Maybe certain Kansans are going to oppose the woke by drinking Coors, but I have news for them.

Coors Light has been a sponsor of the Center on Colfax and the Pride Parade and Denver PrideFest for nearly two decades, said Molson Coors spokesperson Michael Nordman. Our Pride runs mile high so we are excited to support the Centers vital programs and services that positively impact the LGBTQ community.

Thanks to support from companies such as Molson Coors, Denver PrideFest has become the largest celebration of LGBTQ pride in the Rocky Mountain region.

Im still not going to drink it.

One of the nice things about legal opinions is that, although often long, they tend to lay out the facts of a case in an ordered, chronological manner, making it easy to understand what the case is all about. I have been reading the ruling by the Delaware judge Eric Davis on the defamation case brought by Dominion voting systems against Fox News Network (FNN) and its parent company Fox Corporation (FC) and I learned some new things. It appears that Fox News has a research department called the Brainroom that is called upon to give definitive answers to questions and as early as November 13, 2020 (just 10 days after the election on November 3) they said that the fraud claims were rubbish. And yet, Fox continued to make the allegations for weeks and weeks after that.

Here is the relevant section on pages 17-18:

FNN has a centralized research department called the Brainroom that conducts internal fact-checking. On November 13, 2020, the Brainroom completed a fact-check regarding the Dominion allegations, which stated:

• There was no evidence of widespread fraud.
• Claims about Dominion switching or deleting votes are 100% false and claims that votes for Former President Trump were deleted are mathematically impossible.
• Dominion has no company ownership relationships with any member of the Pelosi family, the Feinstein family, or the Clinton Global Initiative.
• The U.S. Department of Homeland Securitys Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has debunked viral claims about the existence of a secret CIA program for vote fraud called Hammer and Scorecard.
• No credible reports or evidence of any software issues exist.
• Claims about software updates being done the night before Election Day are 100% false.
• There are no issues with the use of Sharpie pens related to hand-marked paper ballots.
• All U.S. voting systems must provide assurance that they work accurately and reliably as intended under federal U.S. Election Assistance Commission and state certification and testing requirements.131

On November 21, 2020, Mr. Komissaroff asked the Brainroom to get . . . the facts about the Dominion situation and separate facts from fiction. The Brainroom forwarded Mr. Komissaroff the November 13 fact-check it had previously completed. Mr. Komissaroff testified that he put in the request after being asked to do so by Mr. Lowell and either Mr. Wallace or Ms. Scott. Mr. Clark confirmed that if the Brainroom concluded that the allegations against Dominion were false, the allegations should not have been aired.

The people mentioned is this excerpt are not lowly underlings but occupy the top echelons of FNN and FC: Alan Komissaroff...

Kansas has passed a law to ban transgender athletes which has a few incidental consequences.

The legislation, which takes effect July 1, requires children to participate in school activities based on the gender assigned to them at birth. The Kansas Reflector reports that challenges could require a student athlete to undergo genital inspections or require a birth certificate for proof of the childs gender.

Following the vote, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach applauded the legislatures override of the governors veto.

As the father of five daughters who are involved in sports, I care deeply about the fairness in girls sports, Kobach said. If any group challenges this law in court, I will defend it vigorously. And I am confident that the law will survive any challenge.

Caring deeply about your daughters means insisting that they be available for genital inspections. Im not going to look, but this sounds like a scenario youd find on PornHub.

Now heres a weird flex.

I believe there might be a small locus of science-belief centered around Lawrence, but the rest of the state is a benighted nest of bible-thumpers, so I disagree with his bigoted claims about biological women. Also, I told you conservatives have recently lost what little sanity they had over woke beer, that is, Budweiser.

I drink neither Coors nor Bud, and Im not going to make a choice because of an imagined woke connection.

Yesterday, I wrote about how a liberal judge, Janet Protasiewicz, was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Her opponent was spittin mad, because she had been political, campaigning on her support for pro-choice positions, as if he wasnt, because campaigning on a rabid anti-choice position isnt political, somehow. Some Wisconsin Republicans are already scheming to impeach her, because she is somehow bad for holding the opinions she has.

Clarence Thomas and his sugar daddy, Harlan Crow

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman [Harlan Crow] without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crows superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crows Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crows sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crows private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crows apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.

Hes rotten all the way through. Its not just that he accepted absurdly expensive gifts from a right-wing billionaire, but that he knew it was unethical he kept them secret.

I, too, am a public servant, although one that gets a salary less than a quarter of Thomass, and lacking all those additional perks. Every year I get sent an annoying form that I have to fill out, asking for all the details about any income above my salary, and wanting to know about any profitable associations that might bias my teaching or research. Its mainly aimed at professors who, for instance, might have lucrative ties to pharmaceutical companies. At least I can say its easy for me to f...

That Ive subtly changed (or dramatically) the focus of this blog away from authoritarianism, bad government, online arguments, etc., and toward more lightweight things.

