* Blog & notes for the current week.
DAYLOG MON 02 JUN 25: The Russians seem to have been getting an edge in their war against Ukraine as of late -- but Ukraine regained the initiative on Sunday, in a far-flung drone attack on five Russian airbases.
Ukraine claims that 41 aircraft were hit, with at least 13 destroyed, most of the targets being bombers. The airbases were all over Russia, some far out of range of Ukraine, but the drones didn't fly from Ukraine -- they were delivered by heavy-hauler trucks.
Under Operation PAVUTYNA (SPIDERWEB), conducted by the SBU intelligence service, quadcopter drones were smuggled into Russia via Kazakhstan, then assembled and placed in the roofs of "tiny houses", built to standard 20' container size for hauling on flatbed trucks. The trucks were parked not far from the targets, with roof panels pulled off to deploy the drones. The trucks then apparently torched themselves. The drones had AI-based automatic target recognition systems, having been trained to recognize aircraft -- and, it seems, not hit those already hit. At least some had video feeds, video said to have been delivered over the phone network. PAVUTYNA took 18 months to pull off; the US was not told in advance, though I'm suspecting the Pentagon still had a hand in it.
The US military knows Putin is an enemy and wants to help Ukraine against him -- though they have to do so carefully, because Trump keeps wanting to make nice with Putin. Trump is probably not too hard to fool, and he's sounding more pro-Ukraine as of late anyway.
What to make of Operation PAVUTYNA? Impressive, inspiring, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE stuff. What happens next? Impossible to say, the war goes on -- but at least it's clear that Putin had his whole day ruined.
DAYLOG TUE 03 JUN 25: Feisty Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett ("The Notorious JAZ") posed with Capitol Police cop (now political candidate) Harry Dunn -- with replies that either she was very tiny or he was very big. Dunn shot back: "Both things can be true."
* In further surprising Ukraine War news, following up Ukraine's strike on Russian bombers over the weekend, an underwater attack on the Kerch Strait Bridge seriously damaged at least one of the support columns, with the equivalent of a tonne of explosive being used.
Ukraine has repeatedly attacked the Kerch Strait Bridge, but it's proven a hard target; the support columns are big and sturdy, while the Russians keep improving its defenses. So what happened here? The Ukrainians aren't saying, but Ukrainians have occasionally mentioned work on submarines, and what amounts to drone torpedoes. Just how badly damaged the bridge is remains to be seen.
Recent Ukrainian actions have renewed confidence that Ukraine can hold on -- and if Ukraine holds on long enough, Ukraine will win. How much more that will take remains to be seen. It will help if the USA backs Ukraine more convincingly. Enough of bogus "peace talks".
* Massachusetts Senator Liz Warren has now issued a Senate report titled: "Special Interests Over the Public Interest: Elon Musk's 130 Days in the Trump Administration" -- providing a trail of actions in government by the Musk Rat that "raise questions about corruption, ethics, and conflicts of interest." The report says that "not every action listed ... represents a violation of Federal law," but goes on to say that: "Musk has violated norms at an astonishing pace" while engaging in and supporting actions that are "hurting the American public." It labels this "scandalous behavior regardless of whether it subjects him to criminal prosecution."
That's right. Only limited things can be done to slow down the Trump Regime for the time being, but the regime is not forever. Everything needs to be documented for accountability in the era after Trump -- and the Musk Rat also does not like the idea that people are keeping his receipts.
DAYLOG WED 04 JUN 25: I started following Jess Piper, a Missouri Democrat and a director of the BLUE MISSOURI group. What got me started on her was a video in which she pushed back on people who say: Red states should be allowed to secede, good riddance to them.
That's long annoyed me. As Piper said, 40% of Missourans voted for Kamala Harris -- are we supposed to like the idea of Blue Missourans being thrown to the wolves? No, America has a GOP problem, and it has to be dealt with.
Anyway, relative to raids by ICE, Piper commented yesterday: "I think a lot of those folks dressing up like ICE are not even cops, much less federal agents. The way they carry themselves. The way they are dressed. Something is off."
The masking, the storm trooper uniforms and armament -- it doesn't take much thought to come to the conclusion that ICE is recruiting white militiamen, or even just casually deputizing them. Some photos show ICE sporting white supremacist tattoos.
Where does that go? Hard to say specifically, but definitely no place good. Recent videos show local crowds confronting ICE on raids, shouting them down, and it seems likely there will be more such videos. It appears almost as likely that there will be violence.
