A New Word to Me

Published November 19, 2025 by Nan Mykel

Vance, is reported to be in the middle of a conflict between what’s left of the traditional Republican Party and the so-called groypers, a far-right movement of disaffected extremists whose chief representative, Nick Fuentes, is arguably America’s most prominent neo-Nazi. Here is a taste of what you might hear from Fuentes during a typical episode of his show: “Hitler is awesome. Hitler was right. And the Holocaust didn’t happen.” (See Jamelle Bouie’s opinion column tis weekend). How do you pronounce the word “groypers,” and where did the word come from? More to be found on the Internet, https://nl.nytimes.com/f/a/P_K0goAI4GjXImYMPXWu7A

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GOODBYE A.I.

(Don’t get excited: Wishful thinking on my part.. I just looked at my old copy of “Consilience” and am reminded that E. O. Wilson had faith that mankind would choose not to gamble on it. In his words, “I predict that future generations will be genetically conservative. Other than the repair of disabling defects they will resist heredity change. They will do so in order to save the emotions and epigenetic rules of mental development, because these elements compose the physical soul of the species. The reasoning is as follows: After the emotions and epigenetic rules enough, and people might in some sense be “better,” but they would no longer be human. Neutralize the elements of human nature in favor of pure rationality, and the result would be badly constructed, protein-based computers. Why sould a species give up the defining core of its existence, built by millions of years of biological trial and error? (pp 299-300 and 303).

TODAY’S REFLECTION: This isn’t Wilson speaking now, but myself reflecting on the President of the United States of America using AI to portray himself covering his citizens with his poop. Could that act function as a warning of what could become of us by our own hands/votes/use of AI?
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TO HORDE OR NOT TO HORDE?
Aye, that is the query.
Things that have carried our
load of beingness: should
we dishonor them all
by trashing? Leaving us
alone with ourselves? No!

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SAY WHAT?

Published November 4, 2025 by Nan Mykel

No, seeing is not believing any more. Did Bill Gates really question climate change? Did he contribute to the new ball room? Will colleges in Oklahoma erect golden statues of Charlie Kirk, who said, “I can’t stand the word empathy. Actually, I think empathy is a made up new age term that it does a lot of damage.” I think I heard him say that.

If AI technology really devours millions of jobs, what will they do with all the dead bodies? Every day and in many ways reality has either taken leave or an unloved little boy is set on taking everybody out with him. A zoo is urging pet owners to sacrifice their trusting pets to feed another animal. Trust is on the block and it feels like it’s beyond redemption. And didn’t I read that another head pf state overseas sald that humans should quit telling each other “I love you”?

Oh, and who was it anyway that said “Vengeance is mine?”

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ENOUGH REALITY!

I Don’t Believe This

Published June 8, 2025 by Nan Mykel

This is not a conspiracy theory because I don;t believe it’s true, It may shed light on something, however, so I thought I’d just mention it in passing:

As far as I can recall, yesterday June 6, while watching a CNN news show an update at the top of the screen said that AI has just now gotten out of control; that it had refused to turn itself off.

I waited and waited, expecting the newsroom to react but I’m still waiting, unless it happened and I missed it. If nothing else, the mysterious incident illustrates at least the level of mistrust set loose in the USA.

I expected some ruckus on tv but nothing else was mentioned or happened, other than Spectrum in my area was off the “air” for several hours later in the day. I’m still waiting to hear something about it. OH! Maybe it’s just old age and a hallucination!

SO…Either it was my internal misfire; a disconnect planned by someone; failed to make it to national tv; a joke….or an untruth played by someone or some thing. Can anyone else in the world corroborate my experience? Sigh. Maybe not. Shivers, anyway…

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Dear Ancestor

Your tombstone stands among the rest;

neglected and alone.

The name and dates are chiseled out

On polished, marbled stone.

It reaches out to all who care

It is too late to mourn.

You did not know that I exist

You died ere I was born.

Yet each of us are cells of you

In flesh, in blood, in bone.

Our blood contracts and beats a pulse

Entirely not our own.

Dear Ancestor, the place you filled

One hundred years ago

Spreads out among the ones you left

Who would have loved you so.

I wonder if you lived and loved,

I wonder if you knew

That someday I would find this spot,

And come to visit you.

Author Unknown

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Soft on the Animals

Published December 2, 2023 by Nan Mykel

Alongside some cutthroat actions by humans upon humans, it is refreshing to hear about kindness being given to guilt-free animals. Two instances came across my desk recently: a vetrinarian caring for pets of the homeless and, earlier, a behavoral scientist teaching a migration path to birds extinct in the wild.

Dr. Kwane Stewart’s outreach on the streets started more than a decade ago as a personal mission that he kept to himself. “It was my way to heal,” said Stewart, a veterinarian whose nonprofit, Project Street Vet, provides medical care to the pets of people experiencing homelessness. “Maybe some of it was guilt. Maybe some of it was I just wanted my own little crusade.”https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/14/us/california-street-veterinary-medicine-pets-cnnheroes/index.html>

Separately, Johhannes Fritz, a behavioral scientist, built an aircraft and learned to fly in order to teach the bald Ibis, a bird extinct in the wild for 300 years, how to fly a 3-week migration path south from Germany through the alps by following his ultra light aircraft. Fritz founded the Waldrapp team to better understand the Ibis’s requirements, and began a bond with these species, which turned into a passion to save them. Granted, this was in 2001, but the team Fritz initiated appears to still be operative. https://www.waldrappteam.eu/en/

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THANKS!