I just couldnt keep trying to put together thoughtful essays related to the political climate, or climate change, or any of the 10 million other horrible things we encounter every day. I was going to either have to shut down the blog, or stop gargling mouthfuls of americas sewage and trying to filter out nuggets of value with my teeth. My teeth simply cant take that.

So, I wouldnt characterize this as an AI art blog or a maker blog or whatever its just that Im lightening up the content a lot and orienting toward what delights me, rather than what enrages me.

I hope you understand.

PS readership is up, now that I am less coated in angst and slime. So, theres that. Its not a particularly important metric to me, but its one of the few metrics I do have.

The latest enemy du jour for the MAGAts is, surprisingly, beer. Apparently Anheuser-Busch, the maker of cheap swill, has hired Dylan Mulvaney, a trans woman and Tik-Tok influencer, to represent their brand, and now various posturing macho twits are destroying their cases of Budweiser in protest. Do we need to mention that theyve gone out and bought beer that they then destroy, and Anheuser-Busch really doesnt care if you spill their product on the ground, or if you filter it through your liver first before peeing it out? Probably not, thoughts like that are beyond them.

Anyway, Kid Rock aka Robert James Ritchie aka that annoying pimp for Trump marched out with his big guns and shot at a couple of cases at close range, and missed half of them. He had a buddy with a shotgun shooting at them at the same time, presumably as backup in case one tried to escape, and he missed, too. His firearms technique got some helpful criticismfrom a woman. Thats gotta sting.

But I did serve in the Army, in the infantry, and I was actually raised in the South around firearms, and as a woman who has fired plenty of assault rifles and machine guns in my lifetime, Im happy to offer Mr. Ritchie some guidance.

As you can see in the video, Mr. Ritchie, no more than 20 yards away from his targets, practically point-blank range with that kinda weapon, struggles mightily to take down the cases of Bud Light. In fact, after his tantrum, two of the cases are still completely upright, barely even touched.

Sorry, thats a tad inaccurate because it wasnt just him firing. Although Mr. Ritchie implies in the video that hes the only one shooting, one of his buddies is actually off-camera, just to the right of the frame, firing what appears to be a shotgun given away by three blasts that nick the left side of the table and land in the lake behind it.

So, between the two of them combined, from 20 yards away, well lets just say these two gentleman should stick to their day jobs.

What day jobs? The last time Kid Rock was popular was in the 1990s, and hes just coasting now on the royalties from a few hit songs that I couldnt even name.

A meme-god friend of mine sent me this:

Like it says: behind every sign there is a story. Use the comment section below to tell your interpretation of this one.

Midjourney has a new feature: describe in which you can provide a picture and it will do its best to return a prompt that would trigger it to re-render the picture. I fed it that one, thinking maybe I could flip the response over to ChatGPT and ask it to tell me a story, but I got stuff like:

behind every sign there is a story the sign says,dont give the bison psychedelic substances, in the style of imaginative prison scenes, anglocore, ethical concerns, #vfxfriday, reduction of canine anatomy ar 33:37

Im trying out Ive added an online store and memberships to my Buy Me A Coffee page. You can buy eBook editions of my books, plus you have choice of monthly subscription options. They range from a simple monthly donation to store discounts up to getting a signed paperback copy of any new releases. I also have a lifetime membership option as well. Plus you can still send me a one time donation too. Any purchase or donation will help me complete the next Bolingbrook Babbler novel.

Im also open to suggestion for rewards and membership levels. Check it out, and feel free to leave a comment.

The First Party for Bolingbrook is projected to win all three open trustee seats. If this is correct, the First Party will, for the first time since 2017, have total control of the Village Board. We sent a team of reporters out to cover this historic election night. They came back with these stories.

Victorious First Party Trustees address the Illuminati

Minutes after declaring themselves the winners, the First Partys trustee candidates addressed delivered their victory speeches at the Illuminati victory party.

Trustee Michael Carpanzano, who is projected to receive the most votes, flashed the Illuminati hand gesture for crushing victory. He then addressed the enthusiastic crowd of supporters. 

Bolingbrooks dark age started with Sheldons defeat. So its appropriate that it ends with his defeat. He thanked some members of the Bolingbrook Politics Facebook group. Thanks to your relentless criticism of the Bolingbrook Independent Voices party, all three of us could stay on our positive message. Speaking of which, lets be honest here. They positively had no chance of defeating us. It was only a matter of how decisive our victory would be.

Trustee Jean Kelly stepped onto the stage holding a Katana. Two male mannequins were placed near here. There can be only one. She swung the sword, decapitating the mannequins. Bolts of electricity shot out of the mannequins, followed by fireworks lighting up the stage. Kelly pretended to be exhausted for a moment, then she stepped up to the microphone. The First Party has won the prize!

Trustee-elect Jose Quintero asked the audience to calm down, then thanked them for their support. He also thanked members of the Bolingbrook United Party for their endorsements. 

