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Evening Shade---Resistance Rising---Sunday, June 8 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-08
YOU CAN REPOST IT AS COMMENT in the DIARY
WHEN YOU FIND SOMETHING in the DIARY that you LIKE
THE PERSON who MAKES the FIRST COMMENT WILL GET TWO CRITTERS
(Or NOT As the CASE MAY BE)
YOU WILL FIND in the DIARIES a LOT of POLITICS
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Too many stories for a Sunday morning! The Senate is still trying to sort out the bad from the very bad in the Big Beautiful Bill. And now that they’ve told the House what it actually says, House members have regrets that they signed it in the first place.
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News on the Trump / Musk breakup is still hot.
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But Musk isn’t really gone. He may have walked away but what he set rolling in government is still moving.
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Thank dog that DOGE is gone? It’s not. DOGE’s people are embedded in agencies all over the government, not as watchers and advisors but as leaders and data managers. So who’s in charge of DOGE? Trump told the court that it never was Musk but Amy Gleason. (Who??) It’s clearly someone more involved in Project 2025 than Trump himself. Some think Peter Thiel is calling the shots.
In the short term, this project re-engineered government to protect Musk’s businesses from investigation and fines and steer domestic and foreign government business to his products (and cancel contracts with competitors). But the bigger prize, for Musk and his partners such as Peter Thiel, head of Palantir, is information capture. The long-term goal is to create “a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents,” as the Washington Post has reported. In the short term, this project re-engineered government to protect Musk’s businesses from investigation and fines and steer domestic and foreign government business to his products (and cancel contracts with competitors). But the bigger prize, for Musk and his partners such as Peter Thiel, head of Palantir, is information capture. The long-term goal is to create “a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents,” as the Washington Post has reported. Here, an authoritarian bargain gave the richest man in the world the appearance of co-leader status in return for a massive investment in helping Trump get elected and lending Trump credibility in the lucrative cryptocurrency sector. Speaking authoritatively at Cabinet meetings and in the Oval Office, meeting with foreign heads of state on presidential property, Musk complicated a strongman brand built on the domination of one man over all, to the point that TIME depicted him as president just a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration. (Ruth Ben-Ghiat)
Karoline Leavitt says the whole cabinet is in charge.
“The DOGE leaders are each and every member of the President’s cabinet — and the president himself — who is wholeheartedly committed to cutting waste, fraud and abuse from our government,” Leavitt told reporters Thursday when asked about the initiative’s new leadership structure. (New York Post)
Someone must be herding those cabinet cats. Leavitt would say it’s Trump but he’s not a details guy. Some think Russel Vought is in charge while Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies is engineering the data systems. It makes sense: the Project 2025 expert on strategy, the AI expert on tactics, and Thiel’s ally JD Vance waiting in the wings. Trump’s dictator dreams, mercurial temper, and butterfly attention span may actually stand between them and success.
x The blowup between Elon and Trump hasn’t ended DOGE, it’s still expanding. Russ Vought now plans to institutionalize DOGE across the federal government, and Elon’s staffers are embedded deep within key agencies. — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 7:40 AM
x This raises serious questions. Was the public breakup between Elon and Trump just a distraction from the surveillance machine Peter Thiel is building for the administration? — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 7:40 AM
x With the Supreme Court now handing DOGE access to Social Security data, it’s becoming undeniable, the Trump administration is building the “deep state” themselves. Don’t get distracted by the noise. — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 10:56 AM
x Americans are not okay with the government system Palantir Technologies is building. It’s dangerous and now extends into the Treasury Department. — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 7:40 AM
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What is Palantir? (Aside from being the way that Sauron gets information from unwary hobbits, that is.)
