Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #46

Garthamis has obtained information about ICE being able to enter private parts of New York City shelters without a judicial warrant or being able to obtain private information about residents, despite both of these, in theory being prohibited by sanctuary city laws in New York. Right, thiss happened at least five times.

on more. Last week, we talked about Faustino Pablo Pablo, right, the guy who had been sent to Guatemala despite the fact that he had protections under the Convention against Torture for being returned there. The government has returned him to the US, which is good.

the likeliest thing. It just seems like such a huge jump. But also at this point there's a whole armada blocking off Venezuela from the rest of the world. And Trump put out a statement saying that their oil is our oil and belongs rightly to American companies. So very very very possible when we're about to go to war with them. I'm certainly not a I don't know what's gonna happen, y'all. I'm white knuckling it like everybody else. Yeah, that fucking sucks. I didn't know the thing about that oil.

and other assets that they previously stole from US. The illegitimate Maduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil fields to finance themselves, drug terrorism, human trafficking, murder and kidnapping. For the theft of our assets and many other reasons including terrorism, drug smuggling, and human trafficking, the Venezuelan regime has been designated a foreign terrorist organization. Therefore, today I'm ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil

tankers going into and out of Venezuela. The illegal aliens and criminals that the Madeira regime has sent the United States during the weekend and Biden administration are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. YadA, YadA, YadA. Yeah, all of our oil, land and other assets have to be returned to the United States, which, like he's talking about oil that American companies have had at points like

contracts to exploit. Yeah, but he's phrasing it is like their land and oil is our land and oil.

this is fairly common practice. But Obviously, the way to stop that is a physical blockade, right, Like, that's not going to be possible if these if the US is effectively like inspecting ships leaving Venezuela, right or sort of keeping a very close eye on them, So that will end, and with that will end a very important source of income for the Maduta regime if they keep doing this.

things I've ever seen. And this was also unhinged. The closest thing we've ever really gotten to that, I guess was the IERGC. Yeah, and maybe you could go back and say the Khmer Rouge, but like, they weren't really a government by that point, so this is not This is not a designation that has ever been given to a government before. Right, it doesn't make any sense to give it to a government. It doesn't make sense to

give to this government. I mean, you know, even if you're working with in the logic of counter terrorism, which is just you know, unhinged, murderous imperialism to begin with. But all of the reporting on this has been assuming that the blockade will be of you know, like of these specifically sanctioned oil tankers. However, come The thing about the Foreign Terrorist Organization designation is that it does things.

And one of the things that that Foreign Terrorist Organization designation does is that if you do business with a with a foreign terrorist organization, you are now immediately on the line from material support of terrorism charges like chef run. So, yes, there are lots of countries like Facebook.

then it goes up. So right now we should be theoretically in the seven day window, but it's also really unclear what the illustration has actually been doing because again we're being governed by post.

It is also unbelievably illegal under the War Powers Act. And this this is this has actually gotten a response from Democrats in Congress. There's been a few measures. CBS is reporting this has been if there's been a few measures to stop the president from starting a war. Here, I'm going to quote CBS. A second measure from Democratic Rep. Jim mcgovernor in Massachusetts would remove the armed forces quote from hostilities with or against Venezuela that have not been

authorized by Congress. McGovern's resolution could face the best chance of potential adoption since it has three gop CO sponsors. Rep's Marjory Taylor Green of Georgia, Thomas Massey of Kentucky, and Don Bacon of Nebraska. Bacon says he would also vote and f he or Meeks his measure. Bacon's taking a very weird line here of Keen's congressional approval, and also I support him doing this.

Because a huge part of what was going on there was a rebellion by the sort of agro business like agricultural elite who joined with parts of like a reactionary every middle class.

of overturned famously. But later that year there was also a sort of opposition general strike that lasted from late two thousand and two to early two thousand and three, and a huge part of that general strike was oil

workers specifically, and it was very specifically. One of the things about the structure of oil production is that there were a bunch of very very highly paid and highly skilled technical workers who are are very very loyal to the oil companies themselves and who are very loyal to who are sort of tend to be very right wing. These people went on strike and sort of got fired

on mass. Oil production requires both a huge amount of heavy capital and a bunch of highly skilled workers, and if you don't have both of those things, then you can't do oil extraction. And this has sort of been a recurring problem for the entire time both sort of fugual Srofics and Majuro has been in office, is that they haven't had the capacity to actually extract a bunch of the oil, and also they've refused to turn the oil over to more American companies that have already been contracted.

