I attended a community event tonight

It was good. The food was tasteful and enjoyable, and I’d be happy to back again (it’s a yearly event.)

But — and I hate to criticize — this was Minnesota chili. I was warned multiple times that “this one has a bit of a bite.” It did not. Flavorful, yes, but “bite”? I could have rubbed this stuff in eyes without a twinge. I could have brought some hot sauce and chili flakes, but I feared that might be seen as insulting. I shall be able to use the bathroom tonight without pain.

The problem may be that all the chili cooks were white people who looked like they attend the local Lutheran church every Sunday. Maybe they should invite a few representatives from our local Hispanic population, who aren’t timid about using a few peppers.

Maybe I should submit an entry next year. My chili is considerably more ferocious, and I’ve always toned it down for my wife’s benefit.

Sorry, Texans, you are so screwed

Texans are well aware of the fact that their Republican politicians are remarkably vile. Somehow Ken Paxton has a chance of winning election, in spite of being quite possibly the most corrupt politician in America. Also in the running, though,is Greg Abbott, who has been actively undermining public education.

Schools in Texas are wildly underfunded, with hundreds having to reduce students to four days a week. This is very much by Abbott’s design. As Jessica Grose of the New York Times explained on Oct. 7, the governor signed into law a voucher program whose entire purpose is paying parents to take kids out of school and put them into unregulated “alternatives” — such as private schools or homeschooling — that have no real requirements to offer children an actual education. Since local school funding is tied to student head count, this has created a backdoor way to funnel money out of already-struggling public schools.

So don’t vote for Abbott. That’ll fix the problem, right? Get him out of office and everything will get all better.

Nope. The real problem is Texas billionaires.

Money is the likeliest answer. As Grose notes, Abbott’s war on education is backed by three powerful Texas billionaires — and major conservative donors — Tim Dunn and a pair of brothers, Farris and Dan Wilks. The trio made their fortunes in oil. But their single-minded hatred of public schools is rooted in evangelical Christianity.

“If you ever wonder why state laws and policies are more radical than most Texans would prefer, the answer has a lot to do with Dunn and his checkbook,” Russell Gold wrote in Texas Monthly in 2024. The same is true of the Filks brothers, who share Dunn’s dream of turning Texas into a far-right Christian theocracy.

As is familiar, billionaires are the problem, and especially Christian billionaires. Fundamentalist Muslim billionaires would be just as damaging, but the Christian billionaires would fight back.

You notice, the citizens of Texas don’t count. This would have to be a kaiju battle.

AI is driving some people mad

Some individuals seem to be particularly susceptible to AI psychosis, which shouldn’t be surprising. Humans have long been prone to fall for cults and authoritarian leaders, and what is ChatGPT but a machine trained to emulate authoritarian pronouncements with an all-knowing attitude, marketed by some of the worst people on the planet? So a few people have fallen down the rabbit hole.

Until recently, the tech industry and its financial backers have had little to say about the phenomenon. But last week, one of their own — venture capitalist Geoff Lewis, a managing partner at the multi-billion dollar firm Bedrock who is heavily invested in machine learning ventures including OpenAI — raised eyebrows with a series of posts that prompted concerns about his own mental health.

In the posts, he claimed that he’d somehow used ChatGPT to uncover a shadowy “non-government agency” that he said had “negatively impacted over 7,000 lives” and “extinguished” 12 more.

Yeah, don’t believe anything ChatGPT tells you. It’s a psychiatric phenomenon that has been around for a good long while — AI is just poised to exploit it.

“There’s recently been an influx of case reports describing people exhibiting signs of psychosis having their episodes and beliefs amplified by an LLM,” wrote Cyril Zakka, a medical doctor and former Stanford researcher who now works at the prominent AI startup Hugging Face.

“While I’m not a psychiatrist by training,” he continued, “I think it mirrors an interesting syndrome known as ‘folie à deux’ or ‘madness of two’ that falls under delusional disorders in the DSM-5 (although not an official classification.)”

“While there are many variations, it essentially boils down to a primary person forming a delusional belief during a psychotic episode and imposing it on another secondary person who starts believing them as well,” Zakka posited. “From a psychiatric perspective, I think LLMs could definitely fall under the umbrella of being ‘the induced non-dominant person,’ reflecting the beliefs back at the inducer. These beliefs often subside in the non-dominant individual when separated from the primary one.”

