This is The Morning Press, a Brain Iron dot com production. Here’s eleven minutes or so of news for today, Wednesday, February 28, 2024.
Bloomberg reported Tuesday afternoon that Apple is ending its decade-long effort to bring an electric, autonomous vehicle to market. The project, code-named Titan, was barely officially acknowledged and rarely discussed by the company, but various leaks through the years revealed that Apple had considered manufacturing its own car, but also pursued potential partnerships, at various times, with BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Nissan, Kia, and Hyundai, among other companies, though nothing ever came of those discussions. As many as 5000 employees worked on the project as recently as 2018, which CEO Tim Cook described as the “mother of all AI projects,” and the bulk of the remaining workforce will now be shifted to Apple’s generative AI research, and some employees will be laid off.
A brief editorial aside: Apple has figured out that making cars, especially electric, autonomous ones, is very hard. I am disappointed by this news, but not surprised. I think the future of autonomous vehicles will not come from the advances of a single company, but a massive investment in our communications infrastructure that will allow devices that are near one another to talk amongst themselves in real time. Even with dozens of sensors on a car, processing vast amounts of visual information all the time, I think it’s asking too much of a machine to demand that it react flawlessly to sudden changes in its immediate environment without the input of the traffic it’s moving through. If, instead, your car is in constant, immediate communication with all the other cars in the vicinity, it can safely redirect much of its processing power to the known unknowns in and around the road. I don’t know if it will be 6G wireless networks that give us this capability, but I don’t think autonomous driving is coming until we get beyond this concept of individual vehicle autonomy—the cars will have to be working in concert with one another, not on their own. This feels like a moon-shot type project to me, and something absolutely worth pursuing collectively, by marshaling government resources to figure out how to build a reliable next-generation network that would by necessity have to be highly secure against hacking threats. The economic and quality of life benefits are transformational and almost unthinkable—it would mean the end of traffic, the end of accidents, and a dramatic reduction in the cost of car insurance, if not its elimination as a necessity. The various car companies currently throwing immense piles of cash into the furnace trying to solve an unsolvable problem could stop that, and instead throw a fraction of that investment into a government research project that actually has a chance to succeed. We do so little, have so little imagination about what we are able to accomplish collectively, are stuck in a politics and a political and social culture obsessed with individual identity and mistaken notions of genius and specialness, when the obvious fact is that our best innovations are always piled on or outright stolen from the work of others. We are attacking this problem of self-driving cars all wrong, and the reason is right there in the name. We should replace the pipe-dream of high-speed transcontinental or regional commuter rail with a project that speaks to the spirit and character of this country, warts and all—we don’t want to ride the train together, we want our personal little luxury boxes on wheels that go where we want them to go when we want them to go there, and the best way to have that individualized level of freedom and autonomy is to recognize that we can only get there together, with cars that talk to each other, not to themselves.
In Supreme Court news, the Court heard arguments Wednesday about the 2018 decision by the Trump administration to reclassify bump stocks as machine guns in order to ban the devices. When fitted to semi-automatic rifles, a bump stock allows a gun to achieve rates of fire of 400 and up to 800 rounds per minute, effectively imitating fully automatic machine guns, which have been illegal since 1986. The device uses the recoil of the first fired shot to cause the trigger to bounce back and forth off the shooter’s finger, rather than requiring additional trigger pulls. The device came under public scrutiny after a bunch were used in the October 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 61 and injured more than 800. A bill introduced to ban bump stocks went nowhere in Congress, and the Trump administration chose to act despite a Justice Department determination that legislation was probably needed. The issue before the Court is not so much about the 2nd Amendment question of the right to bear arms, but—like a number of other cases the Court is currently considering—whether federal administrative agencies should be able to wield this sort of rule-making power.