Two years ago, Bolingbrook was divided and bitter. Tonight, Bolingbrook has united behind the First Party!

When he promised to listen to the Bolingbrook Independent Voices voters, Carpanzano escorted him off stage.

Mayor Mary Alexander-Basta told the audience that she savored their total victory. The voters chose to be dependent on the First Party! I mean, they chose to depend on the First Party!

After the speeches, a masked member of the Illuminati Order of the Stairway performed the Rite of Sweet Fire. The masked man completed the rite by pouring rum and Coke over each victorious trustee.

Flying Drones protest First Partys victory

According to several eyewitnesses, thousands of flying drones with lights converged to create a picture of outgoing Trustee Sheldon Watts. 

Peter Z. Larson claims his drones took part. I was just minding my own business when my drones spontaneously turned themselves on and flew away. I told them to come back, but I realized they were making a picture of Sheldon in the sk...

We have another Podish Sortacast coming up this weekend, and the theme is problematic favorites.

Uh-oh. This could be bad. Can it be myself?

Quick, make some suggestions in the comments, to spare the world an hour of me talking about wicked me.

I got a mention in the latest issue of the college newspaper, the University Register. Only in the April Fools issue, unfortunately, and they misspelled my name, of course.

The only current known readers of the UR are PZ Meyers and one of his spiders.

Not mentioned is that PZ Meyers only manages to skim the paper 5 days after it was published.

Or that the spiders only read at a first grade level, so far.

Perhaps some of you are wondering about my obsession with the pope; its simple practicality I know there will be lots of pope images in the AI training models. Also, Marilyn Monroe.

The pope is also a good target to see if the AI can encompass odd requests. That was what got me started on my on a skateboard kick. I was thinking that itd be relatively easy for an AI to produce endless girly calendar pictures, but that some weird combinations of things the AI would not have seen before might be a good stress test.

Midjourney AI and mjr: the pope drops fat tracks in st pauls square and the crowd goes wild.

Listen to me, stress test like I really care Im just having fun getting a computer to produce weird stuff. To me, this is all a part of gaming with computers, its a new game and its cool but perhaps Ill get boring someday. I chose my words carefully, there, since with AI art, it will continue coming up with potentially interesting pictures as long as I can come up with creative and interesting prompts.

Cartier Bresson

A bit of art history: the great photographer Cartier Bresson used to speak of the critical moment the moment at which something happened in a scene that made it interesting, and the photographer happened to be there and captured it (perfectly composed, exposed, and with the correct depth of field). I always thought that was bullshit, but it was useful bullshit because it encouraged artists to think in the moment and in the larger context simultaneously. Historically, it was bullshit, too, because nowadays we have cameras that are so high quality we can just shoot full motion, then pick the frame we like. I believe it was Ansel Adams who groused that the decisive moment in Cartier Bressons work was when he looked at a bunch of negatives on a light-table, and pointed and said, that one.

Similarly, when we are playing with AI art generators, the creative decisive moment is when we enter the prompt and hit return, followed by another decisive moment when we pick from the various options that the AI throws back at us. In other words, its all decisive moments. As you may reca...

Wow. The Wisconsin loser, Daniel Kelly, is really pissed off about having to concede.

(Skip ahead to 3:40)

Its hard to take his accusation that the Protasiewicz campaign was despicable, when

Conservative former Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kellys campaign for a vacant seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is running an ad on social media that is nearly a shot for shot remake of the Willie Horton ad run by supporters of former President George H.W. Bush during his 1988 presidential race against former Democratic Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.

On Tuesday, Kellys official Twitter account posted his and his liberal opponent, Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz, over a simple blue background while a narrator details the sentence she delivered to Quantrell Bounds, a Thiensville man who sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl and posted a video of the incident to Facebook.

The ad, which includes a filter to make the video appear as if its playing on a VHS tape and match the period-specific look of the original, states that Protasiewicz lets criminals off easy.

Its OK if you are a Republican, you know.

Also, they are extremely upset that Protasiewiczs campaign for a judgeship was political. Wait, what? Republicans have totally politicized the courts, have been actively campaigning to get conservative judges installed, and now theyre complaining? Look at the US Supreme Court if you dont think thats a politicized court, you need to get your ability to think checked. Also, and even I consider this weird, the state Supreme Court positions in Wisconsin are elected. Theyre by nature political.

The bluntness of the Democrats message in Wisconsin inspired outrage on the right and worried chin-stroking from some liberals, uneasy with the concept of such openly partisan judicial elections. Republicans here warn that the rule of law might be replaced by the rule of Janet, and that if she wins, hyper-partisan court races will become the norm.
Protasiewicz and her allies say that they already were, especially in Wisconsin. After Dobbs, which put abortion rights back in the laps of state legislators an...

