Daddy's Home - Israel, Migrants, Florida, and TMTG
Israel
We talk a lot around here about AI, and the many harms it has or could someday inflict upon society. Well, it turns out someday is now, because AI is being used by the Israeli military to indiscriminately slaughter civilians in Gaza:
Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
Israel’s army leadership chose to treat AI-generated targets as though they had been thoroughly vetted by intel services, despite knowing the system made errors at least ten percent of the time. What little human oversight existed served only to provide cursory checks:
One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.
If this were a dystopian science fiction novel, a nefarious AI targeting every soldier-seeming male and issuing precision strikes against them would be horrifying enough. Yet somehow the Israeli version is even worse:
Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
If you’ve been following the Israeli siege of Gaza, you may have read stories about journalists and others being wiped out at home, with their families, via indiscriminate air strike. Well, it turns out they were actually quite discriminate - in that the army was well aware it was killing innocent women and children. Nor does the wanton disregard for life end there:
In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers.
The stories of entire apartment buildings being leveled is, again, entirely intentional. It was, in fact, Israeli army policy. A cost saving measure. The army operationalized the murder of civilians in pursuit of single targets believed to be part of Hamas:
In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
If you wondered how we got to more than thirty thousand dead Palestinians, aid workers, journalists, and others in a mere five months, this is how. Israel has been using unreliable AI to tag tens of thousands of young men (the median age in Gaza is 18) and assassinate them in their homes with their families, using dumb bombs that can take down entire buildings.
This is why we talk about the dangers of AI, because while most of its current applications are more annoying than actively harmful, all it takes is a crisis for people to use it as a tool to enable and amplify atrocity.
Migrants
We are on track to accept more refugees into the US than we have in three decades. The Biden administration has reversed some of the draconian Trump-era policies and may admit 125,000 new entrants into the country in 2024. Not only is it the morally correct thing to do, immigrants also help power our economy, often taking jobs Americans don’t want.
With the good news out of the way, we can talk about the heinous treatment of migrants seeking to enter the US via the southern border with Mexico. Here is a story about the hundreds of people who die each year trying to cross a single section of the Rio Grande river. Warning: it contains graphic descriptions of the dead, including children.
The decisions that turned the river and its border towns into sites of mass graves are political, but a well-meaning US presidency isn’t remotely capable of addressing them - the problem is far beyond anything our current system was set up to handle.
It would not be sufficient to simply hand CBP enough money to properly staff border stations, or build housing to handle the influx of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers each year. CBP and ICE and their associated law enforcement agencies are violently hostile towards the people they are meant to interact with and, ideally, help.
Recall the infamous ‘police assault’ in Times Square in January of this year, which the police and conservative media gleefully presented as proof of their caricature of migrants as violent thugs. The two men accused of actually scuffling with the cops (neither of whom was seriously injured) remain at large, but that didn’t stop both the NYPD and ICE from bringing the full weight of the justice system to bear on two other young men who happened to be nearby:
But two friends, Servita-Arocha and 21-year-old Wilson Juarez, neither of whom are accused of touching the officers are both being detained on Rikers Island, after being apprehended mysteriously by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
They were arrested after the scuffle, but released by the DA’s office while it tried to determine whether they should be charged. But the cops (and the governor for some reason) were outraged, and took matters into their own hands:
It’s unclear if ICE officers were with the police when they made the arrests, or if the NYPD took the three into custody and then passed them to immigration authorities. The first scenario would be highly unusual for a routine arrest warrant, the second a violation of the city’s sanctuary policies barring police from enforcing federal immigration laws or honoring ICE requests to detain immigrants in a situation such as this one…
It would matter, if the NYPD or ICE could be held in any way accountable for violating laws. The government accused the pair of gang affiliations, but passed them back to the DA for the original assault accusation rather than attempt to prove it.
Then the NYPD did this:
Back at the apartment, NYPD officers guarded the Zerpa family’s door for two days, telling them they wouldn’t be allowed back in if they left. THE CITY visited the family, and officers on scene confirmed that no one who left the apartment would be permitted to return. The kids missed school, and by the second day they’d run out of food.
[…]
By the afternoon of the second day, the two officers stationed at their apartment door at the time took pity on the family and let them out for a brief trip to buy supplies. That evening, officers appeared with a search warrant and turned the apartment upside down, breaking several doors and smashing up an armoire they later dragged out in black construction bags. Police confiscated all the mobile devices and the one laptop inside the apartment.
The two young men are in Rikers, bail denied despite being accused of minor crimes. Their families were terrorized by the NYPD and ICE, locked in their apartment to starve. This is how we treat people tangentially associated with a light scuffle, and it is why the immigration system as it currently exists is beyond reform. The only solution to bringing people eager to do nothing more than improve their lives and our precious economy into this country is to tear the current apparatus down and start over.
Florida
I am not the only person with the opinion that Florida has become the destination of choice for some of the country’s worst people, but that is perhaps unfair to the people who already live there. As someone who grew up in Massachusetts, I am sympathetic to the argument that you can’t choose where you’re from, and for ensconced Floridians it may be impractical to leave simply because a bunch of retired NYPD showed up in your neighborhood and took over the HOA.
Inflows of MAGA and milder flavors of shithead aren’t only pushing up housing and living costs for existing residents, though, it turns out things also suck for people who came to Florida because they liked what they saw on the label:
One of the first signs Barb Carter’s move to Florida wasn’t the postcard life she’d envisioned was the armadillo infestation in her home that caused $9,000 in damages. Then came a hurricane, ever present feuding over politics, and an inability to find a doctor to remove a tumor from her liver.
