Looking for a pick-me-up, I Googled Bernie Sanders to see what was so bad about him.  I couldn’t find anything I disagreed with.  (Was it Barney Fife who said “Surprise, surprise, surprise!”?  According to Google:

Seems to me that we’re all a pack of lemmings heading off the cliff with eyes open but something in us diminished.

Was this stage of insanity buried within our evolutionary game plan?  When people finally become frantic is a bloodbath inevitable? Shut my mouth–or break my pen–or my keyboard, this isn’t being helpful, I fear.  But no, those who know better say that there’s no game plan, just something called emergence.  I wouldn’t mind emergence so much if it didn’t appear to be from down below (metaphorically speaking), where the fires are kept burning. Since science questions the existence of the Akashic Records, there’ll be no one to ever know.  Some say the cockroaches may survive–whoopee.  Giddyap, Archie!

NO JOKING MATTER, so why do I joke?  (You can’t see my tears.)

‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead

For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm.

Just in case you didn’t visit this Zinger–a brief exerpt: (Click on the blue for the source)

Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.

His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”

He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”  [Duh, ya think?]

Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

_________________________

I think I’ve reached the bottom of my barrel.  I’m not singing if you see me coming better step aside, but maybe I’m a lonely little petunia in an onion patch…

_________________________

Henceforth I’m going to try and limit this blog to light trivialities.  Let’s see how long that (I) can last….

I don’t have the answers; just wonder…

How to understand the phenomenon of Bill Gates?  (In 2002, Bill and Melinda Gates received the Jefferson Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged.)

Why can’t I find any info on either Wikipedia or Google about ALEC?  Do you remember it?  Or is that another banned book?

Bill Gates is covered on Wikipedia with much of the material fact checked by the the editors of the  Encyclopedia Britannica.  The fact checkers overlooked the  truthfulness of Teraw, website selling fake USA postage stamps, which they sponsor.  I wonder…

Re the anti-abortionists: Why should anyone want to increase the population of the USA, given recent massive layoffs in technology, and with increased dependence on mechanization?   (that is,  AI, etc.)  Surely it’s not for cannon fodder!

Why is this photo no longer available on the Internet (except in an old post of mine) :  [of all opponents in 2016 standing with Umptidump  and all pledging allegiance except Umptidump who seems to be dreaming.  All I could find of it was just his face, not the others pledging allegiance.  Is Word Press scott free? What can we believe any more from any source?  I hope it’s scott free. Please, let it be or at least well behaved.  If you can find it more power to you and let me know where:

Too clever and typical: I wonder about the nefariousness of the most beloved and trusted corporate media: According to the Jimmy Dore Show via Drake Chamberlin, Tucker Carlson wasn’t fired. just put in a position where he is still under contract and prohibited to  communication with the public about his views.  (Which appear to have become less extreme).

Once the wrong and rich media has a stranglehold on us we might as well party elsewhere.  Any suggestions?  I wonder…

As Biden Runs Again, Black Voters’ Frustration Bubbles

From <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/us/politics/black-voters-biden-2024.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20230430&instance_id=91422&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=92821497&segment_id=131735&user_id=808aa8374858aa0bb61eef25d704e6b0>

There are 6 (six) column-width ads for illegal US postage stamps on this article from the N.Y. Times today, with the URL (if that’s the correct term) for Teraw.  This is the NY Times.

(If I turn up dead before my time, vote Democrat.)

What can you do?  Distance yourself from the garbage; pretend that it doesn’t stink and cut off your air; pick some of it out to take in the house and make a meal of it; package it and offer it under a new name on the internet; if you’re white try the police; or report it on your piddlin’ blog?

Time for only two stinks today:   hint, today’s load comes from Texas via Daily Kos:

• Texas GOP legislators plan to replace certified counselors in schools with “chaplains”
• Texas agency threatens to fire anyone who does not dress “according to their biological gender”

Or you can just throw up.

_________________

(I thought I had already posted this and wrote a follow-up post which happily I can meld into this one.)  It is titled

SELF THERAPY ATTEMPT

This is a continuation of the blog on dealing with all the current garbage being dumped on us.  It’s divided into the GARBAGE followed by a good memory from the past.  I haven’t tried this before:

THE GARBAGE: From Harper’s Magazine May 23: “The latest turn in automation is toward worker management–that is to say, intensifying the regime of surveillance and control in the workplace.  Bathroom breaks can be monitored. Paces walked, calls made, units completed–data  on all these things can be collected, so targets can be set. The idea, as old as the Taylorist factory system, is to increase productivity by squeezing more work out of each individual worker.” (Easy Chair, Hari Kunzru).

A GOOD MEMORY ATTEMPT TO OFFSET THE ABOVE:    Our old black babysitter laughing at Arthur Godfrey and all the little Godfreys on the radio when they sang I’m a lonely little petunia in an onion patch…back in the late forties….And oh yeah, the Briarhoppers on WBT radio singing Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie, in the early forties….And the soothing sound of one airplane droning  away in the sky during an afternoon nap in the attic.

