.

Then: Pence, too, avoids obstructing justice …

https://findinggravity.substack.com/p/the-new-york-times-invents-a-biden

Quote of the Day: “I never claimed to be Jewish … I said I was Jew-ish.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/nyregion/george-santos-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare