This is F%$#ing Inspired

Self-driving cars are all the rage right now, though I really don’t see the tech taking off for a very long time.

The problem is how to make an AI play nice with people on the road, who are inattentive, stupid, violent, vindictive, and frequently malicious.

And once you do, how do you test it?

Rolling it out on the road, with an operator in the drivers seat, is expensive.

Just the liability insurance would be insane.

Obviously, one solution, for the software at least, is to test it in a virtual environment, but this raises an important question: Where can one find a virtual reality that even comes close to mimicking the insanity that is humans driving cars?

Three Words: Grand Theft Auto:

Developers building self-driving cars can now take their AI agents for a spin in the simulated open world of Grand Theft Auto V – via OpenAI’s machine-learning playground, Universe.

The open-source MIT-licensed code gluing GTA V to Universe is maintained by Craig Quiter, who works for Otto – the Uber-owned startup that delivered 51,744 cans of Budweiser over 193km (120 miles) using a self-driving truck.

The software comes with a trained driving agent; all developers need is a copy of the game to get cracking. After that, programmers can swap out the demo AI model with their own agents to test their code and neural networks. Universe and Quiter’s integration code takes care of the fiddly interfacing with the game.

Video games new and old provide great training grounds for developing reinforcement learning agents, which learn through trial and error – or rather, trial and reward when things go right. OpenAI’s Universe was released in December, and is a wedge of open-source middleware that connects game controls and video displays to machine-learning agents so they can be trained in the virtual arenas.

Admittedly, GTA, with its hot rods, weapons, and rampant crime is only a pale shadow of commuting in Boston,* but putting self driving automobile software through its paces in the fictional burg of San Andreas, is a truly inspired reuse of code.

*No joke: I knew that it was time for me to leave New England when I screamed at someone for NOT cutting me off in a parking lot.

Facepalm

A few days ago, it was revealed that conservative hack Monica Crowley and Trump’s designee for senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council had extensively plagiarized in some of her books.

I didn’t consider it a big deal, because his cabinet is shaping up to be a complete cluster F%$#, and the wingnut welfare system ignores such things.

But today, I read that Crowley heavily plagiarized her Ph.D. dissertation:

Conservative commentator Monica Crowley, who is slated to serve in a top national security communications role in Donald Trump’s presidential administration, plagiarized thousands of words of her 2000 dissertation for her Columbia University Ph.D., a CNN KFile review has found.

On Monday, Politico reported that it found more than a dozen examples of plagiarism in Crowley’s Ph.D. dissertation. CNN’s KFile has found nearly 40 lengthy instances of Crowley lifting paragraphs from numerous sources, including several scholarly texts, the Associated Press, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The revelation comes on the heels of another CNN KFile investigation, which found more than 50 instances of plagiarism in Crowley’s 2012 book, “What The (Bleep) Just Happened.” On Tuesday, the book’s publisher, HarperCollins, announced that it would stop selling the book until “the author has the opportunity to source and revise the material.”

OK, this qualifies as a big deal, particularly since Columbia looks to have cause to rescind her doctorate.

Don’t worry though, she’ll be fine. She’s the Republican equivalent of a “Made Man”, so she will be taken care of.

A selected sample of plagiarism with a huge amount of yellow highlighting after the break:

Even the Liberal New Republic………

While I have said on many occasions that the new New Republic is better than when it was owned by virulent bigot Marty Peretz.

I find the articles far more thoughtful, and the self satisfied smugness and arrogant idiocy is in far smaller supply.

Still, sometimes it returns to form, and the stupidity is epic, such as when Senior Editor Jeet Heer suggests that in 2020, the Democratic party should run a celebrity rather than an accomplished politician for President.

Some points:

  • That’s what we did this year.  Hillary Clinton’s viability in politics has always been as a celebrity, wife of the Governor of Arkansas, and then wife of the President of the United States.*
  • Hillary lost.
  • Trump did not win through celebrity, but through selling the lie that he cares about the ordinary working folks. He did that by pointing out the truth that the the celebrity-political complex did now.
  • It reinforces the idea that the Democratic Party is out of touch with the real world.  It’s why the hit musical is called La La Land, and not The Real World.†
  • It serves to deflect from the real failure here, which was that the party establishment, in a stunning exhibition of solipsism, nominated one of the few political figures on the face of the earth‡ who could lose to Trump, because of this.

I get it: Nominating Meryl Streep is easier than fixing the party, and you support stupid lazy.

Gaaaahhhh!  I hate pseudo-intellectual contrarians.

