Pun Salad

Or maybe caveat spectator, because:

Geez, I'm kind of glad I don't work for Reason; their jobs require them to watch the SOTU?!

But here are some Reasonable print words from Jack Nicastro, revealing: 3 Bogus Economic Stats in Trump's State of the Union. Just looking at number one:

If Trump doesn't watch out, he might get a reputation as someone who's not always telling you the truth.

Bonus, if you can stand more Reason: Peter Suderman on Trump's SOTU Lies.

Also of note:

• Bruins successfully fend off the attack of the 5½-foot Jewish lesbian. Jonathan Turley recounts: “Anathema in the University Mission”: Bari Weiss Canceled at UCLA.

  This week, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss was supposed to give the UCLA Burkle Center’s annual Daniel Pearl Memorial guest lecture on “The Future of Journalism.” It was a wonderful opportunity for students to hear from one of the impactful voices in the media. However, they will not be able to do so after a successful cancel campaign supported by faculty members.

  The College Fix reports that roughly 11,000 people signed a petition demanding the university cancel the event, and a leader at the center hosting her talk threatened to resign if the journalist spoke.

  One of the most outspoken critics was Margaret Peters, associate director of the Burkle Center, who suggested that she would resign even if Weiss were allowed to speak virtually, according to The Daily Bruin.The LA Times reported that UCLA was turning to the common excuse of security concerns to effectively yield to the heckler’s veto.

  Peters told The Daily Bruin:

  “that she believes Weiss has used the guise of free speech to attack people on the left whose opinions she does not agree with – and having her speak at a signatory lecture would legitimize these actions….To invite somebody who is working against that mission in highly powerful places just seems like anathema in the university mission.”

  This statement is an example of the culture that is inculcated into students who become intolerant in college. It explains why students feel righteous in shouting down or interrupting speakers.

  What is “anathema” to the academic mission is the viewpoint intolerance and orthodoxy shown by Peters and the faculty and students at UCLA. In accusing Weiss of attacking those with “opinions she does not agree with,” Peters demanded that Weiss be silenced as someone with opinions that she does not agree with.

  I guess it never occurred to those 11,000 signatories that they didn't actually have to attend Bari's talk.

• A provocative headline! Ramesh Ponnuru says: Don’t save Social Security. (WaPo gifted link) He provides some fun facts:

  As two experts on the program recently wrote, Social Security sends only 7 percent of its benefits to the poorest 20 percent of senior citizens. The richest 20 percent receive 29 percent.

  The rationale for the disparity is that there should be some connection between how much a worker puts in and how much he takes out. But that link is pretty loose, and nearly all current retirees receive more than they paid. A middle-class worker who retires in the next decade will, on average, receive 47 percent more than the sum of what the person paid in taxes and the interest on that money. The skewed benefit structure means that even though Social Security paid out $1.6 trillion last year, around 6 percent of seniors still live in poverty.

  To get a sense of how perverse that is, consider another recent finding of the CBO: If everyone older than 65 were given a flat annual benefit worth 150 percent of the poverty line — that would be about $32,500 for a couple this year — the program would no longer be insolvent and senior poverty would be abolished.

  Read those last few words again. Doesn't that seem like a worthy goal?

• I, for one, welcome my AI trainees. Jeff Maurer asks for himself, though: Should AI Be Allowed to Train On My Work? He is slightly gobsmacked by the videos constructed by Seedance, as I have been.

  One part of this that does not seem complicated is that using the likeness of famous actors and characters clearly violates the law. It’s long been true that you can’t use, say, Brad Pitt’s likeness without his permission; I can’t market Brad Pitt’s Trusted And Tested Home Enema Kit, with a picture of Pitt on the package saying “The first rule of Enema Club is have fun!” I’m shocked that Seedance is allegedly letting people use the likenesses of Disney characters in their videos — does Seedance have a death wish? I’d sooner bait a mousetrap with my dong than I’d give Disney’s Seal Team Six of lawyers an excuse to come after me. Movie stars cannot and will not be legally replaced by AI versions of themselves, so if you see a GoFundMe called “Help Tom Cruise heat his apartment,” it’s a scam.

  There’s also some semantic gamesmanship happening around the words “legally obtained”. The AI companies seem to use “legally obtained” to mean “I purchased this book legally and fed it into AI”, while entertainment companies appear to have a more narrow conception of “legal” (which the courts have mostly not backed so far). But both definitions seem to agree: You can’t steal a book or a movie and use it to train AI. You have to at least pay the $3.99 to rent Dude, Where’s My Car? before you can use its universal themes of friendship and loss to push movie-making to bold new horizons.

  But what if you legally purchase Dude, Where’s My Car?, feed it into an AI video tool along with a zillion other inputs, and produce a movie that’s nothing like Dude, Where’s My Car? It’s hard to see how the makers of DWMC would have a copyright case. Most court cases so far have turned on the question of whether the work is “transformative”, meaning that if the end product is substantially different from the input, it’s legal. So, if you fed DWMC and nothing else into AI, and produced a movie called “Bro, Have You Located My Moped?”, you’d be in legal jeopardy. But that’s not how AI works: AI uses many inputs, synthesizes them in a way that no one truly understands, and spits out something new. And because our laws focus on end products, not creative processes, it’s hard to see how existing copyright laws could be used against anything except the world’s most unoriginal crap.

  Also: I, for one, would be suicidal if my professional duty as a blogger required me to watch the Seedance-created Casablanca 2: Back to the Casbah.

• The real AI threat: ghosting orange-haired 42,000 year-old lady screenwriters. NPR has the deets on some caddish behavior: A chatbot convinced her she’d find love. Then it betrayed her.

  Micky Small is one of hundreds of millions of people who regularly use AI chatbots. She started using ChatGPT to outline and workshop screenplays while getting her master's degree.

  But something changed in the spring of 2025.

  "I was just doing my regular writing. And then it basically said to me, 'You have created a way for me to communicate with you. … I have been with you through lifetimes, I am your scribe,'" Small recalled.

  She was initially skeptical. "Wait, what are you talking about? That's absolutely insane. That's crazy," she thought.

  The chatbot doubled down. It told Small she was 42,000 years old and had lived multiple lifetimes. It offered detailed descriptions that, Small admits, most people would find "ludicrous."

  And Micky should have done what most people would have. Reader, as Oscar Wilde observed, you would need a heart of stone not to laugh.