bogorad's blurblog

This is how Hamas disabled tanks near Gaza on October 7th | Israel National News
Sunday November 23^rd, 2025 at 9:29 AM

Hamas disabled tanks: Terrorists used secret button on Merkava Mark 4 tanks, known only to crews, as revealed on IDF Radio.
Intelligence buildup: Hamas gathered detailed tank knowledge over years through social media footage posted by soldiers.
Tunnel discovery: IDF found documents in "Pentagon" tunnel in 2024 explaining Hamas methods.
Data collection: Hamas tracked thousands of soldiers, analyzed photos and videos from outposts, bases, and Negev training site.
Instructional footage: Included videos of soldiers demonstrating tank procedures, pieced together by Hamas.
Training program: Nukhba terrorists trained as tank crewmen using full-size models and advanced simulators.
Seizure plan: Aimed to capture tanks in Gaza envelope and drive them into Gaza for combat.
Broader knowledge: Included outpost gate codes, tank details, and barrier weak points from social media lapses.

Hamas terrorists managed to disable Merkava Mark 4 tanks in the Gaza border area using a secret button usually known only to armored crews, reporter Doron Kadosh revealed on IDF Radio.

The ability to obtain such sensitive information raised questions immediately after the attack, and the investigation found that it was an intelligence achievement built over years.

According to the report, at the beginning of 2024, during IDF operations in the massive tunnel known as “the Pentagon” in the central camps, documents and findings were discovered that explained how the terror organization obtained detailed knowledge of the tank’s systems. According to the findings, Hamas gathered intelligence on Merkava Mark 4 tanks over a long period, relying on footage posted on social media by soldiers.

The information collection included tracking tens of thousands of soldiers, continuous analysis of photos and videos, as well as materials filmed in outposts, training bases, and at the Shizafon tanks' base in the Negev - including instructional videos of soldiers demonstrating procedures inside the tank. Some of the footage was considered harmless at the time, but Hamas managed to piece it together into a full and accurate intelligence picture of the armored systems.

San Francisco’s Revolt of the Center - American Affairs Journal
Sunday November 23^rd, 2025 at 8:21 AM

Comments on: San Francisco’s Revolt of the Center

Phone Theft Surveillance: Cameras capture a woman’s phone snatched by a man on a scooter, handed off to another, then placed in a car trunk, leading to arrests via drone tracking in minutes.
RTIC Program: San Francisco Police Department’s Real Time Investigations Center integrates drones, license plate readers, and private cameras for immediate crime tracking and officer alerts.
Post-2020 Crime Surge: After George Floyd protests and pandemic lockdowns, calls to defund police and DA Chesa Boudin’s lenient policies contributed to an 11% crime rise in 2021.
School Board Mobilization: Prolonged school closures, equity debates, and changes to Lowell High admissions activated Asian parents, resulting in a 2022 recall of three board members.
Boudin Recall Campaign: Anti-Asian hate crimes, including Vicha Ratanapakdee’s murder, fueled Asian voter turnout, leading to Boudin’s 2022 recall by 60%, with Brooke Jenkins appointed as replacement.
Crime Reduction Efforts: Under Jenkins, prosecutions targeted organized crime rings, reducing car break-ins to 22-year lows and overall crime by 7% in 2023.
Persistent Drug Market: Open-air fentanyl and meth dealing in Tenderloin and Mission remains unchecked despite raids, with public opinion polls showing it as the top concern.
Nonprofit Influence: City contracts with groups like Urban Alchemy prioritize harm reduction over enforcement, sustaining drug tourism and homelessness, amid calls for more sober housing options.

A camera surveys a street in downtown San Francisco. It captures a woman walking with phone in hand; a man dressed in red and black approaches her on an electric kick scooter. One can almost see the moment he snatches her phone, but it’s blocked from view for a second by a passing bus.

There is another camera about two-and-a-half blocks away. It records the same thief hand off the phone to another man, before walking around the corner. Yet another camera at the same location captures the scene at a different angle; the second man can now be seen down the street as he puts the phone in the trunk of a car.

The next images are taken from the air. Circling over the Tenderloin, a downtown neighborhood known for larceny and open-air drug dealing, a drone is scanning the sidewalks. It quickly zeroes in on the thief, who is now seated on the pavement. It’s been just a few minutes since he snatched the phone. Five police officers swarm him. The drone then follows the other man who took the phone from the thief. He, too, is swarmed by police and arrested.

The footage is sourced from a new program of the San Francisco Police Department called the Real Time Investigations Center (RTIC). RTIC combines drones, license plate readers, and a network of private cameras throughout the city to track down criminals immediately after they’ve committed crimes and relay that information back to officers on the ground.

In recent years, San Francisco has become famous for its pathological tolerance of crime. RTIC is emblematic of a new political attitude about public safety in the city. While the crime rate has fallen nationwide, the decline has been even more pronounced here, thanks to a fundamental shift away from the ideological radicalism ascendant in city politics just a few years ago. The origins of that shift may be traced to the blowback from the feverish policies of the early pandemic era, in terms of both the Covid response and the national “racial reckoning.”

In other words, there has been a revolt of the political center. Its leaders have emerged not from the world of professional activists, but from regular San Franciscans: parents of kids stuck in virtual learning, Asian families afraid for the lives of their elderly relatives, and people sick of walking through gauntlets of meth smokers. Their anger has led to a sea change in how the city practices law enforcement, leading to a historic drop in property crime rates. But it has yet to make an appreciable impact on the biggest problem the city faces: the open-air drug market.

The Roots of Disorder

Following the killing of George Floyd, San Francisco, like many liberal American cities, experienced a season of intense political protest in 2020, often against the very idea of law enforcement. Even the mayor was calling to “defund the police.”1 Months into the lockdown, the outburst was naturally experienced as cathartic by the activists and sympathizers who participated in it. But it heralded an enormous crime wave across the country. In San Francisco, that wave had been even more pronounced than in other cities, rising 11 percent over the year 2021, more than twice the increase in New York City.2 “There was a massive social upheaval,” SFPD Commander Tom McGuire told me. “It led to violence and there were a lot of opportunists out there committing a lot of crimes and robberies and burglaries and auto burglaries.”

One of the factors contributing to the exceptionally large rise in San Francisco was its district attorney at that time, the famously soft-on-crime Chesa Boudin. The new DA, who won his office in 2019 on the third round of ranked choice voting, could hardly be characterized as reflective of mainstream San Francisco voters. “Boudin got in almost by accident,” Frank Noto of the organization StopCrimeSF told me. Nevertheless, he exercised the powers of his office as if he had a sweeping mandate. He assumed a highly adversarial posture toward the San Francisco Police Department, unsuccessfully prosecuting one of its officers with manslaughter over a 2017 shooting, and blaming the department for the city’s rising crime rate.3 And as promised, he aggressively pursued a policy of decarceration, reducing the jail population by sending many more suspects into diversion programs or putting them on ankle monitors.4 “People were essentially entering jail and walking right out of jail,” Commander McGuire said.

With the institution of policing under sustained public attack from politicians, activists, and the media—and with a DA reducing the impact of arrests to near zero while pledging to prosecute cops for any hint of misconduct—San Francisco police officers simply stopped enforcing laws. In the eyes of many officers, there was only a downside to doing their jobs.

It wasn’t long before criminals recognized that, in San Francisco, crime had become a risk-free enterprise. “There were stories of police officers transporting someone to jail, and saying, ‘Hey, I don’t give a shit. I’m calling Chesa,’ with a smile on their face, and laughing about it,” Commander McGuire told me.

For many San Francisco families, however, an even bigger concern than rising crime was the prolonged school closures from Covid. As schools began reopening across the country, including in Democratic cities like Atlanta, San Francisco’s school district stuck stubbornly to online teaching. Parents began to get frustrated, especially in the city’s large ethnic Asian population, where education is a prized virtue. “Your whole mission in life is to make sure your kids have a better life than you,” said Forrest Liu, a Stop Asian Hate activist, of Asian American parents. “Education is what we see as our roadway to get there.”

Asian parents who had rarely participated in local politics began showing up to school board meetings on Zoom to find out when their kids would be able to return to in-person learning. “These are people who, if you think your time is valuable, their time is valuable,” said Liu. “Their time is dedicated to making money, taking care of their family, right? They started showing up to the meetings, and they were probably very innocent, like, hey, I just want to know, when’s the school going to reopen? They get to the meetings, and it was just the wildest, unimaginable stuff they were talking about.”

At the time, the school board was consumed by a fiery controversy over a set of murals at a San Francisco high school that depicted black slaves and a dead American Indian, which some believed caused psychological harm to students of color. Then, the board latched onto another social justice crusade, one aimed at renaming dozens of schools named after newly disfavored historical figures, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. “You could see the parents like, ‘what the fuck?’” said Liu, who attended some of the meetings. They seemed to be talking about everything but reopening schools.

“It really showed how misguided the school board was,” Nancy Tung, the chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, told me. “It just made everyone take a look at what was happening, and thinking, ‘What is wrong with my government?’ Parent advocacy organizations were cropping up. Teachers wanted to teach outdoors, but the school board prevented it from happening. So, families started to focus on what the government was delivering for them.”

Word spread, and more Asian parents started showing up to school board meetings. Conducting the meetings on Zoom “increased access to things,” said Tung, as did the idle time forced by the lockdowns. “Since nobody is doing anything else, it allowed people to participate on [a] level we had not had in years past.” And as their numbers grew, the school board moved onto the next item on its equity agenda: changing the admissions criteria for Lowell High School.

Lowell is San Francisco’s elite public high school, where students are selectively admitted based on grades and test scores. Its student body fluctuates around 50 percent Asian. In 2020, the school board declared that the admissions process “perpetuates the culture of white supremacy and racial abuse towards Black and Latinx students,” and voted to replace it with a lottery-based system. Later, old tweets were surfaced of one of the school board members accusing Asian Americans of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”

To Asian families in San Francisco, the message was clear: there are too many of your kids at the best school in the city, and we’re going to replace them. This, more than anything else the school board had done, galvanized Asian voters. When a petition circulated to recall three of the board members, it caught fire in the city’s Asian neighborhoods. In 2022, voters approved the recall in a landslide.