*This is not to say that she is not a capable person, it’s just that if you look at political leaders, they don’t get to be the Senator from the 3rd largest state in the US, and then Secretary of State, and the nominee of the party without being a governor, or a mayor, or a congressman, or a city councilman.
†Also, if they called it The Real World, MTV would sue their asses.
‡Other names that spring to mind as other potential losers, are Clayton Williams, Adlai Stevenson, Kathleen McGinty, Patrick Murphy, Evan Bayh, Ted Strickland , Kathleen Kennedy Townshend, Martha Coakley, Frank Murkowski (lost to Palin, for F%$#’s sake), and George P. Mahoney. (Had to spend some time on the Google machine to get a list even this short.)

This ……… And President Mike Pence

Glenn Greenwald has a very good point here: As loathsome as Donald Trump is, there is no cause to cheer an effort by the US State Security Apparatus to engage what can only be called a soft coup against him:

In January, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address after serving two terms as U.S. president; the five-star general chose to warn Americans of this specific threat to democracy: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” That warning was issued prior to the decade long escalation of the Vietnam War, three more decades of Cold War mania, and the post-9/11 era, all of which radically expanded that unelected faction’s power even further.

 This is the faction that is now engaged in open warfare against the duly elected and already widely disliked president-elect, Donald Trump. They are using classic Cold War dirty tactics and the defining ingredients of what has until recently been denounced as “Fake News.”

 Their most valuable instrument is the U.S. media, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials. And Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss as well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing — eager — to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging those behaviors might be.

 The serious dangers posed by a Trump presidency are numerous and manifest. There are a wide array of legitimate and effective tactics for combatting those threats: from bipartisan congressional coalitions and constitutional legal challenges to citizen uprisings and sustained and aggressive civil disobedience. All of those strategies have periodically proven themselves effective in times of political crisis or authoritarian overreach.

 But cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election and impose its own policy dictates on the elected president is both warped and self-destructive. Empowering the very entities that have produced the most shameful atrocities and systemic deceit over the last six decades is desperation of the worst kind. Demanding that evidence-free, anonymous assertions be instantly venerated as Truth — despite emanating from the very precincts designed to propagandize and lie — is an assault on journalism, democracy, and basic human rationality. And casually branding domestic adversaries who refuse to go along as traitors and disloyal foreign operatives is morally bankrupt and certain to backfire on those doing it.

If the US state security apparatus is behind this, it is indicates a part of our bureaucracy is out of control and a clear and present danger to both our democracy and out civil rights.

There is, however, another possibility, which Greenwald obliquely alludes to:

There is a real danger here that this maneuver can harshly backfire, to the great benefit of Trump and to the great detriment of those who want to oppose him. If any of the significant claims in this “dossier” turn out to be provably false — such as Cohen’s trip to Prague — many people will conclude, with Trump’s encouragement, that large media outlets (CNN and BuzzFeed) and anti-Trump factions inside the government (CIA) are deploying “Fake News” to destroy him. In the eyes of many people, that will forever discredit — render impotent — future journalistic exposés that are based on actual, corroborated wrongdoing.

This is pretty clearly what Karl Rove did to CBS with GW Bush’s going AWOL from his responsibilities at the Air National Guard.

He floated out the story, Rather got fired, and Shrub’s draft dodging was permanently removed as a viable news story.

You create a story, it blows up, and then you point out a few seemingly-minor-but-obvious-in-retrospect-flaws, and you discredit any reporting in that vein for the next few years. (As an historical aside, Karl Rove once bugged his own campaign offices to get control of the news cycle in a campaign, so this is very much in the bag of tricks of both Republican campaign operatives and the GRU.)

I’m kind of hoping it’s the latter, because if it is the former, we are very close to a 7 Days in May scenario.

If RFK Were Alive, He’d Kick His Ass

Donald Trump reportedly has met with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and invited him to head up a planned “vaccine safety and scientific integrity commission” with an as-yet-unknown directive, although it looks like a shot across the bow of the nation’s ship of public health. It also now looks unclear whether or not Trump and Kennedy are on the same page about the invitation itself.

The idea of Kennedy being a part of any federal initiative related to vaccines is appalling, given his record of ignoring scientific evidence that doesn’t fit in with his ill-advised, fantastical fear-mongering about them. Why Trump would choose a lawyer over, say, someone with expertise in vaccines, toxicology and epidemiology is unclear. Perhaps it was Kennedy’s comparison of vaccines to “a holocaust” that drew Trump’s attention. What is clear is that these two are leaping at the chance to leverage some brand synergy.

