AI

Jeffries Met With Kushner? Heaven Forfend…

by MyBaconPress

Well, they’re trying. Democrats. Losing. They’re trying. Hakim Jeffries had a meeting with Jared Kushner. Democrats and other trumpster critics – that is, sane people – are all in a dither. I would just like to invite them to go engage in some biologically impossible activities. The beef is, Kushner isn’t a formal part of the government. Yeah? So? This regime is crooked in every way – including whether they count certain individuals as “part of the government.”

Kushner isn’t part of the government when he’s overseas talking with the Iranians, either. But his is seen as some kind of official role. A guy who’s not part of the government but works in official government roles should STILL be understood to be a guy who has some say with the Dumbass. I think Hakim Jeffries should be talking with some representative of Team Evil, “part of the government” or not.

Quick question: who, in this government, does one talk to who is NOT corrupt, eh? You can’t name one. (Neither can I. That’s not on you.) Every single person associated with Team Evil has “corrupt” as a main feature on their resumes. But talking is better than not talking and what Kushner may have that none of the others have is sanity. Sure, he’s corrupt. Hell, he’s rich. How the hell do you think people GET rich in this once-great nation, hard work and pluck? Oh, you sweet, naive thing.

So, corrupt? Yes. Likely to lie? Sure. One of the few people Jeffries might talk to and get some kind of coherent thinking? I think yes. I think it’s a good thing to talk. Let’s not rip on Jeffries for trying. IF Jeffries bets the farm on something Kushner says, I’ll revisit this post to acknowledge my gullibility. But just talking? We have so much more to worry about…

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It’s not even in widespread use and it’s already killing people – and generating lawsuits! I’m talking about that electric glove, cleverly named G.L.O.V.E. for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. Clever, eh? It generates a low voltage shock, strong enough to incapacitate a suspect. This is one of those “tools” law enforcement loves and probably sometimes needs. This is ALSO one of those “tools” it becomes easy to rely on too often. Sometimes, FAR too often.

A 43-year-old man in Kentucky, for example, died after being shocked 27 times. The glove user manual instructs wearers to avoid using the product on elderly people, small children, pregnant women, and disabled people. I’ve noticed it’s not always possible to know a woman is pregnant just by looking at her. Tough cookies for her, I guess.

The truth is, I think law enforcement might really need these things. Richard Pryor used to tell a story about shooting a movie called ‘Stir Crazy.’ He and Gene Wilder filmed it in a real prison, surrounded by real inmates, whom they got to know a little bit. He said when he went into the prison the first time, he thought he was interacting with the oppressed black man and the downtrodden suffering under the thumb of society. (These are not his exact words.)

By the time they wrapped filming, he said his attitude was, “Thank GOD we have prisons!” He had met some of the inmates. “But why did you kill the whole family?” “Well, they was home.” It’s a solid point. There are some VERY bad people on this planet. A G.L.O.V.E. might mean subduing a suspect without having to draw a gun. That’s a good thing.

But Team Evil wants to give these things to the ICEholes. These are not the best trained people in law enforcement and their targets are usually just people in the US without proper papers – and often people here WITH proper papers. We’ve seen article after article of mistreatment from ICEholes. We’ve seen them gun down innocent people in the streets. People are dying in detention centers from maltreatment.

I doubt ICE needs these things. They’ve already misused the tools they’ve been given. These gloves will constitute an escalation in the violence our government is bringing to harmless people. That’s a bad thing. But, of course, this is Team Evil. They seem to brainstorm ways to do the worst possible thing. The G.L.O.V.E. is only the latest example…

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In the race to snuff out most human life from the planet, Climate Change has been making some pretty impressive moves, recently. I STILL have it as my prime choice. But AI should not be taken lightly – most especially when said AI is being installed into humanoid robots. AI, alone, might be able to trick us into pushing a wrong button or maybe it can launch it’s own nuclear attack, but once you’ve installed it into humanoid robots, AI can chase us down.

And, no. You can NOT outrun it. China hosts the ‘World Humanoid Robot Games’ in Beijing. One of those bad boys outran a world-record time set by Usain Bolt, so unless you can outrun Usain Bolt, you’re in trouble. The robots aren’t coming quite yet. Bolt can STILL do something they apparently can’t: stop running at the end of the race.

