EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Don Surber: Biden takes the dollar down. “When Barack Hussein Obama said, ‘Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,’ it was not a warning; it was a guarantee. Likewise, when former DOD chief Robert Gates said Biden has ‘been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,’ this was not a criticism but a selling point. If you want America to fail, there was no better man to endorse for president in 2020. Cackling Kamala was the best woman for the job. The dollar is dying because of this. Let me explain.”

NIALL FERGUSON: The aliens have landed, and we created them.

It is not every day that I read a prediction of doom as arresting as Eliezer Yudkowsky’s in Time magazine last week. “The most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances,” he wrote, “is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in ‘maybe possibly some remote chance,’ but as in ‘that is the obvious thing that would happen.’ … If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.”

Do I have your attention now?

Yudkowsky is not some random Cassandra. He leads the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a nonprofit in Berkeley, California, and has already written extensively on the question of artificial intelligence. I still remember vividly, when I was researching my book Doom, his warning that someone might unwittingly create an AI that turns against us — “for example,” I suggested, “because we tell it to halt climate change and it concludes that annihilating Homo sapiens is the optimal solution.” It was Yudkowsky who some years ago proposed a modified Moore’s law: Every 18 months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.

Now Yudkowsky has gone further. He believes we are fast approaching a fatal conjuncture, in which we create an AI more intelligent than us, which “does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general. … The likely result of humanity facing down an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss.”

He is suggesting that such an AI could easily escape from the internet “to build artificial life forms,” in effect waging biological warfare on us. His recommendation is clear. We need a complete, global moratorium on the development of AI.

There are a lot of very smart, knowledgeable people with deadly serious concerns about AI.

Off topic, but I’m re-reading Ferguson’s The Pity Of War: Explaining World War I and it’s as good as ever and probably more relevant than ever.

THE GHOST OF SAUL ALINSKY SMILES: Bodega clerk Jose Alba to testify at House Judiciary field hearing on violent crime under NYC DA Alvin Bragg.

FAAFO: Watch: Target Shopper Demands $1000 in ‘Reparations’ — Security Guard Punches Her In The Face.

RUNNING A REAL QUALITY OPERATION, GUYS: Security Docs On Biden’s Ireland Trip Found On Belfast Street.

VOX ACTUALLY ADMITS THAT MASS SHOOTINGS ARE RARE: “Mass shootings at work, like mass shootings generally, are rare occurrences. Though more common in the US than elsewhere in the world, mass shootings make up less than 1 percent of gun violence deaths in the US, and workplace shootings comprise a smaller subset of those fatalities. The workplace is the most common location for a mass shooting, however, according to the Violence Project.”

On a per-capita deaths basis, they’re not more common in the US, it’s just that the U.S. is the third-largest population in the world, and is saturated with media in a way that the other two (China and India) are not. Anders Brevik put Norway (smaller population than many U.S. states) ahead of us all by himself. And, of course, the US media have an agenda, which is what makes Vox’s admission noteworthy.

Flashback: Obama Declares, In Paris, in the Wake of a Mass Shooting Resulting in 132 Deaths, That Mass Shootings Just Don’t Happen Outside the US.

TO BE FAIR, CLINTON STARTED THAT WHEN HE WEAPONIZED THE CDC AGAINST THE SECOND AMENDMENT: Permanent Emergency: Corporate State Repackages Gun Violence as ‘Public Health Crisis.’

THAT’S BECAUSE IT’S STUPID AND DESTRUCTIVE: Even Biden’s Auto Union Allies Hate the Admin’s Plan To Kill Gas-Powered Cars.

RATS ON THE WEST SIDE, BEDBUGS UPTOWN: New York City names its first-ever ‘rat czar.’

New York City now has a “rat czar.”

Kathleen Corradi has been named the city’s director of rodent mitigation.

“You’ll be seeing a lot of me and a lot less rats,” Corradi said Wednesday after she was introduced by Mayor Eric Adams.

Added Adams: “Kathy has the knowledge, drive, experience, and energy to send rats packing and create a cleaner more welcoming city for all New Yorkers.”

The mayor also announced $3.5 million for rat mitigation in Harlem. The money will fund new techniques and new staff members to inspect, exterminate and clean public spaces.

“He hates rats. I hate rats. Every New Yorker hates rats,” Corradi said. “Rats are tough but New Yorkers are tougher.”

Back in 2013, I wrote a lengthy post on Charles Bronson’s first Death Wish movie, filmed on location in the clapped out, crime-ridden Manhattan of the 1970s, and concluded:

In contrast, New York has improved immensely since the period depicted in the original 1974 Death Wish. Naturally, New York’s bourgeois-bohemians, as David Brooks would call them, would welcome a chance to return to the hell of Manhattan in the ‘70s, as Daniel Henninger noted in a 2005 Wall Street Journal article:

The actor John Leguizamo: New York in the ’70s “was funky and gritty and showed the world how a metropolis could be dark and apocalyptic and yet fecund.” Fran Lebowitz, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair: The city “was a wreck; it was going bankrupt. And it was pretty lawless; everything was illegal, but no laws were enforced. It was a city for city-dwellers, not tourists, the way it is now.” Laurie Anderson, a well-known New York artist and performer, admits the ’70s were considered “the dark ages” but “there was great music and everyone was broke.”

I hope everybody in Fun City is enjoying all the newfound funkiness and grittiness as much as its Bobo elites who cheered for its return.

EMMA-JO MORRIS: Survivors of the Trans Panic: Lesbians Threatened by Gender Ideology.

“It’s just another way to get lesbians to want to be with men”

“It’s very sad to see women in general being erased … I see a lot of screenshots of pictures from lesbian dating apps, and, like, every other swipe is a man.”

