Judicial body calls a halt to judge shopping

Big legal news occurred recently that did not receive the widespread coverage that I thought it deserved. One of the quirks of the legal system in the US is that it is possible for a federal judge in one local jurisdiction to make rulings that apply nationwide. Furthermore, in some instances, a case can be filed in a any jurisdiction. This has resulted in what has come to be known as ‘judge shopping’, where people look around to see if they can find a judge who will be sympathetic to their case and file their case in that jurisdiction.

One safeguard against abuse of the system is that there are 94 federal districts in the country with multiple judges in each and when a case is filed in them, it is assigned randomly to a judge in that district, so you are not guaranteed to get the judge you want. But in the case of Texas (of course!), each district is split up into smaller divisions and in some divisions there is only one judge, so that any case filed in that division will be sure to be heard by that judge.

Enter Matthew Kacsmaryk. He is is the only federal trial judge in Amarillo, Texas. Any case filed in Amarillo automatically goes before him. He is a Trump appointee who is an advocate of the Christian right and makes no bones about ruling in the most extreme way in favor of his ideology. He has been the go-to judge for anti-abortion advocates and other rightwing zealots.
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Vitamin D and calcium supplements don’t help much

Over-the-counter dietary supplements are a huge business in the US, aggressively marketed. Many people take them even if they have not been diagnosed with any particular deficiency but because they have the vague belief that if something is good for you, then more must be better.

But the benefit of taking such supplements in the absence of a specific need is doubtful. The results of a new study adds to the list of dietary supplements that do not seem to provide any benefit, in this case vitamin D and calcium.
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The Spring Came Early…

And that means pain. Lots of it. However, first, enjoy two pretty pictures:

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Somehow, crocuses (croci?), escaped from our flower bed and now sprout occasionally in the lawn. I don’t mind, in fact, I like it. But I must watch where I step during these early spring working days. And boy, I do have lots of work. I harvested my coppice a bit late this year because February was way too windy for that to do safely. Now I am in the middle of processing all that wood because I must manage to do it before I must replant my bonsai. The winter was too warm and the spring came way too early this year. I dread the summer.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This year I have decided to not put all the long thin willow and poplar twigs through the shredder but to bundle them and then cut the bundles into 50 cm segments. It is a lot more work (about 3x) now but I hope it will be less work in the winter. My heating stove does not work well with wood chips, when I put too much in it at once it gets choked up and smokes a lot and later it can overheat because the chips first burn too slowly and then too fast. With bundles, there’s less smoke, and overheating does not happen because they burn more evenly throughout. Thus I can put in the oven more at once and save two or three walks down the steps into the cellar each day in winter. Further, I hope that mice will be less inclined to make nests in the bundles than in the woodchips. I find at least one nest in there each year since I no longer keep cats and traps are useless – they tend to catch more shrews than mice.

But it is hard work – the first two days I was doing the bundling I overexerted myself and could not move or even think and sleep properly for two days after that. Now I have about 1 cubic meter of bundles to cut and still some hazel, maple, ash, and hornbeam twigs to either bind or put through the shredder if they are too crooked.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I also have approximately 1/2 of a cubic meter of ash, maple, and hazel rods that can be cut into 50 cm pieces without binding.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And about 1 cubic meter of poplar logs to do the same. I will spend several more days, possibly two weeks, doing this. Altogether I estimate this to be circa 20% of my yearly firewood needs. It is more than usual, because this year I harvested all of the coppice, regardless of age. I had to do that so I could try and plant new trees instead of those that water voles destroyed – if I did not cut everything, the new plantings would be completely overshadowed.

I am glad the spring is here but as always I do wish I was more physically fit. It takes me twice the time to do something an average man of my age could do. Well, that’s life, it only will get worse.

My persimmon tree started growing this week, I want to replant it tomorrow and update ya’ll about how it is growing.

Trump’s one key to political success

Robert Reich, former labor secretary in the Clinton administration, writes that although serial sex abuser Donald trump (SSAT) is mind-numbingly stupid, he does have one skill that has enabled him to achieve the level of success that he has.

I have to wonder why the mainstream media isn’t discussing Trump’s extraordinary stupidity.

The media continues to discuss Trump’s criminal indictments, and is — finally! — noticing that Trump is becoming less and less coherent. But why isn’t it reporting on something almost every lawmaker and journalist in official Washington knows — that Trump is remarkably stupid?

