Looking for reasons for hope

To people with minds that allow them to see, it's clear by now that our democracy, civil liberties, secularism and secular law, tolerant pluralism and respect for inconvenient truth are now all under a sustained deadly attack. The top two motivating destructive forces are rigid CN and BKC dogmas. Both are bitterly inimical to democracy and the rest of it. 

CN = theocratic Christian nationalism

BKC = brass knuckles (unregulated) capitalism

In the face of this decades-long onslaught, it can be hard to see reasons for hope. An opinion piece by Amanda Ripley that the WaPo published discusses this problem. Ripley asks the question, if raising reasons for hope is not a journalist's job, whose job is it? A broader question is whether hope is important or not. It turns out that having hope is important.

Last summer, I wrote a piece in this newspaper admitting that I have been selectively avoiding contact with the news, even though I’m a journalist myself. Traditional news coverage, I had slowly come to realize, was missing half the story, distorting my view of reality. It frequently overlooked and underplayed storylines and dimensions that humans need to thrive in the modern world — with the three most notable elements being hope, agency and dignity.

That column sparked an unexpected response. I heard from thousands of readers caught in the same struggle — wanting to be informed about the world but not bludgeoned into fatalism. Many of you reported that you had taken matters into your own hands. One man, after listening to devastating stories on the radio, does his own Google searches to find examples of people trying to solve the very same problems. Then he shares the links he has found with his friends and family on Facebook, basically doing a job reporters don’t want to do.

Others urged me to check out alternative sources they had found, including the Progress Network newsletter, which curates stories of human cooperation and ingenuity, and the 1440 daily briefing, which attempts to strip bias from the news. Still others said they have sought refuge in sports, hyperlocal news, Wordle and, for one reader, medieval history.

For more than 30 years, scientists have been researching hope and deconstructing its building blocks. And it’s surprisingly tangible. “It’s important to say what hope is not,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her book “Hope in the Dark.” “It is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.”

So what is it? Hope is more like a muscle than an emotion. It’s a cognitive skill, one that helps people reject the status quo and visualize a better way. If it were an equation, it would look something like: hope = goals + road map + willpower. “Hope is the belief that your future can be brighter and better than your past and that you actually have a role to play in making it better,” according to Casey Gwinn and Chan Hellman in their book, “Hope Rising.”

Decades of research have now proved that hope, defined this way, can be reliably measured and taught. Using 12 questions, called the Hope Scale — a version of which you can take yourself here — more than 2,000 studies have demonstrated that people with stronger hope skills perform better in school, sports and work. They manage illness, pain and injury better and score higher on assessments of happiness, purpose and self-esteem. Among victims of domestic violence, child abuse and other forms of trauma, hope appears to be one of the most effective antidotes yet studied.

News bits: The indictment; Large scale book canceling; Etc.

Long list of bits today. I wonder if something is going on that I don't know about.

Bit 1: Trump was indicted for something or another. It's reasonable to think that (i) the radical right propaganda & dark free speech Leviathan, e.g., Faux News, will propel him to sacred, innocent, persecuted Christian martyr status, and (ii) he will be the GOP's nominee for president in 2024. 

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Bit 2: Missouri's radical legislature cut the budget for libraries to $0 in retaliation for suing the state over the radicals' recent book ban law. That will fix those nasty libraries for trying to protect those nasty books. This is yet more evidence of the Republican Party's hyper-radical authoritarianism (fascism IMHO). Too bad we can't defund the pro-tyranny, pro-corruption GOP.

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Bit 3: The radicalized, weaponized House plays more than hardball with its investigations, it plays a scorched Earth game. The WaPo writes:

Democratic lawmakers didn’t hold back their anger Thursday at a House hearing about social media and censorship when a pair of Republican witnesses delivered testimony and left without being questioned.

The shouting began after Sen. Eric Schmitt (R), the former attorney general of Missouri, and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (R) testified before the House Judiciary select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government about what they claimed was the Biden administration’s effort to censor conservative voices online. After the two spoke, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the subcommittee chairman, dismissed them.

Believe it or not, that is what single party dictatorship looks like. It is just one small step from that to simply fabricating the evidence that Republican dictators and theocrats need to finally kill off democracy, secularism, pluralism and civil liberties.

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Bit 4: The Discovery Doctrine bites the dust: Pope falsely claims it never was a big deal anyway. The AP writes:

The Vatican on Thursday responded to Indigenous demands and formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” the theories backed by 15th-century “papal bulls” that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands and form the basis of some property laws today.

A Vatican statement said the papal bulls, or decrees, “did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples” and have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith. .... The statement said the papal documents had been “manipulated” for political purposes by competing colonial powers “to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesial authorities.”

The papal bull did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples?  “Manipulated” for political purposes?  The bull justified immoral acts against Indigenous peoples without opposition from ecclesial authorities? There's a pack of insulting lies and brazen understatements of gigantic proportions. It would make even Trump blush. (nah, not really -- things like this don't faze him)

That bull(shit) sanctified and legitimized the mass slaughter, rape, oppression and ruin of Indigenous people and their cultures. It also sanctified and legitimized the theft of their traditional lands and their brutal, forcible expulsion from them. Church arrogance, mendacity, hypocrisy and sin on this is off the charts.

Last night was very odd

 Let me explain.

My sweetheart and I had just concluded our dinner and we thought we would turn to the TV just for a few minutes to see if there was any news. Bad choice. We turned on Fox first. And OMG - there was a hand-wringing, a bleating, a moaning and a groaning like never before. We turned it off. Later we sat down to watch a hockey game and during the intermission went online to see what is new, or to get some ideas for future threads. And OMG - there was more bleating, more moaning and groaning, and on different political debate forums (yup, I visit a few of them from time to time) there was a wave of anger worse than ever before, some serious mud-slinging, and near suicidal hysteria. All I could thing of was....