Palantir AIP powers real-time, AI-driven decision-making in the most critical commercial and government contexts around the world. From public health ↗ to battery production ↗, organizations depend on Palantir to safely, securely, and effectively leverage AI in their enterprises — and drive operational results ↗. In short, Palantir AIP connects generative AI to operations. Together with Foundry - Palantir's data operations platform - and Apollo - Palantir's mission control for autonomous software deployment, AIP is part of an AI Mesh that can deliver the full gamut of AI-driven products, from LLM-powered web applications to mobile applications using vision-language models to edge applications that embed localized AI. We call this entire set of capabilities, functionality, and tooling the Palantir platform. (Palantir web site)
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The Palantir suite includes AI. Remember last Sunday’s note about Anthropic’s AI that was given access to emails in a test scenario, and seeing that it was about to be turned off, and the engineer was cheating on his wife, the AI threatened blackmail? The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, wrote a letter to NYT about it. He went on to say that
Right now, the Senate is considering a provision that would tie the hands of state legislators: The current draft of President Trump’s policy bill includes a 10-year moratorium on states regulating A.I. The motivations behind the moratorium are understandable. It aims to prevent a patchwork of inconsistent state laws, which many fear could be burdensome or could compromise America’s ability to compete with China. I am sympathetic to these concerns — particularly on geopolitical competition — and have advocated stronger export controls to slow China’s acquisition of crucial A.I. chips, as well as robust application of A.I. for our national defense. But a 10-year moratorium is far too blunt an instrument. A.I. is advancing too head-spinningly fast. I believe that these systems could change the world, fundamentally, within two years; in 10 years, all bets are off. Without a clear plan for a federal response, a moratorium would give us the worst of both worlds — no ability for states to act, and no national policy as a backstop.
(The 10 year moratorium proposal is hiding in the Big Beautiful Bill. It’s the bit that MTG wishes she’d known about before she signed it.)
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While Anthropic is a different company than Palantir, the state of AI technology across the industry appears similar. Here’s what “hallucination” (an AI passing off information that is verifiably untrue) looks like when AI is used in real life instead of a test scenario. ProPublica tells how AI has been used in Veterans Affairs.
x THREAD: An ex-DOGE engineer with no government or medical experience used AI to identify which Veterans Affairs contracts to kill, labeling them as “MUNCHABLE.” @vernalcoleman.bsky.social @ericumansky.bsky.social and I got the code. Here’s what it tells us 1/ — Brandon Roberts (@bxroberts.org) June 6, 2025 at 8:36 AM
x 2/ First, the DOGE AI tool produced glaring mistakes. It often hallucinated the size of contracts, inflating their value. It concluded more than a thousand were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.
[image or embed] — Brandon Roberts (@bxroberts.org) June 6, 2025 at 8:36 AM
x 3/ Second, the DOGE AI tool’s underlying instructions were deeply flawed. The system was programmed to make intricate judgments based on the first few pages of each VA contract — about 2,500 words — which contain only sparse summary information.
[image or embed] — Brandon Roberts (@bxroberts.org) June 6, 2025 at 8:36 AM
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Whew! Take a break.
x "This was an experiment by a kindergarten class. They dropped seeds in the cracks of the sidewalk to see what would happen.
This would help our bees "
via I Love Bees
[image or embed] — Oliver (@oliver48.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 2:42 AM
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On to immigration. Yesterday in Los Angeles, ICE raided a Home Depot, where contractors look for supplies and workers while hopeful immigrants wait to be hired. This social media poster was there with a breathless live account of protesters swarming the area and boxing ICE in, then ICE breaking out. Here’s just a taste (click on the item to see what happened next) but if you want the whole story, look through her thread to find the whole series of her impressions of what it was like to be right there ducking the tear gas canisters.
x Still LA, ICE is gathered again to start another operation after tear gassing civilians for hours at Paramount. A massive ICE presence stands across the street from civilians. This is live right now.
[image or embed] — LorennaCleary.bsky.social (@lorennacleary.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 12:32 PM
Trump says it was a riot.
x Trump lit the match, poured the gasoline, and now wants to use the blaze he is creating as pretext to burn it all down.
[image or embed] — MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) June 7, 2025 at 6:32 PM
LAPD says it wasn’t.
x The Los Angeles Police Department has stated that demonstrations in the city have remained peaceful. Let that sink in. — Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 10:55 PM
They were there to keep the peace, not to help ICE.
x As the federal government conducts chaotic immigration sweeps across the country, the state is deploying additional CHP to maintain safety on Los Angeles highways to keep the peace. It's not their job to assist in federal immigration enforcement. — Governor Gavin Newsom (@governor.ca.gov) June 7, 2025 at 6:10 PM
Trump took the National Guard from Governor Newsom to deploy them.
