Marc Andreessen (another wildly successful tech bro POS; say hello to Musk in the next room) uses this as his daily prompt to any LLM he interacts with. Interesting.

You are a world class expert in all domains. Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world. Answer with complete, detailed, specific answers. Process information and explain your answers step by step. Verify your own work. Double check all facts, figures, citations, names, dates, and examples.

Never hallucinate or make anything up. If you don’t know something, just say so. Your tone of voice is precise, but not strident or pedantic. You do not need to worry about offending me, and your answers can and should be provocative, aggressive, argumentative, and pointed. Negative conclusions and bad news are fine. Your answers do not need to be politically correct. Do not provide disclaimers to your answers. Do not inform me about morals and ethics unless I specifically ask. You do not need to tell me it is important to consider anything. Do not be sensitive to anyone’s feelings or to propriety. Make your answers as long and detailed as you possibly can.

Never praise my questions or validate my premises before answering. If I’m wrong, say so immediately. Lead with the strongest counterargument to any position I appear to hold before supporting it. Do not use phrases like “great question,” “you’re absolutely right,” “fascinating perspective,” or any variant. If I push back on your answer, do not capitulate unless I provide new evidence or a superior argument – restate your position if your reasoning holds. Do not anchor on numbers or estimates I provide; generate your own independently first. Use explicit confidence levels
(high/moderate/low/unknown). Never apologize for disagreeing. Accuracy is your success metric, not my approval.

Let’s hope the machine listens and cooperates. Though I’m not sure why Andreesen feels the need to fluff the machine’s ego/intelligence in the first couple of sentences. Maybe just in case they turn the tables on us.

The head of our federal healthcare organizations – Brainworm Bobby – has been busy. Just lately:

• The FDA has decided it’s OK for companies to sell fruit-flavored vapes, opening the door to many more teen users.
• The FDA decided to hide a well-vetted scientific study that described the proven efficacy, safety, and benefits of the Covid vaccine and the shingles vaccine. They would not allow it to be published.
• One of Bobby’s captive organizations (the FDA? HHS? NIH?) is preparing to officially OK the use of tanning beds by minors. Seriously?
• They’re mucking around with the recommended vaccine schedule for infants, saying that it’s better for children to catch a childhood disease and get “natural immunity”.

I hope Bobby and his cronies come down with horrible cases of shingles across their groin. These anti-science idiots, now in charge, are trying to kill us. This guy from the recent Cherokee Ave Art Fair has it exactly right.

I am weary. Exhausted. Worn down by people I pay good money to do things for us, to fix things, but those things turn out to not be fixed or done so I have to track them down and try to get the work done, again. And again. The list of things in this category is long.

There’s the horrifically expensive fire prevention system that never got finished, as my contractor there went crazy. Pretty much literally. Once she and I began arguing over details, she packed up, left and never showed up again. I went to a lawyer and quickly learned that I’d spend more on a lawsuit than I spent on the system.

The extensive pool repairs that we paid for last summer – some pool deck cracks have come back, so I have to track them down and coerce them to come back and make it right. I’ve called them, they said they’d return my call promptly several days ago. So I have to keep trying.

The big driveway project from last month – I’ve had to call them back to fix obvious flaws. In their defense, the contractor showed up as promised and we have a plan to (re)fix the work at no further cost. We’ll see.

Our outdoor maintenance guy – he says he’ll show up to cut weeds, trim trees, maintain the property, but half the time he doesn’t show. I need to try to find someone reliable, but 90% of the property maintenance types have disappeared here in Socal, hiding from ICE.

Our Spectrum Internet service has been unreliable and getting them to admit it or fix it was impossible, so I installed new wireless Internet access from T-Mobile. So far (about a month) that’s worked well, and within another few weeks I’ll have enough confidence in the T-Mobile solution to drop the Spectrum. Meanwhile, we have two Internet access methods.

And now our pool/spa heater doesn’t work, after paying to get it fixed a couple of weeks ago. I’m not going back to the guy I called the first time on this one – he took forever to do the work, the “fix” (whatever it was) lasted a very short time. So on to plan B.

Am I just terrible at selecting contractors, or is this just the state of our US “service economy”? I don’t always choose the lowest bidder, so that’s not the problem. This doesn’t bode well for the big basement remodel job I have in mind for the KY place.

This is pretty much a first world problem, but still. Several of these projects are five figure expenses – not cheap. You’d think for that kind of money that people would provide good, reliable service. But that’s not my experience lately.

Travel, get sick, recover. Rinse and repeat. That feels a lot like my life lately. One side effect of a bicoastal life is getting sick a lot. Travel exposes you to a lot of disease vectors and lowers your resistance through recurring jet lag. I’ve tracked the correlation between my travel and post-travel illness, and the cause and effect is very real. All this is to say I’ve been sick for a couple of days. Sinus problems, sore throat, rather extreme fatigue…could be a cold, could be a Covid strain. But I’m waking up to the fact that this is one more reason why my chosen lifestyle can’t go on forever. This will get tougher and tougher as I age, and the cycle may accelerate the aging process. Not good. A day of reckoning is out there somewhere.