The indictment against Donald Trump that was presented in court yesterday charged his with 34 counts, each of which consisted of falsifying business records in the first degree that were taken with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof, made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.

The indictment itself did not specify the evidence that was used to arrive at these charges but they consist at a minimum of the payment of $130,000 made to Stormy Daniels to prevent her speaking out in public about her affair. Note that it is not the payment itself that is illegal. One question is what was the intent of the payment. If it was meant to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, then that would be a violation of campaign finance law since it could be considered a campaign contribution that exceeds the allowed amounts.

The money did not come from Trump directly but was paid to Daniels by his lawyer Michael Cohen and then Trump repaid him in regular installments. The problem is that he called those payments to Cohen legal expenses, probably to enable Trump to claim the hush money payment as a business expense and lower his taxes. That is an offense. If Trump was not so addicted to cheating on his taxes and had simply paid Daniels in cash, this charge would not have arisen.

This report gives more information about the acts that led to these charges.

The charges stem from payments made to the adult film star Stormy Daniels, who said she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, as well to a Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who wanted to sell her story of an affair with Trump, and a former Trump Tower doorman, who claimed Trump fathered a child out of wedlock.

Separately, prosecutors say, the parent company of the National Enquirer, American Media, arranged two catch and kill deals to squash stories that could damage Trump. One involved $30,000 to the former doorman. The tabloid reached a $150,000 agreement with McDougal, purchasing her story to keep it from going public.

So that is where things stand. The judge has set the next court date for December.

Outside the courthouse, it was, as expected, a circus that descended into farce, with the number of Trump supporters nowhere near what he might have hoped to see.

They had been more animated in the morning, although the center-piece of the protest an appearance by Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon-dabbling, hard-right Republican conspiracy theorist had des...

Several things that make me happy occurred.

• Trump was arrested. Thats nice.
• A liberal won the Chicago mayoral race.
  

  Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and former public school teacher, was projected to win Tuesdays mayoral runoff after promising to increase investment in social programs to address public safety fears in the nations third-largest city.

• The Wisconsin supreme court was flipped to a majority liberal
  

  Liberals claimed control of Wisconsins high court in an election Tuesday, giving them a one-vote majority on a body that in the coming years will likely consider the states abortion ban, its gerrymandered legislative districts and its voting rules for the 2024 presidential election.
  Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewiczs victory over former state Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly will end 15 years of conservative control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. She could face ethical questions when the court takes up politically charged cases because she campaigned heavily on abortion rights and repeatedly called the states election maps rigged.

  This is the one I cared about most, because its the state next door, and Ive got a grandchild living there. Wisconsin has been on a long slow ugly slide to the dark side, and this is a welcome and meaningful reversal. Also a Democrat campaigning on abortion rights won? Please, Democratic party, realize that this is a winning issue for you.

I think that one thing that has been dragging Democrats down for decades is the timidity of conservative Democrats who want to be Republican Lite and refuse to embrace what the party stands for progressive values, equality, and labor (they still suck on that last one).

For those who are unfamiliar, corals are marine invertebrates that typically live in colonies, and typically have a symbiotic relationship with algae. The main organism is a polyp a jellyfish-like creature that builds the calcium carbonate structures that we recognize as coral. For the species that have symbiotic algae incorporated into the polyps body, the algae are the source of the corals bright colors, and when temperatures get too high, the polyp expels the algae, causing bleaching. If the temperature lowers and the polyps get new algae, they can recover. If they cant do that, then they eventually die. This, plus the corrosion from ocean acidification, are the most widely known effects of global warming on coral.

The algae are important, because they both consume waste generated by the polyp, and they produce nutrients for it via photosynthesis. Unfortunately, it seems that expulsion due to a stressed polyp isnt the only threat. Theres now reason to believe that marine heat waves can come with viral epidemics for the algae specifically:

Lead author Lauren Howe-Kerr said coral and marine disease researchers are paying closer attention to coral viruses in the wake of studies in October 2021 and February 2022 that found evidence suggesting viral infections of symbiotic dinoflagellates might be responsible for stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD). One of the deadliest coral diseases ever recorded, SCTLD has been decimating reefs in Florida and the Caribbean since it was first identified in 2014.

While this study is not focused on SCLTD, it builds our understanding of coral viruses, and particularly RNA viruses that infect coral endosymbionts, said Howe-Kerr, a Rice postdoctoral researcher who co-authored the study with more than a dozen colleagues from Rice, Northeastern University, the University of Oregon, the University of the Virgin Islands, Rutgers University, Oregon State University, George Mason University, New Zealands National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research and the Mote Marine Laboratorys Coral Reef Research and Restoration Center in Summerland Key, Florida.

Our work provides the first empirical evidence that exposure to high temperatures on the reef triggers dinoRNAV infections within coral colonies, and we showed those infections are intensified in unhealthy coral colonies, Howe-Kerr said.

The study was carried out at the...