The robot that beat Bolt’s time just…ran into a padded wall at the end. It fell down and was taken off the field on a stretcher. Most of the other entrants just fell down and/or broke up, never finishing the race. But give these developers a couple of years. Maybe less. The robots will be faster and stronger – AND able to stop. The AI will be sharper – possibly designed by other AI so we have no clue what it’s doing.

I’ve enjoyed technology throughout my life. I admire the leaps and bounds people are capable of making. I wish – oh, how I wish – people could just use it well, to the advantage of everybody. But our society… okay, our species, is a least common denominator group. We ALWAYS have to consider the few. The one guy who screws it up for everybody else. And he’s always out there.

I’m not sure I can think of any technology that is employed as a helpful tool that isn’t also used in some nefarious way. That doesn’t even mention simple human error. One honest mistake – or one dishonest broker – and the AI-powered robots go all Terminator on us.

Issac Asimov wrote the Three Rules for Robots: ‘a robot may not injure a human or allow harm through inaction, must obey human orders unless they conflict with the first law, and must protect its own existence as long as it doesn’t conflict with the first two laws.’ Later, he added a fourth: ‘a robot may not harm humanity or allow humanity to come to harm through inaction.’

Comforting. But in one of his books in which he relies upon the rules, ‘I,Robot,’ one guy builds an army of robots and intentionally leaves the robot rules out. It’s a bad day for humanity. One mistake, one bad choice, one equation humans don’t even realize AI has discovered, and the outcome could easily be unimaginable.

I’ll tell you this: In the race to remove human beings as a consideration, Climate Change is still my lead dog. But I’ve long maintained that AI is capable of catching up fast and it’s getting better every day…

AI or aiR? I Guess We Don’t Get Both…

by MyBaconPress

It could be a science fiction movie. Aliens come to Earth but find the atmosphere just too full of oxygen and freshness. So they begin the long slow process of converting the Earth’s atmosphere to their preferred, much higher CO2 levels with a desertified landscape. It takes a while, so they hide among the locals. They use a tiny fraction of their alien technology to become ridiculously, obscenely rich so they have control.

Over time, they discover that power plants are fundamental to their goal of increasing the CO2 levels. The problem is, once they provide enough power for all of the houses and business, it looks too suspicious to keep adding capacity. It’ll still work, so long as they can focus on coal and natural gas, but it will take too long. The aliens need an excuse.

Enter data centers. These bad boys gobble up energy like small towns. Perfect. Now, alien Bezos announces that his company, Amazon, is going to build a 35-turbine, 7.6 GW natural gas power plant to service a Texas data center. It will be the largest CO2 emitter in the US, twice as bad as the next plant. With the added benefit that the data centers use massive amounts of fresh water, Texas, where this alien is building his climate-destroying machine called a data center, stands to dry up, too.

Really, it’s perfect AND it’s the conflation of BOTH of my bets as to what wipes out humanity first, climate change or Artificial Intelligence (AI). The data centers, you see, are being built, so the story goes, in support of surging AI demands. The aliens get to waste all of that water and dump all of that CO2 into the air and the masses aren’t rising up in revolt. In fact, the masses are begging for it. “Ooh, this AI is so much fun.” “How neato.” “Hey, strip that girl from math class.” “Give us more!”

It’ll be a hard movie to watch. The movie is a warning and doesn’t have a feel-good ending. Billions die rather horrible deaths. There doesn’t seem to be a hero out there, steadily working to defend the planet from the alien invaders. The Justice League was going to come out, but they’ve been bought off and now they defend the aliens. The X-men are all looking at their screens and making funny AI videos to post online. (What could be more important?) Angel just WILL NOT stop “nudifying” Marvel Girl.

I wish someone would – could – write a better ending to this thing. We go to the movies to escape the darkness of our real lives, if only for a while…

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I’ve been saying, the climate has a huge advantage in the goal of wiping out humanity, and it’s pressing in right now. We all know about dwindling water supplies and lost crops. Now we’re learning about migrating toxic insects and illnesses. A recent entry? Flesh eating bacteria. Yuck! Louisiana has confirmed NINE cases of flesh eating bacteria this year. All nine required hospitalization. Five died. For comparison, over the previous decade, Louisiana had seen an average of seven cases and one death.

