Senate Republicans, the Associated Press reports, plan to give the Secret Service $1 billion for “security upgrades” to president Donald Trump’s  (supposedly $400 million, supposedly donation-funded) White House ballroom project.

After an assassination attempt outside the Washington Hilton ballroom hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, Republicans began boosting the ballroom itself as a presidential safety solution.

Every time the president ventures forth to environments inhabited or surrounded by the hoi polloi, they point out, the Secret Service has to create bespoke environments within otherwise open facilities  to ensure that he’s not shot at, yelled at, glared at, or annoyed. Better to keep him in a facility that’s controlled 24/7 for his safety and convenience.

That’s fair, and it occurs to me that, done rightly, adding a secure ballroom to the White House could benefit not just presidential security but public convenience. My proposal:

Build the ballroom. Make it, and the White House grounds, as secure as humanly possible. If necessary, enlarge the White House grounds (perhaps by incorporating Lafayette Park) to make room for more amenities. We want future presidents to be comfortable, because the other half of the deal is:

On January 20 of the year following his or her election, immediately following the  inauguration ceremony, each new president enters the White House grounds, and does not leave until, four years later, he or she leaves for home or to travel over to Capitol Hill for re-inauguration.

Don’t make it a suggestion. Make it a law.

The president would be very safe. Instead of constantly navigating, analyzing, and securing new environments, the Secret Service could focus on a layout they knew like the backs of their hands and could pre-approve and carefully monitor any changes to. No security system is impenetrable, but this one would be a very hard target.

As for the public, we’d no longer be inconvenienced by having the president wander around the country at will and at our expense, disrupting every community he or she visits.

No more airport/airspace closures for Air Force One.

No more roads and streets shut down for presidential motorcades.

No more swarms of Secret Service agents and mobs of other law enforcement agents sealing off golf course, fairgrounds, universities, etc. because The Very Special Important Person is going to be there.

There’s nothing a president HAS to do that requires him or her to leave 1600 Pennsylvania NW and its attached grounds.

The chief executive’s job is to sign or veto bills (which can be done at the Oval Office desk), supervise various departments (whose heads can come to the White House for cabinet meetings, etc.), negotiate treaties (such negotiations are usually handled by envoys, but other heads of state, etc. could visit the White House as necessary), and occasionally report to Congress on the “State of the Union” (which can be, and for many years was,  done via  written report rather than by personal visit to a joint session of Congress).

Safer president, less public inconvenience, and much cheaper. It’s a win-win.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“We won’t be signing off until the world ends,” Ted Turner said in 1980, just before the launch of his latest media venture. “We’ll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event.”

Turner died on May 6 at 87. The world hasn’t ended yet, nor has his project, Cable News Network, but the latter changed the former in a big way.

If you’re too young to remember the pre-CNN era, trying to describe it feels like pulling a fish out of water and showing it a non-aquatic landscape:

On television, “the news” was generally broadcast twice a day, morning and evening, in half-hour local and half-hour national/world shows. Morning network shows included short news segments between entertainment content. Truly earth-shaking events might call for “SPECIAL BULLETIN” interruptions.

Radio stations often carried very short “top of the hour” news updates between their other programming, but prior to CNN Radio (launched at the same time as CNN’s cable television news channel) there were no “24-hour news” stations.

About half of the American population cared enough about “the news” to subscribe to a daily newspaper, delivered to their front porches each morning or evening. Such newspapers — apart from a few big-city publications — tended to be very local in focus, with perhaps a smattering of national stories from wire services like Associated Press and United Press International. USA Today, the first really intentionally “national” newspaper, launched two years after CNN.

At the time of CNN’s launch, about one in five US households subscribed to cable television. Three years later, that number had doubled and eventually approached 90% (streaming options have dragged it down, but the percentage remains higher than in pre-CNN days).

Since CNN’s launch, “the news” has gone from short daily feeds covering pre-deadline events to 24/7/365 real-time coverage of far more things, in far more detail, by numerous and varied outlets.

In theory, that should make the public much better informed than we used to be. We can know more OF what’s happened, and know more ABOUT what’s happened.

In reality, I’m not sure our attention to important facts about important events has really increased.

The 24-hour news environment seems far richer in sensationalism, pearl-clutching, and outrage bait than in useful information about the important stuff.

Former football star leads police on low-speed chase in a Bronco.

One movie star’s divorcing another movie star and it’s getting ugly.

Someone said a bad word on a hot mic.

That’s not Ted Turner’s fault. It’s our fault. CNN and its media children and grandchildren give us what we want to watch, because that’s how businesses make money.

That they’ll keep showing us whatever keeps us watching isn’t news.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Citing anonymous sources, the New York Times reported on May 4, US president Donald Trump is considering an executive order that would require pre-release  “national security vetting” of all new Artificial Intelligence models.

The following day, the US Department of Commerce revealed that three three large AI firms — Microsoft, Google, and xAI —  have already agreed to submit their models for “pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research.”

For obvious reasons, those developments trigger my strong aversion to regulation of anything, at any time, and at any level of government. I can indulge a little — very little — bit of sympathy for the position Trump’s in though:

Individual state governments have been rolling out AI regulation proposals for some time, and that’s just not According to Hoyle.

AI, at least if connected to the Internet, is clearly an interstate and/or international commercial activity, and the US Constitution clearly and unambiguously assigns the power to regulate such activity to the federal government. Specifically to Congress, but in the absence of congressional action, I can see why Trump would want to preempt the illegal state-level schemes with something of his own.

I just wish that something of his own was “none, period.” Here’s why:

“Whatever can happen,” Augustes De Morgan wrote in 1866, “will happen if we make trials enough.”

To which I must add, if “we” don’t make trials enough, someone else will.

AI will inevitably be pushed to whatever, if any, limit it has.

If American researchers can’t legally do it, Chinese researchers will do it.

If Chinese researchers can’t legally do it, Swiss researchers will do it.

If every government on the planet imposes pesky regulations on doing it, people who don’t care about pesky government regulations will do it.

It can happen. Therefore it will happen.

I don’t wear rose-colored glasses … or at least, in poor metaphor mix, I consider those glasses half-full. We can plausibly expect both good and bad things out of AI developed to its limits.

Those  of us who are allowed to avail ourselves of the most advanced AI possible will disproportionately reap whatever rewards it produces.

Those of us for whom maximal AI is forbidden fruit will be more vulnerable to AI’s dark sides.

Since I like rewards and loathe punishments, I prefer to belong to the former group. So should you.

King Canute understood that he could not effectually command the tide. Our rulers should heed the lesson.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY