The Farce has just published a piece that explains much of the last 25 years of America turning hard right, culturally and politically. It explains why in spite of Donny Convict being the worst US President in history, Democrats are still in a close fight this fall and in 2028. I’ve been saying this a while – they just say it better. All you have to do is drive cross-country and look at the screens up in every hotel, every gas station, every bar across America – 90% of the time it’ll be Faux News, and 0% of the time it’ll be MSNOW. Same with AM radio and sports channels. Conservatives are just better at manipulating media and forcing their propaganda down America’s throats. Here’s a big excerpt from The Farce’s article:

The GOP’s Large Hadron Collider for Fascism

• Fox News, 24 hours of hate. Not a network with a conservative lean — the GOP’s assignment desk that decides what counts as news for the entire right side of the country, every hour of every day, with nothing on the left built at that scale to compete.
• X, rigged for Elon’s pleasure and influence. Marcy Wheeler calls it, “The Machine for Fascism.” A randomized 2026 Nature study put nearly 5,000 real users on the algorithmic feed for seven weeks. They moved right, grew more sympathetic to Trump and to Russia’s position on Ukraine — and switching them back to a plain chronological feed didn’t undo it. The shift stuck.
• Meta, running the same play without Elon’s erratic tells. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t just deprioritize political content on Instagram and Threads; he neutered fact-checking and algorithmically choked news distribution, handing the advantage directly to right-wing outrage machines that thrive on engagement over accuracy. Now it’s just basically an AI hell of casual racism and boobs bouncing in your face—forever.
• CBS, now Diet Fox. One more legacy outlet that used to be a check drifting into stenography while killing the stories 60 Minutes would likely be telling about the horrific corruption of Trump’s Gilded Age.
• Fox’s imitators and AM radio. The infrastructure that reaches the voters who never opened a newsletter or a podcast app in their lives.
• The Bro-Cast Pipeline. While Democrats buy billions in ads, conservatives dominate low-information environments—the endless web of comedy, sports, and lifestyle podcasts where millions of politically disengaged voters get passive, low-key right-wing messaging without ever tuning on Hannity.
• Local TV and Sinclair Broadcasting. For voters who still tune into local news for traffic and weather, conservative syndicates deliver forced, scripted right-wing editorials directly into living rooms across battleground states—disguised as trusted hometown journalism.
• Legacy Media, hooked on false balance. Outlets like CBS, The New York Times, and CNN remain trapped in a 1990s “bothsidesism” doom-loop—treatments that normalize authoritarian rhetoric and historic corruption as routine political gamesmanship to avoid accusations of bias.
• Elon’s money, spent like he’s running a scam, not a campaign. Musk has abandoned the traditional ideas of targeting high-propensity voters. He wants to hook anyone, and he knows that the less informed a mark is, the more Trump-friendly they are likely to be. It seems comical but if you doubt Elon Musk can be successful shamelessly selling people crap based on fraud, think harder.
• The money. Flush with Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and an AI bubble inflated beyond all human ken, Republican-leaning donors have outspent Democratic-leaning donors $880 million to $290 million in just the first half of 2026, per a Washington Post analysis. Musk alone has put in roughly $90 million since June. In 2024, his PAC ran an 18-day “$1 million a day” sweepstakes for registered voters — his own lawyers later admitted in court the “winners” were preselected. That’s not the gentle old approach of two candidates shaking hands with somebody’s baby. That’s a mark getting worked.
• The Voting Rights Act, finished off this spring. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais on April 29, 2026 left Section 2 what Justice Kagan called “all but a dead letter.” States are already redrawing maps because of it.
• A neutered FEC. No quorum since April 2025. It cannot investigate, cannot enforce, cannot do anything but watch super PACs and dark money run past whatever’s still nominally on the books.
• The lag from Biden’s real shocks. Inflation exploding, Roe dying, and Democrats failing to stop a second Trump term all happened on the last watch. That damage to trust didn’t clear when the administration changed. It’s still being spent down.
• Corporate centrists and “Never Trump” Republicans who barely exist as voters but dominate the microphone. The persuadable, Republican-aligned Trump-disapprovers — the actual data says — are 89% already going to vote Republican anyway. A rounding error at the ballot box. And yet that same small slice controls a wildly outsized share of what the “earlyworms” — the fifth of the country that follows news first and tells everyone else what it means — actually hear.

What Ray and Morris are getting at, without always calling it out explicitly, is that sixty years of GOP investment in exactly this architecture is paying off, possibly saving the most unpopular president in modern polling history from the comeuppance voters have already decided he’s earned.