It comes from a bacteria called Vibrio vulnificus. One gets it from seawater, when you go swimming in warm, brackish water. It enters the body through breaks in the skin, cuts or even just scrapes. It can kill in three days. It ain’t messin’ around. Because the Vibrio virus likes warmer water, most infections are reported from May to October, and most happen in states along the Gulf coast.

But now, thanks to climate change, the oceans are warming. That means the Vibrio bacteria family, including Vibrio vulnificus, is moving northward. Each year, the number of cases has been rising and the northernmost case of infection moves north by about thirty miles. That’s a clever trap Mother Nature has devised. The temperatures keep going up. We get hotter so we go jump in the ocean – where we contract flesh eating virus through a shaving cut or some such – and die…

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Hey, sorry about all of this. I’m not feeling nearly as dark as these two bits, so far, might indicate. Those were just two stories that caught my eye, this morning. So let’s laugh at a dumbass for a minute. 47 tried to take on a Senate candidate from Michigan. His name is Abdul El-Sayed. Well, that’s the name he uses. His actual, full name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. As far as 47 is concerned, that, alone, is enough to disqualify El-Sayed from running.

So you can just bet that 47 will never, ever, mention the guy without the FULL name. It sounds so, so, Muslim. Recently, 47 decided his best course of action in attacking Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed was to attack his marriage. I just don’t get that. If there’s one topic that dumbass should keep his dumbass mouth shut about, it’s other people’s marriages. Donny has never been in any marriage he didn’t defile. I guess maybe he’s trying to turn his weakness into a strength?

Among all of the myriad, countless things 47 absolutely sucks at, marriage is right at the top of the list! To that end, 47 posted a meme that showed two photos. One, possibly Photoshopped, showed 47 and Melanomia standing together, smiling, at some formal function. The other showed the dangerous Muslim and his wife, Jukaku, out for a meal at what looks like a “family style” restaurant. 47 titled his post, “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s” (sic. HE put the apostrophe there, not me.)

Like nearly everyone, El-Sayed is FAR smarter than 47. His response to Donny’s baby-like taunt? “Yeah, he’s right.” Then he highlighted the differences in the two marriages. “One in which your overlords are two people who don’t like each other, but join in the interest of making billions of dollars off of you – or two people who genuinely love each other, enjoyed some pancakes together, want to come together to build the kind of America where they can raise a family and know that that family is going to have the good things.”

It says something to me about MAGA that 47 knows he can simply pronounce the man’s full name and many of his base will freak out. Also, El-Sayed uses “inshallah” more than they would like, which is not at all. Inshallah is an Arabic word. It means, ‘God willing.’ Yeah, what a horrible thought to express. So, El-Sayed has a scary name. He’s a Muslim. He says scary words. Sadly, all of that actually WILL make it harder for him to get elected.

As to his policies? FAR Too many Americans will just stop at ‘scary words from the scary man with the scary name.’ “Argh! Dark skin! Crap your panties! RUN!!!” I liked it better when America was the home of the brave…

Team Evil vs Nudification…

by MyBaconPress

One of the “joys” of Artificial Intelligence is that one can generate “nude” photos of people, whether the subject of the photo likes it or not – or even knows about it or not. I put the ‘nude’ in quotes because, apparently, the final photo isn’t truly “nude.” The makers have the photo generator “dress” the subject in a single string or something. So some small-minded moron can “get even” with the girl who dumped him because he’s a small-minded moron by posting a “nude” photo of her online, thereby proving she was right to dump him in the first place. But she’s still out there, “exposed.”

One can generate “nude” photos of children, too. And guess what? There are people out there doing exactly that. The practice of ‘undressing’ people in photos – adult and/or child – has become SO commonplace, it has a name: “nudification,” a name that makes clear the subject wasn’t nude, then someone made them appear nude, right? Someone “nudified” someone else.

Politicians – always slow to move on any topic – have taken notice and are trying to craft legislation to rein in the AI companies. People and politicians want the AI companies to limit the abilities of less developed people to do things like that. To that end, Minnesota passed a first-in-the-nation law that bans “nudification” technology on websites and apps. The law is set to take effect today as Minnesota becomes the first state to try to outlaw the increasingly proliferating technology that lets people use AI to to create fake nude images of real people.

