InstaPunk Returns

One of these installed in at least five different cities You probably think this is going to be a screed or a lecture. It isn’t. It’s an honest question, asked out of curiosity: WHAT ARE  YOU  GETTING OUT OF ALL THIS? Almost no one comments here, so I’m not expecting answers. I’m asking you to think about the question for yourselves, with some specificity. To wit: Has the amount of emotion you’ve invested in hating Trump for 10 years made you happier? Is your marriage better, your sex life more satisfying, your circle of friends wider, your career more prosperous, your state of mind more equable and fulfilling? How has your perspective on life changed during the last 10 years? Are you more or less optimistic, diversified in your leisure-time pursuits, content with the personal choices you’ve been making on a day-to-day basis, balanced between the frequently opposing pulls of intellect and emotion? How has your self image (your amour-propre, as the French would say) evolved dur...

That’s it ? No toilet, no breasts, no smoking. What a ripoff!!! I can’t even get any sound file with it. No panting, no dirty words, no dirty old woman vibe at all. What’s a dirty old man to do? Well, it’s not as if she hasn’t already done everything, and I mean everything to death in previous wastes of film. Here’s one you may not remember. Most people who have seen it don’t remember it. That’s how eternal the legacy of Madonna is… Had enough? Me too. File Copy: For posterity’s sake .

  RAV’s Frank Gaffney discussing existential crisis of AI  with statecraft guru Sam Faddish. What could go wrong? This, for one thing: He has his own gaggle of Chicken Little AI experts. And, inevitably, this: Me, when I’m not hiding my true self behind a photograph They’re all worried about AI. Terrified in fact. For different reasons. Bannon has some apocalyptic seer who’s worried about meta-humans replacing Homo sapiens. Gaffney and Faddis are fixated on the latest AI hot topic, “The Singularity,” that magic moment when a supercomputer becomes self aware and decides to exterminate mankind. How did we get here? The usual way. The movies. First, there was HAL: Then, just a quarter century later, after a decades-long detour through a dead-end time paradox called The Terminator , there came the monstrous harpy HAL, a transgendered terminator in a box, like we’d been brought up to believe in, including Gaffney and Faddis: Worried yet? Here’s her resumé and mission statement. C...

The post referenced in the title is about an IPR National Insurrection analysis that is presently underway. Putting it together is a real slog, and I don’t like slogs, which is why I’m putting pressure on myself by publishing this in advance. It’s really just data, but it’s data that show you just how deceptive the presentation and supposed analysis of data can be. Part of the Insurrection post is examining differentials between various troubled regions of the United States. For many kinds of behavioral variables, there are nicely produced maps compiled by this and that federal or public interest organization. Examples I’ve collected so far in researching my post. [Note: Per 100,000 numbers are less messy for the social scientists to soil their hands with than collectively shocking totals.] Of course, it’s very difficult to amass data that won’t be disputed about deaths per 100,000 sexually active females of fertile age. None of the data collectors really like using total deaths as a s...

How did we get here from here ? Don’t forget the question. We’ll be answering it by the end of the post, in our usual roundabout way. Today is the last day of May, finally, and therefore the Last Day of May Madness. I don’t pretend to know what June will bring and what epithet it will earn, but this second part of yesterday’s ramble is about showing you that madness takes different people differently, and mine is not so much random infantilism as obsessive curiosity derived from my relationship with the universe. The universe speaks to me in ways both overt and intimational, which is my own word and also the tacit permission I give you to interpret my references to the universe as free-association play with my particular universe, of which I have documented abundant bits and pieces and bigger parts too. I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t think there was some value to it. Yesterday we started with RINOs in the news and the funny curse they seem to have brought upon themselves, and we ended...