'The collision of life and art is heartbreaking, and my heart is broken'

As Congress prepares to come back from August recess with less than two months before the Nov. 5 presidential election, House Republicans are taking aim at the Democratic ticket through a flurry of investigations and hearings. With only three weeks of the congressional session left before Vice President Kamala Harris squares off against former President Donald Trump in the presidential election, Republicans in Congress have their work cut out for them. Not only does House Speaker Mike Johnson need to negotiate and pass a continuing resolution that protects conservative priorities to fund the government past Sept. 30, but Republicans in Congress also need to find a way to end the Harris honeymoon—which some polls suggest is already coming to an end—or risk defeat. At least four separate House committee investigations, from the Oversight Committee to the Armed Services Committee, are looking to use subpoena powers to put pressure on the Democratic ticket. The Oversight Committee, led by Rep. James Comer, R.-Ky., has two separate probes trained on Harris and Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota. Comer on Aug. 6 announced the first investigation, which seeks to uncover Harris’ complicity in the ongoing illegal migrant crisis at America’s southern border. In a letter to Troy Miller, the Customs and Border Protection senior official performing the duties of the commissioner, Comer claimed the committee is “investigating Vice President Harris’s role in effectuating the worst border crisis in American history.” “Since the Biden-Harris Administration assumed office, there have been more than 8 million illegal aliens encountered entering the country through the southwest border and over 1.6 million ‘getaways,’” Comer’s letter reads. “The mass illegal migration under the Biden-Harris Administration has contributed to murders, sexual assaults, and serious bodily injuries committed against numerous Americans at the hands of illegal aliens.” Comer asked Miller to turn over any documents and communications from Customs and Border Protection to understand the vice president’s role in the Biden administration’s border policies. The second House Oversight Committee investigation deals with Walz’s seemingly extensive connections to China. In an Aug. 16 letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Comer announced the probe and requested information, documents, and communications from the FBI regarding possible connections to Chinese Communist Party-linked entities. Letter-to-Director-Wray-08162024Download “Governor Walz has long-standing connections to CCP-connected entities and officials that make him susceptible to the Party’s strategy of elite capture, which seeks to co-opt influential figures in elite political, cultural, and academic circles to influence the United States to the benefit of the communist regime and the detriment of Americans,” Comer’s letter stated. “Reporting about Governor Walz’s extensive engagement with CCP officials and entities while serving in public office raises questions about possible CCP influence in his decision-making as governor—and, should he be elected, as vice president.” As evidence of Walz’s alleged connections to the CCP, Comer said that Walz organized a Chinese government-funded trip to China when he was a teacher at Alliance High School in Nebraska. From 1994 to 2003, Walz coordinated annual trips to China for students using a company he started called Educational Travel Adventures Inc. Walz himself has been to China an estimated 30 times. “The [Chinese Community Party] has sought to destroy the United States through coordinated influence and infiltration campaigns that target every aspect of American life, including our own elected officials,” Comer said in a statement: Americans should be deeply concerned that Governor Walz, Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential running mate, has a long-standing and cozy relationship with China. Mr. Walz has visited China dozens of times, served as a fellow at a Chinese institution that maintains a devotion to the CCP, and spoke alongside the president of a Chinese organization the State Department exposed as a CCP effort to influence and co-opt local leaders. In a statement to The Washington Post, a Walz spokesperson claimed, “Republicans are twisting basic facts and desperately lying to distract from the Trump-Vance agenda: praising dictators and sending American jobs to China.” Meanwhile, the House Education and Workforce Committee is subpoenaing the Democratic vice presidential nominee for documents relating to an alleged $250 million fraud scheme involving a nonprofit in Minnesota. The nonprofit in question, Feeding Our Future, was ostensibly an organization meant to provide healthy, nourishing meals to at-risk children during the COVID-19 pandemic—with the help of taxpayer dollars.  Prosecutors accuse Feeding Our Future of defrauding the public of $250 million worth of pandemic funds by creating 50 distribution sites and then submitting falsified rosters of children supposedly receiving meals from the nonprofit. The Justice Department has charged 70 individuals caught up in the scheme—18 of whom have pleaded guilty. Five others have already been convicted. In a June report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor for the state of Minnesota, the office claimed that the Minnesota Education Department failed to adequately monitor the state and federal funds to reimburse nonprofits such as Feed Our Future and that the Education Department’s “actions and inactions created opportunities for fraud.” 