A Trump Executive Action I Agree With!
Finally
Good Morning:
USA!
USA!
USA!
The Trump administration has just taken an action with which I fully and wholeheartedly agree: Getting rid of the penny.
The Treasury Department said Thursday it plans to phase out production of the penny, making good on President Donald Trump’s directive that the U.S. government stop producing its one-cent coin after more than two centuries.
A Treasury spokesperson said that the agency had placed its final order of penny blanks this month and that the U.S. Mint would continue manufacturing pennies until that supply runs out.
At last, President Trump has taken an executive action about which I feel unalloyed enthusiasm. It feels good to support the president. Maybe I’ll become MAGA so I can do it more often.
But only if he gets rid of the nickel, the dime, and the quarter.
A reminder to take advantage of the waning days of #DogShirtDaily’s Special Trolling Sale, wherein you can get a full year of dog shirts for only $25. And no, you can’t pay in pennies:
Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable
gave us the President’s Daily Brief on South African-American relations. Specifically, the PDB that she wrote for Donald Trump back in 2017 to explain that no, there really isn’t a genocide against Afrikaners in South Africa. She also talked more broadly about South African democracy and politics and Emily in Paris, for some reason:Yesterday On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Caroline Cornett
Afghanistan’s Critical Minerals Aren’t a Great Investment
William Byrd argues that although Afghanistan possesses considerable mineral resources, the United States should seek alternative investment opportunities due to challenges such as poor infrastructure, reputational costs for companies, and Taliban control of the region.
The situation now is different in that the Taliban authorities are collecting substantial taxes and royalties from mining, trade is better documented, and it appears that a much greater proportion of mineral exploitation is occurring under contracts issued by the authorities—with a large number of mining licenses issued since the Taliban came to power. However, issues of sustainability, waste of resource potential, and oversupply in relevant markets (as exemplified recently by coal exports to Pakistan, which have declined sharply as that country shifted back to traditional suppliers) remain serious problems.
Judges Shouldn’t Rely on AI for the Ordinary Meaning of Text
Justin Curl, Peter Henderson, Kart Kandula, and Faiz Surani argue that because of the risks inherent in large language models (LLMs)—such as intentional manipulation by parent companies or peculiarities in the training data—judges should not rely on LLMs as neutral arbiters of a text’s ordinary meaning.
This quality makes LLMs particularly alluring—and particularly dangerous—for judges seeking to cabin judicial discretion. For adherents of strict textualism, the promise of an ostensibly neutral computational model that resolves questions of ordinary meaning may seem like a triumph of methodological rigor. But that promise is illusory. In outsourcing interpretive judgment to a system developed by private entities, judges are not minimizing discretion; they are merely relocating it—placing interpretive power in the hands of model designers with no constitutional role and no public accountability.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Page Hedley and Gad Weiss join Kevin Frazier and Alan Rozenshtein to talk about the news of changes to OpenAI’s corporate governance structure, the rationale for the proposed modifications, and the significance of corporate governance in shaping artificial intelligence development.
On Rational Security, Scott R. Anderson speaks to Roger Parloff, Dana Stuster, and me about the week’s biggest national security news, including President Donald Trump’s historic trip to the Persian Gulf, the Supreme Court’s ruling that a putative class of Alien Enemies Act detainees received inadequate notice of removal, and former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey’s controversial “8647” post.
Videos
On May 22 at 4 p.m. ET, I sat down with Parloff and James Pearce to discuss the status of the civil litigation against Trump’s executive actions, including the dismantling of federal agencies and freezing of federal funds.
Announcements
The Trials of the Trump Administration, our coverage of President Trump’s executive actions and their legal challenges, has a new homepage. This page includes real-time analysis of the litigation, Lawfare's livestream series, documents related to Trump's actions, and a tracker of the legal challenges against them. Find the page here.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the cheetah cub, seen here feasting on an impala:
In honor of today’s Beast, eat your spaghetti bolognese with your bare hands. Or better yet, just bury your face in it.
Tell Me Something Interesting
I (EJ Wittes) found more ancient dog names! Yes, Kleio has long since been named, but finding ancient dog names is fun, and I have no intention of stopping.
This time, the names come from cuneiform inscriptions on Assyrian clay figurines (c. 650BC). Look at all my tiny friends (but only if you are a paid subscriber):
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Dog Shirt Daily to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
 | A guest post by
|