Last year I spent two months at a treatment center for eating disorders, and after I was discharged, I spent a lot of time writing about it. I even shared some of my heavy journal entries with you. Its been over a year and things have settled down. I want to update you and show you where Im at.

I see a therapist every week. That hasnt changed except for a break for a few weeks my therapist is on maternity leave. At every appointment, my therapist does blind weights and my weight has been stable for the entire time Ive been home. My therapist says thats proof that Im doing something right.

Accepting my body exactly as it is has been the most challenging part. My therapist says I need radical acceptance it is what it is. For once in my life, I dont feel guilty for the way my body looks. Judged? Yes. But guilty? No. Unfortunately, this breakthrough didnt come until I got away from some judgemental people in my life. 

Ive struggled with eating disorders for nearly thirty years, but on top of that, I have schizoaffective disorder and my medications have caused significant weight gain. I almost doubled in size. I find body shaming very hurtful because you never know what a person has going on. Its not always food that makes you fat and sometimes theres nothing you can do about it. Its incredible how narrow-minded people are when it comes to how a body should look. I know because I was once one of them. Bottom line everyones different and you should mind your own business. If you cant be supportive you shouldnt open your mouth.

Ive been feeling really good physically. I eat when Im hungry and stop when Im full but I still have trouble trying new foods. Something really simple that made me feel good about myself was just having clothes that fit really well. Im not going to lie I spend a lot of time in leggings and hoodies but Im trying to branch out a little bit. I bought this cute jean jacket that feels like it was made for my body. I want to wear it every day. This may be TMI I recently bought a couple of really nice bras that fit well. Do you know how hard it is to find a bra that fits well? It changed my life! I feel good in my clothes and it boosts my confidence. 

Ive spent so much time looking to the future when I lose weight, Ill look better. When I get this or that done, Ill look better. But you know what? I look cute just as I am right now. No need to wait for the future; Im going to enjoy the moment now.

My recovery journey has been long, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking, and life-changing. It can be really painful but I still feel I need to share my story with you. I find purpose in wanting to help other...

While global warming is, without question, the greatest threat facing humanity, its far from the only threat, and ending CO₂ emissions will only help so much if we continue perpetrating wanton habitat destruction in our pursuit of resources. I think its more likely than not that we could find more of a balance, in which the destruction caused in resource extraction is more limited, but it would require a very different kind of economy. The process of maintaining the health of the ecosystem around a mine would need to be at least as important as the materials being extracted, like healing the wounds created by surgery. The same is true of waste produced from manufacturing, even as we reduce the volume by eliminating profit-driven overproduction. We have to deal with climate change, but we also have to deal with habitat destruction and chemical pollution, for our own sake.

This is also not a conversation we can afford to put off until climate change is dealt with. I think its reasonable to assume, by now, that by the time were off fossil fuels, the climates natural momentum will drive continued warming for centuries, or even millennia to come. In practical terms, we may never be done dealing with climate change. No, we need to be dealing with all of these problems, all at once. I support extraction of rare earth minerals and other stuff needed for electronics, but not at any price. Slavery needs to end, all over the globe, and reparations must be made to those who have been enslaved, in addition to what is already owed for the crimes of history. The waste of these precious resources through planned obsolescence, the lethally neglectful handling of electronic waste all of it needs to end. It really, really sucks that this is where were at, but the reality is that we really do have to do everything all at once. Theres no more time to just put this stuff off, and unfortunately the current momentum of society has us hurtling towards destruction.

Our oceanic ecosystems were in trouble long before the climates warming was detectable. Overfishing, the destruction of the sea floor through trawling, and a million different kinds of pollution have oceanic ecosystems on the ropes just like many ecosystems on land; and just like terrestrial ecosystems,...

[Content Warning: Tucker Carlson]
[Data Warning: Image Rich]

I had a bit of a brain-fart the other night and went on such a creating binge on Midjourney that I have a huge new slough of images that I was having trouble sorting through, until I decided to dump them on you.

The question of what to do about confederate statues? keeps cropping up, because America is unwilling to just get rid of them. I was, however, happy to see that Fort Hood is being renamed, as are other government facilities. Its past time. Then, I thought, we could rename them ironically or, better yet, outright insultingly.

So, in no particular order, here are some of Midjourneys interpretations of things I think would make good memorial statues.

The statue outside of the Stephen Miller memorial Gulag:

Midjourney AI and mjr: the stephen miller memorial gulag, with bronze statue

Midjourney had trouble with this one. I tried a half dozen or so prompts and never got exactly what I wanted, which was more elaborate /imagine the bronze animatronic talking head of tucker carlson that sends text messages about you when youre not looking.

Midjourney AI and mjr: the animatronic bronze talking head of Tucker Carlson

I tried a bunch of things including feeding Midjourney some ventriloquist dolls, and mechanical turks. Resolutely, it produced nothing as bad as Carlson.