Did something happen to Trump last night??  😕

The radical right's ongoing love affair with Hungarian dictatorship

Radical right Republican activist Christopher Ruffo writes:

Budapest Diaries

Can Hungary’s state-driven cultural policy serve as a model for American conservatives?

In recent years, Hungary has become a hub for conservative intellectuals. The government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has established a constellation of right-leaning university programs, think tanks, research centers, and even a café franchise named after the British philosopher Roger Scruton. Orbán has proposed an alternative to the Brussels consensus, devoting significant resources to reforming the education system, revitalizing the country’s religious institutions, subsidizing healthy family formation, and reviving the classical architectural style.

This is not popular with everyone. The European Union has punished Hungary for bucking the trend of liberal technocratic governance, turning the small, landlocked nation into a scapegoat, much in the same way that America’s elite institutions have denigrated working-class conservative voters in the country’s heartland. Because of this, there is an immediate affection between Hungarian and American conservatives, both of whom feel besieged by the establishment and in need of a new strategy for managing the relationship between state and society.

That touches on a lot of what America's anti-democracy authoritarian radical right claims to see, feel and want. It claims to see and feel disrespectful liberal technocratic governance. It claims the democracy killing and dictatorship that Orban has established in Hungary as a role model for what authoritarian radical right Americans want to do to American democracy. That is clear.

It is also clear that elites like Ruffo know they are lying through their teeth. They know they are pro-dictatorship and anti-democracy.

So who is besieging whom here? Does real or imagined disrespect justify the overthrow of democracy and its replacement with a corrupt dictatorship-Christian theocracy-plutocracy? What about all that disrespect, lies and slandering the radical right routinely hurls at the left?[1] Does that justify the overthrow of democracy? (no, it doesn't)

Who is the more hypocritical group here, the radical right or the center and left, radical or not? 

Also note the standard propaganda technique that Ruffo relies on. He does not call Orban a dictator and he does not say that Orban destroyed democracy, which he in fact did. Ruffo does not call his radical right movement anti-democracy or pro-tyranny. Instead he blandly but falsely refers to his dictatorship movement as being merely "conservative" and "right leaning." Ruffo and his ilk are far merely conservative or right leaning. They are full-blown radical right authoritarians and Christian theocrats, fascists in my opinion.

Footnote: 

1. For example, Vox writes: The right’s moral panic over “grooming” invokes age-old homophobia -- “Groomer” accusations against liberals and the LGBTQ community are recycled Satanic Panic.

Bloomberg Law writes: Combative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones doubled down on his claim that defamation lawsuits filed by the families of 26 children and educators gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School are part of a liberal plot to destroy him. “I think this is a Deep State situation,” Jones told jurors Thursday during the second week of a civil trial in Connecticut. When asked if his credibility is the most important thing to him, the Infowars host replied: “No, crushing the globalists.”

The New York Magazine writes: Why Republicans Are Smearing Everyone As Pedophiles Now -- Conspiracy theories work on different levels.

News bits: GOP continues election rigging campaign; GOP sabotages the rule of law

One of the most obvious actions that proves the inherent anti-democracy authoritarianism that dominates the radical right GOP is its endless push to rig elections so that Republicans can vote, but Democrats can't.  It's hard to get it right, because some GOP votes get suppressed, which is not what the Republicans want to do. So, we get to witness the GOP's trial and error effort to subvert elections. The NYT writes about the ongoing subversion campaign:

Republicans Face Setbacks in Push to Tighten Voting Laws on College Campuses

Party officials across the country have sought to erect more barriers for young voters, who tilt heavily Democratic, after several cycles in which their turnout surged

Alarmed over young people increasingly proving to be a force for Democrats at the ballot box, Republican lawmakers in a number of states have been trying to enact new obstacles to voting for college students.

In Idaho, Republicans used their power monopoly this month to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification.

Even in Texas, where 2019 legislation shuttered early voting sites on many college campuses, a new proposal that would eliminate all college polling places seems to have an uncertain future.

“When these ideas are first floated, people are aghast,” said Chad Dunn, the co-founder and legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. But he cautioned that the lawmakers who sponsor such bills tend to bring them back over and over again.

A wild card in the 2024 presidential elections will be the effectiveness of Republican election subversion laws. This could be a necessary factor in who wins and loses in 2024. This adds to the mountain of evidence of radical right Republican Party animosity toward two-party rule, democracy and the free and fair elections needed to keep democracy meaningful. 

Students at the University of Texas at Austin lined up to cast their ballots 

on campus during the 2020 primary. A new proposal would eliminate 

all college polling places in the state.

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From the Corrupt Republican Politics Files: Daily KOS writes:

House Republicans demanding Bragg's evidence against 

Trump have been coordinating with Trump himself

CNN is now confirming what we've all suspected for a while now: House Republican caucus and committee leaders have been in regular communications with the coup-attempting Donald Trump, keeping him personally up to date on the status of committees and investigations launched to help cover up Trump’s suspected crimes.

"Not only are Trump, his aides and close allies regularly apprised of Republicans’ committee work, they also at times exert influence over it," reports CNN. And those communications have "emerged as a crucial method for Trump to shape Republicans’ priorities in their newly-won House majority."

CNN's report puts a new spin on it, however. It's not just that House Republicans have volunteered themselves as Trump's personal saboteurs. They've been coordinating with Trump himself, even two years after Trump left office following his attempted coup.  

So, yes. Jim Jordan and other Republicans have been in constant touch with Trump as they formulated their attacks on Bragg. And yes, it does appear that there's a direct pipeline in place that will feed whatever confidential information about Bragg's case to Trump's lawyers and Trump himself. It's not obstruction of justice if Jordan does it!

This adds to the existing mountain of evidence that the GOP is completely morally corrupt. Radical Republicans in congress constantly tell us they are just investigating crimes by the Bidens and merely vindicating the rule of law. Instead, they have nothing but open contempt for the rule of law as it applies to Republican elites. For GOP elites, both the Christian nationalists and the brass knuckles capitalists, the rule of law is just a political tool to attack enemies and reward allies and the elites themselves. The GOP is authoritarian, not pro-democracy. This is solid evidence of that truth.

