Tag Archives: science

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.

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February 2, 2026 · 5:13 am

Starting the week with bad ideas (anti-vax and AI)

CBS news top-kick Bari Weiss is all in on the RFK Jr. Kill Medical Science Campaign, hiring Dr. Mark Hyman who claims “that cod liver oil can treat autism and that conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia can be reversed with the kind of nutritional supplements he also sells on his online store.”

Kennedy continues staffing key committees with reliably wrong anti-vaxxers. The Felon of the United States is down with this.

Fla. Governor Ron DeSantis has been all in on anti-vax since he saw which way the wind was blowing. His wife (and possible gubernatorial candidate) Casey DeSantis is outraged some parents are judged for being anti-vax. What a surprise.

Apparently it’s not enough to promote anti-vax ideas — Texas AG and senatorial candidate Ken Paxton is investigating “whether pediatricians, insurers, and vaccine makers engaged in deceptive behavior by allegedly failing to disclose financial incentives tied to vaccinating children.” Spoiler: there are no incentives and there’d be more profits in treating sick kids. Shakezula on this: “No one knows the details of civil investigative demands Paxton claims his office sent, or who received them. It is possible that no letters have or will be sent. That way Paxton can shout about the conspiracy of silence around the bribes pediatricians are taking. If he is lucky more parents will refuse to have their children immunized or stop taking their children to the doctor at all. Some children might die and Paxton will be able to get an erection.”

Vaccine makers are already looking at vaccine trials as not worth the effort any more. Others are grumbling but seem reluctant to fight Kennedy on this. But hey, according to our glorious leaders, losing our Measles Eliminated Status is no big deal.

Infuriatingly, anti-vax propaganda is also killing pets.

There’s lots of studies showing covid vaccines saved lives. It’s one of the Toddler’s few good accomplishments, certainly his only great one. But his cultists want him anti-vax so he’s now asking where the proof of success is?

Sen. Bill Cassidy supported Kennedy, even though as a doctor Cassidy should have known he’s full of shit. If it was a careful political move to win the Felon’s support — oops. I know whoever the Felon supports will be awful, but it’s nice to see a sell-out like Cassidy get shivved.

Just to prove these attitudes didn’t come from nothing, we have Republican Michelle Bachmann 13 years ago explaining we could cure Alzheimer’s in a decade except for big government.

Some thoughts on this from BlueSky: “It’s why I’ve become way less tolerant/more of an asshole about woo woo shit lately I think, other than it’s obvious capacity to hurt people if taken seriously that we’re now seeing, there’s definitely some incipient fascism in “the secrets of the soil have revealed themselves to the worthy.’ ‘We don’t need complicated, possibly corrupt systems of formal sense-making, rather than those with right aptitude will simply Know” seems harmless when it’s like, just astrology or something but there’s a lot of violence implicitly contained in that worldview if you take it seriously”

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins claims you can have an incredibly healthy diet on just $3/meal.

“The U.S. consumer product safety agency will stop collecting data on injuries from incidents like car accidents and adverse drug effects due to staff cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to an agency email seen by Reuters and a source familiar with the situation.”

“Three sources said they believe total cuts to nonprofit groups, many providing street-level care to people experiencing addiction, homelessness and mental illness, could reach roughly $2 billion.” But hey, they can just $3 meals and get strong!

Anti-vaxxers love talking about Big Pharma but Big Wellness is also a business and a less ethical one. With products that are big on bullshit. There’s also money to be made in wearable medical devices, hence the FDA abandoning oversight.

AI needs lots and lots of power, so the Necrotic Toddler is softening the regulations for building nuclear power plants. As Cheryl Rofer explains, “the DOE has loosened up safety, security, and environmental restrictions so that the new reactor developers can move faster. And maybe break things. Most of the new reactor companies are tied to Silicon Valley, after all.” But hey, it’s unlikely anyone will hold Sam Altman or Marc Andreysson legally liable if there’s a catastrophic island so what do they have to lose?

Plus when these power-hog, polluting data centers get built, it tends to be where residents are poor and black.

A while back, a friend of mine predicted that AI would end up learning by studying other AI — and lo and behold.

Lenovo’s Yang Yuanqing claims AI “will be the trend that you cannot avoid,” even if you don’t want Silicon Valley inserting into everything. Corey Doctorow has some thoughts. Or as Lydia Kiesling puts it, “you know the drill. Don’t talk to Chat. Mourn the dead blogs. Fight like hell for the living.”

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December 15, 2025 · 5:15 am

“There is no alternative” means “STOP TRYING TO THINK OF AN ALTERNATIVE.”

