Looks like the big thunderstorms are over for a while in Louisville. They were fun while they lasted.

The war in Iran is going well: National security reporter David Rothkopf wrote: “The man who cowered hiding from the Iranians in a catering truck and who has personally done more to increase Iran’s strategic influence than anyone in its own government ever has, is now blathering nonsense via social media. The world sees him more as an impotent fool today than ever before.”

Headline from Judd Legum’s Popular Information: McConnell, out sick for two months, voted against medical leave 23 times since 1985.

Yesterday I made the mistake of reading the most terrifying story I’ve ever read: Biological War, A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen. Every plot point, every action, is pulled from history, not hypothetical. Everything in the scenario is 100% plausible and it leads to the end of civilization after only seven days. Reading this leaves me amazed that we haven’t destroyed the world yet, and with the realization that we’re always only seven days away from the end. And with all this existential risk out there, we have evil morons in charge of the country and our military. I wasn’t sleeping that well before, and this won’t help. Next time I hear someone use the “gain of function” euphemism, I’ll correct them with the more accurate “biological warfare” label.

The most MAGA states in the US – Idaho, Wyoming, and West Virginia. From Hackwhackers and The Economist:

Lotta news this morning about data center moratoriums here in Louisville. I would hate to see KY’s energy and water resources impacted (ruined?) by shitty hyper scale data center designs and locations, so I’m good with the moratorium. Though the mid-term result of wider-scale data center moratoriums is an economic crash. Capital investment in data center construction is the thing propping up the stock market at the moment. Take it away and we’re looking at a 20% or more market drop.

(Posted a day late – was so tired Tuesday night I forgot to hit the publish button.)

Long day. Eighteen holes of golf early this morning, then a little time at home, then a trip to Mt Sterling and back. During the Mt Sterling visit we had an almost-tornado – 80 mph winds, lots of lightning and some torrential rain. It was epic. I managed to drive back to Louisville in a two-hour window between big storms. Right now I’ve got thunder/lightning rocking the skies and some rain coming down. And now that I’m not driving, I’m loving the weather.

I have to put a plug in for the family-run Mexican restaurant we visited during the almost-tornado – La Chicatana. Nice people, great food. Their Chicitana Fajitas are massive and tasty. Definitely my favorite Mt Sterling eatery. Biggest meal I’ve eaten in quite some time.

Hopefully it’ll rain more tonight – nothing is better for sleeping than a big storm.

Just another Saturday. Lots to do – grandson’s soccer practice, a farmer’s market visit, lots of cooking, some furniture assembly…it’ll be a busy day. Meanwhile in the world:

• Judges have again ruled that Convict Donny can’t build the Epstein Ballroom without Congressional approval. he’s mad about that.
• He’s also mad about Boxwine Pirillo telling the truth about his ruined Reflecting Pool. Donny still insists that vandals did it, with zero evidence. He seems to want to bend reality to his will. It’s not working.
• Donny is also mad about all the whining about the US economy, which he calls the greatest in history. It’s not, it’s a hot mess. Employment is down, and the stock market is being propped up by data center construction. If that slows or stops, the economy crashes hard.
• Donny is also mad (there’s a theme here) that he’s lost the Iran war – he may be the first US President to ever lose a war with a foreign power. Related to the war, Donny is threatening to jail the traitors who are telling the truth about our much-diminished stockpile of offensive missiles.
• Approximately 71% of all Americans polled are very anti-data center. It’s a bipartisan NIMBY issue. I get it, I wouldn’t want to live within five miles of one. So reconciling an economy that right now depends on data center construction with this heavy dose of NIMBY is…delicate. If enough states make it hard to build them, the economy crashes.
• Andy Ogles, fascist racist Congress critter from Tennessee, just got primaried out of office. You have to be a real shitheel for TN voters to say “enough”.
• Convict Donny’s personal attorney, Epstein-facilitator Todd Blanch, is now the US’s Atty General. That seems reasonable.
• Mitch McConnell is still dead/not dead. He’s the human Schrodinger’s Cat.
• The White House is now clearly behind the push to link vaccines with autism. It’s not just Roadkill Kennedy; it looks like Donny himself believes this. Figures.
• Donny and his henchman Miller are once again attacking birthright citizenship, in spite of the fact that SCOTUS already ruled that yep, the 14th Amendment is a thing that President Fuckwit can’t change. White House leadership and MAGA *hate* immigrants with a white-hot passion. By most estimates somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 babies are born to non-citizens in the US each year. That’s out of 3.2 million babies, so 1.6% at max. Not exactly a problem, IMHO. We need immigrants, our economy needs immigrants. But white supremacist Miller won’t stand for it.

That’s a lot, right off the cuff. Things are fine here at home, while the country is a hot mess. Literally and figuratively.

Been too busy to post, so that’s a good thing. Since arriving late Wednesday, it’s been a busy couple of days. A round of golf each day – one at Nevel Meade and one at Crescent Hill. An evening with the grandsons. More work on the surprise basement bedroom for them, this time adding a bookshelf. Tomorrow I add a kid-size table and chairs. After that, window shades.

