Author Archives: Elaine

Have a chat with MIT’s debunking bot.

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A team of MIT researchers has made public a link to an AI bot designed to debunk conspiracy theories.

This study is investigating how humans and artificial intelligence algorithms interact. In the study, you will answer questions and have a back and forth discussion with an artificial intelligence algorithm. If you give us permission by saying yes below, we plan to discuss/publish the results in an academic forum. In any publication, information will be provided in such a way that you cannot be identified.

You don’t necessarily have to ask it about a conspiracy theory; it will answer every question with super-intelligent logic and a thorough explanation. For example, I asked it if aliens from space visited our planet eons ago and had an effect on our evolution. I also asked if there was an “afterlife.” It scientifically explained both issues in detail.

Go debunkbot.com to try it out.

And if you do, please leave a comment here about how it worked for you.

After We Crash and Burn

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After the next four years of the crashing and burning of our democratic government, hopefully, we will be able to rebuild into a better America. But the challenges we will be facing will be unprecedented, and I can’t begin to imagine how we will rise from those ashes.

One of the challenges was predicted in a book I read back in the late 90s, The End of Work. I am re-reading it now and will share some of the ideas put forth in the book.

In the meanwhile, this is from the back of the book:

Rifkin argues that we are entering a new phase in history — one characterized by the steadily and inevitable decline of jobs. Sophisticated computers, robotics telecommunications, and other Information Age technologies are fast replacing human beings in virtually every sector and industry. Near-workerless factories and virtual companies loom on the horizon.

While the emerging “knowledge sector” and new markets abroad will create some new jobs, they will be too few to absorb the vast numbers of workers displaced by the new technologies

Rethinking the nature of work is likely to be the single most pressing concern facing society in the decades to come.

Rifkin warns that the end of work could mean the demise of civilization as we have come to know it, or signal the beginning of a great social transformation and a rebirth of the human spirit.

The book does not even mention the threats of Artificial Intelligence, which makes his argument even more relevant.

His projections and suggestions offer hope to all of those future unemployable citizens and are especially important to those elderly, disabled and/or homeless individuals who, even today, suffer without a safety net.

from “Letters From an American”

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Historian Heather Cox Richardson publishes an online newsletter about the history behind today’s politics, “Letters from an American”. The current issue offers some details about Trump’s cabinet candidates that have not been widely publicized. I quote some of them below. She also includes the following disturbing observation:

There are a number of ways to think about Trump’s appointments. The people he has picked have so little experience in the fields their departments handle that Erin Burnett of CNN suggested that he is simply choosing them from “central casting”—a favorite phrase of his—to look as he imagines such officials should. Indeed, as Zachary B. Wolf of CNN pointed out, while President Joe Biden vowed to make his Cabinet look like America, Trump’s picks look “exactly like Fox News.” Trump has actually tapped a number of television hosts for different positions.

That so many of his appointees have histories of sexual misconduct is also striking, and underlines both that they share his determination to dominate others and that they do not think rules and laws apply to them.

But there is another pattern at work, as well. In a piece he published on November 15 in his “Thinking about…” newsletter, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained that destroying a country requires undermining five key zones: “health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.” The nominations of Kennedy, Gaetz, Hegseth, and Gabbard, as well as the tapping of billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to destroy the administration of the government, are, according to Snyder, a “decapitation strike.”

“Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States,” Snyder writes. “How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective,” he explains, “Trump’s proposed appointments—Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard—are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done.”

Pete Hegseth: According to Heath Druzin of the Idaho Capital Sun, Hegseth has close ties to an Idaho Christian nationalist church that wants to turn the United States into a theocracy. Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,” including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. He calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.”

Linda McMahon: She once incorrectly claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in education when she was trying to get a seat on the Connecticut Board of Education and is known primarily for her work building World Wrestling Entertainment. And she, too, has been entangled in a sex abuse scandal. In October, five men filed a lawsuit claiming that she and her husband, Vince McMahon, were aware that former ringside announcer Melvin Phillips was assaulting “ring boys” who were as young as 13.

TulsI Gabbard: Nichols notes that her constant parroting of Russian talking points and her cozying up to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad make her “a walking Christmas tree of warning lights” for our national security. Former Republican governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley suggested that Gabbard is “a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer” who has no place at the head of American intelligence. A Russian state media presenter refers to Gabbard as “our girlfriend” and as a Russian agent.

Pam Bondi: In March 2016, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) found that the Trump Foundation illegally donated $25,000 to support Bondi at a time when she was considering joining a lawsuit against Trump University. Her office ultimately decided not to join the lawsuit. Bondi defended Trump in his first impeachment trial, during which she was a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel. She supported Trump’s campaign to insist—falsely—that he won the 2020 presidential election. She is also a registered lobbyist for Qatar.