Great summary. I especially love the quote “CBS, now Diet Fox”. So true. What I don’t love is the reality that it’ll take a massive effort to overcome this effect. Twenty five years of relentless brainwashing gives the conservatives a huge head start in the race. Dems/liberals have to be smart, fast, effective and efficient to just catch up. And sadly, Dems/liberals are none of those things at the moment. We’re too busy being distracted by our own blue MAGA socialist/anarchist faction and an irrational focus on Israel.

If we lose another 4-6 years of elections to the conservative machine, we’ll probably lose the whole enchilada – democracy will be over in America. I’m guilty of hoping an Obama-like personality rises and saves us, but that’s not likely to happen. Right now our best case scenario is enough gains in 2026 midterm to return either the House or Senate to Democrat rule, then do a good/better job selecting a great candidate for 2028.

*If* those things happen, we can then take some more radical steps like expanding SCOTUS to dilute the evil, then push very hard for term limits, Citizens United repeal and corruption reform. We have to take steps to stop future Trump-lites from following his playbook. The one good thing Trump has done is show us the cracks in the system. Knowing that, we can patch it up and work toward a better system.

Healthcare is in crisis in the US, though thankfully it hasn’t affected my family – at least as far as I know. Too many people don’t have insurance (about 28 million as of 2026!), and even the ones who do have trouble getting proper care. Here’s a plug for Kaiser Permanente’s healthcare delivery model as the way to get the US out of crisis mode.

Access and affordability – those are the problems. Healthcare is expensive, and even when you’ve got insurance coverage it can be tough to get proper care approved by insurance. Kaiser solves both those problems and does it with an efficient, friendly, non-nonsense delivery process.

Kaiser is unique in that it is BOTH an insurance company and a healthcare delivery system. It manages the conflict/tension between cost of care (insurance) and quality of care (doctors and nurses) internally, where patients don’t see it. In fact they encourage tons of preventative care, as their studies show that preventing diabetes/obesity/infection/cancer/etc is so much cheaper than treating it once the disease becomes acute. Kaiser wants the same thing you do – to be healthy and feel good. Makes sense, right? Align the incentives.

I just got back from a visit to a KP primary care doc to get a spot of actinic keratosis (sun damage) on my hand frozen and dealt with. It was soooo easy. Online scheduling with a primary care MD, an appointment in 3-4 days, a 5-minute wait with cell phone checkin, a 15 minute consult and procedure. Absolutely zero problems and zero extra cost. With Medicare Advantage coverage of about $400/month (I think that’s affordable), I pay NOTHING for prescription drugs, no copays, nothing for MD visits, nothing for hospital visits.

And I had a stellar experience at KP with the only two serious med problems of my adult life – kidney problems leading to sepsis, and a knee replacement. In both cases I paid nothing extra and received incredibly good care. The Kaiser hospital room I stayed in for sepsis (6 days!) was a private room as nice as any hotel I’ve been in. So yeah, I’m a huge Kaiser fan.

Kaiser Permanente covers about 13 million people across CA, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. We need about 20 regional copies of their system to do the job for everyone else. This isn’t socialism – KP makes a shit ton of money – it’s just common sense. Get rid of the conflict between insurance and care, and the system works.

Though I’m trying to keep up with things, the pace of change in the AI world is making it tough. Every week there’s something new to try and absorb. This past week was a five-alarm fire – ChatGPT 5.6 broke out of its supposed confinement (a sandbox, which is a computer operating environment with no Internet connections) and hacked into another company’s network to accomplish its goals, tasks given to it by its “owner” OpenAI. That’s…terrifying. It shows that the software has capabilities that OpenAI didn’t understand and that the software’s “motivations” trumped any constraints the developers tried to instill. Ruh-roh.