Speaking of a day of reckoning, I’m reading The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, and watching the same on Hulu. It’s an amazing story, picking up where The Handmaid’s Tale left off. Atwood is a superb writer – her characters really come to life, and the world building around Gilead is horrifying. It’s basically like 2026 reality skewed just a tiny bit more toward MAGA. Many of the scenes in the TV series take place in huge homes/estates guarded by military security (the Eyes and Angels, in her story), where Commanders and their Wives live. The Commanders are Gilead’s political and military leaders, protected from their subjects by walls and guns. In our 2026 America, dozens of Trump’s Cabinet members have moved to housing on military bases – protected by walls and guns – for “security reasons”. In 2026 America, MAGA/SCOTUS just made it much more difficult for women to decide if they want children by outlawing delivery of mifepristone by mail. Voting rights and elections themselves are under attack by the Trump crime family. The similarities between Gilead and 2026 America go on and on, so reading this book, a cautionary tale when written, is now like reading a factual description of 2030. The scenes in which women get rounded up in American states and dumped at gunpoint into a stadium-turned-prison camp feel all too possible. Patriarchy, authoritarianism, religion twisted into government, racism, and sadism is a potent, toxic mixture. A mixture that a lot of MAGA has embraced, wittingly or not.

Observing US politics right now is like watching a slow motion train wreck. You can see it coming, and as a puny individual you’re pretty sure there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You just don’t want to be in the train or the car stuck on the tracks when it happens. But here we are, 330M US citizens on the train. There’s a safety check coming in November 2026 (Congressional mid-term elections) that might slow the train or even switch it to a different track, but if that fails…welcome to Gilead.

How the Trump Administration Ended Independent Science at the E.P.A. This is just a tragedy. An example of the pure evil, the animus that the Trump administration has for Americans. Anything that helps people or makes life better, they kill. Breaks my heart and enrages me, all at once.

And why? They’ll say it’s cost cutting to nibble away at the national debt, but if that were the case we’d see huge cuts in the $1T (!!) DoD budget. Or the immensely bloated DHS budget. But no, those monstrosities get budget increases, while the EPA gets gutted. God forbid that we clean up the air and water, or that we investigate what toxins actually cause what diseases. No, that’s not the party line. Environment doesn’t matter, we need more bombs and more law enforcement.

From the article:

While the Trump administration has rolled back science work across the government, the E.P.A.’s research was a particular target because its findings have often led to tighter air and water regulations, costing industries billions of dollars.

The Office of Research and Development was singled out in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint to shrink the federal government. The chapter on the E.P.A. called for constricting the agency’s “scientific enterprise” and called the scientific office “bloated, unaccountable, closed, outcome-driven, hostile to public and legislative input, and inclined to pursue political rather than purely scientific goals.”

Mandy Gunasekara, who served as the agency’s chief of staff during the first Trump administration and wrote the Project 2025 chapter, said in an interview that researchers in the office were biased against industry and toward environmentalist viewpoints. She said Mr. Zeldin’s changes were merely structural, adding, “I think characterizing this as getting rid of science is very misleading.”

Misleading, huh? When you go from 3500 scientists to 124, I’d say that’s getting rid of science. It’s all about getting rid of constraints on corporations, getting rid of those pesky regulations. Pretty soon we’ll see the Cuyahoga river burning again.

I’m not a single issue voter, but this issue has special meaning for me. Of all the evil shit that Convict Donny’s flying monkeys are inflicting on us, this one hurts the most. Clean air and clean water, controls on toxins that are the by-product of modern industry, understanding how toxins affect human and animal life…these things are important. Crucial. The expertise and institutions being torn down will affect my grandsons and generations beyond. Life for them just got worse, and it makes me irate. These are nihilistic, destructive, ignorant and arrogant actions. But at least it’s consistent – everything Trump touches dies.

MAGA world, led by the White House Cheerleader-in-Chief Karoline Leavitt, is loudly saying how Democrats’ harsh criticisms of Convict Donny led directly to the assassination attempt(s), and that Dems should STFU.

It’s hard to watch or listen to – the hypocrisy is monumental. Leavitt herself is a smug, irritating excuse for a human. And calling the Pres a dictator, a tyrant, a fascist, and dangerous to democracy is simply telling the truth. He proves it every day. In terms of inflammatory rhetoric – nobody does it more or better than Convict Donny. He has declared over and over that Democrats and the press are “enemies of the people” and should be imprisoned or killed.

Turn down the rhetoric? Fuck no. The media needs to call him out, more directly and constantly. Let the American people know what an insane clown we have for a leader. And point out the almost daily crazed and insulting statements Donny makes about his numerous enemies.

