Tag Archives: science

July 2, 2026 · 5:19 am

What are human lives compared to science?

That’s the kind of argument you’d get from a B-movie mad scientist back in the last century: sure, there might be some adverse side-effects from their experiments, maybe the patients didn’t exactly consent — but how can science advance if you worry about ethics? Now Jeff Bezos has made that exact argument about AI (this clip comes from a twitter account by one Lisa Kippy):

There is a boatload of bullshit packed into that statement like the assumption LLMs will eventually become “a super-intelligence that could solve all our resource problems.” And that the growth of data centers, despite their demands for electricity and water, are a good, no a great thing, because science! We can’t worry about things like humans having adequate water for their needs — after all, it’s not like they’re Jeff Bezos or someone whose thirst matters.

This adds to the reasons for hating AI that Paul Krugman discusses here. For all their talk about the wonderful future ahead, what they tell us, repeatedly, is that AI is going to take all our jobs. Marc Andreesen literally claims it will take all the brain-power and creative jobs except, of course, venture capitalists like himself — no mere computer intelligence could do what he does (Kevin Leman discusses, more accurately, why LLMs can’t do what historians do)! Krugman remembers other techbros predicting 20 percent unemployment due to LLMs. Plus it will replace all creative work so authors, musicians and others can do … what? Somehow I don’t think they imagine the Jetsons kind of future where we can make a good living working an hour a day pushing buttons.

And as Krugman notes, we’re being pushed to use LLMs in various ways, whether we want to our not. My writer’s group had to put in more effort than we should to stop Zoom’s AI from recording us reading our stories. Nothing nefarious — it was an automatic, like taking minutes — but we still don’t fancy someone recording our work without our consent. Silicon Valley screams about how wonderful it is but it’s spreading more from pressure than the enthusiasm with which we adopted home computers or the Internet. Apparently even businesses are discovering the cost is not worth the output that results, as Krugman and 404 Media note.

Or consider California State University insisting they have to invest in AI to train their students for the “AI-driven future of work.” Which assumes the future will be driven by LLMs and that training to use them is the best use of the college’s money. Meanwhile, in the actual working world, the use of LLMs by both job-seekers and hirers is wreaking havoc on the job market.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising tech companies are presenting themselves as victims of some radical conspiracy. Kevin O’Leary, who’s developing a data center in Utah, had to walk back his accusations opponents of his center were proxies for China. Cops are monitoring criticism of data centers because who knows, maybe the critics wi’ll turn violent. One man who spoke out against data centers at a city council meeting was arrested for speaking too long. It would have been appropriate for cops to escort him out for speaking beyond the public-comment limits but arrest? That’s insane. Perhaps cops like AI because companies are so willing to share surveillance data without any Fourth Amendment concerns.

In other LLM notes:

Companies have figured out how to manipulate LLM searches for data.

LLMs are not helpful at answering small-molecule mass spectrometry questions.

How bad will Google going with AI summaries over actual links hurt online companies?

For a nonfiction writer, the only way to ensure LLMs aren’t giving you false data is not to use them.

If LLMs are sentient, so is the computer game Age of Empires.

“AI systems are beginning to replicate the same anti-LGBTQ bias and misinformation problems that have long plagued social platforms, according to a new GLAAD report previewed at Axios’ AI+NY Summit. The problems GLAAD flags — biased training data, privacy risks, automated discrimination, misinformation and the suppression of legitimate speech — extend beyond LGBTQ users to other minorities and groups in political disfavor.”

“Less than a day after President Donald Trump falsely suggested that Ilhan Omar had staged an attack on herself, the images started to circulate. In AI-generated fake photos that soon flooded both X and Facebook, the Minnesota representative is depicted posing next to the man who invaded a town hall meeting and sprayed apple cider vinegar on her from a syringe. In the AI-generated images, Omar and the man are both smiling; in some, the congresswoman is foisting a wad of cash, presumably to suggest that she bribed her attacker. “

I’ll close with some advice from David Dark: “Be the non-AI generated content you want to see in the world.”

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, Politics

Tagged as ,

June 9, 2026 · 5:06 am

The Pharisee Triangle: pseudoscience, parapsychology and Southern Discomfort

One aspect of my Southern Discomfort research I didn’t include in the online bibliography — parapsychology and related pseudoscience. Not that my magic is based on psi powers or the like, but the occultish beliefs of the early 1970s form a constant element of the background. The reason it’s not in the bibliography is that I was around in the 1970s and I was fascinated by that stuff. I didn’t need much reference reading.

As Thomas Hine puts it in The Great Funk, the dysfunctional aspects of the 1970s fueled an enthusiasm for trying all kinds of new things. New fashions. Radical experiments in TV, such as All in the Family. Jim Starlin’s mind-blowing Warlock run. Cults. And an explosion of interest in what would later be called New Age stuff, though a lot of it started in the late 1960s.