A while back someone contacted The Local Reporter about using AI to help reporters like me cover meetings. They have some LLM that will watch the meeting, pinpoint all the key moments and cut them out so I don’t have to watch them myself. Won’t that save time?

A smart manager friend of mine said large language models/AI are actually good at this. And when we do Zoom meetings for the Wandering Grove anthologies, we’ve used Zoom’s chatbot to take notes. But tracking a meeting or a business conference is different from following a government meeting. Will the LLM highlight the things I’d catch? Will it identify all the points that need to be in a good article? The only way to know is to watch the meeting myself and compare, which erases any gains. So no

Plus I suspect this free service is only the beginning; at some point it’ll be “well now that we cover the meetings, why not have us write them up?” Maybe not but a recent article asserts LLMs are doing exactly that, writing stories for harried editor/journalists who may be the only employee at their current paper. It’s efficient (according to the article) and as long as the editor fact-checks, completely harmless. Besides, writing takes money for journalism and time and papers have less of either so why not? It’s inevitable!

Call me cynical but I suspect a lot of editors who go this route are not going to fact-check. They may not even think it’s necessary — after all you can trust the machine, right? You can’t, as the article notes, but once you start using this kind of shortcut more shortcuts will probably follow. As C.S. Lewis says, the slide into bad behavior — in this case, unprofessional and lacking in devotion to their craft — starts small, then accelerates.

And as the title of this post implies (quoted from the Cory Doctorow piece I link to below) this shit is not inevitable. The swelling use of AI isn’t some natural force. It’s not like cars, telephones or electric power where people rush to use it because it’s so much better than other options, it’s because the tech industry spends billions to promote it as wonderful, awesome, the best thing ever! Everyone who opposes it is the maker of the horse-drawn carriage insisting the automobile is a fad! No, there are ton of serious questions and problems, as covered in some of my past Science-tagged posts. The author of that article runs a consulting firm advising the media on the use of LLMs — I’d say it’s in their interest to see the media use more of them.

As Cory Doctorow points out, the kind of thing that the article is talking about is reducing writers and editors to reverse centaurs. Like the classic centaur, they’re a hybrid of man and machine but in this situation all the power and control lies with the machine. The editor or writer relying on AI has given the machine the challenging, interesting part of the job; all that’s left is checking to see if they’ve done it right. And if a screw-up slips by, well clearly that’s not the machine’s fault — it’s the fault of the human in the loop.

The point of massively pushing AI is not to make things better; it won’t. The point is that companies can fire most of their staff (in a given field), leave the rest as reverse-centaurs and use the labor savings to increase profits. Quality will go way down, but who gives a crap? The salespeople swore it would be just as good! And as Doctorow and Daniel Graeber say, the people who get fired will be capable, highly paid and doing real work — the administrators will, of course, exempt themselves from being replaced, however useless their jobs.

AI spreads partly because it promises a frictionless experience — none of the awkwardness of dealing with flesh-and-blood people and their errors which can be a seductive appeal. At the link, Jill Filopovic discusses why that’s wrong; I’ll add that the idea (which Filopovic quotes, but does not support) that an algorithm, because it’s logical and has fewer random errors, must do better than a human being, is bullshit. So, I think, is Pete Hegseth’s claim chatbots are the future of warfare.

(of course it also spreads because it can do things like make us pay more for groceries)

Of course AI will create new forms of friction, like having to wade through AI-generated bullshit to find a real story or a real author. Here’s an extreme example. Plus accounting departments are seeing a rise in employees who create fake expense reports with LLMs.

“There’s a difference between tools and technologies. Tools help us accomplish tasks; technologies reshape the very environments in which we think, work, and relate. As philosopher Peter Hershock observes, we don’t merely use technologies; we participate in them. With tools, we retain agency—we can choose when and how to use them. With technologies, the choice is subtler: they remake the conditions of choice itself. A pen extends communication without redefining it; social media transformed what we mean by privacy, friendship, even truth. ” — from an article about how higher education is breaking itself by embracing AI and trying to make teaching and learning both frictionless.

Chanda Prescot-Weinstein suggests part of the problem is the increasing emphasis on education as nothing but a tool for our careers and a hoop we have to jump through, and that this is wrong: “Knowledge is worth your time because of how it shapes your mind. And the authoritarians may take many things from us, but they cannot take our minds (unless you let them). So, I know it’s very hard right now but that intellectual work is worth your time, even when it’s not obvious how you will profit from it. You are more than a future source of profit, and humanity’s survival depends on all of us understanding this.”

Against this argument we have dubious claims that AI will democratize education so schools must adapt or die: “A business student can ask ChatGPT to explain supply chain optimization or generate market analysis in seconds. The traditional lecture and test model faces its blockbuster moment.” Because before ChatGPT nobody ever had the option to look things up in a textbook or a library book. Apparently, though, there’s a cottage industry built on promoting AI to students.

