In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Generations ago, IBM was the dominant player in tech. It was said that you couldn't be fired if you went with IBM, but within a few years of when I started, people definitely began to be fired for going with IBM, and I was never much of a fan. But when I started thinking about this post, I found this piece at IBM's website that tries to give an overview of artificial intelligence, or AI. It's as good a start as any. I decided I needed to update my own understanding of AI, because the tech billionaires who've lined up with Trump want to influence AI policy. It seems to me that there are two main fields within AI, massive database search and machine learning. Massive database search involves things like searching huge numbers of phone calls or e-mails for keywords or other associations to identify targets. Machine learning involves teaching computers to underatand, translate, and generate natural language, produce original text or works of art, or self-drive automobi...

In yesterday's post, we saw how accounts suggest that Kamala Harris had the inside track for nomination as Joe's running mate in 2020, as well as a lock on designation to replace Joe as the Democrat nominee once he withdrew from the race last July. While some accounts attribute this influence to James Clyburn, I think the evidence points much more strongly to Nancy Pelosi, and to a slighly lesser extent, Barack Obama. Numerous accounts have reported that Joe is angry at both Pelosi and Obama for forcing him out of the race, for instance : Pelosi and Biden have not spoken since he stepped away. And the president’s anger flashed to the surface during a televised interview that aired this weekend when he namechecked the former speaker as he explained why he quit the race. “And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic,” Biden told CBS. “You’d be interviewing me about why did Nancy Pelosi say, why did so — and — and I thought it’d be a real di...

We saw yesterday that, although the conventional wisdom says Joe made a deal with Rep James Clyburn to choose an African-American woman in return for Clyburn's endorsement in the South Carolina primary, Clyburn's version of events was that before the primary, his only ask was that he commit to nominating a black woman to the Supreme Court. CBS News gave another Clyburn account in August 2020, after Joe announced Kamala as his pick: "I was part of the vetting. Then they were doing polling and I said to him, when all of that's over, you let your head and your heart take a look and you go with that" Clyburn told CBSN anchor Anne-Marie Green. "I spoke to him the day before he reached his conclusion and he said to me at the time, 'I am having a little war between my head and my heart. When that is reconciled, I will give you a call and let you know what my decision is.'" Clyburn, a close ally of one of Biden's VP candidates Representat...

I keep coming up with questions nobody else is asking -- for instance, although we hear leaks now and then about how insiders were getting worried about Joe's cognitive decline at least by early this year, why were the national and state Democrats working so hard to discourage serious primary campaigns for other candidates? For instance, Bobby Kennedy Jr originally planned to run as a Democrat in the primaries. Via PBS in October 2023 , Longtime environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday he will run for president as an independent and drop his Democratic primary bid, adding a wrinkle to a 2024 race heading toward a likely rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. . . . Kennedy has spent weeks accusing the DNC of “rigging” the party’s primary against him and threatening that he might need to consider alternatives. In campaign emails and videos, he blasted the DNC’s decision not to host debates between Bid...

The public dialogue has been all about Trump's cabinet nominees, but the question that still won't go away for me, and nobody's talking about, is why the Democrat leadership never came up with a Plan B over Biden before the time to reoplace him was long past. The suggestions we had last summer were that at least by the start of the year, insiders were shocked at Joe's cognitive decline, but as far as I can tell, nobody did anything about it. Isn't that where the history of the 2024 campaign should start? But that means we should go back to 2020. From February of that year : Former Vice President Joe Biden's poor showing in the New Hampshire and Iowa primaries this week — and Bernie Sanders' strong performance in both — are terrifying the Democratic party's top managers and fundraisers. We got to taste that fear when Obama-era Secretary of State John Kerry was overheard on a phone call in a hotel lobby in Des Moines, Iowa, telling someone t...

Last night I was stuggling thbough one of those dreams where I start to suspect I'm dreaming, but the dream keeps going on so long that I decide maybe I had it wrong, maybe this is real life after all. When I finally did wake up, I realized with a start how many of the quasi-realist Edward Hopper's paintings, especially those with people in them, are actually dream images. Forget Salvador Dali, check out Edward Hopper. Then it occurred to me how many people seem to be reacting to Joe's pardoning his wayward son Hunter a little as though they're waking up from a dream . It's been a strange six months. First, Biden wasn’t “sharp as a tack.” He was sick and diminished. Next, Trump wasn’t a Nazi: He’s the president-elect of the United States with a majority mandate. Record numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and 65% of Native Americans supported him. Kamala Harris was a lousy candidate, wasted billions of dollars, and owes her #2 position to her ethnicity and gende...

I've been using Ferdinand Lumdberg's model of the finpolity that he outlined in The Rich and the Super-Rich (1968) as vehicle to understand this year's political developments. It turns out that Sundance, the blogger at Conservative Treehouse, has a parallel explanation that doesn't reference Lundberg or finpols , but it assumes a very similar theory of the wealthiest actors working to advance interlocking interests. He outlines what he thinks is the current state of the game in this post : In late summer 2023 not only myself, but several insightful analysts in the world of high finance, had come to the conclusion that Musk’s financial effort with the purchase of Twitter was unsustainable, unless something changed. Something did change. In early August of 2023, understanding the dynamic at stake, and also having a strategy for his own interests, Oracle’s Larry Ellison said, ‘he would not let Elon Musk fail with Twitter’. Billionaire Larry Ellison, a Tesla Bo...