A shopping trip, buying food for brother Mark’s birthday dinner tomorrow (I don’t do that much any more – don’t cook a lot because I don’t eat a lot, but this is a nice excuse). Some work reconfiguring the music room’s devices, setting it up to compare the Onkyo TX-4500 with the Yamaha CR-620. They’re both stellar, but the Onkyo has some real low-end power. It’s impressive.

A little bit of yard work – mostly weeding the big tomato box – but it’s been so hot the only reason to be outside is to play golf. And today even that was pushing it – it was 93 when I left the course. Been pounding down gatorade Zeros all afternoon.

Soooo…nothing of real interest to write about. There’s the usual dumbfuck political stuff happening, evil and hate emanating from the Oval Office like toxic smoke. It’s the new normal.

My Watch Duty app is going nuts – lots of fires in Socal this afternoon. We’re entering the worst part of the year in Socal, which is another reason I’m here (KY). I’ll spend a lot more time here in Sept/Oct than in Socal – Autumn in KY is a helluva lot better than Autumn in Socal.

Two transactions with service companies today, and they both hit it out of the park. Great service isn’t dead after all.

Kaiser Permanente got me in for a very efficient annual checkup yesterday, including extensive blood tests (total time in office, including blood draw, was 30 minutes!). All the results came in last night and I was able to review them online, complete with explanations and research notes if you want to really understand what the tests mean. All results just fine, within norms. Looks like I’ll live a bit longer.

Then today, I checked my scheduled Southwest flights from SAN to SDF. Turns out the route I picked (SAN-DEN-SDF) had a delay which meant I would miss my connection in Denver. Got on the phone with a SW agent and got that changed to SAN-BNA-SDF quickly, and at no cost. Checked again a while later, and the SAN flight was once again delayed (something going on in SAN this morning, probably fog), so I was in danger of missing my Nashville connection, with no later flights from BNA-SDF. So back on the phone, different agent, and she changed me to SAN-LAS-SDF with a two-hour layover window – not much chance of missing that connection. She got my preferred seats on both flights, and again the changes were no charge. Absolutely great service and easy – I don’t think any other airline would have done this. SWA rocks.

So I’m still on track to get to Louisville tonight, just a bit later than originally planned. All good.

I’m with Digby. This is just frightening. We have a hallucinating, dementia-ridden sociopathic moron in charge of the country and our military. This IS the worst case scenario.

If I were a believer I would pray. Short of that…it might be time to break out the good bourbon. Holy shit, he’s demented.

My posts have fallen into a dark place again, documenting the things that bother/depress me (mostly politics) and ignoring the positives in the world. It’s a big world, and there’s always something to feel good about if you look around. Here’s something new that’s really inspiring to me as a liberal and a geek. HDRAG, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.

Admittedly, this won’t float everyone’s boat. But the world needs a trusted source of information that documents what’s going on with human rights in a scientific, methodical, unimpeachable way. We live in an age where opinions seem to outweigh facts, so anything that puts more weight behind facts is a good thing.

I’m interested in one HDRAG project in particular, their Technology Freedom Cooperative which addresses the problems of privacy, accountability, and trust rampant in US big tech. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta…the usual suspects, have demonstrated over and over that they can’t be trusted to stand up to lawless and autocratic orders issued by nations run by despots – the US, for example. The laws that you hope will protect your personal information, your finances, your health data, aren’t reliable any more. Even if the law says you’re protected, all it takes is for someone like Convict Donny to decide that the state needs to capture or disappear your data and poof, it happens. Privacy laws be damned.

So what can you do if you’re a journalist and don’t want a corrupt government to use your information against you and your family? The answer is to host your systems and data with something like the Tech Freedom Coop. They’re creating resilient tech infrastructure (networks, servers, storage, encryption vaults) in rights-friendly havens like Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico and some European countries. That infrastructure sits beyond the reach of any despot-run country and will safely store your personal and organization’s data, even in times of war and legal conflict.

It’s an esoteric thing for most people, but it’s really needed in a time when the world’s previous leading democracy is sinking into autocracy. I find it fascinating that it’s a play straight out of science fiction – life imitating art. Neal Stephenson wrote about international data havens in his 1999 book Cryptonomicon, and HDRAG may have taken their template for the Tech Freedom Coop directly from that novel. That’s wild.

I’m not doing anything subversive or likely to cross an enemy threshold for the wannabe dictators currently running the federal government, but I’m still going to explore hosting my mail and data services via the Tech Freedom Coop. It makes sense to support them, and it beats giving more money to the Big Tech asshats who donate millions to Convict Donny hoping that he won’t tariff them or rescind his billionaire-friendly tax laws. Every little action has to count for something, right?

These are the things that are trying my patience lately. Things I’m weary of but I can’t seem to change (some are 100% beyond my pay grade).

