☕️ THIEVERY ☙ Tuesday, May 21, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

The Trump trial devolution continues apace; war crimes charges complicate Biden's political calculus; great news for Julian Assange; a dramatic legal conflict exposes AI ethics questions; and more.

Good morning, C&Cers, it’s Tuesday! Your cracking roundup of essential news this morning includes: just as you started thinking the Trump Trial couldn’t get any worse for the prosecution, it got worse; International Criminal Court multiplies Biden’s political conundrum; Wikileaker gets last-minute stay of extradition execution; and the ugly, amoral face of AI gets exposed by grubby, all-too-human theft of people’s voices.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Yesterday’s Trump Trial fireworks included this remarkable Fortune headline: “Michael Cohen says he stole tens of thousands of dollars from Trump's company.” So — by his own admission — the disbarred lawyer is a chronic dissimulator and a thief.

As though he were kneeling in a confessional, President Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen admitted yesterday that he stole tens of thousands of dollars from Trump’s company, because — laughably — he thought he was underpaid.

While being pressed by defense attorney Todd Blanche, Cohen admitted that he pocketed cash that was supposed to be reimbursement for a $50,000 payment Cohen claimed he had shelled out to a technology firm. But Cohen actually gave the technology firm just $20,000, he said.

“So you stole from the Trump Organization,” Blanche asked.

“Yes, sir,” Cohen replied. Cohen agreed he never paid the Trump Organization back.

Ha. That’s just the time they know about. Who knows how much thievery Cohen got up to? What else did Cohen steal, apart from Trump’s good reputation?

It’s a bad look for a star witness. Media missed the immeasurable irony of convicting a President for putting the wrong words on his check stubs through the testimony of an admitted thief who isn’t being prosecuted.

Bragg’s lawyers will spin it like this: Cohen told the truth about lying and stealing, so he must have told the truth about the other stuff, too. But anyone who’s been a parent knows that when kids get caught with their little hands in the cookie box, they often cough up part of the truth, and they often hang onto the big lie to a ridiculous point.

Although corporate media quickly got its act together, in the moment yesterday while Cohen was admitting to a crime in open court, all the attorney analysts from the various networks expressed shock, disbelief, and doubt that Bragg could ever overcome reasonable doubt. For now, I’ll just put it this way: if the jury convicts him, Trump’s lawyers will have a lot to work with on appeal.

There are signs that corporate media is starting to craft a standby narrative, a cover story that losing the case was all Michael Cohen’s fault. Yesterday, NPR ran a revealing story with the slightly misleading headline, “How does Trump's trial end? It may hinge on how jurors feel about sex and privacy. Even NPR thinks it’s not looking too good for persecuting a president.

According to NPR’s legal experts, Bragg has a big timeline problem.

Prosecutors have to show intent to defraud when it comes to the business records. But if prosecutors allege that Trump was trying to defraud the voters, they could run into a timeline problem, because none of these allegedly false entries were made until 2017. That's well after the 2016 election.

"You can't defraud voters with documents when those voters are voting in November 2016 if those documents don't exist yet," Shugerman said, adding that he feels the target of the alleged fraud hasn't been made clear by the prosecution.

"Under the statute, intent to defraud needs a target. They've never applied it to the general public or anything as broad as the electorate,” he added.

You would think they’d want an airtight case while making presidential prosecution history. But Trump derangement is not constrained by such silly qualms.

Today we’ll discover how much defense case Trump’s lawyers intend to put on. But it doesn’t sound like the parties expect much, since Judge Merchan, masterfully dragging out the case, announced yesterday that no matter what, closing arguments would be delayed until after the upcoming holiday weekend. That gives jurors an extended chance to marinate in all the unavoidable media about the case, unless they all keep their phones turned off for a week.

🚀 CBS ran a historic story that multiplied Biden’s political problems yesterday, headlined “ICC prosecutor applies for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leaders.”