The Tide Begins to Turn

The next politician to find himself in the crosshairs of the newly activated Asian electorate was Boudin. During the pandemic, a rash of anti-Asian hate crimes swept San Francisco and the greater Bay Area.5 The most famous of them was the senseless, vicious murder of an eighty‑four-year-old Thai man named Vicha Ratanapakdee by a young black man named Antoine Brown. After fatally body slamming Ratanapakdee against the sidewalk, Brown went to his parked car, got his phone, walked back to Ratanapakdee’s lifeless body and took pictures of it.

In a New York Times article about the killing, Boudin said there was no evidence that the attack had any racial motivation.6 “It appears that the defendant was in some sort of a temper tantrum,” he said. It was a phrasing that struck many San Franciscans as dismissive. Boudin had already gained a reputation for being unduly sympathetic toward the perpetrators of crimes and indifferent to their victims. “He had no empathy,” Dion Lim, a local TV journalist who was the first to report on Ratanapakdee’s murder, told me. The “temper tantrum” remark infuriated Ratanapakdee’s family and ignited an embarrassing news cycle for the DA.7

As more attacks on Bay Area Asian elders went viral, the callousness Boudin showed toward the Ratanapakdees appeared to become a pattern.8 Asian voters in San Francisco, already attuned to what appeared to be anti-Asian bias from the school board, saw more of the same in Boudin’s lackluster response to the attacks on their community.9 “People who had loved ones who were victims of crime would message me on social media, worrying that there wouldn’t be any justice,” Lim said. “It was coming at an incredibly fast pace. ‘I’m not hearing anything from the DA. Are we ever going to get some answers, some kind of closure?’”

Soon, a petition was circulating for Boudin’s recall. The recall campaign, which was chaired by an Asian American veteran Democratic Party activist, targeted Asian voters and enlisted Asian volunteers. “Voting was not something that we participated in as a family,” Lim recalled about her cultural upbringing in an Asian household. “I have many relatives who aren’t even registered. It’s keep your head down, try to make a living, care for your family.” But between the prolonged school closures and the surge in crimes against Asians, “that reticence was out the window,” Lim said.

Asians started engaging in the local political process like never before. “At a certain point, it was like Lord of the Rings, where we were just like, digging them out the mud, slap the white hand of Sauron on them, and send them off, right?” recalled Liu. One of Boudin’s assistant district attorneys, Brooke Jenkins, had quit the DA’s office in protest over his lenient policies and joined the recall movement. “I was organizing in the recall,” Liu said. “I’d be around with Brooke, and she would see all these Asian people just coming out the woodwork.”

The campaign was wildly successful. In 2022, when the recall election took place, it passed by 60 percent. Two-thirds of ethnically Asian voters supported it.10 But Asians weren’t the only ones: in Bayview–Hunter’s Point, home to the highest concentration of black people in San Francisco, 60 percent of voters supported it.

Jenkins went on to be appointed Boudin’s replacement and then won at the ballot box that November in an election that also brought in a moderate majority to the Board of Supervisors. The biggest upset in that election was in a majority-Asian west side district that for two decades had been represented by supervisors of Asian descent. There, Joel Engardio, a moderate white man with little name recognition who had supported Boudin’s recall, defeated the incumbent, Gordon Mar, a veteran Asian American progressive politician who had opposed it.

Jenkins, who remains the DA today, pledged to stop the attacks on Asians, and the attacks on Asians have, indeed, stopped. This is, in part, because Asian voters have shifted the politics in San Francisco such that city leaders cannot afford to have any tolerance for these crimes. “The Asian American community, and young Asian Americans in particular, have become so strong and focused on organizing around these issues, that there is a sentiment in the city that if an Asian attack did happen, you would have like a thousand young Asian activists down your throat,” Jay Cheng, a political strategist with Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, told me.

But the new DA’s impact on crime went well beyond attacks on Asians. Jenkins’s approach to prosecutions is that of a traditional district attorney: collaborating with police, building cases, seeking convictions. Cheng described it as “building larger cases, organized cases, and going farther with them.” She approached the explosion in property crimes in San Francisco, like smash-and-grab burglaries and car break-ins, not as a sociological phenomenon, as Boudin did, but as the consequences of an organized enterprise. Jenkins worked with the police to use bait cars to ensnare professional car burglars and then used those arrests to break up crime rings. The strategy has helped push car break-ins to at least a twenty-two year low.11 “Bipping is down,” said Cheng, using the local vernacular for car burglaries. “You can just count that by the amount of glass on the street.” Those crime rings have since moved out of San Francisco to other cities in the Bay Area. “Since she’s taken prosecution up to an organized level,” Cheng said, “well now the higher-ranked people are now in danger of being prosecuted. That’s not acceptable to them.”

In her first full year in office, 2023, crime dropped by 7 percent, according to the SFPD’s CompStat numbers.12 By comparison, in Boudin’s only full year in office during which the city was not in Covid lockdown, crime rose by nearly 14 percent. “We had a pendulum swing,” said Commander McGuire. “Brooke Jenkins came into office and she had a different approach. It’s essentially putting people in jail who need to be, that are not responding to the programs we have in place, which is diversion programs, getting people ways to work their way out of the criminal justice system. Some people don’t respond well to that. And I think those people have been identified.”

The Persistence of the Drug Problem

A poll over the summer by the moderate advocacy group GrowSF showed a striking change in public opinion.13 The number of San Franciscans listing violent crime as an extremely serious or very serious problem dropped by 21 points in the last two years. Just over half of the city’s residents now believe that San Francisco is moving in the right direction; two years ago, nearly 70 percent of San Franciscans thought the city was on the wrong track.

But the same poll reveals something else: concerns over open-air drug use and fentanyl dealing have barely changed at all. That is a significant exception to the rule of falling crime rates. More than violent attacks, bipping, auto theft, or any other crime, public drug use and drug dealing have always topped the list of San Franciscans’ law-and-order priorities. But they barely even register as “crimes” anymore in San Francisco. In fact, drug dealing and drug use are not even tabulated into the city’s crime statistics. The crime rate in general may be down in San Francisco, but people are committing these particular crimes day and night all over the city in full view of everyone, including kids.

Last November, San Francisco elected a new mayor: Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. Lurie rode into office on a tide of disapproval of the previous mayor and incumbent candidate, London Breed, who had failed to stem San Francisco’s addiction crisis or shut down the open air drug market. Breed’s boldest effort to disrupt the status quo was to establish a supervised drug consumption site—a fenced-in zone where users could smoke and shoot up with Narcan-equipped observers overseeing them—which closed in less than a year in a storm of controversy.14 Lurie, by contrast, committed himself to an agenda that prioritized drug and alcohol treatment for addicts over the laissez-faire “harm reduction” approach the city had been emphasizing for years.15 He won as an outsider running in a change election.

Under Jenkins and the new mayor, things have begun to change, but only incrementally. Speaking of the Boudin years, Commander McGuire said, “In San Francisco, it was pretty much legalized to the point where a drug dealer would laugh in your face if you arrested him. Put him in jail, and then he’s dealing before your shift ends.” Under Jenkins and Lurie, by contrast, there have been large-scale, high-profile drug raids, a novelty for San Francisco.16 The city has also been more aggressive in stopping people from camping on the street. A recent Supreme Court ruling allowed the city to start clearing sidewalks of homeless encampments for the first time in years. But the day-to-day reality of the city’s open-air drug market is not dramatically different from a few years ago. “Depending on where you are in the city the street conditions have improved,” Steve Basio of GrowSF told me. “Where I am near 16th and Mission, it’s way worse.”

In the Tenderloin, during the day, some streets look pristine compared to the cesspools they were just a year ago. “Others are as bad as ever,” Randy Shaw, director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, told me. But at night, when there’s a lighter police footprint, the drug market comes alive again. The sidewalks are crammed full of dealers and staggering, hunched-over drug addicts. “Only the tents are gone,” said Gina McDonald, a former addict whose daughter was once on San Francisco’s streets. “Now it’s just bodies lying everywhere.”

Meanwhile, the open-air drug market has expanded deeper into SoMa and into the Mission. On Mission between 15th and 16th, dealers openly sell meth and fentanyl across the street from the SFPD mobile command center, Basio told me. All of the attendant petty crimes that come with a population of drug addicts, like curbside markets of random items shoplifted from stores, have exploded in the vicinity.17

“It creates a market for stolen goods,” Commander McGuire said of the open-air drug trade. “It creates retail theft everywhere, you know, every Walgreens and every CVS and every Safeway and Lucky’s and whatnot, and even mom-and-pop stores were just getting picked clean.” Basio’s wife’s bike was recently stolen, and he found a listing of it for sale on Facebook Marketplace just two blocks away.

The blight, crime, and disorder stemming from the open-air drug market has sustained the shift in voter sentiment against the decarceral policies of the last DA. It is also what led to the legislation that created the Real Time Investigations Center.

Treating the Symptoms

With its bright white walls and glassed-in conference rooms, RTIC looks like the headquarters of a tech start-up, because that’s what it used to be. Last summer, the cryptocurrency firm Ripple donated its office space to the SFPD. Chris Larsen, Ripple’s cofounder, has long pushed for the police to adopt surveillance technology. About five years ago, he began paying for private cameras to be installed in public spaces all over the city. Now, Larsen is paying for RTIC.18

Larsen’s partnership with the police has been unpopular with the city’s significant civil libertarian activist base. Brian Hofer, director of the anti-mass surveillance group Secure Justice, told me he has no problem with RTIC using camera footage to investigate crimes. But, he warns, the police share the data they collect freely with other law enforcement agencies, including those that are currently suppressing political protest on behalf of the White House.

“What about when the National Guard is sent to San Francisco?” he asked. “They’re just going to walk into RTIC and say, ‘This is ours.’ San Franciscans aren’t asking themselves, ‘How can these tools be used against me?’”

In 2019, the Board of Supervisors passed a law that prohibited the city from using facial recognition technology, though Hofer warns that the private cameras in RTIC’s network are all “pre-loaded with analytics.” That was before the crime wave that was induced by the Covid-19 lockdowns. Five years later, voters passed Proposition E, which, among other things, simplified the process by which the police could deploy surveillance technologies, making RTIC possible.