To read the complete issue of this newsletter go here. To subscribe to the newsletter, either free or paid, go here.

A Fabled Coat Tale

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The following is a double “haibun” that I wrote. Generally, a haibun consists of one or more paragraphs of prose written in a concise, imagistic style, and one or more haiku.

The coat was heavy with history – nights thrown over naked shoulders at smokey Montparnasse cafes, or tossed onto the back of a scarlet sofa at a late night Parisian salon. Its heavily textured fabric masked a delicate residue of absinthe, bathtub gin, and the mascaraed tears of its most passionate devotees. Nina Hamnett, self-proclaimed and notorious “Queen of Bohemia,” wore its gold satin lining next to her skin while she danced shimmering lights into its weave of rich silk brocade. On those nights, the coat created its own melody, a mesmerizing harmony of color, texture, and pattern, the timeless echoes of Sirens’ songs.

            from creative abandon
            and dazzling artistry
            mythos emerges

When war started and the creative effete fled to the safer shores of England and America, the infamous coat reappeared in the window of the Fifth Avenue Parisian boutique that Zelda Fitzgerald frequented during her spendthrift forays around New York City’s Palais Royale Hotel in search of the perfect evening dress. What she found, instead, was the legend and the fantasy of the still richly seductive coat, artfully displayed in a shimmer of late afternoon sunlight. And so the storied coat became her constant companion through bi-polar adventures played out over two continents and two decades, until both she and the coat began to unravel.

            relics of deadly excess
            burdened with fear
            set fragile souls afire

A Little Glimmer of Hope

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As reported on the Oregon Capital Chronicle:

Democratic attorneys general prep for role as last line of defense in Trump era.

As Trump prepares for a new term in office, 23 Democratic attorneys general will be a watchdog against any Trump-led initiatives that they believe are unconstitutional, illegal or both. The landscape has changed: Rosenblum is retiring from the role and former Oregon House Speaker Dan Rayfield will become the next attorney general. Ferguson was elected governor of Washington. The two are the last Democratic attorneys general who were in office when Trump started his first term.

In the second Trump term, attorneys general now have a four-year history of court actions that their predecessors took on wide-ranging issues like immigration, health care and the environment. And they often prevailed in court, an outcome that highlights the remarkable power that attorneys general have, through the court system, to unravel executive orders and directives from the most powerful elected leader in the world.

“We kind of have a track record and a set of expectations of how he has operated in the past,” Rayfield said in an interview with the Capital Chronicle. “The attorneys general are just a check and balance on that power. When he oversteps and pursues, whether it’s discriminatory or unlawful policies, you are that backstop for that.”

Read the whole article here.

Food Health Tips for Thanksgiving from NPR

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I’ve discovered podcasts. Well, I didn’t just discover them; I knew they were out there, but the only one I became addicted to is “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”. Today on one of their podcasts, I discovered some interesting facts about storing and reheating leftovers.

  1. There is no “5 second rule”. If you drop something on the floor and there’s bacteria there, it’s going to get on your food. (Some people think that will help you to develop and immunity to the bacteria. Maybe, but it sure is a risk to risk it.)

  2. You don’t have to was your meat of poultry before you cook it. You’re going to kill the bacteria when you cook it. If you wash your meat you might be doing more harm that good. The bacteria on the outside of the meat can splash all over your kitchen and onto other food nearby.

  3. While food generally lasts 3 or 4 days in the fridge — except if you reheat it, and you can reheat it several times. Each time you do (as long as it’s above 165 degrees, you can reheat it multiple times. Each time you heat it, it will keep in the fridge for another 3 or 4 days. But reheating food will affect its quality and texture.

  4. Don’t leave any food out in room temperature for more than 2 hours.

  5. Expiration/sell-by dates and use-by dates are more of a guideline for nutrition and freshness. You still can use it unless there are signs of spoilage.

Welcome to the Kakistocracy

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As seen on bluesky.social:

Fun fact: “kakistocracy”, a government run by the worst people, is derived from the Greek “kakos”, or bad, evil and vile. Kakos shares its root with “kaka”, or as any child still pronounces it today, “caca”. Yes, Poop. So kakistocracy is literally the government of the shittiest people.

On the other hand, The Onion just bought out Alex Jones Infowars.

Wrapping My Head Around the Election

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I’ve been unsuccessful in trying to formulate how to write about the election. But my son Bix did a good a good job of it, so I quote his blogpost on the subject here, as follows:

Fuck The Unenlightened Self-Interest Of Trump Voters
Nov 11, 2024

In the end, after the past week of watching this take and that take, but mostly just avoiding any real bothering with any takes at all, about how the election went the way it did, I’ve settled in the only place that makes any sense to me.