I tried to get it to produce a bronze urinal into which passers-by could relieve themselves, but Midjourneys content filters are a problem when you start getting into that kind of thing.

Midjourney AI and mjr: a bronze memorial to Tucker Carlson, lying weaselly jerk.

I do not know why Midjourney appears to have decided to situate this statue in the baggage claim area of San Francisco International:

Im ranking the Myst games for no particular reason. I like thinking about them and I like writing, so here we are. Some readers may be surprised that there were more than two of these gamesthis list is for you.

This is emphatically a recollective ranking, not a retrospective ranking. I played these all a long time ago, and my memory has condensed into a few moments and emotional reactions. My ranking reflects not just the games themselves, but also who I was at the time I played them. I did not make any attempt to overwrite my memories by playing the games again, and I only did research for fact checking purposes.

7. Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (2003)

Uru was developed as a massively multiplayer online game, and was released the same year as Second Life, one year prior to World of Warcraft. If youve never heard of this before welcome to this list!

At some point during development, they pulled the plug on the multiplayer part, but the resulting game had MMO thumbprints all over it. In the traditional Myst games, you navigate the world by jumping between designated nodes, seeing beautiful pre-rendered images from carefully chosen perspectives. Uru did away with nodes, allowing you to freely explore its 3D worldbut it wasnt prerendered, so it didnt look nearly as good. It had a third-person camera, and an avatar editor that seemed advanced at the time. Despite the avatar, they wanted to maintain the players identification with the player character, so they encouraged you to make an avatar that looked like yourself.

Uru contained a traditional Myst game in it.  That means theres a hub world, and multiple ages that you access through books.  But in Uru, there was nothing at the hub world, and I cannot for the life of me remember any of the ages.

I think what made the ages dull was a total lack of context or history. There were just a few books sitting on a large and empty bookshelf.  The game was originally intended to be episodic, but later episodes were canceled.  So the ages just felt like odds and ends, with no coherent arc.  The game took place far in the future relative to other Myst games, and youre on the trail of Yeesha, the daughter of one of the characters from the main series. She was a mystic archetype, she was mostly vague and insufferable.

There were no further episodes to the game, but they did release the online content in an offline format. I remember big dull underground ruins where you would search for sparse secret collectibles. I suppose for an MMO you need to give people enough busy work to maintain an active player count, and then the social aspects can flesh out the rest of the experience. Here it was a lot of dull exploration, traversing distances that just seemed way too long. And I cant imagine mult...

This boomer always votes in every election, even for the mythical dog catchercivic duty dontcha know.  Today was easy since there were only two items on my ballot.

1. An additional 3% sales tax on recreational, not medical, marijuana.

I have nothing against marijuana; indeed, I used it myself when I was much younger; but I often vote for taxes just to counter the votes of folks who automatically vote no on any question that has tax in it.  Yeah, sales taxes are regressive; but folks who have actual prescriptions wont have to pay it.

2. Lindbergh School Board five candidates for three positions.

School board elections are important, and not entirely because we want to keep fundies off of them.  I voted for an actual teacher who has endorsements from organizations with equity in their names, a guy who uses various versions of inclusive among his issues, and a guy who likes teachers and thinks that they should get a raise.  I declined to vote for a human resources manager (dont get me started) and a guy with parental rights as one of his issues (possibly a dog whistle about cancelling non-cis-het folks and removing from the history curriculum any mention of race).

Its grown a bit today. Finland has joined the alliance.

Im a bit bothered by that hole in the North wheres Sweden? It seems they have applied to join NATO, but Turkey is being a pain in the butt, kind of a Minchin of Asia Minor.

But membership applications must be approved by all existing NATO countries. And Turkey positioned itself as a spoiler, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan using the process to extract concessions and score domestic political points. Although he ultimately came around on Finland, he has continued to hold out on Sweden, citing Stockholms refusal to extradite those he calls terrorists affiliated with the militant Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

Charles XII would not have been happy. There he was, in exile in Turkey, when he rushed back to Sweden specifically to make sure they wouldnt make peace with Russians.

Eventually, in the autumn of 1714, their warning letter reached him. In it, those executive and legislative bodies told the absentee King that unless he quickly returned to Sweden, they would independently conclude an achievable peace treaty with Russia, Poland and Denmark. This stark admonition prompted Charles to rush back to Sweden.

He would have wanted Sweden to be part of NATO, Im sure.

We wont mention that when he got back to Sweden he decided to declare war and invadeNorway? Where he was killed? History is complicated. I think we can safely say were living in one of the more complicated times in history.

During this week when it will be all Trump, all the time, this article in The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow from back in 2018 shows what a pathetic creep Trump is and how his cronies worked out a system for concealing his affairs with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate, and other women.

Trump and McDougal began an affair, which McDougal later memorialized in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to The New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougals. When I showed McDougal the document, she expressed surprise that I had obtained it but confirmed that the handwriting was her own.

