I suspect we all have mental problems. Most people are not assessed and are high-functioning, yet we’re not meant to work forty hours a week and live in nuclear families, let alone struggle in precarity. Mental illness is and family dysfunction are intergenerational and have been through the twentieth century, if not through the common era.

While there are recreational uses for drugs, I suspect most drug users self medicate, which is to say the drugs they take unpresribed are used to cope with symptoms of stress and existential horror, the same way we take drugs to cope with migraines or allergies, or chronic symptoms.

Does that mean they’re uncool? Not at all. Self aware people, deep thinkers, philosophers, artists, scientists and engineers all often drink, smoke, binge on edibles or engage in street chemistries in order to cope, and the ones who are self-aware are able to recognize it’s a thing they need right now, and that others who are addicted are not to be blamed or judged by whatever gets them by, night after night.

Until we can find a better way to enforce civil liberties, the striking of illegally obtained evidence in the prosecution of terrible criminals is necessary. That they get to walk free is the point first as a penalty to the state (that now a monster remains at large) and second as a penalty to the public for allowing the state to let its agents abuse their power.

If neonazis and terrorists aren’t protected by our Bill of Rights, then you aren’t either. And it informs how the massive extrajudicial surveillance state got formed in the first place, as the US state believes national security (in all its ambiguity) is valued more than American lives.

Actually it does. It involves making use of a copy that is not the original. Fair use is about experiencing media for sake of dialog (criticism or parody) or for edification. That means someone is reading the book or watching the movie, or using it for transformative art or science.

AI training should qualify for fair use.

Cranky enough to demand satisfaction (in the courts if not the dueling field), but no one in the company will think their own ire warrants empathy for those from whom they pirate.

It’s even more okay when the bourgeoisie does it in the interest of potential profit gain.

We Americans commit (more or less) three felonies a day. It used to be at least three felonies a day when violation of a website’s TOS was a violation of the CFAA (which can land you 25 years). If you’re a little girl, the DA is probably not going to prosecute, even if you were naughty and downloaded a song illegally.

But here’s the thing: Officials (especially sheriffs lately, and their deputies) are big in coveting your land and your wife and your other liquidatable assets. Heck, if you have some loose cash lying around, all of US law enforcement is already looking to find it, locate it and confiscate it via asset forfeiture and if you get in the way of their prize, well they’re sheepdogs, and you’re now a designated wolf.

And so anything you do that might be even slightly illegal is useful to make a case before a judge why you should spend the next 10 / 25 / 75 years locked up in Rikers or Sing Sing. Even if it’s a petty violation of the CFAA, or is so vague they have to invoke conspiracy or espionage laws, which are so intentionally broad and vague that everyone is already guilty of them.

Typically, these kinds of laws are used when a company or industry wants to disappear someone into the justice system. The go to example is the Kim Dotcom raid, which happened January 18, 2012, conspicuously on the same day as the Wikipedia Blackout protesting against SOPA / PIPA (PS: They’re still wanting to lock down the internet, which is why they want to kill Section 230).

Kim Dotcom was hanging in his stately manor in New Zealand when US ICE agents raided his home with representatives of the MPAA and RIAA standing by. He was accused of a shotgun of US law violations, including conspiracy and CFAA violations. The gist of the volley of accusations was that he was enabling mass piracy of assets by big media companies, hence the dudes in suits from the trade orgs. His company MEGAupload hosted a lot of copyrighted content.

Curiously – and this informs why Dotcom is still in New Zealand – MEGAupload had been cooperating with US law enforcement in their own efforts to stop pirates, and piracy rates actually climbed after the shutdown. Similarly, when Backpage was shut down for human trafficking charges (resulting in acquittal, later), human trafficking rates would climb as the victims were forced back to the streets.

(But Then – and this does get into speculation because we don’t have docs, just a lot of evidence – Dotcom had just secured a bunch of deals with hip hop artists and was going to use MEGAupload as a music distribution service that would get singles out for free and promote tours, and the RIAA really did not like this one bit which may be the actual cause of the Dotcom raid, but we can’t absolutely say. The media industry really hates pirates even though they know they’re not that much of a threat, but legitimate competition might be actual cause to send mercenaries in the color of US law enforcement to a foreign nation to raid the home of a rich dude.)

What we can say is US law enforcement will make shit up to lock you away if someone with power thinks you have something it wants, and you might object to them taking it, and they have a long history of just searching people’s histories (online and off) to find something for which to disappear them into the federal and state penal systems. After all, the US has more people (per capita or total) in prison than any other nation in the world, and so it’s easy to get lost in there.

So yeah, you absolutely have secrets to hide.

on one hand, it’s really hard to get the attention of the folks responsible for relief in Gaza / giving massacre weapons to the IDF, and so egging Van Goghs (protected from eggs) and spray-painting Stonehenge (with cornflour) helps when it makes news.

But yes, some people will not consider destruction as a negative. Since Libraries in the US are a public service already in jeopardy from right-wing officials, I would lower it on my potential target list.