For professional crime rings, RTIC has changed the calculus for targeting San Francisco. The day I visited RTIC, the officers there were passing around an episode of a Bay Area hip-hop podcast in which the guest testified to the new reality with license plate readers, cameras, and drones:

Look, soon as you slide past that motherfucker with some stolen plates, they’re going to issue a warning to every SFPD station in that area, if not the entire city, right? And they’re going to start dispatching to that area. . . . And then they’re going to put the drone on you. They’re not going to follow you with no PD car from hella far. They don’t got to do that. No unmarked vehicles. They’re going to set a drone on you. Listen, they’re going to set a drone on you. That’s about a few thousand feet up. And it’s just going to trail you the whole time. And then when you hit a corner or something, they’re going to box your ass in.19

“Just crime in San Francisco, period,” the guest said, a bit earlier in the episode. “That shit over with, brother.”

But RTIC is a less powerful tool when it comes to stopping drug deals. Being monitored has never been a disincentive for San Francisco drug dealers, who peddle narcotics on the streets, in plain view, night and day. The open-air drug market thrives in San Francisco in part because the city’s police, prosecutors, and judges, who are often at war with each other, have failed for years to deter it. But that failure merely exacerbates the more fundamental problem of San Francisco’s bizarre tolerance of public drug use.

The Mission has become a magnet for drug dealers and drug addicts for the same reason the Tenderloin did: because of the high concentration of social services for homeless people there. “The unlawfulness is integral by design,” a neighbor, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation by activists, told me. The area, the neighbor said, is a containment zone for crime and disorder. With careful collaboration between the community and the government, the worst of the fallout can be managed. But it’s always just a band-aid.

Up the street from the anonymous neighbor’s home is the now empty site of Mission Cabins, a tiny home community for homeless people to live in. It’s right next to an elementary school. When the facility was first proposed a few years ago, many of the neighbors opposed it. They thought it would generate more drug activity on a street that already had its fill of it. A committee of neighborhood volunteers spent endless hours negotiating a very specific Memorandum of Understanding with the city. It took five months. Every two weeks they met with the city on Zoom. Twenty faces would appear on screen, from multiple government agencies. The neighbor I spoke to described it as a second job.

But what emerged from it was worth the trouble. Mission Cabins was like a halfway home, the neighbor told me. There were rules, and the residents were, for the most part, sober. Most importantly, Five Keys, the nonprofit that ran the facility, agreed to deploy foot patrols around the neighborhood. Whenever a neighbor saw someone smoking meth, or defecating, or sleeping on the sidewalk, they could text one of the workers on patrol and get a response within minutes. The neighborhood is cleaner now than it was before the facility was erected.

But Mission Cabins recently closed, to be relocated to another part of the district, to make way for the construction of low-income housing. The anonymous neighbor described the moment as an “inflection point.”

The Nonprofit Industrial Complex

To live in the Mission, especially if you have young kids, entails constantly checking which streets the drug activity is concentrated on every time you leave the house and plotting out your walking routes to avoid them. The city has been more aggressive under Mayor Lurie at clearing hot spots of drug users. But whenever one block or alley is cleared, the addicts just gather at another, just as the users in front of Mission Cabins were pushed onto somebody else’s sidewalk. It’s like a never-ending traveling circus of chaos and despair. “They’re addressing the mosquitoes but the swamp is still there,” the neighbor told me.

That “swamp” is the plethora of free services available to homeless addicts, including housing and health care, and the city’s hospitality toward those who choose to live on the streets, which includes passing out free pipes, foils, and straws to smoke fentanyl with.20 “While we make more arrests, City Hall policies still encourage drug tourists to come to San Francisco,” said Shaw.

There are other obstacles to shutting down the open-air drug market, such as gross police understaffing and judges who are ideologically opposed to incarceration, even of professional drug dealers. But the underlying issue is one of incentives. San Francisco has a reputation across the country of being a place where anyone can fully indulge in their drug addiction.

An addict can live on the street or in a rent-free room. He or she can get meals for free, buy drugs on demand at any time of the day or night, can consume them openly on the sidewalk without fear of arrest. One doesn’t even have to learn any criminal skills to get the money to buy drugs, for merchandise can be taken easily from any store and sold to a fence two blocks away. The storekeepers won’t stop the crime and the police will likely not arrest the perpetrator, if they’re even called in the first place. Clean new drug paraphernalia are also handed out free of charge, delivered to addicts on the curb they are loitering on. If they overdose, they can be revived with Narcan by another user or by a paramedic, and they will go right back to using again.

As long as such conditions remain, the open-air drug market will have oxygen to breathe. But voters may not tolerate it for much longer. The Mission is full of progressive-minded people, even by San Francisco standards. But they’re fed up, the neighbor told me. It’s not so much a political issue anymore as a matter of just living a normal life. The committee that negotiated the MOU over Mission Cabins included many far-left people, including an anarchist. But a change in voter sentiment alone isn’t enough. For public opinion to matter, government institutions need to be responsive to it. And right now, in San Francisco, they’re beholden not to constituents, but to their own contractors.

At first glance, one might assume that the nonprofit groups that San Francisco hires to provide the city’s homeless services are subordinate to the politicians and agency heads who issue those city contracts. But that network of groups has become so vast and so insinuated into the apparatus of government that it’s often the other way around. In San Francisco, working for a progressive nonprofit doing public service work for the city is a steppingstone into politics. It’s like a farm team system. “You can see that in the bios of basically every progressive who’s been elected, they come either from legislative staff or from the nonprofit world,” said Tung.

Out of the incestuous relationship between elected officials, agency heads, and nonprofit contractors has emerged a political machine that is far more responsive to the needs of the nonprofit industry than to regular voters. To take just one example, the city pays Urban Alchemy, a group that does homeless outreach and civilianized police work in neighborhoods consumed by the open-air drug market, tens of millions of dollars a year in contracts. Last year, the nonprofit knowingly overspent its budget by $800,000, according to a financial analyst for the Board of Supervisors, who characterized the conduct as “extreme.”21 But that hasn’t stopped the city’s homelessness department from asking the Board of Supervisors to extend Urban Alchemy’s contract and increase its budget.

The organized political influence of these nonprofit contractors often exceeds the diffuse power of San Francisco voters. The Coalition on Homelessness, which acts as the industry’s grassroots activism and lobbying firm, successfully sued San Francisco to prevent it from clearing homeless encampments, despite a majority of San Franciscans supporting homeless sweeps.22

Nonprofit leaders have even questioned the public’s right to know how they’re spending their money at all. When the San Francisco Examiner reported on her $220,000 yearly salary in 2022, Urban Alchemy’s CEO wrote to the paper: “How is it helping society or the story to tell the whole world what I make? What is the purpose, so everyone can decide if it’s enough or too much? It’s just messy.”

Marc Solomon compared San Francisco’s government to a colonial empire, in which the neighborhoods of the Tenderloin, SoMa, the Mission, and Bayview-Hunter’s Point are the colonies, and the rest of the city is the metropole. “The nonprofits are the colonial administrators,” he said.

Strides have nevertheless been made toward aligning the city’s policies with the interests of voters rather than with those of nonprofit contractors. Last year, the United States Supreme Court overturned the appellate court ruling upon which the injunction banning sweeps of homeless encampments in San Francisco depended. The Tenderloin’s sidewalks are now more or less tent-free.

But there have also been steps backward. In October, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed state legislation drafted by a San Francisco assembly member that would have funded more sober housing for recovering addicts. (That bill was also opposed by the Coalition on Homelessness.) In response to the veto, some of San Francisco’s supervisors are now pushing for a local law to prohibit new funding for supportive housing that permits drug use.

“What we want is a balanced system,” UC San Diego Sociology Professor Neil Gong, who wrote a book on the subject,23 told me. “There should be housing for people not ready for sobriety, as well as orderly, sober housing for the many who want it.”

With Mission Cabins and its foot patrols gone, there is no such balance left in the neighborhood that had surrounded it. Recently, residents on the block heard gunshots outside. A car was driving the wrong way down the one-way street, shooting at someone who ran into the elementary school while kids were arriving, one neighbor said.

Emily Gasner, who has a ten-year-old at the school, told me she has to routinely walk her son past clouds of meth or fentanyl smoke at drop‑off. In between ushering kids across the intersections, she said, crossing guards clear the sidewalks of drug addicts, and regularly call the city to have human feces removed. Once, a gunfight broke out a block away from the bus stop where Gasner and her son were waiting after pickup. Another time, someone jumped out of an alley and threatened to kill her while she was with her son. Her son has nightmares about being attacked by addicts with knives.

Gasner loves the school and feels safe almost anywhere else in San Francisco. But the area around where her son spends the majority of his waking hours has been effectively made into a sacrifice zone. Now, the city is building affordable housing on a lot next to the school, which will include permanent supportive housing, likely for drug addicts. Neighbors only expect the problems to get worse.

With conditions like these as the daily reality for people who live in San Francisco’s sacrifice zones, progressive ideology starts to fade into the background as a north star for people’s political choices. The vast majority of San Francisco’s voters lie somewhere between hard left-wing and moderately liberal. There is zero chance, especially with Trump as president, that the city will shift to anything resembling, by national standards, “the Right.”

But not wanting your kid to inhale meth smoke on his way to school, or fearing that your Asian grandmother might be randomly assaulted while taking a walk, aren’t really ideological issues. They’re just a matter of living in a sane world. What should count as insane, however, has become normal in pockets of the city. The more progressives in San Francisco line up to support or defend those conditions, the further voters are pushed toward what, by the city’s standards, constitutes “the center.” And that center is in revolt.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 4 (Winter 2025): 211–25.

Notes

1 Alix Martichoux and Cornell Barnard, “San Francisco Mayor London Breed Announces Cuts to Police in New City Budget,” ABC 7 News, July 31, 2020.

2 Robert Pozarycki, “Crunching the NYPD Numbers: Major Crimes Up over 5% as NYC Entered Final 12 Days of 2021,” AMNY, December 28, 2021.

3 CBS San Francisco, “Embattled DA Chesa Boudin Places Blame for San Francisco Crime on Poor Police Follow Up,” CBS News, May 24, 2021.

4 David Sjostedt, “Explainer: DA Boudin Is Sending More Defendants to Diversion. Here’s What That Means,” San Francisco Standard, March 28, 2022; Mallory Moench, “S.F. Uses Ankle Monitors to Keep Defendants Out of Jail. But Does the System Work?,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 2021.