Then there’s the perennial appeal of using AI to create your own media. As I’ve said before “give AI a prompt” isn’t creative — and I’m curious how many people are really keen to do this as more than an idle amusement (let alone if, as the article notes, they can’t infringe copyright). At least one videogame company has dismissed this sort of thing as “creating” for people who aren’t creative.

The AI Is Inevitable crowd skip over the price of using it too, like the demands data centers make on power grids and water supplies. That said, the Felon of the United States is on the side of the AI techbros (though that doesn’t stop him selling computer chips to China) and they are determined to fight any restrictions on their delusions of grandeur. Although the collapse of the AI bubble might.

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December 11, 2025 · 5:15 am

Journalism in the rancid age of RFK Jr.

RFK is an anti-vax fanatic. And he gives platforms to other anti-vax fanatics. Backed by his boss because the Necrotic Toddler apparently figures MAGA will give him more love for spreading plague than fighting it. Though he’s apparently wrong as even most Republicans know vaccines save lives. But the Felon’s made it clear he doesn’t care whether they live as long as they vote for him. And there are the usual array of think tanks that don’t think in his corner.

And so we get the government arguing, in the words of Wonkette, that “while no studies exist providing a causal link, some parents believe their child’s autism was caused by vaccines and no one can prove that they didn’t.” It doesn’t matter that vaccines work, we’ve got a critical mass of people who don’t accept reality and people in office with the power to distort the facts and change the rules. Jay Bhattacharya, who predicted a 20,000 – 40,000 death count from covid (ergo no need for lockdowns, vaccines or masking for most of us), hasn’t apparently learned anything from being massively wrong: as head of NIH he thinks the government’s solution to the next pandemic should be … nothing. Americans need to get healthier, then they can slough off those nasty viruses easily (I’m sure that as almost nobody does everything absolutely perfectly this will prove a shifting target that always points the blame at the sick, not at Bhattacharya for being wrong again).

Every Senate Republican voted for RFK. They own this, despite some of them insisted they had no idea it would get this bad. Or this bad. They knew. They either believe or they decided the personal consequences were worse for saying no — after all, it’s not like they’re going to have trouble getting vaccines, even if they have to fly overseas?

Equally to blame, the media’s sanewashing of Mr. Make America Dead Again. Like a recent Atlantic profile painting Kennedy not as someone completely and utterly ignorant about medicine but “a gadfly outsider” who still can’t get the scientific establishment to take him seriously. Or news media putting RFK’s bullshit in the headline (FDA Claims Covid Shots Killed 10 Children) and leaving the flaws or counter-arguments in the body of the piece. In the words of writer Gil Duran “it is considered neutral to spread a lie, but it is considered “biased” to call out a lie. So, there is a structural asymmetry that rewards colorful lies with virality.” I expect stupid toadying from Newsmax, but the mainstream media should do better.

Then there’s Olivia Nuzzi, the reporter who was covering Kennedy and writing critical pieces about Biden at a time when she was sexually obsessed with Kennedy (she says she wasn’t sleeping with him while covering him). That’s fricking unethical but it hasn’t stopped her getting a new gig, or a glowing profile tied to her new book about the affair (update: the blowback covered here has led to Vanity Fair telling Nuzzi goodbye, so long, au revoir). I read excerpts of the profile (not linking to it) and it’s very much a stereotypical celebrity-journalism piece, showing how even unremarkable things like driving her car or sitting at her desk (there’s a copy of Dante on it! Whoa!) are imbued with depth (she’s a “startling, complex person” and a “Lana Del Rey song come to life”). The book itself includes quotes such as “He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself.”

The Ringer has a lot of the details including some of Kennedy’s writing to Nuzzi about “your open mouth awaiting my harvest” god help us. If we go by her ex-boyfriend Ryan Lizza (who obviously has his own axes to grind) Nuzzi wasn’t simply reporting on the guy she was hot for but actively advising him on his campaign when he was running for the White House. And would do catch-and-kill operations (see here and here) where she would help either bury stories that made Kennedy look bad or at least guide him in countering them. As NYT’s Michelle Goldberg says, it’s not about the bad poetry, it’s not a sex scandal: Nuzzi was a massive failure of journalistic ethics.

The publications willing to fluff Nuzzi or hand her jobs at this point are also failing their readers and their duty.

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November 20, 2025 · 5:13 am

Are anti-vaxxers a horseman of the Apocalypse?

After all, pestilence has been traditionally considered one of the frightful four and they are doing their best to bring that upon us, as if the past century’s medical wonders had never happened.

