News Vérité

Did I hear this right? A  juror in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, who was charged with the murder of her three children, an act that she admitted doing, thinks a proper verdict would have given women the license to carry out such acts willy-nilly. Maybe I’m reading too much into her statement, but here it is, courtesy of juror Paula Devlin on CBS Mornings: “We knew that this was a turning point, and this would be something that could change something to make it better for other women.” Better to do what? Get away with murdering their own children, or maybe their husbands? How about housekeepers, or salespersons who knock on the door? Just blame it on the stress that women are put through courtesy of a misogynistic society. The other part of this juror-reveal-all media frenzy is that the lone juror who refused to go along with this vote “to change something to make it better for other women” has been identified as a black man. There you go, white racism on the jury’s behalf. Anyway, it appears to me that this lone holdout, even if he were a man from Mars with purple skin and one eye,

The GOP just finished its novel-idea Midterm Convention. The faithful sat through an endless onslaught of speakers, and Mr. MAGA himself, Donald Trump, spoke twice, the first time for an hour and 45 minutes. I tuned in and out while mostly viewing NFL games on Wednesday and Thursday. When I did change the channel during the times when President Trump was speaking, I had the sensation that “I think I’ve heard this hundreds of times before.” In his book, “The Art of the Deal,” Trump writes about how he uses “truthful hyperbole” to drive home a point and seal a deal. His Wednesday night speech, from what I could gather while tuning in and out, was a concatenation of not-very-truthful hyperboles. I’m not sure if he mentioned it Wednesday, but a hyperbole he keeps making is how much foreign investment is being made in the U.S. under his watch. Earlier this year, he had the figure at $19 trillion. Now, he’s upped it to $20-plus trillion. No one outside his administration has been able to find more than $3 trillion in pledges, not real investments. Rather than hyperbole, a lot of what Trump claims in his talks more resembles outright

Not long ago, the proposition that artificial intelligence could cause human extinction was largely confined to speculative fiction and niche online discussion forums. Today, the question of whether advanced AI poses an existential threat—often colloquialized as the fear that “AI can kill us all”—occupies a central place in international diplomacy, academic research, and the boardrooms of the world’s most valuable technology companies. The debate is not about Hollywood scenarios involving sentient machines acting out of spite, hatred, or robotic malice. Instead, it turns on complex questions of computer science, game theory, and cognitive architecture: Can humanity reliably control systems that may one day surpass human intelligence? Are the apocalyptic warnings grounded in sound technical reasoning, or do they mistake sophisticated pattern-matching software for autonomous, conscious entities? To understand this debate, one must examine both the specific theoretical mechanisms through which alarmists believe AI could endanger civilization and the empirical arguments advanced by skeptics who believe those fears are fundamentally misplaced. The Mechanics of Existential Risk: How AI Could Pose a Threat Those who view artificial intelligence as an existential risk (often called “x-risk” by researchers or safety theorists) focus primarily on hypothetical future systems known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)