Democrats want to fundraise off of Roe and do nothing: Kamala Interview

 

Republicans: We’ll eliminate the filibuster to pass a national abortion ban if we get control
Democrats: We’ll read a poem and hope that makes you feel better

 

Did you expect better from a cop & prosecutor who thought arresting parents for truant kids? She’s always been awful, now it’s time for her to be awful in front of even more cameras.
When even the mainstream media is starting to ask decently tough questions, you know your time is up in the White House
Kyle you’re exactly right, they don’t care whether they win or lose it’s only about how they can make money on the next election. Losing sometimes is more profitable. That’s who they are.
They’re jumping straight to the fundraising that they want but don’t realise they have to offer something in return or up front. 🤦‍♂
“Yes, we here in the administration understand the issues that this decision will cause, and we are thinking about these things you’re saying.” “Will you be doing any of these things?” “Do what?”
Never have I ever seen the flaws of a two party system so clearly. One makes an unforgivable move and the other is just standing there; doing nothing in believe that they get more votes and money of course… And they probably will just because they seem to value something idk
I like when Kyle goes line by line and breaks it down like this
Put clinics on military bases, it’s federal land. Let the red states close the whole military bases down, a win either way.
>>This is unironicly a fantastic idea. They’ll never in a million years have the balls to actually do it, but it’s a great idea.
So she’s arguing to do literally nothing for some 130 days lol
“They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own” George Carlin
Could you imagine her on Jeopardy? She would answer each question in the form of the same question that came before it
How can anyone passionately fight for the dems, when even when given everything they need, they wont act? Its hard not to become a doomer honestly.
To call this a lame duck administration would be an understatement. It genuinely seems like they don’t care

Bye-bye, bitcoin: It’s time to ban cryptocurrencies

I’ve never quite understood why cryptocurrencies are worth anything. 1 2 3

Of course, the untraceable 4 5 6 payments are worth a lot to ransomware hackers, cyber criminals and money launderers. But dollars, euros and yen are backed by nations’ respective treasuries.7 8 9 If someone invents a cryptocurrency, any value is based solely on convincing others it has value. But is it a usable means of exchange? International banking officials say cryptocurrencies 10 such as bitcoin are speculative assets, not sustainable, usable money 11 12.

Yet the epidemic of hugely disruptive ransomware attacks in recent months — on JBS Foods, a major meat processor; on Colonial Pipelines, our critical infrastructure, causing gasoline shortages for weeks; and on 1,000 or more U.S. businesses on July 4 — highlights the enormous risks. Moreover, hundreds of small towns, hospitals, school districts and small businesses have been hit by the ransomware epidemic — all enabled by cryptocurrencies.

How should governments respond? Besieged with cyberattacks, the Biden administration has been struggling with this question of cybersecurity with few clear answers. Cyber offense still seems to beat cyber defense.

As the eminent economic analyst Martin Wolf outlined in a recent Financial Times essaythe risks and chaos of a wild world of unstable private money is a libertarian fantasy. According to a recent Federal Reserve paper, there are already some 8,000 cryptocurrencies. It’s a new mom-and-pop cottage industry.13

How should governments respond? Wolf argues that central banks (e.g., the U.S. Federal Reserve) should create their own official digital currencies — central bank digital currencies (CBDC) and make cryptocurrencies illegal. 14 15

I’ve been asking the same question: Who needs cryptocurrencies? Apart from the nasty uses and wild speculative value swings, data mining to produce bitcoin is a serious environmental hazard, using huge amounts of electricity 16  17 18 by rows and rows of computers.

Governments should guarantee safe, stable and usable money.19 Already, according to the Atlantic Council GeoEconomics Center’s CBDC Tracker, 81 countries representing 90 percent of world gross domestic product are at various stages of researching and exploring the adoption of digital currencies.

The four largest central banks — the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the U.S. Federal Reserve — are all exploring CBDCs, though the U.S. lags behind. Meanwhile, China is already digitizing its currency, the RMB, and allowing foreign visitors to use it for payments. Though China is still a long way from having an international reserve currency to rival the dollar, its digitized RMB is a step in that direction.

