Politics – Page 24 – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

What’s the Problem with Politically Incorrect AI? These Scores Feel Much Like Most of the News

Politically Incorrect AI? Where’s the problem?

Artificial Intelligence is taking its beatings as it weaves its way into just about anything we think might give us a leg up. Recent misfires from Google and Microsoft after big announcements shed light on just how, to this point, reliably unreliable your AI of choice can be. On one hand it’s entertaining. On the other it’s concerning. If there was a third hand I think it would shake towards irony.

MSNBC ran a recent report highlighting inaccuracy scores when AI chatbots were asked political questions and came up with an average of 27% incorrect responses.

It seems to me that a 27% inaccuracy rate is probably within the ballpark of what we hear on any normal day from traditional news sources, social media, and folks sitting at the counter at the local diner. While there are certainly problems, it feels much like AI is doing what it’s designed to do: spit back the nonsense we feed it and it feeds on.

Frankly, I don’t think humans can design any piece of software that will outstrip our human capacity for ignorance that gobbles up the increasingly large amounts of garbage already available. As long as folks can make money from feeding us the fake alongside the real the churn will continue.

Addendum: After posting this I noticed this article in my feeds:

Google and Microsoft’s AI Chatbots Refuse To Say Who Won The 2020 US Election. I guess not answering is one way to avoid an inaccurate answer.

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. You can also find me on most social media using my name.

The Alito Supreme Court Is Setting Up For A Dobbsian Replay

The Alito Court may be about to repeat the mistakes of 2022.

History may be about to repeat itself. Hopefully it rhymes. Donald Trump is a convicted felon and he and his fluffers are doubling down on their attempts to manufacture a fantasy world that bears no resemblance to the one most people live in. Yet we’re still waiting a decision from the Supreme Court on whether or not U.S. presidents have immunity and thus are kings who can round up and possibly kill political rivals, deport anyone they desire, and generally turn the U.S into a autocracy staffed by criminals.

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While that immunity case has no bearing on the New York case that added 34 convictions to the decaying orange turd’s résumé, it is all tied together because there’s this thing called an election in a few months wherein we’ll decide if America still exists as a democracy.

The Supreme Court hasn’t issued an opinion yet, which in and of itself is an opinion. In delaying action they’ve effectively sided with Trump, allowing any real chance of a trial to be pushed off until after the election. But unfortunately they have to make a decision before they can head off to their yachts for the summer.

What’s intriguing to me is I think the Alito Court is about to make the same political mistake they made in 2022 with their decision removing women’s rights to an abortion in Dobbs vs. Jackson. It was a victory for abortion foes, but energized the electorate enough to wash away any Red Wave in the 2022 elections and others that have followed since. My suspicion is if the Alito Court grants anything resembling immunity to Trump, we’ll see the same sort of rage-fueled energy at the polls in November. There’s enough of that energy already bubbling, but this might (should) blow the lid off the pot.

It’s June, SCOTUS is heading to the end of this term, and an announcement could come any day as the court traditionally rolls out decisions from the current term. The hen-pecked Alito is under fire for flying insurrectionist adjacent flags while blaming his wife, further degrading any sense of integrity the Supreme Court had remaining. I’m thinking (and hints suggest) the decision will be in Trump’s favor thus completely erasing what few bits of integrity still remain on the white board. If they do, it will hopefully ignite the electorate again to finally cancel this unreality show we’ve all been living through.

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

Sunday Morning Reading

Secret octopi, culture wars, convictions, and reading between the letters. In this week’s Sunday Morning Reading.

Life is beginning to settle in after the big move, although there’s parts of it we still can’t figure out which box we packed some of it in. Perhaps we need some sort of A.I. bot to help us figure that out. But we’ll get there. In the meantime here’s some Sunday Morning Reading to share.

Speaking of AI, WTF is AI? That’s the question posed with some attempted answers by Devin Coldeway. It’s a decent primer on the topic. Watch out for secret ocotopi.

