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David Mitchell

M/M,

Article after article - too many to quote here - explaining how inaccurate your (Musk's) claims about Social Security are. 

Just google up a topic like "Are DOGE's Social Security claims inaccurate" or some variation of that - and you gert a deluge of info refuting Musk's misreadings of the data.

If you are going to rely in Fox News for your source, accuracy is going to be hard to come by.

Mark Schweickart

Mike -- Speaking as one who is also struggling with memory loss issues, I take no pleasure in pointing out to you that this is the third time in recent weeks that you have shared this Frost poem. I just thought you should know that this is happening. I don't mind realizing that I have become an old fogey these days, but being old and "foggy" is a pisser. 

Michael McLeod

Thanks Mark.

I truly do appreciate the fact that you pointed this out, gracefully. 

I do have memory issues, and an all-too-common diagnosis these days that goes hand-in-hand with it. 

I went ahead and deleted my repetitiousness in sheer embarrassment and again I know you are just being the friend you have always been to me by calling it to my attention.

And of course you're not the first such friend to gracefully point out my skipping-record tendencies. Unfortunately there's nothing I can do about the symptoms, which will get progressively worse.

Michael McLeod

a column, in the form of a dialogue, about the latest inexcusable Trump-and-company gaffe - and a responsible journalist who did the right thing. 

yay higher learning.

boo trump and thugs for attacking it. 

yay journalists.

boo incompentent blowhard.

More specifically:

if you follow the news you know trump and cronies unwittingly leaked top secret battle plans to the world at large and their asses were saved by one of those nasty left wing journalists he and his flunkies like to mock.

Goldberg, the journalist and patriot mentioned in the back-and-forth below, kept his mouth shut about the plans and duly reported the unwitting leak.

again,

yay press.

boo prez.

It's a profession I'm proud to have been a part of.  

and any president who attacks higher learning is making an effort to keep americans dumb.

he's been doing a damn good job at that.

Bret Stephens: Gail, before we start, is there a journalist from another publication you’d like to invite into this conversation?

Gail Collins: Gee, Bret, could you be referring to Jeff Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, who wound up being unwittingly included in a group chat among top Trump officials discussing classified plans for airstrikes in Yemen?

Bret: Best journalistic scoop of the season, and it couldn’t have been easier to get.

Gail: Seems to me that Goldberg behaved very responsibly in a screwed-up situation that once again defined the utter ineptitude of the administration — from top to bottom. My initial reaction was to wish I could fire them all and buy Goldberg a drink.

Bret: If President Trump were, well, someone else entirely, he’d be the one buying Goldberg a drink for keeping the nation’s military secrets to himself for as long as they needed keeping — and then exposing Trump’s top national security aides as the amateurs they are.

To be clear, the back and forth above entails the following things the public didn't know they were voting for when they picked this dumbass:

Texting battle plans with emojis using an insecure app on personal phones and then blaming the responsible journalist who brought the leak to their attention; seizing, detaining, and deporting college kids for exercising free speech; dismantling the entire public health infrastructure and firing 10,000 staff while ignoring a measles pandemic and telling scared parents to damage their kids' livers by over-dosing them with cod liver oil; dismantling a healthy economy and stoking inflation with Trump's indiscriminate use of tariffs for personal vendettas; ending foreign aid; gutting the VA and firing thousands of vets from federal jobs while depriving them of necessary medical and mental health services for injuries incurred for us; dismantling the first amendment by attacking the free speech rights of journalists, attorneys, protesters, and universities; allowing Musk and his odd teen hackers to take over govt agencies and fire essential federal employees without cause or sense, including those who monitor the safety of nuclear weapons, food safety, and disease monitoring; Trump spending most of his time at one of his golf resorts at great expense to tax payers; destroying NATO, attacking allies, and embracing Vlad the impaler; threatening our long time friend and neighbor Canada; making it nearly impossible to get help and information from Social Security; defunding Medicaid and state block grants; dismantling Radio Free Europe, etc, etc, etc

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/too-many-uncomfortable-things-are-converging

Michael McLeod

dave:

where was this guy when we needed him? he is a celeb chef who has been recruited to beef up the chow line. 

actually I wasn't choosy when I was in the service; don't know about you. (well, "choosy" was not an option, was it?) I guess eating, whatever it was we were eating, was just a welcome relief from everything else...but in all seriousness I don't remember the chow being bad, regardless of where I was stationed. 

I'll find a way to send you the whole story if you're interested but here's the gist. 