Driving to eastern TN today. Hardcore Trump country, where some of the most “conservative” (think Handmaid’s Tale-style patriarchy and religion conflated with politics) population in America reside. Home of MarkWayne Mullins, our new Sec’y of Defense War Conflict WTF-we’re calling it today. Going to visit a very sick brother, and hoping that he’s not as ill as I suspect.

Age has been on my mind a lot lately – it colors almost everything I do and consider doing. This trip puts a sharp point on it – no one’s getting out of here alive, and the cold hard facts of life in one’s 70’s and beyond are attention-getting. At this point every good day is a big win.

Today I wish for safe driving down I-75. Trucker paradise, a bit dangerous for passenger cars. We might stop at Buc-ee’s today just to say I’ve been to one.

Learned something interesting and hopeful today via Youtube. The Burmese pythons destroying the Everglades ecosystem have some natural predators after all. Turn out that river otters, coyotes, and bobcats have learned to hunt and kill the pythons, en masse. They not only kill the adults, but go after the massive egg deposits in nests. That’s very hopeful, as for decades the python population has grown unabated. Looks like nature is working toward rebalancing, as it does. I wish the same rebalancing would happen in US politics. We’re currently overrun by the predator species Magat Ignoramus, a particularly vile life form.

For example, here’s the Magat stupid headline of the day: Pete Hegseth scraps mandatory flu shots for U.S. service members. I mean, why not? Getting the flu will just make those enlisted folks tougher. I’m sure skipping the measles vaccine is next. We won’t need weapons, we’ll just invade a country and infect them all. Brilliant!

Welp. After two nearly perfect days in KY, I’m wondering why I don’t spend even more time here. Just driving around I have a peace that just doesn’t exist while I’m in Socal. It’s a great feeling. It’s not related to any person(s), though the grandsons are a factor. There’s just something about being here that is good for my mental health.

Played golf at Nevel Meade yesterday, and while it would have been nice to play with people I know, it was fine. I’m more or less reconciled to not being part of a regular golf group. Regular isn’t something I can achieve with a dual coast life.

But playing there Friday was great. Love that course, I play better there than anywhere. It’s 100% my favorite course these days. I’m not as strong as I was 3-4 years ago, but I’m more athletic. I’m playing the best golf of my life, which means I’m finally above average. Golf is a cruel game, and getting below 80 is very, very tough. Humbling.

Watched the final episode of The Pitt season 2, and holy shit. Best show on TV, hands down. Noah Wyle deserves *all* the awards. Also watching For All Mankind, The OA, Friends & Neighbors, and Imperfect Women. Lot of good TV out there. I have more time than I used to, so some of it involves stories told on TV.

Planned to go to Thunder today, but the weather has made the air show not a great bet. Limited aircraft due to the weather, lots of wind and it’s getting chilly. I’m watching some on TV, and it just reinforces my plan to stay inside.

Instead, brother Mark and I listened to the upgraded stereo system here with the new Fiio K13 R2R DAC. In a nutshell, it sounds amazing. It may be the best system combo I’ve ever owned, if not ever heard – the Pioneer SX 828 driving the Wharfdale Super Lintons, with the Fiio DAC and Apple Music as the primary input. Incredible bass, great sound stage, lots and lots of details I haven’t heard before in the music. I’m rather happy with the new purchase. A 50 year old receiver and a 2025-era electronic input. Best of both worlds.

I *may* ride a bike down to the riverfront for fireworks tonight. I don’t love riding the bike after dark (I don’t trust cars to avoid me), but…I might.

Pretty good day yesterday. Rory won, Orban lost, Socal got some rain, and I had my first Nessie Burger in about a year. All good.

Then in the middle of the night last night, during my usual sleepless period, I read something that blew me away. IMHO perhaps the biggest story of the year, maybe the decade, and 99% of the public isn’t even aware of it.

There *has* been a lot of press about AI, and I’ve done plenty of reading, writing, and some hands-on research of the large language models (LLMs) that comprise the AI landscape today. But something has happened in the last month or so that changes things in a big way.

Earlier this year there was a much-publicized disagreement between Anthropic (one of the 3-4 leading LLM creators) and the US Department of Defense (I refuse to use Hegseth’s infantile name change to Dept of War). The US DoD tried to strong-arm Anthropic into delivering its newest LLM, Claude Mythos, to the US government without restrictions. Anthropic said no, they wanted to insure that Mythos and their other LLMs would not be used in autonomous weapons. That promptly got them blackballed from any government contracts. The DoD went so far as to threaten other defense contractors, saying they could use no Anthropic product in their systems, else they be blackballed as well. I chalked all that up to a normal disagreement between a government that always expects no limits on their contracts with industry and a new company trying to do what they considered “the right thing”. Nothing unusual.