Nonetheless, caution is well advised, as there are important, complex issues that must be sorted out before launching an official digital currency. These issues include equity: Should the digital dollar be available to all or just used for certain business transactions? I would argue it must be for all.20 Should a U.S. CBDC augment cash or totally replace it, and would there be a transition period? Then there is the impact on private banks: Should individuals have bank accounts with the Fed rather than private banks? What should be the relation between private banks and the Fed with regard to currency? Should businesses have “digital wallets”? How would international payments work?

And not least, there is the question of privacy and surveillance. A digitized dollar would likely make it hard to dodge taxes with untraceable cash. But just how traceable would the public and Congress accept a CBDC to become? Would the fact of a CBDC making transactions safer, faster and cheaper be worth some trade-off? 21

Then there is the question of whether the world’s major powers would cooperate in outlawing cryptocurrencies — and reach agreement on rules and regulations of CBDCs. China, always with an eye on control, has indicated skepticism, if not disdain, toward cryptocurrencies. 22 Indeed, that was one driver in Beijing’s swift move to digitize the RMB. This could be an area of U.S.-China cooperation worth exploring. 23

If China were on board, the possibility of a U.N. Security Council resolution to ban cryptocurrencies could be in the cards. That would be a foundation for taking the issue to the Group of 20 to make it a global norm. 24

For now, there are a whole lot more questions than answers. But the insidious new industry of cyber hacking and ransomware is an unacceptable disruptive threat to American economic security25. It is a problem that is growing, not subsiding. And the proliferation of do-it-yourself digital currencies is a serious and bad omen for global financial stability.26

Yet amid an international order that is fraying and fragmenting, it’s an open question whether such threats are enough to catalyze sufficient international cooperation. I suspect that with a little U.S. leadership27, jump-starting financial diplomacy would go a long way. Certainly, it’s a good test for President Biden’s efforts to align democracies.

Robert A. Manning is a senior fellow of the Brent Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. He was a senior counselor to the undersecretary of State for global affairs from 2001 to 2004, a member of the U.S. Department of State policy planning staff from 2004 to 2008 and on the National Intelligence Council strategic futures group from 2008 to 2012. Follow him on Twitter @Rmanning4.


  1. Do you also question why gold has historically been worth so much more than its industrial and ornamental value?

  2. Gold has 6 important attributes that make it suitable for use as money:

    1. scarcity
    2. durability
    3. portability
    4. uniformity
    5. divisibility
    6. fungibility (interchangability)

  3. Not all “cryptocurrencies” or crypto-assets are created equal, but Bitcoin has the advantage that it is:

    1. much more portable (able to transfer a billion dollars worth of bitcoin electronically at low cost anywhere in the world that has internet),
    2. more divisible
    3. more verifiable (you can verify that you have authentic bitcoin and audit the supply)
    4. decentralized: to prevent power from being concentrated
    5. harder to steal, through the optional requirement that multiple signatures be used to  unlock it

  4. It’s not untraceable.  The FBI has know for a long time that Bitcoin can be traced.  That’s how the FBI caught their own agents stealing money from the Silk Road

  5. The next thing you’re going to do is reverse yourself and argue is that, because it is traceable, that there is no privacy!  The truth is somewhere in between.

  6. Cash is untraceable-ish.  Cash is more useful to money launderers than Bitcoin.  Do you want to ban cash?

  7. How do government treasuries “back” currencies and create value?  The Zimbabwean dollar was backed by the “full faith and credit” of the Zimbabwean government and how much was that worth?

  8. Most people believe the “full faith and credit” of the US government is on the decline and doesn’t inspire confidence. (just ask the Kurds and Afghanis about American credibility)

  9. Some people would prefer a currency that is backed by math and game theory rather than politicians and technocrats.

  10. Why should we believe International banking officials.  The reason Bitcoin was created was out of disillusionment with these sort of people.

  11. To say that bitcoin is a “cryptocurrency” is a misnomer.  Bitcoin is too small to compete with the US dollar — only $1 trillion in market cap compared with $100 trillion +.  Just as micro cap stocks are more volatile than large cap stocks, Bitcoin is more volatile than the dollar.