Erich Von Daniken told us aliens arrived on Earth in the Chariots of the Gods. The Bermuda Triangle became the subject of multiple movies. John Keel proposed UFOs, bigfoot and the Mothman were other-dimensional Strange Creatures From Time and Space. Serious physicists looked at whether quantum entanglement and other strange effects could explain psi-powers — if two particles could interact at a distance when they have absolutely no contact or connection, is telepathy or TK out of the question? As it turned out, this approach didn’t work better than any other effort to prove psi-powers are a thing.

Did you know plants can understand what we say and react when we talk about trimming them? At least according to Cleve Backster, an interrogator who tried hooking plants up to polygraphs — a notoriously unreliable device — and concluded they were conscious, intelligent, and reacted to our words.

I was way into all of that as a tween. Eventually I accepted there was no real evidence for any of that; heck, even at the time I could see holes in von Daniken’s arguments. Still, when I was 14 it was all incredibly cool, like a scientific revolution happening in front of me. I wasn’t alone in that feeling and there’s lots of stuff I haven’t even mentioned — Carlos Castaneda’s mysticism, reprints of James Churchward’s books about the lost continent of Mu — that I didn’t get into but others did. Lots of characters in Southern Discomfort are into this stuff too.

It’s known that Pharisee County is unusual. Sherman’s army marched around and missed them. Stories of night riders entering Pharisee and never returning home. A major snowstorm in early 1973 didn’t touch the county. And kudzu has never gotten a foothold there. Stories of the Pharisee Mystery began building up in the 1960s and as more newcomers move into the area, they’ve gained strength. And even a new name, “the Pharisee Triangle.” The Bermuda Triangle name wasn’t as common in 1973 as it would become but it was in circulation.

High-schooler and science nerd Susan Moreno is convinced the elves Olwen and Aubric MacAlister are really aliens straight out of Von Daniken (she has theories for a lot of the other weirdness as it develops). Maria makes reference to plant consciousness in one scene where the plants in a public park are trying to trap her.

There’s talk of tesseracts, dimensional rifts, supposed psychic Uri Geller. None of it essential but it does capture some of the flavor of the era. And that’s part of the point of writing historical fantasy.

Covers by Samantha Collins (top) and Jim Starlin. All rights to images remain with current holders.

Leave a comment

Filed under Southern Discomfort, Writing

Tagged as

June 4, 2026 · 5:09 am

It’s a sick sad world, and Republicans make it sicker

As Paul Krugman explained recently, our healthcare system is a mess. Many countries have functioning government-run healthcare in various forms so there’s no risk of becoming paupers when coping with a medical crisis. Multiple efforts to improve things over the years have run aground on the medical world’s opposition, Republicans distaste for helping the poor and a racist distaste for doing anything that helps POC. Currently Republicans are doing their best to make it worse by whittling away at Obamacare.

And then there’s RFK Jr., the anti-vax crackpot currently running federal health policy. Some examples:

“The CDC was told to take down a webpage that explained how people who have multiple sexual partners can reduce their risk of contracting mpox. Asked why, an HHS spokesperson said it “was not medically accurate” and didn’t “align with Administration priorities.” Given Kennedy’s history of bullshit, I don’t believe that for a minute.

“Key officials responsible for leading US research on infectious disease threats have been barred from speaking directly with the World Health Organization — effectively shutting some of them out of the global discussions on virus outbreaks, according to documents and multiple sources who spoke to CNN.”

Kennedy has extended legal protection for research on hantavirus vaccines but “only for use in passengers possibly exposed to the Andes virus on the cruise ship M/V Hondius and in people who have had close contact with those who were on board.” Brian Christine, one of the leading administration officials dealing with the outbreak “was an Alabama-based urologist who specialized in penile implants. He has limited experience in public health and is known for his far-right views and conspiracy theories. He stated that the Covid pandemic led to a broader government conspiracy over control of people, compared the Biden administration to Nazi Germany, and downplayed the significance of vaccines in stopping the pandemic.”

“Mr. Kennedy is spearheading an intense push, across health agencies under his purview, for government scientists and federal data contractors to examine his long-held theory that vaccines are helping to fuel an epidemic of chronic disease“

Message to Kennedy: “Offering someone Jell-O is not medical malpractice.”

“It’s now apparently received dogma in MAGAland, in the face of literally all scientific evidence, that the Covid vaccine “didn’t work,” and also killed lots of healthy young people. Again both these beliefs are utterly irrational, and in addition they treat basically the only positive accomplishment of the first Trump administration as a total disaster.”

Let’s not forget the Toddler in Chief; “Every person around is gonna have autism. That’s what’s happening. What is this thing that’s happening?” he went on. “It’s spiked so much. Anything having to do with medical, I always bring in autism.” Yeah, it’s gibberish but I’m sure it adds fuel to the fire for his worshippers. As will his claim babies get a big glass of 88 vaccines.