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About the 2024 election: Newsweek writes:

A poll showing 61 percent of Americans don't want Donald Trump to be president again has been displayed on Fox Business.

The survey, conducted by Marist National Poll for National Public Radio and PBS NewsHour, found only 38 percent of U.S. voters want the New York business tycoon to have another term in the White House.

Despite that, it seems clear by now that as long as Trump is healthy enough to run for president again, The GOP will nominate him in 2024. His core base remains loyal. No other contender has yet made major inroads. Republicans who say they would prefer Trump not to be president again will nonetheless vote for him against any evil socialist Democrat deep state tyrant. It does not matter who the Democrats run, the Dem candidate will be relentlessly and viciously smeared and slandered into a terrifying vision Satan's incarnated evil on planet Earth in 2024. 

Really, who could vote for Satan?

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From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism (BKC) Files: Ars Technica writes about Google destroying inconvenient evidence in a lawsuit:

You can't do that! --

Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly gave false info to court

Google in trouble for auto-deleting chats needed as evidence in Epic Games case

"After substantial briefing by both sides, and an evidentiary hearing that featured witness testimony and other evidence, the Court concludes that sanctions are warranted," US District Judge James Donato wrote. Later in the ruling, he wrote that evidence shows that "Google intended to subvert the discovery process, and that Chat evidence was 'lost with the intent to prevent its use in litigation' and 'with the intent to deprive another party of the information's use in the litigation.'"  

"The Court has since had to spend a substantial amount of resources to get to the truth of the matter, including several hearings, a two-day evidentiary proceeding, and countless hours reviewing voluminous briefs. All the while, Google has tried to downplay the problem and displayed a dismissive attitude ill tuned to the gravity of its conduct. Its initial defense was that it had no 'ability to change default settings for individual custodians with respect to the chat history setting,' but evidence at the hearing plainly established that this representation was not truthful."

Apparently, Google gambles that its is better to take lumps from a judge than lose its defense case in court. By intentionally destroying evidence, Google evinces an poor, condescending attitude toward the rule of law that far too many BKC elites hold and act on. No senior executive at Google is going to go to jail. That's the beauty of the liability shield that routinely protects elite corporate criminals. All bad acts here are by the legal person named Google. That's Mr. Google to you, you puny human citizen.  

What can the court do? No real humans are responsible. Send Google's official documents of incorporation to jail? That's who is responsible in the eyes of the law. The law blinded and neutered by BKC elites.

This is more evidence of how tenuous the rule of law can be and too often is. This is what the slow fall of the rule of law looks like in real time.

What an AR-15 bullet does to a person

A WaPo article provides images of what a .223 caliber bullet from an AR-15 does once it hits a person's body. The GOP wants to make the AR-15 the national gun. Here's why.

Warning, this is unpleasant.

Democracy under attack: Comparing Israel to the US

A NYT opinion piece compares the rise of radical right authoritarianism in Israel to the US counterpart. It's an interesting analysis:

The Kohelet Policy Forum is a libertarian-leaning think tank reportedly funded by at least one American billionaire that has emerged as the ideological architect of the proposed overhaul [radical right attack on Israeli democracy]. The plan’s intellectual backers have routinely pointed to the American model of elected leaders nominating and confirming Supreme Court justices as their inspiration. By invoking the forum, Mr. Bar-David touched on a key aspect of Israel’s social and judicial crisis that has been too often overlooked: American influence.

In many ways, the fight over the future of the judiciary marks the culmination of the Americanization of Israeli society. A segment of Israeli society has always admired the United States and has striven to reimagine itself in its image. Over the past few decades, though, it hasn’t been America’s grand traditions of democracy and multiculturalism that have infiltrated the psyche of many in the Jewish state but rather its less admirable attributes.

As in America, many on the Israeli right have stopped defining themselves based on policies and have resorted instead to nativism and resistance to democratic norms. The political wedge issues in Israel are no longer questions around Palestinian statehood but rather the independence of the courts, good governance and plain decency. It’s no surprise, then, that the heirs of Israel’s earlier generation of conservatives can no longer find their place in the ruling Likud party. They’ve become Israeli versions of so-called RINOs, or Republicans in name only.

Without the demarcation of the ideological rivalries of the past, Israel’s political map is now defined mostly along identity lines, with the ultra-Orthodox, nationalist settlers and working-class Mizrahi voters on one side (the “red” Israel) and the wealthier, mostly Ashkenazi, educated class of the coastal Tel Aviv and Haifa regions on the other (the “blue” Israel). Despite the socioeconomic gaps between them, the main points of contention tend to revolve around matters of decorum, tradition and grievances.  

An example of Israel’s echoes of the United States can be found in the changes to the socialist kibbutz movement that helped shape the country’s identity and fueled its growth, which has been all but overrun by privatization and rabid capitalism that has contributed to the country having among the highest rates of inequality among nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Israel’s collective and pioneering spirit has been ravaged by consumerism and commercialism.

Like America, Israel now finds itself hopelessly polarized along numerous societal fault lines: religious and secular, rural and urban, educated and not, traditional and progressive, hawks and doves.    

Before Mr. Netanyahu attempted this power grab, Donald Trump tried it. Before Israel’s Channel 14 peddled some of its propaganda and misinformation, Fox News was doing the same.  

There is a distinct taste of Americanism to this fresh conservative Israeli persona. Mr. Netanyahu, the country’s biggest panderer to identity politics, is Israel’s most American-style politician. He spent many years in the United States, and many of his pollsters and strategists, not to mention his inner circle, came straight from right-wing Republican campaigns. 

Make no mistake, Israeli politics has always been a blood sport. But only in recent years has this hyperpartisan discourse taken hold, one that transcends ideology and instead revolves around a wannabe strongman’s cult of personality.  