I'm thinking the Trump Regime wants the violence, to justify heavy-handed repression. It will be almost a miracle if it can be avoided -- but we have to remember that violence serves Trump's purposes, not ours, and should be avoided.
* In Ukraine War news, a US Congressional delegation traveled to Kyiv and got a briefing from AFU Colonel Pavlo Palisa of Zelenskyy's presidential office. Palisa stated that Ukraine needed US assistance and did want a meaningful cease-fire -- but felt confident Ukraine was winning:
QUOTE:
Ukraine will not lose the war. In 2024, the enemy captured only 0.5% of the territory, another 0.2% since the beginning of this year -- but at the cost of 167 killed occupiers for every kilometer. This does not look like a quick victory.
END_QUOTE
DAYLOG THU 05 JUN 25: NPR conducted an interview with Sahil Lavingia, a worker for Elon the Musk Rat's DOGE, in which Lavingia said he really didn't find all the "waste, fraud, & abuse" he was expecting to:
QUOTE:
I did not find the Federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins. ... I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There's minimal amounts of fraud. And abuse, to me, feels relatively nonexistent.
... I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing.
The government has been under sort of a magnifying glass for decades. And so ... I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was.
END_QUOTE
Lavingia said there was much room for improvement, but that was just a question of modernization. As I like to say, anyone who thinks big corporations are inherently efficient hasn't worked for one -- and small businesses can be worse.
Lavingia felt that updating government software systems had a lot of potential, there being no "better way to have a larger impact as someone ... designing and building products, web applications, iPhone applications than working for the US Federal government."
Alas, Lavingia decided to talk to a blogger: "Elon was pretty clear about how he wanted DOGE to be maximally transparent. That's something he said a lot in private, and publicly. And so I thought, OK, cool, I'll take him at his word. I will be transparent." The blogger published, and Lavingia was promptly blocked out of the DOGE system. Most of the USA knows the Musk Rat can't be taken at his word; it is surprising that anyone who knew him personally would be more trusting. Lavingia seems like a nice guy -- maybe too much so.
* The Musk Rat appears to be on the bad list with the White House; I was thinking the feuding was a smokescreen, but it seems not so. The WH is factional, and the Musk Rat's (many) enemies apparently got the upper hand. Trump is only loosely in charge. There's been a lot of glee over the feud between the two, but it has to be taken with a grain of salt: they are both evil and dangerous, will stay that way, and may well join forces again.
Publicly blasting Trump's big budget-busting bill appears to have been the snapping point. The bill is clearly in trouble; it remains to be seen if there will be a good outcome, or at minimum a least-bad outcome. I'm holding my breath.
DAYLOG FRI 06 JUN 25: One of the goals of the Musk Rat's DOGE has been to improve government by using AI tools. The title of an essay by one Ben Green in TECHPOLICY ("Using AI to Reform Government is Much Harder Than it Looks", 3 June 25), says it all. According to Green: "The problem isn't just that many AI tools are unreliable and depend on messy datasets, although those issues are pervasive. The deeper problem is a large gap between technical novelty and practical functionality."
Beyond the inherent unreliability of AI systems, there are two problems: AI systems that score high on structured tests typically don't do so well at messy real-world problems, and AI tools may not be well-tuned to user needs or easy to use -- they have no user empathy.
One Blake Reid, commenting on BlueSky, said that DOGE use of AI sounded like terrible software practice, with "an engineer hurriedly deploying an unfamiliar tool to meet an impossible deadline for a problem domain in which he has no expertise." Reid quoted Waldo Jaquith, who had worked on IT systems for the Treasury in the Obama Administration: "AI is absolutely the wrong tool for this. AI gives convincing-looking answer that are frequently wrong. There needs to be humans whose job it is to do this work."
In reply to Reid, I resurrected the saying: "If buildings were put together the way most software is, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." AI only makes it worse.
I believe AI has big potential -- but as Green points out, it is heavily oversold, in this case being used as a pretext for simply "drowning organizations in the bathtub" as part of an anti-government agenda. In the era of Trump, AI has become another fraud, somewhat like cryptocoin.
The talk of "futurists" about "superintelligent" AIs is nonsensical. An AI's performance is dependent on how well it is trained -- and simply hoovering up data does not mean good training, with erroneous AI output hoovered up as well, leading to accumulated errors and "AI model collapse". Instead of "exponential growth" in capability, in practice AI is suffering from "diminishing returns", where the effort to improve doubles with every step. AI has long been like "climbing a tree to the Moon" -- rapid progress at first, that soon runs out of steam. It's always been that way: two steps forward, one step back.
