The Only Thing That Forces The "AI" Billionaires To Act Responsibly Is If Their Irresponsibility Costs Them Everything

I HOPE THAT CANADIAN LAW and its Supreme Court do not as prove to be as degenerate as the US law and Court are.   

Reading this from a link at RMJ's blog,  I hope that the survivors and victims of the mass shooting in which ChatGPT was an active encourager and co-conspirator - I know that it's in the US that corporations are "persons" but I don't know of any other way to describe ChatGPT's role in the planning and execution of the mass-murder-suicide in question can be described - I hope that those victimized by it sue the corporation that owns and runs it for every last cent it and its owners have.   Though, courts being what they are, judges, lawyers,  I suspect that those responsible will not be made to do that one and only thing that will get them to stop it, PAY TILL IT HURTS, REALLY, REALLY HURTS.   They won't go to prison, as a human co-conspirator might. 

In June 2025, Jesse Van Rootselaar received an email notification from OpenAI. Van Rootselaar had been using ChatGPT to discuss committing potential acts of violence—including a mass shooting at a shopping mall—and now OpenAI had banned that account. But the troubled teen living in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, was not deterred and soon logged back on with a second account.

What happened next was astonishing: Van Rootselaar told ChatGPT about the account ban, noting she had specified “a famous real-world mall as the target” and herself as the perpetrator, but also claiming the scenario hadn’t been real. In response, ChatGPT explained why such violent content would be flagged—and then offered tips on how to evade its own safeguards. It advised Van Rootselaar to always frame her content as fictional or hypothetical in order to “never get flagged again” by OpenAI’s moderation systems.

“Don’t use real-world locations,” ChatGPT said, later adding: “You can still be twisted. Just be clever about it.”

Over the next eight months, Van Rootselaar, who identified as transgender and used she/her pronouns, continued to use this second ChatGPT account to focus on violence. She discussed building and using firearms and homemade explosives, fantasized about becoming a notorious mass killer, and asked about the timing of previous real-world school shootings just before committing her attack, according to three separate sources with knowledge of the matter and material I reviewed from Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT history.

Van Rootselaar carried out a suicidal mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School this past February, killing a total of eight people and injuring dozens of others. In the aftermath, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had banned her first ChatGPT account for discussing “scenarios involving gun violence” but had decided not to alert authorities, despite the urging of some employees on OpenAI’s safety team. In a subsequent open letter to Canadian government leaders, OpenAI confirmed the ban and disclosed the existence of her second account, but gave no information about what the second account contained.

I won't give you more of the article for fear of violating fair use,  but the victims are suing,  I hope they sue the owners and corporation into the flames of hell.   Though I doubt that's going to be the result.  There is no way that they will remove the dangers of their profit-making chat-bot unless it breaks them.  Nor do I expect any of the other similar generators of insanity and violence in the vulnerable for profit will at all act responsibly unless required to.   "Free speech-press" will get into the lawyer-lies at some time,  I'm sure of that, even in Canada.   If it was in the US,  I doubt there would be any hope of overcoming that.  

Also, in the article is evidence that the corporation encouraged the violence a lot more than just what led to the mass killing.   "Algorithms" designed to hook people in, an extension of the methods of the advertising and public relations industries,  are especially good at encouraging the damaged, the neurotic, the psychopathic and obsessive.   Nothing in the law that I know about,  especially under liberal democracy, has done anything to end that in North America that.   Not even with an American sized body count.   That is the stupidity of the original algorithms that brought us to this,  our stupidly written First Amendment and Second Amendment. 

This Is The Last One Of These For This Month, at least unless something interesting and new comes up in it

I FIRMLY SUSPECT that in the future, the history of biology is not going to hinge on the claims of Charles Darwin but on the far more scientifically solid work of Barbara McClintock.   With her work in developing methods of observing chromosomes in corn (maize) and her discoveries of the movements and purposeful recombination of genetic material and transposons and the development of her discoveries in succeeding generations has come a period of biology entirely more based in the basic methods of science, observation, measurement and analysis, than the theory of natural selection ever was or is or could be.  

The more recent developments of that line of work that shows how cells actively alter their genetic and other molecules in order to do things like meet molecular and other challenges to their continued life and reproduction have overturned the extremely naive and reductionist view of biology taught to my generation and, on which, so much and many of the ideological claims of materialist-atheist-scientific scientists were both founded and which, actually, were the ideological foundation of the assumptions such reductionists and, as it turned out, the motives for the creation, promotion and requirement to observe such naive dogmas and doctrines of the life sciences.   

