Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics.
The Trump administration recently launched its most high-profile attack on free speech yet—and it didn’t work. In fact, new polling suggests it’s backfiring bigly.
On Sept. 15, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel tamely critiqued the MAGA movement’s response to the murder of far-right activist Charlie Kirk. But even that proved unacceptable for the Trump administration, which successfully pressured ABC to suspend Kimmel’s show two days later.
Demonstrators picket in response to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show, outside of Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, on Sept. 18.
And shortly after this, Trump’s already bad approval rating got even worse.
This is perhaps most noticeable in polling averages, like the one run by election analyst Nate Silver. On the day ABC suspended Kimmel, an average of 44.4% of the public approved of the job Trump was doing as president, while an average of 52.2% disapproved, making for a net approval rating of -7.8 percentage points.
But around Sept. 22, as the Kimmel discourse hit fever pitch and even some Republicans couldn’t get behind the president’s crusade against the First Amendment, Trump’s approval rating started to slide. As of Friday morning, he had a net approval rating of -9.6 points.
In other words, in those few short anti-free-speech days, Trump’s net approval rating dropped 1.8 points. If that doesn’t seem like much, know that it takes a lot to move a polling average.
A deeper dive into the polls seems to back this up. For surveys that exited the field in the week before Sept. 17—i.e., Kimmel’s suspension—Trump’s average net approval rating was -9.3 points, according to a Daily Kos review of polls aggregated by political analyst Mary Radcliffe. (Radcliffe is a former colleague of mine at 538.) But among polls that entered the field on or after Sept. 17, his net approval was down to -11.6 points. That’s a 2.3-point drop in about two weeks.
In other words, the Kimmel suspension tracks with a hit to Trump’s approval rating.
Of course, correlation doesn’t equal causation, and it’s impossible to know every factor causing Trump’s approval rating to fall. It could be statistical noise, though polling averages are designed to reduce such a thing. It could be the brutality of Trump’s immigration agenda or his administration’s mishandling of its files on accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. It could be that almost 8 in 10 voters now think the U.S. is in a political crisis. It could be fears around the job market and Trump’s economy-wrecking tariffs, as Silver himself thinks is the case. After all, nothing hurts an approval rating quite like higher prices. Just ask former President Joe Biden.
Most likely, it’s all of this. And more.
And yet it’s possible that Trump’s attack on free speech is playing an outsized role. The Kimmel suspension was a highly publicized event that earned broad condemnation. Legacy media outlets covered it critically, and even popular right-leaning podcasters like Joe Rogan slammed it. Hell, even Ted Cruz did.
Americans across the political spectrum love the freedom of speech, and the Kimmel suspension has stoked fears around losing it.
Fifty-three percent of voters are pessimistic about free speech being protected in the U.S., according to a Quinnipiac University poll that entered the field the day after Kimmel’s suspension. That’s a big increase from March, when the same poll found only 43% were pessimistic. And in January, only 38% were.
The same poll found Trump with a dismal 38% approval rating among voters, down 2 points from August, when it was 40%. While that drop is within the margin of error, Trump’s dip in his polling average suggests real movement.
On top of that, 56% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of free speech, in a poll YouGov conducted after the Kimmel suspension. And 77% think it is probably or definitely a violation of the freedom of speech for the government to threaten to revoke the broadcast license of a television network that critiques it. You know, the very thing Trump has done.
Another new YouGov poll finds that only about 1 in 5 Americans think the government didn’t pressure ABC to suspend Kimmel—and 2 in 3 think the government should not take such an action.
In our era of stark partisan division, these numbers suggest the Trump administration has severely overplayed its hand in trying to silence a noted Trump critic. In fact, its attempts to do so have made Kimmel all the more popular.
Any updates?
Despite the Trump administration spitting out anti-vaccine misinformation and even curtailing access to some shots, the vast majority of Americans still want kids to receive the shot for measles, mumps, and rubella. Sixty-eight percent of Americans say kids should be required to get the MMR vaccine, according to a new poll from YouGov, while just 16% say they shouldn’t be.
Trump and his team are dead-set on punishing his perceived enemies after years of lying about the former Biden administration politically persecuting him—and this has got his base twisted up in knots. On the one hand, 54% of Republicans tell YouGov that Biden directed his attorney general to investigate his political opponents, but a plurality of them (38%) also endorse the idea of such investigations. In other words, for them, it’s largely okay if Trump does it, but it’s bad if Biden does it, even though Biden didn’t.
Vibe check
The Trump administration is preparing to fire even more federal workers if Congress blows its funding deadline on Sept. 30 and the government shuts down. However, it’s already fired tens of thousands.
tThe internet is full of people claiming to uncover conspiracies in politics and business..." reports the Wall Street Journal.
"Now an unlikely new villain has been added to the list: theoretical physicists," they write, saygin resentment of scientific authority figures "is the major attraction of what might be called 'conspiracy physics'."
In recent years, a group of YouTubers and podcasters have attracted millions of viewers by proclaiming that physics is in crisis. The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory... Most fringe theories are too arcane for listeners to understand, but anyone can grasp the idea that academic physics is just one more corrupt and self-serving establishment... In this corner of the internet, the scientist Scott Aaronson has written, "Anyone perceived as the 'mainstream establishment' faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as 'renegade' wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding...
As with other kinds of authorities, there are reasonable criticisms to be made of academic physics. By some metrics, scientific productivity has slowed since the 1970s. String theory has not fulfilled physicists' early dreams that it would become the ultimate explanation of all forces and matter in our universe. The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, has delivered fewer breakthroughs than scientists expected when it turned on in 2010. But even reasonable points become hard to recognize when expressed in the ways YouTube incentivizes. Conspiracy physics videos with titles like "They Just Keep Lying" are full of sour sarcasm, outraged facial expressions and spooky music...
Leonard Susskind, director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, says physicists need to be both more sober and more forceful when addressing the public. The limits of string theory should be acknowledged, he says, but the idea that progress has slowed isn't right. In the last few decades, he and other physicists have figured out how to make progress on the vast project of integrating general relativity and quantum mechanics, the century-old pillars of physics, into a single explanation of the universe.
The bitter attacks on leading physicists get a succinct summary in the article from Chris Williamson, a "Love Island" contestant turned podcast host. "This is like 'The Kardashians' for physicists — I love it."
"Swiss voters have backed plans for electronic identity cards by a wafer-thin margin," reports the Guardian, "in the second nationwide vote on the issue."
In a referendum on Sunday, 50.4% of voters supported an electronic ID card, while 49.6% were against, confounding pollsters who had forecast stronger support for the "yes" vote. Turnout was 49.55%, higher than expected... [V]oters rejected an earlier version of the e-ID in 2021, largely over objections to the role of private companies in the system. In response to these concerns, the Swiss state will now provide the e-ID, which will be optional and free of charge... To ensure security the e-ID is linked to a single smartphone, users will have to get a new e-ID if they change their device... An ID card containing biometric data — fingerprints — will be available from the end of next year.
Critics of the e-ID scheme raised data protection concerns and said it opened the door to mass surveillance. They also fear the voluntary scheme will become mandatory and disadvantage people without smartphones. The referendum was called after a coalition of rightwing and data-privacy parties collected more than 50,000 signatures against e-ID cards, triggering the vote.
"To further ease privacy concerns, a particular authority seeking information on a person — such as proof of age or nationality, for example — will only be able to check for those specific details," notes the BBC:
Supporters of the Swiss system say it will make life much easier for everyone, allowing a range of bureaucratic procedures — from getting a telephone contract to proving you are old enough to buy a bottle of wine — to happen quickly online. Opponents of digital ID cards, who gathered enough signatures to force another referendum on the issue, argue that the measure could still undermine individual privacy. They also fear that, despite the new restrictions on how data is collected and stored, it could still be used to track people and for marketing purposes.
The BBC adds that the UK government also announced plans earlier this week to introduce its own digital ID, "which would be mandatory for employment. The proposed British digital ID would have fewer intended uses than the Swiss version, but has still raised concerns about privacy and data security."
The Guardian reports:
The referendum came soon after the UK government announced plans for a digital ID card, which would sit in the digital wallets of smartphones, using state-of-the-art encryption. More than 1.6 million people have signed a petition opposing e-ID cards, which would be mandatory for people working in the UK by 2029.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.
Hours after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Suzanne Swierc shared two thoughts on her private Facebook page — that the killing of the right-wing activist was wrong, and that his death reflected “the violence, fear and hatred he sowed.”
The post upended her life.
Indiana Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita soon obtained a screenshot of the post by Swierc, an administrator at Ball State University, and added it to an official website naming and shaming educators for their comments about Kirk.
Libs of Tik Tok, a social media account dedicated to mocking liberals, shared her comments with its 4.4 million followers on X. A week after the post, the university fired her.
“The day that my private post was made public without my consent was one of the worst days of my life,” Swierc told reporters this past week. She said she received calls, texts and other harassing messages, including one suggesting she should be killed, that left her terrified.
A wave of firings and investigations has swept through academia and government in the wake of Kirk’s death, as state agencies, colleges and local school districts take action against employees over comments perceived as offensive or inappropriate. Dozens of workers in higher education alone have lost their jobs.