(I'd forgotten "Sxxx on a shingle" (S.O.S.) as the obscene - and as far as I was concerned unfair - shorthand descriptor of the chipped beef sandwiches, or whatever they put in those things, that they've been serving up since ww2. tasted good to me. )

By the way it puzzled me that he called it a "dish." It wasn't a dish - that means a dinner, right? It was a sandwich, wasn't it? Whatever it was?

By Alexander Nazaryan

Reporting from Fort Jackson, S.C, and Fort Gregg-Adams, Va.

March 31, 2025Updated 3:13 p.m. ET

Army food has been vexing and perplexing the soldiers who have to eat it for about as long as there’s been an Army. An age-old marching song describes a biscuit that “rolled off the table and killed a friend of mine.” Troops in World War II immortalized a much-reviled beef dish with the nickname S.O.S., an acronym that still can’t be translated in this newspaper.

And at lunchtime on a recent Wednesday, a mess hall at Fort Jackson in South Carolina was serving up tacos filled with nondescript meat that glistened with grease. The brussels sprouts had the green boiled out of them. The hall itself looked bland and dated.

But just steps away at Victory Fresh, a small, sleek fast-casual cafeteria that shares the mess-hall kitchen, cooks were pulling individual-size pizzas from a $45,000 Marra Forni oven. The brisket had been cured and charred on-site, then carved to order. Dessert included narrow wedges of cheesecake, marbled missiles of sweet cream cheese cut with bitter chocolate.

The celebrity chef Robert Irvine, who opened Victory Fresh last year, was finishing his lunch when a towering figure in fatigues marched up. The soldier, who introduced himself as Sgt. Major Joshua R. Bitle, declared that in 28 years in the military, he’d never eaten as well as he just had.

Robert Irvine has been enlisted to overhaul the dreary mess hall menus that drive many soldiers to less-healthy choices.

David Mitchell

Mike,

In a previous job (private car service), I picked up Robert Irving, his very attractive chinese wife, and a third guy who was the manager of Irvine's (now closed) restaurant on Hilton Head. I drove them about 5 hours to a really fancy rustic resort up in No. Carolina (can't recall the name of the place), where he was going to film a cooking show. 

We drove about 3 hours up I-95 and got off an exit to head up a smaller highway for the final 2 hours. As we exited, they were all hungry. Meanwhile I gassed up in a plaza with gas, a Burger King, and a Subway.

They agreed they could not be caught dead in a (public) Burger King, so I waited while they went into the Subway. I wanted so badly to film them comming out of the Subway with my phone, but that would have probably gotten me fired.

Super nice guy - and a great tip!

Michael McLeod

dave: I assume you mean Robert Irvine right?

that's hilarious. Robert Irvine in a burger joint.

David Mitchell

Mike,

Yes, it was THAT Robert Irvine

Mark Schweickart

MIke -- I saw your comment on Facebook where you said "There was a time in my life when a coonskin cap was my favorite possession." This reminded me of a picture I have of myself and my little brother playing in our backyard in the 1958.

John Jackson

Mark - pretty intense.  I assume your brother was trying to cut you down with the bow saw.

When you think about it,  boys' play when we were growing up was pretty violent - WWII batle re-enactments and cowboys and Indians - I certainly was armed to the teeth much of the time.  But I guess we all turned out (more or less) OK.

Mark Schweickart

John -- I think that was just a bow (as in "bow and arrow") not a bow saw that my little "injun" (as we used to say) brother is weilding. As for how we all turned out, I suppose that's debatable. 

David Mitchell

I would have never made it through my childhood without my Mattell "Fanner 50" double holster set. But if the scene switched from Roy and Dale (or Hoppy or Gene), to Army stuff, I also had my spring loaded "Thunderbolt" machine gun to shoot the bad guys with. All I had to do was pull the spring loaded bolt back and sqeeze off a loud vibrating burst.

But favorite of all was my 25-pound fiberglass bow. I could either be chief Dancing Bear, or Robin Hood

(I still have that bow packed away somewhere)

Michael McLeod

Dave: I only wish I had hung onto the armaments I accumulated as a kid, from six-shooters to M-16's. Or at least it was an M-16 as far as I was concerned, however cheap plastic make believe it was..

Later in life when I was lugging a real one around in boot camp I was amazed at how it didn't feel much heavier than the toy version.

James Hamilton, M. D.

To all you "Gunslingers of the 50's",

Yeah, I think we all didn't wander far from or homes without being armed with our Roy/Gene/ and other hero's "six shooters" on our hips.

