China, Our Enemy?

Allow me to make a case that China is an economic competitor of ours, but not an enemy.

Leaders in this country throw around the term enemy far too often, even to the resurrection of the term “enemy of the state,” a phrase I thought dead but turned out to be a zombie.

The Trump administration, possibly only the Orange Shitler, have declared China to be our enemy. (How dare they out compete us, it’s un-American!)

Recently China, in a state of preternatural calm indicated that China doesn’t need to lift a finger to destroy America, indicating that their strategy is “when one’s opponents are busy destroying themselves, don’t interrupt them.” (I don’t know who said that first.)

Instead of competing with China our government is planning on going to war with China, a war that we will not win, probably because China won’t come out to play. Time is on their side. The Leaning Tower of Treason, Captain Grabby Hands, The Fluorescent Führer, our president is wandering as if in a daze around the world firing munitions we are not replacing and soon we will be out of bullets. (Maybe we can ask North Korea to help restock us.) China is busy building a modern navy, and modern armaments, but isn’t engaged in constant military strife that drains its resources. The fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper comes to mind. They are also developing AIs that do not cost an arm and a leg, maybe that is because they don’t worship at the feet of the God Profit.

Instead of going around the world bullying other countries, China is trading development projects for access to “strategic materials.” This is a net positive for China, providing jobs for its population, income for its corporations, and good will in Africa and South America and elsewhere in Asia.

Gosh, do you think their leaders aren’t demented psychopaths? Is that their edge?

First Vance and Now Rubio

Our Vice-president Mr. Vance stated recently that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon” even though the U.S. has neither responsibility nor authorization to enforce the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty signed by both Iran and the U.S.

Now, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stated that Israel’s determination to attack Iran and the certainty that U.S. troops would be targeted in response forced the Trump administration to take pre-emptive strikes.

So, now we are letting other country’s determine our foreign policy? WTF?

Apparently exerting diplomatic pressure on our “ally” Israel to not do such a foolish thing didn’t sound like enough of a “deal” to the Ayatollah Covfefe.

These clowns need to start wearing honest clown costumes so we can tell that they are not being serious.

The Law of Unintended Consequences Rules AIs, Too

I read recently that a noted software developer fired many hundreds of Junior Software Engineers and replaced them with AIs. Not just AIs, but AIs now to be monitored, supervised by the remaining Senior Software Engineers. So, gosh, what could go wrong? Well, one Senior Software Engineer pointed out as he was heading out the door (He quit, obviously.) with the question: “Where do Senior Software Engineers come from?” Obviously they come from the ranks of Junior Software Engineers, who are tasked with less important tasks, to cut their teeth, so to speak. They need to work, make mistakes, correct them, etc. There is much to learn and without a large pool of Junior Software Engineers, there won’t be any Senior Software Engineers to do their work, so this guy saw the writing on the wall and hightailed it out of town.

The “leaders” in so many tech firms are now business types, no longer the tech types who used to run these places, you know, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison and even Bill Gates (to some extent). The business guys look at the salaries “saved” when the Junior Software Engineers were “made redundant,” “let go,” “terminated,” etc. and think that is a net savings with an increase in productivity thrown in. Except going out the door with them is much institutional knowledge, even a bit of wisdom, and losing that Senior Software Engineer, is an even bigger hit to those categories. They might not even see those “Juniors” as being “Seniors in Training” or as resources of institutional knowledge, etc.

And when it comes to writing software code, AIs shine, but there is another problem come up. You may be aware of what is called “AI slop” sometimes referred to as “AI Hallucinations” or AI Bullshit,” but output from an AI which is severely flawed, let us say. And AIs are being “taught” to train themselves, so fairly soon, they will be raking through the slop from other AIs, even their own, and the problem magnifies. We were alerted to this problem when photocopiers were invented. We learned that if you copied a copy of a copy, etc. the copies soon became unrecognizable. Then when computers came along we were taught the same lesson again, with “lossy” file formats such as JPEG. When JPEG images were saved over and over, they too became “muddy” if not downright unrecognizable.

Now, in an experiment AIs have been fed their own output, then re-fed and re-fed it and, guess what, what you get is bizarre and of no use whatsoever.

So, if we give over training (the expensive part of AI enterprises) to the AIs themselves, what can we expect as results? You know, from AI medical advisers, and that sort? Hello, SkyNet!

The Effing Elites … Again … Still

I have been watching a number of documentaries of late about ancient Egyptian societies, which have fascinated me since I was a boy. Egyptian kings were considered gods, at least having one foot in godhood status. I don’t know if they invented the “god-king” concept but they were, at least, an early adopter.