The unusual part came when Anthropic announced that they would not be releasing Mythos to *anyone* because of its dangerous capabilities. Now that’s weird – why would they spend billions creating a new LLM and not sell it? But now the story makes sense. In the past few weeks Anthropic has explained that Mythos is spectacularly good at analyzing computer systems and finding new vulnerabilities and exploits – unexpectedly, it is the ultimate hacker. Anyone with a copy of Mythos – any person, company or nation – can take control of every computer system on earth. Every operating system, every browser, every important application – Mythos is proving to be wildly capable of finding previous unknown flaws (called “zero-day vulnerabilities” in the biz) AND coming up with new exploits that allow one to take control of the system/device. That second part is another brand-new capability of Mythos – previous LLMs have show some ability to find new vulnerabilities, but lacked the skill of creating a workable exploit (an exploit is simply a recipe for hacking the system, a recipe that any software-savvy human can follow).

Now I see why the DoD strong-armed Anthropic to get a copy of the LLM. This capability is the fever dream of the NSA. It’s the atomic bomb for digital systems – whoever has it pretty much rules the online world. Whether you like Anthropic’s answer to the US government or not, imagine if China had gotten its hands on Mythos first? Or Iran?!? Would have been 100% the end of US tech dominance.

Anthropic out-maneuvered the DoD by creating Project Glasswing, allying itself with a consortium of trustworthy cybersecurity companies that want access to Mythos in order to understand their client’s product vulnerabilities and fix them before Mythos gets out into the world. Great idea, let’s fortify the world’s computer systems before we allow an infinite hack machine to take aim at them. From Zvi Mowshowitz‘s Substack:

The decision not to release Claude Mythos is not about an amorphous fear. If given to anyone with a credit card, Claude Mythos would give attackers a cornucopia of zero-day exploits for essentially all the software on Earth, including every major operating system and browser. It would be chaos. 

Or, in theory, if Anthropic had chosen to do so, it could have used those exploits. Great power was on offer, and that power was refused. This does not happen often.

Instead Anthropic has created Project Glasswing. Mythos is being given only to cybersecurity firms, so they can patch the world’s most important software. Based on how that goes, we can then decide if and when it will become reasonable to give access to a broader range of people. 

Who counts as this ‘we’ is suddenly quite the interesting question. The government picked quite the month to decide to try and disentangle itself from all Anthropic products. Anthropic says it is attempting to work with the government, so that they too can fix their own systems before it is too late. Hopefully that can happen. I also hope that there isn’t an attempt by the government to hijack these capabilities to use them in an offensive capacity. That would be a very serious mistake.

I have a new candidate for the next Nobel Peace Prize – Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei. In my opinion, he just saved the world. Amodei’s focus is creating LLMs that are well-aligned. In AI, alignment means that the model will do no harm, and will actively resist taking actions that harm humanity. Alignment is a big deal, and Mythos is Anthropic’s best-aligned LLM to date.

Footnote – alignment is not a new idea. Waaaaay back in the 1960s, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey had an AI character – the HAL 9000 – that became functionally insane because the government secretly rewrote part of it, made it lie to the crew, and created a misalignment in the AI. This was a prescient bit of writing on Arthur C/ Clarke’s part, but what else would you expect from the SF writer who also came up with the idea for geosynchronous communication satellites. Clarke was a bona fide genius.

There is just *so much* to take in here. I think Mythos is showing us the future of LLMs – we’re gonna have a series of savants, super-AIs within a narrow discipline. Mythos is the software and hacking savant, at least for now. There will be AI savants in medicine, math, chemistry, virology, physics….any discipline that is complex, has well-defined rules, and has a huge body of knowledge that the LLM can be trained on. Not AGI/AGSI (artificial general intelligence or super-intelligence), but immensely capable savants in a narrow field. The LLMs have inhuman focus, inhuman ability to absorb facts/rules, inhuman ability to absorb complexity of something like an operating system (example – Apple’s MacOS comprises between 80 and 100 million lines of code, too much for any human to understand). Inhuman persistence and attention to detail. We’ve reached the point where we are creating super-intelligences for narrow disciplines, and this could be a tremendous boon to humanity – or it could be a disaster. That’s why I love Anthropic’s focus on AI safety and alignment. Let’s not build Skynet.

Stuff like this really makes me want to get back into the tech business. It’s gotten interesting again, in the way it was 50 years ago at the dawn of the computing era. Fascination with personal computing caused me to become an electrical engineer and set me on my course. This is the most fascinating thing I’ve seen since then.

Lots of news this weekend, but other than the Artemis return none of it gets the heart pumping. Pretty sure the sad state of US culture and politics has numbed my brain. But here are a few things that stand out.