  12. It is better to call Bitcoin a “crypto asset” rather than “crypo currency”.  Right now Bitcoin functions as an emerging store of value like gold. Perhaps someday it will be large enough to stabilize, but until then its only competition to the dollar is with those who do not have access to banks and who value its comparable ease of use via the Lightning Network which runs on top of Bitcoin using products such as Strike.

  13. If in 1998 I told you there were some 8,000 dot-com companies, would you be justified in dismissing the sector?  Sure, many of them failed, which is a cautionary tale against concentrated investment in the sector, but a select group of those companies were innovative and are now powerhouses.

  14. If the government’s new digital currency is so good and crypto currencies currencies not worth anything then the government currency should be able to easily win on the merits, without criminalizing the competition

  15. If you criminilize the competition that suggest to me that you fear the the public will oppose the new digital dollar or at least prefer a private alternative.

  16. YouTube uses more energy that Bitcoin.  It just depends on whether you think Bitcoin provides something useful and whether Bitcoin uses more energy that the current banking system.

  17. The unspoken truth that the Bankers and Political Establishment fail to acknowledge is that the creation and support for cryptocurrencies is directly attributable to the establishment’s failure and the public’s distrust of them.

  18. How can you get an establishment technocrat or politician to see the value of something whose creation was inspired by their failure?  It is like getting a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

  19. The whole reason why Bitcoin was created was because the creator thought the government couldn’t be relied upon to maintain the value of money.  The government may keep CPI low, but CPI is not a very good measure monetary debasement.

  20. I didn’t even know that people were considering not making it available for all.

  21. He doesn’t say it directly, but what I hear is: “Would the fact of a CBDC making transactions safer, faster and cheaper be worth less privacy and more surveillance“.

  22. Why does China have disdain for “cryptocurrencies”?  Is it because they “waste electricity” or does crypto have the potential to check China’s power over their population, including the ability to surveil, debase, and “cancel” individuals’ money.

  23. Maybe the US should be more like China?  Who thought this is a good idea?  If China is jealously guarding its power over its people, the US should not use this as an opportunity to collude to gain additional power over its people.

  24. If you think people distrust you now, wait until you attempt to gain power over the entire world’s money supply and to prevent the people from making a free choice.

  25. Mexican drug cartels use American dollars.  That doesn’t prove that dollars should be outlawed.

  26. It is the current financial system that has required bailouts, not the crypo financial industry.  It is obscene to hear the financial elites complain about Bitcoin — a system which was designed as an alternative to their system. It was their system whose corruption threatened world stability and  required trillions of bailouts with zero accountability.  If people want to put some of their money in an alternative system, can they make an appealing counter-argument or do they have to rule the whole world by force?

  27. Will this “leadership” involve bribes and threats or are people persuaded the more knowledge they gain?

Annotations of Google Tweet about AI Jobs

Translation: We fired and harassed out our top AI researchers from historically marginalized groups who did the work for us, and we are now looking for more people from historically marginalized groups to burn out, exploit, and expend.
Quote Tweet
@JeffDean
·
I encourage students from historically marginalized groups who are interested in learning to conduct research in AI/ML, CS or related areas to consider applying for our CSRMP mentorship program! We have 100s of researchers @GoogleAI who are excited to work with you. twitter.com/GoogleAI/statu…
@hondanhon
the birdhouse annotations on that tweet must be something to behold if birdhouse were actually a thing
Jean-Michel Plourde
@j_mplourde
Replying to
aka: we are looking for more obediant marginalized folks for the PR but yeah don’t cross the line or else…

Racist Police Violence Reconsidered

Tony Timpa was 32 years old when he died at the hands of the Dallas police in August 2016. He suffered from mental health difficulties and was unarmed. He wasn’t resisting arrest. He had called the cops from a parking lot while intoxicated because he thought he might be a danger to himself. By the time law enforcement arrived, he had already been handcuffed by the security guards of a store nearby. Even so, the police officers made him lie face down on the grass, and one of them pressed a knee into his back. He remained in this position for 13 minutes until he suffocated. During the harrowing recording of his final moments, he can be heard pleading for his life. A grand jury indictment of the officers involved was overturned.