Many thanks to friend Sallie for directing me to the following related to Christians for Judaism, discussed in my Nov. 30 post. You can check it out, but here ‘s part of it, from Wikipedia via Google:

Christian Zionism is an ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. Likewise, it holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with Bible prophecy: that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant — the eschatological “Gathering of Israel” — is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.^[1]^[2] The term began to be used in the mid-20th century, in place of Christian restorationism, as proponents of the ideology rallied behind Zionists in support of a Jewish national homeland.^[3]^[4]

Advocacy on the part of Christians for a Jewish restoration grew after the Reformation, and is rooted in 17th-century England.^[1] Contemporary Israeli historian Anita Shapira suggests that England’s Zionist evangelical Christians “passed this notion on to Jewish circles” around the 1840s,^[5] while Jewish nationalism in the early 19th century was largely met with hostility from British Jews.^[6]

Christian pro-Zionist ideals have generally been common among Protestants since the Reformation. While supporting a mass Jewish return to the Land of Israel, Christian Zionism asserts a parallel idea that the returnees ought to be encouraged to reject Judaism and adopt Christianity as a means of fulfilling biblical prophecies.^[7]^[8]^[9]^[10] Polling has suggested a trend of widespread distrust among Jews towards the motives of evangelical Christians.^[11]

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GRIM

“My favorite ‘Twilight Zone’episode is the one where aliens land and, in a sign of their peaceful intentions, give world leaders a book. Government cryptographers work to translate the alien language. They decipher the title — ‘To Serve Man’ — and that’s reassuring, so interplanetary shuttles are set up.

“But as the cryptographers proceed, they realize — too late — that it’s a cookbook.

“That, dear reader, is the story of OpenAI.”…. much more

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SOMETIMES

I wonder, did I write my life?

If so, I was clever and did

A good job. So many dear things

Were included. Best of all was a

Sterling sense of humor. I laugh

At myself for spilling my soup

Or getting into the wrong car

(That was a hoot) or taking a

Year of French but not learning the

Word for potty when needed in

Calais. The black and yellow writing

Spiders at the farm, the fig tree,

Even the scupernong arbor, too.

Red tomatoes warm from the sun–

Patrol girl in the sixth grade and

Best of all, a grandmother with

a soft lap and dimpled elbows.

LIFE METAPHOR

Published November 22, 2023 by Nan Mykel

A.I. Oh my. I’ll cry!

We were gifted somehow

As caretakers of life

On Earth. Toss a penny.

Save or destroy was

The question–what would

We do with all our power:

Make or shake or desecrate.

We lost control and as the

nasty pus of greed triumphed

Now steaming toward 2050

What will be will be. Nan

Aye-Aye, Captain

Published May 1, 2023 by Nan Mykel

…I mean Lemur!

A three week old aye-aye lemur. SUZI ESZTERHAS / MINDEN PICTURES/ SHUTTERSTOCK

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ZINGERS:

‘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. By Cade Metz

Dr. Geoffrey Hinton is leaving Google so that he can freely share his concern that artificial intelligence could cause the world serious harm.Credit…Chloe Ellingson for The New York Times

May 1, 2023 Updates 3:47 pm ET

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By Jessica Bennett

Ms. Bennett is a contributing editor in Opinion who writes on gender, politics and culture.

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OPINION N.Y. Times

MICHELLE GOLDBERG

This Is What the Right-Wing Takeover of a Progressive College Looks Like

April 29, 2023

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I second Horty’s statement, if that’s allowed. I don’t have all that much time left to educate myself about the rules so for good measure I’ll try and copy HortyRex:

Test Yourself

Published March 19, 2023 by Nan Mykel

What is a movie about a man who is a man who is a man?

What could the image at the top refer to?

Stephen Ornes wrote an article in Quanta magazine (Not Quora) about unsuspected abilities of the large language models (LLMs) of computational engines behind AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, and I want to refer you to that article in a minute. But first, the LLMs answered correctly on the first try at the movie question, which was Nemo. Also, it has been discovered as reported in Quanta, that the most powerful LLMs can change themselves by Emergence, a process which first referred to an evolutionary process in living things (slime molds).

The question about the image at the top is that it depicts the Trojan horse, which aided invaders to attack Troy as reported in ancient literature. The dangerousness of its presence was unknown until too late. The invaders hidden in the horse were already in the town and it was too late to avoid a catastrophic takeover.

For the interested and curious go to both Ornes’ Quanta magazine’s site and Johnson’s Book Emergence.

What is emergence? In his 2001 book Emergence, Steven Johnson says that “The movement from low-level rules to higher-level communication is what we call emergence.”