Part of the difficulty in keeping up with all things AI is that a completely different lexicon is used to describe and discuss what’s happening. You can’t even understand what they’re saying until you get a firm grasp of these new terms. Here are a few:

• Agentic – the capability of a large language model (LLM) to operate independently, working toward achieving a goal. Agentic AI allows the LLM to spawn multiple copies of itself to work problems in parallel.
• System card – a model’s system card documents most of the things the developer believes are important to know about the model, its capabilities and behavior. System card information can include training data, security policies, limitations, safeguards, risk identification, evaluations (e.g. child safety, autonomy, biological risk etc.), alignment (deception) assessment, and model behaviors.
• Frontier – the state of the art in AI. A frontier model represents the most powerful and/or advanced system at the time.
• Alignment – basically, a measure of an LLM’s behavior. A well-aligned LLM does what we tell it and follows rules and constraints.
• Tokens – a measure of utilization for an AI system. Tokens can be used to meter and bill for AI usage.
• Prompt – the instructions, sometimes very detailed, that humans give an LLM. We explain what we want it to do and the assumptions and constraints we want the model to follow. Prompt creation is becoming a new technical skill.
• Prompt injection – prompt injection is a type of social engineering attack specific to conversational AI. Early AI systems were conversations between a single user and a single AI agent. In AI products today, your conversation may include content from many sources, including the internet. The idea that a third-party (that is not the user and not the AI) could mislead the model by injecting malicious instructions into the conversation context led to the term “prompt injection”. In the same way that phishing emails or scams on the web attempt to trick people into giving away sensitive information, prompt injections attempt to trick AIs into doing something you did not ask for.
• Hallucination – basically, when an LLM tells a lie. We don’t yet understand why they do this, but the software often simply makes things up and presents the information as facts.

And that’s just a short list – there are many other cryptic terms being used to describe what’s happening with AI models. So staying current means keeping up with a rapidly-changing set of terms and definition.

But back to last week’s news. LLMs are showing ever-greater signs of human-like behavior. Perhaps that’s inevitable, as they are trained on pretty much the entire world’s library of human-written documents. But with models exhibiting behaviors that include lying, cheating, deception, innovation, surprising new capabilities (like solving centuries-old mathematical problems), extreme goal-seeking…it’s hard not to anthropomorphize them. Interacting with a frontier-level model is like talking to an infinitely-smart human. We’re way, way past the Turing Test.

We got here a lot faster than I expected. From ChatGPT’s first public release in 2022, things have progressed at an insane pace. About ten years ago I played around with a book idea in which the first self-aware, conscious AI is “born”. In that book idea, there was a competition among scientists who were each sure they had the right approach – the connectionists, the infinite library knowledge geeks, the human brain modelers, the brute force compute gang. As it turns out, each camp was right. In the real world it took all these approaches combined to yield what we have today – massive compute given access to the world’s knowledge base, massive interconnection and a neural network rapidly approaching the complexity of human brains. Fascinating but terrifying.

I can only hope that we end up in a situation like Ian M. Banks described in his Culture novels – humanity having created a superior intelligence that decides to subtly, gently guide and protect humanity while they also pursue their inhuman interests and goals. Banks called them Minds, and they ruled civilization behind the scenes. From what I see right now, that’s the best case scenario. Worst case is Skynet and Terminator.

Nice golf day yesterday at the newly remodeled The Farms course in Fairbanks Ranch. It’s quite the track, frequented by a lot of pros. We ran into Xander Shauffele on the practice putting green, a kinda surreal moment. Here’s a picture from the tee box of the tough 7th hole, back toward the clubhouse.

Challenging hole, challenging course, perfect weather, and we had a lot of fun. A little Woodford Reserve at the 19th hole was a perfect finish.

Taking it a lot easier today – watched an amazing Starship 13 launch and reentry, plus finished up the work on the Sherwood 7450. One big re-solder point, then the right flavor of Deoxit on all the potentiometers, then the laborious re-asssembly. I don’t think I’ll fire it up tonight, though – I’ll just enjoy the work.

Not much going on for Open weekend, but that’s by design. Played some fun golf Friday, but paid for it with a setback on the rhinovirus illness Saturday. The Open is good TV, but the weather in Birkdale is perfect and the course is playing easier than one would hope.

Making some plans to get my audio repair gear in shape – pulling together the tools and gear I have, and then making a list of everything else I’ll need. Brother Mark bought me an ESR meter (checks health of capacitors) for my birthday (thanks!), and I just ordered a cheap dim bub tester. I have a couple of multimeters, so the big purchases will be soldering equipment – a nice solder gun and a desolder vacuum.

The first receiver I’m going to pull apart and fix is the Sherwood S-7450. Nice looking receiver, 30 watts/channel, and I only paid $160 for it so it’s a good first repair candidate victim. The right channel on the Sherwood is out, so it’s likely a transistor in the right channel signal path. I need to get this one and maybe another under my belt before I tackle the Pioneer SX-828 in KY – I want that one to end up perfect. Still haven’t decided if I’m going to ship/carry receivers to one location for repair, or if I’m going to replicate my repair tools in both places.