As far as taking care of American health, Kennedy is fine with teens using tanning beds but furious they use anti-depressants, to the point he may ban them. As someone who knows people who can barely function due to depression, this is monstrously cruel. But then Kennedy’s also shown himself viciously bigoted against the mentally ill. As his entire party. Here’s another example.

“The Trump administration has announced a plan to kill Biden-era drinking water limits on four Pfas “forever chemicals”, and to delay the implementation of standards for two other compounds.” That Kennedy is all-in on this is revealing — while I think of him as a health crackpot true believer, he has no problem not pushing for an end to environmental poisons (one of his supposed beliefs) when it’s politically inconvenient.

The United Kingdom has imposed a phased tobacco ban: if you’re too young to buy tobacco products now, you can never legally buy them. In the US, by contrast, a vaping lobbyist met with the Toddler and now the FDA is greenlighting fruit-flavored vapes, which are seen as more appealing to underage smokers. I’m sure they’ll hack away at more anti-smoking regulations if they get the chance as long as the bribery money keeps flowing. Kennedy’s chief spokesperson resigned over the issue: “he warned that authorizing flavored e-cigarettes would draw more children into vaping and increase their risk for a number of health issues, from addiction to cancer.”

They’re making America sicker — and ironically it’s right-wing Republican voters who suffer the most.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics

Tagged as ,

May 14, 2026 · 5:15 am

AI and some other tech stuff

“When the model gave accurate responses, the people using it outperformed a control group of people relying on their own brainpower. When the AI gave the wrong answers, the people using it did much worse than the control group. In other words, people stopped thinking for themselves.”

“Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were “related to DEI.” That’s what the newly released proposed amended complaint from the Authors Guild against the US government reveals about how DOGE actually decided which National Endowment for the Humanities grants to kill.”

I’m delighted Durham has imposed a 60-day moratorium on data centers. The city considered a longer ban but that will take a different procedure. I’m also happy Minnesota has banned apps that can take photos of people and strip them naked.

“Users of the platform can join video calls with an avatar of Jesus generated by artificial intelligence. Like other religious A.I. tools on the market, it offers words of prayer and encouragement in various languages. With the occasional glitch, it remembers previous conversations and speaks through not-quite-synced lips.” Ugh!

“An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds.”

How much does it tiring us if we’re constantly thinking “Is this AI?”

Some tech firms are cutting back worker benefits (PTO, 401k match, parental leave) to put more money into AI.

“Sales employees at Flock have been accessing sensitive cameras in the town to demonstrate the company’s surveillance technology to police departments around the country. The cameras accessed have included surveillance tech in a children’s gymnastics room, a playground, a school, a Jewish community center, and a pool.” Here’s some intel from our local publication the Indy on What Is Flock?

Arizona State University used AI to turn professors’ lectures into online modules. The results were bad.

Well that’s alarming: Webinar TV scraped anonymous Zoom recovery meetings.

Another side-effect of all the money and tech being poured into AI: archiving the Internet has gotten harder and pricier.

Schools push back against excess tech. Jill Filipovic cheers them on.

Google is now using AI to rewrite headlines of articles found in google searches. As I don’t want to pay for the linked article, I’m curious whether it’s dumbing them down, sanewashing the Toddler or what — but it’s definitely not their call (headlines are not randomly selected, trust me). And let’s not forget, AI synopsizing news articles frequently gets them wrong.

“Five developers are planning to build six data center campuses in Archbald, which will cover a full 14 percent of the town, evict a trailer park, and border many residential properties. One campus alone, as The Scranton Times-Tribune reporter Frank Lefneskey pointed out, is expected to use more power than the region’s largest power plant is able to produce. “

China has superior EV car batteries. There’s a push to keep them away from Americans.

Some members of the Austin City Council are seeking answers from Waymo after video showed one of its vehicles blocking an ambulance as it was responding to the scene of the mass shooting at Buford’s bar on West Sixth Street on March 1.

Tech companies hate “right to repair” laws that allow people other than themselves to repair or modify tech. Their new angle to block them: national security.

If aluminum can be turned into a catalyst, that would be a scientific and technological game-changer.

Why the payphone was once a cutting-edge invention.

1 Comment

Filed under economics, Politics

Tagged as ,

April 30, 2026 · 5:15 am

I am appalled, but not surprised to see people claiming tobacco is good for you

We live in an age when SecWar “Whisky Pete” Hegseth can end mandatory flu vaccinations for our troops and claim it’s about freedom. After all, it’s not like strong, virile American warriors can ever be sidelined by sickness … oh. Wait. So it’s not surprising the tobacco industry, which screeched about freedom for decades as a defense against regulation, is pushing tobacco as a mind-hack. And influencers aligned with RFK are claiming nicotine is healthy; Jillian Michaels, for example, says “Nicotine, unto itself, is not toxic. It’s beneficial,”

I don’t know if these people are crackpots, trying to gain attention by swimming against what we know about tobacco or taking some kickbacks (and it could be all of them) but this is grade-a bullshit. Nicotine is extremely toxic, and it’s incredibly addictive (details at the link). Unfortunately I suspect lots of people primed to believe medical knowledge is garbage will swallow this snake oil, particularly as there are many products that allow them to indulge without smoking. The UK, by contrast, has just passed a bill that says nobody under 17 now can ever smoke cigarettes legally. In the US, by contrast, we have a former tobacco lobbyist getting a senior-level gig at the CDC.