Not many people have seen this video, however, and that may have something to do with the fact that Timpa was white. During the protests and agonizing discussions about police brutality that have followed the death of George Floyd under remarkably similar circumstances, it is too seldom acknowledged that white men are regularly killed by the cops as well, and that occasionally the cops responsible are black (as it happens, one of the Dallas police officers at the scene of Timpa’s death was an African American). There seems to be a widespread assumption that, under similar circumstances, white cops kill black people but not white people, and that this disparity is either the product of naked racism or underlying racist bias that emerges under pressure.[Agreed: Implicit Bias is a major factor in racially biased split-second decisions] Plenty of evidence indicates, however, that racism is less important to understanding police behavior than is commonly supposed.

Timpa was, of course, just one case and might be dismissed as an anomaly. On the other hand, we are told that what happened to George Floyd is what happens to black people “all the time.” But because the killing of black suspects by white police officers receives more media attention and elicits more outrage, such instances leave us vulnerable to the availability heuristic—a cognitive bias that leads us to form judgements about the prevalence of phenomena based on the readiness with which we can recall examples. Had Tony Timpa been black, we would all likely know his name by now. Had George Floyd been white, his name would likely be a footnote, briefly reported in Minneapolis local news and quickly forgotten. In fact, white people are victims of police mistreatment “all the time” too. And just as the Timpa case tragically parallels the Floyd one, there are countless episodes paralleling those we hear about involving black people.

In 2014, John Crawford, black, was shot dead by police while waving a BB gun. In 2016, Daniel Shaver, white, was waving a pellet gun out of motel window and suffered the same fate. In 2015, officer Michael Slager shot Walter Scott, black, in the back and killed him as he was running to evade a traffic ticket; the following year, Andrew Thomas, white, was shot in the neck by a police officer and killed as he climbed out of the SUV he had crashed trying to evade arrest. In 2015, Sam DuBose, black, was shot dead as he tried to escape a traffic summons in his car; the same year, Michael Parker, white, was shot dead in the same way while trying escape a ticket for a moving violation. In 2016, Philando Castile, black, was shot dead in his car by a cop as he reached under his waistband for his license and registration during a traffic stop; the same year, Dylan Noble, white, was shot dead under almost identical circumstances. Also in 2016, Alton Sterling, black, was shot dead in front of a convenience store as he was being detained for unruly conduct; the same year, Brandon Stanley, white, was shot dead in a convenience store for trying to avoid a warrant.

So, the perception that the police regularly kill black people under circumstances in which white people would be merely disciplined is in fact a misconception.  [I would guess that police make split-second racially biased decisions that result in accidental shootings because they are relatively quick to draw their gun on blacks.]  White people vastly outnumber black people in America, so it should be no surprise that more white people die at the hands of the cops each year than black people. According to a database of fatal police shootings maintained by the Washington Post since 2015, 1,003 people in a population of 328 million were shot by police nationwide in 2019. 405 of those victims were white and 250 were black (of the remaining cases, 163 were Hispanic, 41 are listed as “other,” and 144 as “unknown”). 309 white victims (76.2 percent) were carrying either a gun or a knife, while 199 black victims (79.6 percent) were similarly armed. It is also worth bearing in mind that while police shootings are sometimes perceived to be abuses per se, an analysis of the Post‘s 2015 data by Kimberly Kindy and Kennedy Elliott reminded readers that:

In three-quarters of the fatal shootings, police were under attack or defending someone who was. The officers were often lauded as heroes… 28 percent of those who died were shooting at officers or someone else. Sixteen percent were attacking with other weapons or physical force, and 31 percent were pointing a gun.

Nevertheless, it remains true that black people are killed at a rate disproportionate to their percentage of the population. Does this decisively demonstrate racial bias or murderous animus on the part of American law enforcement? Blacks represent about 13 percent of the US population but about a quarter of victims in cop killings. Whites constitute about 62 percent of the population but only half of those killed by the police. With slight fluctuations, these trends have been broadly consistent.

However, these figures are not necessarily evidence of police racism. According to the Washington Post‘s database, over 95 percent of the people fatally shot by police officers in 2019 were male, and no serious-minded person argues that this is evidence of systemic misandry. So what, then, accounts for the disproportionate representation of black men among those killed by cops?