One has to ask, why did the vast majority of the population give so much power to these people? Clearly the power was usurped by two means: force and religion. So-called kings who were just battle leaders kind of liked being able to order people around and so extended their hegemony into peace time, their loyal soldiers becoming “palace guards.” In many other cases, shamans or other “holy men” saw protection and a meal ticket by running interference for the powerful secular leaders and so made a marriage made in heaven, literally. The Secular-Religious Axis was a joint powers agreement.

Apologists will respond with points like “religion supplies order and is a salve for the vicissitudes of daily life. Religion a salve? Not hardly. Take the word of Tony Castaldo who started reading the Bible as a pre-teen: “And by the time I finished “Numbers”, I did understand God — I understood that God was a superhero story, like Superman or Spiderman, just one invented by brutal men that used violence and murder to subjugate women (so they could rape them at will with no repercussions) and children and slaves.”

Watching myriad Egyptian citizens (not slaves) muscling millions of stone blocks into the shape of a pyramid (two and a half million blocks in just the Great Pyramid, weighing approximately six million tons) over decades requires me to ask about the opportunity costs. What would those tens of thousands of healthy workers been able to do had they not been “assigned” stone carrying duties? Economists explain that whenever you tackle any task, you incur and “opportunity cost” in the form of giving up on what you could do on another task. And archaeologists have identified over 118 to 138 distinct pyramids in Egypt.

And who ordered these to be built? The Egyptian Kings, of course. And, then there are the grandiose temples (e.g. Karnak, Luxor, Abu Simbel, Edfu, Dendera, Hatshepsut, and Ramesseum and thousands of “lesser” temples) to be built for the priests, gotta keep them happy, too. (Google AI says, “These sites primarily served as homes for deities, built by pharaohs to showcase their devotion and power.” Exactly, vanity projects and political sops traded for priestly support.)

It is the Effing Elites who order such grotesque vanity projects, who decide to make war on neighbors, etc. What if instead, all of that labor and wealth were applied to controlling the flooding of the Nile? Or building affordable housing and providing affordable food and drink for ordinary Egyptians)? (I can hear the GOP caterwaulers screaming “Socialism!” already.)

If you then follow the history of the human race for the next 2000 years, you will see the same pattern, e.g. autocrats like Louis the Fourteenth, Mussolini, Hitler, and Trump with their grandiose building projects and wars at the drop of a hat.

So, why do we yield our power to these assholes? Especially when the U.S. was formed as the first nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people” and kings could go eff themselves.

Everything is an Emergency with a Drama Queen

In his first eighteen months back in office, Trump has declared at least eight national emergencies. Not because the nation was actually on fire. Because aging drama queens love emergencies. (Carolyn Beccia on Medium.com February 24, 2026)

The whole post is Members Only and is worth reading.

An Argument Against Naturopathy/Homeopathy

The State of Alaska’s House Labor & Commerce Committee is considering a bill that “would unwisely permit the practice of naturopathy, a discredited form of pseudoscience, in the state of Alaska.” (Source: CFI Director of Government Affairs and Policy, Azhr Majeed)

Naturopathy is not a name people bandy about. Most people, however, are aware of homeopathy which is really what is being considered in the bill above. (I think the term naturopathy is a substitute term to avoid the negative reputation of homeopathy. The term naturopathy was invented 80 years after the term homeopathy.)

The foundations of homeopathy are basically these two:
Law of Infinitesimals (or Law of Potentization): This principle states that the curative potency of a substance increases as it is diluted multiple times, often combined with shaking (succussion).
Potentization/Dynamization: The process in homeopathy involving serial dilution and succussion (vigorous shaking) to unlock the “vital energy” of a substance. (Source: Harvard University)

In ordinary language, they claim is that diluting a drug or chemical makes it stronger. (You can always recognize a scam if they claim “adding water makes it stronger.”) So, if you run across someone who believes in this nonsense ask them to consider the following scenario:

A guy goes into a bar and asks for a whiskey and a pitcher of water. When he is served, he pours out half of the whisky and fills the glass with water from the pitcher. Then he empties half of that diluted beverage into the bartender’s sink, and fills it up with water again. He does this ten times. Then he downs the final liquid in his glass. So, question: do you expect this guy to fall off of his bar stool dead drunk?

If you do. You are a homeopath.

Is Greed Good?

(Hint: No, not just no, but fuck no!)

Currently people are talking about “the” AI bubble (not “an,” but “the”). Corporations are investing billions (possibly trillions) of dollars in companies developing what are called “artificial intelligences,” aka AIs. Since such an “intelligence” is a goal and not yet a reality, some are calling them “pretend intelligences” as they are, so far, only good at regurgitating materials created by actual intelligences.

