Merry Christmas: The Newsletter

Introduction

Welcome to The Cameron Journal Newsletter.

Each week I send out the latest headlines, the latest videos from The Cameron Journal and commentary about the week’s events. If you’re new here, my name is Cameron Lee Cowan, and I’m the Creative Director here at The Cameron Journal. You can learn more about me on the about page.I do research and commentary on politics, culture, and the world around us. Remember, The World is Hard, This is Not.

Updates

We’ve done it again! It’s the end of 2024. It seems like the start of the year was just yesterday. As I get older, time speeds up, mostly because a year is an ever-smaller fraction of my life. I’ve had the past on my mind a lot yesterday and one of the things I realized is that you can only mine the past for so long before you’ve learned all the information. I think this applies to the personal life as much as politics (and boy do I have some updates for you!). In any case, the holidays are always nostalgic. Lately, I’ve been watching back episodes of MotorWeek car reviews. It’s hard to think of cars from the 1980s as “vintage” but that was along time ago now and some of the videos feel like a throwback to another world. In many cases, the world I grew up in was the world I thought I was entering. I’ve had this on my mind because I’m finishing the edits for America’s Lost Generation. I think I’ve been trying to find that place where I fit in and where I make sense, and I don’t think it exists. Now, that’s a mindset shift for the new year. Alright, that’s enough existential crisis for today. Let’s turn to the headlines.

P.S. I hope everyone has a very happy holiday and a wonderful new year. This is my last newsletter for 2024, the next edition will be out the first week of January. There will be no Newshour through the new year as well.

Write your book in 2025!

If you’re looking for a Christmas present that can really do something unique for someone, consider giving the gift of writing! My new writing courses are out now, and you can sign up for Fiction, Non-Fiction or both! To learn more, please visit The Cameron Journal Academy and check out my course: The Power of Story.

The Latest

On Wednesday, an interesting thing happened, Speaker Mike Johnson was busy getting ready to pass a bipartisan Continuing Resolution to keep the government open through Christmas and providing funding for victims of Hurricane Helene. That is until Elon Musk got on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) and decided that “No bills should pass until January 20th.” Never mind the resulting government shutdown that would happen around the holidays with government employees being furloughed when they need the money the most. After tweeting republican members of Congress, and telling his followers to call their congressperson, the CR was swiftly killed in the early evening leaving Speaker Mike Johnson mouth agape at a presser about what happened. Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies was measured in his response and blamed the GOP for the failure. Then, just as I writing this Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) remarked that Elon should be elected as Speaker of the House (which need not be a member of the chamber) since he was already so effective at legislation. We live in the worst timeline. I don’t begrudge Musk’s political voice but the reality is that he has an outsized influence on the government. Between him being glued to President-Elect Trump like his hair piece, his ownership of Twitter/X coupled with his threats of ending the political careers of anyone who doesn’t agree with him is oligarchic rule at its worse.

Trump and the media….it’s already starting

In 2025, I have a new essay coming out about Trump and the media and it’s a good thing that I’m releasing it because it will be incredibly salient. This week ABC News and its parent company Disney settled with Trump for $15 million dollars out of court for a defamation suit. How did ABC defame the President-Elect? The case was about George Stephanopoulous reading the court transcript of his civil case with the author E. Jean Carroll on the air. They did not lie or conjecture. They were not ranting. They were reporting the facts. But Trump didn’t like that, no he did not, and so he sued and rather than fight it in court, Disney/ABC folded and paid out the money. This sets a dangerous precedent for news reportage in this country. This case proves that if you’re big enough, loud enough, and threaten the free press enough you can control the press and keep things off the air. Trump has threatened to pull broadcast licenses of media that doesn’t agree with him in his many rants on Truth Social/Twitter. This is just the start. When I said I was afraid of being arrested for doing my job as a journalist on the Newshour, everyone thought I was crazy and it appears that my concerns may have been well-founded.

Nvidia’s New Computer

This week, Nvidia announced the new AI micro computer, the Jetson Nano which can run local AI models including LLMs. It’s small, it’s fast, and it could run in everything with no connection required. Most AIs are websites that call out to cloud computing in order to provide an answer, render an image or video. The Jetson Nano solves this problem by localizing everything to the local machine. For autonomous robots, this is an important development. This could serve as a computational brain for a fully autonomous robot that doesn’t need wi-fi to operate and will response to new information beyond what is on the internet. This is a computer that you can teach and can respond to you as you feed it training data by simply interacting with it…much like a puppy. No one is really covering this story in the AI space but it is huge because this is most likely how AI will make it into devices and into the everyday person’s life. That does leave one question, what happens if your stove goes on strike for better working conditions?

From The Cameron Journal

Author Micki Janae Crashes in with Of Blood and Lightning

The Cameron Journal Newshour: