Category Archives: culture

The Pope’s Encyclical

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are amused by the press’ response to Pope Leo XIV’s writ that warns of the dangers that Artificial Intelligence presents to the humanity of us all.

I’m amused by the Pope’s naïveté. He wrote this (as cited by the editors), for instance:

Some of what he writes is hard to dispute, such as that AI has “harmful uses, such as the manipulation of information or violations of privacy.”

So do the printing press and reporters since that machine’s invention engage in the harm of manipulating information—what they choose to write, what they choose to not write, how they choose to present either. So do the reporters, specifically, with the means they use to snoop out what they choose then to write about.

And

“There is also a subtler danger,” he writes, of AI “reflecting and reinforcing the stereotypes or ideological bias of their designers and developers.”

“Subtler dangers?” That’s the press and reporters here, too. Reporters today only write consistently with their preconceived notions and/or those of their employers, the press’ collection of editors and publishers. Particular stereotypes are blithely peddled where they support those preconceived notions or contradict the obviously wrong notions of those whom they oppose.

The Pope is on firm ground when he advises the flock—and the rest of us—on morality and the role of God in our lives. However, if he’s going to move from the general of morals and God’s Word to specifics like the tools we use, he would do well to at least be consistent. AI is in many respects, if not most, simply an extension of the printing press, the press industry, and reporters in the arena of information generation and dissemination.

Birthright Political Seat

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In last Tuesday’s Texas Progressive-Democratic Party primary runoff election “for a recently redrawn House seat,” ex-Progressive-Democrat Congressman Colin Allred (from a pre-redraw district) defeated incumbent Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman (from a pre-redraw district) Julie Johnson by 54%-46%.

This is upsetting to senior Party members, even as the upset itself is surprising by its existence. The upset is centered on Johnson being Texas’ only openly LGBTQ Representative in Congress, as if that matters in some way.

For instance, here are Congressmen Mark Takano (D, CA) and Ritchie Torres (D, NY), Party’s Equality PAC co-chairs:

It’s no secret that, without Julie, Texas—and likely the entire South—will lose openly LGBTQ representation in Congress. Many in our community remain deeply hurt by Colin Allred’s decision to challenge one of our own.

The effrontery of Allred—that seat belonged to the LGBTQ community.

The dismay also is typical of Party’s attitude toward blacks. Johnson is white, and Allred is black. That man should have remembered his place, which is squarely in back of the LGBTQ community.

Never mind that, by solidly choosing Allred in the primary, Party voters themselves clearly demonstrated their overall preference for Allred, if not their overall dissatisfaction with Johnson.

Self-Serving and Dishonest

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The Chicago Teachers Union wanted to raise dues on its Chicago membership to the tune of an additional $800 per year. They claimed they wanted the additional money for

win[ning] a majority of the first 21 person fully elected school board

and

resources to fund a statewide millionaires tax campaign

Union management doesn’t care that their own union bylaws say

…our dues are not used for political purposes—so our PAC relies on extra contributions from our members to support progressive candidates….

The CTU’s dues and its PAC are entirely separate from each other. So why raise dues in order to fund political purposes? Because CTU’s management is that dishonest and that contemptuous of union members’ intelligence.

It turns out that CTU members are not as dumb as their Betters think they are. The dues increase was voted down by roughly 3:2.

Members will need to be actively vigilant, though, these Betters have shown their colors, and they’ll be back with more attempts, or they’ll simply weasel-word their way around the members’ No and go ahead, anyway. This is, after all, Chicago.

Throw Money at it

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The letter-writer seems to be writing from the Left. Opening with Praise for Ohio’s Republican candidate for Governor Vivek Ramaswamy’s proposal for attacking Medicaid fraud, he quickly pivoted.

States need more funds to address fraud….

How typical.

No, States do not need more funds to combat and drastically reduce, much less “address,” fraud. Were States actually to get serious about combatting and reducing Medicaid, they’d uncover 10s of millions, if not billions, of dollars of fraud, and they’d recover significant percentages of those dollars. Those dollars then could feed back into the program to help keep Medicaid fraud down to an absolute minimum.

To address the problem for long-term of vastly reduced fraud and commensurate reduced fraud recovery funds, States need only to reallocate existing spending. They most assuredly do not need more money blindly and blithely tossed over the transom at the problem.

The “Anti-Weaponization” Fund

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I have some thoughts on this and how it might work. Of course, I’m speculating; no criteria for eligibility or payout have been set, the five-person “adjudication” panel has not been stood up, and it’s possible the funding will not survive Congressional purse-control oversight. Within that, here I go again.

Payouts, I expect, will be limited to actual loss, with no add-ons related to punitive matters. In many respects, this will be straightforward, but there are a number of areas where losses are not clearly specifiable and/or the alleged losses are highly subjective. These latter include losses from loss of jobs, loss of business revenue, closure of the business. Courts have gotten fairly adept, if widely variable across jurisdictions, in assessing this sort of loss.

Even hazier are things like loss through death of a spouse, loss of the spouse’s income (which is separate from his/her death, even if the income loss resulted from the death), loss of conjugal relations or alienation of affection resulting from divorce or the affair that led to the divorce—and yes, some divorces have occurred as a result of many of the J6 prosecutions and, in the present context, persecutions. Courts make guesses at these losses, but only guesses; they’re not very good at it.

The next, and the overwhelmingly most important, problem, though is this. Given provable or even merely articulable loss that meets fund eligibility criteria to this point, it’s going to be deucedly hard to prove the political targeting, lawfare nature of the cases for which an applicant is seeking recompense. At best, satisfying a court, most likely satisfying the succession of courts, appellate courts, the Supreme Court, with the potential for remands to lower courts for further consideration or for reconsideration, will take years and years to reach a final decision. And that decision may well be that the matter at hand was not, in fact, political targeting, and so no payout is due.

And one more question. Given a final decision, whence the monies for the legal costs of getting to one? Will the Fund pay the government’s legal costs apart from any payout ordered? If not, where will the government’s funding come from?