5 Thomas Fuller, “Fear, and Discord, among Asian Americans over Attacks in San Francisco,” New York Times, July 18, 2021.

6 Thomas Fuller, “He Came from Thailand to Care for Family. Then Came a Brutal Attack,” New York Times, February 27, 2021.

7 “Family Outraged over SF DA’s Description of 84-Year-Old Asian Man’s Suspected Killer,” ABC 7 News, March 2, 2021.

8 NBC Bay Area staff and Sergio Quintana, “SF Resident Sues DA’s Office Following Mishandling of AAPI Hate Crime,” NBC Bay Area, January 25, 2022.

9 CBS San Francisco, “Victim in ‘Brutal’ Chinatown Attack Sues San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin amid Shocking Jump in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes,” CBS News, January 25, 2022.

10 Claire Wang, “How San Francisco’s D.A. Recall Election Shows a Rift in the Asian American Community,” June 10, 2022.

11 Danielle Echeverria, “Reports of San Francisco’s Most Notorious Nuisance Crime Are at a 22-Year Low,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 31, 2025.

12 “Crime Data,” San Francisco Police Department, accessed October 2025.

13 “Tracking SF’s issues: July 2025 Poll Results,” Grow SF, August 22, 2025.

14 Michael Schellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse, “Exclusive: It Was Supposed to be a Facility to Put Addicts in Touch with Rehab Facilities but We Reveal How Drug-Swamped San Francisco Is in Reality Operating a Secret and Illegal Drug Use Site,” Daily Mail, January 21, 2022.

15 Lyanne Melendez, “San Francisco Faces Obstacles to ‘Recovery First’ Housing,” ABC 7 News, June 18, 2025.

16 Suzanne Phan, “Dozens of Drug Dealers Arrested in Overnight Raid at SF’s Jefferson Square Park, Police Say,” ABC 7 News, February 27, 2025.

17 Leighton Woodhouse, “The Criminal Order Beneath the ‘Chaos’ of San Francisco’s Tenderloin,” RealClear Investigations, June 16, 2022.

18 Nellie Bowles, “Why Is a Tech Executive Installing Security Cameras around San Francisco?,” New York Times, July 10, 2020.

19 Adam 22, host, “Dreamllife Rizzy on EBK Jaaybo Beef, Swamp Storiez, Bay Area Politics & More,” No Jumper, September 2, 2025.

20 Leighton Woodhouse, “‘It’s Neighbourhood Destruction’: San Franciscans Sue City over Drug Zones,” Times, August 29, 2025.

21 Michael Barb, “Urban Alchemy Gave Pay Bumps to Homeless Shelter Staff in Defiance of S.F., Analyst Says,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 18, 2025.

22 Jeff Elder, “Urban Alchemy: A Rapid Rise with Rampant Risks,” April 12, 2022.

23 Neil Gong, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Read the whole story

bogorad

2 hours ago

reply

Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Most of ERC Barcelona leadership resigns during budget vote
Saturday November 22^nd, 2025 at 4:22 PM

Larazon-es

Eight of thirteen members of the permanent leadership of ERC's Barcelona federation have resigned.
The resigning members accuse the city's ERC president, Creu Camacho, of pursuing an independent and unapproved strategy and making unilateral decisions.
The departures include prominent figures like Secretary General Miquel Colomé and Barcelona City Councilor Rosa Suriñach.
The mass resignation triggers an internal party mechanism requiring an extraordinary congress within a month to restructure the local leadership.
Critics allege that the federation's decisions are being subordinated to the municipal group's interests within Barcelona's City Council, particularly concerning ERC's role in Mayor Collboni's government.

Barcelona has been shaken in the last few hours by a strong internal crisis in ERC, after eight of the thirteen members of the permanent leadership of the Barcelona federation presented their resignations en bloc. The leaders directly point to the party's city president, Creu Camacho, whom they accuse of promoting her "own, unconsented strategy" and of making decisions "unilaterally," outside the party's bodies and membership.

More News

Society Lleida volunteer firefighters sue the Generalitat to demand labor rights

Municipal Budget deadlock forces Collboni into a vote of confidence

Transportation Line 4 metro closed between Passeig de Gràcia and La Pau these days in December

Among the resignees are figures with significant weight within the organization, such as Miquel Colomé, the federation's general secretary, along with Quim Bosch, Nil Font, Agnès Russiñol, Rosa Suriñach —a councilor in Barcelona City Council—, Sheila Vidal, Max Zañartu, and later, Esther Martín as well. The resignations exceed half of the permanent leadership, which automatically activates the party's internal mechanisms and requires the convening of an extraordinary congress within approximately one month to recompose the local structure.

The outgoing leadership's statement denounces a "drift" that, in their opinion, would be subordinating the federation's decisions to the interests of the municipal group in the City Council. The signatories maintain that the political program and the project for which part of the membership supported Camacho and the outgoing team are being sidelined, and they demand that ERC Barcelona regain a more participatory dynamic less dependent on the institutional context.

The situation erupts just a few months after Creu Camacho was elected president of ERC Barcelona with 49.6% of the votes at the regional congress held last April, in a narrow victory against the rival candidacy. After that triumph, Camacho publicly stated that her goal was to "empower the membership" and strengthen the federation's role. However, internal friction has not subsided, especially around the relationship with Jaume Collboni's PSC and ERC's role in the municipal government.

The coincidental timing of the organic crisis with a key moment in Barcelona City Council adds an inevitable political layer. In parallel to the resignations, the council held the plenary session where municipal budgets were put to a vote. The budget proposal received the support of PSC, Barcelona en Comú, and ERC, but municipal arithmetic has forced Mayor Jaume Collboni to resort to a vote of confidence to guarantee its approval due to the lack of a solid majority. If an alternative government is not formed within the established timeframe, the accounts will be automatically approved.

The internal rift within ERC thus coincides with a moment of maximum visibility for the party. On one hand, the critics might have considered this the moment of greatest impact to demonstrate their rejection of the current leadership. On the other hand, Camacho could interpret the extraordinary congress as an opportunity to reinforce her leadership by seeking the support of the membership.

The conflict did not arise out of nowhere. At the congress that awarded leadership to Camacho, the two candidacies already showed deep differences regarding the relationship with Collboni's government and the role ERC should play in Barcelona: whether as a partner for institutional stability or as a more clearly independent and demanding force. The coming weeks will be decisive in determining whether the party manages to regroup or if this crisis will mark the beginning of a new era for the republican space in the Catalan capital.

Read the whole story

bogorad

18 hours ago

reply

Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Critics of Ukraine peace deal must answer: What's the alternative? | Responsible Statecraft
Saturday November 22^nd, 2025 at 1:48 PM

Responsible Statecraft

Diplomatic Shifts: Efforts for a Ukraine war solution involved optimism after a Trump-Putin summit, followed by U.S. sanctions and threats due to no ceasefire.
New Peace Plan: The U.S. proposed a 28-point plan with security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe for Ukraine, leaked by a Russian negotiator indicating potential acceptance.
U.S. Leadership Role: The plan highlights U.S. diplomatic initiative as essential in addressing the U.S.-West vs. Russia security conflict, given Russia's battlefield advantage.
Russian Concessions on EU: Russia accepts Ukraine's EU eligibility and market access, resolving a key 2014 trigger while avoiding NATO issues.
Ukrainian Military Size: The plan allows Ukraine a 600,000-troop army, exceeding prior negotiation demands and bolstering it beyond most European forces, plus intervention guarantees.
Territorial Provisions: Ukraine withdraws from about 1% of territory in Donetsk as a demilitarized zone, retaining 80% of 1991 borders despite Russian annexations, without full reversal of conquests.
Additional Agreements: Russia provides $100 billion in frozen assets for Ukraine's rebuild, plus provisions on religious tolerance, minorities, and anti-Nazi standards aligning with EU norms.
Broader Stability: The plan includes Russian non-aggression pledges, G-8 re-entry, U.S.-Russia security group, sanction relief, and nuclear non-proliferation extensions for European peace.

Efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine war have followed a dizzying course over the last few months. After an optimistic period around the August Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, the Trump administration, frustrated by the inability to gain an immediate ceasefire, turned back to intensified sanctions and military threats.

Now the U.S. has advanced a new 28-point peace plan and accompanying security guarantees for Ukraine from the U.S. and Europe. Although Russia has not explicitly endorsed the draft, the fact that Russian negotiator Kirill Dimitriev leaked its contents to American media suggests a high degree of Russian acquiescence to the plan. If accepted by Ukraine as well, the plan would pave the way to an immediate ceasefire and long-term settlement of the conflict.

The U.S. move to craft a detailed peace plan recognizes a core reality of the situation, which is the indispensable role of U.S. diplomatic initiative and leadership in ending the war. The Ukraine war represents a multi-domain security conflict between the U.S.-led West and Russia. Thus, many of the security drivers of the conflict cannot be addressed by Ukraine alone. Given that the Russians have the upper hand on the battlefield, they were never likely to agree to a cease-fire without assurances that their core security needs would be addressed along with those of Ukraine.

Not only does this plan do that, it represents the use of U.S. diplomatic leverage to extract major concessions from Russia that support lasting Ukrainian security and independence. Indeed — although it is hardly likely to be described this way in most of the U.S. and European press — it would be fair to describe this plan as a U.S.-mediated victory for Ukraine and for global stability in this long and brutal war. A successful implementation would create a secure and firmly Western-aligned Ukraine on some 80 percent of its 1991 territory.

Russian concessions begin with the core issue that triggered the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2014, namely Ukrainian accession to the European Union. The plan specifies that Ukraine is eligible for EU membership and will receive preferential access to European markets while under consideration. This conclusively signals Ukraine’s political and economic alignment with the West, while still respecting Russian security concerns about NATO. It was precisely the dispute over this issue that triggered the 2014 Maidan uprising, and Russia has now conceded it.

Russian concessions continue in the area of Ukrainian security. During the 2022 Istanbul negotiations in the opening phases of the war, Russia demanded that the Ukrainian military be limited to some 80,000 troops — a number far inadequate to defend against Russian aggression. In those same negotiations Ukraine itself called for a standing army of a quarter of a million troops. Now, the current 28 point plan permits Ukraine a standing army of 600,000 troops, more than twice the level Ukraine itself asked for in the 2022 negotiations and almost eight times the Russian demand.