A Texas State University student was expelled after he publicly reenacted Kirk’s assassination; Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republicans had called for the student’s expulsion. Clemson University in South Carolina fired one worker and removed two professors from teaching. The University of Mississippi fired an employee. An Idaho Department of Labor employee was terminated.
The purge is driven in part by Republican elected officials who are encouraging Americans to report co-workers, their children’s teachers and others who make comments seen as crossing the line. They have been egged on by the Trump administration, with Vice President JD Vance urging listeners of Kirk’s podcast to call the employer of anyone “celebrating” his killing.
JD Vance hosts an episode of "The Charlie Kirk Show" at the White House on Sept. 15.
President Donald Trump has threatened to expand the crackdown beyond Kirk, warning falsely in the Oval Office last week that negative press coverage of him is “really illegal,” despite constitutional protections for freedom of the press.
At Kirk’s memorial service, Trump said, “I hate my opponent.” His choice to lead the Federal Communications Commission threatened ABC over comments about the reaction to Kirk’s death made by the late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel and the network pulled his show for several days.
Mark Johnson, a First Amendment attorney based in Kansas City, Missouri, who has been practicing law for 45 years, said he had never seen a moment like the current one.
“Not even close,” Johnson said. “What’s been happening in the last month is astonishing.”
In Indiana, Rokita is using his office’s “Eyes on Education” webpage to publicize examples of educators who have made controversial remarks about Kirk. The page, billed as a transparency tool, housed a hodgepodge of submitted complaints about teachers and schools in the past. Now, it also includes 28 Kirk-related submissions as of Thursday afternoon.
Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden threatened to strip an entire town of federal funding after a high school math teacher noted on her personal Facebook page that Kirk had in the past said some gun deaths are worth it to have the Second Amendment. The teacher has been suspended.
Donald Trump shakes hands with Charlie Kirk during a March 2018 event at the White House.
Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters, who is leaving his job next month to head up a conservative teachers organization, has launched investigations of school employees in response to tips submitted to Awareity, an online platform that allows parents and others to report concerns. Last week the Oklahoma State Department of Education said it had received 224 reports of “defamatory comments.”
Florida Republican U.S. Rep. Randy Fine has urged people with information about anyone celebrating Kirk’s death who works in government in Florida to contact his office. And South Carolina Republican U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace wants federal funding cut off for any school that fails to fire or discipline staff who “glorify or justify” political violence.
“It’s at a scale never before seen and I think it’s completely unhinged,” Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said of the rush to fire higher education faculty.
Free speech consequences?
Kirk, who founded the campus conservative activism organization Turning Point USA and was close to Trump, was a hero to many Republicans. They saw a charismatic family man and a Christian unafraid to take his hard-right vision onto liberal college campuses.
But many Democrats and liberals experienced Kirk as a provocateur with a record of incendiary remarks about people of color, immigrants and Islam. While many of Kirk’s opponents have condemned the assassination, some have also emphasized their disagreement with his views or suggested his death arose out of what they saw as his hateful rhetoric.
Charlie Kirk hands out hats before speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on Sept. 10.
“I have faculty who are getting fired, who have tenure and are getting fired, for saying things like ‘I condemn political violence but the words that Charlie Kirk used, he sort of reaped what he sowed,’” Wolfson said. “All things told, I may not agree with that statement, but that’s a perfectly reasonable thing for somebody to say. Certainly not something to be fired for.”
Some Republicans have long denounced what they view as past Democratic censorship, including Biden administration efforts to pressure social media companies to censor content during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have also criticized firings and pushed back on perceived political correctness run amok during the height of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, moments of ascendant progressive influence.
But as the current round of terminations plays out, some conservatives argue public employees who speak out about Kirk are facing the consequences of their actions. Oklahoma state Rep. Gabe Woolley, a Republican, said individuals in a taxpayer-funded role who work with children should be held to a high level of accountability.
“I think the most important factor to consider … is that these people chose to enter the public square on public social media accounts and to mock and celebrate the death of an American patriot who was a Christian martyr who was killed for his faith doing what God called him to do,” Woolley said.
Woolley added that “if you choose to make something public, you should not be shocked or surprised by any type of public pushback.”
Swierc described a relatively restricted Facebook account. It was private and couldn’t be found by searching for her name; only individuals with mutual Facebook friends could request to add her as a friend. She did not list her employer on her profile.
Swierc’s post on Kirk could only be seen by her Facebook friends. At some point, someone — Swierc doesn’t know who — made a screenshot of the post. It was then circulated publicly and ended up on Indiana’s “Eyes on Education” page.
People place lit candles below a photo of Charlie Kirk at a vigil on Sepy. 11 in Orem, Utah.
On Sept. 17, Ball State University President Geoffrey Mearns fired Swierc, who had been director of health promotion and advocacy within the Division of Student Affairs. In a letter informing Swierc of her termination, Mearns wrote that many current students had written to the university to express concern and that her post had caused unprecedented disruption.
Swierc filed a federal lawsuit against Mearns on Monday, alleging he violated her First Amendment rights. Swierc, who is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, wants a court to order Mearns to expunge her termination from her Ball State University personnel file, along with unspecified damages.
“I do not regret the post I made, and I would not take back what I said,” Swierc said during a virtual news conference organized by the ACLU of Indiana. “I believe that I, along with every person in this country, have First Amendment rights to be able to speak on a number of things.”
Ball State University declined to answer Stateline’s questions, citing the lawsuit. In an unsigned public statement on the day of Swierc’s firing, the university said the post was “inconsistent with the distinctive nature and trust” of Swierc’s leadership position and had caused significant disruption to the university.
Swierc’s lawsuit is one of a growing number of legal challenges to firings and employee discipline over comments about Kirk. On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered the University of South Dakota to reinstate an art professor who had placed on administrative leave after calling Kirk a “Nazi” but later deleted the post and apologized.
Aggressive state attorney general
Swierc didn’t name Rokita, the attorney general, as a defendant in her lawsuit, but the official has loomed over the situation.
Two days after Kirk’s assassination, Rokita urged his followers on X to submit to him any evidence of educators or school administrators celebrating or rationalizing the killing. He wrote that they must be held accountable and “have no place teaching our students.”
But Rokita has also said the Indiana Attorney General’s Office isn’t investigating individuals submitted to his “Eyes on Education” page — suggesting the effort is mainly intended to generate public pressure against employers. Each example on the page lists contact information for the school’s leadership and in some instances information about the next local school board meeting.
“For a government official, especially of that caliber, to be creating a database and doing this has an incredibly chilling effect on speech,” said Ashkhen Kazaryan, a senior legal fellow at The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank located at Vanderbilt University that promotes the values of free speech and free expression.
Rokita didn’t agree to an interview. “Our goal is to provide transparency, equipping parents with the information they need to make informed decisions about their children’s education,” Rokita said in a news release.
On Monday, Rokitasent a six-page letterto school superintendents and public university administrators, providing guidance on the legal authority to fire and discipline teachers for speech related to Kirk. The letter suggested that speech occurring on social media is a factor that weighs in favor of the authority to fire an employee because it carries the risk of being amplified and disrupting school operations.
Rokita also analyzed comments about Kirk by a U.S. history teacher in Indiana who had said the assassinated activist can “suck it” and referred to comments made by Kirk in 2023 that some gun deaths every year are the cost of Second Amendment rights. The district’s employer had chosen not to terminate the teacher, but Rokita laid out a legal justification for firing the employee.
He concluded the letter by writing that many schools would be within their legal authority to fire teachers “who have similarly contributed to the divisive and, for many, painful eruption of controversial discourse on social media and elsewhere concerning Charlie Kirk.”
Joseph Mastrosimone, an employment law professor at Washburn University, said private employers have broad discretion to fire workers over speech. But the government is different, he said, with the First Amendment providing at least some level of protection to employees.
Decades of court cases have established the core principle that if a public employee is speaking in their capacity as a citizen on a matter of public concern, then the government can only take action if the speech causes significant disruption to the delivery of the public service and that disruption outweighs the employee’s interest in the speech, he said.
Mastrosimone said if a teacher’s message made in his or her own time is causing community outrage and pandemonium, “that’s probably going to count as some disruption.”
“And there might be sufficient disruption to outweigh whatever interest the employee has in the speech,” Mastrosimone said. But the closer the teacher’s message is to core political speech — such as voicing support for a candidate for office — the more the scales tip in favor of the employee being able to speak without fear of discipline.
“It is certainly a matter of public concern, what’s going on here with the Charlie Kirk assassination. The interests are probably pretty high, I would think,” Mastrosimone said.
Push to honor Kirk
As some Republican officials have called for action against public employees who have made comments about Kirk, they have often drawn a line at what they see as celebrating or glorifying his assassination. Walters, the outgoing Oklahoma state superintendent, has gone further and is investigating districts for “refusing to honor his memory.”
The Oklahoma State Department of Education last week said in addition to reports on individual teachers, it was investigating 30 reports of schools that didn’t observe a moment of silence. Three reports alleged schools weren’t flying their flags at half-staff.
On Tuesday, Walters announced an official push to start a Turning Point USA chapter in every Oklahoma high school. Later that day, he announced he would resign as superintendent to become CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a new group that casts itself as a conservative alternative to teachers’ unions.