I’ve covered Kennedy’s problematic response (or nonresponse) to scientific evidence as it relates to vaccines before. I’ve also covered Trump’s equally problematic relationship with facts as they relate to vaccines and autism, and the ways in which people who cling to one conspiracy theory are so likely to glom onto others. Paranoia can be a hell of a drug, for sure, something that savvy showmen easily manipulate for attention.

But it should surprise no one that Trump and Kennedy found each other. They’re not just having a meeting of conspiracy-oriented minds over vaccine fear-mongering. Maybe paranoia or an attraction to conspiracy theories led them to their mutually shared beliefs. But they also share another feature that keeps them from admitting when they’re wrong, and that’s their commitment to their respective name brands.

Kennedy’s claims about vaccines are staggeringly, blatantly incorrect. He’s had that pointed out to him, repeatedly. It may be that optimistic people looked at his name and lineage and thought that he might be reasonable and objective in assessing these facts. They mistook this Kennedy, who refuses to acknowledge even the most direct evidence controverting his claims, for someone who would go where data led him. Their mistake.

I don’t know if RFK would be more upset at his kid spewing flat-earth anti-vaxx bullsh%$, or his offer to work with Donald Trump, but I’m pretty sure that he would be peeling the bark off of his kid right now if he were still here.

The PBA Can Go Cheney Themselves

The national head of the Policemen Benevolent Association is claiming that all of the stories of forfeiture abuse is fake news.

And then he says that departments need the money.

Yes, police departments acting like crooks with the backing of the courts is such a good thing.

F%$# the PBA:

Chuck Canterbury, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, has been given an editorial megaphone over at the Daily Caller. Canterbury’s using this platform to defend the pretty much indefensible: civil asset forfeiture.
Colloquially known as “cops going shopping for things they want,” asset forfeiture supposedly is used to take funds and property away from criminal organizations. In reality, it’s become an easy way for law enforcement to take the property of others without having to put much effort into justifying the seizures. In most states, convictions are not required, meaning supposed criminal suspects are free to go… but their property isn’t.

Canterbury, who previously aired his grievances nationally over director Quentin Tarantino’s participation in an anti-police brutality rally, opens up this piece by trying to equate factual reporting with current hot button topic “fake news.”

Amidst the current national furor against “fake news” is another, more pervasive issue of creating “fake issues” like the myth of policing for profit. There’s been widespread discussion about the need to end the Federal equitable sharing program because a journalist or columnist writes a sympathetic piece describing a case in which the system may not have functioned as intended.

Canterbury admits the “system” doesn’t always “function as intended” (although many could argue these cases illustrate the system working exactly as intended), but argues that every report about a questionable seizure is the equivalent of fake news. Innocent people being deprived of their property by profit-focused law enforcement agencies is a “fake issue” — something that apparently wouldn’t be covered by a more responsible press. 

………

The biggest lie in Canterbury’s editorial is also the most expected: that asset forfeiture is actually having an effect on criminal activity.

For over 30 years, the asset forfeiture program has allowed law enforcement to deprive criminals of both the proceeds and tools of crime. The resources provided by the equitable sharing program have allowed agencies to participate in joint task forces to thwart and deter serious criminal activity and terrorism, purchase equipment, provide training upgrade technology, engage their communities, and better protect their officers. It has been remarkably successful.

See what happened here? He just said, “We’re not extorting money from people, but we really need to take their money.

Sure, that was the theory. In actuality, billions of dollars have flowed into law enforcement agencies with barely any diminishment in the amount of drugs flowing into the country. It may seem like the use of forfeited funds to purchase law enforcement equipment lightens the load on taxpayers but that’s only if you don’t consider any person whose property has been seized without evidence to not be part of the pool of taxpayers.

Normally, I am firmly pro union, but their activities in law enforcement, particulary police and correction guards, seem to be thoroughly pernicious in nature.

Spocko Did This a Decade Ago

10 years ago, Spocko, the blogger who runs Spocko’s Brain, started to send records to advertisers showing what hate-talk radio jocks were showing immediately before and after these ads.

He asked a simple question: Do you really want your products associated with this?

It now appears that it has dawned on online activists that they can do the same thing with online news.

It’s even easier, you just have to email a screen shot with their ad and a headline:

One day in late November, an earth and environmental science professor named Nathan Phillips visited Breitbart News for the first time. Mr. Phillips had heard about the hateful headlines on the site — like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” — and wondered what kind of companies would support such messages with their ad dollars. When he clicked on the site, he was shocked to discover ads for universities, including one for the graduate school where he’d received his own degree — Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “That was a punch in the stomach,” he said.