CLIP: International Criminal Court recommends arrest warrants for Israeli leaders (9:49).

The ICC’s special prosecutor, Karim A.A. Khan,* filed applications yesterday for arrest warrants against three Hamas leaders and two Israeli leaders, including its embattled Prime Minister. The Hamas charges are obvious; the Israelis were charged with intentionally targeting civilians in Gaza just to punish them, rather than for any legitimate military purpose.

"Israel, like all States, has a right to take action to defend its population," Khan generously allowed, but the special prosecutor stressed that right to self-defense “does not absolve Israel or any State of its obligation to comply with international humanitarian law. Intentionally causing death, starvation, great suffering, and serious injury to body or health of the civilian population — are criminal."

It sounds a lot like war to me, but I’m just a commercial lawyer, not an international war crimes expert.

The ICC accidentally planted the seeds of this historic development last year when it issued a similar arrest warrant for Russian President Putin. The ICC had accused Putin of stealing Ukraine’s children, a laughable predicate that no serious commenter seems willing to defend. But, having indicted President Putin, the ICC was required to do the same for Israel’s Prime Minister. Good for the goose, etc.

Neither Israel, the U.S., nor Russia have joined the ICC or agreed to its jurisdiction. So, if the ICC does issue these arrest warrants, Netanyahu will not be able to travel to most of Europe, where he would be promptly arrested by any of the 124 ICC-member countries. Just like Putin!

In a weaselly statement yesterday — not live, in other words — President Biden sniped that the application for Netanyahu’s warrant was "outrageous." He decried the ICC’s making an equivalence between Hamas’ barbaric war crimes and Israel’s predictable military response to the October 7th attacks.

Assuming the ICC accepts A.A. Khan’s application, and issues the warrants — which seems likely — Biden is in even more of a political pickle. It’s a giant, walking, Ghostbuster of a problem, the political equivalent of the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Pickle. The Trump-deranged New Republic ran an emotional, overwrought editorial yesterday:

The gist of the article was that Biden should stop supporting long-time US ally Israel, not because it would be the right thing to do, but just to recover the youth vote, since if Trump wins, that means ‘the end of democracy.’

But Biden is not likely to stop supporting Israel, for any number of reasons, some good, many awful. And so this crazy, over-the-top election season rumbles on.

🔥🔥 In what many will agree was good news yesterday, object of elite hatred and Wikileaker Julian Assange won the right to appeal his extradition to the U.S., for alleged crimes of publishing leaked military documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that embarrassed the United States. The BBC ran the story under the headline, “Julian Assange: Wikileaks founder can challenge US extradition.”

Even more embarrassing for the U.S., the reason the British court gave Assange another chance was because it was unconvinced the U.S. would honor Assange’s constitutional rights, particularly his free-speech rights.

In a short but dramatic ruling yesterday, which was literally the jailed journalist’s last chance to avoid extradition, two senior judges gave Assange permission to appeal the earlier order granting his extradition to the U.S. The judges ruled that Assange must be provided a full appeal in the UK.

The claim is that Assange leaked documents showing how the US military had covered up killing civilians during the Afghanistan war. In other words, the U.S. did what the ICC would consider war crimes, that is if it applied yesterday’s standard to President Obama. Specifically, the U.S. argues Assange “put lives at risk” by failing to redact the names of intelligence agents in the leaked documents.

For some reason, many people think Assange will not receive a fair trial in America. They seem to believe he’ll be relegated to the DOJ’s coach class along with President Trump and the January 6th Capitol tourists. That loss of trust in America’s judicial institutions is a bad sign, given that until recently, the U.S. used to be considered the ‘gold standard’ of justice.

But don’t worry! As we have been repeatedly reassured, we will save democracy by first flattening it into a dead roadside raccoon.

🔥 Finally, the New york Times ran a grotesque cover story for AI yesterday headlined, “Scarlett Johansson Said No, but OpenAI’s Virtual Assistant Sounds Just Like Her.” Actress Scarlett Johansson — and that is, in fact, her real name — just ripped the mask off the hypocritical moral black hole masquerading in this country as “A.I.”