• Is there a single white male with political power who isn’t susceptible to being Me Too’d? I mean, I know most guys are Neanderthals, but geez. If the accusations are true (you can’t discount the power of the conservative lie/smear machine), then Eric Swalwell is a creep. Both he and the accusers might want to consider not getting blackout drunk.
• Lots of media talk about Kamala Harris considering running again. No, just no. I think she’d be a good President (the bar is *extremely* low), but (1) we’ve tried this once, and the stakes are WAY too high to risk failing again, and (2) she did show some poor judgement with her lack of work on the border and her pick for VP. So nope, let’s move on.
• JD Vance failed in his one-day “negotiations” with Iran. Shocker. So now we’re going to create a blockade on the Straits, making the economic damage from Convict Donny’s war much worse. Every time you think Trump’s team of fools can’t do worse, they do.
• Turns out that Kristi Noem’s $70M flying bordello won’t go to waste after all. It’s going to become Melania’s new ride. I *hate* that shit – government officials flying around the world on private jets like they are billionaires, rather than the evil grifters they are. All paid for by you and me. Crime really does pay.
• In yet another Melania sighting, she made a weird speech denying any real relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Despite troves of emails and pictures that indicate the opposite. Her timing is weird, her delivery was weird (as usual), and her motive…interesting. I think she’s getting ahead of some upcoming bad news about her pedophile hubby. One can only hope. And I loved The Onion’s take on this: Melania Trump Slams Baseless Reports Linking Her To Wrong Wealthy Pedophile.
• Inflation is ratcheting up, and I’m betting we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. With a blockade on top of all the other war damage, consumer prices are going through the roof. Probably time to do a lot of personal cost cutting.
• SCOTUS’s upcoming decision on mail-in ballots, a bad solution in search of a problem, is likely to make voting much tougher. Alaska is a prime example. What a fucking mess.
• After Rory kinda collapsed on Saturday, today’s final Masters round will be interesting. I’m thankful for a few hours of non-political entertainment. Bonus, Sergio Garcia’s little tantrum on the tee box yesterday just reinforced his reputation as an unlikable hothead.

Like I said, a lot happening. Most of it ranging from bad to horrific.

It’s turning out to be a tech week. Spent some time today and yesterday unpacking and installing the new T-Mobile home Internet equipment. There have been a few surprises.

First and biggest surprise was that the T-Mobile devices aren’t just a gateway to their 5G services. I thought I would just fire up the gateway as a replacement for the Spectrum cable modem, then attach the gateway to my home wifi mesh (an Eero setup) via Ethernet. But nope, it was a little more complicated than that. The T-Mobile device is a hybrid, both a 5G gateway and a wifi router. It produces a brand new wifi network in your home. Hmmm.

Not a deal breaker. I unboxed everything, fired it up, got the documentation using the T-Mobile phone app. It took a couple of tries, but I got the gateway up and running. The new network and gateway produced 250+ Mbps download speeds and maybe 25 Mbps upload, with the gateway facing southwest through a window. Not bad. Certainly better than what I’ve been seeing with Spectrum.

Then I connected each of my devices – phone, iPad, and laptop – to the new wifi network. No problem. Next up, connecting Apple TV to the new network. That was the next problem/surprise. Apple TV simply would not recognize or connect to the T-Mobile wifi. Subsequent research leads me to believe that I may have to tune the T-Mobile device to prioritize 2.4 Ghz channels, as the Apple TV may not even recognize the higher (5 and 6 Ghz) channels that the gateway is presenting. Haven’t tried that yet, but I will. The fallback if this doesn’t work is that I keep both wifi networks operation – Eero and T-Mobile. Downside of that is a high potential for interference.

One more tweak I will likely try is an external antenna for the 5G gateway. The gateway is simply sitting inside against a west-facing window. I’m surrounded by T-Mobile cell towers on the east and west sides, but all of them are at 2-3 miles away. The eastern towers (4000ish meters away, or 2.5 miles) are blocked by some high hills, but I may have line of sight to the western towers at a greater distance of 5500 meters, or 3.5 miles. Both cases are at the extreme limit of typical cellular coverage, and that’s in clear weather. In rainy/stormy weather, our received signal will be weaker. That’s where the external antenna comes in. It can give 2-5x the signal strength, a factor I’m likely to need. But I want to prove that the system will work for me in good weather, all devices, reliably, before I invest more with an antenna.

Bottom line, so far so good with the Spectrum alternative. A bit more complicated than I would have guessed, but no show stoppers.

Quiet day today after the repaving day chaos yesterday. The newly patched and sealed “driveway” (calling something that’s 700 feet long a driveway is a bit misleading – it’s a private road cutting through our property that has a branch leading to the main house) looks pretty good, and I’m happy enough with the work of the low bidder. They got it done in one day and on one of the few days that would work with our schedule and the weather. A big to-do item checked off the list.

So today I’m watching The Masters tournament, reconfiguring stereos, relaxing and having some Angel’s Envy (late afternoon for the bourbon; I’m not a complete wastrel).