Don’t get me wrong, modern medicine has its share of problems. Price for one (something the Felon’s administration is making much worse). Scientists willing to fudge their results (I recommend Cynthia Crossen’s Tainted Truth for a look at how statistics and research get manipulated). The simple fact that figuring this stuff out is hard work. And doctors can be really bad about how they treat and care for women, like the lack of knowledge of the clitoris.

Nevertheless I’ve spent my lifetime in a United States where we don’t have to fear smallpox or polio, where we’ve made progress against cancer, where we can usually assume our food is safe to eat. They’re still making progress, like figuring out the cause of lupus. But RFK Jr. and the rest of the Republican Party are busy cutting through that medical safety net, either because they’re grifters who see gold in those anti-vax hills or because they have no idea how much work a healthy nation takes. It’s an American tradition.

I agree with LGM that it’s not the errors and fallibility in science that make suckers fall for Kennedy’s bullshit, it’s that lots of people are easy meat, “vulnerable to manipulation by the most preposterously shameless demagogues, such as for example Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and most of all the man who made him the nation’s top health official.” However I agree with Bonhoeffer: it’s less about intelligence or lack of thought than folly.

Let’s look at some examples.

A paper that confirms Kennedy’s biases but is under scrutiny by the publisher? Who cares?

“Tucker Carlson was roundly condemned this week after pushing the conspiracy theory that Covid-19 was created in a way to make Jews immune to it.”

“More than 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections – vaccines, milk safety and fluoride – have been introduced in statehouses across the U.S. this year, part of an organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law.”

“The pair argue that finding and studying pathogens that could cause outbreaks, then stockpiling vaccines against them, is a waste of money. Instead, they say, the United States should encourage people to improve their baseline health” Keep in mind one of “the pair” is Jay Bhattacharya is the asshat who thought covid was no big — 40,000 people dead, then we’d get herd immunity.

Naturopathy.

“The uptick in whooping cough, which is especially contagious in children, has coincided with a decline in vaccination rates for the illness, according to disease experts who urge the best way to control the spread is to get vaccinated. The total so far is also 10 times the number of cases for all of 2023.”

That’s Texas. Here’s another whooping cough story: “By late January 2025, two babies had died in Louisiana. But the Louisiana Department of Health waited two months to send out a social media post suggesting people talk to their doctors about getting vaccinated.”

“From failing to publicize a major outbreak [of E. coli] to scaling back safety alert specialists and rules, the Trump administration’s anti-regulatory and cost-cutting push risks unraveling a critical system that helps ensure the safety of the U.S. food supply, according to consumer advocates, researchers and former employees at the FDA and U.S. Department of Agriculture.”

The Necrotic Toddler in the Oval Office claims our evil medical system forces babies to get “massive vaccines that are twice the size of a jar like that, a glass of water like that, into a baby’s body” Is he stupid or lying? I’d say both.

“The Trump administration is making it more difficult for veterans with a rare but deadly cancer to get their health care needs covered by the government”

“A research facility within the US National Institutes of Health that is tasked with studying Ebola and other deadly infectious diseases has been instructed by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to stop research activities.“

“Something that isn’t getting nearly enough attention is the considerable extent to which the whole “if you get sick it’s because you have a bad lifestyle” discourse is a core piece of classic fascist psychology, which was always obsessed with eugenics, social Darwinism, and purity fetishes of every kind, especially those related to beliefs about master races being “contaminated” by contact, literal or metaphorical, with vermin-like untermenschen.”

“Today RFK Jr. both suggested that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause peanut allergies and admitted there are no data to support this hypothesis, so he wants to find some. Like if you took the scientific method, turned it backward and inside out and made it puke, you’d get RFK Jr.’s thoughts.” To which came this response: “What rfk jr is doing isn’t science, it’s a lazy discussion that should, at best, be held at the back of a waffle house by a few drunk rednecks.

It’s true that medical experts aren’t perfect. But as Lindsay Beyerstein says, “Nobody can know everything, let alone everything by their own research. We always rely on experts to navigate our complex world. The question is whether we pick credentialed and experienced people or internet demagogues and grifters.”

Comics covers by Rich Buckler (top) and Nick Cardy. All rights to images remain with current holders.

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October 29, 2025 · 5:15 am

The idea is not the hard part; more thoughts on AI

There’s an anecdote many writers have, myself included. Someone tells us they have an amazing idea for a fantasy story/movie/high-octane thriller; how’s about I write the story based on their idea and we’ll split the profits (which will be huge, of course. Their idea’s that good).