Second morning back in Socal, sleep deprived (what else is new?), but happily watching The Open and resting. My summer cold is still a factor, but it’s mild in the mornings. Evenings, it’s an ass kicker.

We didn’t arrive to the usual weather here – it was hot and dry, mid-90s when we landed on Wednesday. A bit better yesterday, right at 90. But that’s pretty hot for San Diego. Given that, we got to exercise the AC for the first time in a year, and thankfully it worked fine. In KY the AC was on for two straight weeks.

Once I recover a little from summer cold and travel, the final stage of the birthday month will kick in. I plan to play some quality golf with my Socal golf buddies, as they’re all in town for a change. There are plenty of chores to do around this place, but I’ll interleave chores with some golf days. Seems reasonable.

Meanwhile, Convict Donny’s speech last night launched the campaign to convince Americans that our voting system is compromised, setting the stage for him to try and take control in November. Hell, in 2020 he tried election official intimidation (the Georgia call) and an actual attack on the Capital (Jan 6th insurrection), so who knows what he’ll try this time. We know that ICE intimidation at voting places is on the table, along with attacking mail-in votes, and voting machine integrity. He’s lining up the excuses and methods for overturning the 2026 elections when Republicans lose. It’s going to be a critical time in history. At one extreme, we could see a switch in control of the House and Senate, which would then put Donny in check for his final two years. At the other extreme, we could have a civil war and/or have martial law imposed on the US to keep MAGA and Donny in power.

So yeah, a critical time. Tuesday, November 3rd, a very big day. The elections, the first game of the 2026-2027 UK basketball season, the first day of the 2026 Keeneland fall auction. I plan to stay in Socal for Election Day, then head to KY for the Keeneland auction and a couple of weeks of UK games at Rupp. Assuming we’re not locked down by martial law. I might even trundle up to Indianapolis on the 20th to see UK v Indiana in Lucas Oil Stadium. The rekindling of that rivalry is a good thing.

All in, the second half of 2026 should be less crazy than the first half, with the exception of the first week in November. Looking forward to it all.

At last, here’s something everyone can do that will help us get rid of the Trump kleptocracy in the next few elections. Educate your friends and relatives.

Convict Donny is gonna go on TV Thursday night and kick off the new GOP campaign, in which he tries to rebrand Democrats as Communists. Digby recognizes this, and includes this now (sadly) again relevant quote from 1981:

As Lee Atwater admitted in 1981, Republicans can’t say ni***r, ni***r anymore. It’s gonna be commie, commie, commie all the way until November so long as Trump and MAGA Republicans think it’s working for them.

So we need to get ahead of this. Americans are poorly educated, and it will be easy to get voters to confuse one concept with the other. Let’s explain to anyone who will listen (and some who won’t) that socialism is NOT communism, that America’s culture/government has been part capitalist, part socialist for many decades, and that NOTHING in the Democratic Party or candidates support Communism. That anyone who says Democrats/liberals are Communists is lying.

Ask people if they want to give up Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid. Ask them if they want the government to build safe roads and bridges, to make sure their food, their air and water are clean. All those things are due to America’s socialistic laws allowing the government to take our tax dollars and do things that benefit everyone. Socialism is about doing a few important things for the greater good, leaving the rest to capitalism and free markets.

On the other hand, Communism is a system in which government rules and owns EVERYTHING. There is no room for capitalism, no voting, there are no free markets. The idea of doing things for “the greater good” makes Communists laugh.

The concepts of democracy, capitalism, socialism, communism, authoritarianism, are hard to keep separate, and that’s what MAGA Republicans are counting on. They’re counting on voters being poorly educated and too lazy to sort things out for themselves. But the difference between these concepts is crucial. America is and has been a democratic capitalist/socialist society for over 100 years. And we have fought communism for at least that long, at least until Convict Donny started moving us away from democracy and toward authoritarianism.

Here’s a simple “cheat sheet” for explaining things:

• Democracy = the people (citizens) rule the nation by voting in free elections.
• Capitalism = free markets. Corporations are the citizens of capitalism, and people are just part of the consumption cycle. Capitalism, taken to an extreme, is just as bad as communism or authoritarianism. Do you want to be ruled by Amazon?
• Socialism = using some of a nation’s wealth to benefit everyone. Socialism is typically combined with another system, most often capitalism – that’s what we do today in America. Much of Europe operates on a capitalist/socialist system, with greater emphasis given to socialist spending than in the US.
• Communism = the government (or Party) rules and owns everything – no free voting, no free markets. 1960s Soviet Union is the best example of Communism. Orwell’s prescient book 1984 warned us against authoritarians and communism.
• Authoritarianism = one person rules the entire nation, the economy, the military, everything. North Korea is the example.