Walters’ Turning Point effort comes after Oklahoma state Sen. Shane Jett, a Republican, filed three pieces of legislation to honor Kirk, including one that would establish “Charlie Kirk Free Speech Day” and another requiring public colleges and universities to develop a “Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza” on their campuses.
Walters and Jett didn’t respond to interview requests.
“Charlie Kirk inspired a generation to love America, to speak boldly, and to never shy away from debate. Our kids must get involved and active,” Walters said in a news release on Tuesday. “We will fight back against the liberal propaganda pushed by the radical left and the teachers' unions. Our fight starts now.”
Tim Berners-Lee writes in a new article in the Guardian that "Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0, we took the wrong path
Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users' private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers' mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising...
We have the technical capability to give that power back to the individual. Solid is an open-source interoperable standard that I and my team developed at MIT more than a decade ago. Apps running on Solid don't implicitly own your data — they have to request it from you and you choose whether to agree, or not. Rather than being in countless separate places on the internet in the hands of whomever it had been resold to, your data is in one place, controlled by you. Sharing your information in a smart way can also liberate it. Why is your smartwatch writing your biological data to one silo in one format? Why is your credit card writing your financial data to a second silo in a different format? Why are your YouTube comments, Reddit posts, Facebook updates and tweets all stored in different places? Why is the default expectation that you aren't supposed to be able to look at any of this stuff? You generate all this data — your actions, your choices, your body, your preferences, your decisions. You should own it. You should be empowered by it...
We're now at a new crossroads, one where we must decide if AI will be used for the betterment or to the detriment of society. How can we learn from the mistakes of the past? First of all, we must ensure policymakers do not end up playing the same decade-long game of catchup they have done over social media. The time to decide the governance model for AI was yesterday, so we must act with urgency. In 2017, I wrote a thought experiment about an AI that works for you. I called it Charlie. Charlie works for you like your doctor or your lawyer, bound by law, regulation and codes of conduct. Why can't the same frameworks be adopted for AI? We have learned from social media that power rests with the monopolies who control and harvest personal data. We can't let the same thing happen with AI.
Berners-Lee also says "we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research," arguing that if we muster the political willpower, "we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders.
"We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It's not too late."
Berners-Lee has also written a new book titled This is For Everyone.
"Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is launching paid subscriptions for users who do not want to see adverts in the UK," reports the BBC:
The company said it would start notifying users in the coming weeks to let them choose whether to subscribe to its platforms if they wish to use them without seeing ads. EU users of its platforms can already pay a fee starting from €5.99 (£5) a month to see no ads — but subscriptions will start from £2.99 a month for UK users.
"It will give people in the UK a clear choice about whether their data is used for personalised advertising, while preserving the free access and value that the ads-supported internet creates for people, businesses and platforms," Meta said. But UK users will not have an option to not pay and see "less personalised" adverts — a feature Meta added for EU users after regulators raised concerns...
Meta said its own model would see its subscription for no ads cost £2.99 a month on the web or £3.99 a month on iOS and Android apps — with the higher fee to offset cuts taken from transactions by Apple and Google... [Meta] reiterated its critical stance on the EU on Friday, saying its regulations were creating a worse experience for users and businesses unlike the UK's "more pro-growth and pro-innovation regulatory environment".
"Meta said its own model would see its subscription for no ads cost £2.99 a month on the web or £3.99 a month on iOS and Android apps," according to the BBC, "with the higher fee to offset cuts taken from transactions by Apple and Google."
Even users not paying for an ad-free experience have "tools and settings that empower people to control their ads experience," according to Meta's announcement. The include Ad Preferences which influences data used to inform ads including Activity Information from Ad Partners. "We also have tools in our products that explain 'Why am I seeing this ad?' and how people can manage their ad experience. We do not sell personal data to advertisers."
Congressional Cowards is a weekly series highlighting the worst Donald Trump defenders on Capitol Hill, who refuse to criticize him—no matter how disgraceful or lawless his actions.
President Donald Trump has been inching the United States toward becoming an authoritarian state since he put his hand on the Bible and took the oath of office for a second time back in January.
But the inching turned into a full-on slide this week, as Trump took tangible steps toward weaponizing the Department of Justice to jail his perceived enemies and silence those with views that differ from his own.
There were fewer comments than usual this week, as Congress is in recess and thus lawmakers are not on Capitol Hill, and safe from reporters asking them to comment on Trump’s impeachable actions.
But the Republican lawmakers who did comment this week cheered Trump's actions.
Following reports that Trump's newly minted U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia will seek an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey—even though career prosecutors said they do not believe probable cause exists to charge him with a crime—multiple GOP lawmakers applauded.
"James Comey betrayed our nation. He meddled in the 2016 election, concealed the baseless Trump-Russia probe, abused FISA with the Steele dossier, leaked classified memos to spark the Mueller witch hunt, and lied to Congress. The DOJ should indict him. Justice must be served," Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) wrote in a post on X.
Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) went a step further, saying on Fox Business, "In my opinion he should be charged with treason."
Van Orden later said he was excited about the possibility of DOJ officials resigning in protest over a possible Comey indictment, saying that it would be "Outstanding."
"In SEAL training we call this 'self selection,'" Van Orden wrote.
Meanwhile, other Republicans continued to applaud Trump for trying to force ABC to pull comedian Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves.
“It is reasonable for the FCC commissioner to say what he basically said, which is when he said, 'You can do this the easy way or the hard way, either back off, Disney ... or you’re going to deal with the fact that you’re going to have licenses,'" Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) told right-wing hack Glenn Beck.
They also refused to say Trump should rule out a third term—which the Constitution explicitly prohibits.
“Trump 2028. I hope this never ends,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) refused to condemn Graham for cheering on a blatantly unconstitutional action.
“Well, I didn't see—I know Lindsey said that before—and I think he generally expects a, you know, a pretty lighthearted response when he says it,” Thune said.
Less scary but embarrassing nonetheless were the Republicans who defended Trump's moronic speech to the United Nations on Tuesday, with others joining Trump's attacks against the organization over the failure of an escalator that Trump and first lady Melania Trump attempted to ride.
Thune called Trump's embarrassing speech that diminished the United States on the world stage "Straight talk from the president."
"He puts out the unvarnished truth," Thune said of Trump's idiotic remarks.
"President Trump commanded respect at the UN, while Biden's wandering turned America into a global punchline," Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) wrote in a post on X, which is the absolute opposite of reality. "It's great to have leadership that doesn't apologize for American strength once again!"
Meanwhile, Steube called for an "investigation" into the escalator situation at the U.N., saying that it “could not be a coincidence" that the escalator stopped right when Trump was on it.
Never underestimate Republicans' ability to debase themselves in subservience to Dear Leader.
IEEE Spectrum ranks the popularity of programming languages — but is there a problem? Programmers "are turning away from many of these public expressions of interest. Rather than page through a book or search a website like Stack Exchange for answers to their questions, they'll chat with an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT in a private conversation."
And with an AI assistant like Cursor helping to write code, the need to pose questions in the first place is significantly decreased. For example, across the total set of languages evaluated in the Top Programming Languages, the number of questions we saw posted per week on Stack Exchange in 2025 was just 22% of what it was in 2024...
However, an even more fundamental problem is looming in the wings... In the same way most developers today don't pay much attention to the instruction sets and other hardware idiosyncrasies of the CPUs that their code runs on, which language a program is vibe coded in ultimately becomes a minor detail... [T]he popularity of different computer languages could become as obscure a topic as the relative popularity of railway track gauges... But if an AI is soothing our irritations with today's languages, will any new ones ever reach the kind of critical mass needed to make an impact? Will the popularity of today's languages remain frozen in time?
That's ultimately the larger question. "how much abstraction and anti-foot-shooting structure will a sufficiently-advanced coding AI really need...?"
[C]ould we get our AIs to go straight from prompt to an intermediate language that could be fed into the interpreter or compiler of our choice? Do we need high-level languages at all in that future? True, this would turn programs into inscrutable black boxes, but they could still be divided into modular testable units for sanity and quality checks. And instead of trying to read or maintain source code, programmers would just tweak their prompts and generate software afresh.
What's the role of the programmer in a future without source code? Architecture design and algorithm selection would remain vital skills... How should a piece of software be interfaced with a larger system? How should new hardware be exploited? In this scenario, computer science degrees, with their emphasis on fundamentals over the details of programming languages, rise in value over coding boot camps.
Will there be a Top Programming Language in 2026? Right now, programming is going through the biggest transformation since compilers broke onto the scene in the early 1950s. Even if the predictions that much of AI is a bubble about to burst come true, the thing about tech bubbles is that there's always some residual technology that survives. It's likely that using LLMs to write and assist with code is something that's going to stick. So we're going to be spending the next 12 months figuring out what popularity means in this new age, and what metrics might be useful to measure.
Having said that, IEEE Spectrum still ranks programming language popularity three ways — based on use among working programmers, demand from employers, and "trending" in the zeitgeist — using seven different metrics.