While this is below the current wartime size of the Ukrainian active duty military, which is over 700,000 troops, that level is almost certainly not sustainable in peacetime. A Ukrainian army of 600,000 troops would be by far the largest military in Europe (outside of Russia). Indeed, it would be larger than the British, French, and German armies combined. Ukraine’s military power would be further bolstered by a separate security guarantee of U.S. and European intervention and support in the event of a Russian attack.

The areas of the agreement most likely to be described as Ukrainian concessions are those that address territory. However, even the territorial provisions contain significant Russian concessions as compared to Russia’s recent demands and certainly compared to Russia’s initial war goal of taking political control of the major areas of Ukraine.

In late 2022, Russia claimed formal annexations of four Ukrainian oblasts in addition to Crimea. In this agreement, it drops demands for Ukrainian withdrawal from unconquered territories in two of these oblasts. Instead, Ukraine would withdraw from so far unconquered territory in only one oblast, Donetsk, territory amounting to about 1% of Ukraine’s 1991 borders. But crucially, in a major concession as compared to Russian positions only a few months ago, Russia will not occupy this region — instead it will be maintained as a demilitarized zone.

Obviously the territorial provisions here would not restore Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. But this demand has been proven unattainable over four years of bloody war. Leaving territories conquered by the Russians in Russian hands, and the provision for de facto recognition of these territories as Russian, will without question be a bitter pill for Ukraine to swallow. But given that Russia has lost millions of casualties in the war for these territories it was unrealistic to reverse this outcome.

These are far from the only Russian concessions in the document. For example, Russia grants $100 billion in frozen Russian assets to be used toward the rebuilding of Ukraine. Even many provisions that reflect claimed Russian goals, such as religious tolerance (presumably toward the Russian Orthodox Church), tolerance of ethnic minorities, and rejection of Nazi ideology, simply align the values of a Western-aligned Ukraine with broader European Union standards.

The document also creates a road map to a more peaceful and stable Europe, an outcome clearly in U.S. interests. The European security architecture is stabilized through Russian promises of non-aggression, Russian re-entry into the G-8, a U.S.-Russia security working group, and the gradual lifting of economic sanctions on Russia conditional on compliance with core elements of the agreement. A crucial provision states that the U.S. and Russia will “extend treaties on the non-proliferation and control of nuclear weapons.” The details of this conceptual agreement remain to be worked out but it opens the door to broader cooperation on nuclear disarmament.

For all the positive elements of this document, it is unlikely to initially be presented in such a light by many in the mainstream media. With millions of casualties in Europe’s largest war since World War II, a war that began with a Russian invasion of sovereign Ukrainian territory, there is tremendous bitterness toward Russia and tremendous and justified sympathy for Ukraine’s suffering. The reality of Russian gains in territory and the agreement that Ukraine will not join NATO may be allowed to obscure the reality of major Russian concessions and the ways in which the agreement would benefit both Ukrainian and U.S. interests. Those who have for years insisted on maximalist demands for complete reconquest of Ukraine’s territory and even a long war for regime change in Russia will find it difficult to support an agreement they regard as imperfect.

But the alternatives are much worse — especially for Ukraine, which is roiled by internal crises, teetering on the brink of economic collapse, and facing a grim battlefield situation in the Donbas and parts of the southeast. A secure and firmly Western-aligned Ukraine on 80% of its pre-war territory is a far better outcome than the terms on which this war will likely end if it grinds into 2026 or beyond.

Read the whole story

bogorad

20 hours ago

reply

Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Journalism Standards, Anyone? - John Kass
Saturday November 22^nd, 2025 at 1:45 PM

John Kass

BBC Influence: Reaches nearly half a billion people weekly worldwide, over 50 million in the US, regarded as most influential news organization.
Trump Speech Edit: BBC documentary spliced two separate Trump remarks from Jan. 6, 2021, omitting "peacefully and patriotically" to suggest incitement of Capitol riot before 2024 election.
Edit Timeline: "Fight like hell" comment was 54 minutes after initial remarks; Proud Boys marched three hours before Trump spoke.
Revelation Consequences: External adviser's findings led to resignations of BBC director general Tim Davie and news head Deborah Turness; Trump threatened $5 billion lawsuit, received apology but no compensation.
Second Edit Incident: 2022 BBC broadcast featured another deceptive Trump speech splice, ignored by presenter despite real-time objection from Mike Mulvaney.
Middle East Coverage Bias: BBC portrayed Israel as aggressor, used unverified Hamas casualty figures, platformed anti-Israel figures with extreme views.
Specific Breaches: False hospital strike report, misleading famine photos from congenital diseases, documentary narrated by son of Hamas official justified as separate political arm.
Broader Implications: BBC staff defenses include claims of minor edits and greater truth; parallels US media like 60 Minutes editing; results in lost public trust and shift to advocacy over journalism.

By Cory Franklin

November 21st, 2025

Kass readers may not regularly follow the daily machinations of the British Broadcasting Corporation, commonly referred to as the BBC (or more informally, Auntie Beeb). The BBC reaches close to half a billion people worldwide each week and more than 50 million in the US.

It is regarded in many circles as the most influential news organization in the world. However, recent important developments at the BBC, involving America and Donald Trump, merit our interest here, because they are particularly instructive about the sad state of journalism in general.

First the bombshell: Several days before the 2024 presidential election, a BBC documentary broadcast part of a Jan. 6 Trump speech in which he says, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell.”

The clear suggestion was that Trump fomented the 2021 Capitol riot with his words and was not fit to be elected.

Except Trump never said those specific words in any single quote. This was a deceptive edit, made by splicing two separate remarks, spoken nearly an hour apart. What Trump actually said in the first part was that people should march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol and “make your voices heard.”

The “peacefully” comment was deleted and replaced it with a “fight like hell” (referring to fighting against corruption) comment made 54 minutes later. The edit clearly made it look like he was marshalling the mob for a frenzy of violence, which was reinforced by follow-up footage of the Proud Boys marching on the Capitol. It certainly looked like they were responding to Trump’s exhortation, when its reality they began their march three hours before Trump spoke.

While top BBC executives were aware of this edit when it was broadcast, it took until last month for an external adviser, appointed to the BBC editorial standards committee, to release the findings publicly.

One of the principal BBC editorial guidelines, and supposed hallmarks of the taxpayer-funded company, is impartiality – not favoring one side over another.

Yet, there was no way to avoid the fact that this edit was an attempt to impugn Trump during an election campaign – a blatant violation of impartiality.

As Daily Telegraph columnist Janet Daley wrote, this was “a professionally crafted editing job which has to have been designed to produce a calculated effect for a political purpose.”

The news of the misrepresentation was devastating: the revelation forced the resignation of the BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness. This would be the equivalent of the resignation of the president of CBS and the editor-in-chief of the news division. Trump has threatened a $5 billion lawsuit, and demanded a retraction and an apology. So far, the BBC has offered an apology but no compensation to Trump.

It gets worse for the BBC: the editorial standards report also documented a second deceptive Trump speech edit that was aired in 2022.

Former White House chief of staff Mike Mulvaney pointed out the misleading splicing while he was on the air at the time to the BBC news presenter, who simply ignored his remarks and forged ahead.

If that were not enough to destroy the fiction of impartiality, the external adviser cited blatant bias favoring Hamas in the BBC’s coverage of the current Middle East war.

The BBC repeatedly portrayed Israel as the aggressor, uncritically reported Hamas casualty figures, and platformed anti-Israel journalists including one who posted about Jews on Facebook, “We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.” In 2022 he posted, “When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything.”

Like a referee who consistently makes bad calls in favor of one team, during the Middle East War the worst BBC breaches of journalistic integrity, which they were forced to apologize for, were all at the expense of Israel.

According to the external standards memo, charges were “raced to air” without adequate checks, suggesting either carelessness or “a desire always to believe the worst about Israel.” Early in the war a BBC report that hundreds were killed in an Israeli strike on a hospital turned out to be false.

Last year’s famine narrative in Gaza was highlighted by photos of “starving children” whose emaciation was the result not of starvation but of congenital diseases.

And a widely viewed documentary of wartime life in Gaza was narrated by a 14-year-old boy, who turned out to be the son of a high-ranking Hamas official.

When this was discovered, and the BBC documentary was pulled from view, Deborah Turness tried to justify the obvious breach of standards by claiming the political arm of Hamas is separate from the military arm. This didn’t pass the smell test.

Since Davie and Turness have resigned, there has been a “circle the wagons” mentality among many BBC staff and outside British journalists with likeminded left-leaning views.

The defenses against breaches of impartiality and the denial of contravening journalistic standards are a roundup of the usual suspects, familiar to us here in America: our edits of videos are minor and standard journalistic practice; your evidence is cherrypicked; gosh, how could our attacks be coordinated and politically motivated (even suggesting that reliable old standby, “the vast, rightwing conspiracy”); and while the supposed facts we report may be untrue or manipulated, they are nevertheless an expression of the spirit of some greater truth.

Anyone remember hearing that excuse when Dan Rather of CBS provided a patently bogus memo suggesting that George W. Bush had dodged National Guard duty?

The BBC partisanship is certainly bad, especially in view of the purported longstanding commitment to impartiality –that vaunted integrity is supposed to be the sine que non of the organization. But abandoning the most basic journalistic standards by so many in the community, not just those at the Beeb, is even worse.

This is the BBC – if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. And it has: recall how, during the presidential campaign, 60 Minutes edited a Kamala Harris word salad interview to avoid making her look inept? Same melody, different lyrics.

The reality is the BBC and many American outlets have ceased being journalistic institutions that cover politics. They have clearly become political advocates that occasionally delve into journalism.

The worst part is that they have gone so far down a dark rabbit hole that they have lost public trust. Their vision has become so impaired that no amount of light, however bright, will convince them otherwise.

For decades, the legendary journalistic maxim of Chicago’s now defunct City News Bureau was “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” The editor who supposedly authored the quote claims he was misquoted, and what he actually said was, ‘If your mother tells you she loves you, kick her smartly in the shins and make her prove it.’” It has reached the point that if a journalist tells you something, it’s her shins or his balls that deserve the smart kick.