get a US backed too. And it's also sort of word noting that the other thing that's happening here, and the reason this is all going to probably cause really significant economic problems and probably humanitarian disaster, both in Venezuela and probably also in Cuba, which extensively relies on Venezuelan oil to have their economy function, is that the Venezuelan economy has been really structured around oil in a way

that they failed to transition out of multiple times. The first big one I've done in a different episode about this in the Neolipical List series a bunch of years ago. But you know, there was a whole bunch of delivery sabotage by American car companies over the attempt to build it car industry. There's a long sort of history of this. But it means that both of these countries' economies are

desperately reliant on oil. And the more of this is just that is cut off, the more fucked it's going to get for just everyone in Venezuela.

between the US and Venezuela. It's also kind of word noting that right before this whole thing, there was a giant Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles, who's Trump's chief of staff.

attack you. And this logic has always been wrong. And it's also every new generation of like military leaders, especially in the air power field, are like all we need is air strikes. You don't need to send in ground. You can accomplish all of your goals, all of your power projection, just by bombing people or shooting missiles at them, And they're always wrong.

you need to Unfortunately, you can't do war with computers yet. Yeah, but yeah, I think that that might be where this this belief that and like the Marca Rubio lobby, right, the Florida Cubans who are invested in this kind of Trump corrollary to the Monroe doctrine right in the idea that they can roll back leftist regimes in uh like South and Central America.

go out of Claire War. There's another article that just came out on Stitch Snitches by Gloria Shaw, citing a pro Trump host on Real America's Voice who characterized the upcoming Oval Office address as a pr thing meant basically as an acknowledgment that a lot of Trump's voters are frustrated that he keeps talking about like international issues like Venezuela, while everything is more expensive for them and they continue

to lose their jobs and the economy is shit. To quote from that article, and this is them quoting a segment from that Real America's Voice podcast. The remarks came during a segment on The water Cooler with co host David Brody, who teas the nine pm Eastern address is an elevated effort to regain the narrative on affordability. The president is going to be in the Oval Office tonight nine pm Eastern, Brody said, big address to the nation.

He's elevating this clearly, this is to regain the narrative and explain more about the affordability issue America and what this administration is doing. I think they're trying to seize this right off the top and make sure it doesn't

get away from them. And the claims here is basically like this is Trump trying to steal a night march on the twenty twenty six election cycle and reset a lot of what people are talking about around affordability, Like this argument is that now he's basically acknowledging that it's been kind of a mistake to focus so much on his overseas policies, and he really needs to start promising that that golden age is actually going to come for his voters, which the numbers don't bear out right, Like

almost no jobs have been added in the US since April. There's about seven hundred thousand more people unemployed now than there were in November of twenty twenty four.

golden age if you make me president. So like the fact that he hasn't done he hasn't followed through any of his promises to actually improve life for his voters or the economy is starting to hurt. And I guess I'm hopeful that that's what it is, rather than the Marines are about to be in Caracas, right, but I guess we'll see very soon. Yeah, great stuff.

At least one country lacks mechanisms in hospitals to ensure bursts are reported, and widespread corruption, combined with a general lack of vecking and poor record keeping, result in any non citizen being able to obtain any civil document from that country, particularly if that person is willing to pay a fee or engage an individual that specializes in assisting in such fraud. They go on to basically document failures in government bureaucracy that they talk about corruption.

is what they spoke about last time. What is getting less reporting, or at least was this morning when I looked, was that they have removed exemptions which existed for the previous nineteen These include family member visas right, So that means that, for instance, someone who could themselves become a permanent resident or even a citizen, now cannot bring a family member, say a spouse, a sibling, etc. Across, even

though those people were people sly vetted. And it appears some there is certain categories of SIVA exempt, but I believe not all SIVs, so that's especially immigrant visa right. The vast bulk of SIVs will be Afghan people who

worked with the US military in Afghanistan. The nineteen countries who are now partially restricted are I'm just going to read them of Angola, Antigram, Barbuda, Benin, Kuttivois, Dominica, Gabon, the Gambia, Malawi, Mauritanian, Nigeria, senegauld Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. For some reason, the first five of these are underlined on the White House website. I don't know if some were copied and pisted them across with hyperlinks like.

as immigrants remain suspended. The last element of this that I want to cover is that it would appear to stop international adoptions from the listed countries, like all of those thirty nine listed countries, which is wild and like particularly unfortunate because I know, like people who who adopt children from outside the United States, like that is a process that takes years, and I can imagine it being horrifically traumatic.