Unfortunately, this article quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky extensively, who is not an AI, but has had the same kind of deleterious effect on people as any chatbot. If we killed ChatGPT, we’d still have the same problem, only with self-declared human prophets who tell people nonsense, yet are believed.

I am either amused or horrified that the poor deluded victim of AI psychosis is citing the SCP Foundation.

As observers quickly pointed out, the ChatGPT screenshots Lewis posted to back up his claims seemed to be clearly inspired by a fanfiction community called the SCP Foundation, in which participants write horror stories about surreal monsters styled as jargon-filled reports by a research group studying paranormal phenomena.

Jeremy Howard, Stanford digital fellow and former professor at the University of Queensland, broke down the sequence that led Lewis into an SCP-themed feedback loop.

“When there’s lots of training data with a particular style, using a similar style in your prompt will trigger the LLM to respond in that style,” Howard wrote. “The SCP wiki is really big — about 30x bigger than the whole Harry Potter series, at >30 million words! Geoff happened across certain words and phrases that triggered ChatGPT to produce tokens from this part of the training [data].”

“Geoff happened across certain words and phrases that triggered ChatGPT to produce tokens from this part of the training distribution,” he wrote. “And the tokens it produced triggered Geoff in turn.”

The SCP has a clear statement about their intent and purpose.

The SCP Wiki is a collaborative speculative fiction website about the SCP Foundation, a secretive organization that contains anomalous or supernatural items and entities away from the eyes of the public — or so it may appear.

A fictional conspiracy website of 30 million words is part of the training data for AIs that have no context, no ability to distinguish fact from fiction, which then credulously fills gullible human minds with bullshit. That’s the real danger of AI.

I wonder if the AIs have also been soaking in Charles Stross’s novels. I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s not a purely AI thing.

Actually, throughout history people’s minds have been poisoned by the Book of Revelation. Ban the Bible!

One could argue that capitalism is satanic, I guess

I haven’t eaten at Chipotle for years. Similarly, I haven’t had a Margarita in years, even though I think they’re tasty. So I’m not boycotting Chipotle, it’s just that I have no interest in what they offer. I want to be perfectly clear, though: it’s not because I think they’re satanic.

This is the time of year when born-again, fundamentalist Christians are straining to find reasons to hate (something they’re so good at), and their latest reason to shriek while they wait for the seasonal Starbucks cups to come out is Chipotle’s Hallowe’en advertising gimmick. They’re selling Margaritas with a Ouija board hook!

It’s demonic, you know.

The Chipotle controversy reflects a much larger cultural shift.

Tarot readings are increasingly presented as tools for self-discovery. Astrology promises insight into relationships and destiny. Psychic consultations offer supposed contact with deceased loved ones. Spirit guides are promoted in some wellness circles as sources of wisdom.

What previous generations of Christians recognized as occult practices are now frequently repackaged as empowerment, entertainment, or spiritual exploration.

And the marketing is inviting. There is nothing particularly frightening about colorful tarot cards, a fashionable psychic influencer, or a Ouija board appearing in a humorous commercial.

That is precisely why discernment is necessary.

Christians need not believe every Halloween decoration is demonic or that watching a fictional supernatural story constitutes occult participation. There is a meaningful distinction between portraying something and deliberately practicing it.

But when society treats divination, spirit communication, and supernatural guidance as recreational activities, Christians should recognize the danger.

The concern is not simply that people become comfortable with occult imagery. It’s that they may eventually become comfortable with the practices themselves.

Gosh. Atheists must be the godliest, purest, saintliest people on Earth, because we also don’t practice Tarot readings, astrology, or psychic consultations, and we think spirit guides are bunk. I’m not tempted by Chipotle or its Margaritas.

Besides, we have a Qdoba in the student union (no alcohol) and a good Mexican restaurant in town (with a bar and genuine Margaritas made on site.)

Oooh, Morris is at the center of a UFO conspiracy theory!

A farmer in Morris, Minnesota discovered a mysterious large metallic object in his cornfield. (It’s always going to be a cornfield around here.)

That thing is large, almost 3½ meters across. We don’t know much about it, as it has already been hauled away, and unnamed federal agencies are telling us nothing. But that just means the internet is having a ball making up stories! I’ve already discovered multiple sites using the “some say” construction: some say it is a crashed alien spaceship! They never tell us who the “some” might be.

One of the more interesting videos about it is full of AI-generated slop interspersed with actual photos of Morris. It’s about 75% garbage. The debris changes shape every few seconds.