Setting all of that aside, the focus of many of the postings right now is the “AI Bubble” which is that the AIs currently on offer are not making enough income to justify their investment. In fact they cannot make enough income to justify the investment, hence the “bubble” declaration and the focus on the damage that will be done by that bubble when it bursts, because financial bubbles always burst. (Many think the AI Bubble is the “Mother of All Bubbles” and could wreck the global economy.)

So, seeing these posts, I have to ask, why are these corporations investing so much money in the development of products that cannot produce enough income to justify the investment? The answer is simple: the corporations want to use AIs to replace a sizable fraction of their employees. You have already seen some of this happening if you have called for help to any company and gotten in a conversation with a chatbot, via “chatting” about your issue.

But if we stop to think about the effect of that replacement, we start from the thinking of the corporations. Corporations used to think of their highly trained workforces as an asset. But those days are long gone. Corporations now look at their labor costs as a liability. If only they didn’t have to pay all of those pesky workers … damn! Economics used to have somewhat of a soul, but that soul was sucked out by the likes of Milton Friedman of the Chicago School of Economics. Today economics is solely about profit and loss and has nothing to do with providing good jobs and services for the communities the companies exist in, etc.

So, modern corporations see the turnover from human workers to AIs as a reduction of losses … only. Estimates of as high as 40% of all jobs being replaced by AIs are dancing in their heads. But think about it. The executives of these corporations only see their stock prices soaring because their profitability increased. But looking past that, will stock markets even still exist? If 40% of corporate workers are canned, what happens to the economy when those folks no longer make an income and have no money to spend, or at least far less to spend. The job market cannot absorb all of those laid off workers, so what happens?

Also, a lower demand created by non-workers having less to spend means a lot of the currently marginal companies go belly up, creating more unemployment, creating even more uncertainty. And stock followers like uncertainty like they like the plague, so what happens?

I have to ask: Would the world be better off if there were less greed? We have no real need for billionaires, so why are we encouraging their existence? What if corporations were judged as to how good they are as corporate citizens of their communities? They keep insisting they are people, shouldn’t we expect them to act like good people instead of the psychopaths they currently are?

And how do the values of the products made by AIs hold up? Would you rather have an authentic painting by Picasso or ChatGPT? How good could a recipe be if an AI can’t taste the damned thing? How good can music be if the singer is an AI and the band is artificial. How likely are “they” to get “in the groove” or improvise, one bot riffing off of another?

Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should, especially when the guide star of such efforts is making a profit, just making a fucking profit.

Say it Ain’t So, Max!

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of the mystery that we are trying to solve. (Max Planck, one of Quantum Mechanics OGs))

Theists use such quotations in support of their blatherings, but again, the context trips them up. According to Google “Max Planck was a deeply religious and spiritual person throughout his life, though he did not adhere to a conventional “personal God” of traditional religion. As a lifelong Lutheran, he believed in an almighty, omnipotent, and intelligent God, often framing science and religion as complementary forces that pursue the same goal …”

Yes, Der Herr Doktor was pandering as so may religious people do. But can his statement not be true?

Let’s look at that. Consciousness “research” is a hot topic now. (I used quotes around the word research as it is used to cover philosophical speculations and most people think of research as being scientific research.) In consciousness studies a key point is self awareness. How is it that we are aware of ourselves, as an entity, and also aware of our own thoughts? That question wouldn’t exist is we were unaware of such, so what that means is we can study ourselves, which such studies are examples of so doing. So, is being part of the mystery we are trying to solve any kind of barrier to solving such puzzles? I don’t think so, but possibly Max did.

Postscript The quotation is in a Socratic dialogue with Einstein, included as an appendix to Planck’s 1932 book, “Where Is Science Going?”

The Flaw Is In Us

School grades are in the news … again! The phrase that set me off is:”

… a traditional A-F grading system in which the F range is often 50-60 points while all other grade ranges are 10 or fewer points.”

Why people still use this range is mysterious, but of course I have my suspicions. When introducing a new class to my grading system I asked what grade a student would have were she to get two perfect A scores (100/100) and then being dog sick for the third test got a zero, an F. Most students shouted out something sensible (high C, low B) while as usual other shouted out nonsense. If one takes an arithmetical average of 100, 100, and 0 one ends up with an average score of 67. This score qualifies on the “traditional grading scale” as a D, just below the C range. Intuitively, the average of one A and one F should give a C, but with this system two As and one F give a D. Clearly something is wrong.