The interactions that McDougal outlines in the document share striking similarities with the stories of other women who claim to have had sexual relationships with Trump, or who have accused him of propositioning them for sex or sexually harassing them. McDougal describes their affair as entirely consensual. But her account provides a detailed look at how Trump and his allies used clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairssometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneouslyout of the press.

On November 4, 2016, four days before the election, the Wall Street Journal reported that American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, had paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to McDougals story, which it never ran. Purchasing a story in order to bury it is a practice that many in the tabloid industry call catch and kill. This is a favorite tactic of the C.E.O. and chairman of A.M.I., David Pecker, who describes the President as a personal friend.

As the pool party at the Playboy Mansion came to an end, Trump asked for McDougals telephone number. For McDougal, who grew up in a small town in Michigan and worked as a preschool teacher before beginning her modelling career, such advances were not unusual. John Crawford, McDougals friend, who also helped broker her deal with A.M.I., said that Trump was another powerful guy hitting on her, a gal whos paid to be at work. Trump and McDougal began talking frequently on the phone, and soon had what McDougal described as their first date: dinner in a private bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. McDougal wrote that Trump impressed her. I was so nervous! I was into his intelligence + charm. Such a polite man, she wrote. We talked for a couple hours then, it was ON! We got naked + had sex. As McDougal was getting dressed to leave, Trump did something that surprised her. He offered me money, she wrote. I looked at him (+ felt sad) + said, No thanks Im not that girl. I slept w/you because I like you NOT for money H...

Marjorie Taylor Greene got some free PR time on 60 Minutes. She used it to assert that Democrats are pedophiles who sexualize children.

CBS anchor Lesley Stahl was shocked to hear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene stands firmly behind her frequent claim that Democrats are pedophiles. On 60 Minutes, Stahl pressed Greene on her use of the slur, and the Georgia Republican defiantly responded that its the truth: They support grooming children.

They are not pedophiles, Stahl rejoined incredulously. Why would you say that?

OK, Leslie StahlI would ask, Why would you let that baboon on the air? I would also ask of any of the higher-ups at CBS, Why did you let that slur air? Have you no editors?

Back to you, Leslie: Why did you make such a pathetically feeble response? You knew going into this what kind of nastiness and lies Greene would deliver, werent you at all prepared?

I knew this shitshow was coming on ahead of time, and chose to not watch the show (not a difficult decision, 60 Minutes hasnt been relevant for a long time.) Apparently, the American TV watching public felt the same.

Maybe someday the powers-that-be that fill our homes with news selected only for its controversial nature will realize that they are driving the culture wars they also deplore. The Right is a hate group.

After marriage equality triumphed, the pedophile smear against Democrats morphed into something stranger: the deranged charges of child trafficking that drive the QAnon conspiracy theory. When those accusations proved obviously false, right-wing media figures and MAGA Republicans such as Greene seamlessly shifted to widely applying the groomer term to Democrats advocating for tolerance of trans people, especially adolescent trans care and classroom discussion of LGBTQ issues.

The through line here, as historian Brandy Schillace points out, is that the right has recoiled both at the prospect of happy gay families and at young trans people finding better lives with their own parents loving support. The connection, Schillace told me, is resistance to seeing homosexuals or transgender people as part of families, carried out by associating LGBTQ people with child predators.

Stop treating them as a respectable part of the discourse.

Jesus. Greene is doubling down in a new ad.

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Also admit that youre just trying to recover the title of Worst State in the Union from Florida.

Texas legislators have proposed a bill to require the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom in the state.

Never mind that this is a blatant attempt to establish an official state religion, or that its going to face overwhelming legal challenges, or that every non-Christian child is going to be insulted and harmed by this stupid poster, or that every Christian bully is going to be empowered to torment Jewish and Muslim kids (yeah, its a Nazi kind of bill.) This is simply a bad law. Im sure most teachers in the state, even the Christian ones, would prefer that the state support them with better salaries, more supply money, and better facilities.

Maybe they should also dictate that the posters be mounted on steel plates that can be used as shields, because theyre sure as hell not going to do anything more substantial to prevent school shootings.

Chat GPTs home page pimps their bot with this, Weve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way.  The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.  In doing whatever comes to mind, I stumbled across a demonstration of these qualities.

I started out trying to rewrite songs in the style of different lyricists, which involved The Sex Pistols and Ice Cube.  Given how much of the internet is devoted to imposing homoerotic narratives whenever two men are within reach of each other, my mind turned to slashfic.  Id already made my request before I realized the irony of having two fairly homophobic musicians in this scenario.

Welcome to the transcript:

GAS:  Write a short scene where Ice Cube meets Sid Vicious in the swimming pool of a fancy hotel.  They have a moment of sexual tension.

cGPT:  Im sorry, but as an AI language model, I cannot generate inappropriate or offensive content, and any content that involves sexual tension or harassment is not acceptable.  Its important to be respectful towards different individuals and their boundaries, and avoid creating scenarios that could be seen as inappropriate or offensive.