Their results? Among programmers, "we see that once again Python has the top spot, with the biggest change in the top five being JavaScript's drop from third place last year to sixth place this year. As JavaScript is often used to create web pages, and vibe coding is often used to create websites, this drop in the apparent popularity may be due to the effects of AI... In the 'Jobs' ranking, which looks exclusively at what skills employers are looking for, we see that Python has also taken 1st place, up from second place last year, though SQL expertise remains an incredibly valuable skill to have on your resume."
The energy and natural resource sector has spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying the federal government so far this year, according to data compiled by the nonprofit OpenSecrets.
That spending comes amid a wave of policy wins for fossil fuel interests—and significant setbacks for environmental and green energy groups.
Nearly $240 million poured in during the first and second quarters of 2025, with about 2,200 lobbyists representing the sector—nearly half of whom are former government employees themselves. That spending puts the sector slightly ahead of last year’s pace, when its yearly total reached $435 million.
This year’s expenditures make energy and natural resources the fifth-largest lobbying sector that OpenSecrets tracked over this period—ahead of transportation, defense and labor.
Electric utilities represented the largest share of those expenditures, totaling nearly $75 million.
That’s more than half of what it spent in all of 2024 combined—the industry’s biggest year in over a decade.
And with about $71 million already spent on lobbying this year, the oil and gas industry continues to significantly outpace the renewable industry’s lobbying expenditures of roughly $40 million.
The totals for oil and gas so far this year put the industry slightly below the pace of last year’s expenditures, which totaled over $150 million—its highest since 2009.
However, watchdog organizations say the industry’s steady funding is actually the result of its existing influence within the federal government.
“When you’ve got a White House that has made clear that they’re going to do whatever you want, you don’t have to spend as much money to get results,” said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. “They had to spend more when you had bipartisan, shared control over government, and you didn’t have a rubber stamp in the Oval Office. Now they do.”
Since President Donald Trump took office, his administration and Republicans in Congress have pushed through a slew of regulatory and legislative measures fulfilling the priorities of fossil fuel interests, often at the expense of renewables.
The party’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, has been criticized as a handout to the fossil fuel industry that increases lease sales for drilling and mandates that millions of acres of federal lands be made available for mining.
President Donald Trump signs executive orders on July 23 in Washington.
Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, told CNBC at the time that the bill “includes almost all of our priorities.”
The administration has also granted Clean Air Act exemptions to dozens of fossil fuel-burning power plants, delaying their need to reduce emissions of mercury and other air toxins.
And the EPA’s announcement that it intends to rescind its “endangerment finding” for greenhouse gases would remove the basis for its ability to regulate emissions from motor vehicles, power plants and oil and gas operations.
These moves have come amid a reversal of government support for renewable energy projects. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act included a phaseout of tax credits for wind and solar that critics say runs counter to the administration’s goal of achieving “energy dominance.”
Wind energy, in particular, has been singled out as a target by the administration. Trump issued a presidential memorandum on his first day in office halting approvals, permits, leases and loans for both offshore and onshore wind projects. The administration later took the unusual step of issuing stop-work orders for some offshore wind projects that were already under construction.
Multiple watchdog organizations told Inside Climate News that the real source of the fossil fuel industry’s current influence stems in part from industry insiders who have been strategically placed into key government positions. That list includes Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former oil and gas executive, and a range of political appointees with ties to the industry within the EPA.
In an emailed statement, a White House spokesperson did not directly address concerns about administration officials’ ties to fossil fuel interests, but said that “President Trump has kept his Day One promise to unleash American energy, protecting our national security and lowering costs for families and businesses.”
According to Robert Maguire, vice president for research and data at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, those ties have meant that the fossil fuel industry hasn’t had to increase spending on lobbying to secure key wins.
“This has been a hallmark of both [of] Trump’s terms, where essentially he fills his administration with lobbyists and industry officials who, in many cases, have no government experience,” Maguire said. “Their only qualifications for the jobs that he’s putting them in is the fact that they want to do the industry’s bidding within the government.”
A source within the oil and gas industry, however, downplayed the effect of the “revolving door” of industry insiders gaining positions within the government, and instead emphasized that Trump came into office with an already-friendly attitude toward oil and gas.
The source, who requested anonymity to speak freely on the topic, said that industry lobbyists have had conversations with people in government who are “more engaged or more willing to talk for any number of reasons,” saying that there is “expertise” within the current administration on matters tied to the oil and gas industry that didn’t exist during the Biden administration.
Although the source emphasized that the industry has still fought difficult policy battles this year, including over tax credits for clean hydrogen projects, they said that this expertise has meant that industry lobbyists haven’t needed to spend as much effort educating lawmakers or officials on key issues.
Utilities, meanwhile, continue to have a “massive” amount of influence in D.C., according to David Pomerantz, executive director of the watchdog Energy and Policy Institute.
But he noted that far fewer utility insiders have been appointed to positions within the federal government during Trump’s second term.
And unlike the oil and gas industry, the agendas of various utility companies are more complex, and sometimes reveal significant differences between what utilities want and what the Trump administration wants.
The headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington in 2019.
“Where the utilities are lobbying for policies or regulatory changes that will allow them to burn more coal and gas, they’re successful,” Pomerantz said.
“The EPA basically said, ‘If you want waivers so that you do not have to comply with pollution limits, all you have to do is send us an email.’”
Still, Pomerantz said that not all utility companies sought out those exemptions—and that some utilities have also lobbied unsuccessfully against some of the Trump administration’s anti-renewables policies.
“Even [with] their considerable political power notwithstanding, the utilities have tried … to prevent some of the worst attacks on wind and solar,” Pomerantz said, “and they’ve basically failed at every turn.”
Although the renewable energy industry continues to lag behind oil and gas, its spending so far of roughly $40 million puts it on pace to eclipse last year’s record of $63.7 million.
This year’s spikes are driven in part by massive increases from the renewable industry’s top spender—the American Clean Power Association (ACP).
ACP’s expenditures in the second quarter of 2025 alone, which reached $3.8 million, were nearly twice the amount the trade association spent in all of 2024 combined.
The $4.3 million it has spent so far this year places it ahead of any of the oil and gas industry’s trade associations. The American Petroleum Institute, by comparison, spent just under $4 million, while American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers spent less than $3 million
But Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, suggested that ACP’s efforts have been unsuccessful.
“The American Clean Power Association sort of is on the outside looking in, and I’m not sure that any amount of money is going to be able to overcome this,” he said.
Slocum also said that the association had “badly misjudged their strategy” by assuming they could appeal to both Democrats and Republicans.
“They thought that they could build a bipartisan appeal for renewable energy, and you see that with a few senators like [Chuck] Grassley and [Lisa] Murkowski, but for the most part, you know, mainstream Republicans just do not want to challenge Trump publicly,” Slocum said.
In an emailed statement, ACP suggested that its efforts on Capitol Hill helped the renewable energy industry avert even worse outcomes—and defended the association’s attempts to build bridges with key Republican legislators.
“The ability to successfully remove the destructive excise tax [from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act] and secure a more reasonable phase out of clean energy tax credits required a sophisticated response to underscore the impact of these policies on consumers and the communities we represent,” said Jason Grumet, the CEO of ACP.
“Despite the highly polarized environment, a group of Republican senators came forward to support the core interests of the clean energy industry,” Grumet said. “Securing this support for provisions that the entire Republican caucus originally voted against is an important accomplishment.”
A Coast Guard planecarrying several dozen people in immigration custody landed in Alaska in early June.
Several of the men said that they didn’t have bathroom access on the plane — or even seats. They flew shackled in the cargo area of the plane.
They’d been transferred from the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, to the Anchorage Correctional Complex, a facility run by the state Department of Corrections.
“From that moment on, I personally felt dehumanized,” said one man who kept a journal from the experience.
A mural is shown during a media tour in Dec. 2019 of the ICE detention center in Tacoma, Wash.
Capital & Main is not identifying him or several other people in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement due to retaliation concerns.
Transfers of people in ICE custody between facilities are becoming more and more common under the Trump administration. According to anICE Flight Monitor reportfrom Human Rights First, transfer flights from January through August increased 43% compared with the same time period last year.
“These frequent transfers not only disorient individuals but also make it significantly harder for them to access legal counsel and maintain contact with family,” the report says.
ICE and the Alaska Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment. GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the Tacoma facility, deferred to ICE.
Luis Peralta, who was transferred from Miami to Tacoma, told Capital & Main that officers did not allow him to bring his personal documents with him when they moved him. That meant that he didn’t have access to any phone numbers for family members — his mother’s had been written on a piece of paper in his belongings at the Miami facility.
That also meant he hadn’t been able to reach the attorney that his family found for him, he said. Peralta, who has been in the U.S. since he was a child and was arrested by ICE outside his home in Miami, said he hoped to fight to stay in the U.S. because he has several children here and provides for them.
“Hopefully we don’t get transferred again,” Peralta said. “Being transferred is like the worst experience that anybody could go through.”
He said that during the transfer, officials didn’t tell the group where the plane was headed until they had been flying for several hours. Each man received a piece of bread and cheese and a bottle of water as the only sustenance for the entire day, he said.
Their wrists, ankles and waists were shackled together, he said.
“If something malfunctions in the air, there’s nothing you can do about it,” he said. “It’s very, very, very scary.”
