Dehyping AI

I left Facebook a few years ago, and have never gone back.

I left Twitter 9 months ago, and have never gone back.

I have never once regretted abandoning them, even though they were a pretty good bullhorn for me. It seems they’re just getting worse now, but I don’t want to look in to find out. These things came from profoundly capitalist companies that poisoned their own product with their addiction to growth and algorithmic garbage injection, which they’re now investing in the hope that AI will keep the pointless, cancerous growth. Here’s a fine dissection of the Next Big Thing, AI. It’s also shit.

Ed Zitron makes a good point comparing AI to previous technology improvements: the iPhone was a great and obvious advancement that had immediate utility, but ChatGPT has done nothing significant, other than fueling paranoia. In my own occupation, there is so much hysteria over Large Language Models without real justification.

They also mention another cool advancement, the Raspberry PI. I agree with that too, since once upon a time I spent a heck of a lot of time doing custom lab automation that a $40 circuit board can do with a few lines of code. AI is empty noise by comparison.

To the contrary, though, AI is great for ungodly nightmarish fantasies. HP Lovecraft would have been driven mad by this video of AI-generated gymnastics.

I’ve read a few romance novels, some fantasy, and a lot of bad science fiction

I prefer all of them to loony flat earth trash.

Candace Owens tries so hard to make women who read silly romance novels sound stupid, while she pretends to be an intellectual.

Can you guys imagine being married to me? My my poor husband, he rolls over, he’s like, what are you reading? And I feel like a regular wife says something, I don’t know, maybe a love series. Nora Roberts sweeping her away. Me, on the other hand — he rolled over, he asked me and I said, oh, I’m reading a flat earth theory. And it dawned into an entire conversation. He’s like, why are you reading a flat earth theory? And I’m like, because somebody messaged me on Monect about it, and they included some links, and I’m just reading them. I don’t know. I’m just an interested person no matter what. If there’s a bunch of people that believe something, I now want to know what it is that they believe. And, of course, he pushed me on this, and he was talking about the earth curvature and science. And I said to him, listen. I’m not a flat earther. I’m not a round earther. Actually, what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science. I have left the megachurch of science because what I have now realized is that science, what it is actually, if you think about it, is a pagan faith.

Sorry, lady, you were never a member of that “megachurch”. Witness the fact that you are bragging about taking flat earth theory seriously.

Who remembers when lots of conservatives were reliable supporters of science and engineering, and called liberals “moonbats” for their crazy hippie ideas? What happened to them, anyway? Are they all dead?

Good news, bad news

The good news: we’ll have the mortgage on our house paid off by next month!

That’s it. That’s all the good news.

The bad news: we have some major repair work to do on the house. The estimate for that involves many, many zeroes.

Worser news: my mother is in the hospital again. COPD is an evil, vengeful bitch. Didn’t my kind, tolerant, loving mother suffer enough with having to raise me?

Translation, please

I don’t know what the hell JK Rowling is babbling about now.

I’ve heard straight men talk about trans women as though they’re fallen men to whom sympathy ought to be automatically extended, but there’s deeper stuff going on, too.
I asked a lefty straight man I know (this is irl) whether he was aware how many penised ‘lesbians’ are involved in the push to access female spaces. The subject made him incredibly uncomfortable. He simply didn’t want to hear it. I then asked him whether he knew what his straight male friends wanted from women in the bedroom, kink/sex wise. Horrified look: ‘no, of course I bloody don’t’
I said to him that if you put 100 straight and bi women of our age and average sexual experience in a room together, they could write an authoritative compendium on straight male kink in an afternoon, from their own direct experience or that of women they know. I said I presumed he knew that a cross-dressing fetish is one of the most common paraphilias in heterosexual men and that this has been in the psychological literature since Freud.
I cannot overstate how little he wanted to talk about this, let alone acknowledge that any of it was real and happening. I don’t know whether it was the idea that women actually talk about what they meet in the bedroom that touched a nerve, or whether he found the whole subject ick, or didn’t like the suggestion that he was naive or poorly informed, but the impression given was that I was depraved to say such things aloud, and that he’d much prefer a seemly silence.

straight men talk about trans women as though they’re fallen men…what? Who? Does anyone actually think like that?

penised ‘lesbians’? Is this how TERFs talk among themselves? So she’s talking to a guy who confesses that men don’t talk much among themselves about personal sexual preferences…news at 11.