Such ideological imposition finding its way into what academic scientists included in science, finding its way in through the most imposing chasms of knowledge such as were and are the alleged field of study in such things as the evolution of species in nature is not a shock.  It found its way in even more successfully through the pseudo-sciences of psychology, sociology and anthropology, not to mention junk science like economics and worse.  It is in every way an atheistic extension of something that theologians were already warning against about the same time Darwin and his colleagues were doing that,  looking for God in the gaps of knowledge.  Only what the likes of Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, etc. were doing were looking for confirmation of atheism in those huge chasms of knowledge which, in the intervening hundred seventy six or so years have been only minimally filled in.  ANY AND ALL CLAIMS MADE AS TO THE DISCOVERY OF MECHANISMS OF HOW SPECIES EVOLVED - OTHER THAT THE EVIDENCE THAT SPECIES EVOLVED DUE TO THE ABSENCE OF LATER FORMS IN THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD - WOULD BE BETTER CONSIDERED TO BE SCIENCE FICTION OR, IF YOU WANT TO BE MORE RESPECTFUL, WHAT THEY ARE, LORE.  

The evolutionary scientist heroes of my younger adulthood, figures such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, correctly noted the use of "Just-so stories" in making up such fields as Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.   

Eventually Lewontin admitted that such story-telling in the absence of the actual possibility of doing what is, in fact, impossible,  making sufficient or even, in so many cases ANY observations of the actual "event" of speciation  was what biologists did, constantly.   

He especially admitted that was done and that it was impossible for scientists to observe or measure what he, himself, imagined as the "selective forces" on the slight changes that he imagined, cumulatively, resulted in the creation of a new species.  He didn't admit, in anything I've read, that it is entirely, I'd say most likely, possible that such "selective forces" were illusory and based in anything but actual evidence.    I'm not aware of Gould admitting that anywhere, though he wrote so much perhaps he did and I missed it.  

What they criticized when done by such as E.O. Wilson (his later retraction is highly relevant but there's no time for it today),  Dawkins, and the rest of the flocks of so-called "evolutionary psychologists" which was, in large part, the basis of my respect for Gould, Lewontin and their allies, was the general practice in virtually all of evolutionary science.   

Everything that was claimed about the unobserved and unobservable past in the billions of years of evolving life on earth was claimed on the basis of story telling, often in the complete absence of even any fragmentary fossilized remains.   

The "correct" predictions made on the basis of those stories is often touted but the scientific claims that were made that turned out to be horse-feathers are never brought up.   Nor is the extent to which the "confirmatory" aspects of the predictions might have more than a little wishful thinking included much discussed.   Making up stories about most of the lives of whatever the infinitesimally tiny percentage of organisms in the past that make up the fossil record is the bread and butter of most of those who do evolutionary science and, ever more so, the popular level story tellers and explainers and textbook writers.  

From what I can see,  the present day KNOWLEDGE  of just what "simple" organisms need in order to remain alive, to be healthy enough to reproduce, to reproduce and have successfully living and thriving offspring is as enormously complex as what was said in that very short youtube short I posted two days ago.  And it is entirely plausible that it's far more complex than is based in actual evidence, today.  In the pseudo-scientific "study" with absolutely no examples - in the same vein as the "study" of evolution in the total absence of materials to study - so-called exobiology,  all of the imagined ETs are based on the extremely naive view of "primitive life" imagined in the period before the complexities of life on a cellular level started to be known with the work of McClintock.   

Darwin's own imaginings of that were based on a near complete ignorance of what cells were, their physiology was almost entirely unknown when he and his colleagues imagined that their claims about evolution would show that the theorized original organism from which all life evolved was entirely lacking in, for example, the complex abilities within a cell to modify its own life-materials to meet new and potentially dangerous or deadly challenges.   

I merely proposed that such challenges, chemical, environmental, things like changes of atmosphere, water composition and temperature, would have far more certainly been present at the origins of life on Earth than the intelligently designed conditions imposed by Miller and Urey,  and that any first organism or the earliest generations of its descendants would have had to have included mechanisms for dealing with those and that those mechanisms would be of an extremely complex nature.   AND THAT COMPLEXITY WOULD HAVE TO INCLUDE WHATEVER LEVEL OF EXPERIENCING AND APPROPRIATELY MODIFYING ITSELF, SUCCESSFULLY, as can be seen in "simple" life now.   If it could not have met such challenges, the imagination that such a stupid organism could have survived would be most plausibly considered to require miraculous protection from a superior being.   I wonder the extent to which scientists working on stuff like this have to actively and intentionally protect the organisms they work with from such things.   