Another man transferred from Miami said that ICE transferred him after a judge approved his request for bond so that he could get out of custody.
“It was like a strategic move,” the man said. “I went to court. The judge approved me for a bond, and literally two days later I was here.”
He said a judge in Tacoma later denied him bond.
“I don’t see like it’s fair to us as human beings to just be shipping us around the country like this,” the man said. “I’m on the other side of the country away from my family. My family can’t come visit me.”
A detainee is searched as another boards an ICE flight departing from King County International Airport-Boeing Field in Seattle on Aug. 23.
When guards informed men in one of the housing units at Northwest ICE Processing Center that they were being transferred to Alaska, some at first refused to go, according to accounts from several men in the unit.
One man who was waiting to be deported said an ICE officer saw his name on the list and took it off, along with several others, so he stayed in Tacoma.He said other people who were sent to Alaska were also waiting for deportation.
“If I’m waiting to get deported, why would I go to Alaska?” he said. “It makes zero sense.”
After several of the men refused to leave the Tacoma facility, officials threatened them with federal criminal charges, according to multiple accounts. Then officials arrived in riot gear, according to the detainees. Some people used sheets to hold their doors closed, according to the detainees, while others watched, worried that they would be swept up in whatever violence might come, even though they weren’t participating.
Before the officials in riot gear entered the unit, those on the list negotiated with ICE, according to the detainees.
“They’d rather go rather than be hurt and then go,” one man recalled other detainees saying.
The men sent to Alaska said their transfer there meant they spent several weeks in conditions even worse than those they hadpreviously complained aboutat the Tacoma facility run by GEO Group — conditions that contradictICE’s own policies and standards.
“I felt frustrated,” José Alvarez recalled in Spanish of his transfer to Alaska. “I felt powerless.”
A plane transporting immigrants at King County International Airport-Boeing Field in Seattle on Aug. 12.
Several of the men told Capital & Main that they were not allowed to make phone calls for days, so they were unable to inform their families or their attorneys what had happened to them or where they were.Under the ICE detention standards, facilities are required to provide phone access to detainees during waking hours.
When, after several days, one man asked for access to his belongings so he could get a phone number to make a call, a guard at the facility left and returned with other guards who launched pepper spray, according to several of the men.
“You are completely unable to breathe for two days, and you’re coughing every 10 seconds because all the residue is stuck to the walls and the floor,” one man recalled.
The men were held in overcrowded cells, with one sleeping on a mattress on the floor, they said. In another violation of ICE detention standards, they weren’t given daily access to the yard, they said.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Alaskawrote a letterto the Alaska Department of Corrections and ICE about the conditions that the men were held in, including the incident involving pepper spray, which the letter calls a “particularly egregious and excessive use of force.”
The letter says that the facility staff did not follow ICE guidance which would require a consultation with medical staff prior to using pepper spray.
“If they had, they would have been made aware that one of the individuals whom they pepper sprayed was diagnosed with borderline chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and that exposure to such an irritant could be deadly,” the ACLU of Alaska wrote in the letter.
In the letter, the ACLU noted that it had already sued over conditions in the facility in the state criminal system before ICE moved people in its custody there, and it said that multiple people have died in the facility this year.
“In other words, ACC currently does not safely housethose charged with or convicted of crimes,” the ACLU wrote in the letter (emphasis in original). “And immigrant detainees are entitled to even greater protections.”
That’s because people in ICE custody are in civil detention rather than criminal custody, meaning that they cannot be held as punishment and the standards for what custody looks like for them are supposed to be different.
“On June 4, 2025, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) agent asked how many immigrant detainees the Anchorage Correctional Complex (“ACC”) could safely house for longer than 72 hours,” the letter says. “Given the inability of ACC to meet federal standards of care, the answer should have been zero.”
A few of the men were deported while in Alaska.The rest returned to Northwest ICE Processing Center after a few weeks at the Alaska facility.
But as ICE transfers continue to increase, the detainees do not know how long they might remain there.
“We’re not animals,” Peralta said. “Animals are treated better than the way we are being treated in here.”
"Today's AIs are book smart," reports the Wall Street Journal. "Everything they know they learned from available language, images and videos. To evolve further, they have to get street smart."
And that requires "world models," which are "gaining momentum in frontier research and could allow technology to take on new roles in our lives."
The key is enabling AI to learn from their environments and faithfully represent an abstract version of them in their "heads," the way humans and animals do. To do it, developers need to train AIs by using simulations of the world. Think of it like learning to drive by playing "Gran Turismo" or learning to fly from "Microsoft Flight Simulator." These world models include all the things required to plan, take actions and make predictions about the future, including physics and time... There's an almost unanimous belief among AI pioneers that world models are crucial to creating next-generation AI. And many say they will be critical to someday creating better-than-human "artificial general intelligence," or AGI. Stanford University professor and AI "godmother" Fei-Fei Li has raised $230 million to launch world-model startup World Labs...
Google DeepMind researchers set out to create a system that could generate real-world simulations with an unprecedented level of fidelity. The result, Genie 3 — which is still in research preview and not publicly available — can generate photo-realistic, open-world virtual landscapes from nothing more than a text prompt. You can think of Genie 3 as a way to quickly generate what's essentially an open-world videogame that can be as faithful to the real world as you like. It's a virtual space in which a baby AI can endlessly play, make mistakes and learn what it needs to do to achieve its goals, just as a baby animal or human does in the real world. That experimentation process is called reinforcement learning. Genie 3 is part of a system that could help train the AI that someday pilots robots, self-driving cars and other "embodied" AIs, says project co-lead Jack Parker-Holder. And the environments could be filled with people and obstacles: An AI could learn how to interact with humans by observing them moving around in that virtual space, he adds.
"It isn't clear whether all these bets will lead to the superintelligence that corporate leaders predict," the article concedes.
"But in the short term, world models could make AIs better at tasks at which they currently falter, especially in spatial reasoning."
The BBC reports that a million-year-old human skull found in China suggests that the human species "began to emerge at least half a million years earlier than we thought, researchers are claiming in a new study."
It also shows that we co-existed with other sister species, including Neanderthals, for much longer than we've come to believe, they say.
The scientists claim their analysis "totally changes" our understanding of human evolution and, if correct, it would certainly rewrite a key early chapter in our history. But other experts in a field where disagreement over our emergence on the planet is rife, say that the new study's conclusions are plausible but far from certain.
The discovery, published in the leading scientific journal Science, shocked the research team, which included scientists from a university in China and the UK's Natural History Museum. "From the very beginning, when we got the result, we thought it was unbelievable. How could that be so deep into the past?" said Prof Xijun Ni of Fudan University, who co-led the analysis. "But we tested it again and again to test all the models, use all the methods, and we are now confident about the result, and we're actually very excited."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.
He believes there are Democrats who are “doing stuff” and those who are “doing nothing.”
“I think what we've got is a Democratic establishment and a leadership right now that finds security in doing as little as possible,” he said in an interview with Daily Kos.
“Their approach to Trump has been, ‘Let's do as little as possible and win off the backlash.’”
As for House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, who has represented her San Francisco district for 38 years, Chakrabarti and a growing amount of supporters believe she has fallen into the “doing nothing” category.
And her lack of action has earned the 85-year-old a feisty challenger.
Saikat Chakrabarti at a news conference at the Capitol in July 2019.
The 39-year-old Chakrabarti said that he wouldn’t call himself a “spring chicken” and he definitely isn’t the new guy on the block.
The former tech bro hopped on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016 as a “lowly programmer” who had already struck gold from a previous role at Stripe, the multibillion dollar payment system.
Soon after, he co-founded the political action committee Justice Democrats and helped boost progressive darlings Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the spotlight and, ultimately, to seats in Congress. He went on to serve as AOC’s chief of staff.
Now he’s coming out from behind the scenes and throwing his hat into the ring.
Chakrabarti talked with Daily Kos at his San Francisco campaign office about his congressional bid ahead of the 2026 primaries.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Kos: I'm here with Saikat Chakrabarti, who is running for Congress against Nancy Pelosi. And you're not new to the scene here. You've been around for a while. You were the guy who really brought Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the scene, and now you're running for Congress. Why now?
Saikat Chakrabarti: Yeah, and I would say I wasn't the guy. It was a team effort. A bunch of us worked on that. But yeah, I worked on Justice Democrats. I helped start that group after I worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 and I was recruiting a bunch of people to run for Congress at the time, with the idea being we should actually have people running who aren't bought out by the corporations, who have grassroots energy and who would be running on an actual plan to make life better for people.
Our thesis, really, with Justice Democrats, was, if the Democrats don't have a real way to improve people's material conditions, we might defeat the fascists once, but then they're going to come back. I didn't think it'd be Trump, exactly, but we thought somebody was going to come back in 2024, and that's basically what happened, right? Like Trump just won again. And I'd say he won largely because he was running on sort of this message of economic change and a bunch of hateful stuff. But I think that was a big reason, the big thing that got him to win.
And then I saw the Democrats’ reaction to it, and it did not inspire much confidence. I don't think they're taking this moment seriously. I think we are living in the middle of an authoritarian coup, and the Democrats seem sort of satisfied to be treating this as politics as usual.