Neanwhile, she claims that she and her buddies are better authorities on straight male kink than men themselves, and pontificates on the cross-dressing fetish, as if it’s relevant, and cites Freud. Is she confusing trans with cross-dressing? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Also, who is she delivering this lecture to?

Then she concludes by admitting that she’d been grossing out the person she was talking about, and that he just wanted her to shut up. Finally! Something I can understand and totally relate to!

The rest just informs me that she’s been talking with her cult/clique and has cultivated a whole bunch of weird-ass ingrown assumptions and biases.

We’ve been winning?

Uh-oh. The villains are monologuing.

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, is gloating over the Supreme Court decision to enable an imperial presidency.

…let me speak about the radical left. You and I have both been parts of faculties and faculty senates and understand that the left has taken over our institutions. The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning.

And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.

Funny, I don’t think the Left has been winning at any time in my lifetime. After Reagan and Bush I and Bush II and Trump we’re supposed to believe we’ve been triumphing because we managed to elect a couple of centrist presidents who had to struggle against a mostly conservative congress? US politics have been biased by the influence of big money.

It’s interesting that Roberts, after singing the praises of the Sacred Constitution and suggesting this decision was a natural evolution of the Federalist papers, compares the decision to the American Revolution. Wasn’t that a time when the old rules and the old government were completely overthrown? You can’t simultaneously claim nothing is different and call it a revolution.

Then, that not-so-veiled threat: the revolution will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. Surrender, puny Leftists! If you oppose us, our response will be bloody and crushing.

The shocking thing is that they’re gleefully promising this destruction for the benefit of a dim-witted con artist.

The Claremont Institute is also gloating!

Americans are growing angry with the regime’s unending train of abuses. Perhaps without intending to do so, Merrick Garland, Jack Smith, Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg, Tanya Chutkan, Arthur Engoran, Juan Merchan, Letitia James, and scores of others have wagered everything—their property, their careers, their reputations, and their liberty—on the regime’s retention of power. They are “all in” as the saying goes. If the regime wins, they will win. But if Trump wins, we should expect that some of the worst perpetrators of the regime’s lawlessness will be held to account. An example will be made. If any of them retain their positions or end up with cushy private sector gigs, you’ll know what you need to know about the regime’s retention of power.

There are now only two paths forward: either the regime will solidify its power in November or Trump will be elected. If the former, we will descend further into the regime’s totalitarian grip. If the latter, unpleasant things will have to be done to hold people to account—people who attacked our constitutional republic by refusing to recognize limits on their exercise of power over us. In this respect, Trump’s claim that the regime is really after you and he’s just “standing in their way” is correct.

Note: the “regime” they are talking about is Biden’s, if that wasn’t clear.

Is this still the 19th century?

One hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, pious Christian churches would gather donations to fund missionary work — they’d send people to Africa or to Indian reservations to ‘enlighten’ the heathen, which often meant chastising native peoples for living life without proper obedience to Christian authorities. These frequently had horrible consequences. Here in the US, we had boarding schools, forced separation from family, and vicious denigration of native culture. Kids died. Communities were trapped in poverty. And it was all to ‘save’ people from an imaginary hell.

It’s still going on.

The Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona spans 2,625 square miles – just a little larger than the state of Delaware, but with a population just over 14,600.

Based on our reporting and speaking with members of the tribe, there are over 80 churches on the reservation, representing 27 different Christian denominations. The tribe indicated that there was an official list the churches operating on the reservation but no list has been delivered.

East Fork Lutheran school was founded in 1951 by the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (Wels), a religious group which has been active in Arizona since 1893 as part of its Apache Mission – an effort to convert “unreached tribes” to Christianity. This was one of many schools built on the reservation by Wels. The mission has shifted to now being focused on training Native American Christians to lead in the ministry and serve as missionaries to other Indigenous nations throughout the US and Canada.