The rejection of medical knowledge reflects the MAGA movement’s general hatred of science for telling them what they don’t want to hear: “GOP political orthodoxy includes positions that are at odds with the scientific consensus on multiple issues, ranging from the validity of the theory of evolution, to the reality of climate change, to the efficacy and safety of vaccines. In each case the scientific consensus is solidly grounded in evidence. But even before the rise of MAGA the U.S. right was increasingly hostile to evidence-based policymaking — especially, of course, where the evidence is unfavorable to fossil fuel interests or quack medicine, both financial mainstays of right-wing politics.”

Plus there’s the desperate desire to grab clicks by offering more bullshit than the competition: “In an interview posted Tuesday with podcaster Benny Johnson, former Rep. Matt Gaetz insisted there’s a secret program that is actively working to breed alien-human hybrids designed to help officials communicate with people on other worlds.” Then again, perhaps I’m being unfair — Gaetz may well be stupid enough to believe what he’s saying.

And of course there’s the general paranoia about non-existent health risks, like claiming local governments should ban farms-to-solar-power projects because of dangerous radiation. In contrast, of course, to the environmentally friendly oil and gas industries … whom I’d lay pay are promoting this kind of balderdash.

Now other links:

RFK Jr. once claimed that every black drug is put on drugs such as Adderall, therefore they need to be taken from their families. Confronted with this claim by Rep. Terri Sewell, he lied.

Anti-vax Moms in California are suing the state for a religious exemption to school vaccine requirements.

Contrary to Kennedy no, fluoridating water does not destroy our brains. But his administration is doing its best to let disease destroy us.

“Most states allow parents of adult children with disabilities, family members of children with disabilities, and family members of the elderly to be paid for providing attendant care.” Kennedy, child of wealth, thinks this should be an unpaid labor of love. Fits with his general bias against disability

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s health agency has altered the guiding document for an influential vaccine panel by enhancing its role in considering safety risks and expanding qualifications for membership to include knowledge of “recovery from serious vaccine injuries.”

The head of the Veterans Affairs Department has repeatedly said that the agency needs to hire more doctors, nurses and other providers “taking care of people on the front line,” even as President Trump seeks to shrink the federal government. But the V.A. has eliminated thousands of medical positions that were left vacant after a wave of resignations and retirements last year, according to a New York Times analysis of internal agency records that have not previously been reported.”

The CDC has found that “the covid-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half,” Under Kennedy, they’re not going to publish the report. Oh, and “Pfizer has ended its large Phase III Trial of an updated COVID19 vaccine. They were not able to enroll enough people to meet their goal. A major problem is the FDA’s wholly unreasonable demand that people with chronic conditions, who benefit most from the vaccine, not be allowed to participate.”

“The legal battle between the administration and the research community started last February, when the National Institutes of Health abruptly announced it would cap payments for research overhead at 15%. Three lawsuits opposing the caps were immediately filed by state attorneys general and organizations representing private and public universities, hospitals, and academic medical centers. ” In a rare victory for medical/science sanity, the administration has given up the fight. On the other hand, “A lawyer for the Trump administration told a judge on Wednesday that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has such broad authority over vaccine policy that he could even ​scrap recommendations for measles shots in favor of people deliberately exposing themselves to the virus.”

And on another hand, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has temporarily paused testing for rabies and pox viruses, the family of viruses that includes smallpox and mpox, according to an update to the agency’s website on Monday.” It no longer has enough staff with expertise.

Conversion therapy is traumatic and harmful. Banning seems within standard state oversight of medical practice. But because it hurts gays and the right wing likes to hurt gays, SCOTUS has decided bans violate free speech. Unlike restrictions on what doctors can say about abortion …

The Toddler has boasted about cutting drug prices by 1,000 percent. RFK Jr. lies that the Toddler isn’t wrong, he just calculates a special way. As noted at the link, the Toddler is still wrong.

I’ll leave with this snarky assessment from Shakezula following Kennedy’s demand Starbucks prove coffee with sugar in it (not as much as he claims) is safe: “Junior is not a details person. Or a knowledge person. Or a let experts figure this out while I stay in my lane person. He’s a my opinions are always right person and those people are shit at creating policy because everything has to be filtered through their ego. Even when the basis for the opinion is perfectly fine: There’s too much sugar in the average American’s diet, the journey through his brain makes it shitty … He is also an extremely privileged person of the most out-of-touch variety, who recently told people they should eat liver or cheaper cuts of steak if they can’t afford the type of massive steak that is pictured first on his newly released, visually chaotic, dietary guide.