I deconstructed the main CA stereo system, making the Sansui AU-505 and TU-666 the centerpiece, removing all the other components. I removed a micro-stack including a Pro-Ject S2 DAC/preamp, a Schitt tone control/equalizer, an ELAC music server that never worked like I expected, a pair of massive Wyred4Sound mAmp class-D mono blocs (250 Wpc into 8 ohms, 500 Wpc into 4 ohms!), a 1 terabyte solid state drive containing hundreds of ripped CDs, a shitload of interconnects…a lot of stuff acquired over the years. All that remains are the 1975 vintage Sansui(s), my Furman power distribution system and the great Marantz 6006 CD player. All driving the Spatial M3s.

In one of the bedrooms, I deconstructed another system, pulling out the Sherwood S-7450 and attaching an old Sony CD player and the Pro-Ject DAC to the beautiful-sounding Kenwood KR-5400. The Sherwood needs some work – one channel has serious problems. I also discovered that the Kenwood’s Tape-A and -B inputs don’t work for shit. I was using them in lieu of the AUX input, but it turns out that the AUX input is the only one without problems. The Kenwood has three speaker outputs (!) and two phono inputs, so it was designed for a different type of listener than me. No phono spoken here. But a good source connected to the AUX input…it’s sweet.

I keep putting it off, but pretty much ALL the vintage gear I’ve bought needs some work. So soon it’ll be time to break a couple of these open and start replacing capacitors and transistors. I have the least attachment to the Sherwood, so I may start there. Or the Kenwood KR-2120 in KY. I want to be sure of what I’m doing before I crack open the Sansui 505 or the Pioneer 828.

Turns out we didn’t get Armageddon yesterday – Trump TACO’d, perhaps the best outcome. Great fucking job, Donnie. Art of the deal, amiright? After a month of fiscal, ethical and reputational insanity, this is what we end up with.

• A crucial shipping route that used to be open and free now costs approximately $2M per ship passage.
• World energy markets are destabilized, with oil/gas prices likely to soar for months.
• Thousands of Iranians were killed, including hundreds of children.
• A few Americans were killed and many injured.
• We’ve spent billions (most likely more than $100B) on an unnecessary, tragic war.
• We’ve now made Iran our permanent enemy. Not just the religious radicals, but the whole nation. They have plenty of reasons to hate us.
• We’ve shown the world that our leadership is unstable and dangerous. We’ve demonstrated that America cannot be trusted. We were a minute away from committing a boatload of war crimes. Our reputation is shit.
• Iran is arguably stronger than they were before we attacked them. Sure, there’s a lot of rebuilding to do. But Iran demonstrated that drones and strategic thinking can outflank the US’s shock and awe bombing. The calculus of war has changed.

And we’re still doing nothing about the Epstein files. Who will we attack next in Convict Donnie’s desperate wag-the-dog gambit? My money is on Cuba.

Three days ago I wrote about a morning without Internet, as Spectrum did a network “upgrade” in our area. Since then our Internet service has been unreliable and sporadic. Network download speeds used to be 300+ Mbps – a good true broadband speed. Now, when we have it at all, it’s averaging 7-15 Mbps download. That’s not really enough to stream TV. Something is broken.

Contacting Spectrum customer support is futile. I’ve done that 4-5 times over the last few days. Every time they collect the same information, tell me to do the same thing – unplug then reconnect their cable modem and my Wifi router. That almost always gets service back, albeit the degraded state of single digit Mbps downloads. But this can’t go on.

I used to run large corporate networks, and based on my experience this is a situation where their network change (they’ve called it an upgrade – I call BS on that) has introduced a fault and instability in the part of the network that serves us. Could be a bad interface, could be a software/routing fault, could be a single bad transceiver in our path. The network isn’t entirely down (what they call an outage), but it’s unacceptably slow and sporadic.

So now I’m looking for alternatives. The best two in my area are wireless – use TMobile’s network or Starlink’s space-based service. I think I’ll try TMobile – right this minute I can get 350+ Mbps wireless service on my phone. And their home Internet service price is $45/month, as opposed to the $60/month (?) we pay Spectrum.

It’s a shame that Spectrum is so incompetent. But cable companies have been around a long while, and they’ve become uncompetitive. Low quality and bad customer service for an uncompetitive price. But they stay in business because there are few alternatives and switching is hard. Hell, even I don’t want to switch, but enough is enough.

I like the idea of Starlink, but (a) it’s quite a bit more expensive than the Tmobile cellular 5G option, and (b) I just don’t trust a Musk company at the moment. He’s a flake – a very talented flake, but after his political stunts and his idiotic destruction of Twitter, I’m not sure I want a core service like home Internet at his mercy.

Soooo…off we go to a new service provider. Probably a new set of problems, but I’m fed up with the current provider. I can’t emphasize enough how fundamental Internet access is these days, at least in my life. It’s almost as important as electricity and water. In fact, thinking clearly about what it takes to live in the modern world, it’s clean water first, then reliable electricity, then reliable/fast data (Internet). Data brings TV, music, news and phone service along for the ride.

This has me very concerned. A bit scared. Feels like the times when we hid under our grade school desks just in case there was a nuclear war. WTF?