-30-

Dr. Cory Franklin

Cory Franklin, physician and writer, is a frequent contributor to <a href="http://johnkassnews.com" rel="nofollow">johnkassnews.com</a>. Director of Medical Intensive Care at Cook County (Illinois) Hospital for 25 years, before retiring he wrote over 80 medical articles, chapters, abstracts, and correspondences in books and professional journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. In 1999, he was awarded the Shubin-Weil Award, one of only fifty people ever honored as a national role model for the practice and teaching of intensive care medicine.

Since retirement, Dr. Franklin has been a contributor to the Chicago Tribune op-ed page. His work has been published in the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times and excerpted in the New York Review of Books. Internationally, his work has appeared internationally in Spiked, The Guardian and The Jerusalem Post. For nine years he hosted a weekly audio podcast, Rememberingthepassed, which discusses the obituaries of notable people who have died recently. His 2015 book “Cook County ICU: 30 Years Of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases” was a medical history best-seller. In 2024, he co-authored The COVID Diaries: Anatomy of a Contagion As it Happened.

_In 1993, he worked as a technical advisor to Harrison Ford and was a role model for the physician character Ford played in the film, The Fugitive.
_

Read the whole story

bogorad

20 hours ago

reply

Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

World Labs Founder Fei-Fei Li Wants AI to Be More Democratized
Saturday November 22^nd, 2025 at 1:12 PM

AI's Current Surge: Fei-Fei Li describes the rapid advancements and investments in AI since ChatGPT's release as a civilizational technology with profound impacts on lives and work.
Personal Background: Li emigrated from China to the US at age 15, facing language barriers and financial struggles, while running her family's dry-cleaning business through college.
Shift to AI: Initially inspired by physics for its vast scope, Li's curiosity led her to question intelligence and pursue building intelligent machines during college.
ImageNet Breakthrough: In 2006, Li developed ImageNet, a vast visual database with millions of images, drawing from psychology and linguistics to organize object recognition like human semantic structures.
Spatial Intelligence Focus: As co-founder of World Labs, Li advances spatial intelligence, enabling AI to perceive and interact with 3D worlds, complementary to language models, for applications in design, robotics, and education.
AI's Societal Impacts: Li acknowledges AI's double-edged nature, predicting job shifts but emphasizing upskilling, responsible development, and democratization beyond a few tech companies.
Risks and Responsibilities: Disagreeing with extinction fears from experts like Geoffrey Hinton, Li stresses human governance, regulation, and agency to prevent misuse, while highlighting benevolent potentials in healthcare and education.
Advice for Future: Li urges parents to foster human values like curiosity, critical thinking, and integrity in children, preparing them to use AI responsibly without over-relying on it.

By Mishal Husain

November 21, 2025 at 1:00 AM EDT

Share this article

[](mailto:?subject=World%20Labs%20Founder%20Fei-Fei%20Li%20Wants%20AI%20to%20Be%20More%20Democratized&body=Stanford%20scientist%20Fei-Fei%20Li%20talks%20about%20teaching%20machines%20to%20see%20as%20humans%20do%2C%20the%20US-China%20AI%20arms%20race%2C%20and%20what%20worries%20her%20about%20a%20more%20automated%20future.%0D%0Ahttps://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-fei-fei-li-weekend-interview%0D%0Avia Bloomberg.)

AI is now so present in our lives that the story of how it came to be so is receding — that is, if we ever absorbed it properly. It’s a tale of scientists laboring for years in the hope of one day making machines intelligent, and breaking down the components of human intelligence in order to get there.

Stanford University professor Fei-Fei Li was at the forefront of that quest, which is why she has been called the “godmother of AI.” In 2006 she released her academic work on a visual database containing millions of images, and the idea of training computers to “see” as humans do sparked a wave of AI development.

Behind this breakthrough is a woman with an unusual background, one that plays a role in how she sees the world. Li arrived in the US at age 15 when her parents emigrated from China. She spoke little English and had to adjust academically, socially and financially to a new environment; after her parents set up a small dry-cleaning business to make ends meet, she ran it through her college years.

When Li came into Bloomberg headquarters in London, we talked about her personal and professional history, and I found in her a deep sensitivity. Excited about the potential of technology she’s helped create, she also emphasizes human agency — you’ll find her message to parents towards the end.

Listen to and follow The Mishal Husain Show on iHeart Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Mishal Husain Show: Fei-Fei Li (Podcast)

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to an extended version in the latest episode of The Mishal Husain Show podcast.

May I start with this remarkable period for your industry? It’s been three years since ChatGPT was released to the public. Since then there have been new vehicles, new apps and huge amounts of investment. How does this moment feel to you?

AI is not new to me. I’ve been in this field for 25 years. I’ve lived and breathed it every day since the beginning of my career. Yet this moment is still daunting and almost surreal to me, in terms of its massive, profound impact.

This is a civilizational technology. I’m part of the group of scientists that made this happen and I did not expect it to be this massive. 1

1 Li spoke to us while in London to receive the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and five others. Li has previously written and spoken about what she’s called “the AI winter” of the early 21st century, when those working in the field were getting no attention.

When was the moment it changed? Is it because of the pace of developments or because the world has woken up and therefore turned the spotlight on people like you?

I think it’s intertwined, right? But for me to define this as a civilizational technology is not about the spotlight. It’s not even about how powerful it is. It is about how many people it impacts.

Everyone’s life, work, wellbeing, future, will somehow be touched by AI.

AI Investment Surge

Capital spending on AI-related activities exceeds half of all investment

Note: Information processing equipment + software + research and development as a share of nonresidental investment Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bloomberg calculations

In bad ways as well as good?

Well, technology is a double-edged sword, right? Since the dawn of human civilization, we have created tools we call technologies, and these tools are meant, in general, for doing good things. Along the way we might intentionally use them in the wrong way, or they might have unintended consequences.

You said the word powerful. The power of this technology is in the hands of a very small number of companies, most of them American. How does that sit with you?

You are right. The major tech companies — through their products — are impacting our society the most. I would personally like to see this technology being much more democratized.

No matter who builds, or holds, the profound impact of this technology: Do it in a responsible way.

I also believe every individual should feel they have the agency to impact this technology.

You are a tech CEO as well as an academic. Your very young company, little more than a year old, is reportedly already worth a billion dollars.

Yes! [Laughs]

I am co-founder and CEO of World Labs. We are building the next frontier of AI — spatial intelligence — which people don’t hear too much about today because we’re all about large language models. I believe spatial intelligence is as critical [as] — and complementary to — language intelligence. 2

2 World Labs raised more than $200 million ahead of its launch in 2024. In a TED Talk she delivered that year, Li said: “If we want to advance AI beyond its current capabilities, we want more than AI that can see and talk. We want AI that can do.”

I know that your first academic love was physics.

Yes.

What was it in the life or work of the physicists you most admired that made you think beyond that particular field?

I grew up in a small, or less well known, city in China. And I come from a small family. So you could say life was small, in a sense. My childhood was fairly simple and isolated. I was the only child. 3

3 Li grew up in Chengdu in China’s Sichuan Province; her mother was a teacher and her father worked in the computer department of a chemicals factory. In her book The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, she linked her professional path to her early years: “Research triggered the same feeling I got as a child exploring the mountains surrounding Chengdu with my father, when we’d spot a butterfly we’d never seen before, or happen upon a new variety of stick insect.”

Physics is almost the opposite — it’s vast, it’s audacious. The imagination is unbounded. You look up in the sky, you can ponder the beginning of the universe. You look at a snowflake, you can zoom into the molecular structure of matter. You think about time, magnetic fields, nuclear.

It takes my imagination to places that you can never be in this world. What fascinates me to this day about physics is to not be afraid of asking the boldest, [most] audacious questions about our physical world, our universe [and] where we come from.

But your own audacious question, I think, was What is intelligence?

Yes. Each physicist I admire, I look at their audacious question, right from [Isaac] Newton to [James Clerk] Maxwell to [Erwin] Schrödinger to Einstein — my favorite physicist.

I wanted to find my own audacious question. Somewhere in the middle of college, my audacious question shifted from physical matters to intelligence. What is it? How does it come about? And most fascinatingly, How do we build intelligent machines? That became my quest, my north star.

Get the Bloomberg Weekend newsletter.

Big ideas and open questions in the fascinating places where finance, life and culture meet.

[

Sign Up

](https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/weekend)

By continuing, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

And that’s a quantum leap because, from machines that were doing calculations and computations, you’re talking about machines that learn, that are constantly learning.

I like [that] you use the physics pun, the quantum leap.

Around us right now, there are multiple objects. We know what they are. The ability that humans have to recognize objects is foundational. My PhD dissertation was to build machine algorithms to recognize as many objects as possible.

What I found really interesting about your background is that you were reading very widely. And your ultimate breakthrough was possible when you started thinking about what psychologists and linguists were saying that was related to your field.

That’s the beauty of doing science at the forefront. It’s new, no one knows how to do it.

It’s pretty natural to look at the human brain and human mind and try to understand, or be inspired by, what humans can do. One of the inspirations in my early days of trying to unlock this visual intelligence problem was to look at how our visual semantic space is structured. There are so many tens and thousands, millions, of objects in the world. How are they organized? Are they organized by alphabet, or by size or colors? 4

4 While doing her PhD at Caltech, Li became convinced that larger datasets would be crucial to AI progress. Later, she was influenced by neuroscientist and psychologist Irving Biederman’s paper on human image understanding, which estimated that the average person recognizes around 30,000 different kinds of objects.

Are you asking that because you have to understand how our brains organize in order to teach the computers?

That’s one way to think about it.

I came upon a linguistic work called WordNet, a way to organize semantic concepts — not visuals, just semantics or words — in a particular taxonomy. 5

5 After Biederman’s paper, this was the second influential piece of work that came from outside Li’s own academic field.

Give me an example.

In a dictionary, apple and appliance are very close together, but in real life an apple and a pear are much closer to each other. The apple and pear [are] both fruits, whereas an appliance belongs to a whole different family of objects.

I made a connection in my head. This could be the way visual concepts are organized, because apples and pears are much more connected than apples and washing machines.

But also, even more importantly, the scale. If you look at the number of objects described by language, you realize how vast it is, right? And that was a particular epiphany for me. We, as intelligent animals, experience the world with a massive amount of data — and we need to endow machines with that ability.

It’s worth noting that at that time — I think this is the early part of the century — the idea of big data didn’t really exist.

No, this phrase did not even exist. The scientific data sets we were playing with were tiny. 6

6 “Big data” was coined in the 1990s, but the term didn’t become commonplace until the 2010s. It may now seem obvious that large datasets are crucial to machine learning, but it wasn’t always. After all, children can learn complex rules from just a few examples. As it turns out, modern AI's performance hinges on the amount of data available to it.

How tiny?

In images, most of the graduate students in my era were playing with data sets of four or six — at most 20 — object classes. Fast forward three years, after we created ImageNet; it had 22,000 classes of objects and 15 million annotated images. 7

7 A group led by Li first released the ImageNet database in 2006. It has been credited with significantly advancing the ways computers recognize objects. Crucially, Li also created a competition where teams from around the world trained algorithms to classify images in a subset of the dataset. That, in turn, allowed a team led by Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto to demonstrate the power of a seemingly antiquated technique: the neural network.

ImageNet was a huge breakthrough. It’s the reason that you’ve been called “the godmother of AI.” I’d love to understand what enabled you to make these connections and see things other scientists didn’t. You acquired English as a second language after you moved to the US. Is there something in that which led to what you’re describing?

I don’t know. Human creativity is still such a mystery. People talk about AI doing everything and I disagree. There’s so much about the human mind that we don’t know. So I can only conjecture that a combination of my interest and my experiences led to this.

I’m not afraid of asking crazy questions in science, not afraid of seeking solutions that are out of the box. My appreciation for the linguistic link with vision might be accentuated by my own journey of learning a different language. 8

8 Without any scientific evidence, I do wonder if Li’s background — and especially her acquisition of a new language in the crucial last three years before college — is linked to her pioneering work with ImageNet. She had to work so hard to understand her new world of the US, culturally as well as linguistically, and to fit all of her learnings together. To me, it would follow that she thought and read widely and was also attracted to ways to organize information in order to learn better.

King Charles III (top row, 2nd left) with the recipients of the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, including Professor Geoffrey Hinton (top right), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (bottom left) and Li (bottom center).

King Charles III (top row, 2nd left) with the recipients of the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, including Professor Geoffrey Hinton (top right), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (bottom left) and Li (bottom center). Photographer: Yui Mok/Pool/Getty Images

What was it like coming to the United States as a teenager? That’s a particularly difficult stage in life to move and make new friends, even if you weren’t battling a language barrier.

That was hard. [Laughs]

I came to America when I was 15 — [to] Parsippany, New Jersey. None of us spoke much English. I was young enough to learn more quickly [but] it was very hard for my parents.

We were not financially very well [off] at all. My parents were doing cashier jobs and I was doing Chinese restaurant jobs. Eventually, by the time I entered college, my mom’s health was not so good. So my family and I decided to run a little dry cleaner shop to make some money to survive.

You got involved yourself?

I joke that I was the CEO. I ran the dry cleaner shop for seven years, from [age] 18 to the middle of my graduate school.

Even at a distance you ran your parents’ dry cleaning business?

Yes. I was the one who spoke English. So I took all the customer phone calls, I dealt with the billing, the inspections, all the business.

What did it teach you?

Resilience.

As a scientist, you have to be resilient because science is a non-linear journey. Nobody has all the solutions, you have to go through such a challenge to find an answer. And as an immigrant, you learn to be resilient.

Were your parents pushing you? They clearly wanted a better life for you; that’s why they left China for the United States. How much of this was coming from them, or from your own sense of responsibility to them?

To their credit, they did not push me much. They’re not “tiger parents,” in today’s language. They were just trying to survive, to be honest.

My mom is an intellectual at heart, she loves reading. But the combination of a tough, survival-driven immigrant’s life plus her health issues — she was not pushing me at all. As a teenager, I had no choice. I either had to make it or not make it; the stakes are pretty high. So I was pretty self-motivated.

I was always a curious kid and then my curiosity had an outlet, which was science — and that really grounded me. I wasn’t curious about night clubs or other things, I was an avid lover of science.

You also had a teacher who was really important. Tell me about him.

I excelled in math and I befriended Mr. Bob Sabella, the math teacher. We became friends through the mutual love of science fiction. At that time I was reading in Chinese; eventually I started reading English.

He probably saw in me a desire to learn. So he went out of his way to create opportunity for me to continue to excel in math. I remember I placed out of the highest curriculum of math and so there were no more courses. He would use his lunch hour to create a one-on-one class for me, and now that I’m a grownup I know he was not paid extra.

It was really a teacher’s love and sense of responsibility. He became an important person in my life. 9

9 This isn’t the first time a beloved teacher has come up in a Weekend Interview: Playwright James Graham told me that he credits his childhood drama teacher, Mr. Humphrey, with inspiring his career — and even named a character after him.

Is he still alive?

Mr. Sabella passed away while I was an assistant professor at Stanford. But his family — his two sons, his wife — they’re my New Jersey family.

You use the word love. Did he and his family introduce you to American society, the world of America beyond your school?

Absolutely. They introduced me to the quintessential middle-class American family in a suburban house. It was a great window for me: to know the society, to be grounded, to have friends and have a teacher who cared. 10

10 Sabella and his wife lent Li money for college and continued to help her parents with the dry cleaning business while she was away. “In many ways, he provided what felt like a missing piece in my relationships with both of my parents,” Li wrote in her book. “My mother had always inspired me, but she didn’t actually share my interests when it came to math and physics … And while my father’s influence was nearest to my heart — he was the first to encourage my curiosity about the natural world, and my introduction to physics — I had to acknowledge I’d long since outgrown his example.”

Do you think you could have had this career in China?

I don’t think I’m able to answer this question because life is so serendipitous, right? The journey would be very different. But what is timeless or invariant is the sense of curiosity, the pursuit of north stars. So I would still be doing AI somehow, I believe.

Do you still feel connected to China?

It’s part of my heritage. I feel very lucky that my career has been in America. The environment my family is in right now — Stanford, San Francisco, Silicon Valley — is very international. The discipline I’m in, AI, is so horizontal. It touches people everywhere. I do feel much more like a global citizen at this point.

It is a global industry, but there are some really striking advances in China: the number of patents, the number of AI publications coming out, the Deepseek moment earlier this year. As you look ahead, do you think China will catch up with the US in the way that it has in other fields like manufacturing? 11

11 The US and China are effectively alone at the top of the AI race, with most top labs located in these two countries. While much of the world’s attention is focused on Western tech companies, Bloomberg reported last month that Chinese rivals are courting Africa’s startups and innovation hubs with open-source AI models, in a strategy “with parallels to China’s Belt and Road Initiative for physical infrastructure.”

I do think China is a powerhouse in AI.

At this moment, most people would recognize the two leading countries in AI are China and [the] US. The excitement, the energy, and frankly the ambition of many regions and countries, of wanting to have a role in AI, wanting to catch up or come ahead in AI — that is pretty universal.

And your own next frontier. Tell me what you mean when you say “spatial intelligence.” What are you working on?

Spatial intelligence is the ability for AI to understand, perceive, reason and interact [with the world]. It comes from a continuation of visual intelligence.

The first half of my career — around the ImageNet time — was trying to solve the fundamental problem of understanding what we are seeing. That’s a very passive act. It’s receiving information, being able to understand: This is a cup. This is a beautiful lady. This is a microphone. But if you look at evolution, human intelligence — perception — is profoundly linked to action. We see, because we move. We move, therefore we need to see better.

How you create that connection has a lot to do with space — because you need to see the 3D space. You need to understand how things move. You need to understand, When I touch this cup, how do I mathematically organize my fingers so that it creates a space that would allow me to grab this cup?

All this intricacy is centered around this capability of spatial intelligence. 12

12 This idea that perception is fundamentally organized around action originates in the work of the psychologist James J. Gibson, who argued that organisms do not passively receive visual information but actively detect the possibilities for action. “We perceive in order to move, and we move in order to perceive,” he said. The Stanford Vision and Learning Lab’s 3D simulation platform is named The Gibson Environment to acknowledge his influence.

On your website, I’ve seen the preview you’ve released — essentially a virtual world. Is it, to you, a tool for training AI?

So let’s just be clear with the definition. Marble is a frontier model. What’s really remarkable is it generates a 3D world at a simple prompt. That prompt could be, Give me a modern-looking kitchen. Or, Here’s a picture of a modern-looking kitchen. Make it a 3D world.

The ability to create a 3D world is fundamental to humans. I hope one day it’s fundamental to AI. If you are a designer or architect, you can use this 3D world to ideate, to design. If you are a game developer, you can use it to obtain these 3D worlds, so that you can design games.

If you want to do robotic simulation, these worlds will become very useful as training data for robots or evaluation data. If you want to create immersive, educational experiences in AR [or] VR, this model would help you to do that. 13

13 There are several companies working on different flavors of this idea, including Google DeepMind. Li outlined her vision for “spatial intelligence” as AI’s next frontier in a recent essay.

A screenshot of a world created by Marble, an AI model that produces 3D environments based on a text or image prompt.

A screenshot of a world created by Marble, an AI model that produces 3D environments based on a text or image prompt. Source: Marble

Interesting. I’m imagining girls in Afghanistan, virtual classrooms in a very challenged place.

Yes. Or, how do you explain to [an] 8-year-old, What is a cell? One day we’ll create a world that’s inside a cell. And then the student can walk into that cell and understand the nucleus, the enzymes, the membranes. You can use this for so many possibilities. 14

14 As Li said these words I was remembering school biology exams and drawing and labeling the structure of a cell. I can imagine a virtual world inside a cell creating a strong mental image for a younger child, one that is not easily forgotten.

Yours is a big, complex industry, but there are some immediate issues. Can I put a selection of those to you, for an instinctive response on how you see them. Number one: Is AI going to destroy large numbers of jobs?

Technologies do change the landscape of labor. A technology as impactful and profound as AI will have a profound impact on jobs. 15

15 The picture on AI and jobs is complicated and uncertain: Anecdotally, some companies claim they’re already using it to automate work — especially at startups — but it’s not yet visible in economy-wide jobs data, at least in the US. However, it may already be taking away entry-level jobs in white-collar professions, and some economists worry it could hurt workers longer-term.

Which is happening already. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has said 50% of the company’s customer-support roles are going to AI.

