Let’s start with a requiem for the White House Rose Garden. There has been a garden in this same area of the White House lawn since the days of Edith Roosevelt, Teddy’s wife. It became a rose garden in Ellen Wilson’s time. And during the Kennedy administration, it became Jackie’s Rose Garden. The Kennedy-era garden was not, strictly speaking a “rose garden” but was a flower garden with a variety of flowers and crabapple trees. And it was designed by some famous garden designer, but I bet Jackie had a lot of input.
But during the Trump I Administration, Melania got rid of the crabapples and the flowers and turned it into this:
We’re told the sidewalk was added because ladies with heels had a hard time walking on the grass. And now we won’t even have the grass, because Trump is having it all paved over.
I take it the reason for this is that it’s hard to get big media equipment onto the grassy lawn for “rose garden” events. Except there’s no rose garden any more. Couldn’t they have paved some other part of the grounds for the media equipment and the ladies with high heels and leave Jackie’s garden alone? I swear, that man turns everything he touches into something tacky and ugly.
In other news: A week ago I wrote that Trump had decided to stop immigration raids that affected the agriculture and hospitality industries. Well, skip that. It appears Trump genuinely wanted to hold off on agriculture and hospitality, but Stephen Miller and Tom Homan overruled Trump and plan to continue the raids. And is this a big red flag that Trump is not really running much of anything now, but his mouth?
In more other news: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided to let Trump retain control of the National Guard he federalized in California. This didn’t surprise me. Analyses of last week’s hearing all predicted that’s what the court would do, although one could always hope everyone was wrong. The only analysis of the decision I have found is at Reason magazine, which I usually ignore. And the column in Reason in which it appears is a continuation of what was once a right-wing political blog. But the analysis seems reasonable to me. Most of the written decision seems to lean away from Trump having the authority to unilaterally federalize the Guard in Los Angeles, but the court applied a “a highly deferential standard of review.” So while they didn’t entirely agree with the administration’s arguments, they are letting Trump get away with it. Naturally, Trump is planning to deploy more troops.
Is AI Over-Hyped? There was a thread at Bluesky that argued that women are more skeptical of, or at least less credulous about, AI than men. That would include me, as I am definitely an AI skeptic. I think it’s useless, frankly. You can’t trust anything it does. So I read with interest this essay on a Harvard website, Watching the Generative AI Hype Bubble Deflate.
Will Trump go to war in Iran? The best news I heard this morning is that the Kremlin opposes regime change in Iran. It’s obvious that Trump is utterly befuddled. He’s put Israel on a “two week” hold. Wars can’t be put on hold. There is talk of restarting negotiations, although Iran wants a cease-fire first. But as of yesterday it was looking as if Trump was working up to Take Out Saddam Hussein II.
Fox News bobbleheads are screaming to invade Iran, often using some of the same arguments that got us into Iraq. But other parts of MAGA are pushing in the other direction. And Steve Bannon is calling for an investigation of Fox News. Most of the hard-core MAGAts are isolationists, I take it.
Believe it or not, there is a very good, and thoughtful, analysis of the Israel-Iran-Trump-neocon-isolationist mess we’re in now at The American Conservative.
When I visited Saint Petersburg, Russia, years ago, I made the trip to the summer home of Peter the Great. A palace, really, with fountains and sculptures. Magnificent. Almost all of it replicas from pre-WWII photos and plans. You see, the German army advanced to the outskirts of Saint Petersburg, though they did not capture the city. The Germans used the palace they had captured for artillery practice. After the war, Russia rebuilt it as exactly as possible. Much of the furniture that had been saved in the city was later returned.
That's how I feel about the obscenities Trump is doing to the building, but even more to the traditions and spirit of the Constitution, the Congress, the law, and the courts. All of it has to be reversed when the War against Democracy is over. For the moment, we are trying to survive the siege, as the residents of Saint Petersburg did. I remember a hand-painted sign on a wall in Saint Petersburg (in Russisn, of course) which translated, "Sniper fire is worse on this side of the road." That's how it feels now, but we will prevail.
When I visited Saint Petersburg, Russia, years ago, I made the trip to the summer home of Peter the Great. A palace, really, with fountains and sculptures. Magnificent. Almost all of it replicas from pre-WWII photos and plans. You see, the German army advanced to the outskirts of Saint Petersburg, though they did not capture the city. The Germans used the palace they had captured for artillery practice. After the war, Russia rebuilt it as exactly as possible. Much of the furniture that had been saved in the city was later returned.
That's how I feel about the obscenities Trump is doing to the building, but even more to the traditions and spirit of the Constitution, the Congress, the law, and the courts. All of it has to be reversed when the War against Democracy is over. For the moment, we are trying to survive the siege, as the residents of Saint Petersburg did. (Many did not survive – they starved. But they held on.) I remember a hand-painted sign on a wall in Saint Petersburg (in Russisn, of course) which translated, "Sniper fire is worse on this side of the road." That's how it feels now, but we will prevail.
You don’t know what you got till it’s gone!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ratQlft_G5c&list=RDratQlft_G5c&start_radio=1
Intelligence is a hypothetical construct like the word gravity. The only way you know it exists at all is as an explanation for something you see directly, but it itself cannot be seen. Both can be defined but only from theory, which in the case of intelligence is not at all settled. Take the term athletic ability. This we think we understand. We can name skills associated with the construct such as speed, endurance, muscle strength and memory, hand-eye coordination and the like, yet athletic ability exists only in theory. Which skills get what weight or importance depends also upon theory.