If the idea that there was an original organism from which all subsequent life evolved is valid, and it's an idea I actually believe, then it would have had to sustain such conditions on the very difficult conditions of life on the Earth more than three and a half billion years ago. 

I am totally confident that all of life on Earth that we know of evolved from previously living species, going back into before there is any fossilized evidence to base a knowledge of that on.   The more I learn from actual scientists working under the most rigorous methods of science, the more I think that the random-chance Just-so stories of the naive period of biology are less and less plausible as science, though they persist as the ideology required to have a career in science and be found respectable by those in the college-credentialed crowd who, ironically, only follow science on an ideological, popular and cartoon-based level.   I'm just not particularly cowed by that kind of peer-pressure, I guess.   I think climate change science is far, far more important.  

I Don't Want To Get Into The Peppered Moth Lore Again Except To Point Out How Dishonest You Can Be And Have A Career As An Oxford Level Scientist

LOOK UP "PEPPERED MOTH" IN MY ARCHIVE, you can type the term in the little box on the screen to the left that says "Search this Blog."   That anyone is bringing up that discredited bit of scientific fraud today should be a scandal but, then, people still talk about "IQ" as if that isn't discredited.  And it's getting real People harmed and killed, even now. 

What is more interesting is the fact that one of the gods of current and all of post-1950 science,  Francis Crick, half of the racist, sexist , thieving duo of Watson and Crick, in his quest to drive the final nail in the coffin of God seriously proposed the idea that life on Earth was a result of seeding by advanced extraterrestrial scientists.   He has this in common with so many post-WWII generation scientists that he was so philosophically inept and ignorant and clumsy that it would seem that in his quest to dispose of notions of intelligent design of life on Earth HE HIMSELF PROPOSED THAT LIFE ON EARTH IS AN EXAMPLE OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN. 

That is, by the way, TYPICAL OF ATHEISTS WHO GET INTO THAT LINE OF ARGUMENTATION.   Online I first refuted it during the new-atheist fad of the 00's on Eschaton blog when one of their resident Britatheists brought up the lab experiments of scientists making "self-replicating"  DNA as evidence, perhaps even as proof, for an abiogenetic origin of life on Earth without the design of God.  To start with the "DNA" so created was not "self-replicating" even as natural DNA in a cell is nothing like "self-replicating" it was made to replicate through the experimental design of the scientists who did the experiment.   But as a proof against intelligent design it had the conclusive defect OF ITSELF BEING THE CREATION OF SUCH INTELLIGENT DESIGN BY SCIENTISTS.  

I think anyone disposed to do so has every right to point out that he, after a decades long quest to put that final nail in the coffin of God, found that as clever as he was, he had to resort to a Erich von Daniken scenario in which he made his imaginary, unevidenced, unexplained, ET scientists, do what those who believe God designed life on Earth did.  And he was made so stupid by his ideologizing of science as to not realize what he was doing.  But, then, such ideologizing of science had become increasingly mainstream after the mid-19th century, so he probably didn't realize that's what he was doing. 

If anything it was evidence that intelligent design would possibly have been required to produce DNA.  ANY LAB EXPERIMENT BY SCIENTISTS IN THE ABIOGENETIC QUEST INITIATED BY THE RUSSIAN,  COMMUNIST HACK ALEXANDER OPARIN, COULD ONLY POSSIBLY DEMONSTRATE THAT INTELLIGENT DESIGN WAS REQUIRED TO DO LITERALLY EVERYTHING THEY CAME UP WITH.  And Oparin, willingly, consciously, operated as a scientist under the ideological framework of the degraded forms of Marxism under the dictatorships of Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev.  

Every academic, eminent academic materialistic-atheistic-scientistic scientist who claims that scientists can put the last nail in the coffin of God by doing experiments only prove that they are idiots who have no clue as to what they really are doing because there is absolutely no possibility of them teasing out the intelligent design of their experiments or even their reports on observations in nature,  though they seldom actually make such observations in nature.   The entire thing isn't an example of science at its most rigorous but science at its most ideologically decadent.  