I’m also a terrible cynic. I suspect the same apathy and inaction by our policymakers informs the apathy and inaction being taken regarding imminent great filters. As a species, were just not prepared to organize for international humanitarian crises even when they affect nations we like, and certainly won’t when they start overwhelming responding forces.

Your library got 12-Monkied.

Which means finding a personal purpose for using the spark radio, that way it remains a side-effect.

Might me time for some electrical experiments.

Humans are not descended from contemporary apes rather the apes that were around millions of years ago.

Also, if we attain the not-insignificant-anymore possibility of going extinct in the next couple hundred years (like the dinosaurs from famine complicated by drastic climate change, or from too many microplastics in the brain, or from nuclear escalation, which we haven’t entirely ruled out) we will have only survived ~250,000 years compared to Homo-Erectus which survived over 2,000,000. But we will get the self-extermination achievement.

Related to the current election, that OG conservatives, or Reagan and Bush conservatives (referring to George H. W. Bush) are the same thing as MAGA conservatives.

The difference is, the old guard blithely preserved the kind of policies that shredded social safety nets and business regulations in favor of tax cuts, leading to precarity and the rise of paranoia that led to the Trump takeover in 2015.

The OGs just wish they had another mile or two of altitude to plummet, and are freaked out about the ground looming so close and rushing so fast. But they will still keep the same policies, and will still lay a ground of Ayn Randian, Reagan-worshiping Mitt Romney / Jeb Bush / Ted Cruz candidates until some other charismatic narcissist Mussolini-wanabe rushes in and plucks the whole party from their hands again. And they’ll get all butt-smoochy with the new guy like Lindsey Graham did with Trump (after predicting how this loose cannon will end the Republican party).

They didn’t just buy the ticket to ride. They bought stocks in the railroad line, and insisted that fascism-backed one-party autocracy was the destination. They knew it since Reagan. By George W. Bush it was showing serious signs even before the PATRIOT act.

So when people freak out today because we’re on the brink of losing our democracy, I have to wonder where they’ve been the last two decades. How is it after George W. Bush, and torture and Iraq and the pig lagoons and Abstinence-Only sex ed, did you think another Republican president was a good thing? I know Clinton was scary, but did you take even one look at Trump?

Your [alleged] god [allegedly] knows what evidence will convince me, on the supposition They are omniscient.

In contrast to the few (thousands) of popular notions of god or gods, there are an unknowable but are greater number of theistic cosmic paradigms that are not popular or even conceived by humankind.

A lot of them are programmers or dreamers.

Most of them are completely apathetic to our well-being and don’t care about us individually. Some don’t notice us at all. To others, we’re roaches in the card reader and are a pest.

To assume we are special or chosen by the divine is literally hubris.

Prior to James W. Fifield’s ( Wikipedia ) ministry in 1940 (and his debt from building the first megachurch), feeding the hungry was such a critical part of Christian ideology that our industrialists didn’t even think about looking to religion to back their preferred economic model (in which they were very rich, as per the Hoover administration and the great depression. Good times!) In fact the industrialists were super resentful of FDR’s New Deal measures, which Roosevelt enacted to prevent a communist revolution. (Life for the proletariat really sucked, and did not make capitalism look good at all.)

Fifield reinterpreted scripture to do away with all the beatitudes and rhetoric about feeding the hungry, uplifting the poor and welcoming the immigrant and the stranger as a way to draw millionaire parishioners (and millionaire tithes) so he could pay for his new church. This was the primordial ooze from which modern Christian nationalism emerged not only linking American exceptionalism and anti-communism to Christianity, but also making Christianity an ideology of guns, low taxes and rugged individualism, the John Wayne era of Christianity.

Behind the Bastards discusses this in How The Rich Ate Christianity two-parter. Then Jerry Falwell was driven by the one-two punch of segregation ending and interracial marriage becoming decriminalized, and he developed the Moral Majority, a religious based (white Christian nationalist) voting bloc that was driven by a single point, specifically abortion. In fact, the Pro-Life anti-abortion sector really just didn’t want slutty young American women to have reproductive rights so they would suffer (hence our complete failure to consider children’s welfare until after we noticed animals had more rights than kids. Even then, development’s been a slow crawl.)

With the Moral Majority voting bloc in place that would vote for any anti-abortion Republican, Falwall was able to get Reagan into power with a landslide. Soon lobbyists were unlocked; labor was suppressed; anti-trust suits were dropped; wall-street greed became good and the express train to white-power one-party US autocracy was established and we’ve been on that train ever since.

(So when you encounter Reagan-Bush Republicans who don’t like Trump much, remember that they actively vote for policies that create the conditions in the US that are fecund for charismatic strongmen to take over their party, and another one will, and these guys will probably MAGA up behind the new guy. Until then, everyone they offer will be about as interesting as Mitt Romney or Ted Cruz.)