A couple of pieces on AI from Nico Grant at the NY Times shows just how unknown and perhaps reliably unreliable this fast evolving tech territory is. First up is Google’s A.I. Search Leaves Publishers Scrambling. Follow that up with Google Rolls Back A.I. Search Feature After Flubs and Flaws. I wonder how AI will spit all of this back at us once articles like these are trained in. I also wonder when publishers will start to standardize whether or not we’ll write it as AI or A.I.

Some think The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam. I happened to agree with Christopher Mims, the author of this piece.

Even in the midst of moving it’s been tough to ignore the political comings, goings and convictions in the news. Check out David Todd MCCarty on Bedtime for Bonzo, Or Nothing To See Here. Even after 34 convictions for the orange dude, this piece holds up.

This piece from July of 2021 by John Pavlovitz resurfaced in my feeds in the last week. The Sadness of Sharing A Country With Trump Supporters is worth a re-read in the wake of this week’s news. Somehow I think it will remain relevant for quite some time.

With all that is going on in the political world, it’s a good idea to always remember there is so much more going on behind the scenes than we ever want to realize. Check out Ken Silverstein’s look behind the curtain in Off Leash: Inside The Secret, Global, Far-Right Group Chat. You might be sorry you did.

I hope The Wonkette is writing you visit often. There’s an excellent serial novel there called The Split by Ellis Weiner and Steve Radlauer. It’s up to Chapter 30. It’s terrific and worth your time.

There’s a new book worth highlighting and highlighted by Laura Colliins-Hughes in the NY Times. James Shapiro’s The Playbook chronicles the history of The Federal Theatre Project. The subtitle teases well: A Story of Theatre, Democracy and The Making Of A Culture War. A great story from back in the day when live theatre was actually something folks believed was dangerous enough that it could change minds.

And to close out this week’s edition check out Natasha MH’s Writing The Unpretentious Prose. Don’t just read the words. Look between the letters.

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

Trump Guilty: Everything Changes Everything Remains The Same

A stench that will never fade.

Yesterday’s unanimous jury verdicts convicting former President, rapist, and con artist Donald Trump changed everything and changed nothing. Beyond the damage to the decaying orange turd’s branding (he should now always be introduced and referred to as “Convicted Felon”) the MAGA political world is still living in their own warped reality. It’s historic and full of histrionics.

We shouldn’t really be surprised. Some say it’s a fear of Trump’s wrath. For the compromised I’m sure that’s true. What’s more dangerous is the larger group who want to use Trump as a bludgeon to beat back and down what they definitiely fear more. They don’t like him, they just want to take advantage of his blustering bumbling to hang on to their plantation mindset. They fear their idea of an America is under threat by too many anyones who don’t look, act and think like them. Make no mistake. That fear is tangible.

It’s led to abandonment on some sort of cosmic political level and defies the laws of political gravity. They’ve abandoned any sense of the virtue that this country’s founders believed was the key ingredient to the idea of America. They’ve abandoned any sense of shame. They’ve abandoned any sense of good sense, common or calculating. They’ve twisted and turned themselves into enough knots that there’s no way to untangle the mess they’ve put us in without cutting off some piece of anatomy they might need later. I’d argue they need thoughts and prayers, but they’ve abandoned and defiled thinking and praying.

The verdict wasn’t predictable. They never are. The MAGA reaction to it was. It’s a script written for bad characters that that have crossed beyond the borders of caricature and cliché into some other definition that the human experience and literature hasn’t been able to label yet.

The bottom line in all of this is that on May 30, 2024 in a courtroom in New York City an asshole got his ass handed to him in a court of law and the reaction to that proves his ass wipers obviously enjoy the smell so much they will still stand in line and fall over themselves to be the first to wade deeper into his offal. It’s a stench that will never fade.

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

The GOP Nominee for President Donald Trump Guilty On 34 Counts.

Donald Trump, the GOP nominee for the office of President of the United States is guilty on all 34 counts in his New York trial. He is now a convicted felon. Certainly he will appeal. Certainly he will wail. But he is now a convicted felon, that under Florida law can’t vote for himself as President.