A brief editorial aside: Congress’s failure to act to ban these devices in 2017 is why we are here. The bump stock is not a machine gun. The A.T.F. and the Justice Department under former president Barack Obama had already made that determination many times since its invention. It’s also not a gun at all, which means that there is no 2nd Amendment issue here at all. Congress, like a number of states, could simply ban the devices by passing a law. A headline at Slate today is insisting that “Amy Coney Barrett Gets to Decide If Machine Guns Are Actually Legal,” which is an infuriating headline to read because it takes the responsibility of lawmaking out of the hands of lawmakers and entrusts it in one swing vote on the Supreme Court. The article insists that this is all just part of the conservative war on the administrative state, and that federal law already bans bump stocks because they are machine guns, and simply hand waves away the fact that the ATF and Dianne Feinstein believed new legislation was necessary. Under the Slate article’s understanding of what constitutes a machine gun, my finger and shoulder working in concert to bump fire a weapon—which is possible without a bump stock—would qualify as a machine gun under federal law. Slate would rather argue that conservative gun nuts just want to dismantle the entire rule-making authority of the executive branch than acknowledge that a law, duly passed by Congress, would solve this problem beyond constitutional judicial review. Nothing was preventing the 117th Congress, under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and with President Joe Biden in the White House, from passing a law banning bump stocks, except the political will. Instead, people will be comfortable blaming the Supreme Court for an obviously correct ruling that they don’t like, and insisting that this obviously correct decision represents an erosion of the legitimacy of the Court, rather than an indictment of the uselessness of Congress.
Also on Wednesday, the Court announced that it would decide whether former president Trump can be prosecuted on 2020 election interference charges, or if he enjoys, as he claims, absolute immunity from prosecution. Arguments won’t be heard until the end of April, with a decision expected before the end of June, making it entirely possible that a trial would be delayed until after the November election.
In death penalty news, Texas executed Ivan Cantu by lethal injection on Wednesday, just hours after officials halted the execution in Idaho of Thomas Eugene Creech after an hour of trying and failing to hook him up to an IV. There seems to be little doubt about Creech’s guilt—he is a convicted serial killer originally sentenced to die, got his death sentence commuted to life in prison, and while serving that term, beat a fellow inmate to death, the crime for which he was once again sentenced to die, in 1981. Cantu, who was successfully executed in Texas today, insisted until the end that he was innocent of the murders for which he was convicted, and had drawn the support of many anti-death penalty activists, who believed there were legitimate reasons to doubt his guilt. Texas proceeded anyway, and Cantu became the second person to be executed in the United States in 2024.
A brief editorial aside: The government should not kill people.
In briefer news, Mitch McConnell announced Wednesday that he plans to step down as Republican Senate Conference Leader after November elections, ending his record-setting 17-year tenure as senate leader. The 82 year-old plans to serve out the rest of his senate term, which expires in 2027, which would bring his Senate career to a close after 42 years in Washington.
Marianne Williamson announced Wednesday that she is unsuspending her campaign to become the Democratic nominee for president in 2024. The self-help author and love enthusiast finished third in the Michigan Democratic primary on Tuesday, securing some 22,000 votes, 600,000 fewer than incumbent president Joe Biden, 80,000 fewer than an option voters had to express that they are still “uncommitted,” but a couple of thousand more than Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips.
And former president Donald Trump won 12 of the available 16 Republican delegates on Tuesday in Michigan’s primary, while Nikki Haley received four, and about 27 percent of the vote. The Michigan GOP will hold a caucus on Saturday to determine who will receive the state’s remaining 39 delegates—Trump is expected to come out well on top in that contest, as well. Haley has vowed to stay in the race through Super Tuesday, coming up on March 5, when more than a dozen states will vote in primaries.
Now, here’s a look at the weather.
An active-duty member of the US Air Force died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC on Sunday. He was 25-years-old. He live-streamed himself walking down the sidewalk, declaring in the video that he will no longer be complicit in genocide and that he is about to engage in an extreme form of protest. He then places his cell phone on the ground, walks away from the camera towards the gates outside the embassy, douses himself in some sort of an accelerant from a metal water bottle, and lights himself on fire. He screams “Free Palestine” a number of times while fully engulfed in flames, and eventually collapses to the ground, where security guards use extinguishers to put out the fire. He died in the hospital a few hours later.