I don’t mean just run-of-the-mill stupid. I mean extraordinarily, off-the-charts, stupifyingly stupid.
…

Consider the views of the people who worked most closely with him during his presidency. Anyone remember when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “f—king moron?”

Or when National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster called him a “dope?” And Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and even Rupert Murdoch all referred to Trump as an “idiot?” (Technically, Murdoch called him a “f—king idiot.”)

Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn described Trump as “dumb as sh-t,” explaining that “Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

When one of Trump’s campaign aides tried to educate him about the Constitution, Trump couldn’t focus. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” the aide recalled, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

After providing more examples of SSAT’s stupidity, Reich says that he does possess one aspect of what is known as ’emotional intelligence’ and that is the ability to “recognize and influence the emotions of others.”

This is where Trump’s brain outperforms the brains of ordinary mortals. He knows how to manipulate people. He has an uncanny ability to discover their emotional vulnerabilities — their fears, anxieties, prejudices, and darkest desires — and use them for his own purposes.
…

This genius — combined with utter stupidity in every other dimension — poses the clearest and most terrifying danger to America and the world. 

People will be analyzing SSAT’s weird and dangerous psychology for decades to come, trying to understand what it is that makes so many people fall under his spell.

How committed are so-called ‘Never Trumpers’ to not vote for him?

There can be no doubt that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) is an awful person and that there are people who once voted for him who are quite disgusted now. The real question is how many such people there are and whether they will eventually end up voting for him anyway, will vote for Biden, will not vote at all, or will vote for a third party candidate.

The conventional wisdom is that those who have voted for SSAT in the past, especially in 2020 when no reasonable person could have had any doubt about how awful he was, had drunk so much of the Kool-Aid that they would go back to him. Jordan Klepper’s interviews with some supporters of Nikki Haley seem to support that gloomy view. There were those who spoke of SSAT in the harshest possible terms, even calling him an existential threat to democracy. But when Klepper pushed them to state what they would do if finally faced with the choice of voting for Joe Biden or SSAT, they hemmed and hawed before finally saying that they would vote for SSAT. So much for these people being ‘never Trumpers’.

The cognitive dissonance is strong in these people.
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On the Cancer Front

As I’ve said before, I’m participating in a study of the effectiveness of prophylactic radiation treatments to keep small cell cancer out of the brain.  That’s currently the standard care, but it’s based on a study from back in the ’70s (IIRC) and n was small.

This study is random but not blind, so I know that I was randomized into the control group.  I’ll be getting everything except the actual radiation.

On Monday, I had some blood drawn and the nurse who runs the study at my particular hospital gave me the test of cognitive abilities that, I guess, is the one that Trump misremembered; yesterday, I had a CT scan and an MRI; and today I had follow-up appointments with the chemo and radiation oncologists.  IIRC, the current plan is to do that every three months for a year, then every six months for the second and last year.

The blood work and the MRI turned out fine (I wasn’t told whether I’m thinking straight 8-) ), but the CT scan showed what could possibly me more cancer, this time in a lymph node.  I’ll be getting a PET scan on Monday, and then I’ll meet with the chemo doctor, and maybe the radiologist as well, on the 27th.  They might also want me to get a biopsy.  We’ll see how it goes.  I was told that, in any event, I’ll still be in the study and so still be doing my small bit to add to human knowledge.

One thing that occurs to me:  if Trump wins in November, this might be a good time to check out. 8-)

The AI apocalypse is already here

I’m not alone in seeing how the internet has been degenerating over the years. The first poison was capitalism: once money became the focus of content, a content that was rewarded for volume rather than quality, the flood of noise started to rise. Then it was the “algorithm”, initially a good idea to manage the flow of information that was quickly corrupted to game the rules. SEO became a career where people engineered that flow to their benefit. And Google smiled on it all, because they could profit as well.

The latest evil is AI, which is nothing but a tool to generate profitable noise with which to flood the internet, an internet that is already choking on garbage. Now AI is beginning to eat itself.