Israeli militancy has always existed. But it was the immigration of the Brooklyn-born rabbi Meir Kahane in the 1970s that helped introduce an American-tinged racism to it. Arabs were no longer just adversaries to overcome in war; they were vile enemies who had to be expelled or killed.

Note the reference (i) to being hopelessly polarized along numerous societal fault lines, (ii) a wannabe strongman’s cult of personality and (iii) American-tinged racism. If that feels sickeningly familiar, it should. That's where America is right now. We are hopelessly polarized and our democracy, pluralism, civil liberties, the rule of law and inconvenient facts and truths are all under a vicious attack by a radical right cult and its wannabe dictator. Decades of dark free speech is mostly responsible for this, ~80% in my opinion.

In the US, old-fashioned, pro-democracy and pro-civil liberties conservatives are now dead RINOs. They are either out of power or cowed into silent submission and complicity with corrupt, radical right Republican Party authoritarianism and its polarizing identity politics. The same phenomenon has occurred in Israel. 

But that makes sense. If authoritarians want dictator-style wealth, power and control, democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties need to be sharply curtailed or completely controlled by the dictator, theocrats, kleptocrats or plutocrats. About the same situation applies in Russia, China, North Korea and all or nearly all other current dictatorships or plutocracies.

Israelis protest after the tyrant wannabe

fired his Minister of Defense for opposing

the radical right slow coup to kill democracy

Tech news bits: ChatGPT improves rapidly; Cat videos are crippling war material supplies

This post ushers in a whole new universe of content here at DP, tech stuff!! Yeah, well, tech stiff is not new here. Whatever.

From the Computers Are Going To Take Your Job Files -- ChatGPT rapidly gets a lot smarter: One could have reasonably believed that ChatGPT would get better over time. But this fast. Insider writes:

A professor says he's stunned that ChatGPT went from a D grade 

on his economics test to an A in just 3 months

An economics professor said the progress ChatGPT made — it improved its score from a D to an A on his economics test in just three months — has stunned him.

when ChatGPT-4 debuted, its progress stunned Caplan. It scored 73% on the same midterm test, equivalent to an A and among the best scores in his class.

ChatGPT's paywalled upgrade sought to fix some of the early issues with the beta version, GPT-3.5. This purportedly included making ChatGPT 40% more likely to return accurate responses, as well as making it able to handle more nuanced instructions.

For Caplan, the improvements were obvious. The bot gave clear answers to his questions, understanding principles it previously struggled with. It also scored perfect marks explaining and evaluating concepts that economists like Paul Krugman have championed.

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From the Sucking The Juice Out Of The War Files: Insider writes:

Weapons firm says it can't meet soaring demand for artillery shells 

because a TikTok data center is eating all the electricity

• An arms manufacturer complained that TikTok's data center is using all the electricity in the region.

• As a result, the company cannot keep up with the surging demand for artillery rounds.

• The CEO told the FT the company's growth is "challenged by the storage of cat videos."

"We are concerned because we see our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos," said Morten Brandtzæg, the CEO of the Norwegian arms manufacturer Nammo, in an interview with the Financial Times.

Brandtzæg said the demand for artillery rounds was 15 times higher than normal — a trend driven by the war in Ukraine, which has featured heavy artillery use.

Ukraine, for instance, would like to increase its daily usage of rounds from 6,000 to 65,000, he said.

Ukrainian soldiers fire at Russian positions from a U.S.-supplied M777 howitzer 

(my favorite artillery piece) in Kherson region, Ukraine, Jan. 9, 2023

Actually, multiple sources are reporting that there is a huge gap in what US arms manufacturers can produce and the vast demand for arms and supplies from Ukraine. Lots of stories had come out saying that the Russian could not keep up with demand, and so far that has not made much noticeable difference. But the US military is now reporting that its reserves of all kinds of modern arms and ammo are being rapidly depleted and manufacturers cannot keep up.

Does anyone else get a sense that the wheels have come off the cart in America, or is that just my paranoia speaking? Remember when America could not even make simple cloth. M95 and N95 masks in the early days of COVID? America feels significantly broken and mostly not fixable, especially if brass knuckles capitalism gets much more control of commerce and government than it already has.

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Making an updgrade by downgrading it: Insider writes on a trend that many consumers are noticing. If I recall right, I first started noticing this about 25 years ago.

Google, Amazon, and Meta are making their core products worse — on purpose

In recent years, Google users have developed one very specific complaint about the ubiquitous search engine: They can't find any answers. A simple search for "best pc for gaming" leads to a page dominated by sponsored links rather than helpful advice on which computer to buy. Meanwhile, the actual results are chock-full of low-quality, search-engine-optimized affiliate content designed to generate money for the publisher rather than provide high-quality answers. As a result, users have resorted to work-arounds and hacks to try and find useful information among the ads and low-quality chum. In short, Google's flagship service now sucks.  

All of these miserable online experiences are symptoms of an insidious underlying disease: In Silicon Valley, the user's experience has become subordinate to the company's stock price. Google, Amazon, Meta, and other tech companies have monetized confusion, constantly testing how much they can interfere with and manipulate users.

This makes perfect sense if one looks at it from the point of view of a brass knuckles capitalist. Why try to improve something that already works, when it is easier to break it and add some useless fluff to distract from what was broken? Why not stuff ads and sponsored links in a search result if it forces consumers to wade through the garbage to find what they want, thereby generating some extra profit when an ad snags someone?

I notice this most acutely now with Amazon, where searches are now loaded with crap I don't want and did not search for. Unfortunately, Amazon does not have much in the way of significant competition. When I try a non-Amazon source, the selection is usually poor and/or service bad or non-existent. 

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AI and human intelligence are becoming a gray area?: Vice writes about an alleged blurring of the line between humans and machines:

On Wednesday, Microsoft researchers released a paper on the arXiv preprint server titled “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4.” They declared that GPT-4 showed early signs of AGI, meaning that it has capabilities that are at or above human level. 