They're kind of acting like we'll just wait for the backlash of Trump to build up, and then we'll run off of that backlash and we'll win in the next election cycle. And I just couldn't stand that, you know, I just got madder and madder watching their sort of positioning and the way they're responding to Trump.
And then I heard Nancy Pelosi in an interview soon after Trump won the second time, and she was asked straight up, like, “What did the Democrats do wrong? How could they change?”
And her answer was nothing. She was like, “We did our best. Sometimes it goes their way, sometimes it goes our way.”
And I feel like that sort of helplessness just can't be what our message is going forward.
We need to actually have a plan to dramatically improve people's lives. That's the only way we're going to defeat authoritarianism for good in this country. That's how FDR did it when we had rising authoritarianism in the ‘30s. You know, he built a whole new economy in society. That proved democracy can work. So I decided to jump in the race, because this is what I've been working on for 10 years. And I feel like if I'm gonna be calling on people to run around the country with me, I should be willing to put my skin in the game.
You’ve talked about this before: Nancy Pelosi has been in Congress almost as long as you've been alive.
Yeah, I think she got elected in 1987. So, I was 1 back then. I'm 39 now, I have a 6-year-old kid, so I’m no spring chicken.
You guys did an internal poll in regards to this race, and 51% said they supported her previously, but it was “time for a change.” And 84% agreed that we need new Democratic leaders. That speaks pretty loudly. But what did you really take away from this poll?
Well, from the start of this campaign, we knew the only way this would be possible was if we were in this moment of a deep appetite for change, and there's sort of this bet that that's where we're at.
When I ran AOC’s race in 2018 it was a similar moment. Trump had just won. Democrats were really upset at their own party, and they're looking for candidates who had some real vision of what comes next. That was really why AOC could win, because she was the right candidate with the right message in the right moment.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Saikat Chakrabarti in New York after her primary win in June 2018.
And when I look at the moment right now, I felt like it was dwarfing what the sort of appetite for change I saw back in 2018, and that's what I was seeing when I was knocking on doors. That's what I see on these voter calls I do every day. And this poll really bore that out. And the other piece of this poll is it showed that right now, if you test Nancy Pelosi versus myself in a head-to-head matchup, we're down 13. But if you tell people just my bio, just what I've done, and we tell people a positive bio about Nancy Pelosi—we say, you know, she won the Medal of Freedom, she's one of the greatest speakers of all time—our campaign ends up winning by 6 points.
So that really proves the theory of the campaign, which is, if we just do the work of getting our message in front of every voter in San Francisco, we're gonna win this race.
You have a rally on Oct. 8? At the same time as Pelosi’s dinner?
It's right after. So, Pelosi is doing a lunch on Oct. 3, where you can pay $50,000. I think there's a cheap, discounted price for $500 per plate. We're doing a rally on Oct. 8, completely free. Anybody can show up. We've got over 300 people signed up so far. And that's really what this campaign is. Because ultimately, you know, I think the Democratic Party establishment, they believe political power comes through money, right? It comes through fundraising. And that's ultimately why the Democrats in power right now, they can never give up the donor class, right?
Rep. Nancy Pelosi speaks during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in Aug. 2024.
If you're going to challenge that and you want to show the proof of a new kind of politics, it has to be people-driven. It has to be people knocking on doors, volunteers coming out, mass rallies, a mass movement style of politics that I think can win races like this. And I think I can win nationally.
I really do think that's sort of the model that people like Bernie and AOC are proving out. And I think that's going to be the real challenge within the Democratic Party over the next several years is, “Which politics are we going to choose?”
Are we going to choose the politics of a donor class-driven Democratic Party that can't actually move on issues, and is sclerotic on how we actually react to fascism? But, also, it's keeping us from fully embracing the kind of very popular issues that the country wants: banning congressional stock trading, banning the revolving door between Congress and lobbying industry, universal health care, universal child care, tuition, free public colleges, building millions of units of affordable housing, a wealth tax on billionaires and centimillionaires. These are all issues that actually poll at like 70-80%, but Democrats won't embrace them because of the donor class. So I'm saying we need to have a politics and a Democratic Party that is full of people who will reject the donor class, run on the stuff that's actually popular, build a mass movement, and win that way. And I think we can do it.
If you were elected to Congress, you yourself would probably be one of the wealthiest people to join, and there is a bit of a bad taste that the public has in their mouth when it comes to the wealthier class. So what is it that sets you apart from the people who look down on the bad billionaires and bad millionaires?
Yeah, when that article came out, I think I tweeted: “Oh, I've been exposed as a class traitor.”
The way I ended up making money was that I was an early employee at a company called Stripe, and I basically won the lottery. Which was crazy, because I grew up middle class. I mean, my parents grew up extremely poor. My dad grew up as essentially a refugee in post-partition India, and I grew up going to public schools.
And I never thought I'd make a bunch of money, but I ended up working just in the right place at the right time. And yeah, I worked hard, but I worked hard for a few years, and I ended up hitting the lottery and making a bunch of money, whereas, you know, at the same time, you've got nurses and teachers and firefighters and police work, people who are actually running the city every day, who work way harder than I ever did.
And most of them are never going to afford a home in the city. They're not going to be able to afford a secure retirement. And I think an economy that's set up like this is absolutely batshit crazy. I really do. I think if we keep doing this, where we're just squeezing the middle class out and having all the money go to this top, tiny group of people, while most people can't afford just the bare essentials, that will lead to America's demise.
I'm not trying to be overly dramatic. I really think that's how countries fail, and that's why, because I went through that experience, I spent the last 10 years working on progressive politics.
I think the system is completely rigged against working people, and has to change.
You have been a very progressive guy for a long time. And we're at a time where we have an administration saying that these people on the left, these far-left progressives are violent, they're terrorists. You're trying to come into Congress staying true to these policies. How do you feel about going up against that kind of rhetoric?
You have to call the rhetoric for what it is. Right? They are absolutely using this rhetoric as just a way to crush any dissent to this authoritarian government. They're starting by attacking trans people, by attacking undocumented immigrants. They're building up a paramilitary police force, and they're just doing the normal authoritarian playbook that people like Erdoğan in Turkey and Orbán in Hungary have done to completely crush all their opposition. So, of course, they're going to do that.
But ultimately, I am progressive, but I actually don't run on that label. You know, what I talk about are what policies I'm running on, because it is popular.
I think that's really the big strength we have going our way, is the stuff I'm talking about. At the end of the day, it's all very popular, and it's popular because most Americans in this country, for decades now, have been seeing their wages completely flatten, while the cost of health care, child care, housing, and education has been skyrocketing.
These are the essentials. This is how you build a life. And if that trend doesn't reverse, I think we are going to keep seeing the pendulum swinging left and right, and usually it's going to go farther right every time, and authoritarians are going to win.
So, we have to actually stop the authoritarianism that's right in front of us. And I think that happens by going at it head on, by trying to keep them from making the abnormal normal, which is what they do, and that's a daily fight, right? That's calling out all the abuses they're doing and sticking to it. But after we do that, we have to actually deliver a better life for people. That's the only way we're going to defeat this.
On that note, like you've previously said, “We need to tack to the hypothetical middle.”
You've also said, more recently, “Our Democratic Party leaders are unfit to lead in this world as it is today.” You've been pretty strong for years now on these unproductive, more moderate Democrats. Do you feel like there's going to be an opposition if you were in Congress going up against that?
It's not just the moderate Democrats. Because, you know, whenever we talk about as progressive versus moderate, it makes it sound like there's these policies where we disagree.
I really think it's “doing stuff” versus “doing nothing” Democrats. I think what we've got is a Democratic establishment and a leadership right now that finds security in doing as little as possible. That's what we're seeing right now. Their approach to Trump has been, “Let's do as little as possible and win off the backlash.”
And my approach would be, we actually have to do something, right? The stuff I'm calling to do is popular, right? Therefore, the stuff I'm calling to do is, just by definition, is centrist if it's popular.
If most people support it, that's what most people want. That's the center position.
But I do think that the current leadership we have, they're completely ill-equipped to deal with the kind of politics that Republicans are doing right now, and they're not interested in coming up with how we actually fundamentally change the system.
And part of that comes from, I think, a lack of imagination, but part of it comes from, you know, they are ultimately beholden to a donor and corporate class that doesn't want the system to change. They’re doing well in the system.
You were part of the Green New Deal as well. That's been used as a boogeyman for the GOP. I think it was even [EPA chief] Lee Zeldin who used the term, we're going to “drive a dagger” through the heart of the Green New Deal, which doesn't exist currently, right? So it's funny for them to say that. But is that something that you would want to revive and push forward today?
Well, I'd say the thing I've been working on for the last five years is a plan we've been calling the Mission for America, which is basically a Green New Deal with the details filled in.
I wouldn't say this is a campaign strategy, but it's a very detailed policy proposal and a political strategy. It's kind of like our version of Project 2025 if Democrats win. We have this chance to actually not just solve climate change, but actually build up wealth for the vast majority of Americans, build the factories and the highways jobs that a lot of people who voted for Trump thought they were going to be getting with him.
How do we do that? So that's really what I've been focusing on. And I think, ultimately, the only way we win this is going to be not just expanding the social safety net, but building back people's means of making a living. And I think that's what's been decimated.
