Here is an update on a story you may not yet have heard of. It manages to be at once fascinating, deeply disturbing and a perfect living metaphor of our age. AI models are vulnerable to something called “model collapse.” In the early days of LLM-based AI there was a seemingly limitless store of online content to train it on. But that’s mostly been used up. Meanwhile, a rapidly growing percentage of online content is produced by AI. If you try to train AI on the product of AI it’s a bit like locking a person in a sealed room and watching them slowly suffocate as they breath in the product of their cellular respiration (CO2) rather than the fuel (oxygen) that makes the body function. Not a perfect analogy but you get the idea. This has made the creators of AI increasingly desperate in their search for new artifacts of human intellection — a phrase I heard once from the great Chaucer scholar John V. Fleming who died this past May — to feed into large language model AI systems.

The solution? Physical books published before 2022. You can guarantee as a matter of absolute certainty that whatever their quality, their merits, whatever they’re about, they are the product of human minds.

It’s relatively easy to scan a book without damaging it. But if you’re doing it at scale the costs of scanning and digitizing a book’s contents without damaging it are vastly higher. So what AI companies appear to be doing is buying up books, cutting off the spines, feeding them into industrial scale scanners and then throwing away.

With the growing attention being given to Trump handler/confidante Natalie Harp, I looked up this November 2024 Times article which captures some of the relationship …

“You are all that matters to me,” she wrote in one of the letters, which were seen by The New York Times. The letters’ authenticity was confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of them.

“I don’t ever want to let you down,” Ms. Harp wrote, thanking Mr. Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”

In another letter, she told Mr. Trump that she wanted to get back to “that synergy” she used to have with him, where “we’d talk about everything and nothing.”

“I want to bring you joy,” she wrote, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”

At the White House, Ms. Harp is likely to serve a role unlike any presidential adviser in modern history.

Given that Natalie Harp is not only a conventionally attractive women but also Trump’s type, there’s an obvious and understandable inclination to imagine that they are involved in a sexual relationship. Perhaps they are. But my best guess is that the relationship is more akin to an emotional support pillow/blanket. If they are having an affair, mostly who cares? There are so many other higher priority dangers this rapidly-fading, degenerate man-child poses to our country and our future. If he’s receiving some kind of emotional soothing from Harp in whatever form better he get it there than from invading more countries.

The more public-relevant issue with Harp is that she appears, from pretty credible reporting, to be a key vector for Trump’s incoming and outgoing information. She notoriously carries with her a portable printer and batteries so she can print out flattering press coverage. If you’re familiar with Trump’s Truth Social feed it’s clear that he frequently bases new de facto policies, attacks, demands … what have you, on things that come from far-right sites or absurd Twitter threads. So like new claims of vandalism, justifications for his actions that need new rationales. There’s this feedback loop of randoms trying to come up with justifications, arguments, new forms of retaliation. Then Trump sees them adopts them as his own. They’re no less stupid or dangerous or absurd but like Frankenstein’s monster they become real, if no less disfigured, when he brings them to life and invests them with the power of the American presidency. Harp seems to be the vector for a lot of that. Reporting also suggests that when he fires off new demands or threats or whatever else it’s often Harp who is clicking “send”.

Needless to say there doesn’t appear to be any shortage of sycophantic idiots in the second Trump White House. She may simply have taken over some of the role once occupied by Dan Scavino who has now ascended to bigger things. So it’s not like she’s the problem. Perhaps more like she’s the current executor or actuator of the problem. In any case, she’s an important figure beyond just rumor and jokes.

I had a couple conversations today which turned on the role of private equity in today’s economy and the importance of business models that align with a company’s purpose. Both of them were relevant to our soon to be completed drive for the TPM Journalism Fund. In the new episode of the TPM Social Club podcast Joe Ragazzo and TPM head of product Derick Dirmaier talk about the impact of private equity on sports. This involves caricatures of course but I think of Venture Capital and Private Equity as sort of twin players, often with perverse and deleterious effects on the lives of companies, the first on the ascent of the rocket, the second on the descent. Both have had deeply negative impacts on the news and journalism industry. In both cases that’s because scale and market dominance don’t play the same role in the news business as they do for social media or the production of widgets and many other kinds of business. Most require being rooted in the lives of particular communities, often geographical communities, or having a more than transactional relationship with an audience.

This probably won’t get the attention or, frankly, outrage that it deserves because it’s kind of technical. But it’s stunning and a ‘Caligula making his horse a senator’ kind of craziness, as revealed in a new report from The Washington Post.