I can’t help thinking this explains, in part, the belief that if someone gives AI a prompt and tells them to write a story, therefore the prompter has written the story themselves. Isn’t coming up with the idea the hard part? AI just makes it easier to build on your concept, by saving you from having to think about character arcs, plot or writing well. Lots of people say “Someday I’ll write a novel,” but never have the discipline to sit down and do it (I’ve known a couple of talented people like that). Now they don’t have to sit

Case in point, Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist who believes AI may never be able to do what he does, is quite confident it can master comparatively trivial skills such as art and filmmaking.

(I got this off BlueSky. My apologies for losing track of the source post).

That is an interesting definition of “future creatives.” No cameras, no set, no filmmaking skills, but they’ve got an idea! Thanks to AI, they can become Spielberg!

It’s true that improvements in tech have made it easier to shoot a low-budget movie than ever before. However that does not guarantee you can make a good or even marginally competent low-budget movie. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, shooting a movie well is a skill. Or as I put it some years ago, “Photojournalism is a skill, not just a matter of pointing a camera because something interesting is happening.” Even less is it a matter of telling AI to point the camera for you.

A less charitable interpretation than my opening remark would be that the AI-is-art boom is a bunch of techbros who do not get art, can’t make art (but remember, Andreessen’s investment skills are much more of an art than art!) and resent the accolades flowing to artistic people. Well, now they’re going to annex art. Their tech will make it and real artists will soon be nothing special!

Plus there’s the money. As comics artist Jamie McKelvie put it, “the main achievement of the tech industry has been increasing the flow of money from people who make or do things to people who already have more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes” Case in point, Spotify; great for tech, ruinous for musicians (“It has become entirely unsustainable for a band like us to come and tour anywhere except the coasts.”).

I read a dubious argument recently that using copyright against AI tech companies to protect them from learning on our work for free is wrong: copyright is supposed to promote innovation and this will work against innovation by stifling all the awesome creative work that will come out of AI. I’m less optimistic. As Charlie Warzel puts it in The Atlantic, “This is how it feels to live in the golden age of slop, a catchall word used to describe the spammy quality of easy-to-generate AI material. I’ve begun to think of it as the digital equivalent of an invasive species. Just as the introduction and replication of a novel plant or animal usually results in some form of ecological harm and threatens native organisms, the arrival of chatbots pumping out lorem ipsum–flavored text has polluted Google search results and added hallucinations to scientific archives.”

Warzel also has an answer to claims that AI will liberate creatives: “The idea is that Sora 2, like all AI tools, removes an enormous amount of friction between conception and completion in the creative process. Ideas and imagination are universal to the human experience, but execution is learned, the result of energy and time spent to develop the skills necessary to bring an idea into the world. Altman’s definition of creativity seems to elide this second element altogether—so much so that it appears to be an animating principle behind most of OpenAI’s tools.

‘ “The fact that you will be able to have an entire piece of software created just by explaining your idea is going to be incredible for humans getting great new stuff,” Altman said on the comedian Theo Von’s podcast this summer. “Because right now, I think there’s a lot more good ideas than people who know how to make them. And if AI can do that for us, we’re really good at coming up with creative ideas.”’

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October 8, 2025 · 5:15 am

Thoughts on AI, none of them enthusiastic.

(As you’ll see, all my illustrations are robot/computer themed. Rights to all images remain with current holders)

Henry Farrell speculates that a lot of investment in AI is less about faith in the tech and more about betting on the entrepreneur or figuring that everyone else is investing in AI, maybe you should too?

This theory seems plausible. Case in point company that recently created an AI actor, Tilly Norwood, claims they have studios and talent agencies eager to work with “her.” Maybe so, maybe just hype to generate some real offers. There’s a lot of bullshit in their press relief, like Norwood saying “I may be AI generated, but I’m feeling very real emotions right now. I am so excited for what’s coming next!” No, she’s not feeling real emotions, no she’s not excited, and the article should have pointed that out. SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, was less kind (good for them!).

Vulture agrees the hype is probably smoke and mirrors and says “Tilly” is very far from impersonating a human. However the issues it raises remain: “Technology doesn’t have to be good to be disruptive, only viable enough for corporations to monetize. The concern isn’t that Norwood will “land” a role but that the system might be ready to cast her. She exists to probe what audiences will tolerate and to remind Hollywood, already anxious and penny-pinching, that the line between performance and product has never been thinner. The question of AI isn’t just a technical one about what the tools can or can’t do; it’s a political and economic one about how industries choose to use them.”

Reading x-rays and similar radiology would seem a perfect use of computers. Yet AI ain’t good enough to replace human radiologists. It can, however, make doctors less effective, relying on AI and not double-checking its conclusions. Which fits with a story I linked to earlier, about how some therapists rely on AI to tell them what to say.

Version 1.0.0

Drew Harwell: “OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this” Spoiler: he’s being sarcastic.