You know, if you look at the de-industrialized Midwest, it's gone from this place where people used to be able to graduate high school and get, like, a $50 an hour job at Ford, and that's all gotten replaced with minimum wage work at Walmart.
Of course, people are angry.
And of course, when they hear someone like Trump show up and say, you know, the politician shipped away your means of making a living to China, and that he’s going to bring it back, people are going to say, “Okay, let's try that out.”
But Trump's going to fail at that. In fact, he's destroying manufacturing jobs right now. So how are Democrats gonna respond? What's our version of actually building up wealth? And I think that is right now. You know, when I talk about the Green New Deal or the Mission for America, it's not just about climate change. It's the fact that we have a $100 trillion global green transition happening with or without us.
And right now, we're just saying, “Let China have all the wealth. Let Europe have all the wealth. We're gonna be Kodak while the digital camera revolution is happening.” That's kind of what this is like. I don't want to live in a country that's getting left behind.
I am curious. You spent a lot of time with Bernie, with AOC. Did they have any reaction to you announcing that you were running?
Not publicly, no. I mean, I think even for them, like, it's difficult. I’m going up against Nancy Pelosi, right? And Bernie's friends with Nancy Pelosi.
Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a "Fighting Oligarchy” event on March 8 in Warren, Mich.
And I get it.
This is a race where I think my job is to make the race competitive and to actually build up traction and show I've got grassroots momentum. And before I go to someone like Bernie or AOC and say, “Hey, do you want to get involved?”
They're busy also. I mean, they're trying to do their Fighting Oligarchy tour, and I'd say they're being successful as some of the only Democrats actually showing some fight right now.
Is there anything that I haven't brought up that you want to talk about?
Well, I will say at the end of the day, something I'm really trying to talk about with this campaign is how the issues we face in San Francisco are not problems San Francisco created on its own.
They really are downstream from the fact that we've just been ignoring these big structural issues nationally for decades. If you look at health care, it's one of the major reasons our city budget keeps exploding. The city of San Francisco is not gonna be able to solve that, right?
We have to solve that at the national level. Otherwise, the only answer San Francisco has is that we just gotta keep cutting services. And that's happening not just in San Francisco, but in cities all across the country.
We can't just retreat into our cities, into our states and hope for safety and hope for freedom. We actually have to solve it nationally. Otherwise, these problems are coming for all of us. And the problems that San Francisco faces, you see them everywhere. Whether it's homelessness, cost of living—it's really bad in San Francisco because of how bad our inequality is—but you see versions of it in every city across the country. So I really do think that to solve these problems for San Francisco, we have to solve them for the whole country.
Six months ago California had 48% more public and "shared" private EV chargers than gasoline nozzles. (In March California had 178,000 public and shared private EV chargers, versus about 120,000 gas nozzles.)
Since then they've added 23,000 more public/shared charging ports — and announced this week that there's now 68% more EV charger ports than the number of gasoline nozzles statewide. "Thanks to the state's ever-expanding charger network, 94% of Californians live within 10 minutes of an EV charger," according to the announcement from the state's energy policy agency. And the California Energy Commission staff told CleanTechnica they expect more chargers in the future. "We are watching increased private investment by consortiums like IONNA and OEMs like Rivian, Ford, and others that are actively installing EV charging stations throughout the state."
Clean Technica notes in 2019, the state had roughly 42,000 charging ports and now there are a little over 200,000. (And today there's about 800,000 home EV chargers.)
This week California announced another milestone: that in 2024 nearly 23% of all the state's new truck sales — that's trucks, buses, and vans — were zero-emission vehicles. (The state subsidizes electric trucks — $200 million was requested on the program's first day.)
Greenhouse gas emissions in California are down 20% since 2000 — even as the state's GDP increased 78% in that same time period all while becoming the world's fourth largest economy.
The state also continues to set clean energy records. California was powered by two-thirds clean energy in 2023, the latest year for which data is available — the largest economy in the world to achieve this level of clean energy. The state has run on 100% clean electricity for some part of the day almost every day this year.
"Last year, California ran on 100% clean electricity for the equivalent of 51 days," notes another announcement, which points out California has 15,763 MW of battery storage capacity — roughly a third of the amount projected to be needed by 2045.
Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 280 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
A few weeks ago, I noticed on my handy soul music birthday calendar that Ben. E King was born on Sept. 28 1938, and thought he would be a great musician to feature today.
I brought his name up to my husband and to several friends who are way younger than I am, and the immediate response from all of them consisted of the same three words: “Stand By Me.” So while covering his life, musical career, and major hits both with The Drifters and as a solo artist, let’s take a deep dive into that one epic hit of his.
Born Benjamin Earl Soloman in Henderson, North Carolina, on September 28, 1938, King moved with his family at age 11 to New York City, where his father opened a luncheonette in Harlem. King had sung in church choirs throughout his childhood; at Harlem's James Fenimore Cooper Junior High he eagerly set out to start his own singing group, which was dubbed the Four B's, as all of its members' names started with the letter B. Accounts vary as to how King's professional career got started, but most agree that it began in his father's restaurant, where King often sang as he worked. Somehow, his smooth tenor attracted an authoritative ear, and King was asked to join the singing group the Crowns, with whom he immediately began touring on the rhythm and blues circuit.
Also cutting a swath through that circuit was a group called the Drifters; popular throughout the 1950s, the Drifters had cut 11 albums by 1958 when, with record sales slumping, the group disbanded. But George Treadwell, the Drifters' manager, was contractually obliged to deliver the group to audiences for years to come.
Scrambling to replace the old group, Treadwell discovered the Crowns and renamed them the Drifters, as he had retained legal use of the name. A complete overhaul was apparently just the ticket for the Drifters. Atlantic Records liked their new sound so much that its executives assigned ace producers Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and Phil Spector to produce a string of new recordings. The new Drifters struck quickly with the Number Two hit "There Goes My Baby," which was sung and co-written by King, then only 20, and followed by "Save the Last Dance for Me"--with King again contributing lead vocals--which reached Number One on the pop charts in 1960.
Another 1960 release by the Drifters featured King singing lead over a background of Spanish guitars. The sound intrigued Spector and Leiber so much that they decided to try King as a soloist on a similar number, "Spanish Harlem." The song soared up the charts and King soon found himself performing solo as one of America's most favored balladeers. His eminence was cemented the following year when "Stand by Me"--his own composition--made the Top Ten on the pop charts and Number One on rhythm and blues lists.
Here’s a short bio from Ed Collects’ YouTube channel:
Here’s King singing a medley of his famed lead parts with The Drifters: “This Magic Moment,” “Dance With Me,” “There Goes My Baby,” and “Save The Last Dance For Me.”
It was with Spanish Harlem that he stamped his own identity on the airwaves and the pop charts in the early weeks of 1961. Here was an instant pop classic, Leiber’s romantic, evocative lyric perfectly matching a melody, composed by the 21-year-old wunderkind Phil Spector, that artfully heightened the drama by suddenly tightening in the middle couplet of each six-line verse before gently releasing the consequent tension. Accompanied only by a marimba, a double bass, a choked triangle, a bass drum and a discreet backing choir, with those swirling strings and a solo soprano saxophone creating an instrumental interlude, King’s rich, ardent voice was at its most compelling, and the record became his first solo top 10 hit.
Here’s “Spanish Harlem,” which was released on Dec. 31, 1960:
Franklin’s take on “Spanish Harlem” was one of the three new recordings included on her 1971 greatest-hits album, along with “You’re All I Need to Get By” and “Bridge over Troubled Water,” and it was actually the second single to be released from the album, following “Bridge over Trouble Water.” Aretha changed up the lyrics slightly, shifting the lyric “a red rose up in Spanish Harlem” to “there’s a rose in Black and Spanish Harlem,” thereby giving it an element of social consciousness.
In the wake of her death, Rolling Stone put together a piece about the 50 greatest Aretha Franklin songs, and her version of “Spanish Harlem” made the cut:
“A transfixing example of the way Aretha could refurbish a familiar song, ‘Spanish Harlem’ was a romantic rumba in the hands of Ben E. King, who made it a huge hit in 1961. Opening with a blaxploitation-flick-style riff and a subtle lyrical rewrite, Aretha modernizes it for the civil rights era. In her hands (and those of Dr. John, who played piano on the session), you can sense the heat pounding on the Harlem sidewalk in ways the song’s writers – the unusual combo of Phil Spector and Jerry Leiber – may have intended.”
King’s Guardian obit continued to describe his career trajectory:
With Stand By Me, a few months later, he had his first R&B No 1, and went to No 4 on the pop charts. Credited to Leiber and Stoller (under their regular nom de plume) and King, it was based, like many early soul songs, squarely on an old gospel tune. Again the arrangement was spare but highly effective, inspiring King to respond with a majestic performance in which powerful emotions were typically expressed with a dignified restraint – King wrote the words about his wife-to-be, Betty, whom he would marry in 1964. Taking his birth surname, she was known as Betty Nelson, and survives him, along with a son and two daughters.