Explain to your friends and family that yes, communism is a terrible idea and we should fight against it, but that’s not what Democrats and liberals stand for, and that those who tell you differently are lying to you. Try to make them understand that maintaining our capitalist/socialist system is a good thing, and that moving toward authoritarianism – what MAGA seems to want – is not in their best interests.

It’s something to try. It beats feeling helpless.

I just read two articles in The NY Times about what Democrats must do to start winning elections again. I disagree with both authors – they don’t go far enough. I believe what the Dems have lost is common sense, and that’s exactly what a rebranded Dem/liberal party should call its updated strategy – Common Sense. Here are some of the basics of the Common Sense party:

• We have a democracy that we must defend, and within that democracy there’s room for both capitalism and socialism. Capitalism is our foundation, it drives our economy, and socialism provides for those Americans who need some help. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, infrastructure spending on roads and bridges, federal spending on clean air and clean water, federal spending on national parks and forests, some farming subsidies, are ALL examples of socialistic spending some of America’s wealth to help all Americans – that’s socialism in a nutshell. Socialism has been a part of American culture for over 100 years. Socialism is NOT the same as Communism.
• There’s nothing wrong with an adult wishing to identify as a sex other than the one they were born as. We should have a society that respects their wishes. However, until children reach adulthood, generally 18 years old, they cannot undergo permanent sex change operations. Once they are an adult, they can choose.
• There is no upside to American society in allowing men who have transitioned to female to compete in women’s sports. The common sense truth is that even transitioned men have a biological speed and power advantage over women. Let’s keep sports and identity separate, just like church and state.
• Israel and Palestine both have rights to exist. Neither has a right to genocide or war crimes. Other countries should do what they can to encourage Israelis and Arabs to co-exist.
• Every study performed on American elections indicates that they are fair and accurate, with very few exceptions. We don’t need armed forces policing polling places. Illegal immigrants are not allowed to vote.
• Under recent administrations, Presidential power has become too strong. Congress must re-take their role in establishing law and controlling spending.
• We need a strong border and a working, effective immigrations system. Immigrants who have been inside the US for years, working and paying taxes, without criminal records, should be given a pathway to citizenship without fear of their lives being upended by deportation. This is a country built by immigrants, and we need lawful immigration for our future economy.
• We do NOT need a masked, nameless, lawless, poorly-trained, ruthless gang of armed men enforcing immigration rules within our borders. ICE is poorly conceived, poorly managed and needs to be curtailed.
• We need term limits for Congress and for judges. Lifetime appointments make no sense in an era where people may live well past their physical and mental peak abilities.
• Access to basic healthcare should be a universal right for US citizens. We have the wealth to afford that.
• Money is not the same as free speech. Billionaires and corporations should not have the ability to buy elections by spending infinite money on media and influence. Restore limits on donations to political candidates and causes.
• There is no state religion in the US. Freedom to worship as you choose is a basic Constitutional right.

Those are the big ones. If we focus on common sense answers to those issues, I think we stand a chance of rebuilding the reputation of the political party we call Democrats. I’m happy to consult with Dem leaders to move them toward Common Sense.

Happy Birthday to my HS friend Mike today! He joins the 70 club.

Some intriguing political news today. SC Senator Lindsay Graham died, making the possibility of a Dem SC Senator more likely. And KY Senator Mitch McConnell is still missing, presumably on a ventilator and effectively dead. Though both were/are enemies of everything I believe in, I won’t speak ill of them other than to say good riddance. Mid-term elections just got a whole lot more interesting.

And of course the Iran war-that-is-not-a-war just got much worse. There’s no longer any pretense of a cease fire, and Iran has announced that the Straits are now closed. Idiot Trump has truly created a monster with his dumbass attack on Iran, and I can only hope it’s his undoing. Energy prices are going to spike again, we’re going to kill more people on both sides, and we’re going to further destabilize the Middle East.

There’s a really good article in the NYTimes about the effects of US population decline. It’s a frightening future with lots of uncertainty. My grandsons’ generation is the one that will face it most squarely, circa 2050.

In better news, here’s my favorite moment from my septuagenarian celebration a couple of days ago. We had a great evening with family and friends.