Recently an AI Felon promised America medbeds, a nonexistent technology that seems to amount to Wolverine’s healing factor. Melania’s getting in on AI videos too.

If you’re using Google’s AI to research “Trump and dementia,” it will block the search. It won’t if you ask the same question about Biden.

Israel has a plan: put up lots of websites for ChatGPT to scrape data from, said data being pro-Israel, thereby training the AI to give pro-Israel answers. Unsurprisingly the First Family and Oracle bazillionaire Larry Ellison seem to be involved.

Medicare doesn’t require prior authorization for medical treatment. In the Felon era that’s going to change, and AI will make the decisions (at least in a pilot program).

And for a non-AI endbit, the Federal Communications Commission voted to end discounts for library Wi-Fi hotspot lending and school bus connectivity programs on Tuesday, drawing criticism from lawmakers and librarians who say the moves will make it more difficult for people who are low-income or live in rural areas to access the internet.

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September 24, 2025 · 5:15 am

Science … weird science!

The title should be sung to the tune of the Oingo Boingo song, of course.

What could be weirder than the deranged conviction artificial intelligence is the way, the truth and the light? Never mind the environmental damage, the wrong answers, the countless other problems, Silicon Valley wants it to be the next game-changing technology. And it is, but not in a way that improves things.

“A user on X complained that Grok’s answers were too progressive after it said violence from right-wing Americans tended to be deadlier than violence from left-wing Americans — a conclusion matching findings from various studies and data from the Global Terrorism Database.” So Elon Musk tweaked it to be more conservative.

HHS employees have been ordered to use chatbots in their jobs.

“A book collection steeped in 19th century thought could also be “immensely critical” for the tech industry’s efforts to build AI agents that can plan and reason as well as humans, Leppert said.” At this point AI looks more like the flop tech of the past — jetpacks, nuclear powered vacuum cleaners — than anything approaching human.

“She said librarians report being treated like robots over library reference chat, and patrons getting defensive over the veracity of recommendations they’ve received from an AI-powered chatbot. Essentially, like more people trust their preferred LLM over their human librarian.”

AI is spreading into areas it shouldn’t, like therapists secretly using chatbots to tell them what to say to clients. Seriously, what kind of hack therapist can’t think of what to say when a patient’s dog dies?

“The whole tech industry is once again facing questions over the casual way it sometimes turns unassuming people into lab rats, especially as more tech companies wade into health-related services.” And people don’t know because it turns out the Turing test — if we think a computer is intelligent, we should assume it is — is dead wrong.

Podcasts are (I think) what blogs were 20 years ago. So naturally an AI company plans to flood the zone with tons of AI-hosted podcasts. High point: “We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life,”said CEO Jeanine Wright. Um, no, but I get that her financial model probably depends on bullshit like that.

“I’m working every day on using AI to figure out how to cure cancer or launch fusion energy or understand dark matter. Our Defense Department is trying to figure out how to keep America safe. God bless the First Lady. She of course is wiser than all of us.” — Felon Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Yeah, I’m sure he’s lying but why would he even pretend he’s spending his work day to figure out dark matter?

If you’re wondering about his First Lady tongue-bathing, Melania’s calling on schools to train kids in using AI. I’m sure that will be more profitable for tech companies than learning anything valuable.

“On religious apps, tens of millions of people are confessing to spiritual chatbots their secrets: their petty vanities and deepest worries, gluttonous urges and darkest impulses. Trained on religious texts, the bots are like on-call priests, imams or rabbis, offering comfort and direction at any time. On some platforms, they even purport to channel God.The “faith tech” industry is booming.”

“When asked “How many Ds are in DEEPSEEK?” the DeepSeek-V3 model with 600 billion parameters “returned ‘2’ or ‘3’ in ten independent trials” while Meta AI and Claude 3.7 Sonnet performed similarly, “including answers as large as ‘6’ and ‘7.’” — from an excellent look at how AI hallucinations may be inevitable.

“Many of the students have completely surrendered to letting AI do their homework, badly, I might add. How do you fix this?” — Roxane Gay. One solution discussed in the thread: handwritten assignments.

Ted Chiang (quoted in the same thread): “The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write […]. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning.”

Now some non-AI links:

Stuff we post to the Internet doesn’t last forever.

The Toddler of the United States’ new $1,000 fee for HB-1 visas will undermine our tech industry (plus the option to waive the rules is an invitation to corruption).

A solar storm could wreak havoc on our electrical systems. It’s something we can prepare for, but I have a lot less faith in either government or corporate leaders doing so than I used to.