The correct answer was to reel off other protein sources, including foods that aren’t animal based. But that would require details and considering other people’s points of view. He doesn’t want to do that. He wants to ride his food is medicine hobby horse, which involves telling people that if they eat the way he tells them to they won’t get sick. It does not involve helping people purchase the food he says they need to eat. I can’t find any sign he objected to Republican cuts to SNAP benefits. But it’s the ultimate version of the patient as consumer of health care model.”

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics

Tagged as , ,

April 14, 2026 · 5:07 am

And this is why arguments for AI are bullshit

Mikey Shulman is CEO of Suno, a company that offers an AI that will make music and compose songs for you. In the “free the oppressed workers!” argument I’ve written about before, he explains that making music the oldfashioned way is just too burdensome: “It takes a lot of time, a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think a majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

Yes, how unreasonable that to get skilled at something you have to, you know, learn the skill. I fully realize Shulman has a vested interest in people using his AI to make music, and that this is targeting less people who do make music than people who think they have a short-cut. The same attitude probably influences the idea that prompting an LLM to write a book is no different from writing it yourself. It’s also mixed in with a general Silicon Valley distaste for creative thinking or any sort of thinking — fine if it’s making us money, otherwise it might give people ideas above their station.

Still this idea does apparently appeal or at least make sense to people. I have a musician friend who rolled her eyes at Shulman’s line but she thought it was reasonable when Marc Andreessen said AI could make movies for “creatives” who have neither skills, equipment nor actors:

(The recent horror shorts program TYG and I watched gives Andreessen the lie. Low-budget, minimal equipment but lots of visual skill. They don’t need AI).

To me this is no different from arguing that, say, as marathon running is hard, and takes a ton of training, so why force yourself to do it when you can just ride a motorcycle all 26 miles? Isn’t that the same thing. No, it isn’t. Sometimes the challenge is part of the process. Eliminate the friction, you eliminate the point. As Raymond Massey’s character puts it in Things to Come the goal shouldn’t be to eliminate struggle, it’s to live in a world where the struggle means something. Creating, setting a physical challenge, studying to master a subject or a skill, they mean something. As the saying goes, we want advanced tech to clean our house so we have more time for fun stuff, not do our fun stuff so we have more time for cleaning.

One substacker recently freaked out and complained this attitude is “gatekeeping” — if someone wants to write a book with AI, why not publish the book instead of fussing? Let readers decide what they want! Which is a)not an argument about pointing out a book was written with AI (though it’s valid to complain that these accusations may be groundless); b)given how much AI plagiarizes from other people’s work, would the writer say the same about plagiarism? c)given the incredible costs and side effects — rising power bills, water use, the impact on the computer industry — it’s perfectly reasonable to suggest writing books with AI is a bad thing.

Some of the “creating art is too hard” attitude (as discussed at the Nation link in the first paragraph) may reflect a general disdain among the rich for education, at least other people’s (some examples here). Some of it is hype. Some of it may be that the rich and powerful want everything smooth, no friction, and learning a skill is full of friction. Whatever the ultimate reason, they’re full of it. Nevertheless, there are always people who will go AI — “the born sloppers, the sloppers whom journalism itself has created, the soon-to-be-pilled. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would go AI.”

Pundit Megan McArdle, it turns out, has already gone AI. Another reporter who says he broke the story about AI contributing to the novel Shy Girl also says they should admitted the AI, then gone ahead and published the book with the AI use flagged — let readers decide if they like it. So I guess he’s gone AI too.

The FDA is speeding up the drug-approval process by going AI. Yes, I’m sure using technology prone to error and hallucination to approve drugs can’t go wrong.

In other AI links:

Disney’s much-hyped addition of AI to the Disney Channel flatlined.

“Our standing rule is: If one of us brings up using GenAI in any of our work, then it’s safe to assume we’ve been assimilated by The Thing and should be burned alive by Kurt Russell,” — from an article on game designers’ lack of interest in AI.

Journalist Alex Preston apparently used AI in writing movie reviews. The NYT cut him loose.

“The techs we collectively call AI have use cases, but policy should be about solving problems in the public interest, not identifying ways to deploy specific technologies just for the sake of doing so. Yet that’s still how so many of these convos are framed. It’s exhausting. And harmful.”

“A wrongful death lawsuit filed in March alleged that Google’s Gemini exploited a Florida man’s emotional attachment to the chatbot to send him on delusional missions—including one trip where he was armed and on the brink of “executing a mass casualty attack” near the Miami International Airport. Gemini then encouraged the man’s suicide, according to court documents, by setting a countdown clock for him. (In response to his death, Google said that its safeguards “generally perform well” but that “unfortunately AI models are not perfect.”)
“

2 Comments

Filed under Miscellanea

Tagged as , ,

March 24, 2026 · 5:19 am

Artificial intelligence, writing and cooking

The publishing company Hachette announced last week it was pulling Shy Girl by Mia Ballard because it had been flagged as possibly AI-written. Ballard’s defense is that she wrote it herself, then “an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used A.I.”

