March 7 2024
The handoff
FLASH Senate Republican Leader and frienemy Mitch McConnell endorses Trump
1 Trump ends Reagan’s hold on Republican Party
2 Federal government secretly flew 320k migrants to 43 US airports in 2023
3 Fallout from cyberattack on health system 2 weeks ago lingers
4 Federal government cracks down on excessive credit card fees
5 Iran seeks to build naval base on Red Sea
Correction
3/7/1876 Alexander Graham Bell patents telephone
see ad astra on x @greg_loving
1 Trump ends Reagan’s hold on Republican Party
Donald Trump’s sweep through the primaries Tuesday erases any lingering doubt that a Republican Party long-defined by allegiance to Ronald Reagan’s world view has been transformed into a party singularly dominated by Trump’s. With Nikki Haley ending her bid, Trump effectively clinches his third consecutive presidential nomination and cements his role as party leader. “When a party nominates somebody three times in a row, it’s not a fluke or an accident — it’s because the party belongs to him,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and veteran of Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. For decades, Republican politicians faithfully hewed to the platform Reagan established with his 1980 election: the so-called three-legged stool of a hawkish foreign policy, free-market economics and social conservatism. Trump challenged that orthodoxy when he began his first presidential campaign in 2015 by championing tariffs on imports — particularly from China — sharp immigration restrictions and an isolationist foreign policy. He de-emphasized hot-button social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage and defended Medicare and Social Security, entitlement programs that generations of conservative Republicans had sought to cut.
“Every Republican institution of any significant power has now gone full Trump,” Bannon said. “And every important institutionalist has been removed, from Kevin McCarthy in the House to Mitch McConnell in the Senate to Ronna McDaniel at the Republican National Committee. Some people may not like it. But it’s all Trump and his MAGA army now.”
Bloomberg
2 Federal government secretly flew 320k migrants to 43 US airports in 2023
Thanks to an ongoing Center for Immigration Studies Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the public now knows that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has approved secretive flights that last year alone ferried hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens from foreign airports into some 43 American ones over the past year, all pre-approved on a cell phone app.
But while large immigrant-receiving cities and media lay blame for the influx on Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, CBP has withheld from the Center – and apparently will not disclose – the names of the 43 U.S. airports that have received 320,000 inadmissible aliens from January through December 2023, nor the foreign airports from which they departed. The agency’s lawyers have cited a general “law enforcement exception” without elaborating – until recently – on how releasing airport locations would harm public safety beyond citing “the sensitivity of the information.”
Center for Immigration Studies
3 Fallout from cyberattack on health system 2 weeks ago lingers
An urgent care chain in Ohio may be forced to stop paying rent and other bills to cover salaries. In Florida, a cancer center is racing to find money for chemotherapy drugs to avoid delaying critical treatments for its patients. And in Pennsylvania, a primary care doctor is slashing expenses and pooling all of her cash — including her personal bank stash — in the hopes of staying afloat for the next two months. These are just a few examples of the severe cash squeeze facing medical care providers — from large hospital networks to the smallest of clinics — in the aftermath of a cyberattack two weeks ago that paralyzed the largest U.S. billing and payment system in the country. The attack forced the shutdown of parts of the electronic system operated by Change Healthcare, a sizable unit of UnitedHealth Group, leaving hundreds, if not thousands, of providers without the ability to obtain insurance approval for services ranging from a drug prescription to a mastectomy — or to be paid for those services. In recent days, the chaotic nature of this sprawling breakdown in daily, often invisible transactions led top lawmakers, powerful hospital industry executives and patient groups to pressure the U.S. government for relief. On Tuesday, the Health and Human Services Department announced that it would take steps to try to alleviate the financial pressures on some of those affected: Hospitals and doctors who receive Medicare reimbursements would mainly benefit from the new measures.
NYT
4 Federal government cracks down on excessive credit card fees
The U.S. government announced Tuesday it would sharply limit the fees that credit card companies can charge customers who fall behind on their bills, aiming to cap the penalties at $8 in a move that immediately drew fierce resistance from financial giants. The rules arrived as part of a suite of fresh federal efforts to promote competition and crack down on unfair or illegal pricing across the economy, which President Biden has blasted as one of the primary sources of rising costs facing American families over the past year.
Under the new regulations, credit card issuers, including Bank of America, Capital One, Citibank and JPMorgan Chase, cannot charge more than $8 for a late payment unless they can explicitly point to data showing they must impose higher fees to make up for losses.
WaPo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/05/credit-card-fees-cap-8-month/
5 Iran seeks to build naval base on Red Sea
Iran reportedly requested Sudanese permission to establish a permanent naval base on the Red Sea coast, which would support Iranian out-of-area naval operations and attacks on international shipping. The Wall Street Journal reported the Iranian request on March 3, citing a senior Sudanese intelligence official. Ahmad Hasan Mohamed—an intelligence adviser to the Sudanese military leader—said that Iran offered “a helicopter-carrying warship” in exchange for Sudan allowing Iran to establish the base. Mohamed stated that Iran wanted the base to gather intelligence on maritime traffic around the Suez Canal and Israel and to station warships at the base.
Understanding War
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-march-4-2024
Correction
Yesterday I posted this tweet from venture capitalist Marc Andresen:
2 AI secrets are easy for enemy nations to steal
Let's assume, for discussion, that AI in 2024 is like atomic technology in 1943, that AI should therefore be handled like the Manhattan Project, and that the specific risk is that the Chinese Communist Party gains access to American AI. And let's use OpenAI as an example of an American AI R&D facility.
What counterintelligence capabilities does OpenAI have to prevent China from stealing our AI?
What you'd expect to see is a rigorous security vetting and clearance process for everyone from the CEO to the cook, with monthly polygraphs and constant internal surveillance. Hardened physical facilities, what are called SCIFs (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities), US Marines or the equivalent as 24x7 armed guards, Faraday cages and electronic countermeasures. Alarms going off if someone carries so much as an Apple AirTag into the building. And someone very much like Boris Pash overseeing it all, interrogating and terrorizing people in all directions.
Remember, even WITH tight security, the Russians still got the atomic bomb from the US via their spies in the 1940s. The first Russian atomic bomb is said to have been "wire for wire compatible" with the American Nagasaki bomb, thanks to David Greenglass and the Rosenbergs. So to protect AI, you need even TIGHTER security. Remember, this is a civilizational threat!
Is this what we see at OpenAI or any other American AI lab? No. In fact, what we see is the opposite -- the security equivalent of swiss cheese. Chinese penetration of these labs would be trivially easy using any number of industrial espionage methods, such as simply bribing the cleaning crew to stick USB dongles into laptops. My own assumption is that all such American AI labs are fully penetrated and that China is getting nightly downloads of all American AI research and code RIGHT NOW.
The conclusion is obvious: OpenAI must be immediately nationalized.
I missed a later tweet, which was set up by the first. Apologies for the error.
Of course every part of this is absurd.
(1) AI isn't nukes, it's math.
(2) Big companies, small companies, independent developers, and open source communities should be free to pursue AI.
(3) AI companies should not be nationalized, de jure or de facto (government-protected cartel).
(4) Restricting AI means restricting math, software, and chips, which taken seriously would impose tyranny far beyond anything even imagined by the Communists and Fascists of the 20th Century.
(5) AI authoritarians should learn from history and rethink their positions.
@pmarca
https://x.com/pmarca/status/1764408581405982988?s=46&t=nVb-5uC_WM3Cp0R0dGiqHQ
3/7/1876 Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone
Thanks for reading!