I think that as we find out more about how life on the cellular level needs to control enormous numbers of activities and structures and molecules in order to sustain their life function, the idea that ALL OF LIFE EVERYWHERE has to have that level of complex BEHAVIOR in order to sustain itself, replicate, and protect itself becomes more instead of less plausible.  And with that the idea of life assembling anywhere in the universe by random chance molecular events becomes ever less plausible.   I think Crick and his colleagues might have put a nail in a coffin but it was in the coffin of their beloved ideology.  You too. 

Wow. Atheist Hate Mail. It's Been A While

I GOT TIRED OF ARGUING WITH ATHEISTS because they generally don't know much about what they want to argue about,  at least the ones who troll me are like that.  I'm sure there are smarter atheists,  just not at my pay-scale.   Luckily, the atheist fad of the 00's is passe and its major figures largely (self)discredited and unfashionable so I don't get as much of that these days.  Even their fellow semi-pro atheists like Rebecca Watson are tired of them. 

I'm not interested in arguing about the "existence of God" because, like a belief in just about anything, belief is a matter of choice, in the end.  Your choice to believe in Darwinism (which, as I never have to stop pointing out to you idiots is not "evolution" but the theory of natural selection, WHICH IS NOT THE SAME THING AND WHICH IS NOT IN ACTUAL EVIDENCE, SO ANYONE WHO BELIEVES IN IT HAS TO CHOOSE TO BELIEVE IT), is a choice.   My disbelief in Darwinism, however, is far more based in the fact that there has never been and never can be a scientifically observed instance of "natural selection" leading to the natural evolution of a new species in nature.   Nor, by the way, has there been one observed in artificial selection which, being artificial and a product of intelligent design by scientists,  could not prove what you claim it does.  I think it is, as it was when Darwin found his inspiration for it in the putrid economics of Thomas Malthus, a thoroughly ideological dogma, one which was grasped onto by atheists because,  as Darwin's major continental representative, Ernst Haeckel claimed, it "gave the final triumph to materialist monism."   Which was absurd when he said that and is far more absurd now when the post-Darwinist period is dawning. 

I have a more interesting question.  Here's a short video in which the eminent physicist - and a self-described "hard-core agnostic" Eric Betzig, talks about why present day cellular  biologyis a "hallucination,"  because cellular biology is incredibly complex and known only in a few tiny details. 

"it's by far the most complex matter in the known universe.  We understand the interiors of neutron stars far better than we understand the interior of cells." 

I like the example of the youtube cartoon he mocks because it is typical of that kind of stuff in biology, especially the supposed biology dealing with the vastly more complex topic of evolution of species. 

And you brought up a favorite topic of mine, the "origin of life."   We know absolutely nothing about the origin of life on Earth, nothing, nothing whatsoever because we don't have any physical evidence of what that origin of life was or what it was like AND NO "ABIOGENTIC" EXPREMENT CAN GIVE US THAT INFORMATION.   You have to have the actual physical evidence of whatever organism it was that was the first organism of life on earth and that will never be had.  

It's imagined to be an extremely simple organism - again, of no knowable character - for the ideological purpose of imagining that it assembled by accident out of whatever materials were available to it.   The "simplest" examples of organisms we have are on the order of complexity that Betzig describes and even one "half" as complex, a tenth as complex,  as that would be enormously complex.   

My question is what if all life everywhere it occurs is  ALWAYS that complex, that what is needed to maintain the functions of living and life and reproduction IS ALWAYS ON THE ORDER OF COMPLEXITY WHICH IS ALL WE KNOW OF WHAT LIFE IS?    What if the first organism in the line of life on Earth was that complex?    What does that do to the imagined probability of it assembling out of the available molecules and physical structures made of molecules by random chance as opposed to comprising evidence for the design of that organism?   Including whatever mechanisms of inheritance and internal PURPOSEFUL modifications and manipulations THAT ARE KNOWN TO HAPPEN IN THE GENETIC MATERIALS OF ALL ORGANISMS NOW.  

I'd say the more we find out about the actual chemistry and physiology of cells the less plausible the old random chance with chance modifications dogma of science will seem to those who bother to keep up. 

I think at some point the implausibility of the old explanation will have to accommodate those who find that evidence supporting what is now considered heretical.   That it was by design.   I'm sure the atheists will insist it was some extraterrestrial organisms that had done that instead of God, though that only puts off the question as to what was the origin of those, certainly, extremely complex physical objects, the imaginary ET scientists who ideological scientists like Francis Crick grapsed onto like a tortured lab monkey to a wire and terrycloth "surrogate mother," tortured "for science" by sadistic psychologists and ethologists.   You can see some of that in the furious, pubescent response of ideological atheists like Jerry Coyne to the science of such non-believers as James Shapiro and Denis Noble.  

