Miscellaneous short stories/links: AI betrayal of healthcare, Invertebrate Politicos, and Fear!

 AI Battle Between Insurers and Hospitals Jacked Up Patient Prices by Nearly $1 Billion

“Not exactly the cancer cure we were promised,” quipped one critic.

 

Artificial intelligence proponents claim AI will make healthcare more efficient, but an analysis published Wednesday suggests that the burgeoning technology is instead helping hospitals identify more lucrative diagnoses—and is driving nearly $1 billion in additional costs for patients and insurers.

Happy Oligarch Day as Trump-Aligned Billionaires Take Over Hollywood

(from Matt Stoller, reacting to the WB/Paramount merger)

I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with a legal scholar named Cass Sunstein, who is a widely cited and politically influential ex-Obama administration official. I met him at a book event for his now-discredited book Nudge and criticized his thesis. He didn’t defend himself, but instead listened and made my argument for me. It was weird, and then I realized, he was simply trying to make me like him. To him, being correct or not, or holding any sense of integrity, was utterly irrelevant. He simply didn’t want to offend anyone.

That’s what this culture is about, it’s completely vacuous courtier politics, people living as if they are seeking the favor of a monarch instead the honor of popular support. And that’s why this merger loss is useful. It shows that Trumpism isn’t about one man, and it’s not about a nation full of racist voters or anything like that. Democrats like Gavin Newsom and Rob Bonta did exactly what Trump did, on behalf of the same [Hollywood] oligarchs, because their basic view of power is the same. They simply cannot fathom a world in which we have equality before the law.

What Happens When Neoliberalism’s Only Got Fear Left to Sell?

Neoliberalism promised us prosperity, security and freedom through markets. Increasingly, it is delivering insecurity instead. So what does it have left to offer? Fear. And that is it.

We are told to fear government debt. We are told to fear the bond markets. We are told governments must maintain “fiscal credibility”, even when doing so means higher taxes, weaker public services, lower living standards and fewer jobs.

Why Can't Those South Americans Get It Together?

 

Part of why Trump’s administration is so enraged by the Bolivian attorney general prosecuting their guy isn’t only because the crimes it will expose but also because bribing attorney generals to run political lawfare campaigns against the left is their whole strategy. From Lavo… https://t.co/YQab94w6Dq

— Camila Lourdes Galarza (@sovietwithsazon) October 1, 2026

Today's Bee Letter: The DSA is silly!

RE: The DSA agenda may cost $200$. Who pays for it?
10/2/26 p. B-10

The Bee's opinion writer (Ingrid Jacques) joins the paid chorus of pundits promoting the lavender-haired trans lesbian lefties as representative of the silliness of anyone proposing a change in the current dog-eat-dog economy, with (bonus!) the largest homeless population since the Great Depression. Sorry, Ms. Jacques, there are going to have big changes from spending trillions on war while ignoring health, shelter, transportation and infrastructure. You may not like it, but the alternative is beyond painful.  As for whether public, rather than billionaire, ownership and management of the economy is a good idea. How's that alternative working out now?

Fantasy vs. Reality: Where the US is at...

 

The Democratization of Hollywood

 Chinese AI-produced miniseries are incredibly cheap to make. Now they go one step further: you can "localize" them easily. This is pretty revolutionary. The irony is that the Commies are going to democratize public spectacle...!

People are really not paying enough attention to this.

Last week, in the post below, I wrote that China would soon have AI tools to easily internationalize the hundreds of thousands of AI mini-series it produces every year, and "re-render the footage with local faces, languages… https://t.co/5mNOJeeQp9 pic.twitter.com/hfBudd9aQm

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) September 30, 2026

"Evil" and Donald Trump

 From ianwelsh.net

Donald Trump and the Age of Evil – By any standard of morality, Trump is depraved. But adorned with the power of the state, he descends to another level — the level of evil.

Chris Hedges, Sep 25, 2026

Donald Trump exhibits the classic traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation and incapacity for remorse or guilt.

But is he evil?

If, as the philosopher Susan Nieman writes, evil is not simply the opposite of good but inimical to it, if the aim of evil is to destroy all moral distinctions, then Trump qualifies as evil. Morality, for Trump, is for losers. All life is transactional. Self-interest and self-enrichment usurp all other considerations. No one else matters.

In her new book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” Neiman argues that evil “isn’t cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary.”

She continues:

“There’s a difference between calling one action evil and calling another a crime. Crimes are things for which we have procedures—at least for punishing, if not for preventing. This means that a crime can be fit in some way into the rest of our experience. To call an action evil is to suggest it cannot—and that it thereby threatens the trust in the world that we need to navigate it. There’s no signpost on the border between evil and awful. Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to drop if you sense that a line has been crossed.” ….

“Once the supremacy of self-interest is enshrined as commonsense realism rather than a philosophical idea, moral capacities like empathy and shame become not just naïve but suspect,” Neiman writes. “Sadists exist and cause no end of pain. But the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage.” ….

The institutions designed to protect democracy, to safeguard civic virtues, to foster equality — including the courts, law firms, universities and the media, all of which have been captured by the billionaire class — swiftly fell to their knees to curry favor with the Trump White House. The titans in Silicon Valley showered him and his campaign with millions of dollars. The supposed virtues these institutions and individuals claimed they championed were jettisoned. These virtues, they illustrated, were nothing more than branding, performance art, a sham.

To an enraged public Trump’s transparent greed and cruelty is preferable to the slick hypocrisy of the politicians, Republican and Democrat, who preceded him. He does not engage in their faux empathy. In fact, he seems incapable of empathy.

Once morality is for fools, virtue makes no sense. Once we believe we should grab what we can, even at the expense of those around us, we surrender to evil.

“Unlike the rest of us, he permanently exhibits the combination of motives we are told are the true forces driving human behavior,” Neiman writes of Trump….

[TW: The organizing principle of capitalism is that everyone pursuing their own self-interest results in the greatest benefit to society. This is obviously counter to civic republicanism, and why I believe that we must rebuild a republican spirit of governance, and why I insist Adam Smith and John Locke in particular should be disdained, not venerated. Their ideas are hostile to the very basis of good governance.]

 

The Consequences of Private Equity

 

Last year I walked into a Jo-Ann fabrics because they were having a closing sale, got to talking to one of the managers and they said they'd been there for 15 years and that the store was one of the most profitable in the state, Was making a million dollars in profit each year.…

— Crypto Facts 🇺🇲🏳️‍🌈 (@Crypt0_Facts) September 22, 2026