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This isn’t over. Sentencing will be July 11th. But this is a big day in American hisotry and the history of bunkum artists and conmen. May they all rot in hell.

The image is from the front page of The Drudge Report.

Jamie Raskin Offers Some Hope For SCOTUS Failings But He’ll Have To Check With The Wives First

SCOTUS wives rule the roost while their hen-pecked husbands stumble instead of strutting like the cocks of the walk they pretend to be.

I appreciate and admire Jamie Raskin. I really do. In a NY Times guest essay he offers a glimmer of hope for those of us who think Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas should recuse themselves from decision making over whether or not Trump (or any president) should have any sort of immunity for his/her actions. What he offfers makes sense in a world of honor, in which the rule of law is adhered to, and in most corners of the world not inhabited by MAGA conmen, rapists, and thieves.

Here’s an excerpt:

Of course, Justices Alito and Thomas could choose to recuse themselves — wouldn’t that be nice? But begging them to do the right thing misses a far more effective course of action.

The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.

The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can invoke two powerful textual authorities for this motion: the Constitution of the United States, specifically the due process clause, and the federal statute mandating judicial disqualification for questionable impartiality, 28 U.S.C. Section 455.

It’s a good, principled, and rational proposal. But even if the levers of government can be oiled up enough to work the way he’s proposing, these two guys aren’t going anywhere until Ginny Thomas and Martha-Ann Alito give their obviously hen-pecked spouses the go ahead.

Again, much respect to Mr. Raskin, he deserves it. But we’re well past laws, rules, honor, and traditions on this matter. Unless you count the tradition of wives ruling the roost, while their husbands strut about pretending they do.

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

Sunday Morning Reading

Sunday Morning Reading is back while we continue to unpack. The environs are different, but everything remains the same.

Everything changes and everything remains the same. We’ve completed the Big Move and are now in our new abode. Heads sleep on the same pillows, coffee is sipped from the same mugs, but we’re still living out of boxes and unpack others. That’ll be the state of things for a bit still. That’s life on the home front as everything has changed but remains the same. That seems to be the case in the world in this week’s Sunday Morning Reading.

Kicking things off is an excellent series of articles from The New Republic. What American Fascism Would Look LIke is a collection of essays by a collection of writers, each one worth your time. Start with Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s The Permanent Counterrevolution, but check them each out.

The Roberts Supreme Court continues to show its true colors witih all sorts of flag flyiing controversy from Samuel Alito. Blaming your wife is becoming a thing also. Check out Alitio and Thomas Aren’t Really Jurists. They’re Theocratic Leninists by Michael Tomasky.

There was lots of big news on the Artificial Intelliegence front. There was also not much new in much of that news. LLMs still bung things up. Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI pushed their newest in a race that feels very much like the runners keep tripping over themselves. Nico Grant in the New York Times points to the ongoing snafu in Google’s A.I. Search Errors Cause a Furor Online. At some point this is all going to end up like the streaming entertainment wars. Once all the players are on the field there will be consolidation. There will still be problems. Those new subscription prices will rise. And everyone will complain.

Even so, Steven Levy says It’s Time to Believe The AI Hype.

Naveen Kumar takes a quick look at how AI might be worming its way into live performance in AI Is Getting Theatrical.

David Todd McCarty takes on the contradictions of believing that more than one thing can be true at the same time in An Angel With An Incredible Capacity for Beer.

NatashaMH pens a nifty piece about how the act of writing gives a teacher a window into the mind of her student in Writing The Unpretentious Prose.

And while we were busy moving, Apple released new iPads. Not surprisingly everything changed and everything remained the same. The new software that may or may not yield potential changes is due to roll out in a few weeks, but until it does, those iPads remain behind the software curve while setting the hardware pace. Or at least that’s the accepted line in Apple circles. Federico Viticci penned an excellent summary of what he feels iPads are still missing in Not an iPad Review: Why iPadOS Still Doesn’t Get the Basics Right and Steve Troughton-Smith also put out The iPad Pro Manifesto (2024 Edition ).