Oh god. WELS. I grew up in a very liberal Lutheran church, where we learned that the Wisconsin synod was the wellspring of the devil — extremely conservative, tied tightly to hateful conservative politics, and consorting with them was even worse than hanging out with the Baptists* (isn’t sectarianism wonderful?). We’d get that message in between the Sunday calls to support our mission in Africa.

WELS is running a school in Arizona, and they recently expelled a couple of young Apache girls for…DANCING. It was satanic, don’t you know.

The way the school saw it, it was devil worship.

In October 2019, three teenage girls were punished for participating in a spiritual ceremony. Their Arizona school expelled two of them, and let the third off with a warning, citing their attendance as a violation of school policy and grounds for expulsion.

Caitlyn, now 18, says she and her friends were disciplined for participating in a Sunrise Dance, a traditional Native ceremony at the core of White Mountain Apache culture.

The Monday after the dance, Caitlyn’s parents told her to stay home that day. They had received a call from East Fork Lutheran school telling them not to send their daughter in. She didn’t know why. Then around noon, her mom got another phone call. The principal wanted to meet with Caitlyn, her parents and the local preacher. The principal and preacher also invited the two other girls and their families to their own private meetings with school leadership.

The Sunrise Dance was a very big deal for young women in their culture, but the church hated it. You’re not allowed to think differently in their church, and some of the stuff taught in the Apache community was competition with white Christian mythology, so it must be crushed.

For the first 12 years of her life, Caitlyn looked forward to having her own dance – a sacred coming-of-age experience celebrating the transition from girlhood to womanhood. It’s a great financial sacrifice for the family. Over four days, a girl’s community prays for her. They offer her gifts and witness her as she participates in rituals symbolizing her maturity and growth. A medicine man presides over the event, praying and singing with holy members of the community called Crown Dancers, who recite the creation story to the audience.

The idea meant the world to Caitlyn. But she didn’t have her own Sunrise Dance: if she were found out, she would be expelled from school immediately, a stain on on her permanent record that could affect her college opportunities.

At the time, her private school’s teachers were mostly white people who would often discuss the satanic nature of Apache traditions. When Caitlyn was in fifth grade, she was given an F on an art project for drawing the White Mountain Apache crest and including an eagle feather. An “A” student, she was devastated to be chastised this way. As Caitlyn remembers it, her teacher smiled and explained that this kind of project wasn’t allowed because it denoted “pagan worship”. Her father was furious but the family couldn’t do anything about it. It was what the girl and her family expected from the white people who worked on the reservation.

That Apache creation myth is wild. It’s longer and more detailed and far more interesting than what is contained in the book of Genesis, so I can see why Christians were concerned. If, in my youth, I’d been presented with Genesis and the Apache myth as alternatives, I would have rejected both, but I’d have been tempted by the far more appealing Apache tradition. I can see why stuffy old evangelical missionaries would want to stamp out the competition.

The problem here is that this exclusive attitude means depriving young women of an opportunity for a good education, because Christian schools tend to be better supported financially by their sanctimonious and devout external donors, while as usual, public schools limp along — especially reservation schools, which are usually woefully undersupported. I think these girls are better off being evicted from a religious school, and that the secular schools are going to be far more beneficial for their identity and progress.

When it came time for registration, Maria did not receive any notification from the school. It finally notified her two weeks before the school year started that her children would not be invited back. She had to move them to the public school. “Now that they’re in a public school, and they’ve adjusted to it, they are more proud of their traditions or culture, they’re more proud of who they are,” she said.

But there are 80 churches on that one reservation? I am reminded of how ticks can swarm and kill moose.

*My wife was brought up Baptist. Neither of us are at all religious.

Looking forward to the big meeting

Skepticon is coming on 26 July, and they’ve announced the first few speakers. One is Kavin Senapathy

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Kavin Senapathy is a writer, journalist, and author covering a slew of life science-related stories for outlets like SciShow, Scientific American, Slate, Forbes, Undark, The Daily Beast, and SELF. They are the author of the forthcoming book The Progressive Parent: Harnessing the Power of Science and Social Justice to Raise Awesome Kids (August 2024, Hanover Square/HarperCollins).

