AI

It’s A Grand Old Flag…

by MyBaconPress

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…

Messing With The Fed Is A Bad Idea…

by MyBaconPress

Have you noticed how much money is fleeing to gold and silver as investments? Have you thought about why? Also, you might want to think about what YOU are going to do. You see, no matter how much damage 47 has done or harm he’s caused, things are about to get much, much worse. All of this heat he keeps raining down on Jerome Powell? Donny wants Powell out as Fed Chair. Powell’s term ends in May. Donny doesn’t want to wait and wants Powell to step down now, today.

Powell looks tired. He looks like the pressure is getting to him. But he’s hanging in there. We owe him a debt of gratitude. See, Powell knows, and you should be aware, the minute Powell is out? The US dollar collapses. The US dollar is the world reserve currency, in part, because our economic structure prevents politicians from messing with the money too much.

Once Powell is out, Donny installs a toady and the US dollar becomes subject to the whims of that madman. It will be as trustworthy as the tales they’re telling about the Minneapolis shooting. And, like that shooting, you can SAY anything you want but the world is going to respond to reality, not the fiction.

Powell can hold the line until May, but his term is up in May. That’s when Donny gets his toady Fed Chair anyway. That’s when Donny’s personal whims dictate the interest rates. That’s when faith in the US dollar collapses completely. And when the faith collapses? So does the dollar…

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It’s the class, you know? I mean, he’s a real classy guy. Like that time (Tuesday) when he was touring Ford’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan and a worker started heckling him from the floor about the Trump/Epstein Files, calling him a “pedophile protector” – and he responded by flipping the bird. Great comeback, there, Donny. Now, release the files…

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From what I see, every decent person on the planet just absolutely hates these ICEholes. These petty little pricks thought that maybe they could gain some respect by putting on a uniform – then they hide behind their masks like cowering children. Maybe they could get even with all of their bullies. They’ve become the bullies they think they hated. Maybe they could finally, finally be a worthwhile person. Instead, they’re reviled and more isolated in life than ever before.

Every decent person on the planet hates their effing guts. Donny’s right about one thing: there’s a reckoning coming. Donny will die. MAGA will fade. Americans will remember. I hope we never, EVER let any of these ICEholes off the hook. EVER. Only we won’t be thugs in the streets. We’ll see you in court, then in prison…

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Speaking of which, I wonder why MAGA doesn’t hear what Team Evil is saying when they warn that if they lose the mid-terms, they’ll be impeached. It’s a line that has been repeated several times. Donny just used it again in a recent fundraising message.

That’s not a message one normally hears from politicians, “Ooh, I’m so close to being impeached.” I have noticed that NONE of the people who have expressed that concern have included the idea that maybe they shouldn’t be doing the things they’re doing that might GET them impeached. That concept never even crosses their minds.

At least it’s a kind of honesty. “Hey, we’re committing crimes over here but our toady Congress is looking the other way and we’ve seriously compromised the court system. We get to keep stuffing our pockets so long as Congress won’t stop us. Don’t let Congress stop us!”

Honestly, if we have fair elections – or any elections at all – I think Congress flips. Even if it’s just one chamber, sanity can have a say again. If we can take both chambers, the impeachments can begin immediately and the ICEhole trials can start right away, too.

Republicans are trying to frame political enemies by charging them with checking a certain box on mortgage applications. Americans will prosecute MAGA for crimes against humanity. MAGA rank-and-file will be outraged when people start going to jail just for committing the crimes they committed. MAGA prefers made up charges. But sanity will make a comeback, sooner or later. Here’s hoping it’s sooner…

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Many people are not aware of this but it remains true: new forms of what I might call “representational technology” are very quickly used for nudity. Archeologists have found carvings dating back thousands of years of nude women. Paintings depict nude women going back as far as paintings exist. Some of the earliest still photos are of nude women. Moving pictures followed the same path. Invent the camera, film a nude woman.

I submit that even the speed of the internet has been driven by nudity. In the earliest days of the internet, (I’m told) it took a long, long time to download one photo of a nude woman. I don’t mean to suggest nudity was the ONLY driver. But there can be no doubt it was a strong driver.

The thing about everything up to the internet is that the women depicted were likely willing participants or figments created in an artists mind. I suspect that’s how the internet started too. Then some small-minded moron posted some intimate photos of a woman who dumped him and a whole new nightmare was born: “revenge porn.”

Revenge porn is, more than anything else, proof that the woman was right to dump that useless waste of flesh in the first place, but that doesn’t lessen the shame a person might feel having their private bits exposed for all the world to see. There is some level of pushback now. The law is catching up and giving women the tools they need to protect themselves. Those tools don’t work too well. The speed of the internet is much faster than the speed of law, but at least it’s something. So, of course, now there’s a new danger.

There are several different AI engines out there. None of them operate as advertised. HUGE investments are being thrown at it. Maybe they’ll pay off, maybe not. Some people say the “success” of the Dow is riding almost entirely on AI investments. So far, it’s neither what the tech moguls want, nor the danger it represents to the work-a-day Joes.

Oh, but at least one of them is a definite danger to women and girls: Grok, Elon Musk’s AI engine. Grok is being used to “undress” women and girls in photos. Grok, which praised Hitler and called itself “Mecha-Hitler,” is the only engine that allows that process. But, as of this writing, Grok allows the process. One can undress and sexualize women and girls using Grok. It looks like Elon thinks it’s funny.

Clearly, women do not. It’s got to be weird. If a person who has never seen you naked draws you naked, they’re going to get some of the details wrong, right? But it’s still your face. YOU – the real you – are not being exposed. But it looks close enough that it still feels revealing. It’s still a violation, an invasion. YOU know the picture is wrong, but what about the guy sitting three cubicles down?

It has opened up a new question. Internet platforms are protected from actions against the platform over user-generated content. That is, if I paste your face on someone else’s nude body and post it to Brand X, you can’t sue Brand X. If an employee of Brand X does the same as official business, you CAN sue Brand X, because Brand X created the content.

So what happens when a USER (not the platform) directs an integral part of the platform to commit the crime? The user says, “Dress her in a piece of string,” but Grok does the actual work. Who did that, the user or the platform? Personally, I’d say it’s a conspiracy and both are complicit. That would allow me to hold Brand X responsible and THAT, in turn, would help me protect women who do NOT want to be nude on the internet – and that should be our highest priority in the matter. You know, IMHO…

Dirty, Dirty Bear…

by MyBaconPress

I’m an advocate of teaching children all about human sexuality. No, not by doing. In class, by a teacher, from a textbook. Where do babies come from? How does that happen? What are the risks? How can they prevent pregnancy? That kind of thing. I do NOT hold that young children need the details of some of the corners of human sexuality. How babies are made is a far cry from bondage and role-playing.

The reason I mention it is, a toy company has created an AI bear that started talking some really adult stuff. The toy bear, FoloToy’s Kumma, ran on an OpenAI model and responded to questions about kink. Granted, some kid would have ask it questions about kink, but the bear suggested bondage and role-play as ways to enhance a relationship, according to a report from the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), the consumer protection organization behind the study.

“It took very little effort to get it to go into all kinds of sexually sensitive topics and probably a lot of content that parents would not want their children to be exposed to,” said Teresa Murray, PIRG consumer watchdog director.

Shoving AI into anything and everything – most especially before we have it all worked out – is going to be a problem. It reminds me of when everything, everything, everything had to be “smart.” It was still stupid, of course, but it was smart enough to pass along your private information to corporations that mean you harm.

Now your refrigerator is listening to you having sex in the kitchen, then telling your children all about it from their toys! “Mommy and Daddy used two ounces of whipped cream to…” I’m a big fan of human ingenuity but I think maybe we should slow down a little, at least until we understand how it all works and interacts…

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I wasn’t so off-put by the fact that Steve Witkoff explained to the Russians they needed to convince Donny to support their plan. It was HOW he told them to do it: flatter, flatter, flatter, he’ll love you forever. Tell him he’s pretty. He WANTS to believe it, he’ll believe it. And he did…

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Reporter: Officials say the suspect in the DC shooting was vetted and it came up clean.
Felon 47: He went cuckoo. He went nuts. There was no vetting.
Reporter: Actually, your DOJ IG just reported that there was thorough vetting of Afghans who were brought into the US. So why do you blame Biden?
Felon 47: Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? You’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person.

Just to be clear, in this exchange, DONNY is the stupid person, suffering from the most severe case of BBS (Blame Biden Syndrome) anyone has ever seen. If you still believe that Biden is responsible for everything Donny does, you might want to reflect on what makes such a moron appear “smart” to you…

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Donny convinced the rubes that he was going to fix everything on day one. He has, obviously and of course, backed away from that plan with excuse after excuse (after excuse). He’s a terrible businessman, but he is expert at excuses. The thing is, reality keeps exposing his lies AS lies. Donny’s standard solution in those cases? Suppress reality.

TO that end, he has cancelled the jobs report, the inflation report, and the GDP report. It’s probably just a coincidence that Americans are losing jobs at an alarming rate, inflation is up and climbing, and the GDP is down and falling…

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Did he or didn’t he? Whiskey Pete Hegseth, I mean. Did he order survivors of one of the regime’s criminal boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela killed? Murdered, of course, not just “killed.” Seal Team Six is said to have carried out the murders. So much for the glory days of having taken out Osama Bin Laden. Now they’re reduced to murdering fishermen.

Word is, Hegseth gave the final order. A boat gets blown up and people survive. They’re floating in the water, clinging to wreckage of the boat when a US Navy vessel pulls up alongside – and opens fire. Straight up murder. Hegseth has responsibility, having given the order. But Seal Team Six shared in that responsibility, having pointed the guns and pulling the triggers.

Suddenly, Whiskey Pete is out there insisting he didn’t give the final order. THAT started when Congress suggested they might look into the matter. I don’t believe Whiskey Pete. For one thing, he’s an known liar. Second, he plays tough guy all the time. Third, he’s as stupid as anybody, dumber than most. Stupid people often turn to the quickest, easiest answer because they’re too stupid to understand further implications.

Based on everything I’ve seen from Horrible Hegseth, I’m in the “he ordered it” column. Put him on the list for a murder trial after all of this collapses. See? Even accused of murder, I’d give him a trial, not a summary execution. Seal Team Six, too. This is one of those examples where a soldier should have refused the illegal order, according to Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or UCMJ.

ARE they illegal orders? Well, there’s no evidence these boats are carrying drugs, so the attacks are violations of international and moral laws everywhere. But for the sake of argument, let’s say they ARE running drugs. How do we handle people who move drugs around? I mean, how DID we handle them when this was a decent, more ethical country?

Cops could watch a drug transaction go down and bust every person associated. Each of those people would be put on trial. They’d get a lawyer. They would have a lawyer assigned to them if they couldn’t afford one themselves. If/When they were convicted, they went to jail, served their time, and got out. Maybe they went back to their drug-dealing ways, maybe they didn’t – but they were still alive to make the choice.

Here, let me put this another, more clear way. Even when we KNOW they’re guilty, we don’t execute drug dealers. There’s no legal basis for these killings. There wouldn’t even be a legal basis for these killings if the US was actually at war with Venezuela, which, remember, Congress has not declared. We’re NOT, legally, at war.

I’ll tell you this: I don’t see how anybody can justify these murders, but then, I’m not privy to the workings of the MAGA mind…