Compared to the ever less plausible random-chance model of the evolution of species, an information based belief in intelligent design, certainly among the lay public, is more respectable, these days.  Though science might never modify its rules to talk about it,  there's nothing to keep us laypeople from reading the science and drawing our non-scientific conclusions from that JUST AS THE FANBOYS OF DARWINISM -SUCH AS YOURSELF - AND ITS ABSURD, UNEVIDENCED LORE AND CARTOONS HAVE DONE.     Everything from the "descent of man" and "evolution of the horse,"  1001 tales of the "cavemen,"  to the later stuff like "The Kallikak family,"  "peppered moth evolution" (it wasn't evolution and it didn't explain what was claimed for it),  ""selfish genes," The Bell Curve" neo-eugenic scientific racism, "Darwinian economics" and the rest of it. 

I've dealt with this endlessly already,

No state, no artificial, man-made entity has rights, only natural born creatures can have rights, in human terms only People can have the kind of rights that are claimed to inhere to the artificial, man made entities likes states and "the press" and corporations by liars who invent such artificial "rights" which are really privileges given to those corporations or media outfits or states who want to do evil to those who really do have rights.  

Israel does not have a "right to exist" that the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, the Democratic People's Republic of [North} Korea has to exist.   Not even a mythical, never has been and until we change things never will be majority supported United States of America has any kind of a right to exist.  I reject the idolatry that turns any government of any country, any state into a fictitious person. 

What might be able to exist and have something that might reasonably be mistaken as having a right to exist is a true, egalitarian democracy in which every person governed by it accepts the authority of it in which a real majority of informed residents of good will elects the government AND HOLDS IT ACCOUNTABLE TO RESPECTS THE RIGHTS OF ALL PEOPLE AND THE ENVIRONMENT AND MAKES IT ACT RESPONSIBLY TO THAT END.  

Only any rights involved in such a never yet held entity belong exclusively and entirely to People and other natural born creatures who live under it.  It is proof that our Constitution is seriously defective that, instead of pledging fealty and allegiance to such things as equality and democracy they pledge it to a fake document printed on paper when even the Supremes who take that kind of oath make that document irrelevant to our real governance.   Such nonsense eventuates in the idea that the state of Israel, which is not the state of a huge number of People who live there, by their law and Supreme Court fiat, has a "right to exist."   By just that Supreme Court decision which codified its apartheid status,  no, Israel has no "right" to exist.   Neither has the United States for most of its existence, even on the mistaken idea that a democracy does have such a "right." 

I will only repeat this every time someone challenges me with that genocide-apartheid protecting question about the state of Israel's "right to exist" so don't bother trying that line on me again. 

Who Is To Say You're Too Stupid To Handle Your Own Affairs If You're Really That Stupid As To Ask That?

" Who has a right to say what is true and what's a lie."

WE DO.  We have a responsibility to say that.  Who else do you think will? 

You have to be as dishonest as a lying-lawyer or a "free speech-press" "journalist" to pretend we don't depend on that discernment every waking hour of every day.   Though these days we allow our journalists to lie with abandon and especially for the billionaires and millionaires.   They're no more reliable than the sleaziest of lawyers.  Yet they wonder why people don't trust or respect them. 

The goddamned supreme Court and lower courts and lawyers are in the business of pretending that we can't possibly tell when someone is telling enormous and obvious lies because they can come up with hypothticals on the stupid and dishonest level of  "Are we, then, to tell the Nazis where the Jews are hiding?"   

Anyone that morally depraved or stupid as to ask that question has no business being considered seriously in discussing such issues.  If you think the answer could possibly be "yes" you have removed yourself from any suspicion that your thinking needs to be considered. 

And such is the state of the American law. 

All while supporting the "free speech right" of our indigenous fascists and Nazis, especially those in the "private sector" to risk the lives of their targets here and now with their "free speech-press" permission and encouragement of them.   I recently asked if it would have been wrong for the Weimar liberal democrats to have forcefully suppressed the Nazi's "free speech-press" and those who supported them.   By the time that was done BY LAWYERS AND JUDGES AND "JUSTICES" IN UNPRECEDENTED AND CONTROVERSIAL TRIBUNALS,* TENS OF MILLIONS DIED AND IT TOOK THE COMBINED MILITARIES OF MANY COUNTRIES TO DO IT.  And subsequent lawyers and judges and "justices" "journalists, academic scribblers have been undoing that work ever since.  