All this is to say the current state of Christianity, associated with guns and flamboyant wealth and hypermasculinity and hating LGBT+ and tradwives (and quivers-full) was actively cultivated since the early 20th century. It also shows that scripture can and will be shaped into what plutocrats and ministers what it to be, which de-legitimizes the scripture-and-church system that is allegedly God-approved to spread His word. If there was a true word-of-God, it would be more resistant to alteration by ownership-class interests. The Great Commission would be much more effective in getting strangers on board, and the movement wouldn’t experience so many apostates or failing regimes.

The history of Christianity makes for its indictment.

Exactly as per the label in 2016, the biblical themes and involvement of children were too spicy for the App Store, and the folks in Apple weren’t allowed to think outside their box, so it was rejected.

Even now, Apple is fighting gunpower and gelatine to sabotage all efforts to allow side-loads and stores they cannot control.

It begins with Apple’s petty reasons to prohibit The Binding of Isaac from the Apple store.

LLMs are less magical than upper management wants them to be, which is to say they won’t replace the creative staff that makes art and copy and movie scripts, but they are useful as a tool for those creatives to do their thing. The scary thing was not that LLMs can take tons of examples and create a Simpsons version of Cortana, but that our business leaders are super eager to replace their work staff with the slightest promise of automation.

But yes, LLMs are figuring in advancements of science and engineering, including treatments for Alzheimer’s and diabetes. So it’s not just a parlor trick, rather one that has different useful applications that were originally sold to us.

The power problem (LLMs take a lot of power) remains an issue.

Yep. The weakest link in the security chain is between chair and keyboard. And you can’t encrypt that.

I’m reminded of an animated short that really insisted it wasn’t a metaphor, about a fellow building a giant puzzle embodying all of human knowledge, with a special missing piece regarding a unification theory.

His buddy who finds this all to cerebral pulls a cross-shaped piece out of his pocket and jams it in there, and points out he has dozens of this piece and we can use it as edge pieces. The short closes insisting it’s just a story about puzzles with no symbolism whatsoever.

I can’t find it online anymore, sadly, and wonder if it faded away or search just sucks now.

I have a number of Wikipedia tales that might be appropriate here:

Thought-terminating cliché is the incredible disappearing / reappearing article. During the aughts, Wikipedia had more interested in inclusion of the public rather that requiring Wikipedians to be super diligent about referencing a published source, and someone added Robert Jay Lifton’s phrase. It turns out it was super useful, though there was not enough sourcing to elevate it up to proper levels of notoriety, so the article was removed, and missed by the public. Now it’s back.

Freefall (Webcomic) by Mark Stanley, was removed from Wikipedia in the aughts for failing to have sufficient notoriety. It was / is regarded by some as a furry comic for featuring a genetically engineered sentient wolf as a primary character (the other two main characters are an alien in a habitat suit and a robot), though the comic itself explores space life, cosmology, robotics and AI topics. The comic is still ongoing, I think more than two decades old now, with fans who have made colorized versions of all the early ones. (Current ones are colored by George Peterson.) But since its Wikipedia policy not to recognize Freefall it still doesn’t have its own Wikipedia article.

Weapons of Mass Destruction referring to nuclear ( “NOOK-you-lure” ) weapons that Iraq might or might not have which is why the United States has to invade Iraq immanently. Weapons of Mass Destruction shortened to WMDs became a common phrase, and the Wikipedia article discussed this as the primary term used by the United States to describe nuclear weapons. (Although, with the 2001 anthrax attacks fresh on our minds, we were also thinking of bioagents). During the cold war, the WMD phrase was not used often, but instead we referred to them as strategic weapons, based on the WWII notion of strategic attacks that bombed war-machine production and infrastructure in order to kill supply (and a whole lot of civilians). This developed into an edit-war between those who wanted Weapons of Mass Destruction to be about the payloads used in warfare and those who wanted it to be about the change of language that occurred depending on who was in control of such payloads.

Historicity and origin of the resurrection of Jesus had its own article for a long time which discussed how biblical scholarship scrutinized the event of Jesus’ Resurrection, a mythical element of the Christian faith, with modern naturalist understanding of the world. One of the early phrases in the opening paragraph of this article was Post-Enlightenment historians work with methodological naturalism, and therefore reject miracles as objective historical facts. Needless to say, the article was unpopular. Normally it’s not possible to just erase an article on Wikipedia. All historic versions of an article, including acts of vandalism, are archived and can be restored. (And Wikipedia has staff and volunteers who go about restoring articles to the most recent intact version.) So someone made the phrase Historicity and origin of the resurrection of Jesus link instead to the Resurrection of Jesus article which discusses really very little regarding its historicity. It turns out the Church has saboteurs everywhere to silence voices of reason.

One can only hope. Copyright has, for a long time been wrongdoing against the public by denying it a robust public domain. We should have free access to ideas less than a century old.

This reveals, nonetheless, even European government is about control, not governance, enforcement of established hierarchy, not civil rights for all.

Here in the US, there are no progressive legislative bodies. The Democratic party treats its progressive members as the red-haired stepchildren who have to dine at their own table.