Jaimee Michell is the founder of “Gays Against Groomers,” a gay advocacy group set up to denounce the targeting and sexualization of children by “LGBTQQIP2SAA” activism. Jaimee began the organization in an effort to separate homosexuals from the gender ideology movement, in her words, to “reclaim our good standing in society that we just achieved not that long ago.”

Jaimee told Breitbart that, amid the push to “affirm” transgender claims that biological males are “women,” lesbians are being marginalized as they are forced to disregard or downplay their innate sexual preference — hinged on gender and biological sex being aligned and immutable — to appease community activists. Conversations among lesbians about only wanting to date biological women have been dubbed “transphobic” and “abusive” by activists and media. Lesbian dating apps now boast “inclusion” of “queer,” “non-binary, gender-fluid and transgender people” — broadening the pool of users from homosexual women to people who don’t “identify” as women, or people who are not women at all.

Lesbians and non-woke feminists — usually derided as “TERFs” by their enemies on the Left — were among the first to warn of this madness.

TRUE, THOUGH IT FITS SOME IDEOLOGIES MORE CLOSELY THAN OTHERS: Freddie deBoer: The real world doesn’t adhere to partisan ideology.

THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION THE MEDIA NEVER ASKS GAVIN NEWSOM:

It’s an inarguable reality that California has lost a substantial portion of its population and its revenue, while Florida surges.

So why is Newsom not being asked about it?

If Californians were happy with the job he’s doing, why aren’t they staying?

In just a few years, California’s lost 1.3% of its population. That’s a staggering drop for a state that previously led the country in growth and provided endless opportunity.

Meanwhile, Florida’s had a massive influx of new residents, more than any other state.

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it makes perfect sense that Gov. Brylcreem get to avoid the tough questions about his state’s ongoing collapse.

CHRIS QUEEN: The NPR Emperor Has No Clothes. “Instead of pushing out its ‘editorial independence’ on Twitter, NPR is asking listeners to follow it on TikTok — you know, the Chinese Communist spyware social media outlet.”

FROM PATRICK CHILES:  Escape Orbit.

A RACE AGAINST TIME AND A GATEWAY TO THE UNKNOWN AWAITS
Thrilling space adventure from a Marine vet.
Five years ago, astronaut Jack Templeton took the spacecraft Magellan to the farthest reaches of our solar system, never to be heard from again.
Until now.

PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY REVIEW: Here.

LEE FANG: MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan Gets Basic Facts Wrong on DHS Content Moderation Partnership: Exclusive Twitter Files emails and publicly available documents show Mehdi Hasan’s accusation is false.

Imagine that.

MSNBC pundit Mehdi Hasan, in a series of tweets over the last five days, has repeatedly claimed that Matt Taibbi “deliberately & under oath misrepresented” the facts when he testified to Congress last month.

Hasan linked to a video of Taibbi’s testimony, in which the Racket News journalist noted that “Twitter executives did not distinguish between [the Department of Homeland Security] or [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] and this group [the Election Integrity Partnership]” and that emails show and EIP worked in concert with CISA to flag content for moderation. Hasan claimed this is a lie, that Taibbi conflated a private nonprofit with a government agency during his testimony, and that EIP only worked with the Center for Internet Security, or CIS, a private sector organization with a similar acronym, not CISA.

It’s a serious charge and federal crime to make false statements to Congress, one punishable with prison time.

But the record shows that CISA, the government agency, was involved in the very formation of EIP and was one of the most important government partners to the group in its bid to influence content moderation decisions at firms such as Facebook and Twitter. EIP’s own leaders have said as much, and there is endless documentation – from publicly available websites, to discovery from litigation, and from the “Twitter Files” – that all confirm this relationship and CISA’s role in assisting EIP.

In other words, Hasan is wrong and presents a deeply distorted view of the mechanics of this process. Taibbi’s testimony, especially the video excerpted by Hasan, is accurate.

Worse, after being presented with evidence of CISA working directly with EIP, Hasan doubled down, repeating his false allegation that Taibbi lied under oath.

Well, MSNBC.

NEWS YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO USE:  On Suicide.

BE CONCERNED. BE VERY CONCERNED:  VOLUNTARY VOTING SYSTEM GUIDELINES (VVSG) DEPRECATION.

TO BE FAIR IT SHOULD BE DEEP STATE AFFILIATED MEDIA:  Tax-Payer Funded NPR Quits Twitter After Being Labeled ‘State-Affiliated Media’.

AND THE REAL WORLD:  Joint Chiefs Chairman Disconnected from Reality Regarding China.

FRANKLY THAT COMIC IS A SLANDER ON THE MEMORY OF A MURDERED TEENAGER:  Media Hoax: No, the Diary of Anne Frank Has Not Been Banned From Florida Schools.

SO LITTLE?  Trump Sues Michael Cohen for $500 Million for Allegedly Lying ‘With Malicious Intent’.

IN THE MORNING, YOU GO RIDING FOR THE MAN WHO STOLE YOUR WATER:   Biden And The Next Great Idea: Cut Water To Western States.

Or so I heard in some song or other. Does he know about Western states?

INDEED:   New auto industry rules a disaster in the making.

IT’S ODD HOW THEIR ‘MANAGEMENT’; OF RESOURCES ALWAYS SEEMS TO MEAN ‘DEAL WITH LESS’:  Biden Admin Proposes Reducing Water Supply From Colorado River Basin Amid Drought.

THIS ONLY WORKS IF THEY CAN MAKE ENOUGH CARS TO MEET THE NEED:   US Unveils Toughest-Ever Car Emissions Rule in Bid to Force Surge in EV Purchases.

Besides people being able to afford them.