The Toddler claims one in 10 boys is born with autism, which is a lie, and that they get 80 different vaccines pumped into them in infancy, which is another lie. Surprisingly, RFK claims a definite link (spoiler: another lie!) to women taking Tylenol, and his anti-vax worshippers are furious (though he’s still anti-vax — I don’t know what his beef with Tylenol is). Though Newsmax’s fascist toadies are happily embracing the lie. So is ever-idiotic Senator Ron Johnson. And Politico sanewashes the Felon by explaining he’s really compassionate and wants to “solve the autism problem.”

Oh, RFK Junior’s also lying about the Amish not getting vaccinated and therefore not having autism.

I’ll wrap up with a comment from someone online elsewhere: “RFK Jr. seems to walk through life like it was always 20 minutes after he smoked his first joint in ninth grade.”

Remember, every Senate Republican voted for him, knowing he was a hardcore anti-vaxxer. Including the ones now pretending they’re shocked, shocked that he’s an anti-vaxxer.

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September 4, 2025 · 5:15 am

No, RFK Jr. cannot diagnose people by looking at them

According to our crackpot Secretary of Health, RFK Jr., he can spot sick people by looking at them. That’s how he knows that we’re less healthy than we used to be: “I had eleven brothers and sisters, I had about 70 first cousins, and I never saw anybody with diabetes. I never knew anybody with a food allergy. I never knew anybody with autism. And I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like.”

No, he doesn’t. And know, he can’t tell. And while it’s true diabetes and (I believe) food allergies are more common than they used to be, they aren’t a radical new thing either: I’m four years older than he is and I developed a food allergy in college. I suspect Kennedy’s “never knew” is more that he never cared to ask, and that he cannot in fact spot sick people at a glance.

The idea us non-doctors can diagnose someone by looking at them is quite common (“My kid’s distracted, I know he has ADD, give him Ritalin.”). Unfortunately Kennedy’s in a powerful position over our health establishment and he’s too Dunning-Kruger to realize how ignorant he is.

And he can count on sanewashing from journalists who ignore the anti-vax stuff to focus on how RFK wants people eating healthier — he’s just like Michelle Obama (who was mocked for suggesting kids eat more veggies). While his “MAHA” movement is losing steam, that’s partly because Kennedy’s supporters want more vaccine bans, mRNA bans, etc., than he’s offered so far.

His ongoing attack on our healthcare systems was completely predictable. That makes Sen. Bill Cassidy (head of the Senate health committee, putting him in a position to fight the Kennedy nomination if he chose) declaring his concern over Kennedy’s positions very disingenuous and CYA. You knew what he was when you voted for him. If not, why didn’t you? Sen. Roger Marshall is a doctor so he should know too but he’s all in on covid and other medical lies. But apparently anti-vax has such a hold on the Republicans that even the necrotic toddler is saying maybe the vaccines he had developed were fakes.

Hell, right wing pundit Erick Erickson’s wife is dying, she can’t get the drugs she needs because of the state of the CDC — but he insists the left “built the foundation for Kennedy’s rise.” He’d probably blame them for Ron DeSantis may scrap school vaccination requirements.

While Cassidy dithers, Chuck Schumer — not someone I think of as a fighter — has come out calling for Kennedy lose his cabinet post. Meanwhile Rep. Buddy Carter of Georgia blames the CDC for everything that’s happening and implies Biden was to blame for mismanaging the pandemic (Biden was not, of course, president when it broke out). Carter also freaked out about former CDC vaccine chief Demetre Daskalakis, presumably because the latter said, quite truthfully, that “I’ve been worried for months. The firewall between science and ideology is completely broken down. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is bullshitting (is she ever not?) that the covid vaccine is death!

Kennedy claims he can also spot the current health bugaboo, mitochondrial dysfunction. As explained at the link, there’s no clear cause and effect between our mitochondrial cell bodies and our health.

Kennedy talks about the horrors of ultraprocessed foods. Now for some reason he’s also upset with the government making sensible recommendations to eat more beans.

In the best “when you have nothing but a hammer, everything looks like a nail” tradition, Kennedy has decided since he doesn’t like drugs, maybe antidepressants cause school shootings. Like a good Republican, he’s never going to blame guns.

Using AI to vet whether someone’s medical needs are covered by Medicare? Yeah, I’m sure that will go well — but it will certainly cut what Medicare spends.

“Despite the many decades of evidence that the aluminum in vaccines is perfectly safe when used in appropriate doses, he believes it just can’t be true.” As noted at the link, a number of medical groups are telling Kennedy to pound sand.

But Kennedy still has a lot of clout, like only approving fall covid shots for people over 65 and other high-risk individuals.

The CDC had a drowning prevention program — that’s now shutting down. I can’t figure out who even benefits from something like that — Big Drowning? But hey, ivermectin’s going to become way more available.