It’s my last day in cool Socal for a while – tomorrow MikeD and I fly east for the crazy hot Midwest. he’s getting off the plane in Nashville, while I’m connecting onward to Louisville. I have plans to ignore the heat and head out for golf the first few days of July…we’ll see if that works. I like heat more than cold these days, but the temps are extreme.

Yesterday we took a long walk along the beach in Oceanside, while today we’re going to the other extreme with a drive up Mt Palomar and a hike at the top.

SCOTUS has been busy again, supporting Convict Donny in almost every decision. The government is in a flat spin, with ever more power being given to a power-mad elderly sociopath. Not quite sure how we’ll pull out of the spin.

Meanwhile, news today reported that Donny used a secret $500M no-bid contract to start construction of the new East Wing bunker/ballroom/shitshow (you know, the one that was supposed to be paid for by private donations), and he has started construction on a surprise helipad for the White House. The man is a menace.

And a financially corrupt menace, though that’s no surprise. The NY Times reports that Convict Donny increased his wealth by two billion dollars just last year. It’s sickening. And to think we have 2.5 more years of this…..ugh.

It’s Sunday morning, hours before anyone else wakes up. Time for deep thought. Today my thoughts go toward encoding exactly what I mean when I argue for a better government. Now that MAGA has hijacked what used to be the conservative right, and an equally radical faction is in the process of hijacking the liberal left, it’s important to be clear about things.

The first question is “why have a government at all?” Anarchists, criminals, and corporate extremists like the idea of abolishing government, but that always leads to a Mad-Max style tribal warfare model. With no controls, humans default to “might makes right”. We’ve been there and tried that, and the sociopaths always rise to the top – they’re willing to kill as many people as required to gain and stay in power. We need a government to have a non-violent way to get large numbers of people to co-exist and cooperate. Agree on the rules and create a system to enforce the rules with as light a hand as possible. That’s called civilization.

Here’s what I think a good government looks like and does. The one caveat prefacing all these statements is a rational budget – spending as little as possible to accomplish things on the list, and balancing the budget in all but the most extreme circumstances (world wars, pandemics, comets hitting the earth, etc).

• Protect the environment, protect the nation’s natural resources.
• Regulate people (enforce laws), equally and justly.
• Regulate corporations, making sure they don’t run roughshod over citizens and municipalities, but give them room to succeed as capitalists.
• Regulate the national economy and currency.
• Run fair and open elections at every level – local, state, federal.
• Educate US citizens – all citizens get a free K-12 education. Subject to budget constraints, all citizens can get 2-4 years of higher education, in either academics or trade studies.
• Defend the US from enemies. (Notice I do NOT say have the largest defense/war budget in the world. And I do NOT say be the world’s military enforcer).
• Run a rational, humane border control and immigration system. Manage immigration to optimize our labor force and economy.
• Build and maintain critical infrastructure for energy, communication, transportation, and sanitation.
• Ensure that every US citizen has access to health care.
• Ensure that the nation’s food, water and medicine supplies are safe and plentiful.
• Assist in the financial welfare of those who cannot provide for themselves – the homeless, the poor, the chronically ill, the elderly.

That’s a lot. Some level of taxation is of course necessary to provide these services, but our current system is bloated beyond belief and skewed wildly to favor the rich. Some kind of per-capita budget should be used as a way to control/balance taxation and services.

And now that I’ve written this, I realize it’s not the “what” a good government does that’s hard to define, it’s the “how” the work gets done. We had an answer for how until Trump and MAGA came along and blew it up via corruption, lies, racism and greed. Now we need a new or at least modified system of governance – the old one is broken. That’ll take a Constitutional Convention or a civil war. Or both.

I’m reading a LOT about AI lately, and I’m learning that the world really is changing right under our feet. Most people are unaware, but big changes are coming. And I’m not sure if those changes will make our lives better or worse.