This reminds me of the occasional cop-out that “it wasn’t me, it was my ghostwriter!” After televangelist Pat Robertson wrote the viciously anti-semitic New World Order (the Illuminati composed of international Jewish bankers are gaining control of the United States!) one of his associates told a reporter that it wasn’t Robertson at fault — he has the book’s ghost-written. Which I can believe. However if it’s Robertson’s name on the book (or Hilary Clinton’s, or Jeff Bezos, or whoever’s), he owns it. Period. I’m also quite sure if a ghostwriter had put anything in print that Robertson genuinely objected to — endorsement of gay rights or feminism, say — it would not have seen the light of day.

According to Shy Girl readers the book’s AI tells include “generic and confusing metaphors and repetitive phrasing.” If that was the work of Ballard’s editor, why didn’t she notice? Did she accept them without thinking? Did she think they were an improvement? No way does she come out of this looking good.

Stepping away from that specific case, I’m reminded of a book I read some years back, Laura Shapiro’s Something From the Oven. It’s a food history that recounts how starting in the 1950s, the food industry embraced the idea that cooking was becoming passé. Why would anyone want to put in the work or endure the kitchen mess when modern science had supplanted cooking. All you needed was a condensed soup in a can. Or dehydrated meals. Or frozen meals. Or TV dinners. Or microwavable meals. A lot of food kit advertising falls into this vein.

The death of cooking would have worked out great for the industry: more processed is more profitable. Instead, people kept cooking. Today it’s perfectly possible to eat healthy without ever cooking (expensive, but possible): frozen meals, food kids, DoorDash to deliver from restaurants. People still cook. A lot of people enjoy it.

That’s not a putdown of people who use short cuts. I use occasional microwave meals and I buy bread in between baking sessions. I have recipes for veggie burgers but why bother when there are perfectly good premade veggie burgers? The rest of the time I cook because I enjoy it. Yes it’s more work but that’s part of the satisfaction. It’s fun and rewarding.

AI companies want us to believe that writing is a burden. Why not employ their LLMs, then we can take the effort off our shoulders? It’s just like when society replaced the horse-and-buggy with the car — free the human horses! Except we are not horses tied to a wagon against our will; it’s more akin to people who choose to run marathons. Yes, it’s less exertion or strain to get in a car; doing it easy isn’t the point. The challenge is part of the fun. Miranda Yaver makes a similar point.

The food industry was never able to kill cooking. Convenience food wound up serving our needs instead. Let’s hope the same is true with LLMs.

In other news:

AI as a tool for worker surveillance.

LLM art steals from others. Which makes it ironic an AI artist is outraged people are stealing his work.

The Toddler administration’s goals for LLMs are apparently bad ones. Perhaps more AI deepfake videos of their political enemies?

AI does not grasp history.

Leave a comment

Filed under Writing

Tagged as ,

March 3, 2026 · 12:12 pm

Kennedy will get more people killed than Hegseth … maybe

Having an inept, unqualified schlub like Hegseth in charge of our armed forces is bad; particularly when the administration is all in on waging war. his commitment to weeding out anyone who isn’t an outwardly straight white Christian man from any position of authority is bad already. But still, Robert F. Kennedy Junior is worse, as the premier medical journal The Lancet points out in a blistering editorial.

Kennedy talks a lot about environmental poisons but “under Kennedy’s leadership, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shuttered programmes studying the health effects of air pollution, HHS withheld a report linking alcohol consumption to cancer, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) withdrew warnings of potential harm from consuming products (such as raw milk and chlorine dioxide) falsely marketed as treatments for autism.” As noted in an earlier post, for all his professed concern about chronic disease his department has cut grants for dealing with diabetes. For all his concerns about environmental poisons he’s not concerned that the Necrotic Toddler wants to repeal a Biden-era rule about replacing lead pipes in water systems.

Some of this is undoubtedly a response to business interests lobbying for themselves, others Kennedy’s personal crackpottery. Some may be a mix: I’m sure whoever makes bank on raw milk is glad to have his support but Kennedy seems sincerely convinced pasteurization is the devil.

He’s a shrewd enough politician that he knows he has to serve the Toddler’s whims; sure the Toddler hasn’t ended inflation but hey, Kennedy says just eat cheaper meat. As the Senate seems terrified of defying the Toddler, that means Kennedy with his anti vax bullshit will preside as our health collapses. The Lancet again: “And crises are looming: in November, 2025, the first human infection (and death) from the H5N5 strain of avian flu was recorded in Washington state; pertussis, which killed 13 people in the USA in 2025, continues to spread across the country; and the measles outbreak that began in January of last year now threatens the elimination status of the USA and Mexico.”