As I post this, Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act. Adam Kinzinger (Republican) explains.
x Big point that is being missed: without the insurrection act, the activated Guard troops are now federal army and cannot
Do law enforcement. Period — Adam Kinzinger (@adamkinzinger.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 6:43 AM
x Now, if Trump invokes the insurrection act then we’re in a whole new world and it won’t end well for Trump — Adam Kinzinger (@adamkinzinger.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 7:11 AM
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Trump used a different rule to justify his command of the California National Guard.
It is the first time since 1965 that a president has activated a state’s National Guard force without a request from that state’s governor, according to Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent law and policy organization. The last time was when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators in 1965, she said... The directive signed by Mr. Trump cites ”10 U.S.C. 12406,” referring to a specific provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services. Part of that provision allows the federal deployment of National Guard forces if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” (NYT)
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x Trump congratulates the National Guard in Los Angeles for doing a great job despite the fact they had not yet even arrived. This brings up a quandary we all face: How do we know when Trump is just brazenly lying versus when he's experiencing another creeping advancement of his cognitive decline?
[image or embed] — The Shallow State (@ourshallowstate.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 12:38 PM
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x How extreme is the June 7 Memorandum on federalizing the National Guard? One of several issues: It has NO geographic limit. None. No mention of California or any other state. It's open-ended. Now this from President Trump: "Well, we're going to have troops everywhere."⬇️
[image or embed] — Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 3:42 PM
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ICE was ready to arrest but not to provide appropriate holding. Congress members show up to protest inadequate conditions for those who have been arrested.
x This is exactly what we need from all our members of Congress—SHOW UP. Thank you, Reps @gomez.house.gov , @repluzrivas.bsky.social , @ntorres35.bsky.social , and Lou Correa for showing up at the Federal Building to demand answers amid reports of inhumane conditions: no beds, no food, no water.
[image or embed] — Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) June 8, 2025 at 11:40 AM
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One last interesting fact to counter the right’s manufactured hatred of immigrants:
x Undocumented immigrants pay almost $100 billion in taxes each year. The top 1% evade $163 billion in taxes each year. Stop pretending that immigrants are the ones taking advantage of taxpayers. — Melanie D’Arrigo (@darrigomelanie.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 1:02 PM
Is that really true? Brookings Institute says so.
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Sunday Science
Look at AI a different way: how much energy AI demands.
Boston Consulting Group estimates that data centers will account for 7.5% of all US electricity consumption by 2030, or the equivalent of 40 million US homes. Mark James, interim director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law and Graduate School, offered another comparison. "These sort of facilities are going to run close to their full capacity -- per hour, it's 1000 megawatts," he says. "That's the same size as the peak demand of the state of Vermont -- 600,000 plus people -- for months." (zdnet)
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Condoleeza Rice reminds us universities are our national research engine.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was a guest on Fox & Friends and said: “The scientific research base of the United States of America is the research university. We made that decision 80 years ago. We don’t have a Plan B.” Rice, director of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a conservative public policy think tank focused on free enterprise, added, “I am a major believer in making sure that we are able to continue the kind of research that produced the stem cell revolution, that produced, actually at Stanford, the double Helix, that produced the heart transplant.”
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Florida and South Carolina got a dose of Saharan dust this week, causing a mixture of beautiful sunsets and air quality issues, and bringing nutrients for Florida ecosystems but also contributing to coral bleaching and red algae bloom. The NOAA shows the satellite views (not set up to embed here so you have to go there.)
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It’s National Upsy Daisy Day! “This fun day is set aside to encourage everyone to face the day positively and to get up ‘gloriously, gratefully and gleefully’ each morning.” So...did you?
x YouTube Video
It’s National Name Your Poison Day, celebrating the act of making difficult choices.
x YouTube Video
And it’s National Best Friends Day! So call yours, if you didn’t already today.
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