On my 12th birthday I recieved my most treasured childhood gift from my parents - a  Daisy99 BB gun.

It was (is) a classic. Lever action, all genuine wood and metal, no plastic. It holds up to 1000 BBs and had a real leather strap. 

And, yes I still have it and it does still work!

Jim

Mark Schweickart

I don't know about you, but for me the temptation to wax nostalgic, both happily and sadly, about days gone by seems to becoming ever stronger as I grow older. This song comes from a poem I wrote a zillion years ago, when I had been thinking back about how my first marriage fell apart. Years later I turned it into a song. And now, all these many years later-still, I thought maybe I should share it with you guys. I don't know why. I just seem to be in a days-gone-by mood today, and found myself listening to this because... well, because it is all about remembering the past, and I figure many of you may suffer from this same affliction, and might identify with the sentiment expressed.

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

Mike....how about this one? 

What President of the U.S. was cognitively impaired for the duration of his term and his Party and the legacy media denied it?

(hint....recent history)

Michael McLeod

MM: I'm not quite sure what your point is but can send you scores of stories, including a whopper of one from the new york times, about biden's cognitive issues.

But you would certainly be correct in saying that Biden's staff was doing its best to put a good face on the president's decline. .

Anyway Here's a passage from one of the ny times stories about Biden's fragility which was published a while back.

"The people closest to President Biden were well aware that he had changed. He talked more slowly than he had just a few years before, needed to hoist himself out of his seat in the presidential limousine and walked with a halting gait.

“Your biggest issue is the perception of age,” Mike Donilon, the president’s longtime strategist, told him in mid-2022, according to three close aides who heard it. That bit of feedback, delivered repeatedly by Mr. Donilon, was the sort of blunt talk that did not often make its way to a man who had spent a half-century in politics prizing loyalty and deference.

Mr. Biden acknowledged the concerns, but the warnings only ignited his defiant, competitive streak. In April 2023, without convening his family or having long deliberations with aides, he announced he was running again.

Now, as President-elect Donald J. Trump heads back to the White House, demoralized Democrats debate what might have been had the president bowed out in time to let a younger generation run. Mr. Biden, 82, has at the same time made the extraordinary admission that he might not have made it through a second term. “Who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?” 

I don't watch much tv so I can't speak to the television coverage.

So, to stick up for my profession, more specifically the old guard, so-called "legacy media" that's being impugned here, I'd say it was covered -- and, hell, it was so damn obivous to anyone. BUT:

I wish we had been harder on him and spelled it out more clearly for folks that this guy should have had the humility to pass the torch sooner than he did. It was just so damn obvious.

And one last thing: a felon, as trump is, made a conscious choice to act the way that he does.

Biden has a disease over which he has little control. Trump is a felon because he chose to be -- 34 felony counts, to be specific. He's a regular repeat offender.

Which of those human beings should we be sympathetic towards, all politics aside?

John Jackson

MM, which recent President lies (about the “stolen” 2020 election, who started the war in Ukraine, who pays the cost of tariffs, that the US is getting ripped off by other nations, and on and on) much more often than he tells the truth, a fact that has been ignored by all but the legacy media?

Michael McLeod

It's a 'bot time.

The CIO of Goldman Sachs has said that in the next year, companies at the forefront will begin to use AI agents as if they were employees — as team members with tasks to do.

He also pointed out that, as AI becomes embodied through robots that have AI brains, that the AIs will then “live in our world” and will develop their own experiences and develop the awareness of human situations — giving them human-like judgment.

Elon Musk and now Trump know this. In fact, I believe that they are anticipating a global economic collapse. And if so, then they realize that time is short for them to get ahead of the situation personally. Perhaps that is why Trump wasted no time creating cryptocurrencies in his first day in office — something that most would consider to be unethical, since it is an attempt to personally and directly profit from his new office. But who cares? — the world is going to collapse, so get as rich as possible now, so that when the fall comes, you are among the richest billionaires who can then buy up all of the natural resources and live in an AI-powered enclave, safe from the starving masses.

Perhaps that is why one of Trump’s first actions was to revoke Biden’s AI safety executive order.

A collapse is what is coming. Sam Altman said clearly that they “know how to create AGI” (human-level artificial intelligence). This came sooner than expected, and so it means that the collapse is coming sooner than expected.

When companies can use AI to do 90% of what humans do, why would they hire people?

They won’t, except for the few remaining tasks that require human accountability; but those roles will migrate to partners and senior shareholders, and away from managers.