Obviously I stacked the numbers in this example to expose the flaw. How I “fixed” this basic flaw in the “tradition grading scale” is I took the tale of the Bell curve, off of 50 where it lay, and dragged it over to zero. This gives grade range scores of:
A–100-83
B–82-67
C–66-33
D–33-16
F–15-0

These numbers were arrived at by using standard deviation splits off of the standard Gaussian curve. Students were delirious with joy. I pointed out that in my example (above) the student’s average score would be a B–, which intuitively seems right. But I also told them what the ramifications were. Whereas other teachers scoring an example might look at an answer to an essay questions and see clear evidence of tear drops, might score that a 6/10, whereas I would give it a zero, with maybe a “nice tears” comment (that’s a joke, please do not flame me). My score is an indicator of how far you got to a correct answer using the path you chose. If you chose a long, convoluted path and got half-way down that path, you got a 5/10. If you chose a short route and got half way, you would also get a 5/10. If the two of you compare answers, you might be puzzled as one answer clearly involved more work than the other. But my thinking is that was your decision, not my request. You chose a longer way to answer the question that consumed space and time, but didn’t get you where you needed to go.

I was not an ogre. I modeled what 10/10 answers would be for a great many test questions asked on previous exams. (I also told them I tended to include one of these recycled questions on their exams and the well prepared got a high score as a gift.)

So, why is the flawed, clearly flawed, “traditional grading system” still used? I think at its core is a teacher’s delusion that students learn a sizable fraction of what we try to teach them. (Gosh, to think less is to hint that we aren’t all that good at teaching!) So, to demonstrate “average” learning they needed to get a score of 70-80 percent of the possible correct answers. It is clear from research, however, that that assumption only flatters teacher’s egos as students do not absorb high percentages of what they are taught. And because the system is way over balanced (a score of zero on the first test, needs three perfect scores to get an average, 75, that would give the student a grade of B) teachers make up bullshit rules to hide the flaws. For one, when they are grading you need to leave an answer blank to get a score below 5 or 6 (any drivel will do), leading to students thinking they did better than they actually did in answering such a prompt. If there are multiple quiz scores, some teachers will throw out the lowest score before averaging them, and so on.

The latest “outrage” in this discussion is the assigning of zeros for grades, when the 100 point scale is used. One state is considering a bill outlawing the giving of zeros. Some institutions are suggesting scores of zero be dropped out before average scores are calculated. Obviously these do not address the flaw in the “tradition grading system” of having ten point ranges for As, Bs, Cs, and Ds and a sixty point range for the Fs. A score of less than 50 is actually off of the curve and is meaningless, well, meaninglessly nasty. But what score does a student earn for “no response” or “off topic”? Should those not be scored with zeros?

As usual, these reformers are missing the point, expending energy trying to fix incongruities rather than fixing the system that causes the incongruities. And I think the main motivation is that teachers cannot accept that the average student learns from a third to two thirds of what they are requested to learn, which is what my system is based upon.

Fine Tuning, My Ass

There is an argument running in theistic circles called the “fine-tuning argument.” This states that if one looks at the fundamental physical constants of nature, that they support the existence of life. But, if even one of these were to be even a slightly different value, the universe could not support life, so obviously God has carefully aligning the constants of the universe like dials on a machine, God is somehow found in the laws of nature and science, the designer hidden in plain sight in the design.

WTF? You mean it wasn’t aliens tampering with our universe? Or maybe Ancient Druids were tickling the ivories of Nature’s Piano? Magic fairies?

My scientific brethren, slow, plodding that they are, shot holes in this “argument” almost immediately but apparently none of the excusigists noticed. I guess a cadre of people still banging upon the Kalam Cosmological Argument can’t be expected to keep up with the nuances of the latest apologist’s baby. (YouTube has dozens of videos debunking this nonsense.)

Okay, allow me to take if from the top. There are a number of aspects of the argument which never seem to be brought up, so I will:

1. Can the fundamental constants of the universe change? (If they can’t change, how could they be changed, to make life possible?)
2. Is there any evidence of any of these constants being different at some other time? (This would establish that said constant can change, for sure.)
3. Studies show that quite a few of these constants could be slightly different from their current values and the universe would hardly be changed.
4.  Since God was pulled out of someone’s ass as the Agent of Change, how was this done? What was this god’s procedure for doing so. (Magic does not seem to exist in our universe, so if you claim it was via magic, explain how your god’s magic works.)
5. Explain how you know that it was your god doing this work and not one of the others. You cannot just claim that those other gods do not exist, unless you are able to explain why your god does exist and the others do not. (The evidence for the existence of any of the thousands of human gods is roughly equivalent, so this is a heavy lift.)

There is more but enough of you have told me that I am abusing your good nature getting some of these things off of my chest.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Impeach President Corrupt Asshole the First! Thank you for your attention to this matter!