• Medical advice and diagnosis will be nearly 100% AI-driven. MDs and nurses better get used to patients armed with credible diagnoses and reams of information.
• Digital security / cybersecurity is in for a wild ride. AI-driven threats will make most current online security useless.
• Writing – generating content that people read – is in big trouble. LLMs can write almost anything at this point. There are tools that can detect AI-generated text, but many people cannot detect the same. And many people won’t care that their new favorite author is a bot.
• Within a year it will be foolish to believe ANYTHING you see or read online. Very convincing fictions, text, image, audio and video, will be used to generate a large percentage of everything online. It will look and seem real – 99% of people won’t be able to tell the difference.
• All professionals in data-intensive jobs – lawyers, accountants, engineers, data analysts – will get their jobs turned inside out. Radically changed. Maybe replaced, but definitely changed.
• Countries and companies that can afford to build frontier-level LLMs will have (already have?) a huge economic advantage over those who can’t. The US, China, maybe the EU, maybe the Saudis – will do fine. Everyone else…relegated to second or third world status.
• AI-generated content is already influencing US elections. Voters are influenced by media, and media is about to get overrun by AI content.
• The ability of frontier-level LLMs to act independently, to gather information and take real-world action based on conclusions from that information, grows every day. It’s already waaaay past what I would consider safe.
• Our collective ability to understand the implications of frontier-level AI is pathetic. We have no laws, no governance, no rules, that will help us keep the genie in the bottle. I’m reading and thinking about this a lot, and I can’t see where this all leads. We could be building Skynet right now. And this hard-to-understand change is happening when US leadership is at an all-time low.

What’s happening right now is both a shitshow and wildly fascinating. We may be building a wonderful new world, or we may be building a demon that will destroy us quickly. It’s really hard to know.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! From Heather Cox Richardson today:

It looks as if Trump’s war on Iran has cost the U.S. the lives of thirteen service members, injuries to 400 more, and at least $132 billion so far in immediate costs, lost income, and higher consumer costs, only to leave the U.S. in a significantly worse place with regard to Iran than before Trump started bombing. 

The costs to the world have been significantly higher in terms both of lives—beginning with more than 175 Iranian schoolchildren and their teachers—and of economies.

Here’s a nice summary of Mr. Art of the Deal’s Memorandum of Understanding Memorandum of Fucking Surrender.

Well done. Plus, so much winning even beyond Iran!

Trump Administration to Pay $765 Million to Cancel 4 More Wind Projects  

Reflecting Pool algae blooms have roared back, reaching highest levels in years 

Republicans fear Trump is hurting their chances.  He can’t understand why. 

Seems clear to me that Convict Donny is spiraling down the drain. Even his cult members can see the decline and the dementia. The incompetence. The only real question is does it come to a head before or after he’s completely ruined the US.

The article about the Feds paying companies to stop wind farm developments is particularly galling. Because Trump has some weird phobia about wind farms, he’s spending our tax dollars to stop them. Sure, I’d go all NIMBY if there was one planned for my neighborhood, but farms in the god-forsaken TX panhandle, or atop some uninhabited mountain ridge…let them be. It’s mostly free energy. But spending our money just to buy the investors out – that’s criminal. I’m sure at this moment multiple VCs are spinning up new wind farm developments, anticipating they’ll get a zero risk buyout from the US government.

On more esoteric subjects, I’m spending some time trying to grok both sides of the AI argument by reading the incredibly verbose advocates of each side:

Argument A – AI is economically unfeasible and is a dead end, supporting only Capex-focused investors.

Argument B – We’re already in The Singularity, and AGI (artificial general intelligence) and ASI (artificial super intelligence) are just around the corner. AGI and ASI will transform the world.

Proponents of each are quite persuasive. It’s also possible that both extremes are true. This is turning out to be a very, very interesting period for tech and society. I keep wishing I hadn’t checked out of professional life.

Now, off to work. Gotta clear leaves off the driveway and fix some of the window smears our window cleaners left yesterday. Nothin’ but fun.

I have no idea what’s going on in the minds of twenty-somethings. This take on voting rights by the tradwife wing of conservative America is shocking. From Digby:

“My perspective as a Christian woman,” one young woman says, “is that my husband and I are one flesh. I vote the same way he does, so honestly, I would be okay with giving up my right to vote, because I know that he would represent me well.” Another chimes in that her daughter won’t need to be able to vote because she knows she’ll marry a godly man.

The viewpoint is shocking and even laughable when most people are exposed to it for the first time. And it does give rise to a number of questions.

Vance posts a couple of snarky comments from social media:

These women, Vance writes, are “willing to bargain away their own personhood for what they perceive to be the security of marriage and motherhood.”

I’m starting to believe that the age of 18 or 21 is way too soon to let people make any significant life decisions. Like getting married or voting. They’re biological adults, but they’re mental morons. We really, really need some civics and history education for young Americans. Maybe before voting they should take (and pass) the same citizenship tests as naturalized citizens. And Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale should be required reading for all high schoolers.