Do you can if you're not familiar. She's not the judge in New Mexico who was accused of providing firearms to somebody who was not a permanent resident or citizen. She is a judge who is accused of allowing a migrant man named mister Flores Luise to leave her court room from a door that is not the usual door. That door led to a private corridor. In that private corridor, there was one exit to a public area and also a door to a fire escape. Mister Flora's ruiz took

the exit to the public area. He then took a lift down I think to the ground floor with an ICE officer. He then attempted to run away when Ice officers attempted to detain him when he left the lift, he was caught and detained. So we learned quite a lot in this and it's just been interesting to follow.

really funny. The FBI agent conceded in crust examination that's not a NAP approved by the FBI, but according to one the DHS apparently does approve it, according to a CBP agent who has crossed damon there, which obviously creates an issue for the retention of records right because signal, if you're not familiar, auto deletes things after a period

of time that users can configure. It also appears that when one of these DHS agents and to the courthouse, court security officers told him that he needed an escort, but then he appears.

unpacked here, right, this is just the first day. This could go on past Christmas and into the new year, and it probably will. But there's been some pretty good reporting on this from a substack called all Rise Media, and I will keep checking in on this and we'll report it on it again after the New Year.

injuring nine others, all students. About thirty minutes after the shooting started, the university police announced a suspect was in custody. Twenty minutes later, they retracted that statement. Then university police reported shots fired in another section of campus, which they also later retracted. President Trump posted on truth Social quote, I've been briefed on the shooting that took place at Brown University in Rhode Island. The FBI is on the scene,

the suspect is in custody. God bless the victims and the families of the victims. Quote. This too was untrue, as the university released a statement about an hour later clarifying that the shooter was not in custody and that over four hundred officers were on the scene to assist in the investigation. The next morning, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley announced that a new person of interest was detained. The Providence Police chief told NBC that they were confident that

the suspect was the shooter. Major news outlets later named this individual, though later that evening this quote unquote person of interest was released, with the Rhode Island Attorney General saying that the evidence quote now points in a different direction quote. The shooter currently remains unidentified and at large. On Sunday night in Sydney, Australia, a father and son, Sajid and Navid Akram, coordinated a targeted attack against Jewish

people attending a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach. Fifteen people were killed in the shooting. Victims include a ten year old girl and a Holocaust survivor. Twenty four victims remain hospitalized. A bystander named Ahmed al Ahmed, a son of Syrian refugees, charged one of the gunman and wrestled his gun away. Ahmed was later shot multiple times, but survived and has been labeled a hero by the Australian Prime Minister. Police say that a vehicle used by the gunman contained homemade

Islamic state flags and improvised explosive devices. The men were not part of an official terror cell, though the Prime Minister says that they were motivated by Islamic state extremist ideology. Counter Terrorism officials believed the shooters received quote unquote military style training in the Philippines a month before the attack.

On Tuesday, self styled online investigators in right wing social media content Mills falsely identified the Brown University shooter as an LGBTQ Palestinian studying at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, citing gate analysis based on surveillance footage of the unidentified suspect released by police. The university removed this queer Palestinian student's online profile file in an effort to prevent doxing, though this itself was used by the online smerror campaign

as evidence of guilt. Brown University later published this statement quote in the aftermath of the shooting, We've seen a harmful doxing activity directed towards at least one member of the Brown University community. It's important to make clear that targeting individuals could do a revocable harm. Accusations, speculation, and conspiracies were seeing on social media and in some news reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous for

the safety of individuals in our community. It is not unusual as a safety measure to take steps to protect an individual's safety when this kind of activity happens, including in regard to their online presence. As law enforcement officials stated clearly on Tuesday afternoon, if this individual's name had any relevance to the current investigation, they would be actively

looking for this individual and providing information publicly. On a final note, after the holiday break, we will be reporting on the indictment against four alleged members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front in California regarding a New Year's Eve bombing plot.

deputy director of the FBI. You know, look, if he was podcasting right now, they would have caught the mass shooter at Brown.

