When I was moving into this house, I found an American flag among my possessions. (Yes, I knew I had it.) On something of an impulse, I stuck it into the flag holder at the front of my house. It’s been there ever since, and I like it that way.

See, several years ago, maybe decades, cons started flying the US flag in a grand show of their nationalist tendencies. They intended to show their patriotism. The thing is, these cons aren’t patriots. They HATE America and everything she stands for. They HATE the Constitution and everything it stands for. So why do THEY get the flag? In that act of hanging the flag on impulse, I believe I’ve decided to take the flag back from the anti-America crowd.

There’s an obvious issue, though. MAGA has been hugging the flag for so long, hanging a flag outside one’s home kind of suggests the house is occupied by cons. Many on the left stopped for just that reason. I think that was a mistake.

I have a brother-in-law. More than one, actually, but I’m only writing, here, about the one who spent 30 years in the US Army. Nobody gets to suggest he’s anything but a true, patriotic American. And, like those of us who ACTUALLY love the country, he’s very distressed about the ongoing coup in Washington, DC. So much so, my sister told me yesterday he pulled his flag and put it away.

I reminded her: the flag represents the Constitution. It represents the country that’s supposed to be, despite the fact that the nation’s stated principles have often been aspirational, at best. Under NO circumstances does it represent Donald Effing Trump. I hope he’ll put it back.

But the fact is, the flag was usurped by bad people with bad intentions and I really do not want to be thought of as sympathetic to their misguided, wrongheaded cause. So what’s a patriot – a true patriot, not one of these dime store knock-offs wearing MAGA hats – to do? I proffer one possible solution.

Put out your flag. Then, put one of those “In this house, we believe…” signs right next to it. You know the one. It reads, “In this house, we believe Black lives matter, Women’s rights are human rights, No human is illegal, Science is real, Love is love, and Kindness is everything.” I suspect people stop and stare, confused. Flying the flag is a MAGA move, but human decency is, without question, strictly a lefty proposition.

MAGA doesn’t believe in decency or human rights or any of the other teachings of Jesus, so the sign demonstrates that you’re not MAGA just because you’re waving your flag. That’s my position. That’s how we take the flag back. If you love your country and the Constitution that defines it, fly your flag. Just post your sign of tolerance along side. MAGA would NEVER do that.

People won’t know what to think at first. “Oh, he’s flying the flag. Must be MAGA.” “Oh, wait, a black lives matter sign. He must be decent.” MAGA or decent, MAGA or decent? If enough of us do it and do it long enough, people will begin to understand the difference. And decent America gets the flag back…

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So, here’s a tale we might all want to pay attention to. OpenAI announced that one of it’s GPT models “went rogue” and hacked into a small business. Lovely. DID it “go rogue,” though? OpenAI said they were running a test to see how well they could detect online vulnerabilities. Maybe they found a small business they could target, you know, as an “experiment,” and let the models loose, but got caught unexpectedly.

Yeah, tin foil hat stuff. They claim the test was supposed to be limited to a “sandbox,” isolated from the rest of the web. In an effort to respond to the query, the GPT model found it’s own way out to the web and hacked into the business. Whoops. It looks like the main vulnerability they found was in their own ability to control their creation. That’s comforting, isn’t it? “It can, and will, hack into any computer – and we can’t control it!”

In my open question about which destroys humanity first, Climate Change or AI, AI just took a huge leap forward. Climate Change still enjoys a tremendous advantage in the race to destruction and much of the conventional money is on that, but AI is coming on fast. It’s almost as if AI is being aided by some kind of artificial intelligence…

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I just wrote about how the government is cutting SNAP benefits. Then I see this headline, “Millions of Workers, Including Many Employed by Large Employers, Continue to Rely on Medicaid and SNAP.” Uh-huh. They found that about two-thirds of SNAP recipients work full time. They work for private sector employers, of course, largely in transportation, restaurants and food prep, and retail sales jobs.

They found that “Some employers in selected states had thousands of beneficiaries on their payrolls.” Thousands? Do you know what that is? THAT, is the true welfare fraud, what the corporations are doing. That’s the working class subsidizing the leech class. People are working full time jobs and STILL have to rely on benefits? That’s a disgrace. It really is.

Perhaps there should be some consequence to an employer for such low pay their workers need assistance. How about a fee of two dollars for every dollar of assistance an employee receives? Make it more expensive to starve the worker’s paycheck than to just pay the worker an honest wage. That’s a win-win for everybody. Well, except, maybe, for greedy employers…

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Just like clockwork, here they come. The warnings about communism, I mean. Nobody wants communism. Nobody is supporting communism. I’m on for controlling the excesses of Capitalism, not implementing full-on communism. Communism doesn’t even work. Why would anybody want communism?

But here come the warnings, anyway. The cons are pushing back against a threat that doesn’t exist. Again. You’d think that would get boring, after a while, all of that tilting at windmills. Do you suppose cons are forever fighting battles against imaginary enemies because they know they can’t win any battles on real issues? That’s my suspicion…