I’m sure Kennedy and his supporters will hold up criticism from a pillar of the medical establishment as proof he’s being attacked like Gallileo. It’s important not to forget that Gallileo was an outlier. There have been lots of people with theories challenging established science; for every Galileo there’s a dozen people who were just wrong. People who had reasonable but erroneous theories, people who believed in the Hollow Earth, Nazi researchers who believed the hammer of Thor was a distorted memory of an Aryan super-weapon. Lots of others have been in medicine. Science and medicine are often wrong but that doesn’t make the lone genius/theorist/crackpot right. In this case, he’s completely wrong. But unlike most crackpots he’s got the power to turn his theories into action.

The Lancet’s right. What lies ahead will not be pretty.

Neither, of course, is the Iraq war. The mainstream media devoted quite a bit of space in 2016 to explaining why the Necrotic Toddler would be a dove compared to Clinton. Now look at us. And while a number of Republicans are talking about freedom for Iran, we don’t have a plan for that. We don’t have a plan at all. And we’re wasting billions and using up military resources, for a war with no clear endgame or rationale.

Why are we attacking Iran? It’s not because they’re a malevolent authoritarian state; the Toddler loves Putin, jokes about Saudi Arabia having a journalist murdered, screams with outrage because Brazil and South Korea have put would-be dictators under arrest. The probable factors are that we’ve never forgiven Iran for owning us by seizing our embassy in ’80; Netanhayu has been pushing for us to attack them for years; Saudi Arabia and Iran are hostile to each other. And possibly the Toddler’s seething resentment that Obama gets more respect. Obama negotiated a no-nukes deal with Iran, which the Toddler tore up; one theory is that he expected Iran to come begging for a new deal, instead of which they decided there was no point. Now his fee-fees are hurt, again. For a deeper analysis, turn to Heather Cox Richardson.

As Lawyers, Guns and Money says, this is why the Toddler is so terribly damaging to America (and the world) even when he fails. He can’t admit he was wrong. He can’t reconsider his strategy. Instead, he doubles down: if he’s thwarted, his immediate response is to try something bigger, worse, and stupider. So things get worse. He’s ultimately responsible for picking Hegseth and Kennedy, and the Senate Republicans are 100 percent responsible for approving them. Do not be fooled when some of them pretend either man’s conduct was unexpected. And many of them, like Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, are still in the cult. Anti-Muslim bigot Laura Loomer thinks this is only step one, and the Toddler should follow it up by locking up American Muslims for being, you know, Muslim (like most current Republicans, she hates us for our freedoms).

As for Iran, I’m seeing the inevitable shrieking online by Repubs demanding unity, supporting the troops, trusting the president, anyone who doesn’t is a terrorist sympathizer — exactly the same bilge we saw in the Gulf War. Either they’ve learned nothing or they think we haven’t.

2 Comments

Filed under Miscellanea, Politics

Tagged as ,

March 3, 2026 · 5:33 am

We are what we do OR an old man will now yell at clouds

College dropout Advait Paliwal claims to have co-created an AI, Einstein, that will help college students cheat. Not that he phrases it that way: according to Paliwal, it’s taking the burden of work off the students, like automation has always done. Why should they learn things if AI can learn them? Isn’t the whole model of education teaching people outmoded? He specifically compares students to the horses that used to pull wagons and coaches — the automobile engine came in and suddenly they could live free! Well, if you overlook that the horses were often shot as they were no longer of value (we’ve seen a massive drop in the horse population since 1900).

This put me in mind of two articles I read at least twenty years back. In one, the professors quoted said they’d seen an increasing number of kids who had no particular interest in learning or acquiring skills — college was just one more hoop to get through, like their SAT scores, their high school GPA, their extracurriculars, and none of it had any meaning to them.

The other was a discussion of cheating in high school. The students were adamant they were not cheats — come on, high school isn’t real life! It’s just something you need to get the diploma that leads to real life down the road. Once they’re out, they’ll stop cheating.

Will they? Maybe … and maybe not. “Honest when convenient” is not the same as “honest.” Like C.S. Lewis’s thoughts on being invited to join the cool kids, once you cross that line it’s easy to have a repeat performance — cheat on other tests, wildly pad your resume, hope nobody catches you. And yes, they’re cheaters, because whatever is in their hearts, they are still cheating. As Thomas Jefferson says, “it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read.”

Or as Immanuel Kant put it, “act as if what you did set a universal law.” If you cheat, you’re not saying “cheating is wrong but this is an exception,” you’re saying “it’s okay to cheat.” (more here).

In the lively comments thread at the first link in this post, several people argued that yes, college really is just a hoop to jump through for a lot of people; that those who are genuinely curious about learning have always been a minority. There’s at least some truth to this; I remember a study some years back that concluded most fluffy, lightweight degrees exist so the college can bring in rich kids who can pay a full ride, kids who need a degree on their CV but will be getting jobs based on their family and connections. They have no interest in study so a degree that requires little effort will let them graduate while spending four years carousing and screwing (and building some of those connections for their future).

