The David Frum Show, 11/19/25
Source: The Atlantic
“The End of the American Empire.” (11/19/25)
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2025/11/the-david-frum-show-margaret-macmillan/684981
Source: The Atlantic
“The End of the American Empire.” (11/19/25)
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2025/11/the-david-frum-show-margaret-macmillan/684981
Source: The Daily Beast
by Michael Ian Black
“I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is a loathsome, self-serving narcissist. But if she can make life even one iota more unpleasant for the current President of the United States, then I say go for it, mean girl. Go for it all the live long day.” (11/19/25)
Source: The Dispatch
by Scott Lincicome
“A few months ago, an impromptu trip to my neighborhood wine store turned into an awesome lesson in spontaneous order, American entrepreneurship, and creative destruction. There, I met several small-business owners who were proudly sampling their new products and eager to tell me all about them, their upstart businesses, and the booming local industry to which they belonged. Being a dork, I drank up their stories for almost an hour …. these happy folks weren’t selling beer or wine — they were selling THC-infused drinks that’ve become all the rage at local stores, breweries, bars, and restaurants here in North Carolina, thanks to nothing more than consumer interest, good ol’ fashioned American industriousness, and the federal government getting out of the way. Now, that same government is putting these and many other entrepreneurs out of business — and for no good reason.” (11/19/25)
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/capitolism/congress-hemp-ban-thc-seltzers/
Source: France 24 [French state media]
“The Paris public prosecutor’s office will investigate allegations that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence platform made antisemitic comments. … Last July, French prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into X, over allegations that the company manipulated its algorithms for the purposes of ‘foreign interference.’ ‘The Holocaust denial comments relayed by the artificial intelligence Grok on X have been included in the ongoing investigation conducted by the cybercrime division of the Paris public prosecutor’s office, and the functioning of the AI will be analyzed in this context,’ the Paris public prosecutor’s office told POLITICO, confirming a report from AFP. The League for Human Rights, or LDH, also announced Wednesday that it was filing a complaint against the AI model. The messages posted on X by Grok are a ‘denial of crimes against humanity,’ according to the human rights organization.” (11/19/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
“The Critical Importance of Civil Liberties with Ron Paul.” (11/19/25)
Source: The Atlantic
by Jonathan Lemire
“President donald trump’s administration has been embroiled in scandal and sloppiness. His own party has defied his political pressure. His senior staff has been beset by infighting. He has sparred with reporters and offered over-the-top praise to an authoritarian with a dire human-rights record. A signature hard-line immigration policy has polled poorly. And Republicans have begun to brace themselves for a disastrous midterm election. That was 2017. But it’s also 2025.
Ten months into the president’s second term, Trump 2.0 is for the first time starting to resemble the chaotic original. And that new sense of political weakness in the president has not just emboldened Democrats who have been despondent for much of the past year. It’s also begun to give Republicans a permission structure for pushing back against Trump and jockeying for power with an eye to the elections ahead. This was not the plan.” (11/19/25)
Source: The New Republic
by Brynn Tannehill
“When the shutdown ended, Arizona Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva was finally sworn in, 50 days after she was elected. She promptly signed the discharge petition to release the full Epstein files, getting it past 218 signatures and forcing a vote in the House. Democrats were jubilant in the expectation that this would finally expose Trump and bring us to a point where Republicans are perhaps forced to remove him from office — or at least forced to reckon with his moral deficiencies. The problem is, even assuming the best case for Democrats (and the worst for Trump), and even though every House Republican but one hopped on the ‘release the files’ bandwagon, neither of these things are likely to ever happen.” (11/19/25)
https://newrepublic.com/article/203379/trump-escape-justice-epstein-files
Source: Axios
“The White House is floating an executive order to override state AI laws by launching legal challenges and conditioning federal grants after President Trump publicly backed a federal regulation standard, per a copy of the draft seen by Axios. … The ‘Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy’ executive order calls on government agencies to move aggressively to end a patchwork of state laws in favor of a ‘minimally burdensome national standard.'” [editor’s note: How about NO government-created, government enforced “standard?” – TLK] (11/19/25)
Source: National Public Radio [US state media]
“Hundreds Of Immigrants Arrested In Chicago Lack Criminal Records.” (11/19/25)
Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander
“Most discourse on AI is low-quality. Most discourse on consciousness is super-abysmal-double-low quality. Multiply these — or maybe raise one to the exponent of the other, or something — and you get the quality of discourse on AI consciousness. It’s not great. … But a rare bright spot has appeared: a seminal paper published earlier this month in Trends In Cognitive Science, Identifying Indicators Of Consciousness In AI Systems.” (11/19/25)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-paper