And then guess what happens? All those companies that ditched human workers for AI agents? They now have no customers, because no one has a job. No job, no income. No income, no purchases.

Economic collapse.

Musk and Trump know this.

They are preparing for their enclaves (Musk’s enclave, Trump’s enclave).

— — — — — —

Update:

Some readers have lamented that this story “provides no evidence”. It was purposefully written as a short story, because I want more people to read it to make more people aware of what is happening. For those who want a longer article (with references), I previously wrote this one: https://medium.com/@cliffberg/agi-is-upon-us-at-last-and-what-that-will-mean-fd8ab565fce4

Also, here are some references pertaining to the inexorable rise of AI:

On the continuously increasing capabilities of AI: https://ourworldindata.org/brief-history-of-ai

On progress in reasoning models — AI today is far ahead of where it was only two years ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00275-0

On the coming embodiment of AI in robots: https://www.techopedia.com/most-advanced-ai-powered-robots

On neuromorphic architectures, which reduce the power use of AI by a factor of tens of thousands and make it mobile and “unplugged”: https://www.utsa.edu/today/2025/01/story/nature-article-neuromorphic-computing-systems.html

By the way, AI is not software. Yes, today it is written using software, but today’s implementation is actually a computational graph, and the software is there to get the graph onto GPUs. Neural network AI is actually a set of interconnected virtual “neurons”. A computational graph is used to calculate matrices that model the activation functions and inputs of arrays of virtual “neurons”. Using neuromorphic chips, engineers are moving toward actual neural networks — and those do not run software. AI is not the next evolution of computers: AI is a move away from computers, to something that is much more brain-like.

Some readers have said that AI is confined to its virtual world, and cannot do physical labor. I would encourage those readers to read up on progress in robotics, especially where AI is being used to drive the robot.

Some readers also have questioned my personal knowledge on the subject. I am not an AI expert, but I have built AI systems (from scratch), and I collaborate with people who are AI experts. In addition, Jeff Hinton, the “father of AI”, has been sounding the alarm on AI: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65452940

Interestingly, one of the other “fathers of AI”, Yann Le Cun, says not to worry: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65886125

But among experts, Le Cun seems to be in a decreasing minority.

Finally, many readers have said that all this is decades away. I am sorry to be the bringer of bad news, but it is not decades away. Look at the curves in my reference on the continuously increasing capabilities of AI.

Ray Kurtzweil has been warning us for decades, and predicted all this would happen by 2040; it seems we are ahead of schedule, perhaps because of the huge investment flow into AI. Among the first to mention the “singularity” was Vernor Vinge, a professor of mathematics at San Diego State University, and he predicted it would occur between 2005 and 2030.

It seems that Vinge might have been spot on.

David Mitchell

Oh boy!

This tarriff thing is really gettin' off to a good start - ain't  it?

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

It is going to be a lonnnnnggggg 4 years for you guys, but if I could endure the 12 years of Obama/Biden policies which nearly destroyed our republic, you can endure 4 years of Trump. He is not going anywhere. 

David Mitchell

Am I in luck!

Pole-dancing-Pete just called and invited me to to a meeting at the Pentagon. He said I could bring my in-laws and their neighbors and their in-laws -- and their in-laws neighbors if I wanted.

Can't wait !

(I'll call ya'll and let you know what I find out)

Mary Margaret Clark (Schultheis)

Mike since you don't watch any TV news,,,,,,here are the MSM putting forward Democrat leaders debunking conservatives for claiming Biden was cognitively challenged and questioning who was acturally running the country. https://x.com/DefiantLs/status/1886139166657794205

Regarding the NYT - This was their reporting in June 2024 PRIOR to the election “Videos of [President] Biden . . . are clearly manipulated to make him look old and confused.” (This was their way of dismissing actual videos of Biden as "cheap fakes"). VS their reporting this...“It is hard to imagine that he seriously thought he could do the world’s most stressful job for another four years.” - POST election December 2024

Michael McLeod

No I don't watch tv news much mm. But that doesn't make me ill informed. Disregarding the boob tube just makes me old fashioned. I assure you the printed word surpasses tv in terms of clear analysis in many cases.

I may start offering up new clips for folks as old fashioned as I am about the printed word vrs the boob tube. Might surprise you what they have to say.

Yes I read a lot. Our teachers from Immaculate Conception grade school would be proud of me.