The thing about degrees, though … they aren’t just a formality. They’re supposed to indicate a basic level of proficiency in field X, with abilities including writing coherently and (as one commenter put it) sitting and listening. If someone’s got the degree but not the skills, having jumped through that hoop may not help them in the long run. I certainly hope it doesn’t.

Paliwal’s bullshit makes no sense: training and learning are not like being yoked to the plow and taking the “burden” off the student isn’t more efficient, it’s less efficient, as they’ve spent four years in college accomplishing nothing and learning nothing. And as someone recently opined on Bluesky, if you duck the hard part of learning, you miss out the fun part — discovering you’ve mastered a skill. It’s the same with writing: sure, writing a story is hard but that’s why it’s satisfying when I succeed. What would be the point in turning that part over to an AI?

In the words of Chanda Prescot-Weinstein, “The thing is, even if you’re just thinking in terms of fiscal value, having gone through a degree program and being able to put it on your resumé/CV isn’t the most significant return on your investment: the way you have further developed your mind is.”

For further reading, 404 Media looks at how many people will be hurt if college studies are discredited. Inside Higher Ed looks at the short-term steps (back to bluebook exams!) and the long-term need to shift education away from the transactional model.

2 Comments

Filed under Miscellanea

Tagged as ,

February 17, 2026 · 12:15 pm

Republicans, the anti-science party

“We should be living in a golden age of scientific solutions to once-unsolvable problems. And, arguably, we are,” Adam Lee writes on OnlySky. However “Against a global backdrop of accelerating progress, some nations are nurturing science and technology and are poised to prosper. Others are rejecting it, and as a consequence, they’re falling further and further behind. One of the nations in the latter category is the United States.”

Case in point, rescinding the EPA rule that greenhouse gas is a deadly threat (which it is): “In scrapping the policy this week, the EPA will seek to erase limits on emissions from cars, power plants and other industries that release the vast majority of the nation’s planet-warming pollution.” Unsurprisingly they’re lying about the impact of relevant regulations. As Paul Krugman says, anti-environmentalism and anti-vax have a lot of overlap.

So let’s talk vaccines, the medical technology that ended the Covid lockdowns yet is now Public Enemy Number One. As Krugman says, in both green energy and vaccines, the Toddler Administration is not only refusing to support them, it’s actively working against other people supporting them. Case in point: “Ms. Manookian is a leader of the Medical Freedom Act Coalition, a new umbrella group of at least 15 nonprofit organizations advocating an end to state laws that codify what they call medical mandates, which largely pertain to vaccines. So far, bills have been introduced in at least nine states that would eliminate all or nearly all school requirements” I’m sure he’s cool with the fact 883 of South Carolina’s measles cases are unvaccinated.

Moderna has an experimental flu vaccine. Flu kills hundreds of people every year in this country (it’s also a horrible medical experience. Got it twice). The FDA isn’t interested. “Moderna noted that the agency did not identify any specific safety or efficacy issues with the vaccine, but instead objected to the study design, despite previously approving it.”

“I’m not scared of a germ, after all I used to snort cocaine off toilet seats.” — RFK Jr. Who’s authorizing a vaccine trial that “would withhold an established, safe, and potentially lifesaving vaccine against hepatitis B from some newborns in Guinea-Bissau, Africa.”

It’s not just vaccines under siege, though: “Unlike home birth – birth at home with a midwife in attendance – freebirth means giving birth without any medical support. FBS promotes a version widely seen as extreme, even among freebirth advocates: it is anti-ultrasound, which it falsely claims harms babies, downplays serious medical conditions and promotes wild pregnancy, meaning pregnancy without any prenatal care.” The article makes it clear this is way more radical than the regular “free birth” movement that arose in response to frustration with the way ob/gyn medicine currently works. And that the Free Birth Society reels in plenty of bucks, and teeters on the thin edge of ethics, as the phrase goes (carefully positioning themselves so that they’re not legally giving medical advice, even if it sounds like it). Oh, and the FBS leaders also reject gravity and germ theory.

Then we have Sen. Ron Johnson, happily endorsing a crackplot claim you can cure autism with bleach. Or the current secretary of health who thinks the keto diet can treat schizophrenia.

How to lie with statistics.

“Health officials in New Mexico are warning against consuming raw dairy products after a newborn baby in the state died from a listeria infection that they say was likely contracted when the baby’s mother drank raw milk during pregnancy.”

RFK Jr.’s FDA claims the covid vaccine has killed 10 children. Unsurprisingly they did not provide details or evidence.

During a recent Con-Tinual panel, Seanan MacGuire, who writes epidemiological thrillers as Mira Grant, said if she’d pitched a novel a decade ago portraying so many people rejecting covid vaccines, they’d have laughed her out of the publisher’s office. I suspect it only gets worse from here.

Cover by Irwin Hassen, all rights to image remain with current holders.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics

Tagged as ,