Another is Greg Gbur.

Greg Gbur is a Professor of Physics and Optical Science, the author of two popular science books on invisibility and falling cats, and the author of a long-running blog, Skulls in the Stars, about physics, science history, horror fiction and whatever else catches his fancy.

They are both excellent human beings and interesting people. This is going to be a great meeting!

Three cartoons

This first one is blunt and all-too accurate.

The second one is cynical and will reinforce my disappointment in humanity.

The third one is horrible and supports the disappointment I have…and also needs some explanation.

That’s by Michael Ramirez, far-right flaming nutjob and actually talented cartoonist, who is cheering the Supreme Court in the Chevron v. NRDC case, in a decision called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. He thinks it was a good thing, because he’s insane. Loper Bright chopped off the whole idea of an informed government that listened to the evidence and paid attention to experts.

The Supreme Court fundamentally altered the way that our federal government functions on Friday, transferring an almost unimaginable amount of power from the executive branch to the federal judiciary. By a 6–3 vote, the conservative supermajority overruled Chevron v. NRDC, wiping out four decades of precedent that required unelected judges to defer to the expert judgment of federal agencies. The ruling is extraordinary in every way—a massive aggrandizement of judicial power based solely on the majority’s own irritation with existing limits on its authority. After Friday, virtually every decision an agency makes will be subject to a free-floating veto by federal judges with zero expertise or accountability to the people. All at once, SCOTUS has undermined Congress’ ability to enact effective legislation capable of addressing evolving problems and sabotaged the executive branch’s ability to apply those laws to the facts on the ground. It is one of the most far-reaching and disruptive rulings in the history of the court.

This corrupt court is just that bad. I always thought that the Roger Taney court was the gold standard for a bad court that led the USA into self-destruction, thanks to the Dred Scott decision, but the Roberts court is giving ol’ Roger a run for the money…although at least John Roberts hasn’t denied the humanity of a large chunk of the citizenry, yet. You know he’d love to.

As if to illustrate the point that government should pay heed to scientific input, the Court also ruled against the EPA last week, and their opinion made multiple errors of scientific fact.

Justice Gorsuch’s opinion refers five times to “nitrous oxide” (aka laughing gas) rather than the entirely different chemical compound — smog-causing “nitrogen oxides” — actually at issue in the case.

But OK, the Supreme Court will never again be troubled by basic chemistry. Some people think this is a good thing, and they’re the same people who think it’s great that Donald Trump is above the law (who is already trying to use the Supreme Court decision to overturn his 34-count conviction in New York).

Are you ready for the 4th of July?

To celebrate our independence from kings, the Supreme Court has declared the president to be a king. At least, that is, when he’s a Republican.

Sotomayor dissents. She’s one of the 3 patriots left on the court.

We’re going to have to tear this court down someday soon. It is absurd that the supreme arbiter of the law in this land is run by people who are appointed for life, with no ethics regulation at all.

Rural American values

Believe me, they suck. A corporation, Tractor Supply Co., has announced some revisions to their policy.

Going forward, we will ensure our activities and giving tie directly to our business. For instance, this means we will:

  1. No longer submit data to the Human Rights Campaign
  2. Refocus our Team Member Engagement Groups on mentoring, networking and supporting the business
  3. Further focus on rural America priorities including ag education, animal welfare, veteran causes and being a good neighbor and stop sponsoring nonbusiness activities like pride festivals and voting campaigns
  4. Eliminate DEI roles and retire our current DEI goals while still ensuring a respectful environment
  5. Withdraw our carbon emission goals and focus on our land and water conservation efforts

Human rights? Unamerican. Fuck pride, we gotta support our veterans (who are all heterosexual, of course). Why support diversity, there are plenty of straight white men we can hire. Global climate change, we’re not worried that that will affect local land and water.

Short-sighted and stupid and selfish, those are core rural values.