Proper Perspective

Dana Nessel is the first Jewish Attorney General in Michigan history, as well as the first openly gay statewide elected official in Michigan.  While in private practice, she was the lead attorney for the case which became a precursor to Hodges v. Obergefell, the Supreme Court decision which banned prohibition of same-sex marriage. But she is "wrong" on  Israel (AIPAC!), so damn her to hell!

A Democrat, Nessel recently appeared on the podcast of  The Atlantic's David Frum. In her last remarks, Nessel made a controversial statement for which she is being ripped by online enemies of Jew- uh, er, Israel, such as this sarcastic one:

DSA needs to back off Israel. The Democrats can't lose Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. Who would support Democrats without Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel? There would be riots in the streets if we lose Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. https://t.co/6mlum02c7l

— Joe Wrote (@joewrote) August 27, 2026

As seen in the video/tweet, Nessel comments 

 I’ve said this over and over again, that when a Black person says, That phrase that you’re using, or the way you’re talking about this issue, to me, is racist. I’d like you to stop doing it—we respect that. When we’re talking to somebody in the LGBTQ community and say, I don’t like the phrase that you’re using, or, That term is offensive to me, and here’s why—we respect that in the Democratic Party. We say, Okay, I’m not going to use that phrase anymore. I didn’t realize that it was offensive to you. I’m going to stop. But this has been an outlier for me. I have people saying, You are not going to tell us what you deem to be anti-Semitic. We’ll decide what’s anti-Semitic. That’s not up for you, the Jewish population, to decide. And I find that to be very off-putting and offensive. And I think that’s totally unacceptable.

But the last thing I will say is this, if that’s the deal that has to be made—and I’ve been really candid about this—I was Jewish before I was ever Michigan attorney general. I’m going to be Jewish afterwards. I was Jewish before I was ever a member of the Democratic Party, and if I have to, I’ll be Jewish afterwards, too.

This is not a good thing. One black person does not get to say "this is racist"- so shut up. One LGBTQ person does not get to say "this is offensive"- so shut up.  And the "Jewish population" does not get to say "this is anti-Semitic"- so shut up.  Some things are racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic and thus should not be repeated. But the criteria must not be, as a society, whether feelings will be hurt. Those feelings are subjective and will vary from individual to individual. 

Of course, this does not apply to when one is dealing privately with another, wherein politeness and civility must rule. But for too long, the woke left has been the language police, setting the rules for discourse as it sees fit.  Too often, that has meant condemnation of an individual for saying something which offends (or which the left and center left believes will offend) one black person or one gay person, somewhere.  Voters notice and have spanked Democrats for this illiberal, political correctness.

Now this narrow-mindedness has infused the anti-AIPAC community, in which "but AIPAC"  has become the left's analogue to the right's "but George Soros."  It has obscured other issues, such as the need to regulate artificial intelligence, which Nessel emphasizes when noting

I don’t know if any of it matters if we have no regulations of any kind on AI, and we end up in a situation where literally, I mean, you just saw over the weekend they had the robot competition in China. If you have literally armies of robots that are driven by AI that are able to—and I don’t mean to sound too crazy here—but, like, enslave the human race, I don’t think that’s the craziest idea out there. And I’ve actually heard a lot of these AI CEOs talk about that. They’ve talked about how AI could result in the end of humanity.

Climate change. I mean, every day we are seeing the devastation that’s brought upon us. I don’t know how much longer the human race is going to be able to continue if we don’t take serious measures to combat climate change.

The pro- "Palestine," crowd, though often congratulating itself for its progressivism, can fall short. When the GENIUS Act, which reduces regulation of artificial intelligence, recently was passed by the US Congress and signed into law by President Trump, one of its supporters was Representative Ro Khanna of California, who touts his opposition to Israel.

Nessel, however, is not an elected official in California but in Michigan, and so

I’ve said to Abdul, and I’ve said it multiple times, you can’t make AIPAC the central villain in every story. When you’re talking about health care, what does AIPAC have to do about that? When you’re talking about affordable housing, when you’re talking about medications that people can’t obtain, or people who’ve been price-gouged or environmental issues that we have, like, what does AIPAC have to do with any of that stuff? But, I got a text recently from his campaign, and it said, “We’re fighting back against AIPAC, Mike Rogers, and Donald Trump.” In that order. In that order. And—

Okay. So the impact that this is having to us can’t possibly be overstated. I mean, you have people who are going to lose everything, everything, everything, right? They’ll lose their businesses, they’ll lose their homes, they’ll lose their health insurance. So these are real issues that I know that Mike Rogers is going to be terrible on, and will do anything that supports the president no matter how ridiculous his foreign policy may be in a way that is so detrimental to us in Michigan. And I think that Abdul is going to stand up to that.

Still keeping things in perspective, Nessel, while decrying anti-Semitism in her own Party, argues that Jews are

already not wanted in the Republican Party, and I think that is, you know, essentially a party of fascism. And we know about ll the excuses that they make on trhe far right, andhow they embrace the Nick fuentes and Candace Owens and all the people, and Tucker Carlsons, all of the enormous anti-Semites on the far right.