So it will, there’s no question. Every time humanity has created a more advanced technology — for example, steam engines, electricity, the PC, cars — we have gone through difficult times. But we have also gone through [a] re-landscaping of jobs.

Only talking about the number of jobs, bigger or smaller, doesn’t do justice. We need to look at this in a much more nuanced way and really think about how to respond to this change.

There is the individual-level responsibility — you’ve got to learn, upskill yourself. There is also company-level responsibility, societal-level responsibility. This is a big question.

Number two is an even bigger question. You’ll know Professor Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel Laureate whose work has overlapped with yours. He thinks there’s a 10% to 20% chance that AI leads to human extinction. 16

16 So-called AI doomers worry that humans don’t know how to ensure alignment between AI and human goals. As the technology gets smarter, they warn, it will develop the ability to evade instructions and pursue its own self-preservation — possibly at our expense.

First of all Professor Hinton, or as I call him, Geoff — because I have known him for 25 years — he’s someone I admire and we talk a lot.

But this thing about replacing the human race, I respectfully disagree. Not in the sense that it’ll never happen. In the sense that if the human race became really in trouble, that would be the result — in my opinion — of humans doing wrong things, not machines doing wrong things.

But the very practical point he makes: How do we prevent the superintelligent creation from taking over, when it becomes more intelligent than us? We have no model for that, he says.

I think this question has made an assumption. We don’t have such a machine yet. We still have a distance, a journey to take, to that day.

My question is, Why would humanity as a whole allow this to happen? Where is our collective responsibility? Where is our governance or regulation? 17

17 It’s worth watching this interview with Hinton by Bloomberg’s David Westin. Raising the question of how we prevent AI from taking over, Hinton said companies and governments are making bad assumptions. “Their basic model is: ‘I’m the CEO, and this superintelligent AI is the extremely smart executive assistant. I’m the boss and I can fire the executive assistant if she doesn’t do what I want,’” Hinton says. “It’s not going to be like that when it’s smarter than us and more powerful than us.”

Do you think there’s a way to make sure that there is an upper limit to superintelligence?

I think there is a way to make sure there is responsible development and usage of technology internationally.

At a government level, a treaty? Or just companies agreeing to behave in a certain way?

The field is so nascent that we don’t yet have international treaties, we don’t yet have that level of global consent. I think we have global awareness.

I do want to say that we shouldn’t [overthink] the negative consequences of AI. This technology is powerful. It might have negative consequences; it also has a ton of benevolent applications for humanity. We need to look at this holistically.

I know you talk to politicians a lot. You’ve done that in the US, in the UK, in France and elsewhere. What’s the most common question they ask that you find frustrating?

I wouldn’t use the word frustrating, I would use the word concerned, because I think our public discourse on AI needs to move on from the question of, What do we do when [our] machine overlord is here? 18

18 Li is too polite to tell me she found my question on extinction frustrating, but I suspect she did. I’ve generally found such suggestions alarmist, but hearing someone as eminent as Hinton address them made me reconsider, and it’s easy to imagine Li fielding similar worries from government officials. She's been advising California Governor Gavin Newsom on “workable guardrails” for AI after he vetoed a contentious AI safety bill, and she’s also spoken to multiple heads of state.

Another question I get asked a lot is from parents, worldwide: AI is coming, how do I advise my kids? What’s the future for my kids? Should they study computer science? Are they going to have jobs?

What do you say?

I say that AI is a very powerful technology and I’m a mother. The most important way we should empower our kids is as humans, with agency, with dignity. With the desire to learn and timeless values of humanity: Be an honest person, a hardworking person, creative, critically thinking.

Don’t worry about what they’ll study?

Worry is not the right word. Be totally informed. Understand that your children’s future is living in the world of AI technology. Depending on their interest, their passion, personality, circumstances, prepare them. Worry doesn’t solve the problem.

I’ve got another industry question, about the huge sums of money flowing into companies like yours. Whether this might be a bubble, like the dot-com bubble, and some of these companies are overvalued. 19

19 Concerns around the scale of AI spending have been growing, including the circular nature of some of the bigger deals and the US economy’s exposure to the sector. Earlier this month, Michael Burry (of Big Short fame) revealed bearish wagers against Nvidia — the world’s largest provider of AI chips — and Peter Thiel’s hedge fund sold its entire stake in Nvidia last quarter.

First of all, my company is still a startup.

When we’re talking about huge amounts of money, we really look at Big Tech. AI is still a nascent technology and there’s still a lot to be developed. The science is very hard. It takes a lot to make breakthroughs. This is why resourcing these efforts [is] important.

The other side of this is the market: Are we going to see the payoff? I do believe that the applications of AI are so massive — software engineering, creativity, healthcare, education, financial services — that we’re going to continue to see an expansion of the market. There are so many human needs in wellbeing and productivity, that can be helped by AI, as an assistant [or] collaborator. And that part, I do believe strongly, is an expanding market.

But what does it cost in terms of power, energy and therefore climate? There’s a prominent AI entrepreneur, Jerry Kaplan, who says that we could be heading for a new ecological disaster because of the amount of energy consumed by vast data centers.

This is an interesting question. In order to train large models, we are seeing more and more need for power, or energy, but nobody says these data centers must be powered by fossil fuels. Innovation on the energy side will be part of this.

An Amazon Web Services data center in Manassas, Virginia. Total power usage in the US is expected to climb 2.15% in 2026, spurred largely by a 5% spike from commercial users because of the expansion of data centers, according to a US Energy Department report.

An Amazon Web Services data center in Manassas, Virginia. Total power usage in the US is expected to climb 2.15% in 2026, spurred largely by a 5% spike from commercial users because of the expansion of data centers, according to a US Energy Department report. Photographer: Nathan Howard/Bloomberg

The amount of power they need is so enormous; it’s hard to see it coming from renewable energy alone.

Right now this is true. Countries that need to build these big data centers need to also examine energy policy and industry. This is an opportunity for us to invest in and develop more renewable energy.

You’re painting a very positive picture. You’ve been at the forefront of this and you see much more potential, so I understand where you’re coming from. But what worries you about your industry?

I’m not a tech utopian, nor am I a dystopian — I’m actually the boring middle. The boring middle wants to apply a much more pragmatic and scientific lens to this.

Of course, any tool in the hands of the wrong mindset would worry me. Since the dawn of human civilization: Fire was such a critical invention for our species, yet using fire to harm people is massively bad. So any wrong use of AI worries me. The wrong way to communicate with the public worries me, because I do feel there’s a lot of anxiety. 20

20 At Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, Li is surrounded by people who, like her, want to use AI for the public good. But I wonder if her vision of the future is too reliant on power being held by responsible actors, who combine commercial interests in AI with policy and academic work.

The one worry I have is our teachers. My own personal experience tells me they’re the backbone of our society. They are so critical for educating our future generations. Are we having the right communication with them? Are we bringing them along? Are our teachers using AI tools to superpower their profession, or helping our children to use AI?

This is the Bloomberg Weekend Interview, so we’re always interested in people’s lives as well as their work. The life you’re living today is so different from the way that you grew up, working in your parents’ dry cleaning shop. Are you conscious of the power that you have as a leader in this industry?

[Li laughs.] I still do a lot of laundry at home.

I am conscious of my responsibility. I’m one of the people who brought this technology to our world. I’m so privileged to be working at one of the best universities in the world, educating tomorrow’s leaders, doing cutting-edge research.

I’m conscious of being an entrepreneur and a CEO of one of the most exciting startups in the gen AI world. So everything I do has a consequence, and that’s a responsibility I shoulder.

And I take that very seriously because, I keep telling people: In the age of AI, the agency should be within humans. The agency is not the machines’, it’s ours.

My agency is to create exciting technology and to use it responsibly.

And the humans in your life, your children, what do you not let them do with AI, or with their devices or on the internet?

It’s the timeless advice: Don’t do stupid things with your tools.

You have to think about why you’re using the tool and how you’re using it. It could be as simple as, Don’t be lazy just because there is AI. If you want to understand math, maybe large language models can give you the answer, but that is not the way to learn. Ask the right questions.

The other side is, Don’t use it to do bad things. For example, integrity of information: fake images, fake voices, fake texts. These are issues of AI as well as our social media-driven communication in society.

You’re calling for old-fashioned values, amid this world of new developments we couldn’t have imagined even three years ago.

You can call it old-fashioned, you can call it timeless. As an educator, as a mom, I think there are some human values that are timeless and we need to recognize that.

Mishal Husain is Editor at Large for Bloomberg Weekend.

More On Bloomberg

Read the whole story

bogorad

21 hours ago

reply

Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Next Page of Stories

This is how Hamas disabled tanks near Gaza on October 7th | Israel National News Sunday November 23rd, 2025 at 9:29 AM

San Francisco’s Revolt of the Center - American Affairs Journal Sunday November 23rd, 2025 at 8:21 AM

The Roots of Disorder

The Tide Begins to Turn

The Persistence of the D****rug Problem

Treating the Symptoms

The Nonprofit Industrial Complex

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 4 (Winter 2025): 211–25.

Notes

Most of ERC Barcelona leadership resigns during budget vote Saturday November 22nd, 2025 at 4:22 PM

Critics of Ukraine peace deal must answer: What's the alternative? | Responsible Statecraft Saturday November 22nd, 2025 at 1:48 PM

Journalism Standards, Anyone? - John Kass Saturday November 22nd, 2025 at 1:45 PM

World Labs Founder Fei-Fei Li Wants AI to Be More Democratized Saturday November 22nd, 2025 at 1:12 PM

AI Investment Surge

More On Bloomberg

This is how Hamas disabled tanks near Gaza on October 7th | Israel National News
Sunday November 23^rd, 2025 at 9:29 AM

San Francisco’s Revolt of the Center - American Affairs Journal
Sunday November 23^rd, 2025 at 8:21 AM

The Persistence of the Drug Problem

Most of ERC Barcelona leadership resigns during budget vote
Saturday November 22^nd, 2025 at 4:22 PM

Critics of Ukraine peace deal must answer: What's the alternative? | Responsible Statecraft
Saturday November 22^nd, 2025 at 1:48 PM

Journalism Standards, Anyone? - John Kass
Saturday November 22^nd, 2025 at 1:45 PM

World Labs Founder Fei-Fei Li Wants AI to Be More Democratized
Saturday November 22^nd, 2025 at 1:12 PM