I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT INFLATION WAS IMAGINARY, TRANSITORY, HIGH-CLASS, AND BASICALLY OVER ALREADY: Federal Reserve minutes indicate worries over lack of progress on inflation. “Consumer surveys indicate increasing worries. For instance, the University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey showed the one-year outlook at 3.5%, the highest since November, while overall optimism slumped. A New York Fed survey showed similar results.”

Wages haven’t caught up with inflation and consumers have already burned through their savings and maxed out their credit cards. Spending has to give.

NEW ALLEGATIONS OF PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT IN THE JACK SMITH PROSECUTION OF DONALD TRUMP: “Walt Nauta, one of former President Donald Trump’s co-defendants, [was scheduled] to present arguments that special counsel Jack Smith’s team had selectively and vindictively brought charges against him. But the hearing quickly diverted into a longstanding disagreement over an August 2022 meeting between prosecutor Jay Bratt and Nauta’s defense attorney, Stanley Woodward. Woodward has claimed in court proceedings and filings that Bratt attempted to pressure him into convincing Nauta to cooperate against Trump by threatening to affect a potential judgeship nomination.”

MATT TAIBBI: FOIA Files: Garry Kasparov Resigns from Aspen Institute Commission, Compares it to Soviet Committee: “If I’m being honest…This type of approach was common practice in the USSR.” Leftists gonna leftist. If you let them.

Plus: Introducing the Censorship Files: What you can expect to find in Racket’s FOIA library, opening today. Why we targeted publicly-funded “anti-disinformation” programs, which are misnamed.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Leftists Continue to Try and Normalize Deviants and Criminals. “Leftists will dismiss this as a minor thing, but the accumulation of of the seemingly minor things plays a big role in the ongoing assault on the Constitution and the rule of law.”

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: This Is How You Get More Ants: Student protests and college administrators.

As always, if you like these essays, consider a paid subscription.

ADHERING TO OUR ENEMIES:

Read this letter.

Whistleblowers’ emails reveal John Kerry blocked the FBI and DOJ from arresting Iranian terrorists and agents on U.S. soil in order to protect his Iran deal.

He even ran away from a White House meeting to avoid getting confronted by the Attorney General. pic.twitter.com/MuPUqWOA4n

— Gabriel Noronha (@GLNoronha) May 22, 2024

If, as seems increasingly plausible, we face a Kurt-Schlichter-type scenario, he should be hanged.

Flashback: Of Course: Biden Was Plotting With Iran Against Israel.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Russia’s New Counterspace Weapon Is in the Same Orbit as a US Satellite.

“On May 16, Russia launched a satellite into low Earth orbit that the United States assesses is likely a counterspace weapon presumably capable of attacking other satellites in low Earth orbit,” said U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood in a May 20 speech at the United Nations. “Russia deployed this new counterspace weapon into the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite.”

Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder said May 21 that “assessments further indicate characteristics resembling previously deployed counterspace payloads from 2019 and 2022.”

Ryder declined to discuss what U.S. intelligence agencies know about the satellite’s payload.

Maybe SpaceX could mass-produce anti-satellite-weapon satellites like they do Starlink birds.

MAKE THEM PAY: A List (with Links) of Antisemitism Lawsuits Filed against American Universities.

IT’S HARD TO BLAME THEM GIVEN WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING ON CAMPUSES: Companies Want Fewer Grad Hires This Year: Companies are hiring fewer fresh graduates and rethinking their needs for entry-level talent.

Employers plan to hire 5.8% fewer new graduates than they did last year, according to a spring survey of 226 employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. And what those bosses want from entry-level workers is changing, students and recruiters say, from years of experience to sophisticated artificial-intelligence skills. Some companies say AI is taking over part of the work fresh graduates used to do.

It’s just the latest challenge for the graduating seniors who began their studies with Covid-19 lockdowns and Zoom classes and finished them amid protests that disrupted campus life nationwide. . . .

HealthEdge, an insurance-software company, is among the companies hiring fewer new graduates this year. It’s bringing on five new graduates in the U.S. compared with 20 in 2023. Overall, it’s hiring fewer entry-level employees, and a greater share of them are in India, said Stefani Coleman, who leads early-talent recruiting and programming.

Demand for such jobs, meanwhile, has been overwhelming, she added. At one point, she received about 2,000 applications within 24 hours for an associate software-engineering role.

“The market has changed so drastically,” she said.

The supply of computer-science majors continues to grow as hiring demand for software programming roles appears to be cooling. Two other major campus job recruiting sectors—consulting and finance—are also retrenching after pandemic hiring sprees.

Graduates looking for jobs must meet a higher bar because the market is already crowded with junior workers who recently lost jobs, says Jay Killough, who leads Texas Tech University’s career center.

“Learn to code” turns out to have been bad advice.

Plus: “Some career advisers are also advising graduates to refrain from opining about campus protests if asked in job interviews.” That seems like good advice.

LIMITED TIME DEAL: Greenworks Battery Powered Outdoor Tools. #CommissionEarned

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VOKDAPUNDIT [VIP]: Wargaming the Electoral College.