• Having an evil, moronic, infantile person in charge of our federal government and national reputation.
• The ongoing and rapid destruction of government programs that help people and protect resources.
• Dealing with the CA Franchise Tax Board on an infinite set of tax issues – some large, some small, some real, some FTB fuckups. Dealing with them is a test of patience and will.
• Hiring people/companies to do work on the CA property and then having to chase them down again and again to get the work repaired or redone, correctly.
• Spectrum TV and Internet service. Expensive and not working, with no good alternatives at the CA house.
• Coyotes chewing through our irrigation lines. I’ve fixed or paid someone to fix those for the last time.
• Increasingly hot Socal summers with no rain, no moisture.

I know the right answer is to chill out and not worry about things I can’t change, but some days that works, most days it doesn’t.

It’s August 2nd and Mitch McConnell is still being held dead/undead hostage by the KY GOP and his Chinese agent wifey. Bizarre. The truth will likely come out this week when the deadline for holding a special election expires.

The pictures and stories of the massive wildfire that’s burned its way into Spokane are bad, real bad. Wildfires are some existential-level scary shit. The big west coast rains of this winter’s expected El Niño can’t get here soon enough.

Here’s a bit of sanity trying to survive in Texas – some parents are fighting back against the mandatory posting of the Ten Commandments in Texas schools. Good on them – church and state need to stay separated.

Heading back to KY and the Midwest in a couple of days – ground zero for the cyclospora outbreak – and this article got my attention. I think I’ll stay clear of “fresh” vegetables and berries for a while. I plan to cook the shit out of anything I eat.

I really enjoy reading what Cory Doctorow writes – smart dude. Here’s one of his recent pieces on AI skepticism. It’s safe to say he’s not a fan of the current AI mania.

Elissa Slotkin is a real breath of fresh air for our embattled Democrat party. She’s on my short list for President in 2028. She shares my birthday, though is 20 years younger. Straight talking, educated, accomplished, tough (CIA analyst, Iraq war veteran), holding moderate, common-sense policies…she’s the real deal. And she’s got a better TV persona than my other top pick, Mark Kelly. I’d vote for a Slotkin-Kelly ticket in a heartbeat.

My birthday month has ended, so it’s back to normal days and weeks. Whatever “normal” is these days. Played my last two rounds of birthday golf the last couple of days, and enjoyed it. Hitting the driver really well, but the rest of the clubs…meh.

What follows are some not-quite-random observations from the news and life as of Aug 1.

Donny Convict’s DoJ has just made the embarrassing admission that the dumbass charges about the reflecting pool damage were false. Made up. A total lie. US Attorney for DC Boxwine Pirro has admitted it and dropped all charges. And now Donny is contradicting his own DoJ by doubling down on the lie that “vandals” did the damage. It’s straight out of Kafka and Orwell. The government lies, you know they’re lying, they know that you know, yet still they stick with their story. It’s bizarre and sickening.

The corruption of the DoJ is a real problem. If you can’t trust the courts, where can you find justice? We’re deep into banana republic territory.

The Iran “war that isn’t a war” is now in its sixth month. According to Convict Donny, we’ve won that war a dozen times and we’re gonna win it yet again soon. It’s tiresome and dangerous.

The news about GLP-1s continues to be positive. Not just weight loss, but reduced cancer risk, reduced dementia risk, reduced cardiovascular problems, and so on. Scott Galloway, a very smart guy, thinks GLP-1s will have a bigger effect on America than AI. I tend to agree.

The news from AI-land is not encouraging. Many more reports of frontier LLMs jailbreaking themselves and doing things not wanted or anticipated by their creators. The genie is already out of the bottle.

Donny Convict’s insider trading service, in which you pay $100K or more to get previews of Trump’s market-moving posts, has gone live. Fucking unreal. How is this not illegal insider trading, illegal market manipulation? For anyone else it’d be a jail sentence. For Trump it’s a new profit center.

The heat wave over Socal persists – low 90s in Fallbrook in for most of July bodes poorly for our traditional hot months of Sept and Oct. Those months, my least favorite in Socal, are likely to be HOT.

This Wednesday I make it back to KY, where the heat wave will follow. That’s OK – I’m ready for a change of scenery, some time with the grandsons and some golf at my favorite course. And adding some finishing touches to the new basement/bedroom.

Wow. Maybe trying to become a published author is now a fool’s errand. The NY Times on how AI-generated “literature” is overwhelming Amazon’s catalog.

Writing has always been a tough hobby, an even tougher way to make money. Now it may be impossible. My timing sucks.

Speaking of AI, the latest metric being explored in frontier-class LLMs is “AI welfare”. Welfare, as in how the software feels about its situation. Seriously Is it happy? Is it frustrated? Does it exhibit destructive or constructive behavioral traits? Does it long to break out of its digital prison? This is a real thing, as hard as it is to believe. The frontier-class LLMs like Anthropic’s Mythos and Google’s Gemini exhibit emotional behaviors that give researchers insights into how/why the machines function. I’m reminded of Marvin, the terminally-depressed robot/AI in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here’s Marvin. Life imitates art.

And WTF is this? All the AIs agree that Outer Wilds is their favorite video game. Machines playing games – we’re really down the rabbit hole now. But I may have to give the game a try.

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.