The US is in the process of transitioning from the Nimitz class to Ford class aircraft carriers. The USS Ford is already in service. I think one other Ford class ship is in the testing phase. (For clarity, the class of ship takes its name from the first shape in production. So there’s a USS Ford and then a Ford ‘class’ of ships which follow the same design.) The tower on the Ford class ships is swept toward the back of the ship. That has some safety advantages but it also creates a much longer launch and storage area. President Trump has decided that he prefers the look of the World War II era battleships where the tower is in the middle of the ship. And he is pushing the Navy (and considering ordering the Navy) to move the tower forward on the Ford class ships. This comes after Trump just a few days ago ordered the Navy to go back to steam-powered catapults (the thing that hurls the planes forward off the ship for takeoff) from the new electromagnetic catapults. He apparently wants to do this because he once talked to a catapult operator who told him the old kind was better.

A follow up to last night’s post on Mike Huckabee, now U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Axios reports that Donald Trump is pretty conspicuously declining to endorse Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel’s October election. I would be remiss I didn’t explicitly note that it is unprecedented and outrageous that a U.S. president is even considering a formal endorsement in the election of an allied country. They’ve often had preferences of course. But we used to have respect for the internal affairs of foreign governments, especially allied ones. In any case, we don’t now. And here we are.

This appears to be part of Trump’s deliberate move away from Israel and the closely related annoyance that Israel continues to complicate his other priorities, which are one part conventional geopolitics and one part corrupt deals with various Gulf States. But there’s another factor Axios points to which we’re familiar with from the U.S. endorsement game. Netanyahu’s polls look bad. And Trump doesn’t want to back a loser.

Here’s something to keep a close eye on. Mike Huckabee, who as part of Trump’s fun house diplomacy is now the U.S. ambassador to Israel, went on X yesterday and called the siege of a Palestinian family’s West Bank home by a group of Israeli settlers a “horrific act of terror.”

Now what’s happening there is that and worse. In many ways, what’s been happening in the West Bank for the last year and a half is worse than what is happening in Gaza, though the death toll is orders of magnitude less. But this doesn’t sound like Huckabee. He’s one of the biggest supporters of the settler movement and the most violent and nationalistic parts of it.

So what’s up here?

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I noted a few days ago how many of the news stories of the day are knock-on effects of earlier episodes of Trump’s cupidity or grandiosity. Airport Food Truck-Gate goes back to the wildly corrupt and unconstitutional personal gift of a plane; the Reflecting Pool prosecutions go back to his whim and rushed decision to make the bottom of the Reflecting Pool blue and then the way in which he was embarrassed when his no-bid contractors messed it up. I want to return to one aspect of the plane story.

Yes, it’s corrupt, silly, stupid, etc. But Trump got the gift from the royal family of Qatar. Qatar isn’t any gulf state. It’s not UAE or Saudi or Kuwait. Qatar’s regional brand, their niche in the complex geopolitics of the Gulf, is that they’re close to both sides. They host a U.S. military base. They have decent relations with the U.S. They also have close relations with Iran. They were until recently the host of Hamas.

We’re almost to the critical goal we need to hit in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. We have only $37,866 to go. If you’ve been planning on contributing please make it today. We’re almost there. It’s super important. Click here.

Update: Now just $33,853!

Update II: Now just $31,600!

Over the last few days as we’ve been discussing Francesca Hong’s campaign, Thanksgiving abolition and “defunding the police,” I’ve made the same argument a number of times — most recently with TPM Reader AB whose email dispatch you can read below. I wanted to share it with you because it informs my way of understanding these things.

After Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary last year, there were so many powerful people eager to take him down and so many ways it would be easy to do it. It’s very, very challenging to navigation the transition from a lefty/social democratic/identity politics milieu to a broader society-wide electorate. Obviously New York City is a very blue city. It’s not Wisconsin or Michigan, let alone Texas or Ohio. But the same general point remains. It’s an incredibly challenging needle to thread, one that requires immense, innate political skill. Mamdani fielded all the standard attacks, some fair, some very unfair, and again and again he was able to finesse them. This, to me, was the biggest signal. He’s an immense political talent. Some have it; most don’t; he does.

Of course I have my own issues with him on Israel/Palestine. But even on that issue, perhaps especially on that issue, I saw how he was able to navigate a super challenging electoral thicket. Again and again.

Which brings me to Francesca Hong.