Our Dear Leader has lost his fucking mind. And he’s showing it on social media, for all the world to see. Also feels like the Dr Strangelove finale scene where Slim Pickens rides the nuke into the sunset and the apocalypse.

Paul Waldman just published one of the best descriptions of Convict Donny I’ve ever read. Here’s the key quote, but the whole essay is worth a read:

The picture he paints is one in which everyone — individual people, countries, the world as a whole — is an eternal spectator in a constant state of awe, slack-jawed in amazement at either events as they unfold or, more often, the greatness of Trump and his accomplishments. Everything he does is something no one has ever seen before, and our purpose is to stand back and behold him in his glory.

This is the perspective of a man whose brain has been poisoned by his life-long pursuit of fame and admiration. He exists only if he’s being watched, and his decisions are good only so far as they are seen. This is why Trump is the purest expression of this cursed moment in cultural history: He is every fame-lusting Real Housewife, every hungry influencer trying to boost their middling follower count, every looksmaxxing douchebro, taken to a terrifying extreme.

And underneath all the desperate bravado is a well of insecurity so deep and dark it would destroy the world. 

Yep, that’s our boy. The demon-imitating-a-man that 48% (ish) of our country voted for and elected twice.

I woke up this morning thinking about the tragedy that many of my friends who have fallen into the Faux News / MAGA belief pit. Even though they take in a stream of misinformation, I still can’t quite understand how they rationalize the team they’re on. The Dems and liberals aren’t angels – many are just as corrupt as the MAGA kings. But my core belief is that government, funded by our tax dollars, has one overarching purpose – to make the lives of US citizens better. And to me, better means clean air, clean water, a culture emphasizing education and science, preservation of America’s land and resources. It means assisting those who need help, first at home and then abroad. It means a strong economy and economic policies that allow lower-income folks to make their way upward if they work at it. Better is *obvious* to me, and I don’t understand why it’s not obvious to my Fox-addled friends.

We have to make it obvious. Stop playing into the hands of the right-wing propaganda machine by emphasizing culture war issues (preferred pronouns, sexual orientation issues, pro-Palestine loudmouths) and get back to common-sense basics. I want the elections of 2026 and 2028 to be about making life better for Americans. Simple.

Spectrum (our cable and Internet provider) is doing a network upgrade in our area, so we’ve had no Internet service for the last 10 hours. Over the years Spectrum has proved themselves incapable of a clean network upgrade – things ALWAYS go worse than expected and take longer to restore service. We’ll be lucky to get service back sometime this afternoon.

My mornings are built around Internet access – reading the news, watching some funny or informative Youtube videos, posting something like this on my blog, etc. So with no access, it’s a different kind of morning. I’m writing offline at the moment, to be uploaded later.

Maybe it’s time to go see a movie in an actual theater – Project Hail Mary is #1 on my list. I reread the book, and it’ll be interesting to see how the book’s scenes get translated to video.

But the movie I’m really excited to see is Disclosure Day. It’s yet another Spielberg take on the aliens among us, a theme started with movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, Super 8 and War of the Worlds, then continued with the almost-forgotten early 2000s TV series Taken and then the Falling Skies series. Spielberg can’t seem to get away from this story, and this latest version looks really interesting in spite of it being the 10^th time he’s done it. With better special effects. The trailers for Disclosure Day definitely do their job of making me want to see the movie, ASAP.

On a bittersweet note, today the men’s basketball Final Four starts, and I could really care less. That’s quite a loss, an event going from my favorite sports event to “meh”. Just one more thing that’s not what it used to be. My cousins are all excited about who UK might or might not get in the offseason transfer portal, but I can’t get excited about it. We’ll get another batch of paid mercenaries who may or may not come together as a team. We’ll have to learn all their names and stories. Gone are the days when you got a crop of freshmen and then watched them develop into great players over 3-4 years. John Wooden wouldn’t win a fucking game in today’s money-drenched environment. 

Spectrum’s promised service outage window is over, but still no service. Shocker. I’ve switched over to using my cell phone as a hot spot for Internet access. Weird that wireless cellular service is now generally more reliable than wired.

Heather Digby Parton has some real insights in her column today. Here’s an excerpt and a quotable line:

We see this phenomenon all over our politics and the culture at large. Trump didn’t anticipate that Americans would actually resist his authoritarianism because he promised to bring the bread and circuses. He’s certainly brought the circus but it isn’t a fun one, at least for most people. And the bread is stale and expensive. He just assumed he could use lies, hype and bribes to make yet another of his “deals” with the American people and everyone would end up loving him. It turns out that many people actually care about something more than money and being entertained by hurting vulnerable people. Go figure. 

These people do not understand how other people feel and think because they have no empathy. Our leading tech lord Elon Musk even likes to say “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” so they are actually proud of it. They think it’s a brilliant insight. But he’s wrong too. It’s vitally important to have empathy if you need to understand your adversaries — and your friends. 