_______________________

THE GARBAGE:  Drake Chamberlin refers  us to The Chris Hedges Report on American Universities  having become appendages of the corporate state. For example, educators are increasingly poorly paid, denied benefits and job security while senior administrators pay themselves obscene salaries. “Rutgers, like most American universities, operates as a corporation…This inversion of values is destroying the nation’s educational system.”

A GOOD MEMORY ATTEMPT TO OFFSET THE ABOVE:  …Wait a moment, I’m wracking my brain…Oh yeah, attending the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, north Tennessee with friends back in 1988 and getting a photo of me with Pete Seeger.  (Due probably to  planned obsolescence my printer quit working; otherwise I would add that photo.)  Now that didn’t turn out to be very therapeutic, but another good memory is getting two A-plusses from Miss Arveson in the ninth grade in Bethesda, Maryland, on one history essay.  And of course finding that wonderful Indian arrowhead just lying under a big tree after a rain in Charlotte, North Carolina.  It seemed like it might have just been dropped, and seemed to connect the ages.

________________________

Well, I do feel a little better now, but I do know that the garbage is still out there and just running away from it doesn’t help the situation, just me, briefly.

Why oh why do many feminists hate Transgender MtFs?

Other than probably an unfair advantage in sports?   To get a hint perhaps, is the complaint of a feminist member of TERF  (Trans-Exclusionary  Radical Feminism)  in a recent Court House steps protest in Athens, Ohio. She said she rejects the belief system that humans are able to change sex. She said she embraces “the truth”.

She accused the false narratives of  those  aimed at dismantling rights and protections fought for and won by courageous women of history. “identifying into an existing oppressed group, then demanding the rights and protections that group has fought centuries to secure, is not a civil or even human right. It’s a gross violation of women’s sex-based rights to feel safe in areas devoted to their privacy and safety.”

So, it’s a turf war?

Another protester called “LGBTQ+” a lie. “The acronym excludes lesbians and gay men.”  [What?]  “The world is rapidly waking up to the hateful, oppressive, and violent nature of the lie that men can be women.”

Another protester said that no one is born in the wrong body, that everyone is either female or male. No one changes sex. “…for crying out loud, it should not have to be said that women don’t have penises.  But it does have to be said because there are countless people who want you to believe the stupid and outrageous lie that some women have penises.”

So…are they MAGA?  They also must not know of those humans in the  “Intersex” category.

I must admit that I used to overrate women. For some reason I thought they were much more empathic and encouraging than men, also that men unfairly turned them into sex objects.

Now women have dropped somewhat in my esteem as a result of the women who “weaponize” their sexuality, if that’s the right word–who flaunt and seem to welcome being seen as a sex object.  Also the women of our country who  seem to want to punish and “castrate” women who are sexually active, by tying them to the “mess”  their enjoyment may produce. (For an excuse they seem to vacillate between potentially killing a foetus who would cure cancer versus replenishing our workforce  (not the expanding technical one).   Also to  spoiled elected women  who make a mockery of democracy, and even our own incorporation of what it means to be a female. I am thinking of a new female university president who said she was “excited” by her new position.  I can’t imagine a man admitting to being excited about anything but sex.

Oh well, it’s 1:40 a.m. and I’ve probably said too much.

Have they come to hate men so much?  There’s something afoot and apparently rampant on the network called Terf

THE INVASION OF HEAVEN

You Can’t Take the Country Out of the Girl…or some such.  This is an autobiographical note.

I woke today with the realization that my heart is anchored to nature from my roots on my grandmother’s North Carolina farm.  My grandfather was there too, but it felt like it was my grandmother’s.  Just looking around my apartment [condo?] today:

This week I visited the local Rock Shop and bought a marvelous sheet (slice) of fossils which is on display in my living room, alongside my bowl of leaves, fungi on a short limb, skinny pine cones, and a couple of seed pods–(Google says they are  a sweet gum seed pod and an Osage orange (Maclura pomifera).  It was separately identified as a Hedge Ball tree seed.

One daughter just visited from Atlanta and spent a chunk of her time cutting strips of an invasive vine for ornamental purposes–and I mean beautifully ornamental.

Although I received my doctorate in clinical psychology, I majored in English with a minor in journalism as an undergraduate. I spent my Masters  on anthropology, which was really archaeology, and spent much of my time surface collecting, although I participated in many digs also, including the excavation of a Spanish well in Florida and a dig at Cedar Key. also in Florida. I have fossils from an Indian mound in Florida (legally collected with my Apy class under Dr. John Goggin); a fossil from the cliffs of Dover, a piece of fossilized lightning, a piece of fool’s gold, and mysterious melted iron pattern pieces from a local state park.  Plus a couple of pleasing shell collages–one which I made from a single brief vacation to an Oak Island N.C. beach.

I lost a couple of collections of  “Indian arrowheads” collected in adolescence from fields after a rain (they come to the top as if by magic).  I lost them because of our irregular moving growing up, and sometimes not being on the premises at the time.  I also mourn the loss of my piece of the Berlin wall, which my other daughter brought home from Europe after working as a nanny for a couple of years.  (As an O.U. student she had originally gone Over There).