The socioeconomic gap between blacks and whites is doubtless an important contributing factor. Police are called to poor neighborhoods more often, so poverty makes someone more likely to encounter law enforcement. From the 1970s through the 1990s, many conservatives argued that too many black people were on welfare. Liberals and progressives replied that, firstly, more white people were on welfare and that, secondly and more importantly, a greater proportion of the black population is on welfare because a greater proportion of black people are mired in poverty. In this context, former Washington Post journalist Wesley Lowery observed that black people are about two-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by cops than their representation in the population would predict. Today, the percentage of black people living in poverty is about two-and-a-half times that of whites (22 percent and nine percent, respectively, in 2018).

This disparity in poverty rates means black people are also disproportionately represented in rates of violent crime. Poverty can lead to dangerous survival choices that include lucrative criminal activity. Furthermore, [How many warrants are for petty broken-windows offenses] outstanding warrants can cause suspects to flee law enforcement when stopped for other trivial infractions. This disparity cannot explain every fatal police shooting, including some of the most notorious examples, such as the shootings of Tamir Rice and Philando Castile. Nevertheless, the tragedy remains: Higher aggregate crime rates lead to more encounters with police officers overall which increases the likelihood that a proportion of those encounters will get out of hand. Entrenched socioeconomic disparities should concern us all, and are as intolerable [Society is not very concerned] as cop murders. But the idea that the police murder out of [intentional] racist animus [Not my argument]  is much less clear than we are often led to suppose.

This is not to say that race has nothing to do with policing issues in America. Black people are disproportionately more likely to be pulled over for drug searches, a disparity that, interestingly, disappears after dusk [IMPORTANT Concession] when officers cannot easily identify the race of a driver. Black people are also more likely to be verbally abused by police [IMPORTANT Concession] during interactions. Contrary to his expectations, Harvard economist Roland Fryer has found that while white men are actually more likely to be killed by cops, [IMPORTANT] black people are more likely to be handcuffed, pushed against the wall, and treated with weapons drawn. Blacks are still somewhat more likely than whites to suffer physical and verbal abuse from the cops [I Assume this is Under-reported because police officers are less accountable to minorities] even when the behavior of the suspect is taken into account. Findings like these contribute to a [IMPORTANT CONCESSION] general sense that cops treat black people as an enemy.  [How do you expect black people to treat the police as legitimate when police treat them like an “enemy”?]

[IMPOTANT CONCESSION] Racist bias may well play a role in these statistical discrepancies in treatment. Certainly, this perception was as central to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri as the shooting of Michael Brown. If, upon close examination, that turns out to be the case, then this must obviously be addressed [Say More about this should be addressed]. The [IMPORTANT CONCESSION] acrid relationship with police is among the main reasons that so many black people feel like aliens in their own nation. If a new generation of black people could grow up without the sense that the cops are their enemy, America would turn a corner [IMPORTANT: AND VICE VERSA: IF THE POLICE DID NOT TREAT BLACK PEOPLE AS THE ENEMY] on race and finally break its holding pattern.

Police officers are too often [IMPORTANT CONCESSION] overarmed, undertrained, and low on empathy. Some police officers are surely racist and act like it. But it does not follow that white cops routinely kill black people in tense situations out of racist animus [IMPORTANT: AGREED, but “Routinely Kill out of Animus” is a very low bar]. This scenario may seem plausible—I believed it until only a few years ago. [This was never my assumption]   [I also assume that police are not entirely reliable in their police reports.  If police accidentally kill someone who had a gun, the police are more likely to say that he brandished it than what actually took place.  And I would assume that when dealing with blacks police are more likely to plant evidence and cover-up than with whites.  This perception contributes to the legitimacy deficit] But there are times when facts are counterintuitive, and it is important to get the facts right and to analyze them with clear eyes and a clear mind (the enlightening work of criminologist and ex-cop Peter Moskos is helpful in this regard). Rhetoric has a way of straying from reality, and to get where we all want to go, it is reality that we must address.

1) Police should enforce the “Spirit of the Law”.

When the top police official is elected, they are more accountable and this changes behavior

2) What Rural whites have in common with Urban blacks