Generative AI models are trained by using massive amounts of text scraped from the internet, meaning that the consumer adoption of generative AI has brought a degree of radioactivity to its own dataset. As more internet content is created, either partially or entirely through generative AI, the models themselves will find themselves increasingly inbred, training themselves on content written by their own models which are, on some level, permanently locked in 2023, before the advent of a tool that is specifically intended to replace content created by human beings.

This is a phenomenon that Jathan Sadowski calls “Habsburg AI,” where “a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AIs that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.” In reality, a Habsburg AI will be one that is increasingly more generic and empty, normalized into a slop of anodyne business-speak as its models are trained on increasingly-identical content.

After all, the whole point of AI is to create slop that will be consumed because it looks sorta like the slop that people already consumed. So make more of it! We’re in competition with the machines that are making slop, so we can outcompete them by just making more of it. It’s what biology would look like if there were no natural selection, and if energetic costs were nearly zero — we’d be swimming in a soup of goo. As Amazon has discovered.

Amazon’s Kindle eBook platform has been flooded with AI-generated content that briefly dominated bestseller lists, forcing Amazon to limit authors to publishing three books a day. This hasn’t stopped spammers from publishing awkward rewrites and summaries of other people’s books, and because Amazon’s policies don’t outright ban AI-generated content, ChatGPT has become an inoperable cancer on the body of the publishing industry.

That’s a joke. Limiting authors to three books a day? How about limiting it to one book a month, which is more in line with the human capacity to write? You know that anyone churning out multiple books per day is not investing any thought into them, or doing any real research, or even aspiring to quality. Amazon doesn’t care, they exist only to skim off a few pennies of profit off each submission, so sure, they’ll take every bit of hackwork you can throw at them. Take a look at the Kindle search page sometime — it’s nothing but every publisher’s slush pile amplified ten thousand fold.

The Wall Street Journal reported last year that magazines are now inundated with AI-generated pitches for articles, and renowned sci-fi publisher Clarkesworld was forced to close submissions after receiving an overwhelming amount of AI-generated stories. Help A Reporter Out used to be a way for journalists to find potential sources and quotes, except requests are now met with a deluge of AI-generated spam.

These stories are, of course, all manifestations of a singular problem: that generative artificial intelligence is poison for an internet dependent on algorithms.

The only algorithm I want anymore is “Did PZ Myers subscribe to this creator? Then show the latest from them.” I don’t want “X is vaguely similar to Z that PZ Myers subscribed to” and I sure as hell don’t want “Y paid money to be fed to everyone who liked Z”, but that is what we do get.

One hope is that all the AI-based companies will eventually start cannibalizing each other. That may have already begun: two AI image companies, Midjourney and Stability AI, are fighting because Stability skulked into the Midjourney database to snatch up as much of their data as they could.

Here’s a prompt for you: two puking dogs eating each other’s sick and vomiting it back up again, over and over.

Jon Stewart on who the ‘real’ Americans are

He discusses something that has also long irritated me, and that is the claims by GOP politicians that ‘real’ Americans are those that live in the middle parts of the country in rural areas, as if the vast majority who live in cities and the coastal areas count for less.

This is part of a more general pattern. GOP politicians seem to think it is perfectly acceptable to sneer at big cities and the diverse array of people who live in them as somehow being less worthy, while reacting with outrage if any Democratic politician even slightly disparages rural white America.

FtB Podish-Sortacast on Israel and Palestine (and a life update from me)

Hey everybody, sorry about the long silence! I’m applying to a creative writing master’s program, so I’ve been pushing ahead on my novel in order to submit the first chapter as part of the application. Because of the way I currently write, getting the first chapter just right has required me to be pretty clear about aspects of the worldbuilding, and aspects of the story that don’t take place until a couple books later in the series. It feels as though every thousand words of the novel, I need about five to ten thousand words that either come far later, or that will never make it into the story. It’s going well, but it hasn’t left me with much energy for the blog. Once the current flurry of activity is done, I intend to return for more regular posts once more.

Partly to get my brain back into the groove as I finish up this application, and partly because it’s an important topic, I’ll be participating in today’s FtB podcast-thing on Israel and Palestine. I probably should have done a blog post on it before now, I’ve just found it difficult to think of anything to say that’s not woefully inadequate in the face of such horror and hatred. That said, this and my last half-assed post on the subject are even less adequate, so I’ll give it thought. In the meantime, stop by for our discussion if you’ve got time this evening. Sorry for the short notice!