Whatever the perceived self-interest of any given Mine Furor voter—be it caste allegiance or aspiration, simple racism or sexism, some claim to an economic concern, or even (somehow) abortion rights—the only thing that matters actually is pretty simple:

They were willing to sell out the safety, dignity, and humanity of their neighbors to fascism in order to get what they wanted.

None of the other chatter, be it considered opinion or hyperventilated bloviating, amounts to anything but noise, and anyone who covers the angle of “what happened” without this focus is a distraction.

I’ve already mentioned it, but if you still haven’t done so, go watch this debate-ender, or from here if that link insists you download TikTok.)

Whether a Mine Furor voter engaged in selfish indifference or willful ignorance amounts to the same thing, and after three election cycles now it’s pretty evident that they are stubbornly unreachable. They should still get to benefit like anyone else from progressive policies, but it’s past time to let them go.

If the Democratic Party decides the road to victory runs through mega-donors, high-class consultants, and yet another rightward shift, they’ll be a lost cause, too. This country’s path to correcting itself lies at the bottom and to the left, which just so happens also to be the symbol of antifascism.

Bix is selling Everyday Antifascist t-shirts, so I went and bought one today. I hope you had a chance to watch the video. It says it all.

Dancing in the “Zone”

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I learned to Polka soon after I learned to walk, and by the time I was in the middle grades, I was performing in a Polish dance troupe.

In high school, I never missed a “sock hop”, and my girlfriends and I used to practice dancing the Lindy Hop and Cha Cha with each other.

In college, we (both guys and gals) gathered in the Student Union after classes every day to dance to all of the popular songs. On Friday’s, it was TGIF, dancing at a bar before the regulars took over. I also danced in college musicals.

I married someone who didn’t dance (except brilliantly with words), and that should have been a clue that it might not last. And so after we divorced, I went back to dancing.

In my late 30s-early 40s, it was Round and Square and Western dancing.

In my 40s it became Disco partner dancing. With partner dancing, I learned to let myself flow into the “zone” — going where I was led, without having the think about it. (My favorite line about myself is that the only place I enjoy following a man is on the dance floor.)

In my 50s Latin and Ballroom. Again, dancing with partners who could lead me into the “zone”. My dancing then ended in my 60s when I retired to spend a decade taking care of my other, who had severe dementia.

In my 70s, after I moved to East Longmeadow in Massachusetts, I found a dance studio over the border in Connecticut that had open dances on weekends. But because they were at night and my knees and back were giving out, I had to stop going there.

And so that was the end of my dancing. Except with my hands.

Now I take lessons in African drumming, giving myself over to the enticing rhythms of the African and Caribbean cultures, feeling and internalizing the rhythms throughout my body, letting my hands to the dancing that the rest of my body can longer enjoy. I’m still learning, but my soul embraces those mesmerizing rhythms, and I look forward to the time when I get good enough to again, enter the rhythmical “zone”.

Judaism vs Zionism; Religion/Culture vs Politics/Apartheid

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You can be Jewish without being a Zionist, but you can’t be a Zionist without being Jewish.

According to the Conversation:

As the Israel-Hamas war continues, there’s been a lot of discussion around Zionism.

Put simply, Zionism is a nationalist movement that advocates for a homeland for the Jewish people in the Biblical Land of Israel. It is the organisation of ideas that actively sought and achieved the existence of the Israeli state in 1948.

Basically, political Zionism underpins the country we today call Israel.

It’s a movement that encompasses a broad spectrum of political beliefs with common objectives at its centre. But perhaps more than other political movements, Zionism has evolved over time.

There is more on that site about the role of Zionism in today’s Israeli government.

According to Wikipedia,

Fundamental to Zionism is the belief that Jews constitute a nation and have a moral and historic right and need for self-determination in Palestine. [snip]

The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the notion that Jews had a historical right to the land which outweighed the rights of the Arabs, which were “of no moral or historical significance.” According to Israeli historian Simha Flapan, the view expressed by the proclamation “there was no such thing as Palestinians” was a cornerstone of Zionist policy initiated by Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and continued by their successors. [snip]

In order to achieve a Jewish demographic majority, the Zionist movement was faced with a problem, namely the presence of the local Arab (and primarily non-Jewish) population. The practical issue of establishing a Jewish state in a majority non-Jewish region was an issue of fundamental practical importance for the Zionist movement. Zionists used the term “transfer” as a euphemism for the removal, or ethnic cleansing, of the Arab Palestinian population. [snip]

The early Zionist thinkers saw the integration of Jews into non-Jewish society as both unrealistic (or insufficient to address the deficiencies associated with the demographic minority status of the Jews in Europe) and undesirable, since assimilation was accompanied by the dilution of Jewish cultural distinctiveness.