2024-mdefofDownload After the June report, Walz claimed at a news conference that there was no “malfeasance” on the state government’s part. “There’s not a single state employee that was implicated in doing anything that was illegal,” the governor added. “They simply didn’t do as much due diligence as they should have.” Nevertheless, the House Education and Workforce Committee issued subpoenas to Walz, the Minnesota Education Department, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Wednesday regarding the alleged fraud. The committee is seeking all documents concerning the apparent failure to oversee Feeding Our Future.  “As the chief executive and the highest-ranking official in the state of Minnesota, you are responsible for the [Minnesota Department of Education] and its administration of [federal child nutrition programs],” Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., wrote in her letter to Walz: 9.4.24_fof_gov_subpoenaDownload Statements in the press by you and your representatives indicate that you and other executive officers were involved, or had knowledge of, [Minnesota Department of Education’s] administration of the [federal child nutrition programs] and responsibilities and actions regarding the massive fraud. In early August, House Armed Services Military Personnel Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin seeking more information about Walz’s military service record. Walz has consistently lied about serving in combat, the circumstances of his departure from the National Guard, and the rank he achieved while serving.  “The American people deserve transparency into the military records of service members who serve in public office and especially when they represent such service as credentials for public office,” Banks wrote to Austin. “Misrepresentation and deceit intended to mislead the public about their service erode the integrity of our military and impact all Americans who choose to serve.” The House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is also working to turn up the heat on the Harris-Walz ticket. On Friday, the committee held a hearing in Santee, California, titled “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: California Perspectives.” The committee featured California politicians, law enforcement officers, and residents who explained how their communities have struggled due to a surge of illegal immigrants. “We are a major artery of highways utilized by cartels and other bad actors to facilitate the trafficking of narcotics and human smuggling to other major cities and criminal hubs across the state and nation,” Don Sharp, undersheriff of Riverside County, California, told the committee. “The current administration could be complicit in the delivery of a child into the sex-trafficking world.” While the Judiciary Committee’s hearing Friday was in Harris’ home state, they will also bring the probe back to Washington. A hearing, “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: Victim Perspectives,” is scheduled for Tuesday. Also on Tuesday, one of the Judiciary subcommittees has a hearing focused on noncitizens voting in elections. Some House Republicans are skeptical the barrage against Harris and Walz will have the intended effect. “We have an election to win. Don’t make these people martyrs,” one anonymous lawmaker told Axios. Others, such as Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., think the investigations are “fair,” but warned that Republicans need to “handle it professionally.” The post The House GOP’s Barrage Against Harris, Walz appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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The technology now exists to render video games in real, playable time computationally — a first achieved with the classic pixelated first-person shooter Doom. Don’t yawn — this isn’t just a footnote in the annals of nerd history. Elon Musk promptly chimed in on the news in the replies to promise, “Tesla can do something similar with real world video.” We are now governed by people who seem hell-bent on preserving their power regardless of the cost — people who are also getting first dibs on the most powerful AIs in development. The military applications of this latest leap forward are obvious enough. A person at a terminal — or behind the wheel — enters a seamless virtual environment every bit as complex and challenging as a flesh-and-blood environment … at least as far as warfare goes. Yes, war has a funny way of simplifying or even minimizing our lived experience of our own environment: kill, stay alive, move forward, repeat. No wonder technological goals of modeling or simulating the given world work so well together with the arts and sciences of destruction. But another milestone in the computational march raises deeper questions about the automation of doom itself. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the company has “witnessed our first AI-to-AI crypto transaction.” “What did one AI buy from another? Tokens! Not crypto tokens, but AI tokens (words basically from one LLM to another). They used tokens to buy tokens,” he tweeted, adding a ? emoji. “AI agents cannot get bank accounts, but they can get crypto wallets. They can now use USDC on Base to transact with humans, merchants, or other AIs. Those transactions are instant, global, and free. This,” he enthusiastically concluded, “is an important step to AIs getting useful work done.” In the fractured world of bleeding-edge tech, “doomerism” is associated with the fear that runaway computational advancement will automate a superintelligence that will destroy the human race. Perhaps oddly, less attention flows toward the much more prosaic likelihood that sustainable war can soon be carried out in a “set it and forget it” fashion — prompt the smart assistant to organize and execute a military campaign, let it handle all the payments and logistics, human or machine, and return to your fishing, hiking, literary criticism, whatever. Yes, there’s always the risk of tit-for-tat escalation unto planetary holocaust. But somehow, despite untold millions in wartime deaths and nuclear weapons aplenty, we’ve escaped that hellacious fate. Maybe we’re better off focusing on the obvious threats of regular ordinary world war in the digital age. But that would require a recognition that such a “thinkable” war is itself so bad that we must change our ways right now — instead of sitting around scaring ourselves to death with dark fantasies of humanity’s enslavement or obliteration. That would require recognizing that no matter how advanced we allow technology to become, the responsibility for what technology does will always rest with us. For that reason, the ultimate concern in the digital age is who we are responsible for and answerable to. As the etymology of the word responsible reveals (it comes from ancient terminology referring to the pouring out of libations in ritual sacrifice), this question of human responsibility points inescapably toward religious concepts, experiences, and traditions.Avoiding World War Autocomplete means accepting that religion is foundational to digital order — in ways we weren’t prepared for during the electric age typified by John Lennon’s “Imagine.” It means facing up to the fact that different civilizations with different religions are already well on their way to dealing in very different ways with the advent of supercomputers. And it means ensuring that those differences don’t result in one or several civilizations freaking out and starting a chain reaction of automated violence that engulfs the world — not unto the annihilation of the human race, but simply the devastation of billions of lives. Isn’t that enough? Unfortunately, right now, the strongest candidate for that civilizational freakout is the United States of America. Not only did we face the biggest shock in how digital tech has worked out, but we also have the farthest to fall in relative terms from our all-too-recent status as a global superpower. We are now governed by people who seem hell-bent on preserving their power regardless of the cost — people who are also getting first dibs on the most powerful AIs in development. Scary as automated conflict indeed is, the biggest threat to the many billions of humans — and multimillions of Americans — who would suffer most in a world war isn’t the machines. It’s the people who want most to control them.

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Ella Bleu, the daughter of John Travolta and the late Kelly Preston, is honoring her mother’s memory in a special way. The 24-year-old shared the release of her new song, “Little Bird,” a heartfelt lullaby dedicated to Preston, four years after her passing. The music video features intimate, previously unseen footage of the Travolta family, showcasing moments from both their early years and more recent memories together. In the emotional lyrics, Ella sings: “Little bird, don’t you cry / Would you stay awhile before I fly? / Close your eyes / Won’t you smile / Sing a lullaby, it’ll be alright / What do I say? / What is real? / When everybody tells me how to feel / What is mine? / How do I speak? / When every word is taken, chosen for me.” Ella Bleu Travolta shares new song with video footage of mom Kelly Preston   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Ella Bleu Travolta (@ella.bleu) Those are just a snippet of the lyrics in the song dedicated to Ella’s late mother. People flooded the comments section of the Instagram post with love for Ella and her family. One person wrote, “That was the most beautiful post I’ve seen on here in a long time. Precious. Your family is so full of love. Hang onto that love sweet girl, take it with you wherever you go whatever you do.” RELATED: John Travolta Pays Tribute To Late Wife Kelly Preston For Mother’s Day Another person wrote, “I lost my mom to suicide when I was 14. Your voice is so beautiful and this song and video is amazing. The lyrics really hit home. You were raised by two of the greatest humans. Endlessly proud of you and your family.” Instagram Preston passed away in 2020 after a two-year battle with breast cancer. Her husband, actor John Travolta, shared the heartbreaking news in an Instagram post at the time. “With a heavy heart, I must let you know that my beautiful wife Kelly has lost her two-year fight with breast cancer,” Travolta wrote. “She fought bravely, with the love and support of so many,” he continued. “My family and I will always be grateful to her doctors and nurses at MD Anderson Cancer Center, and to all the medical professionals and friends who stood by her side.” Shortly after, Ella paid tribute to her “courageous” mother in a heartfelt post. “I have never known anyone as strong, beautiful, and loving as you,” she wrote at the time. “Anyone lucky enough to have been in your presence would agree that you had a glow and light that made everyone around you feel instantly happy.”   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Ella Bleu Travolta (@ella.bleu) Click for next Article The post John Travolta’s Daughter Ella Bleu Shares Never-Before-Seen Home Videos Of Late Kelly Preston appeared first on DoYouRemember? - The Home of Nostalgia. Author, Jane Kenney