300 volunteers joined in repairing a statue of a black woman at the beach which was vandalized with spray paint.

Recommendation engines that spread disinformation can be thought of as humanity's first major encounter with AI. Humanity is losing.

It is pertinent that these AIs are not autonomous; they do not have agency. They do not have emotions or goals of their own. They work under the control of very rich groups of people and those groups decide the goals they work for.

The plutocrats that mostly rule the US have a simple plan for what to do with people who can't ever find a job that can keep one alive: neglect them and let the consequences of poverty do away with most of them.

The New York City thug department operates a corrupt system of traffic enforcement, where friends and relatives of thugs get "courtesy cards" and thugs on traffic duty are told not to give tickets to those people no matter what they do.

One cop, who has a sense of integrity and may qualify to be called a police officer, rejected this system of corruption and gave tickets to privileged people just as he would to anyone else. He was punished for this and now s suing to put an end to the system.

He points out that one of the effects of this corruption is systemic racism.

UK thugs falsely convicted 6 man of a bombing in Birmingham, they fiercely defended that decision against all the evidence showing it was false.

*According to Irish cabinet papers from 1989, the British Home Office had indicated that its main [104]concerns about the potential overturning of convictions were "to avoid giving scandal” and “the credibility problems for police evidence in court hearings."*

Such determination never to admit that verdicts can be wrong occurs in the US too.

Almost all the US "think tanks" that comment on questions involving actual or possible war receive a lot of funds from military contractors including arms manufacturers.

Their unstated motto seems to be, "Think `tanks'."

We should not allow arms companies to have so much influence on how we use arms. There is an advantage in giving Ukraine plentiful arms; if they did not cost anything, why not give it a thousand tanks, a thousand fighter planes and a million missiles? But they do have a cost, and we need to consider the trade-offs.

What the invasion of Ukraine shows Americans is that the US needs to be prepared to greatly increase production of arms and supplies if the US is involved in a major war. The system we have is adequate only for the kind of war that the government starts quietly, the kind that makes the news only when things don't go according to plan.