There had been a Latin rhythmic undertow to all these records, and Amor made it more explicit, not entirely to King’s benefit. Pomus and Shuman’s Here Comes the Night, his last release of a hectic year, was perhaps too subtle to win great success – it barely crept into the top 100 – but showed the singer at his very best, his phrasing beautifully judged over the melody’s complex, flamenco-inspired syncopations and yet another imaginative orchestration.
The last big hit of this phase of King’s career came in 1962 with Don’t Play That Song (You Lied). Co-written (with Betty Nelson) under a pseudonym by Ahmet Ertegün, a Turkish diplomat’s son who had founded Atlantic Records, its plaintive accusations suited the singer perfectly. Like Spanish Harlem, it would find a second life in the hands of Aretha Franklin, another Atlantic artist, while Stand By Me eventually found another effective interpreter in John Lennon. All three songs have become standards.
King recorded this after he left the Drifters. Charles Albert Tindley wrote “Stand By Me” but it was a gospel hymn. He did copyright it but some say it goes back a century early.
The Staple Singers covered it in 1955 and King tried to get the Drifters to cover it but they rejected it. Now… let’s back it up a little…this version of Stand By Me really didn’t sound like the version we know. King took this song to songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and they modernized it and made it into the song we know today with King’s help.
The bassline was the innovation the track has been missing. It gave what had been a mournful gospel hymn the uplifting rhythm it needed. King also had the idea of asking the drummer to turn over his snare and scrape across the skin with a brush – creating that infectious groove.
King’s song had gospel roots, as sung by The Staple Singers:
This is the 1955 Gospel song by The Staples Singers that Ben E. King's famous song of the same name is based on. He wrote his song in 1960 and climbed the charts to Number 1 twice!Lyrics by : Charles A. Tindley
Singer Ben E King and writer Mike Stoller recall how a song originally intended for the Drifters came alive thanks to a killer bassline
Leiber, Stoller, and King were credited but they left off Tindley’s name who came up with the version of the song they heard.
Ben E King, co-writer and singer
Of all the songs I wrote or co-wrote in my career, this is my favourite. It came at a strange time, though. I'd just left the Drifters and had to plead with Ahmet Ertegün, the president of Atlantic Records, to find a place for me. He put me to work with legendary songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It was like a schooling for me – a kid from Harlem who knew nothing about anything.
There's been some debate about how the song was conceived. But, as I recall, we'd some time left over at the end of a session, and I was asked if I had any songs in my head. I'd originally intended Stand By Me for the Drifters. The song we eventually recorded wasn't so different from what I'd come up with. Jerry may have changed the lyrics in places, but not by much.
It was 1960, but in my vocal I think you can hear something of my earlier times when I'd sing in subway halls for the echo, and perform doo-wop on street corners. But I had a lot of influences, too – singers like Sam Cooke, Brook Benton and Roy Hamilton. The song's success lay in the way Leiber and Stoller took chances, though, borrowing from symphonic scores, and we had a brilliant string arranger in Stan Applebaum.
But Jerry Wexler, a producer at Atlantic, was unimpressed. He hated it because we'd gone into overtime in the studio with an expensive orchestra. I wasn't trying to make a hit with Stand By Me, though. I was just thrilled one of my songs was being recorded at a time when there were so many great songwriters around, people like Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King.
I still perform it in all my shows. I'll do it as long as I'm breathing. I'm so proud it has stood the test of time.
On paper, Stand By Me seems a simple song, and certainly King wrote it with simple intentions: a love song to his partner at the time, Betty Nelson. Pop songs are seldom expected to mirror the lives of the artists who created them, but it certainly adds a sparkle to the song to know that Nelson would go on to celebrate five decades of marriage with the man who sang to her: “If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall / All the mountains should crumble to the sea / I won’t cry, I won’t cry / No, I won’t shed a tear / Just as long as you stand, stand by me.”
It’s especially fitting that a song about enduring love – a love able to survive, no matter what trials and traumas it encounters – was built equally strongly to stand the test of time.
The record sounded remarkably original, for something that was made up almost entirely out of repurposed elements from other songs, and it shows more clearly than perhaps any other song that originality doesn’t mean creating something entirely ab initio, but can mean taking a fresh look at things that are familiar, and putting just a slight twist on them.
In particular, one thing that doesn’t get noted enough is just how much of a departure the song was lyrically. People had been reworking gospel ideas into secular ones for years — we’ve already looked at Ray Charles doing this, and at Sam Cooke, and there were many other examples, like Little Walter turning “This Train” into “My Babe”. But in most cases those songs required wholesale lyrical reworking.
“Stand By Me” is different, it brings the lyrical concerns and style of gospel firmly into the secular realm. “If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall, and the mountains should crumble to the sea” is an apocalyptic vision, not “Candy’s sweet/And honey too/There’s not another quite, quite as sweet as you”, which were the lyrics Sam Cooke wrote when he turned a song about how God is wonderful into one about how his girl is loveable.
This new type of more gospel-inflected lyric would become very common in the next few years, especially among Black performers. Another building block in the music that would become known as soul had been put in place.
The record went to number four on the charts, and it looked like he was headed for a huge career. But the next few singles he released didn’t do so well — he recorded a version of the old standard “Amor” which made number nineteen, and then his next two records topped out at sixty-six and fifty-six. He did get back in the pop top twenty with a song co-written by his wife and Ahmet Ertegun, “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)”, which reached number eleven and became an R&B standard:
[Excerpt: Ben E. King, “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)”
Fifty-five years after its release, the song has become a modern standard, reinterpreted countless times across genre, era and culture. From Otis Redding and Muhammad Ali’s early attempts to Stephen King and Miley Cyrus’ later revisions, here are 20 interpretations worth standing by.
Some of them I wasn’t aware of, like this cover by Muhammad Ali:
From the award-winning documentary, Playing For Change: Peace Through Music comes "Stand By Me," the first of many Songs Around The World produced by Playing For Change. This Ben E. King classic features musicians around the world recorded by the Playing For Change team during their travels. This song continues to remind us that music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people.
I’ll close with this magnificent choral rendition at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, performed by Karen Gibson and The Kingdom Choir:
Paris-based AI giant Mistral "is pushing to improve its models," reports the Wall Street Journal, "by looking inside legacy enterprises that hold some of the world's last untapped data reserves...."
Mistral's approach will be to form partnerships with enterprises to further train existing models on their own proprietary data, a phenomenon known as post-training... [At Dutch chip-equipment company ASML], Mistral embeds its own solutions architects, applied AI engineers and applied scientists into the enterprise to work on improving models with the company's data. [While Mistral sells some models under a commercial license], this co-creation strategy allows Mistral to make money off the services side of its business and afford to give away its open source AI free of charge, while improving model performance for the customer with more industry context...
This kind of hand-holding approach is necessary for most companies to tackle AI successfully, said Arthur Mensch [co-founder and chief executive of Mistral]. "The very high-tech companies [and] a couple of banks are able to do it on their own. But when it comes to getting some [return on investment] from use cases, in general, they fail," he said. Mensch attributes that in part to a mismatch between expectations and reality. "The curse of AI is that it looks like magic. So you can very quickly make something that looks amazing to your boss," but it doesn't scale or work more broadly, he said. In other cases, enterprises simply might not know what to focus on. For example, it is a mistake to think equipping all employees with a chatbot will create meaningful gains on the bottom line, he said. Mensch said to fully take advantage of AI, companies will have to rethink organizational structures. With information flowing more easily, they could require fewer middle managers, for example.
There is a lot of work yet to do, Mensch said, but in a large sense, the future of AI development now lies inside the enterprise itself. "This is a pattern that we've seen with many of our customers: At some point, the capabilities of the frontier model can only be increased if we partner," he said.
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp says America's Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted a patent to Tableau (Salesforce's visual analytics platform) — for a patent covering "Data Processing For Visualizing Hierarchical Data":
"A provided data model may include a tree specification that declares parent-child relationships between objects in the data model. In response to a query associated with objects in the data model: employing the parent-child relationships to determine a tree that includes parent objects and child objects from the objects based on the parent-child relationships; determining a root object based on the query and the tree; traversing the tree from the root object to visit the child objects in the tree; determining partial results based on characteristics of the visited child objects such that the partial results are stored in an intermediate table; and providing a response to the query that includes values based on the intermediate table and the partial results."
A set of 15 simple drawings is provided to support the legal and tech gobbledygook of the invention claims. A person can have a manager, Tableau explains in Figures 5-6 of its accompanying drawings, and that manager can also manage and be managed by other people. Not only that, Tableau illustrates in Figures 7-10 that computers can be used to count how many people report to a manager. How does this magic work, you ask? Well, you "generate [a] tree" [Fig. 13] and "traverse a tree" [Fig. 15], Tableau explains. But wait, there's more — you can also display the people who report to a manager in multi-level or nested pie charts (aka Sunburst charts), Tableau demonstrates in Fig. 11.
Interestingly, Tableau released a "pre-Beta" Sunburst chart type in late April 2023 but yanked it at the end of June 2023 (others have long-supported Sunburst charts, including Plotly). So, do you think Tableau should be awarded a patent in 2025 on a concept that has roots in circa-1921 Sunburst charts and tree algorithms taught to first-year CS students in circa-1975 Data Structures courses?
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dailykos_feed) wrote2025-09-28 11:00 pm