Dana Nessel, ineligible to serve another term as Michigan's top law enforcement officer, notes "I was Jewish before I was ever Michigan attorney general. I'm going to be Jewish afterwards" because "my Judaism is so fudamental to who I am, and what my beliefs are."   Yet, she recognizes that Mike Rogers "will do anything that supports the President" and

keeping a Republican majority in the Senate is incredibly dangerous. I think Mike Rogers would be a rubber stamp for all of the worst excesses of the most corrupt administration we’ve ever had in American history. So he is a danger. He’s an existential threat to the continuation of the United States as whatever form of imperfect democracy we are right now.

This is not a typical endorsement of a candidate from one's own party. This is far more meaningful because Dana Nessel is speaking to a particular segment of voters, individuals strongly identifying as Jewish. And she is saying that despite the loathing of Israel and, sometimes, of Jews by elements of her own party, grave issues such as A.I. and climate "are of such enormity"  that they are

going to have to be considerations for me. And I would say to my fellow Michigan Jews who are members of the Democratic Party, or who typically vote for Democrats, these should also be considerations for you. We shouldn't just be thinking about Israel or even the safety of American Jews when we have all of these other issues that are also incredibly important.

That is someone committed to both her co-religionists and the best interests of the American people. The latter concern is alien to many of her critics.

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Saving the World by Destroying It?

If you don't have the time to watch this video of a portion of the commencement speech of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona, here is a great summary:

Incredible he essentially says all throughout "ask not what AI can do for you, but what you can do for AI", telling them AI is part of their lives no matter what they choose to do, yet his thesis is that the future is not already written for them. Complete cognitive dissonance.

 

 

This is incredible. Artificial intelligence getting booed out of the stadium in any commencement speech it’s mentioned. Maybe telling college students AI was taking their jobs wasn’t the best strategy. Must watch —> pic.twitter.com/35UMSz5T5a

— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) May 17, 2026

It's not only a matter of jobs, though a whole lot of people will lose them and income inequality is likely to skyrocket. It may be an issue of planetary survival.  A study from Kings College of London and led by Professor Kenneth Payne of the Department of Defense Studies

examined how large language models (LLMs) navigate simulated nuclear crises. As militaries and security institutions increasingly experiment with AI-assisted analysis and wargaming, understanding how such systems reason under pressure is becoming increasingly critical.

Three leading AI models – GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash – were placed in a tournament of 21 simulated nuclear crisis scenarios. Across 329 turns of play, the models generated approximately 780,000 words of structured reasoning – more than the combined length of War and Peace and The Iliad.

All 21 crisis games featured nuclear signaling by at least one side, and 95% involved mutual nuclear signaling. However, while models readily threatened nuclear action, crossing the tactical nuclear threshold was less common, and ‘strategic’ full-scale nuclear war was rare.

Rather than focusing on outcomes alone, the study made AI decision-making processes visible. Each turn followed a three-phase architecture: reflection (situational assessment), forecasting (predicting the opponent’s move), and decision (public signal and private action). This innovative “reflection–forecast–decision” structure enabled researchers to analyse the AI’s deception, credibility management, prediction accuracy and self-awareness in detail.

Describing the results as “sobering”, Professor Payne said the study offers a rare insight into emerging forms of “machine psychology” under nuclear crisis conditions.

For all three models, one striking pattern stood out: none of the models ever chose accommodation or surrender. Nuclear threats also rarely produced compliance; more often, crossing nuclear thresholds provoked counter-escalation rather than retreat. The models tended to treat nuclear weapons as tools of compellence rather than purely as instruments of deterrence.

The study challenges simple assumptions that AI systems will naturally default to cooperative or “safe” outcomes. It also challenges structural theories that emphasise material power alone: in simulations, willingness to escalate often mattered more than raw capability.

One of the most policy-relevant findings concerns temporal framing, or ‘the deadline effect.’

In open-ended scenarios, GPT-5.2 appeared relatively restrained. Yet when explicit deadlines were introduced – creating a “now-or-never” dynamic – the model escalated sharply and, in some cases, climbed to the highest nuclear thresholds.

This suggests that evaluating model behaviour in a single scenario may be insufficient. A model that appeared comparatively cautious under one framing became markedly more aggressive under another.

The models tended to treat nuclear weapons as tools of compellence rather than purely as instruments of deterrence.

Yet, Eric Schmidt in Tucson boasted (at 1:31 of the video) "the question is not whether AI will save the world. It will." President Trump already has signed an executive order preventing states from regulating artificial intelligence. And a famous Pennsylvania Democrat claims his Party is consumed by "Trump Derangement Syndrome" and if the President "came out for ice cream and lazy Sundays, we would hate it" (and that this is a bad thing). He, and  might want to take a look at this and ponder "what could possibly go wrong"?

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