Why would an environmental science program want to be promoted on a site that denies the existence of climate change? Mr. Phillips figured — correctly — that Duke officials did not know where their ads were appearing, so he sent a tweet to Duke about its association with the “sexist racist” site. Eventually, after a flurry of communication with the environment department, he received a satisfying resolution — an assurance that its ads would no longer show up on Breitbart.

………

In mid-November, a Twitter group called Sleeping Giants became the hub of the new movement. The Giants and their followers have communicated with more than 1,000 companies and nonprofit groups whose ads appeared on Breitbart, and about 400 of those organizations have promised to remove the site from future ad buys.

“We’re focused on Breitbart News right now because they’re the biggest fish,” a founder of Sleeping Giants told me. (He requested anonymity because some members of the group work in the digital-media industry.) Eventually, Sleeping Giants would like to broaden its campaign to take on a menagerie of bad actors, but that would require a much bigger army of Giants, and “it has only been a month since we started doing this,” he told me when I talked to him in December. Then he added, “This has been the longest month of my life.”

Advertisers have been fleeing Rush Limbaugh’s show for precisely the same reason ever since he tried to slut shame Sandra Fluke, and it appears from the silence over the numbers, last time around they were trumpeting the numbers, that he took a significant pay cut.

Everyone has a right to free speech, but that doesn’t mean that they have a right for you to support their sponsors.

She Would Say That, Wouldn’t She?*

Over at the Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist (and former Ombud for the NY Times)  suggests that we should stop using the term “Fake News”, particularly when applied to major metropolitan newspapers like the Post.

It appears that she is mightily offended that people are calling out the WaPo for publishing fake news (the non-existent Vermont Power hack) just because they, well, you know, published fake news.

She thinks that the term has, “Had its 15 minutes of fame.”

Let’s be clear: If you have an anonymous source, and they burn you repeatedly, and you don’t burn the source, and you keep going back to the well for more quotes from them, as the Post has done with the US state security apparatus since its founding (with a few notable exceptions), it’s fake news.

Use the same standards as libel for public figures: A reckless disregard for the truth, and a quick Google gives us this

Disregard of the truth or falsity of a defamatory statement by a person who is highly aware of its probable falsity or entertains serious doubts about its truth or when there are obvious reasons to doubt the veracity and accuracy of a source [the knowingly false statement and the false statement made with reckless disregard of the truth , do not enjoy constitutional protection “Garrison v. Louisiana , 379 U.S. 64 (1964)”

The Washington Post is not just regularly burnt by its sources in intelligence, it is routinely burnt by these sources.

The reporters know this, the editors know this, and Margaret Sullivan knows this, and they just don’t care.

This is the very epitome of fake news.

*This is a reference to Mandy Rice-Davies and the Profumo Affair, who when told that Lord Astor denied having ever met her, much less f%$#ed her, replied with a rather similar quote.

Linkage

Here is Paul Simon, the lyrics version because I could not find an official version of the video:

Go. Just Go!

They are now trying to suggest that Hillary Clinton should run for mayor:

From political circles in New York City to cocktail parties on Capitol Hill, on right-of-center Facebook pages and among left-of-center donors, two of the biggest untethered threads in New York politics are being drawn together around a single question.

Would Hillary Clinton run for mayor?

The prospect has an obvious, novelistic allure: A run for mayor of New York this year would pit Mrs. Clinton against Mayor Bill de Blasio, a fellow Democrat who managed her Senate campaign in 2000, and, should she win, would put her in charge of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s hometown, ensuring years of potential clashes between bitter rivals.

Gaaahhh!!!!!!

Hillary R. Clinton, would you please go now?
The time has come.
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go.
Go.
GO!
I don’t care how.

You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Hillary R. Clinton,, will you please go now!

Please ……… Make ……… it ……… Stop………

Snark of the Day

The most remarkable thing about the government’s assessment released on Friday is that more than a quarter of the report is merely an annex dedicated to the colossal significance of the RT (Russia Today) television network. These seven pages written by the U.S. intelligence community comprise what is perhaps the greatest and most generous Christmas gift in the history of Russian Orthodoxy, which celebrates the birth of Christ on Saturday, Jan. 7.

—Moscow Times. American Unintelligence on Russia (Op-ed)

Heh.

Barack Obama, Shut the F%$# Up

Barack Obama has a sad, because it’s all liberal’s fault that Obamacare is unpopular.

