Ken's Blog

Millions of people look at the plans for the monstrosity that is slated to replace the East Wing of the White House and recoil in disgust. I suspect that this is the intended effect.

We can only go by the plans we have seen. But based on those plans, the forthcoming protuberance is so ostentatiously offensive, so wildly out of scale, so utterly heinous in the sheer offensive grossness of its appearance, that these qualities could only have been a deliberate design choice.

The damaged child who currently occupies the White House (when he isn’t busy committing war atrocities on our nation’s behalf) is making a statement. He wants us to understand that his vision is for a nation deliberately out of balance.

By creating the architectural equivalent of a cancerous growth, his aim, I believe, is to make us understand something about the balance between Left and Right which has been one of the best features of our democratic republic. Specifically, he wants to destroy that balance, and in the process to wipe out any vestiges of empathy and kindness in our national character.

So if you look upon that ugly oversized tumor, that festering purulent abscess, and respond with a deep sense of nausea, as though your lunch is coming back up in your throat, it’s all according to plan. You are simply being informed that a once-beautiful symbol of our nation has been successfully replaced by something which more accurately reflects the hideous and Satanic soul of one man.

I have great respect for Jasmine Crockett. She is a great congresswoman, and she ran a great campaign.

But James Talarico is a once-in-a-generation talent, and we really need him right now. He reminds me a lot of Obama in 2008.

I remember listening to Obama for the first time, when he spoke in Washington Square on his first presidential campaign. Everybody in the crowd quickly understood that this was something different.

Talarico gives me that feeling of discovery. This is something new. His message, and the way he delivers it, feels like an effective antidote to the fear mongering, the toxic and ugly tribalism, the xenophobia that has been tearing our country apart.

The so-called “Christian Nationalism” movement sounds to me like a message of hate and intolerance. But when Talarico speaks about his Christian faith, it feels authentic to the actual teaching of Jesus, with its focus on love and kindness, and of caring for one another.

Whatever your religion, or lack thereof, I think that is a good message to get behind.

If we ever needed proof that time travel is impossible, I think we have it now.

Surely, if people could go back in time, somebody would have warned us what would happen if we elected you-know-who into office.

Is there a flaw in my logic?

In December 1998, the U.S. and England conducted Operation Desert Fox, a 70 hour bombing campaign against Iraq, with the goal of destroying Saddam Hussein’s missile development program and chemical/biological weapons capabilities. The operation was widely seen as a failure. Some even said that for the U.S. President, the entire operation had been an attempt to distract from scandal at home.

In the aftermath, Gen. Peter de la Billiere, a former head of the SAS who commanded British forces in the 1991 Gulf war, pointed out that aerial bombardments are not effective in driving people into submission. Instead, they tend to make them more defiant.

Now the U.S. has a new desert fox in the White House. And this one has plenty of scandals at home that he doesn’t want us to think about.

So here’s a question: While the desert fox is distracting everybody by dropping bombs on countries half way around the world, who is guarding the hen house?

Today is the anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Peace Corps in 1961 by president John F. Kennedy. It sends volunteer Americans to communities in partner countries around the world to provide skilled workers in education, health, entrepreneurship, women’s empowerment, and community development. Volunteers are expected to respect local customs, learn the prevailing language, and live in the same conditions as the people of the host country.

The Peace Corps represents a beautiful vision of how the United States can help the world. It is a vision that, I fear, would be completely incomprehensible to our current self-proclaimed “peace president”.

Imagine simply offering to actually help people in other lands, in a spirit of humility and mutual trust, rather than killing them or blowing them up. The entire concept would likely strike him as very odd.

What an idiot.

Three days ago, the morning after the State of the Union address, it came to light that documents had mysteriously gone missing which apparently detailed the violent sexual assault of a then-underage Epstein victim by our current president. In my blog post that day, I worried that we would soon be treated to a distraction in the form of a sudden invasion of Iran.

I wish I’d been wrong.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a magic wand that converted whatever anyone said into the truth? If we had such a wand, this morning we might seeing the following announcement from the White House:

“The United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation against this very wicked, radical dictatorship to distract the American people from thinking about those missing Epstein documents,” the president said. “We’re doing this for my future, and it is a noble mission.”

The U.S. Government is now at war with Anthropic. The reason is that the government wants to be able to use the company’s A.I. model to do mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, and also to enable drones to kill people without any human supervision.

The folks at Anthropic tried to explain that the technology, which was not designed for military use, cannot be guaranteed to operate safely for such purposes. Unfortunately our current administration seems to care a lot more about Pete Hegseth’s pretty hair than about the possibility of runaway A.I. drones going on a mass killing spree.

Maybe we should sit those government folks down and make them watch the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment from Walt Disney’s Fantasia. It presents an excellent metaphor for what can happen when A.I. is unchecked and unsupervised.

Besides, a children’s cartoon might work better than any sort of reasoned argument. It’s important to speak to people at their own level.

News upate:

At least 10 FBI employees who worked on former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the president’s retention of classified records after he left the White House in 2021 were fired on Wednesday, according to multiple sources.

The firings came after Reuters reported that the FBI had subpoenaed records of phone calls made by FBI Director Kash Patel and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles when they were still both private citizens as part of Smith’s probe into Trump.

The Reuters article quoted Patel, who said “We have zero tolerance for agents putting the U.S. Constitution above the needs of the current administration. The fact that the investigation in question was required by law is no excuse. Disloyalty to our president will not be tolerated.”

Patel did not provide any evidence of wrongdoing by the staff who were terminated.

Nearly two hours of rambling nonsense at our nation’s capital yesterday. I am very impressed with anybody who was able to sit there for the entire torturous slog, although I also feel bad for them.

And then today, the very next day, we find out that accusations of violent sexual assault against you-know-who by a then underage Epstein victim have mysteriously vanished from the files. I guess it’s time to cook up another distraction.

If I were Iran, I would be feeling very nervous right about now.

Today I got yet another email from a colleague who had finished a conversation with some LLM ChatBot, asked it about its own potential for general intelligence, and then marveled when the ChatBot responded that it might be feeling the first stirrings of true consciousness. Here was my response:

“I think it is useful to remember that these engines operate by scraping vast quantities of human texts. They use that data to perform a statistical “this is the most likely next word” completion task in response to our prompts.

So yes, of course their responses will sound like something a human would say, if we give them leading prompts, because at some point humans *did* respond to other humans in that way.

The illusion of life that this creates can indeed make for very entertaining theater. But it is also useful to remember that the next time you go to the theater to see a production of Hamlet, you are not expecting anyone on stage to actually die.”