To the extent that I can muster a response to this event, I find myself waffling between a predictable horror and a sort of angry forlornfulness, which suggests to me that I must not be the intended audience. I don’t mean to diminish the person, but I find the sheer wastefulness of the act overwhelms all of my attempts to engage with it on terms that would be acceptable to the dead and those who have sought to lionize him. The extremity of the act demands a response—that was his doing, not mine—but he doesn’t get to determine the shape of that response, that’s not how human interaction works, and he is no longer around to set the terms of the conversation. And again, that was his doing, not mine. The extremity of the act demands a response—but the response is mine, no one else’s.
If it matters—and I think it does—I find myself utterly unmoved from my previous positions about the war in Gaza, Israel’s efforts to eradicate Hamas, the US’s role in the conflict, and the plight of the Palestinian people. I have expressed plenty of thoughts about all of these things since October 7, 2023, and this “extreme act of protest” has no impact, one way or another, on what I think. Again, I don’t say that to diminish the person—but I think I do say it to diminish the act, or at least to offer a contradiction to the insistence by some that this was an act of courage or heroism or sacrifice. I cannot be persuaded to see that an act of total self-annihilation is anything but an act of wastefulness, of throwing away, of either sincere confusion or illness or plain wrongness. The extremity of the act does not lend legitimacy to the motivation, or to the cause. If anything, it undercuts it. I have no interest in plumbing the depths of a dead stranger’s psyche from across a wire, of examining his internet post history or listening to his friends and acquaintances declare equally certain and contradictory statements about his well being, or state of mind. It doesn’t matter to me if he was confused or ill or wrong about the world, because he was so tragically mistaken about what to do about it.
I have never been persuaded of something simply because someone else was so thoroughly convicted of a belief. What would it say about the things you believed, and how you arrived at those beliefs, and the meaningfulness of those beliefs, if they could be upended by the expressed certainty of someone else? Someone you’ll never know. Not by their words or arguments or explanations of new ideas or evidence—just by the fact of their belief. This would not be persuasion at all. This is an acknowledgement that persuasion is impossible, that further conversation is pointless. That all that is left is the spectacle of violence.
I don’t seek to diminish the person, but I do seek to diminish the act. I believe that the instrumentalization of a human life for political ends is always wrong, is immoral, is a denial of the fundamental dignity of that life—a dignity born of the individuation of a unique consciousness, a rare and precious thing. To turn a life into a cudgel, to wield it like a tool, is to diminish that life.
I am never convinced by the certainty of others. I am, and have always been, suspicious of it. I seek to undermine my own, whenever I feel it settling in. The most dangerous thing is certainty, because there is never anywhere to go, from there. Nothing left to say. Nothing left to figure out. And it’s such a hard thing to give it up, once you’ve grabbed onto it, or it’s grabbed on to you. Because it feels like it cost you so much, to get there. I think there is a recognition, conscious or unconscious, that you really have foreclosed on too much, sacrificed too many other possibilities, to arrive at such certainty. That to give it away, now, would put the lie to the whole project, would mean that it was all, after all, in service of someone else’s answers. After certainty, only the end. Only the spectacle. And then what. No more understanding. No more. There is so much time for certainty. Time that stretches on forever on either side of this moment, this brief window of observation and experience and finding out and possibility and not knowing. Certainty is inevitable and undefeated and irresolvable. There should be no rush to arrive there. All we have is that we are here. Uniquely individuated consciousnesses made of the same ancient stuff, recycled and repurposed and inexplicably rearranged into creatures of belief and purpose and curiosity. Here we are.
That’s the weather from here—how’s it look out your window?
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The Morning Press is eleven minutes or so of the news of the day, and is a production of the BrainIron dot com multinational media empire. Please direct comments and complaints to brainironpodcast@gmail.com, or visit the website at www.brainiron.com. For a transcript of today’s episode and links to the stories referenced, find The Morning Press at brainiron.substack.com. To support this and the other podcasting and blogging endeavors of the good website Brain Iron dot com, please consider becoming a paid subscriber at brainiron.substack.com. Have a wonderful day.
The Morning Press for Wednesday, February 28, 2024