“Not so fast,” says failed human being Elon Musk. “The whole point of Grok is to allow evil people to do evil things to innocent victims. Why would you want to stop that?” Yeah, okay, that isn’t what the lawsuit Musk filed said at all. Musk is evil, not stupid. What xAI actually said was that it does not contest the state’s interest in banning the distribution of AI-generated nude images of real people without their consent (wink, wink).

No, the problem xAI has with Minnesota’s new law is that it provides no “safe harbor” provision for companies that make good-faith efforts to prevent such images from being created by users. That’s the big tech bros excuse for everything their companies do. “Oh, we’re trying to fix that problem. Just because we provided the tools and the platform doesn’t mean it’s our fault!”

There are already laws on the books punishing users for creating deepfakes. Minnesota’s law intends to hold the makers of the nudification tools responsible for the fakes and they mean to charge the developers up to $500,000 per violation. See, all the AI companies have to do is pull the nudification tools. THAT would be – should be – the only good faith effort that qualifies as actually trying to solve the problem.

But Musk doesn’t want to do that. He went to a lot of trouble to add nudification tools. Now, obviously, he doesn’t want to be seen as supporting his nudification tools, either, so he’s pretending the law is just over-broad. He agrees with the goal, he pretends, but thinks this legislation goes too far. Uh-huh. He’s obligating states to try to use legislation to force him to remove the nudification tools he claims to dislike and could simply remove himself. How serious is he about wanting to protect victims?

Honestly? I don’t like AI. I’ve got it down as one of the two most likely things to destroy humanity altogether. Humans are having enough trouble with reality. We don’t need fakes, deep or otherwise, gumming up the works. So take that into account, here, because, frankly, once fake nudes and AI generated child porn started showing up, I would have banned AI entirely. And I STILL think that’s the right answer.

For clarity, I don’t think it’s a matter of free speech, either. Posting fake nude photos of real people should fall under the few umbrellas where we control speech, like shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater when no fire exists, maliciously spreading ruinous rumors about someone, or threatening them.

If the tech bros can’t put out a helpful, harmless product, they shouldn’t be allowed to put it out at all. Intentionally adding tools like nudification doesn’t seem like they’re even trying to put out a harmless product. If the offset is “not at all, then,” I guess they’d police themselves more aggressively…

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It’s just another opportunity to learn a lesson the right WILL NOT learn. We should break our dependence on oil so we don’t need to worry about what happens in oil producing regions, right? That lesson became clear way back in the 1970’s, when Saudi Arabia proved a point by shutting off the spigots. Americans were stuck in gas lines and could only buy gas on designated days.

The US economy suffered greatly. That, right then, was the moment a smart nation would have said, “Hey, let’s find a better answer and get off of this stuff.” We did, too. Well, we tried. Big oil didn’t WANT us breaking our addiction and, like any good pusher, has worked to maintain our dependence ever since. Now that dedication to antiquated technology is going to bite us in the butt again.

The US has pulled Saudi Arabia into that stupid, ill-advised war-that’s-not-a-war in Iran. Iran will respond, of course. Most likely, that will involve attacking oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. That will hurt supply AND take years to rebuild. It also widens Donny’s stupid war. We’ve had lots of opportunities to learn. We refuse to. That’s going to be costly…

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It looks like Donny is trying to ratchet up the pressure on his Republicans in Congress to pass the SAVE My Ass Act and eliminate the filibuster to do it. He sent Susan Wiles, his Chief of Staff to Congress to huddle with Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Thune has maintained consistently that he doesn’t have the votes for either. 47 wants him to do it anyway. No, it doesn’t make sense but then, less and less of what he does makes any sense…

Quick question: what do YOU think Donny is going to do to try to interfere or stop the upcoming midterms completely? It’s not a rhetorical question. We all (except MAGA, and even some of them) know he’s going to do something. The whole world hates this guy with a white hot passion. If a free and fair election takes place, he loses as badly as we can manage. Then he faces honest investigations, criminal indictments, and, likely, impeachment. He CAN NOT let that happen. SO…what do you think he’s going to do to intervene?

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…