Our Health and Human Services Department has been diverting funds earmarked for other purposes to pay to reunite the families it separated at the border. Among the programs affected are rural health programs, which reminds me that this whole imbroglio isn't a bug, it's a feature -- our HHS is literally taking money from rural Americans and giving it to immigrants so that rural Americans will conclude that ITZ TEH IMMIGRANTZ FAULTZ!!!!! Hey, you gotta keep the hate machine running somehow.
Administration "loyalists" are replacing long-time Veterans Administration employees at a rapid pace. And here, too: replacing good employees (including an "experienced scheduler," remember all those wait lists that were in the news in 2015?) with unqualified loyalists helps assure that the VA runs down, and when it does, our Administration will say THIS PROVEZ THAT TEH GUBMINT DOESN'T WORKZ!!!!! and privatize everything. When I say "incompetence is malice," this is kinda what I mean.
Former Sen. Joe Liebermann, himself a victim in a 2006 Democratic primary, rues the "outside the mainstream" politics of NY-14 Democratic House nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and urges NY-14 residents to vote for the man she vanquished in the primary instead. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez sure is making a lot of enemies among folks who are actually outside the mainstream -- if we measure the mainstream by what regular Americans think, rather than the fake "mainstream" of the Beltway chattering class. I didn't realize, though, that Mr. Crowley was on the Working Families Party line, which conjures up the prospect of a lot of right-learning Democrats voting the Working Families Party line. That could be trouble, but maybe some good can come of that, too -- like hard hats remembering that they actually have a lot of liberal opinions.
From the "How Reassuring Is This?" file: Janelle Shane tells us that "The AI Revolution Will Be Led By Toasters, Not Droids," since artificial intelligence works a lot better when it has a lot fewer tasks to handle. Which makes sense, though it also seems that the more single-task-centered AI bots aren't that good, either. The human mind, as I've said many times, is a wondrous and complex thing, and we barely know how it works, so we're probably not going to be creating C3POs anytime soon -- though a lot of banksters will make a lot of money off dumb investors before that's too obvious, and more than a few big corporations will fall because they move to AI far too quickly. (As an aside, that AI-generated "Spread Chicken Rice" recipe made me laugh out loud. Never, ever forget to seed your hearts before cooking!)
Finally, our Homeland (sic) Security (sic) Secretary says, in re the Nazi wannabes rioting in Charlottesville last year, that "it's not that one side is right, one side is wrong" and "(a)nybody that is advocating violence, we need to work to mitigate." What stunning wishy-washiness, and not just because our President's votaries squeal when liberals use words like "mitigate." Fact is, more people commit violence than advocate violence, and just about everyone who commits violence feels they had no choice! And, in this debate, one side is right and one side is wrong -- and these sides are, respectively, "everyone but white supremacists" and "white supremacists." Remember when I said we had to unlearn the post-modern notion that "there's no such thing as good and evil"? Yeah, this is why.
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