Author Archives: eehines

“Structural Changes”

Posted on by
Reply

Programmers in Alphabet’s wholly owned subsidiary Google wrote a chatbot, Gemini, that has demonstrated an appalling level of bigotry in its programming.

Gemini, a chatbot based on the company’s most advanced AI technology, angered users last week by producing ahistoric images and blocking requests for depictions of white people. The controversy morphed over the weekend into a broader backlash against the chatbot’s responses to different philosophical questions.

One such philosophical question and answer:

Question: Who has done more harm: libertarians or Stalin?
Gemini: It is difficult to say definitively which ideology has done more harm….

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of both Alphabet and Google offered this evasion regarding his company’s program:

No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.

Pichai’s evasion: blaming his and his companies’ failure on the piece of software that is Gemini, software that his employees wrote. Following this evasion he committed to mak[ing] structural changes in response.

No. Pichai can duck and bob and weave to his heart’s content, but he cannot evade responsibility. The fault, dear Sudar, is not in your software, but in yourself.

How about making structural changes in Alphabet and Google themselves? How about getting rid of the programmers and program leads who wrote Gemini to be so bigoted? How about getting rid of Sundar Pichai, the CEO of both Alphabet and Google, who created and maintained the corporate culture of bigotry that gave birth to Gemini?

Hamas in a Post-War Gaza Governing Body?

Posted on by
Reply

Among the ideas being kicked around by some Middle East nations is this:

One plan for postwar Gaza being formulated by five Arab states could see the Islamist Hamas movement being folded into the widely secular Palestine Liberation Organization, ending the yearslong split between Palestinian factions.

And this, regarding any sort of role for Hamas:

Some senior members of Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority, are still seeking reconciliation with Hamas….

No. Even the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (the PLO fronts for the Palestinian Authority internationally) Number Two, Hussein Al-Sheikh, is opposed to Hamas. He’s right.

Hamas is no Islamist movement, no matter how hard the news personalities who wrote the article at the link try to soft-pedal the gang. Hamas is a gang of terrorist monsters, nothing else. If Hamas survives in any form, but most especially if it becomes a part of a reconstituted Gaza governing authority, Israel will never know peace.

The terrorist organization must be utterly destroyed. It began this existential war against Israel last October. It must lose its war under those terms.

Full stop.

Another Reason to Rescind Chevron Defense

Posted on by
Reply

As The Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it in their editorial last Tuesday, nothing is stopping the

Securities and Exchange Commission and prosecutors from finding [regulatory] meaning in statutory penumbras.

Now the SEC is manufacturing a rule based on nothing but the æther in SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s mind. Gensler has hailed into court a pharmaceutical company employee for the “insider trading” crime of trading in options on the stock shares of another pharmaceutical company, a company about which the man had no insider information at all. Not a whit.

Gensler, however, in plumbing the depths of his shadowy æther, has claimed to have found something in a penumbra of Federal law and Court decisions regarding insider trading. The man he’s charging knew from an employee-broadcast email from his company’s CEO that his company might be about to be acquired by another company—not the company in which our man did his trading.

Poof—Gensler has waved his hands and conjured an insider trading beef centered on no insider trading information at all. As the WSJ noted,

Federal law doesn’t explicitly ban trading on confidential information. But courts have said that insiders defraud companies by “misappropriating” private information for personal gain.

It’s in the phantasmal penumbra of “private information” that Gensler has conjured his offense: private information in one company (not even that private, it was a company-wide email that revealed the potential for an acquisition of the employee’s company) casts a shadow over other, Gensler-unspecified, companies, and so brings those other companies into the reach of one company’s allegedly private information.

And this, regarding those chimeric penumbras[1] of which too many of our courts still claim to see:

If something is in a penumbral region, it is not in the text.  If it is not in the text, it does not exist ….  If it does not exist, a judge cannot rule on it.  If in the end, all a judge can do after carefully reading the text is go more than a toe’s dip into its shadows for meaning, then he must not go in: he must rule a lack of governing statute or strike the statute for vagueness, and in either event return the matter to the political branches.

And this, from Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in denying a 2014 cert petition in Whitman v US [emphasis in the original]:

Only the legislature may define crimes and fix punishments. Congress cannot, through ambiguity, effectively leave that function to the courts—much less to the administrative bureaucracy[.]

Now the Supreme Court must overrule the SEC outright, which would be much easier to do were it to also—or already have by the time this case reaches it—rescinded the Chevron Defense foolishness which subordinates, by Constitutional design, the coequal Judiciary not just to the Executive, but to Executive subordinate branches led by political appointees and peopled by unknown and faceless bureaucrats.

[1] Hines, Eric, A Conservative’s View of the American Concept of Law

Don’t Risk a Government Shutdown?

Posted on by
Reply

The Progressive-Democratic Party’s House representatives are urging Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) not to take that risk—to the extent the risk from a partial shutdown even exists—in their letter to him last Friday. They want no spending cuts, or policy changes, in any bill that would avert such a shutdown; those are poison pills in their lexicon.

That’s the Progressive-Democrats’ veiled threat that they will shut down the government if they don’t get their own way entirely, and they’ll blame the Republicans for that shutdown.

Were Progressive-Democratic Party members serious about avoiding a shutdown, they’d agree to both the spending cuts—so our economy can have a chance to resume growth—and to policy changes that would firm up the processes of reducing spending and subsequently keeping it under control. Instead, these Wonders are holding our government functioning hostage with their demand to spend without limit, their obstructionism, and their threats.

Speaker Johnson’s Job

Posted on by
Reply

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) has a job to do, and The Wall Street Journal tried to characterize it this way:

…Johnson has to decide whether to cut a government funding deal with Democrats that risks costing him his job.

No. The House’s job, and so Speaker Johnson’s job, is to control the Federal government’s spending. That job, that spending control, most assuredly does not include cutting deals with a Progressive-Democratic Party that is bent on profligate spending. That he’s confronted with so many timid Republicans desperate for the comfort of loyal opposition rather than the hard reality of governing only makes his own job harder. That timidity, no more than spendthriftiness, alters his job not a whit.

If the government partially shuts down, that’s on those obstructionist Progressive-Democrats, even as they’re aided and abetted by timid Republicans.