“We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting,” the researchers write in the paper’s abstract. “Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4’s performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.”  

Microsoft researchers observed fundamental leaps in GPT-4’s abilities to reason, plan, solve problems, and synthesize complex ideas that signal a paradigm shift in the field of computer science,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.  

With all this being said, it is clear that the “sparks” the researchers claim to have found are largely overpowered by the number of limitations and biases that the model has displayed since its release.

Although the paper's title is asserted to be more click bait than substance, the technology is improving rapidly. At some point fairly soon, there is going to be serious blurring of work by AI and humans in increasingly complex topics. One thing that makes improvements faster and better is learning what limitations and biases the AI has. Once those are known they can be improved and fixed.

One question this raises is what about jobs and job losses. A poll conducted 10 days after the first version of ChatGPT came out indicated that over half of employers who tested it, had started to lay people off and replace them with the AI software. Other questions are how far will AI make inroads into jobs and and how fast will it happen? 

Not Your Average JOE

 In case you haven't heard:

National Joe Day

National Joe Day is somewhat of a different holiday that falls on the 27th of March every year. It’s a holiday in which people celebrate the name Joe and all of the people they know with that name.

How To Observe National Joe Day

National Joe Day is probably one of the easiest holidays to celebrate. On this day, all a person has to do is to celebrate a Joe in your life, celebrate a famous Joe, or even change your own name to Joe for the day. People can also use the day to enjoy a hot cup of Joe or even a plate of sloppy Joes.

https://www.holidayscalendar.com/event/national-joe-day/

Now, which Joes should we celebrate?

Joe Biden? One of the most successful Presidents ever in terms of legislation passed during his first term, but still, for some reason, immensely unpopular? Any theories as to way?

How about Joe Manchin? Somehow, he always does manage to coming around to supporting the other Joe's agenda, though he likes to drag it out before he does and is still beholding to the oil industry. But, he does manage to stay popular in a red district. A pain in the butt? Or a surviver?

Of course we could go way OUT there and give some love to:

Joe Exotic

Such a handsome fellow, agree?

If you want more on politics, there is also:

The anti-Trump Republican, not the rock star. Mind you, has his star faded? I seldom see any more interesting news items on him.

SO, who are your favorite Joes, your least favorite Joes, or are there any Joes you know personally you want to give a big shout out to on this National Joe Day?

News bits: Zealots censoring tolerance; Tales from the free market

Insider writes about the radical right canceling a song about tolerance and accepting others:

Wisconsin 1st graders were told they couldn't sing 'Rainbowland' by Dolly Parton 

and Miley Cyrus because it was too controversial

"Rainbowland" includes the lyrics: "Living in a Rainbowland, The skies are blue and things are grand, Wouldn't it be nice to live in paradise, Where we're free to be exactly who we are, Let's all dig down deep inside, Brush the judgment and fear aside, Make wrong things right, And end the fight, 'Cause I promise ain't nobody gonna win."

That's just another example of the Christian Taliban in action in America today. They are going to crush tolerance, secularism and democracy or die trying.

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ProPublica writes about how one health care insurance company does business:

How Cigna Saves Millions by Having 

Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them

The vague wording [of his rejected medical reimbursement claim] made Dr. Nick van Terheyden suspect that Dr. Cheryl Dopke, the medical director who signed it, had not taken much care with his case.

Van Terheyden was right to be suspicious. His claim was just one of roughly 60,000 that Dopke denied in a single month last year, according to internal Cigna records reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

The rejection of van Terheyden’s claim was typical for Cigna, one of the country’s largest insurers. The company has built a system that allows its doctors to instantly reject a claim on medical grounds without opening the patient file, leaving people with unexpected bills, according to corporate documents and interviews with former Cigna officials. Over a period of two months last year, Cigna doctors denied over 300,000 requests for payments using this method, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each case, the documents show. The company has reported it covers or administers health care plans for 18 million people.  

Before health insurers reject claims for medical reasons, company doctors must review them, according to insurance laws and regulations in many states. Medical directors are expected to examine patient records, review coverage policies and use their expertise to decide whether to approve or deny claims, regulators said. This process helps avoid unfair denials.

But the Cigna review system that blocked van Terheyden’s claim bypasses those steps. Medical directors do not see any patient records or put their medical judgment to use, said former company employees familiar with the system. Instead, a computer does the work. A Cigna algorithm flags mismatches between diagnoses and what the company considers acceptable tests and procedures for those ailments. Company doctors then sign off on the denials in batches, according to interviews with former employees who spoke on condition of anonymity.  

Within Cigna, some executives questioned whether rendering such speedy denials satisfied the law, according to one former executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because he still works with insurers.

“We thought it might fall into a legal gray zone,” said the former Cigna official, who helped conceive the program. “We sent the idea to legal, and they sent it back saying it was OK.”  

In a written response, Cigna said the reporting by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum was “biased and incomplete.”

It is OK to have a computer reject your insurance claim, legal said so. And so did the computer! Saying otherwise is just biased and incomplete.

So much for the rule of law and social conscience. If a law gets in the way of profit, just blow it off or get your lobbyists to get the law obliterated. That's just how brass knuckles capitalism works whenever it can. 

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Tales from Fauxlandia: NBC News reports:

Ex-Tucker Carlson producer files new claims Fox News lawyers 

coached her testimony in Dominion lawsuit

Abby Grossberg sued Fox last week, alleging she was coerced into giving misleading testimony about the network's election fraud coverage. She was fired Friday.