A.I. encounters litigious human beings.

It is critical to note that AI developers literally won’t shut up about how moral and ethical they are, while they design a glorious new generation of thinking machines to advise and perhaps, to govern us. During developers’ many, near-weekly ‘ethics conferences,’ the standing ovations from congratulating each other for their altitudinous ethics and unassailable morality have produced a constant baseline of 2.6 on the Richter scale.

A few upcoming examples, if you’d like to swank it up with Big Tech:

Of course, since we are blessed to live in a neo-Marxist era, a lot depends on what you mean by, ‘ethics.’ Here are just a few example sessions that will inform AI luminaries attending DePauw University’s upcoming Midwest AI Ethics Symposium:

• “Artificial Intelligence, Human Cognition, and Human Rights: Employee Infantilization and Organized Immaturity with Bossware Platforms,”

• “Superintelligence and Assisted Suicide,”

• “Conscious AI and the Climate Crisis,” “Brain/Computer Interfaces, Relational Ethics, and the Habitus of Ableism,”

• and my favorite, “The Ethics of Customizable AI-generated Pornography.”

The ethics of p*rn! I’d love to explore that hilarious oxymoron a bit more, but I digress. Let us assume without chuckling that A.I. developers actually do understand what the word “ethics” means: determining what is right and wrong, good and bad, by applying some kind of objective moral framework.

Yesterday the indignant, red-headed mega-actress released a furious statement (edited for brevity; link to the full version here):

"Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people. After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer. Nine months later, my friends, family and the general public all noted how much the newest system named "Sky" sounded like me.

When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief. Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word "her" - a reference to a 2013 film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human writer.

Two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo was released, Mr. Altman contacted my agent and asked me to reconsider. Before we could connect, the system was released. As a result of their actions, I was forced to hire legal counsel, who wrote two letters to Mr. Altman and OpenAl. Consequently, OpenAl reluctantly agreed to take down the "Sky" voice.

My goodness. It didn’t at all seem like ethics. Here’s Sam Altman back in 2022, during his less morally ambiguous salad years, prophetically describing this awkward development wherein a top AI designer and ‘ethics expert’ steals a human’s voice — after being told ‘no’ — to feed his machine:

In his own words, yes please dunk on Sam. He wants us to. But more important, after all this time, we see that AI morality hasn’t sunk in, notwithstanding the mind-numbing, endless charade of constant AI ethics conferences. Maybe things would have been different had Sam’s classroom displayed the Ten Commandments. (It’s number eight! The one about not stealing.)

Looking closer into how this happened, it becomes even more troubling. The New York Times article actually ran defensive cover for OpenAI — raising its own questions — suggesting that, even after Scarlett told them ‘no,’ OpenAI’s brilliant developers found a different way, not to steal, exactly, but to reproduce something remarkably similar to Scarlett’s voice.

They didn’t steal her voice. In other words, they worked around it. Uh huh.  Scarlett didn’t buy that story, or her lawyers, or me, for that matter.

They knew it was wrong, but they did it anyway. Not only did Altman — and the rest of OpenAI’s team — freely ignore the Eighth Commandment, copyright laws, and a basic sense of right and wrong and fair play, but also OpenAI evidenced a very concerning willingness to try to evade the rules.

This forces us to ask: What other rules or laws or morals are they evading? And, what kind of morality are they teaching these machines? Is this Artificial Ethics? A.E.?

Christians with moderate theological achievement understand that it is literally impossible for ethically flawed humans to create a morally perfect AI. The way things are going, that could become kind of a problem.

My legal advice to Scarlett Johannsen would be: check your purse and your garage to see what else morally ambiguous Sam Altman might have purloined.

Have a terrific Tuesday! And get back here tomorrow morning for another informative and energizing roundup of Coffee & Covid.

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