Johnson wonders if computers will become self-aware in the coming years by drawing upon the adaptive open-endedness of emergent software. “Even the most optimistic champions of self-organization feel a little wary about the lack of control in such a process.”

The discovery of emergence appears to have begun with studies of slime molds, which in some conditions move as one unit but in other conditions (of food availability) separate and function as individuals.

Happy Ides of March, By the Way…

Published March 15, 2023 by Nan Mykel

Just today a new pop-up on my MicroSoft computer:

I didn’t realize AI was going to follow us around…I SPY AI!

Evolution’s Tipping Point?

Published March 5, 2023 by Nan Mykel

Many of us thought the 21st century would be the Age of Aquarius, not evolution’s tipping point:

The older generation knows the “The Age of Aquarius”, as a song by the 5th Dimension in 1969. This is exactly what they were telling years before us we were coming into this new age. They got this information from old writings and prophecies. They knew these kids would come to us to help us heal. From (Spring Rayne)

The dictionary’s definition of tipping point is:
“the point at which a series of small changes or incidents becomes significant enough to cause a larger, more important change”.

Life-saving abilities, honed by evolution to foster survival, are being short-circuited in many areas. A look at various AI entries on Google just today is alarming. Do see for yourself…

Tech giants are heralding ChatGPT as revolutionary…. With millions of users, the chatbot has started an A.I. arms race. Companies are rushing to release their own chatbots, and some seem eerily human.
Beyond the excitement, the technology’s possibilities can feel scary — as if science fiction has become reality. ChatGPT has already inspired many people to ask: Will A.I. take my job? It’s a familiar panic, one that resurfaces every time a groundbreaking innovation emerges, like the car or the internet. Still, questioning how A.I. could replace jobs in the future misses a more urgent point: The platform is changing how people work right now.

No longer the future….NOW:

<https://www.forbes.com:
Between them, some of the world’s biggest tech companies have [already] collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers in recent months.
The Real Reasons For Big Tech Layoffs At Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon: In truth, it isn’t likely to be because the companies involved need money. Microsoft MSFT +1.7%, which is reported to have laid off around 10,000 employees, practically simultaneously announced that it plans to invest $10 billion in OpenAI, the creators of the viral application ChatGPT. It seems likely that there is a business reason at the heart of the decision to invest a sum that would equate to $1 million per laid-off employee in an AI company.

Likewise, Google’s parent company Alphabet GOOGLE announced plans to reduce its global headcount by 12,000 – a cut of around 6%. CEO Sundar Pichai has previously described AI as the most transformational technology of all time, and in making the layoffs, stated that the strategy will be to “direct our talent and capital to our highest priorities.” It’s widely thought that Google is working on its own AI-powered answer to ChatGPT that will be announced soon.
From

Folks are asking a machine what the weather outside is like; depending on a GPS to guide them to their destination;and apparently enjoying the auxiliary help. They’ve even made progress in robot tv anchors. And my college graduate granddaughter cannot read cursive handwriting.

I’ll eat my words if AI succeeds in killing Climate Change, but with a decrease in smarts, manners, education and brotherly love, our much earlier and more primitive underpinning of kinship selection makes a happy Aquarious future less likely.

AND MANY STATES WANT, ARE GETTING, AND REWARDING MORE BABIES. Poor babies, poor mothers and poor us.

BLUE COLLAR BLUES

Published November 17, 2022 by Nan Mykel

Work and the future of it in the age of automation is the focus of Alyssa Battistoni’s article/book reviews in the Nation’s Fall Books issue. She is the author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, and she draws upon Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav and Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe.

Benanav reminds us that automation theorists hold that technological advances have increased productivity and reduced the need for workers altogether. Manufacturing has borne the brunt thus far, but artificial intelligence, they claim, threatens to replace many more jobs in the service sector, as well as in many professional fields. One widely cited study estimates that 47 percent of jobs are at risk of being automated. Many automation theorists are Silicon Valley tech boosters, who are thrilled by new advances in AI and information technology and concerned about their social consequences as an afterthought. [Remember, one gadget even lets you know how cold it is outside without the bother of opening the door].

Jaffe’s vision of post-work politics is more clearly rooted in her descriptions of how workers are organizing today, and she places more faith in the potential of their agency to remake the world…..Moments of possibility can appear in unexpected places. Although they are often associated with autonomous movements like Occupy Wall Street that explicitly seek to disrupt 6he rhythms of everyday life, Jaffe points out that they also appear in more “organized” forms of action, like teachers’ strikes. We can even generate such moments when we imagine our lives otherwise.

“What would you do with your time if you didn’t have to work?” she likes to ask.

Such utopian moments won’t abolish capitalism, Jaffe acknowledges. But the projects that generate them give us a glimpse of alternatives of bonds among people that can drive struggles forward. Political power can only emerge, partially and unevenly, out of actual experiences and relationships–the kinds of relationships of solidarity and, yes, love, that organizing can create and sustain.

But Nan Mykel wonders, who’s going to feed us while we enjoy our time? In the next post or two: the problem of an aging population that only an elder could write.