order that our beloved President put out very recently. Some of you may be aware of this, but on December eleventh, twenty I mean this year, twenty twenty five, Trump released yet another executive order, this one titled Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence, and basically, in this and Trump stated that like, the reason he's doing this is because it's absolutely critical to the US's future that we be at the top of the game when it comes

to AI, that we be global leaders in this burgeoning new field. He states in the EO, these efforts have already delivered tremendous benefits to the American people and led to trillions of dollars of investments across the country. Certainly haven't, but we were made in the earliest days of the technological revolution and in a race with adversaries for supremacy

within it. Trump stated in an interview that he expects AI to be fifty to sixty percent of the US economy in the near future, which is nuts.

this EO actually do well. The goal of this the statement is that it is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance the United States is global AI dominance through a minimally burden some national policy framework for AI. This EO will establish an AI Litigation Task Force. Within thirty days of this order going out, the Attorney General is supposed to establish this task force whose responsibility is to challenge state AI laws that are inconsistent with

the policy set forward above. Right that we need to be globally dominant in AI. Right, So this task force is supposed to go out and find state laws that it believes are like an onerous burden on the development of this technology. Going along with this, within ninety days of the order, the Secretary of Commerce is supposed to do an evaluation of all state AI laws in order to point out which ones this task force should go after.

And then the stick that this EO establishes is that if this task force decides that like a state AI EYE law is in violation of our need to be dominant in AI, we can restrict state funding to things like the broadband Equity Access and Deployment program. Right. Basically, they'll cut off federal funding for like broadband access, in order to punish states that try to restrict or in any way shape or form, govern what people can use

what companies can use AI for. And the primary thing this is all about, I know, we all think about the stuff that like most people have more direct experience with, which is like all the slop flooding the Internet, the disinformation that's continuing to cook the brains of a lot of our peers and elders, and just the fact that like it's making certain industries full of hardworking people a lot harder to exist because companies are just trying to

replace quality work with absolute like slop trash. Yeah, but really, what this is about, and the primary focus of most of these state level laws regulating AI is the housing market.

to coordinate pricing. Basically, there are a couple of different programs, the most prominent, which is called Real Page, And what they do is landlords join these programs and they share information on like what their different properties cost, and then the AI knows what everybody is charging and can suggest

that they charge higher prices right now. The way that this is supposed to work is that you, as a landlord, look out at what's publicly available about the prices of your competitors and look at like what your customers are currently willing to bear, and then try to set your prices and future price increases based on that. What Real Page is doing is a legal collusion, right, This is price fixing. It's just the AI is doing the actual active price fixing. The landlords are just sharing their data

and paying a fee to the service. And so a bunch of states have tried to stop this because this objectively makes the housing crisis worse. I know, there's some annoying assholes who come out and be like, you shouldn't talk about anything but in increasing the supply of housing, and like that's that's idiot shit, Yes, we need to increase the supply of housing. This objectively hurts people. These programs subjectively increase the price of print, they do damage.

We should be mitigating or making it impossible for businesses like this to exist. Anyone who disagrees is just being a dummy. New York passed law in October that banned the use of AI algorithms to allow landlords to do price fixing. There's a similar bill in the Massachusetts legislation's

making its way forward right now. And this is fundamentally what a lot of the opposition to like state level AI regulation is about is that the landlord ward's basically uh, think that this is a great way to make a shitload of money, and tech companies like and we can continue.

We got to make a shitload of money selling them the tools to do this, and states are trying to push back on this, and like, that's fundamentally what a lot of the impetus buying this executive order is is an attempt to stop people from making this even more harmful.

There is some like in this that political article they quote from Kevin Donnelly, who's the executive director of the Real Estate Technology and Transformation Center, and he talks about like, well, actually, we're currently using AI to identify buildable lots and promote sustainable constructions so that we can actually like reduce some

of the cost of housing. And all of these bills, could you know, undermine our ability to impure people's Like yeah, it's just fucking go like literally jump off a bridge, man, Fuck you. Yeah, no, we know that's not how it works. We have data on this, Yo, this isn't theoretical.

