“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)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“I recently wrote about the significant gender tolerance gap. That naturally raises another question: are there controllable factors that actually help make people better or worse on this front? One obvious candidate is political involvement. Maybe political participation broadens people’s exposure to clashing viewpoints and forces them to wrestle with ideas they’d otherwise ignore. Maybe it teaches civic virtues like freedom of expression. Or maybe it simply funnels them into ideological echo chambers where bad habits grow and tempers get sharp. Turns out both stories might be true — just not for the same genders …” (11/19/25)
“Senior Pentagon officials have arrived in Ukraine to ‘discuss efforts to end the war’ with Russia, the US military has said. The team, led by US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, is expected to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Thursday. Reports began surfacing on Wednesday that the US and Russia had prepared a new framework peace plan, requiring significant concessions from Ukraine including giving up territory it still controls and dramatically cutting the size of its military. Neither Washington nor Moscow has officially confirmed the plan, drafted by President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev.” (11/20/25)
Source: International Guild of Professional Anarchists
“Politicians don’t stand up and shout, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ anymore. Their version is closer to: ‘Give me your fear and I’ll rent your freedom back to you, one crisis at a time.’ That’s the real slogan of modern governance, and Fearmongering 101 is the core course every aspiring ruler passes with honors. The curriculum is simple: invent or exaggerate a crisis, declare yourself the only solution, demand more power, money, and obedience, then repeat the process until the public is too anxious and exhausted to notice the chains tightening. This isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s standard operating procedure.” (11/19/25)