JOHN LUCAS: “Once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane.” Spain, Ireland and Norway throw their support to Hamas by paying more Dane-geld.

To be fair, those countries were all on Hitler’s side, more or less, during the Holocaust. Ireland even sent condolences after his death in 1945. So, you know, playing true to type.

Related: Rewarding Fascism: “So now we know what it takes to become a state: the murder of Jews. Rape, kill and kidnap Jews and seven months later, the leaders of Ireland, Spain and Norway will recognise your statehood. That’s the lesson of today’s coordinated spectacle of virtue-signalling in Dublin, Madrid and Oslo: pogroms work. The butchery of civilians gets results. Fascism has its rewards. This is ‘diplomacy’ at its most dangerous.”

HMM: OpenAI promised 20% of its computing power to combat the most dangerous kind of AI—but never delivered, sources say.

OpenAI’s Superalignment team had been set up under the leadership of Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI cofounder and former chief scientist, whose departure from the company was announced last week. Jan Leike, a longtime OpenAI researcher, co-led the team. He announced his own resignation Friday, two days after Sutskever’s departure. The company then told the remaining employees on the team—which numbered about 25 people—that it was being disbanded and that they were being reassigned within the company.

It was a swift downfall for a team whose work OpenAI had positioned less than a year earlier as vital for the company and critical for the future of civilization. Superintelligence is the idea of a future, hypothetical AI system that would be smarter than all humans combined. It is a technology that would lie even beyond the company’s stated goal of creating artificial general intelligence, or AGI—a single AI system as smart as any person.

Superintelligence, the company said when announcing the team, could pose an existential risk to humanity by seeking to kill or enslave people. “We don’t have a solution for steering and controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue,” OpenAI said in its announcement. The Superalignment team was supposed to research those solutions.

It was a task so important that the company said in its announcement that it would commit “20% of the compute we’ve secured to date over the next four years” to the effort.

So either they decided the perceived threat will never materialize, management decided they don’t care if it does, or Skynet is already in charge of OpenAI.

THE PROSECUTORS SHOULD BE DESTROYED OVER THIS: ‘Fat Leonard’ Scandal Felony Convictions Thrown Out Over Prosecutorial Misconduct. Either they prosecuted innocent people, or they’ve let guilty people get away.

THE DISGRACE THAT IS TODAY’S CANADA: This Is What State Harassment Looks Like.

KRUISER: Good Luck Chasing the Youth Vote Unicorn, Grandpa Joe. “The campaign strategy from Team Biden is the equivalent of watching a football team with homefield advantage throw nothing but Hail Mary passes to start the third quarter.”

ROBIN HANSON: How Long Will Population Fall? “Many, including my colleague Bryan Caplan, are confident that the widely forecasted world population fall based on fertility trends won’t last long, because: selection. Many papers that make this point. . . . Another set of papers cautions that, sans heritability, fertility may continue to decline to far below replacement levels, and that selection effects may not be strong enough to counter such culturally-induced decline. For example, a 2022 Demography paper titled ‘Intergenerational Transmission Is Not Sufficient for Positive Long-Term Population Growth.’ I find it suspicious that though we didn’t see such selection effects over the many centuries decline of the Ancient Greek and Roman empires, nor in other ancient empires, nor over the last few centuries of declining fertility, we are just now about to see it kick in strong enough to reverse fertility decline.”

Related: Free Will, Children, and the Great Filter: Thoughts on the Population Implosion.

ONCE YOU LOSE THEM, YOU CAN’T GET THEM BACK:  Norms.

ONLY IF HEROES AND SAINTS AREN’T “NICE”:  Nice Guys Finish Last? Depends on One’s Definition of “Nice”

DIGGING UP THE EVIDENCE OF A WOKEIST CORRUPTION OPERATION:  The Reason Why Homeworld 3 Had A Terrible Story – Ruined By Woke DEI Involvement.

Datamined Cutscene Shows A VERY Different Homeworld 3 BEFORE It Was Ruined.

COVER-UPS BEGAN BEFORE THE FIFTIES:  Did Robert Maxwell start the censorship of science?

COVID WASN’T THE FIRST – MERELY THE LATEST:  Blood scandal and covid cover-up – spot the difference.

CAPPING MIGRANTS? THAT’S CRAZY ENOUGH IT JUST MIGHT WORK!  A cap on migrants is our only chance.

Also I fear much too little too late, but hey.

WHISTLEBLOWERS’ EMAILS REVEAL JOHN KERRY BLOCKED THE FBI AND DOJ FROM ARRESTING IRANIAN TERRORISTS AND AGENTS ON U.S. SOIL IN ORDER TO PROTECT HIS IRAN DEAL:  Whistleblowers’ emails reveal John Kerry blocked the FBI and DOJ from arresting Iranian terrorists and agents on U.S. soil in order to protect his Iran deal.

You don’t hate leftist apparatchiks enough. You might think you do, but you don’t.

MATH, ADDITION AND THE US DEBT:  If you had spent $1 million per day since the date the Assyrians under Tiglath-Pileser III first invaded Israel.