Most people would scoff even at a notion of artificial athletic ability yet somehow find artificial intellectual ability acceptable. Just because words can be put in proximity to each other does not mean the combination makes sense. It takes real intelligence to recognize an oxymoron one would suppose. A level of intelligence many humans do not appear to even have. Could even half even define the word?
I highly recommend a very readable and exiting book by Max Bennet which I am in process of reading myself. It is a science-based book about AI, evolution, and what made the human brain entitled A Brief History of Intelligence. It begins with all known history of life itself as best we know it. Some branching led toward intelligence some did not. Fascinating.
Interesting…I might get a hold of that book.
The Cris Hayes compilation is awesome. I quivered with recall of the days of Freedom Fries and our total lack of skepticism and rush to war. That clip of BiBi Netanyahu was new to me, but his questionable credibility was definitely not. Yet, way too many Americans seem fooled all of the time by him. Any media airtime given to BiBi needs a disclaimer broadcast with it, as his lies are so numerous and flagrant.
So too, for our bird of a feather with a similar aversion to truth.
Re: AI, I don't think it's useless.
It sounds like it can summarize text – just like with any summary, you'd want to skim the high points. *IF* that works, mostly reliably (as well as a high school book report), that's amazing.
It sounds like it can do simple code. Now, that might not sound like much to you, but I'm fumble fingered, and sometimes, code requires a lot of stupid symbols that you never type, and includes function names like thisIsCamelCaseAndTooLongToTypeWithoutAutoComplete, and #$VARIABLE_NAME (all caps, and yes, hash-dollar), and…
…it sounds like AI could help me code, and help me spin up 2-3 play projects without having to do as much work as I would, without AI.
It sounds like AI could help me learn complicated programming concepts like "explain how a client-side cursor works in VB.Net."
So it's like, if you could speak commands to a computer, and it would set up geometry and algebra/pre-calc graphing problems for you, and help you think your way through proofs, that would be a huge advance in teaching pre-calculus math, but, in the end, it would probably still take a full semester for most students.
Well – that's AI. Some of the hype is good.
I used to support databases. I could probably use AI to "send them my disk warning, send them my memory explanation, and find me a good blocking query for PostgreSQL" and handle customers maybe 50% faster, but, that's because I was really good at my job, and I really did spend a lot of time "re-inventing the wheel."
But is it overhyped? Yes – people are talking about the number of jobs it will replace, and I think it'll be closer to word processors and e-mail/calendar clients on the desktop. More people will do more work, and, over time, it'll seem natural to do it that way, but when you look back, you won't actually see all that many jobs replaced, so much as changing.
For me, it’s useless. I can summarize text perfectly well by myself, thanks. It tends to give really bad information about a lot of things, in my experience. If it works for you as a learning aid that’s fine, but I hope you aren’t being mis-taught. As just one example, here is an answer I got to a real-world question.
Wow, I find AI to be extremely useful. It's like having a research assistant that can get me information, and summarize it sometimes 5-50x faster than I could on my own.
From solving critical-path problems on a project I'm working on, to just asking idle questions. Type in "current events" and it will give you a 10,000 foot summary, which most of the time is all I want to know. Kind of like a dynamic front page of printed newspapers.
It and nano-technology are going to revolutionize medicine. I expect the average human lifespan to begin to increase, starting in about ten years or so. If we make it that far.
Re: the courts letting Trump retain control – that actually does make sense to me, too. Strong deference to the executive, on military matters, is generally proper, and you know the SCOTUS is going to endorse a "muscular" view of the Presidency, where Seal Team Six can assassinate political opponents as an official act.
So better to just go limp, and let the SCOTUS write what they're going to write anyway.
It's amazing how isolated from reality the Trump team is. When someone, somewhere, asked about questions the military has about the bunker-buster working, the WH responded that the military is *perfectly* confident in the bunker buster.
I'm not sure the thing has been tested, and I've seen people say that even a Robin Hood shot, two bombs, the second landing right down the middle of the first one's crater, might not destroy the facility. They might just have to excavate it. Well, excavation is a big effing deal, but, a lot less than having to rebuild it.
I really hope someone in Trump's circle is explaining how much effing work Trump would have to perform, if he actually attacks Iran. They'll retaliate, he'll have to decide how to respond, they might keep fighting, he'll have to decide war plans… does he really want all of this shoved in his lap by that "ready fire aim" Bibi?
Because if there's one thing that I think protects Canada and Greenland, it's how Trump is lazy.
Paul Waldman, Which Group of Morons Will Trump Listen to on Iran?
The photo Waldman used with his article perfectly captures late-stage Trump.
By contrast, the Rose Garden photo you started out with is the most beautiful thing I've seen in a long time. I'm going to matte it and hang it on the wall, it is so gorgeous. More importantly, it recalls the America of my youth, that's a thousand miles higher than the one we're currently floundering in. It's the visual aid for the time where/when I might try to explain when I came, or reminisce about the past.
I read that DHS / ICE is out of money, but there's a line item in the Big Ugly Bill to hire 10,000 agents (proud boys) and build enough detention centers to hold 125,000 people. See Jay Kuo, SuperCharging ICE.