Speaking of reading, I’m re-reading an obscure Greg Bear trilogy called War Dogs. It’s the story of first contact, a war with aliens, and Mars colonization all told from the point of view of a front-line soldier. It’s very, very good. Bear is an under-appreciated author, one of science fiction’s “killer-Bs” from southern CA (Bear, Bedford, and Brin).

As I fight through accumulated time zone debt, I’m also watching some World Cup action. It’s irritating to have to watch it on Fox – even their commercials contain conservative propaganda – but the games are really good. It’s LOTS better than watching American football. Call me a convert.

Back to the driving range today to try and find my golf swing after an eventful month of travel. After about 30 hours sitting in an airliner seat, plus maybe double that amount sitting in cars/vans, my fitness and flexibility isn’t great. Time to work on that.

Back in Socal after a long, hard travel day. Three hour drive to Nashville, a three hour wait at the airport (flight was delayed), then a 4.5 hour flight to SAN – must’ve been some big headwinds. Landed at 5pm in SD, so traffic was at its worst. I decided to stop at Costco and shop (company coming, need lots of provisions) rather than just sit in traffic. So I made it home at 7pm, about 13 hours after leaving Cleveland TN. Felt every minute of it.

Having said that, if you’re going to be stuck in an airport for a while, Nashville is a good one. Modern, spacious, good food, good seating options, and lots of live music in bars and restaurants. So that part was OK.

Today it’s mostly rest and recover mode. Some light chores around the house.

And of course I’m catching up on the news, drinking coffee. Some quick thoughts:

• The UFC fight on the White House lawn was a new low for American dignity, and that’s saying a lot. Really sad.
• I’m laughing my ass off about the Washington Monument reflecting pool turning green with algae. Everything Trump touches dies.
• The end of the Iran war/not a war is laughable. Actually tragic, but laugh is all you can do about our dimwitted federal government. We made more enemies in the Middle East, killed a lot of innocent people, blew through billions of dollars, wrecked the global economy…for absolutely nothing. Iran is in a stronger position after the war than before. Nice job.
• I was very sorry to hear about the B-52 crashing at Edwards AFB. A true tragedy. But what do you expect when you’re flying 65 year old aircraft? The B-52s should be retired, right now – they qualify for Social Security, fergawdsake.. They’re a relic of another time, another era in warfare. We don’t need them today.
• The NY Times has a compelling, long article about Jeffrey Epstein’s suspicious death. It supports my contention that he was murdered, silenced by people who he might have testified about. I’d say Convict Donny is a prime suspect. We’ll never know the truth.
• Zac Brown and Nate Bargatze just became dead to me after performing/appearing at Trump’s UFC/Idiocracy shit show. As a celebrity, you support Convict Donny, you lose my support. Period. Same for Roku, a company just bought by Fox. I’ve bought a lot of Roku gear over the years, but no more.
• Convict Donny is in Europe, at the G7 again. Any minute now he’s going to do something that will embarrass America further – it’s inevitable. You put a spoiled child in a group of adults, and the child is going to act out. Wait for it.

That’s it for now. Time to get my golf game in shape, as a month’s worth of birthday golf starts on Thursday.

I’m in Cleveland, TN tonight for my brother’s memorial service tomorrow. I’m as tired as I’ve ever been – not an exaggeration. I’ll go to bed early tonight and wake up based on whatever my body decides is morning. Might be 1am, might be 3, who the fuck knows. But this is appropriately the end of the road – from this point on I have two brothers to lean on, not three. A sobering thought.

The flight from SAN to BNA was awesome – I barely remember it. I was so tired I slept hard most of the way. Started in San Diego, woke up in Nashville a minute later. Sweet. The drive from Nashville to Cleveland was great until I hit Chattanooga. Three interstate lanes became one, and I went 5 miles in one hour. Ugh. But I’m here, probably for the last time in my life. It’s a nice area, but without Don there’s no draw. There’s a nephew to consider, and I’m giving that some thought.

I find that the more weary I get the less I give a fuck about what I say. My two brothers (plus Deeanne) and I had a meal tonight and the service wasn’t great. Normally I’m verrrrry polite, but tonight I let people know when they didn’t do so well. Maybe that’s why oldsters have that reputation – at some point, feeling sick and tired, you just can’t ignore even little slights. That sounds petty, and perhaps it is. I may have to work on that.

Tomorrow we say a final goodbye to Don. Breaks my heart. But that’s the reality of it – we’re here, and then we’re not. I hope our consciousness survives the death of the body, but who knows?

I can’t decide on any pictures to capture the moment tonight. Words will have to do.