And by the way the new york times and other leading papers have been quite blunt about criticizing Biden, as well as Trump, though belatedly. I believe you are doing a bit of cherry picking with that clip you offered - although I agree it's quite damning in terms of playing favorites instead of being more fairminded and analytical.  But that's an isolated case. They (the times) ran a particularly blunt (if belated) series of articles about how Biden insisted on running for another term in spite of his obvious struggle with senility. 

Anyway in defense of reading as just as good a source of information as tv, here's a pretty good recent analysis of this dangerous game Trump is taking with the trade deficit deal.

It's an interesting column in today's New York Times. Enjoy.

Donald Trump is not known for doing his homework — he’s more of a go-with-my-gut kind of guy. What I find most terrifying about what Trump is doing today is that he seems to be largely relying on his gut to bet that he can radically overturn how America’s institutions have operated and the way the nation relates to both its allies and enemies — and get it all right. As in, America will become stronger and more prosperous, while the rest of the world will just adjust. Next question.

Well, what are the odds that Trump can get all of these complex issues right — based on trusting his gut — when on the same day that he was announcing his huge tariff increases on imports from the world over, he invited into the Oval Office Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist who believes that Sept. 11 was an “inside” job. She was there, my Times colleagues reported, to lecture Trump about how disloyal key members of the National Security Council staff were. Trump subsequently fired at least six of them. (No wonder so many Chinese asked me in Beijing last week if we were having a Mao-like “cultural revolution.” More on that later.)

Yes, what are the odds that such a president, seemingly ready to act on foreign policy on the advice of a conspiracy theorist, got all this trade theory right? I’d say they’re long.

What is it that Trump, with his grievance-filled gut, doesn’t understand? The time we live in today, though far from perfect or equal, is nevertheless widely viewed by historians as one of the most relatively peaceful and prosperous in history. We are benefiting from this pacific era in large part because of a tightening web of globalization and trade, and also because of the world’s domination by a uniquely benign and generous hegemon called the United States of America that is at peace and economically interwoven with its biggest rival, China.

In other words, the world has been the way the world has been these past 80 years because America was the way America was: a superpower ready to let other countries take some advantage of it in trade, because previous presidents understood that if the world grew steadily richer and more peaceful, and if the United States just continued to get the same slice of global G.D.P. — about 25 percent — it would still prosper handsomely because the total pie would grow steadily larger. Which is exactly what happened.

The world has been the way the world has been because China brought more people out of poverty faster than any other country in history, largely on the back of a giant, relentless export engine that took advantage of the U.S.-engineered global free trade system.

The world has been the way the world has been because the United States had the good fortune to be bordered by two friendly democracies, Canada and Mexico. Together the three nations wove a network of supply chains that made them all richer, no matter that many goods manufactured in North America could have a label saying, “Made by America, Mexico and Canada together.”

The world has been the way the world has been thanks to the alliance between the United States and both the other members of NATO and the European Union, which, with U.S. help, have kept the peace in Europe from the end of World War II right up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This vast, prosperous trans-Atlantic partnership has been a pillar of global growth and security.

The world has been the way the world has been because America had the government work force it had, with its expertise, incorruptibility and funding of scientific research that was the envy of the world.

Trump is now betting that the world will stay the way the world was — growing more prosperous and peaceful — even if he converts the United States into a predatory power ready to seize territory, like Greenland and even if he sends the message to aspiring talented legal immigrants that if you do come here, be very, very careful what you say.

If Trump turns out to be right — that we’ll still enjoy the economic benefits and stability we’ve had for nearly a century even if America suddenly shifts from a benign hegemon to a predator, from the world’s most important proponent of free trade to a global tariffing giant, from the protector of the European Union to telling Europe it’s on its own and from a defender of science to a country that forces out a top vaccine specialist like Dr. Peter Marks for refusing to go along with quack medicine — I will stand corrected.

But if Trump turns out to be wrong, he will have sown the wind, and we as a nation will reap the whirlwind. But so, too, will the rest of the world. And I can tell you, the world is worried.

When I was in China last week, more than a few people asked me if Trump was launching a “cultural revolution” the way that Mao did. Mao’s lasted 10 years — from 1966 to 1976 — and it wrecked the whole economy after he instructed his party’s youth to destroy the bureaucrats that he thought were opposing him.

This question was so much on the mind of one retired senior Chinese official that he emailed me last week, with a warning: Mao sent his young party cadres to attack “anyone who could think — ruling elites such as Deng Xiaoping, college professors, engineers, writers and journalists, doctors, etc. He wanted to dumb down the entire population so that he could rule easily and forever,” the former official wrote. “Sounds a bit similar with what is going on in the U.S.? I hope not.”