“If you want to make foodborne disease go away, then don’t look for foodborne disease. And then you can cheerfully eliminate all of your foodborne disease regulations. My concern is that that is the path down which we appear to be heading.”

But if you think RFK is bad, here’s a shocker: a group of atheists claim the real threat to science is wokeness.

It’s a good thing some of the blue-state governors are starting stepping up.

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July 17, 2025 · 5:30 am

I think it’s a bad thing to have the inmates running the asylum

“Rush University Medical Center in Chicago is adding a new twist to its curriculum for medical students and residents, using AI tools and learning modules to teach how to more quickly identify measles rashes on different skin tones. It’s another reminder that diseases once thought to have been eradicated are showing up with increased frequency in clinics and ERs, posing challenges for younger physicians and health workers who thought they were relegated to history.”

That’s what you get when you have an ignorant anti-science, anti-medicine dude such as RFK Jr. in charge of health policy. “There have been 1,267 confirmed cases of measles in the U.S. this year, almost 4.5 times the total for all of last year and on track to pass the highest annual count since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” He’s not a vaccine skeptic, he’s an anti-vax extremist who thinks this is a better alternative than kids getting autism (which isn’t an issue anyway — vaccines don’t cause autism, despite Kennedy’s lies). And he’s not just talk. Also this.

This also extends to a hatred for respected scientific journals that print facts. Because the facts are not on his side.

Kennedy says staying healthy is our patriotic duty — which is repackaging old cliches that if you’re sick, it reflects your bad decisions. Because like so many health crackpots he thinks we can stop ourselves being sick if we try (This is not new: Rep. Mo Brooks several years back argued that requiring insurance cover pre-existing conditions is bad because those conditions are our fault. Or complaints by some libertarians (John Stossel) that healthcare would work better if insurance didn’t let us use “too much” healthcare)

Epidemiologist Elizabeth Jacobs discusses how chronic disease is a fruitful ground for flim-flam hustlers and fake cures (something true throughout American history); sewing doubt about vaccines opens up preventable diseases to the same money-making opportunities.

It’s also fruitful ground for women who get sucked from wellness into fascism.

RFK’s vaccine review committee is stuffed with anti-vax clowns. And of course the Felon is an imbecile who thinks maybe 18 people out of every 10,000 don’t have autism. Plus his federal funding cuts have forced projects such as NC’s long-covid recovery clinic to close. mRNA breakthroughs are facing tough sledding, despite their tremendous potential. AG Pam Bondi, as ever a loyal toady to the Felon, has dropped charges against Dr. Michael Kirk Moore for (allegedly) providing people with fake vaccine cards and destroying several thousand dollars worth of vaccine. Fraud and destruction of government property are pretty trivial crimes to Bondi, as long as they’re directed at the public and not her Fuehrer.

Scientific integrity doesn’t matter much to these creeps either. I have a feeling they won’t worry about nuclear safety either — after all, the Felon would never accept any blame if anything goes wrong

Speaking of clowns, here’s Marjorie Taylor Greene. And the guy who wrote yet another RFK Jr. has a point article.

Kennedy talks a lot about how he wants to eliminate environmental chemicals but he’s lying. Apparently he doesn’t care about processed foods as much as he pretends either. I’m also curious if he has a financial stake in his push to get everyone wearing health trackers. We know lawyer Mat Staver approached anti-vaxxing as a tool to raise money; now he’s fund-raising off God supposedly curing Staver’s covid, saying that if he’d taken “Fauci’s deadly protocol” he’d be dead (what, God can’t counteract it?)

Here’s to more lawsuits like this one. And to scientists working on an end run around the CDC, even if they aren’t there yet. Because Republicans will destroy America’s scientific establishment if it doesn’t conform to their distorted reality. For example, Greene’s claim that the Texas floods were caused by weather control. She’s not the only one spewing this bullshit and it’s leading to attacks on weather stations. Lee Zeldin, the Felon’s EPA administrator, says he’s outraged these questions are dismissed. The truth is, they’ve had the answers — no, our government is not doing weather control — but they don’t want to accept them. That doesn’t entitle them to be taken seriously. Hell, they’ve been screaming for years that human activity can’t possibly make the climate worse — but consistency isn’t the issue.

We are indeed in the stupidest timeline. As Paul Campos says, “This country has always been chock full of credulous paranoid morons, but there used to be some sort of effort to keep them handling snakes as opposed to congressional committees and federal agencies.” As witness the Felon, having horned his way into the Club World Cup awards ceremony, is now keeping the trophy. Stupid and pathetic.

But I guess Republicans destroying the Department of Education will keep people too uneducated to notice.

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