America Is Preoccupied

America Is Daydreaming

America Is Crackpotting

America Is Banning Books

America Is Not Concentrating

But Tucker the Liar is serious about getting 

to the bottom of the barrel, . . uh, . . story

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From the Let's Kill Them All Files, legal wizards, not lizards, have dreamed up a snagglepuss of a new legal theory. It's published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review in a paper entitled Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths. This one is a real gullywhumper. The wizards write:

Prosecutors regularly bring homicide charges against individuals and corporations whose reckless or negligent acts or omissions cause unintentional deaths, as well as those whose misdemeanors or felonies cause unintentional deaths. Fossil fuel companies learned decades ago that what they produced, marketed, and sold would generate “globally catastrophic” climate change. Rather than alert the public and curtail their operations, they worked to deceive the public about these harms and to prevent regulation of their lethal conduct. They funded efforts to call sound science into doubt and to confuse their shareholders, consumers, and regulators. And they poured money into political campaigns to elect or install judges, legislators, and executive officials hostile to any litigation, regulation, or competition that might limit their profits. Today, the climate change that they forecast has already killed thousands of people in the United States, and it is expected to become increasingly lethal for the foreseeable future. 

Activists and journalists declaim the executives of ExxonMobil, Shell, and other large oil companies as “mass murderers.” Lamenting that “millions of human beings will die so that they can have private planes and huge mansions,” they talk of “[d]ragging the corporate titans who profited from driving the world to the brink before a judge.” But as of this writing [Jan. 25, 2023], no prosecutor in any jurisdiction is bringing homicide charges of any kind against fossil fuel companies (FFCs) for even a single death related to climate change. They should. 

The case for homicide prosecutions is increasingly compelling. A steady growth in the information about what FFCs knew and what they did with that knowledge is revealing a story of antisocial conduct generating lethal harm so extensive it may soon become unparalleled in human history.

Woof! Lethal harm so extensive it may soon become unparalleled in human history? The FFCs are in big trouble now. That is gonna scare the jebus out of those feisty Huge Oil Co. executives and their lackeys in congress, the courts, etc. 

They are gonna stop polluting, killing and propagandizing real quick, right? Nah. They are going to yawn and buy black smokers for their employees to show their sincere support for the environment.

Take that, you evil socialist 

environment

A NYT interview with Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg (91) has terminal cancer, with about 3-6 months left to live. In 1971, he gave copies of the US military’s secret 7,000-page history of the Vietnam War to The New York Times and The Washington Post. The government tried to stop publication, but the Supreme Court defended the First Amendment right of a free press against prior restraint. That led to public anger at the government for lying about the conduct of the war. Ellsberg faced criminal charges, e.g., violating the 1917 Espionage Act, but government misconduct caused the charges to be dismissed. 

Here are couple of the Qs and As from the NYT interview:  

Q. As you look around the world today, what scares you?

A. I’m leaving a world in terrible shape and terrible in all ways that I’ve tried to help make better during my years. President Biden is right when he says that this is the most dangerous time, with respect to nuclear war, since the Cuban missile crisis. That’s not the world I hoped to see in 2023. And that’s where it is. I also don’t think the world is going to deal with the climate crisis. We’ve known, since the 2016 Paris agreement and before, that the U.S. had to cut our emissions in half by 2030. That’s not going to happen.

Q. The number of people with the security clearances to view classified material has expanded, perhaps exponentially, since the leak of the Pentagon Papers, and I wonder, aside from a few people like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, why haven’t there been more Dan Ellsbergs? Why aren’t there more people who, when presented with evidence of something that they find morally objectionable, disclose it?

A. Why aren’t there more? It’s a question I’ve often asked myself. Many of the people whistle-blowers work with know the same things and actually regard the information in the same way — that it’s wrong — but they keep their mouths shut. As Snowden said to me and others, “Everybody I dealt with said that what we were doing was wrong. It’s unconstitutional. We’re getting information here about Americans that we shouldn’t be collecting.” The same thing was true for many of my colleagues in government who opposed the war. Of course, people are worried about the consequences.

Before my case and the Obama administration’s prosecutions of whistle-blowers, they needn’t have been worried about going to jail. But apart from that, they fear losing their jobs, their careers, risking the clearances on which their jobs depend. People who have these clearances have often invested a lifetime in demonstrating that they can be entrusted to keep secrets. That trust becomes a part of your identity, which it is difficult to sacrifice, so that one loses track of a sense of higher responsibility — as a citizen, as a human being.

Q. We tend to think of the classification system as a system of protection. But you sometimes talk about it, and I think correctly, as a system of control.

A. That is what it is. It is a protection system against the revelation of mistakes, false predictions, embarrassments of various kinds and maybe even crimes. And then the secrecy system in its application is predominantly to protect officials, administrations from embarrassment and from accountability, from the possibility that their rivals will pick these things up and beat them over the head with it. Their rivals for office, for instance.

....

The media as a whole has never really investigated the secrecy system and what it’s for and what its effects are. For example, the best people on declassification outside the media, the National Security Archive, month after month, year after year, put out newly disclosed classified information that they have worked sometimes three or four years, 10 years, 20 years to make public. Very little of that was justified to be kept from the public that long, if at all. An expert estimated in Congress in 1971 that 5 percent of classified information met the criteria for secrecy at the time it was classified, and after a few years that decreased to half of one percent. 

....  

As I said, my work of the past 40 years to avert the prospects of nuclear war has little to show for it. But I wanted to say that I could think of no better way to use my time and that as I face the end of my life, I feel joy and gratitude. 

Ellsberg's arguments seem sound to me. The threat of nuclear war is frighteningly high, we're not going to deal responsibly and seriously with climate change, and the US government lies far too much to us by unwarranted opacity. Unwarranted secrecy threatens democracy and the rule of law. 

Ellsberg explains his fear of nuclear war by arguing that nuclear weapons have been used many times since 1945, including now by both sides in Ukraine.* Their use is threats of use akin to a bank robber threatening to use a gun. Even if the robber doesn’t pull the trigger one time, they might the next. Ellsberg comments on that: "But eventually, as any gambler knows, your luck runs out."

