The United States Congress manipulated by the corporations that make up the military-industrial complex that routinely rents its members has a budget larger than the next seven high budget nations on earth. We can’t feed our children, we can’t educate them properly, we have the worst healthcare system amongst developed nations. But, by God, we have a defense budget so large that the Pentagon has had to develop an AI program, as this article describes, just to keep track of it all.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is seen on a monitor while testifying during a House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense hearing in Washington, D.C. Credit: Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty
As tech luminaries like Elon Musk issue solemn warnings about artificial intelligence’s threat of “civilizational destruction,” the U.S. military is using it for a decidedly more mundane purpose: understanding its sprawling $816.7 billion budget and figuring out its own policies.
Thanks to its bloat and political wrangling, the annual Department of Defense budget legislation includes hundreds of revisions and limitations telling the Pentagon what it can and cannot do. To make sense of all those provisions, the Pentagon created an AI program, codenamed GAMECHANGER.
“In my comptroller role, I am, of course, the most excited about applying GAMECHANGER to gain better visibility and understanding across our various budget exhibits,” said Gregory Little, the deputy comptroller of the Pentagon, shortly after the program’s creation last year.
“The fact that they have to go to such extraordinary measures to understand what their own policies are is an indictment of how they operate,” […]
Corporations having rented state legislators and governors, particularly in Republican controlled states, are doing everything they can to make child labor legal. As this report describes, “the number of illegally employed minors has surged by 69 percent since 2018, according to Labor Department figures.” It is just another trend showing us that as a country we are going backwards. Another example of how the United States has become a nation that does not foster wellbeing, and see its citizens as exploitable peasants.
A child laborer Credit: Lewis Hine / NC Museum of History.
Working in industrial laundries at age 14, laboring up to 35 hours a week on top of school — some US states are relaxing the barriers to employing minors, despite rising cases of exploitation.
At least five states have amended their legislation covering adolescent job regulations, with Arkansas being the latest to see changes take effect in August.
But such shifts come as the number of illegally employed minors has surged by 69 percent since 2018, according to Labor Department figures.
Removing the work permit process for young people in Arkansas “might sound like it’s not a big deal, but we actually think it’s a pretty impactful law,” said Reid Maki, coordinator at the Child Labor Coalition.
“Eventually this will allow some kids to end up in jobs they really shouldn’t be in,” he told AFP, adding that the work permit requirement “should not have been removed.”
A spokesperson for Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders pushed back against that characterization, saying it is “still illegal for minors to work dangerous […]
Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski, and Joseph Menn, Reporters - Microsoft Start / The Washington Post
Stephan:
As this story describes the Congressional Republicans led by MAGAT Representative Jim Jordan and others are doing everything they can to stop research on misinformation. They rely on misinformation in order to manipulate their voters whom they hold in obvious contempt, and they don’t want researchers identifying what they are doing. They want their peasants to only know what they want them to know no matter how inaccurate that information may be. I started the SR podcast to try and get actual facts into the public discussion of the trends that are shaping our future. I am so disgusted with the weaponization of lies that I am now doing a monthly Schwartzreport column in the peer reviewed science journal Explore, the weekly SR podcast, and the daily SR web publication. It is a terrible risk financially but I just cannot sit by and watch my country be destroyed as a democracy, and as a nation that fosters wellbeing.
Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks led by Republican MAGAts like Representative Jim Jordan Credit: Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post
Academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.
The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress and state government — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of medical information online.
Facing litigation, Stanford University officials are discussing how they can continue tracking election-related misinformation through the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a prominent consortium that flagged social media conspiracies about voting in 2020 and 2022, several participants told The Washington Post. The coalition of disinformation researchers may shrink and also may stop communicating with X and Facebook about their findings.
The National Institutes of Health froze a $150 million program intended to advance the communication […]
The Republican Party, as this article describes, in the states it controls, is trying to gut colleges and universities that rely on public money to stop them from teaching the truth and, instead, indoctrinate them into the White Nationalist christofascist cult that they are trying to install and dominate our government. We have got to stop this. It will all turn on the 2024 election. Think about what you are willing to do.
Credit: Stuart Seeger / Flickr
Texas A&M University’s disgraceful treatment of celebrated journalism professor Kathleen McElroy should terrify anyone who cares about academic freedom, education, and equality in Texas. The state’s Republican leaders, along with Governor Greg Abbott, have launched a radical, McCarthyite crusade to purge education of liberal bias.
Only in Texas or Florida would decades of experience at the country’s most prestigious newspaper and a track record of championing newsroom inclusivity disqualify someone for a job relaunching A&M’s defunct journalism program, which was shuttered in 2004 after 55 years.
McElroy’s ordeal is just the beginning.
At first, A&M officials seemed to realize how lucky they’d been to snag McElroy, a Black woman who served in various managerial positions at the New York Times for 20 years before completing a doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she served as the director of the School of Journalism and Media and now teaches.
McElroy didn’t want to draw attention to herself, but A&M insisted on a public ceremony to celebrate her appointment as head of the university’s new […]
David Badash, Staff Writer - New Civil Rights Movement
Stephan:
How a member of Congress can advocate violence as the only way to create change government and still remain a member of Congress I do not know. And yet it is becoming clear that the Republican Party not only tolerates such members, but many Republicans agree that democracy must be changed to fascism, and if that takes violence so be it. You cannot support democracy today and be a Republican. Listen to the Republican god king, criminal Trump; he talks about this almost every day albeit in coded language.
MAGAt Republican Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida
U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL). largely seen as pushing Speaker Kevin McCarthy‘s Republican-majority House of Representatives toward shutting down the federal government, is praising and promoting remarks made by a freshman GOP lawmaker that appear to suggest the use of violence. U.S. Rep. Eli Crane‘s comments, posted Friday (below), call for change “through force,” remarks echoing Congressman Gaetz’s recent comments which were denounced by an expert on authoritarianism as fascistic.
“The only way we’re going to see meaningful change in this town is through force,” wrote Congressman Crane, Republican of Arizona atop a three-minute video in which he frames what is now an almost guaranteed government shutdown as a “spending fight.” In his video he says, “the only way you’re gonna get any change in this town is through force.” Gaetz in August had said, “we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C.”