The Wikipedia article goes on to explain how the Zionists rationalized establishing Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians. Apartheid refers to the implementation and maintenance of a system of legalized racial segregation in which one racial group is deprived of political and civil rights. Apartheid is a crime against humanity punishable under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Amnesty international’s website provides extensive coverage of the way Israel, under Zionist influence, has instituted apartheid against the Palestinians, including:

In May 2021, Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem, began protesting against Israel’s plan to forcibly evict them from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers. Many of the families are refugees, who settled in Sheikh Jarrah after being forcibly displaced around the time of Israel’s establishment as a state in 1948. Since Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in 1967, Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah have been continuously targeted by Israeli authorities, who use discriminatory laws to systematically dispossess Palestinians of their land and homes for the benefit of Jewish Israelis.

In response to the demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah, thousands of Palestinians across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) held their own protests in support of the families, and against their shared experience of fragmentation, dispossession, and segregation. These were met with excessive and deadly force by Israeli authorities with thousands injured, arrested and detained.

The events of May 2021 were emblematic of the oppression which Palestinians have faced every day, for decades. The discrimination, the dispossession, the repression of dissent, the killings and injuries – all are part of a system which is designed to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.

This is apartheid.

Amnesty International’s new investigation shows that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT, and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited in international law.

Laws, policies and practices which are intended to maintain a cruel system of control over Palestinians, have left them fragmented geographically and politically, frequently impoverished, and in a constant state of fear and insecurity.

According to Wikipedia, Judaism is a

religion that comprises the collective spiritual, cultural, and legal traditions of the Jewish people. Religious Jews regard Judaism as their means of observing the Mosaic covenant, which was established between God and the Israelites, their ancestors. The religion is considered one of the earliest monotheistic religions in the world.

Also

Jewish culture is the culture of the Jewish people, from its formation in ancient times until the current age. Judaism itself is not simply a faith-based religion, but an orthoprax and ethnoreligion, pertaining to deed, practice, and identity. Jewish culture covers many aspects, including religion and worldviews, literature, media, and cinema, art and architecture, cuisine and traditional dress, attitudes to gender, marriage, family, social customs and lifestyles, music and dance. Some elements of Jewish culture come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews with host populations, and others still from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community. Before the 18th century, religion dominated virtually all aspects of Jewish life, and infused culture. Since the advent of secularization, wholly secular Jewish culture emerged likewise.

Israel’s political foundation in Zionism is not the same as the Jewish religion or culture.

According to an article in the Jewish Voice for Peace:

Before October, 2023 was already the deadliest year ever for Palestinian children. Israeli soldiers and settlers were rampaging through the Occupied West Bank setting fire to villages, supported by the most far-right government in Israeli history. They forced entire Palestinian villages to flee, to abandon the homes and land in their family for generations. Palestinian children were regularly dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. The Israeli government was tightening its 16 year illegal blockade of land, air and water – suffocating the lives of the 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza. Ten-year-olds in Gaza had already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives. As news broke on October 7th, we immediately understood that Israel would exploit the tragic deaths of its Jewish citizens to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinians.

For decades, the Israeli government, and the U.S., and other western governments have shut down any attempts to hold the Israeli government accountable for these violations of Palestinian rights. I have seen Palestinian resistance to oppression ruthlessly repressed, from the criminalization of boycotts to Israeli snipers murdering protestors at nonviolent Palestinian marches in Gaza. The Israeli government has jailed Palestinian poets for posting poems to Facebook, and criminalized prominent human rights organizations.

In the U.S., Israel’s largest supplier of military funding and weapons, every new atrocity has been met with impunity. This has been true for decades, as it was this year.

How much different it would be today if the Zionists had not won, and Palestine remained a country open to both Jews and Palestinians, and anyone else who wanted to live there. Now, Israel exists as a country rooted in apartheid, and religious/cultural Jews who are citizens of other countries are being targeted because people don’t know the history of Israel’s foundation in the bigotry of Zionism, which most cultural and religious Jews do not support.

As a non-Jew, I can be against the government of the country of Israel and not be anti-Semitic; I can support the right of Jewish people to be respected, supported, and safe, and still despise what the powerful Zionist Israeli government has done to the disempowered Palestinians over the decades. If I were I Jew living in America today, I would voice my distance from the policies of the Israeli government, and educate the public via every media possible, that there is a difference between supporting the government of today’s Israel and being committed to my religious and cultural Jewish heritage.