Closing things out this weekend as I try to get these old bones moving again to unpack some more boxes, check out Margaret Dean’s A Mutiny of Bones about recalcitrant bones and aging and how it’s not just the joints that stop bending. The one constant as everything changes around and within you, some things just don’t work the same as they once did.

Things We Know

Life sucks when there are things we know and can’t change.

Things we know and it doesn’t appear we can do anything about.

Judge Cannon is on the take.

Our judicial system has been exposed as corrupt beyond repair, much like our political systems. Neither is going to save us from a deranged orange tinged rapist who is willing to blow anything and everything up. Regardless of how the election turns out.

Destroying musical instruments for advertising purposes is apparently a sin against nature.

There are bears in the woods.

There are no answers for the problems in the Middle East. Too many prayers. Not enough thoughts.

Streaming entertainment consolidation continues. Prices will go up, and we’ll see more of the same ads because there’s not enough advertising to go around.

At times Social Media can be anything but.

Moving sucks.

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

NY Times Buries The Lede As It Buries Itself

The Gray Lady is digging her own grave.

“Good media is the Fourth Estate.” says Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times. He continues with “it’s another pillar of democracy.” All well and good. As far as it goes. It doesn’t even come close to going far enough apparently for the folks at the Times. This interview in Semafor certainly proves Kahn and his publisher A. G.Sulzberger are missing the story, the point, and the knife at their own throats.

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Here’s the quote that opens up the window on their self-centered delusion:

It’s also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote. Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair. And there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote. So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.

Again, as far as it goes it makes sense AND what I think many of us believed about how journalism should work in our political system. But that political system doesn’t exist anymore. You have to have some powerful blinders to not see that. Either that or be far too comfortable living within a myth of mostly your own making.

The very political system that guarantees The Times it’s right to think, write, and publish that way is being threatened by someone and a party that aren’t shy about abandoning the constitution that guarantees Kahn the ability to do his job as he sees it.

As I say far too often the media will cover its own funeral until the last shovel of dirt is tossed into the grave. If you think I’m being hyperbolic, you aren’t paying attention.

You can read the entire interview here. Photo by Olkesandr_U

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

Sunday Morning Reading

Some Sunday Morning Reading to share amidst prepping to move.

I’ve been fortunate enough in my life to rub elbows with folks from all corners of life. Those who live the high life, those who live the low, and many in between. One thing those on the high side have in common is that however they achieved their status above it all is their predilection towards self-delusion increases commensurate with the size of their bank accounts. The first few links in this edition of Sunday Morning Reading feature three interesting pieces about life on that side of the tracks.

The Blindness of Elites by Thomas Chatteron Williams takes on Walter Kirn and the empty politics of defiance revealing how much of a luxury it is to make life up as you go along. It also reveals how wacky it is when elites go after others for being elite.

This piece by Elizabeth Mika is from 2016 but it could have been written at any point since, so it’s worth a revisit. The Pivoting: On Narcissistic Collusion of How Evil “just happens” reminds us that we can’t escape black holes, especially those of our own making.

Dan Adler takes on The Life and Times of Fergie Chambers. It’s a strange journey into the life of a rich, radical communist with time on his hands that only money can buy.

David French takes on The Magic Constiutionalism of Donald Trump. There’s nothing magic or constitutionaal about it.

James Jordon has a terrific piece about racism called My Grandfather’s Response to a Racial Slur Shaped My World.

David Todd McCarty says America is in crisis because voters are completely uninformed. I concur. That’s a state that doesn’t get votes in the Electoral College, but it’s one too many prefer to live in. Check out For They Know Not What They Do.

Changing course, last week Natasha MH wrote about dancing. This week she’s ridiing carousels in Riding the Taylor Swift Carousel.

And closing things out this week is Anne Spollen with An Unedited Day In An Ordinary Life. Pro Tip: Every day is unedited. Often we’d be better off trying not to make it make too much sense.