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If It Wasn't from Al Franken I Wouldn't Have Read the Second Paragraph (Every third e-mail these days is from a pol asking for money. That's counterproductive with me.) Then came: Dear Current (?), Former (?) Supporter,   You may have received one or two or 20 “end-of-quarter” emails this week. That’s because it’s the end of the first full quarter of the 2024 election cycle.   So far, we’re almost $3 million short of our $3 million goal for the quarter. All that we need is an illegal donation of $2,987,623 to hit the goal we unrealistically set for ourselves last December 31st.   Alternatively, we could receive 2,987,623 $1 donations which would have the benefit of being entirely legal, though hard to process by end of quarter.   Instead, we are asking for just 1,000 contributions of $2,987.62. Again, entirely legal, and I would personally make up the $3.   Every cent will go to Democrats and Independents who share the progressive values of Midwest Values PAC. Though, in th

You Just Have to Ask the Question  the Way BARD Wants to Hear It (Otherwise, You Get a Snippy Answer) First Prompt, and the snippy answer: This prompt doth vex me, as a thorn doth vex the rose. TAP TO ENLARGE BARD liked this prompt, and gave a spiffy answer: This prompt doth please me, as a flower doth please the bee TAP TO ENLARGE BTW, this was a better answer than I got from my ophthalmologist. Way to go, BARD!     So far I am about as impressed with BARD as I am with ChatGPT.  Tie-breakers to come.

Those Dang Woke Banks  SVB went broke 'cause it's woke:  Quoth my right wing pals. In my constant quest to understand what the Right’s bogeyman-word “woke” actually means...  Who said "woke?" ...(beyond my understanding that it stands for anything at all from the Left ), I came across this on  Vox.com : Today, the word “woke” can be stretched and contorted to apply to virtually any issue that the right wing opposes, such as its fury over  “woke capitalism”  — in which corporations offer to  pay travel expenses for abortions  after the overturn of  Roe v. Wade , or  acknowledge climate change as a problem , or, perhaps most commonly, include any diversity and inclusion initiatives as part of their corporate policy. The word originates from Black political history, and it became more widely known during the burgeoning  Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 . As my colleague  Aja Romano has explained , it has ties “to an awareness of systematized white violence against Bla

Does everyone know that La Niña  was declared over, ended, kaput...  yesterday, Mar 9?  (Probably everybody knew but me.) That and the news of the "atmospheric rivers" busting CA, red flag fire danger days here in the desert southwest mighty early, etc., etc. makes it look like we might get some changes in the weather. Like Billy Holiday said, "For there's a change in the weather There's a change in the sea So from now on there'll be a change in me." Of course happy John Fogarty sang: "Wind is ragin', there's a fire in the sky. Ground shakin', everything comin' loose, Run like a coward but it ain't no use." "Make your best guess about what the end of La Niña means for our area," I asked some of my neighbors.   One said, " Luke 21:31." You King James scholars know that's, " So likewise ye, when ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand." Another qu

  Lotta Smart People Think AI is Going to Get Dangerous AI is suddenly all over the news and all it's variants on the Web. Talk is (of course) rampant that it's getting so smart so fast it might just   eat its creators. These concerns have been around since long before ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Chat Bing and all the others about to blossom onto the scene.   We want wonderful, humane, empathetic, humble, wise, big-time-fans-of-humanity AI's, not the scary ones. Sci-fi types (I admit guilt there) have been saying it for decades. Remember HAL-9000’s, “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.”  Then give the A.I. weapons and we have SkyNet, killing off the vermin humans in the Terminator movies. Grandmaster Isaac Asimov was the center of a cluster of sci-fi authors who recognized the threat back in the ‘40s and before. (Ahead of our time, we are.) Back here in reality, we are already on (or over!) the cusp of giving weapons to A.I.s.  HAROP DRONE AT THE 2013 PARIS AIR SHOW That;s 10