Another has a guy in a tuxedo and alien mask speculating about the “great unknown”.

I’ve never lived in a hotspot for alien conspiracies before. It’s fun, but it will fade away soon enough, especially since more credible sources have identified what it is.

About a month ago, a Chinese rocket took off from a remote spaceport in the Gobi Desert, released 10 satellites into orbit, then reignited its engine and put itself on a trajectory to rain down debris over the American Midwest.

The rocket’s flight on September 15 lasted between 75 and 80 minutes, and it came down without completing a full orbit of the Earth. Social media posts at the time showed streaks of fiery debris falling from the sky, heading north over Kansas toward Minnesota. The overnight spectacle was also visible on the western horizon from Wisconsin.

The exact time, location, and direction of the debris allowed experts to connect it to the launch of a Zhuque-2E rocket, a medium-lift vehicle built by a Chinese company called LandSpace. The rocket had launched from Dongfeng, a commercial launch zone co-located with the military-run Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, less than two hours before.

So…not aliens, but Chinese rockets crashing in an American cornfield is almost as juicy. I eagerly await the next wave of paranoia to sweep across us.

Wait, what? We’re live again?

Yuck, I had my head deep in the bowels of the beast. I finally got BlueHost to accept me as the Man in Charge, but it still wasn’t working, and they told me I had to work through Digital Ocean (yeesh, boy is that complicated) and get them to tell cloudflare to accept our domain address…and it was looking like a nightmare. And then I suddenly look up and it was working! For now!

This job is so easy. I have no idea what I’m doing.

A resonant quote

I come from a working class family. I grew up watching my father struggle, often working two jobs, just to make poverty level wages. He’d come home with calloused hands stained with oil and grease, and would be too tired to play with his kids. My mother was a full-time homemaker, with 6 kids, and she worked just as hard — and later, when I was in high school, she also took on a full time job. They both worked at Boeing, a capricious employer, that would lay them off if they didn’t get a contract one year, and then they’d have to scramble to find new jobs. They managed to keep us kids fed and clothed, but I don’t know how, as I managed to crawl up to the middle class, and I wouldn’t have been able to cope with the stress and responsibility of just 3 kids.

And that is why I can never support any Republican, and way too many Democrats, because they’re the ones making the smug statements Zinn describes here.

“I’ve always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn’t worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, as I saw my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and the politicians,- harder than anybody, still struggle in poverty.”
– Howard Zinn.

Throw the rascals out in November.

Update on Professor Piss

You may recall that last Spring, a chemistry professor at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota was accused of urinating on student belongings, and was dismissed from his position. His troubles have greatly increased: he has been formally charged with a felony.

There has been a confession.

Urination had been found in trash cans, individuals’ water bottles and inside professors’ decorations, the state criminal court document said.

Investigators determined Fischer was responsible for the series of urine-related cases, and he resigned from Macalester College, where he had spent 25 years working.

Authorities confronted Fischer before charging him, the court document said. He allegedly shared that “during the last one and a half to two years he developed a habit of urinating in a cup and disposing the contents in either trash cans or lab sinks around campus”, according to the document.

Calling it a “habit” doesn’t make it better.

Hot tip for any young people hoping for a career in the sciences: having a criminal record of peeing all over your workplace is the kiss of death for your employment prospects. Dr Fischer has flushed away his 25-year teaching career with his “habit”.

Our president is a bloody-minded child

In a horrible, tragic incident, a man with a history of mental illness climbed a fence at a South Yorkshire zoo and walked up to a Siberian tiger, which did what a tiger does. It swiftly killed him. His family is grieving. It’s all over the news — this was such a rare and unusual event.

Our mentally ill president, who watches television constantly, saw the video, and rather than doing something anywhere close to presidential, or what a sober adult would do, like expressing his sympathies, chose to eruct on social media.

Donald Trump reposted a silent 41-second video apparently showing the attack on his Truth Social account on Tuesday, captioning it: “Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT.”

A minute later, he posted a 24-second video compilation of lion attacks on people, this one accompanied by jaunty music.

So presidential. So dignified.

Can someone take him to the zoo and leave a few cage doors unlocked?

It got worse.

“President Trump posted a wild AI-generated video late Tuesday that showed him chasing, tackling and befriending a Siberian tiger, hours after he had warned his Truth Social followers: ‘Don’t ever mess with nature!’” the New York Post reports.