* I am unaware of Ukraine threatening to use nuclear weapons against Russia, but Russia has made the threat against Ukraine.

News chunks: Texas bounty for drag queens, dead or alive; Border bounty hunters empowered to use force

Radical right sex derangement syndrome (RRSDS) continues to worsen and spread among red states. The targets of this dangerous disease are people in the LGBQT community. The Intercept writes:

GIVEN REPUBLICANS’ RELENTLESS legislative attempts to erase trans and gender nonconforming people, a new bill in Texas that LGBTQ+ advocates are describing as the “drag bounty hunter bill” may seem like a drop in the ocean. This fact alone is intolerable. There is, however, something particularly barbaric in the bill’s explicit encouragement of citizen harassment to drive gender variance out of public life.

The proposed legislation defines “drag” as any “performance in which a performer exhibits a gender that is different than the performer’s gender recorded at birth using clothing, makeup, or other physical markers and sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs in a lascivious manner before an audience.”

The inclusion of “lascivious” might suggest that the bill is only aimed at performances in venues that already exclude minors, like nightclubs. But given that Texas Republicans are at this very moment attempting to pass a law defining any venue that hosts a drag performance as “a sexually oriented business” — including restaurants — it’s clear that “lascivious” provides no limit to the bounty hunter bill.

If passed, the law is certain to shut down family-friendly drag events and library story hours, but it threatens all gender-nonconforming performers, and even events like Pride.  

The bill is a rehash of a strategy used against abortion in the state. When Texas lawmakers passed Senate Bill 8 in 2021, effectively banning abortion in the state, they introduced a novel legislative approach for running roughshod over constitutional protections: sanctioned vigilantism.

The abortion law deputized private citizens to sue anyone suspected of helping a person obtain an abortion, with the promise of a $10,000 reward for successful cases. Since its passing, copycat laws have abounded, given the legislation’s ability to evade federal court challenges by relying on civil lawsuits. Now, Texas Republicans are seeking to use the same legal mechanism in their all-out assault on gender variance.  

The drag bounty bill likewise encourages citizens to sue anyone who hosts or performs in a drag performance in the presence of a minor — with the added allure of a monetary reward. Successful plaintiffs could receive as much as $5,000 in “damages,” up to 10 years after the event.

Across the country, even in New York City, far-right militias and other armed fascists have already made a habit of threatening family-friendly drag performances and story hours. The Texas bill grants the practice a vile authority — and pulls from a long legacy of the government using state-sanctioned vigilantism to enforce white supremacy, gender conformity, and border rule.

It won't be long before RRSDS leads to non-conforming people being murdered by zealous, heavily armed people seeking to inflict self-righteous discipline on the bad people. Knowing this was coming, Texas has empowered and encouraged the impending slaughter by anointing the murderers to the lofty status of God's righteous bounty hunter. 

In due course, the radical right Texas legislature will come to see that instead of bounty hunters, God's enforcers are law enforcers. They are thus entitled to State Marshall status, a badge and qualified immunity for non-conforming who get people shot dead. It will be a BYOG operation. MAGA!!

BYOG = Bring your own gun

Compulsory heterosexuality and gender conformity is so manufactured and 

fragile, that it requires heavy policing and enforcement

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In another exciting development from Texas, the legislature is proposing a law that deputizes citizens and empower them to shoot immigrants crossing the border. The Independent writes:

Republican lawmakers in Texas want to create a state security force to patrol the US-Mexico border that critics have characterized as a "vigilante death squad policy."

Dade Phelan, the Republican speaker of Texas' House of Representatives, told a meeting of the Texas Public Policy Foundation that he plans to introduce a bill that he says will "make national headlines and change the conversation on border security," according to The Intercept.

The bill — House Bill 20 — would allow Texas' Department of Public Safety to hunt, arrest, and deport undocumented migrants.

The group would be comprised of law enforcement officers and civilians under the direction of a governor-selected chief. The members of the group would also be extended immunity from criminal prosecution relating to their actions on the border. They will be directed to "arrest, detain, and deter individuals crossing the border illegally including with the use of non-deadly force."

The group will also apparently be authorized to "use force to repel, arrest, and detain known transnational cartel operatives in the border region."

I've argued here several times that if Democrats get blown out of power and democracy falls, illegal immigration is going to be a key factor in the collapse. 

Defending the border

Who are we?

I’m throwing this together at the last minute, so I hope it makes some sense.  I’m just spit balling here, typing out loud. 🤷‍

A couple of days ago, one of our bloggers was asking about “How to love a country that doesn’t love you back.”  Here, in the U.S., a lot of people are feeling that way these days.  They and their chosen lifestyles are feeling rejected by the country as a whole.  Whether racially, ethnically, sexually, other, they do not feel safe or wanted. Are such people being paranoid, experiencing some kind of perceived indignance?  Or, is such treatment real?

I was lying in bed this morning thinking about those feelings of rejection, trying to figure out the “whys” of it all.  And, there are plenty.  We all know what those reasons are.  We also know it’s complicated.  As populations grow larger and more diverse, the problem gets exacerbated, almost exponentially.

It seems, politically, everyone is at each other’s throats.  For the most part, we’ve “chosen teams” and seemingly will fight to the political death (of a party) over the eventual outcome.  Who will “win” (have the final say-so)?  As a result of that inner-conflict, I have to wonder if America is destined to eventually fail.  And that would be a real shame, because it really once was, in my opinion, “the shining city on the hill,” as proclaimed by Republican President, Ronald Reagan.

Back in my father’s day, America once represented many desirable freedoms that only a handful of countries out there have enjoyed.  Patriotism abounded, and freedom of thought and expression, freedom of the press, freedom of religion or no religion, etc., was a given.  America said you could be all that you could be, and you believed it; that YOU were in charge of your own destiny.  How great was that?!?  Very.

So, what happened?

What do you think?  Is there a problem?  Is this post an overreaction?  Is it spot-on?  Does American idealism need “fixing”?  Is America even broken?  Is it destined to eventually fail?

