Hey Jasmineโฆ
Black pilot here.
I think you missed the plot.
Then again, thatโs becoming a pattern.
I graduated from West Point.
I went through Army flight school.
I learned to fly the AH-64 Apache.
I deployed to combat and flew 55 combat missions over Baghdad.
Nobody handed me a cockpit because of my skin color.
Nobody lowered the standards for me.
Nobody looked at me and said, โLetโs check a diversity box.โ
Thatโs what people like you donโt seem to understand.
Suggesting that Black pilots, Black engineers, Black doctors, or Black leaders need special preferences to succeed is not empowering, itโs insulting.
I didnโt want a different standard.
I wanted the same standard.
And when youโre flying into combat, the American people donโt care what race the pilot is.
They care whether the pilot is qualified.
Merit isnโt racist.
Excellence isnโt discriminatory.
And reducing every achievement to skin color says far more about your worldview than it does about mine.
THEY PLANNED THIS!
As we witness shady shifts in CA election results, we now know why Gavin Newsom and CA Democrats rushed SB 73 into law as an "emergency measureโ and passed AB 2230 a week before the election to undermine investigations of election fraud.ย Corrupt stuff is going on here, folks! WATCH:
While Iโm no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sandersโ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right.
The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations.
Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what weโve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book.
Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy.
Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax.
Thereโs just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion weโre already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI โ a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior.
We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of โtrust & safetyโ expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid).
That โsafetyโ agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI wonโt just moderate posts; it will curate reality โ with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior.
America wonโt win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. โ and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control.
Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.
"The endlessly repeated argument that most Americans are the descendants of immigrants ignores the fact that most Americans are NOT the descendants of ILLEGAL immigrants."
โ Thomas Sowell
The 1920-21 depression was the sharpest economic contraction in American history, yet you've probably never heard of it. Industrial production collapsed 32%. Unemployment spiked from 4% to 12% in twelve months. By every measure, this downturn dwarfed the initial shock of 1929.
President Warren Harding faced enormous pressure to "do something." Labor leaders demanded public works programs. Businessmen begged for bailouts and trade protection. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon advised Harding to slash government spending and let wages fall. Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover (yes, that Hoover) pushed for massive federal intervention.
Harding chose Mellon. The federal budget dropped from $6.4 billion to $3.2 billion in two years. No stimulus packages. No bailouts. No alphabet soup of new agencies. Government employment fell 40%. When you let markets clear, they clear fast.
The recovery started in July 1921. By 1923, unemployment had dropped to 2.4% and industrial production reached new highs. The entire episode lasted eighteen months from peak to full recovery. Compare that to Japan's lost decade of intervention, or the European debt crisis that dragged on for years, or our own jobless recovery after 2008.
Most economics textbooks omit this episode because liquidating malinvestments and allowing price adjustments works exactly as free market theory predicts: a fact that destroys the Keynesian narrative that government must spend its way out of recessions. Politicians today claim they learned the lessons of the 1930s, but they studiously ignore the more important lesson of 1921.
@GadSaad Congressman Dick Armey (1985-2003), a former economics professor and Chair at the University of North Texas, famously described academic politics as more "bloody and contentious" than the politics of Washington.