As with that notion about regulating AI to be non-woke, have they thought this one through?
Washington Post, 28 Jul 2025: Trump administration urges federal employees to talk religion at work, subtitled “In a shift, the guidance from the Office of Personnel Management encourages religious expression among federal employees.” (Via)
So what is the conservative agenda concerning colleges?
Vox, Sean Illing, 26 Jul 2025: What the right’s war on college is really about, subtitled “Wesleyan President Michael Roth details the conservative agenda targeting American universities.”
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I note and quote NYT opinion columnist David Brooks here fairly regularly, because though he’s nominally conservative, he isn’t MAGA or populist and he often makes points about, oh, how to live a meaningful life, that are worth thinking about. Though I have noted that, for my tastes, he’s a little too concerned with how other people live what is a meaningful life according to *him*. As conservatives are wont to do; they don’t quite trust other people to make their own decisions about life, especially if those decisions are different than what conservatives think are good and proper.
Today Salon posts a take-down.
Salon, Mike Lofgren, 26 Jul 2025: David Brooks faces the truth of US history — and runs away, subtitled “NY Times’ pet conservative offers a lengthy apologia for America — and gets pretty much everything wrong”
There’s much about AI that I haven’t explored, but my understanding is that the models, the various Chat apps and so on, are, as Paul Krugman wrote a couple days ago, “a souped-up version of autocorrect.” I’ve seen it in Microsoft Word for two or three years now. As you type into a Word document, the software “predicts” which words you will type in next, on the bases of probable word combinations from the vast amount of data (including newspapers, magazines, and books) in the context of the words you’ve just typed. It works fairly well fairly often. The predicted words show up in gray past the location of your cursor, and if you want to accept those works, you just hit tab. OTOH, it hasn’t helped me from having to type the entire word “totalitarianism” into my notes several times today, as I’m reading the Harari book.
An AI is not a fount of fixed wisdom. Or any kind of truth. It’s feeding you answers based on what it thinks you want to hear.
So who’s to determine what’s biased or not?
Wired, Steven Levy, 25 Jul 2025: Trump’s Anti-Bias AI Order Is Just More Bias, subtitled “The Trump administration says it wants AI models free from ideological bias, as it pressures their developers to reflect the president’s worldview.”
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So Trump issued executive orders today to fund AI and to make sure it’s not “woke.” Oh, and he doesn’t like the term “artificial” intelligence.
NY Times, 23 Jul 2025: Trump Plans to Give A.I. Developers a Free Hand [gift link]
Subtitled: With executive orders and an “A.I. Action Plan” to promote American dominance of the technology, President Trump declared that the United States needed to win the A.I. race.
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This is interesting. Why would this be? Because these people live in bubbles? Put another way, because they don’t get out much — of their bubbles? They don’t read books or any media outside what their bubble endorses?
Ars Technica, Jennifer Ouellette, 22 Jul 2024: Conspiracy theorists don’t realize they’re on the fringe, subtitled “Gordon Pennycook: ‘It might be one of the biggest false consensus effects that’s been observed.'”
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And whether humanity can “grow up” and thrive by living in reality and not fantasy.
Today I spent more time than I expected to insert “more” tags into posts that I had not already done so… without realizing I had not done so since April. It took a surprisingly long time, because I also discovered that some image links had gone bad — ones from Salon. I went back to the original articles and got revised image links and updated my posts. Why would they change the image links…? Anyway, I fixed quite a few, but I’m sure there are others I didn’t see.
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A Paul Krugman piece from a few days ago about whether AI would be communist.
Paul Krugman, 17 Jul 2025: The Road to MechaHitler, subtitled “Reality still has a well-known liberal bias”
Some sciency things today. Oh, OK, and a couple about Trump.
From Tom Nichols (whom I’ve reviewed and mentioned many times).
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 21 Jul 2025: Presidential Pettiness, subtitled “Donald Trump seems to have no theory of governance beyond personal gain and retribution.”
Years pass, Trump keeps doing the same thing, the commentators comment, pointing out the same things, and his fans don’t care, and nothing changes. But we can’t become complacent. People in the future will look back on this generation and see which people let Trump get away with all this. They will look back the same way they look back at the “good Germans” who supported Hitler.
So I will offer several paragraphs by Tom Nichols, and leave it at that.
(First published 1959. Edition here: HarperCollins/Perennial Classics, 1999, 323pp, including author biography and publication history by Hal Hager)
Next up in the group of apocalyptic novels I read in June, following Butler’s PARABLE OF THE SOWER, is this. It isn’t as famous as two other near-contemporaneous novels, ON THE BEACH from 1957 and FAIL-SAFE from 1962, since popular movies were made from both of them. (I think there was a TV version of this one.) The author was a journalist whose work took him into contact with military people who strategized various nuclear war scenarios. He was asked what would happen if nuclear war broke out. He said, “Oh, I think they’d kill fifty or sixty million Americans–but I think we’d win the war.” This was in the 1950s. Frank was similar to George R. Stewart, author of EARTH ABIDES (my review here), in that while both wrote other books and were moderately well-known in their day, they are remembered decades later only for one book each.
The previous time I read this it reminded me of a Stephen King novel. Continue reading
I’ve mentioned before that my understanding is that there are more crimes depicted in movies and TV shows, especially the latter, than there are in real life, though I don’t have citations for relevant statistics. But here’s an item from today’s NYT Magazine that, offhandedly, supports the notion.
NY Times Magazine, John J. Lennon, 16 Jul 2025: Everyone’s Obsessed With True Crime. Even Prisoners Like Me., subtitled “As the genre has boomed on cable, the incarcerated have found themselves watching more and more of it.”