What’s your take on all of this?  What is the ultimate solution?  Is a solution needed?  What is in America’s future?

Like I did, just go where your mind take you.  And thanks for giving us your perspective.

News bits: Immigration into Canada; Marketing on the people; CN's authoritarian culture war

A NYT article reports on an effort by Canada (2021 pop. 38.3 million) to increase the size of its workforce by increasing immigration:

For the first time in its history, Canada grew by over one million people last year and most of them were newcomers, signaling that the federal government’s ambitious goal of boosting immigration to fill labor shortages is within reach.

Canada’s population growth rate of 2.7 percent in 2022 put it among the world’s 20 fastest-growing nations, ....

The growth comes as the federal government makes a push to address its labor shortage and manage a wave of retiring baby boomers by raising its 2025 immigration targets almost 25 percent.

a United States official familiar with the issue said that the two countries had reached an agreement that would allow Canada to turn back asylum-seekers walking into the country from the south. In exchange, Canada has agreed to provide a new, legal refugee program for 15,000 migrants fleeing violence, persecution and economic devastation in South and Central America, the official said.

Canada enjoys widespread support for immigration and public “attitudes are extremely positive,” said Victoria Esses, the director of the Centre for Research on Migration and Ethnic Relations at Western University in London, Ontario.  

But as Canadians contend with house prices and monthly rents that strain even affluent budgets, some are questioning how much the government’s rosy outlook on immigration is taking into account the other supports those newcomers will need, particularly for housing.

One can hope that this does not lead to the rise of a Canadian radical right movement like immigration has in other countries. 

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Marketers, like some politicians, are chronic liars. The car industry is pushing paid subscriptions for whatever can be turned into a subscription. Most consumers are not buying it. The car industry is telling us consumer demand is driving the whole thing. ArsTechnica writes:

The last decade or so has seen the creeping techification of the auto industry. Executives will tell you the trend is being driven by consumers, starry-eyed at their smartphones and tablets, although the 2018 backup camera law is the main reason there's a display in every new car.

But automakers have been trying to adopt more than just shiny gadgets and iterating software releases. They also want some of that lucrative "recurring revenue" that so pleases tech investors but makes the rest of us feel nickeled and dimed. Now we have some concrete data on just how much car buyers are asking for this stuff, courtesy of a new survey from AutoPacific. The answer is "very little."

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Christian nationalism (CN) is a powerful, aggressive political movement that aims to gather power and wealth for elites, while imposing cruel theocratic Christian Sharia law on everyone except chosen elites. At present, brass knuckles capitalism (BNC) and CN dogmas dominate the radicalized GOP. After the takeover of the Supreme Court by radical Republican CN judges under Trump and the radical CN Republican Party, the Christian theocracy floodgates opened fast and wide. We all know what happened to abortion. It still is happening. 

There is an expanding scope of increasingly virulent CN attacks on transgendered people. For whatever reason, transgendered people enrage and terrify the CN ranks and file. CN elites feed that fear and hate by passing laws to make transgendered sex identity go away, or at least get out of sight and mind. Vice reports:

Trans Children Were the Beginning. The GOP Is Coming for Adults Now

The politicians who’ve repeatedly introduced anti-trans bills under the guise of “protecting children” are routinely going after adults now

A newly-proposed healthcare ban in Florida could effectively ban gender-affirming care for people of all ages, in yet another indication that GOP lawmakers are not only targeting trans youth, but trans adults too.

Florida HB1421 would prohibit insurance providers, including private insurers, from covering gender-affirming care, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket. “A health insurance policy may not provide coverage for gender clinical interventions,” the bill states. Florida previously introduced a bill that will force businesses that pay for gender-affirming care to also pay for detransitions, in a bid to further restrict access to life-saving healthcare for transgender people by disincentivizing employers from covering care in the first place.

So here is a case where radical right BNC hate of government interference dogma appears to be at odds with CN dogma which imposes government interference with the powerful insurance industry. The tension probably will not flare up into anything because a lot or probably most BNC elites are also CN elites. There is a lot of cooperation and overlap between those two anti-democratic, authoritarian powers. That, along with a couple of things like vast wealth and vicious, shameless demagoguery, is a significant part of what make the unholy authoritarian BNC-CN alliance so powerful and terrifying.

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Another trait of the CN-BNC power and wealth movement is its hate of transparency. That too is starting to be reflected in states controlled by the radical right Republican Party. The NYT writes: 

Florida Bill Would Shield DeSantis’s Travel Records

The bill, which was advanced by state senators in both parties, includes a sweeping retroactive clause that would block the release of many records of trips already taken by Mr. DeSantis and other officials, as well as their families and staff members.

Florida has long had expansive public information laws, known as sunshine laws, codified in the State Constitution. They allow the public to gain access to a variety of government records, including criminal files, tax documents and travel logs. These laws have exposed abuses of state resources by Florida officials: In 2003, for example, Jim King, the president of the State Senate, was found to have used a state plane to fly home on the weekends.[1]

So, not only is the authoritarian CN-BNC wealth and power movement anti-democracy and anti-inconvenient truth, it is also pro-corruption. Corruption shielded by unwarranted secrecy is a key marker of authoritarianism. It is always or nearly always a significant part of the tyrant-theocrat package. The rule of thumb is: Where corruption is high, tyranny is high and democracy is low.

Footnote: 

1. In a sign of Democratic Party stupidity, Democrats voted for the secrecy bill in committee. One Democratic legislator was asked why they voted the bill out of committee, they said they thought the bill was only about security for government officials. On reflection one changed their mind and claimed they now oppose the bill.

Honestly, one has got to wonder what is wrong with a lot of Democratic politicians. They still don’t get it. Are they really that stupid or are they complicit and in silent support of getting rid of democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, secularism, pluralism, the Democratic Party, inconvenient truth, transgendered people, etc.?