Many states advertise an easy, inexpensive lifestyle in order to attract new residents and tasty tax inflows, but Florida’s reality is anything but:
In the South Florida region, which includes Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach, consumer prices in February were up nearly 5% over the prior year, compared to 3.2% nationally, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
[…]
Homeowners insurance rates in Florida rose 42% last year to an average of $6,000 annually, driven by hurricanes and climate change, and car insurance in Florida is more than 50% higher than the national average, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
Despite one of the highest costs of living in the nation thanks to skyrocketing insurance rates and lax state regulation, Florida’s job market hasn’t kept pace:
The median salary in Florida is among the lowest in the country, according to payroll processor ADP.
Rather than addressing these issues, the state’s governor and its hard-right legislature spend most of their time passing Cold War-style bills requiring schools to teach the evils of Communism. Running your state based entirely on Twitter’s outrage du jour is becoming increasingly unpalatable - 700,000 people moved to Florida in 2022, but nearly half a million left the state.
Florida is now run entirely by and for culture warriors, and its changing demographics reflect this nihilist approach to governance. It’s hard to know what happens after DeSantis leaves office in 2027, but the state will continue to spiral as long as he and his allies are in power.
TMTG
While speculating about the public debut of Trump’s not-actually-a-media-company two weeks ago I said:
I disagree with these takes because there is one characteristic of modern right-wing zealots people are discounting - utter certainty that they are the smartest people in the room. Believing that you are both investing in your beloved Emperor and are going to become unfathomably rich as a result are not contradictory opinions in the minds of these people. Trump voters are, to a person, temporarily embarrassed millionaires who have earned the right to exist outside the social contract.
And then the Washington Post talked to some of them:
Many of Truth Social’s investors say they’re in it for the long haul. Todd Schlanger, an interior designer at a furniture store in West Palm Beach who said Trump had been one of his customers, said he’s invested about $20,000 in total and is buying new shares every week.
While the author frames these MAGA lifers as true believers willing to lose their shirts if it means ‘supporting’ Trump (I suspect no one has pointed out they aren’t actually buying shares from Trump himself (yet), and are actually just enriching other investors) their rhetoric tells another story:
In a Truth Social post last week, he encouraged “everyone who supports Donald Trump and Truth [Social to] buy a share everyday” and asked, “Do you think we have hit bottom?”
[…]
He suspects the recent drops in share price have been the result of “stock manipulation” from an “organized effort” to make the company look bad.
[…]
The user @manofpeace123, who said they bought shares at $65 and that 71 percent of their portfolio was DJT stock, said on Wednesday that investing was a way of telling Trump, “I believe in you and I stand with you through good times and bad.” But a day later, the user added: “can’t help but feel sad. … feel like I’m trying to catch a falling knife.”
There are many such quotes in the piece and if you are seeking solace from the never-ending coverage of Trump’s courtroom shenanigans or the bloodbath in the Middle East or whatever, I suggest you read the whole piece.
Trump Media has moved to issue millions more shares to insiders, and the plan appears to be to flood the market and cash in as much as possible on the couple hundred thousand rubes bemoaning their disappearing life savings on Truth Social. Whether Trump is able to extract enough from his sham company to pay his extravagant legal bills and keep the lights on in his various homes is an open question, but TMTG is an ambitious attempt at wringing his MAGA base dry.
Every one of Trump’s various scams over the years has promised success and riches while padding his pockets. He’s openly looting his political party, because extraction is the only strategy he knows, and Republicans are too cowardly to push back. Perhaps, like the DJT bagholders, they’ve fooled themselves into thinking remaining in Trump’s orbit will see some of the plunder trickle down in their direction.
Short Cons
Defector - “The most general description of AI as it exists now—which is as an array of expensive, resource-intensive, environmentally disastrous products which have no apparent socially useful use cases, no discernible road to profitability, and do not work—is something like the apotheosis of Silicon Valley vacancy.”
NBC News - "During one seven-day period in March, seven of the most widely shared pro-Nazi posts on X accrued 4.5 million views in total. One post with 1.9 million views promoted a false and long-debunked conspiracy theory that 6 million Jews did not die in the Holocaust."
Insider - "Men tend to take more financial risks than women. As investors, they're more prone to overconfidence, which often leads them to trade more — and, as a result, get lower returns. Men generally gamble more than women, and they've been found to have lower levels of impulsive coping in gambling settings."
ProPublica - “A special State Department panel recommended months ago that Secretary of State Antony Blinken disqualify multiple Israeli military and police units from receiving U.S. aid after reviewing allegations that they committed serious human rights abuses.”
Defector - “Why does every Cybertruck driver I glance at appear to be simultaneously peacocking for attention but also totally embarrassed, haunted by the unexamined knowledge that as a maneuver in a culture war they paid $100,000 for a car that doesn't work?”
Sherwood - “After a long legal battle that included an unsuccessful US Supreme Court appeal, Argentina lost the case last year and was ordered to pay YPF shareholders $16 billion. Burford’s share of the pot: $6.2 billion (on just a $17 million investment).”
Harpers - ““It is probably the deepest and most existential crisis it’s ever been in. The writers are losing out. The middle layer of craftsmen are losing out. The top end of the talent are making more money than they ever have, but the nuts-and-bolts people who make the industry go round are losing out dramatically.””
Know someone thinking of moving to Florida? Send them HERE!