Yeah, I guess the fact that he killed the public option and spent the entire process fellating big insurance and big pharma, giving people rate increases, narrow networks, and balance billing had nothing to do with this:

President Barack Obama said on Friday that criticism from the left wing of his own Democratic Party helped feed into the unpopularity of Obamacare, his signature healthcare reform law.

………

But Obama also said Liberals like former Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders had contributed to the program’s unpopularity.

During Sanders’ campaign for the presidential nomination, he proposed replacing Obamacare with a government-run single-payer health insurance system based on Medicare, the government plan for elderly and disabled Americans.

“In the ‘dissatisfied’ column are a whole bunch of Bernie Sanders supporters who wanted a single-payer plan,” Obama said in the interview.

“The problem is not that they think Obamacare is a failure. The problem is that they don’t think it went far enough and that it left too many people still uncovered,” Obama said.

“They” are right.

If you had been more interested in a good policy than you had been to check off a box on your Presidential legacy, the program would have been better, less expensive, and more universal, and far less unpopular.

You improved on the status quo, but you did so in a way calculated to make minimum changes and to keep the malefactors of the US health insurance system in the driver’s seat, because ……… markets.

What’s more, your program was structured in a way to make it as opaque and politically unpopular as possible.

Look in the mirror, dude.

Getting it Wrong

Sir Martin Sorrell suggests that the problem with business today is that companies are too timid about taking the long view, so they spend most of their profits on things like stock buybacks, as opposed to investing in capital improvements or R&D.

While this is a nice theory, and the modern publicly held corporation does have an unrealistically short time horizon, this is not about timidity.

This is about managers looting the companies futures for their own personal benefit.

You see, much of the modern manager’s remuneration these days is in stock options, and if the stock price goes up, they make 7, 8, and 9 figure paydays, while if the stock does not appreciate, they get nothing, so they, as basic capitalism predicts, manage the firm for their own private benefit by mortgaging the future.

This is not timidity, this is honest services fraud, or at least it was until the Supreme Court found 18 U.S.C.§1346 to be unconstitutional except in the case of a bribe or a kickback. (I actually agree with the decision, the law was too vague and prone to abuse.)

I’d like to go back to the pre-Reagan regulations, which defined most stock buybacks as illegal stock manipulation.

Seriously, the Masters of the Universe are Seriously Delicate Snow Flakes

Bond king Bill Gross is so very upset that Donald Trump is jawboning companies about moving the jobs out of the USA:

President-elect Donald Trump’s targeting of corporations, to make them change their practices, is reminiscent of policies in Italy under dictator Benito Mussolini, according to billionaire bond manager Bill Gross.

“Some of these pre-term policies, where he’s cajoling companies to move production back into the United States — that’s fine — but it reminds me to some extent of policies in Italy long ago associated with Mussolini and government control of corporate interests,” Gross said in an interview Friday on Bloomberg Radio. “I don’t want it to go too far.”

Seriously?

Calling companies who f%$# their workers “Worker F%$#ers,” is telling the truth, not nascent fascism.

Get over yourself.

Out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings and ……… Republicans?


Awkward!

Thom Tillis, the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina, reminds James Clapper that the US has been meddling in foreign elections on a wholesale scale for decades:

Several times in today’s hearing on foreign cyberattacks on the US, James Clapper explained why he never favored big retaliation for China’s hack of OPM: because he considers it the kind of espionage we engage in too. “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw rocks.”

When North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis got his turn, he addressed Clapper’s comment, pointing out that on election-tampering, as with espionage, the US lives in a big glass house.

The glass house comment is something that I think is very important. There’s been research done by a professor up at Carnegie Mulligan that um Mellon that estimated that the United States has been involved in one way or another in 81 different elections since World War II. That doesn’t include coups or regime changes. Tangible evidence where we’ve tried to affect an outcome to our purpose. Russia’s done it some 36 times. In fact, when Russia apparently was trying to influence our election, we had the Israelis accusing us of trying to influence their election.

So I’m not here to talk about that. But I am here to say we live in a big glass house and there are a lot of rocks to throw and I think that that’s consistent with what you said on other matters.


With regards to comparative numbers on US and Russian intervention in elections, Tillis is discussing research published by Dov Levin last year (see WaPo version), who found that either the US or Russia intervened in 11.3% of all elections since World War II, with the US — indeed — intervening far more often (and more broadly) than Russia.

The research shows that over 11% of competitive elections between 1946 and 2000 were hacked, and about ⅔ of these interventions were by the US state security apparatus, and wasn’t just some obscure banana republic:  It includes things like intervening in the Italian elections of 1948.

Glass houses indeed.