a bunch of industries. And so there's even a significant amount of resistance among Republicans this, which is why the bill didn't pass, right, and Trump when he announced this EO basically sat down with like a chunk of the conservatives who are more critical of this, and I think basically bullied them into getting on board and saying no, he promised us this won't restrict state levels to like

improve safety for children. Right, there's absolutely like no guarantee of that, Like you just have David Sacks, it was Trump's top AI advisor saying no, no, none of this is about trying to stop state laws to make kids savor. It's just trying to stop state laws that will make rent less expensive. Yeah, there's Marjorie Taylor Green's come out against this. She's basically said that you know this is

a violation of states, right, it's bullshit. Steve Bannon is in the same place he had a good quote I found in an article by The Hill. After two humiliating face plants on a must pass legis now we attempt an entirely unenforceable EO tech bros doing upmost to turn potus megabase away from him while they line their pockets, which is essentially accurate. Yeah, he's wrong, wrong about that. So all this is like pretty annoying and fucked up. We'll see what actually becomes of this. I tend to

agree with Bannon that it's pretty much unenforceable. Like the lawsuit, the court battles that will come from this is just going to be expensive and time consuming. But I actually don't think this is going to work the way they want. This is this is Trump making it very clear that he has bought and paid for by the tech s end that he understands that he is hanging on by

a thread in terms of popularity. One of the only things stopping it from getting stopping the situation from getting worse is that AI spending on data centers and ship is propping up the image of the economy, Right, that's what this is all about.

based off of? And I think I figured out what like the fundamental source of all of this shit is, which is back in twenty seventeen, there was a research which paper put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John Van Reenan, and Michael Webb. The kind of summary of that article reads as follows. In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and then the long run growth rate is the product of two terms, the effective number of

researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence for various industries, products, and firms showing that

research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. Right, So basically, we're we have more people doing research, and we're spending more money on research, but that research is translating into economic gains at a lower level than ever before, right to the point where we're not going to be able to continue to make economic gains like we used

to be unless something changes. And if you're kind of paying attention to this, you might notice that that study, which is the underpinning of that Vox article and all of these claims that we need AI for ideas, really is not actually making an argument that people aren't having more ideas. It's making an argument that it is harder to profit from ideas than it used to be right now.

That is fundamentally different from people not having ideas for one thing, it's reducing an idea to something that delivers a return for venture capitalists. Yeah right, that's all an idea is in. This is something that makes money, and a lot of great ideas like the post office don't

generate a direct profit. And obviously it's a net benefit to the economy that we have a post office, but the post office runs at a loss, right, which is why you have state funding for certain things, because they're just not going to be the kind of ideas that like a bunch of Silicon Valley investors want to throw money into.

hanging fruit has been picked. There's not another the telephone waiting out there. We already did that. It was the smartphone. There's not another indoor plumbing, right, There's not something that's going to be as much of a sea change for the economy and for the quality of human life as those ideas, because those were really big things.

brain has been completely fucking cooked. I did find a good article, ironically, from twenty seventeen from Vox EU that is titled ideas aren't running out that they are getting more expensive to find, which is making a lot of the claims that like I've made, which is that, or that I've been bringing up so far in this which is that it's not that there's a lack of ideas, that it costs more money to do stuff like that now like the costs because everything's so much more complex.

Idea the big ideas we're looking at, artist simple is indoor plumbing. They require a lot more computing power, they require a lot more people working on them. Right, Like we've plucked the low hanging fruit, and it ends with a paragraph I find kind of valuable here, returning to the oil metaphor, we are digging deeper into a trickier part of the rock.

effort are need to offset its declining productivity. And again, if you want to have the big ideas and the Star Trek future that all of these billionaires like Elon Musk pretend they want, what you actually have to do is be willing to put a lot of money into research and development without any promise of a profit. Your motivation can't be well, now we have to get a

two hundred percent rate of return in our investments. Right, it has to be well, this would improve people's lives and make life more sustainable, right, like finding solutions to a lot of problems with climate and cleaning the air, Like dealing with lack of access to clean water, lack of access to basic basic medical care. These are not things where doing them means that your company gets an immediate profit and evaluation in the tens of billions of dollars.

they want to do. It's a good way to put it.

actually doing the thing they're trying to do. And then, you know, this is a huge problem in academia where it's like, okay, so you have you know, you're teaching in academia, but you're also spending like a quarter of your time trying to get another job. You're spending another quarter of your time dealing with all of the unhinged whatever like accounting bullshit that your fucking supervisors have like or like like university management has like put upon you.

And this is and this is something that's also true for government researchers, where there's just like this, you know, there's been this incredible increase in sort of the amount of bureaucracy they have to jomp through it like largely because of the right and because of all of the like weird shit they do, where like they hate government fundings. They're like, ah, everyone has to like justify their funding

literally every ten seconds. And I think I think, like that's that's one of the other angles of this, and it's something that's only gonna get worse because this administration is just fucking annihilating the entire basis of American science.