Still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. His latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming via PBS.
Jimmy Fallon finally returned last night after a full summer off, amid rumors that he will be axed next season…
….And Jon Stewart also came back after a month away….
Plus: “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone posted Tuesday they are changing the name of their satirical sitcom to “South America”—they already did it with their Twitter feed—mocking Trump, and Apple and Google after they complied with executive orders to change names of Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico. Now Trump has demanded the state of New Mexico to change name to New America.
Parker and Stone said in a statement the name change is “Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google,” announcing it ahead of their show’s 29th season premiere next week. Parker and Stone added, “We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount -- a Skydance Capitulation,” taunting the controversial merger of Paramount and Skydance last year.
Earlier in the day, Jon Stewart (who was an early and often activist on the issue) spoke at a NYC presser as the 25-year coverup of toxic air exposure in downtown after 9/11 was finally broken.
Politico:
President Donald Trump gave three of his closest aides $45,000 cash gifts for the holidays, according to financial disclosures filed by the White House.Natalie Harp, Chamberlain Harris and Margo Martin each reported receiving the gift from Trump in their annual public financial disclosures. The gifts totaled $135,000 and came on top of each aide’s $150,000 taxpayer-funded annual salary.
From Axios newsletter this morning. No biggie. We’re all going to die. I love that they close it with their usual “Why it matters.”
Three Anthropic researchers went public last night with chilling concerns about out-of-control AI, warning it could destroy humans this decade.
Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon wrote on X, after resigning yesterday to sound the alarm: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”
Anthropic alignment-science lead Evan Hubinger responded: “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
Samuel Marks, Anthropic scalable-oversight lead, added: “AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes). This could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”
Why it matters:
Good to see:
Israeli Allies Ban Trade With Settlements as U.K. Cites ‘Ethnic Cleansing’
Britain, Canada and France on Tuesday announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, with Britain saying Israel had “turned a blind eye” to violence against Palestinians.
A Musk-see Film
Heather Cox Richardson:
A new documentary about Musk by filmmaker Alex Gibney argues, as Steven Zeitchik of the Hollywood Reporter put it, that Musk is “a dangerous huckster [who] is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data.” The documentary, called Musk, notes that, under Musk, DOGE had access to federal IT systems and, as Zeitchik recalls, a whistleblower warned that members of DOGE accessed and shared sensitive data from the Social Security Administration.
Zeitchik reports on the onscreen comments of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the godfather of AI,” who said: “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he says onscreen. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.”
Music Picks
Julie Christensen, friend of newsletter and longtime singer/songwriter solo and with bands (most beloved by many for decades of work with Leonard Cohen) just out with an anti-ICE protest song, “Don’t You Push.”
Reminder: They will be screening, and I will be talking about, my new Woody Guthrie film at the Springsteen Center in Jersey on Sept. 25, get your tickets here.
From Tunes to Toons
KAL:
Sack:
Ohman:
Steve Brodner on evil GOP senator who has now, for once, given Dems a shot to take a seat in Kansas this November:
Anderson:
Ann Telnaes as the GOP “mid-term convention” in Dallas starting today:
Photo Finish
Maybe not my greatest image, but kind of a thrill—after capturing so many graceful and imposing blue herons out on the Hudson nearby, we spotted for the first time one hunkered down in a tree branch over the Piermont marsh.
Thanks for the hot tip. I just put a bundle down on Kalshi that AI is going to kill me within 10 years. I’m gonna die rich!
Wow. So many excellent videos, music and cartoons.