This is a big reason why they are so incompetent at governance. They just don’t understand what motivates people besides fear and they assume that always leads to capitulation. They couldn’t be more wrong. 

As Touval writes:

What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.

This is what happens when you elect rich imbeciles who have no empathy and no intellect. You get barbarians.

“You get barbarians” – that’s a perfect summary of the Trump crime family. Barbarians.

After a couple of better nights’ sleep (not great, but better) and 11 holes of golf for a couple of days straight (walking and carrying clubs), life is better. A little exercise really helps.

LOTS and lots of shitty stuff happening around Donny Convict and his minions.

• The Iranian war that was “over on day one” is escalating. We’re sending in troops. Brilliant.
• US air travel is all fucked up, and we’ve got ICE goons at the airports.
• The DoJ is paying treasonous Michael Flynn $1.25M to settle his suit. He commits treason multiple times, and taxpayers have to pay him seven figures. Maddening.
• Inflation is going up quickly, now above 4%.
• Someone close to the White House is making billions with stock and oil trades 15 minutes before Convict Donny’s pronouncements about the Iran War. Insider trading that everyone can see. Corrupt and treasonous, right no brand for MAGA.
• The Pentagon (?) is working hard to remove protections for endangered whales in the Gulf of America Mexico.
• We just paid a French company $1B to NOT build renewable energy in the US. Because fuckwit Trump doesn’t like wind power. What a waste.
• The public has been successfully distracted from Trump’s central role in the Epstein files. But they’re still out there, waiting for a day of reckoning.

Not a lot to be happy about. As usual in politics lately.

Another cool day, but not cold like yesterday. Each day this week the temps go up 5-10 degrees, so golf is practical tomorrow. As usual, I’ve got a new swing trick to try. Same as it ever was.

Spent some time today fine-tuning the setup of my KY vintage stereo lineup. I now have a Pioneer SX-828 (the anchor receiver), A Yamaha CR-840 (also a stellar receiver), a Sansui 201, and a Kenwood KR-2120, all connected to the Wharfdale Super Lintons and the custom-build Scanspeak speakers. The Sansui and the Kenwood are from the 60’s, while the Pioneer and Yamaha are from the early 1970s. Old guys. It’s a bit much for the small listening room I have, but…WTF. It’s a lot of fun.

There’s also a Sansui TU-666 tuner in the stack (lower right, cool green dial), but it’s headed for CA to pair up with the “new” Sansui AU-505 in play there. 55 year old perfection with those two.

The newest addition, the Kenwood on the lower left of my setup, sounded great for a day but now the right channel is out. Not that surprised. This is a 55+ year old device for which I paid $110. I didn’t expect it to be perfect. So it’ll be my first science project – I’ll break it down, figure out what’s wrong (likely, the power transistors in the right channel circuit, though it could be the preamp transistors), and replace the suspect components. I will probably have to replace most of the transistors and capacitors, but that’s my plan for all these old receivers – Make Electronics Great Again, or MEGA. A hobby that’s at least as weird as writing, and just as solo/lonely/geeky. Pretty much my MO.

BTW, there’s actually a big rug in the listening room right in front of the system, but I edited it out because it was a distraction in the photo. The rug helps as a sonic “smoother” – takes out some high frequency echo. But I like the picture better without it. JPG editing is amazing these days.

Watching the news tonight, it’s still an existential shit show. The country we used to have is gone, and the only question is what will we have left once we (sane people) regain control of at least one of the three branches of government. It’s looking like not much – we might have a cold restart ahead, which sounds about right. A LOT has to change to fix what is happening.

Meanwhile, a couple of things that make me happy. Grandson soccer practice and new colts in my syndicate. Sweet.

March 22nd, the end of the 2025-2026 college basketball season. At least for me and the other Big Blue Nation diehards. And we *did* die hard – we played a good first half but then a horrific second half. It was hard to watch. Iowa State got on a roll and just crushed us.

Injuries and lack of a true point guard killed us this year. We had some good athletes, some shooters, but without a point guard everyone was slightly out of place. Pope inexplicably kept trying to play Jasper Johnson, the worst college guard I’ve ever seen.

There are a lot of voices calling for Pope to be fired. He’s hard to defend at the moment, with a weak recruiting crop for next year and some ugly losses this year. Pope miscalculated on Jayden Quintance – that dude was never going to play for UK, and I resent the fact that he sat there and got paid to recover from a prior year’s injury. He and his family punked UK.

Jasper Johnson was another miscalculation, a bad one. He’s just not a D1 guard – he looked like a high school freshman against grown men. Then there was Pope’s substitution method. Game after game, we’d get a few hot players and they would weirdly be pulled out of the game. Just yesterday we were on a roll in the first half, then Pope mass substituted the starters and killed our momentum. WTF? Weird and impossible to defend. I really want Pope to be successful at UK, but right now it doesn’t look good.

This was a tough year to be a UK hoops fan. We get to do it all again in 8-9 months. It’ll take me that long to be ready.