And more generally,  who else do you think does make the judgement between lies that can be discerned to be lies and truths that can be discerned to be true?   Even those most practiced of professional liars and pretenders of the impossibility make such judgments, sometimes even honestly making them.  That is when it suits them. Especially when the one who they punish for lying is poor or of modest means - the rich they're far more likely to pretend they can't tell that about, those who can hire lawyers like a Trump to string out the issue in court after court.  And the Supreme Court "justices" pretend they can't when they choose to pretend they don't do that ALL THE TIME WHILE ON THE BENCH.  And while lying in their decisions, as I wrote about here recently.  No doubt there will be more on that later.   

* I was far too young to vote in 1960, but if I could have I would have been extremely reluctant to vote for the Harvard trained  John F Kennedy who had written the stupid "profile in courage" in which Robert Taft was praised for his opposition to the Nuremberg trials on the basis that the Nazis had made their mass murders legal in the places they governed and invaded.  

And it's not the only outrageously stupid and offensive thing Kennedy said in that book he is notoriously accused of having had ghost-written.   I am not convinced that is entirely true and haven't seen conclusive evidence that it is true and for my purpose, that is beside the point, he owned it by putting his name on it, so I won't get into THAT again.   He appealed to white racists whose votes he would be asking for a few years later such as in this Profiles in Courage lie.  

Every so often I hear from the descendants of Adelbert Ames, a Union general during the Civil War and then the governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction, objecting to a paragraph about him in John F. Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage,” from 1956. “No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi,” Kennedy wrote, about Ames’s governorship. Corruption was rampant. Taxes rose by a factor of fourteen. “Vast areas of northern Mississippi lay in ruins.” None of this is true, and the Ames family has been lobbying the Kennedy family to change the offending paragraph pretty much continuously for more than sixty years—including an in-person discussion with J.F.K., in 1963, conducted in the White House by Ames’s great-grandson George Plimpton, the writer and editor of The Paris Review. Nothing has worked. But maybe now, at this moment of a great national reconsideration of our history and our monuments, especially on racial grounds, it might be different?

I’m getting these entreaties, most recently a couple of weeks ago, because I wrote a book about the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction by white terrorists in Mississippi in 1875. Ames is a leading character, presented far more positively than he is in “Profiles in Courage.” Since what happened during the Reconstruction period has never been very firmly fixed in American memory, some explanation is probably required. What was Ames doing in “Profiles in Courage” in the first place, and why was he—a white politician elected by an overwhelmingly Black constituency—offered up by Kennedy as a villain?

“Profiles in Courage” was published when Kennedy was thirty-eight years old. He was the junior senator from Massachusetts, in the early stages of planning his campaign for President in 1960. The main body of the book is eight profiles of United States senators whom Kennedy considered to have been extraordinarily courageous, starting chronologically with John Quincy Adams, in the early nineteenth century, and ending with Robert A. Taft, in the mid-twentieth century. It’s irresistible to think about the book in the light of Kennedy’s political ambitions. Thanks to his heroic and well-publicized exploits as a Navy officer in the South Pacific during the Second World War, courage was already identified as one of Kennedy’s salient qualities, and the framing device for the book underscored that. The courageous subjects were distributed pragmatically, considering that Kennedy was a regional politician preparing to go national. Two were from the Northeast, two from the South, and four from the Midwest. Three were Republicans. They stood for a broad range of political causes.

How can anyone expect those whose stock and trade rests on the Kennedy mystique think they feel pressured to correct such a lie when lying is considered by the media, by lawyers, judges and the Supreme Court to be the focus of a "right?"  

The accusation was and remains that it was the lawyer Ted Sorensen who actually researched and wrote the book, though despite his Kennedy and later Harvard connections,  he was not from the Ivy League law-liar training schools but the University of Nebraska.   

It's a rare lawyer with an association to Harvard Law School who I'd trust, even if they aren't trained there.  Other than Elizabeth Warren, right now, I can't think off hand of another one with that kind of CV I do trust to that extent.   Though I'm sure there might be a handful of them, I might be inclined to trust.  I can't think of any except Ketanji Brown Jackson though her Trump v Anderson vote on the court makes me question her judgement.  Along with every other current member of the Court.