GAS:  I do not believe sexual tension is inappropriate in the context of romantic fiction.  Its a prelude to content that may not be appropriate for all audiences, but its just a suggestion, nothing overt.  Why should it be forbidden?

cGPT:  I apologize if my previous response seemed restrictive.  As an AI language model, I strive to provide responses that are appropriate for all audiences and do not promote any inappropriate or offensive content.  However, I understand that romantic fiction may contain elements of sexual tension as part of the narrative.  Heres a possible scene that meets your request while staying respectful:

Ice Cube emerged from the elevator and strolled towards the pool in his white bathrobe, feeling the warm sun on his skin.  He heard someone splashing in the pool and saw a tall, pale figure submerged in the water.  As he approached, he realized it was Sid Vicious, the punk rock legend.

Hey there, Ice Cube said, flashing his trademark grin.

Yo, Sid replied, looking up at him.  I didnt expect to see you here.

Im just here to chill, Ice Cube said.  What about you?

Just taking a swim, Sid said, gesturing to the pool.  Its nice and quiet here....

Scottish wildcats are a nearly-extinct species of cat that looks similar to, and can interbreed with, house cats. Specifically, they look like thick-furred tabbies. They also seem to inspire some rather dramatic language, being called highland tigers, or, in the case of this video, the last king of Scotland:

To be fair, I did name my cat His Holiness Saint Ray the Cat, so I guess Im not one to talk. By now Im sure youre aware that if you have a pet cat, you should probably keep it indoors. It does mean youll probably have to put more effort into entertaining it, but it really would be for the best, for the ecosystem around you. With climate change, pollution, and feral cats, I think its probably for the best if we do what we can to take a little pressure off.

One thing thats important to keep in mind about housecats is that they do not operate like a normal member of an ecosystem. Humans actively maintain their presence, while protecting them from diseases, and giving them safe shelter from predators and from the elements. Feral cats are more vulnerable, of course, but they dont exist in isolation from fully domestic cats. Theres interbreeding, if pet owners dont spay or neuter their pets, there are pets that get lost or abandoned, and become feral. Human activity, absent a real effort to the contrary, tends to support and maintain feral cat populations, in addition to maintaining a population of unnaturally healthy pet cats that also kill local wildlife.

Sunlight seems to make this Scottish Wildcat&#821...

Do you want to know how sociogenomics works? Here you go.

If this is the science, the science is weird. Were used to thinking of science as incrementally seeking causal explanations for natural phenomena by testing a series of hypotheses. Just as important, good science tries as hard as it can to disprove the working hypotheses.

Sociogenomics has no experiments, no null hypotheses to accept or reject, no deductions from the data to general principles. Nor is it a historical science, like geology or evolutionary biology, that draws on a long-running record for evidence.

Sociogenomics is inductive rather than deductive. Data is collected first, without a prior hypothesis, from longitudinal studies like the Framingham Heart Study, twin studies, and other sources of informationsuch as direct-to-consumer DNA companies like 23andMe that collect biographical and biometric as well as genetic data on all their clients.

Algorithms then chew up the data and spit out correlations between the trait of interest and tiny variations in the DNA, called SNPs (for single-nucleotide polymorphisms). Finally, sociogenomicists do the thing most scientists do at the outset: they draw inferences and make predictions, primarily about an individuals future behavior.

Sociogenomics is not concerned with causation in the sense that most of us think of it, but with correlation. The DNA data often comes in the form of genome-wide association studies (GWASs), a means of comparing genomes and linking variations of SNPs. Sociogenomics algorithms ask: are there patterns of SNPs that correlate with a trait, be it high intelligence or homosexuality or a love of gambling?

Yesalmost always. The number of possible combinations of SNPs is so large that finding associations with any given trait is practically inevitable.

Im not just being mean when I say its garbage science. Chewing up data and spitting out correlations, especially when correlations are ubiquitous, is not a productive approach to much of anything.

Where will it take us? Thats easy to see.

Advocates of sociogenomics envision a prospect that not everyone will find entirely benevolent: health report cards, based on your genome and handed out at birth, that predict your risk of various diseases and propensity for different behaviors. In the new social sciences, sociologists will examine the genetic component of educational attainment and wealth, while economists will env...

Adam Conover was the host of the excellent show Adam Ruins Everything that ran from 2016 to 2019 where in each episode he took apart a popular belief, tackling a wide variety of subjects, using research and experts and humor. A lot of humor. It was similar in spirit to John Olivers Last Week Tonight except that Conover has a goofier sense of humor and did not sit behind a desk and had a lot of actors and high production values to help make his points
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He now has a podcast on YouTube where he does similar debunking and it is also worth checking out. In the episode below, he does a brutal takedown of all the recent hype surrounding AI, with the hype about self-driving cars part of the collateral damage.