Meaning

To succeed, investigative reporters have to be good at perceiving relatively obscure patterns out of random bits of information. It often starts with a hunch, then juxtaposition, followed often by a stroke of luck. 

Visual artists sometimes discover patterns as they work. It often starts with an idea, a single image and the perception that things are interconnected in mysterious ways.

Soon they are making things visible that had previously been invisible.

Many other people who do not consider themselves journalists or artists have these same skill sets. They are quite good at solving mysteries, drawing conclusions and finding meaning in life.

Some of them make great story-tellers.

The stories we tell each other matter. They sustain our families, our communities, our religions. 

Patterns, connections, stories. It’s all really simple. Caring for each other is the meaning of life.

LINKS:

• Hurricane Hilary could dump over a year’s worth of rain on parts of the Southwest (CNN)

• Fulton County Sheriff's Office investigating threats to grand jurors who voted on Trump indictment (CBS)

• Texas woman accused of threatening to kill judge overseeing Trump election case and a congresswoman (WFAA)

• Trump cancels press conference on election fraud claims, citing attorneys' advice (NPR)

• American democracy is cracking. These forces help explain why. (WP)

• Judge dismisses Hunter Biden misdemeanor tax charges (The Hill)

• The Cobb County School Board in Georgia upheld the firing of Katie Rinderle, a fifth-grade teacher at Due West Elementary School in Marietta who was terminated in June after reading a book about gender identity to her class. The book had been purchased at a school book fair. [HuffPost]

• A Talisman Against the Taliban (Time)

• Taliban’s ties with Pakistan fraying amid mounting security concerns (Al Jazeera)

• Corruption in Afghanistan offers lessons for billions going to Ukraine (NPR)

• Russia recruited operatives online to target weapons crossing Poland (WP)

• Biden turns to Camp David diplomacy for first-ever trilateral summit with Japan and South Korea (CNN)

• At Camp David Summit, Japan, South Korea and U.S. Present a United Front (NYT)

• Report: Potential NYT lawsuit could force OpenAI to wipe ChatGPT and start over (Ars Technica)

• A Letter Prompted Talk of AI Doomsday. Many Who Signed Weren't Actually AI Doomers (Wired)

• AI Is the Real Deal—if You Understand It. (Barron’s)

• LinkedIn Says ChatGPT-Related Job Postings Have Ballooned 21-Fold Since November (Forbes)

• Does artificial intelligence pose a risk to humans? (Al Jazeera)

• Companies Increasingly Fear Backlash Over Their AI Work (WSJ)

• AI is speeding up scientific discoveries and helping to spot new ideas (Axios)

• Some of the world's biggest advertisers are experimenting with using generative AI software to cut costs and increase productivity. But many companies remain wary of security and copyright risks as well as the dangers of unintended biases baked into the raw information. (Reuters)

• AI chatbots become more sycophantic as they get more advanced —

  If a person says they believe an objectively false statement, AIs tend to agree with them – and the problem seems to get worse as models get bigger (New Scientist)

• Millions of old printed photos are sitting in storage. Digitizing them can unlock countless memories (AP)

• Man Tinkering With Anecdote Set List Before Next Date (The Onion)

 

Are Manners Obsolete?

 (I first published an earlier version of this essay three years ago in August 2020.)

One legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic will almost certainly be the increased use of robots in our society. Among their advantages, they don't need masks or social distancing and they don't take sick days, vacations or parental leave.

They also don't easily take offense when treated badly or need to be thanked for doing a good job. In fact they don’t require any emotional involvement whatsoever.

As robotized services including Alexa and Siri have become more embedded in our offices and households, a question that occurs to me is what long-term impact are they having on the way we communicate with those around us.

It starts, as do all things, with the children. Kids quickly learn to ask Siri or Aleza to do something in a commanding voice, which then becomes anger if the robot cannot comply with their wishes quickly enough.

I wonder how a child growing up in such circumstances will treat his or her employees in the future.

When voice commands first became a thing, I found myself speaking in a respectful voice and often thanking Siri for her help. Siri never answered. The engineers who developed her apparently hadn't bothered to work "you're welcome" into her vocabulary.

Thus, my politeness fell on deaf ears.

And although this type of software is supposed to be intelligent, i.e., it learns from interacting with us, in my experience our robotic friends are in no way learning to be more polite.

As for humans, when we are not rewarded for being polite, we tend to become less so over time. Gradually, for example, I’ve learned to issue simple straight-out commands to my voiced units. There is no point in engaging in social niceties with an entity that doesn’t respond accordingly, is there? 

But what I am conditioning myself to become?

When it comes to the people who have designed the relevant software in this case, I‘m not sure that words like gracious, polite, or well-mannered are the first to pop into mind. I don't mean to be impolite, but many of these folks are direct, logical and on occasions outright rude. After all, social skills simply are not at a premium for anyone during an intense Agile development cycle.

As our society populates the environment with robots, maybe the ultimate effect will be that nobody will have much of a reason to be nice anymore.

This would, of course, resemble our political culture, where it seems politeness and respect for others became utterly extinct some time back. 

Indeed, being not nice is often a virtue in modern America. And those who cheer on the misogynist, racist, homophobic demagogues at political rallies? They resemble nothing so much as robots. 

The news summaries in an age like this might as well be compiled by robots as well, I guess, but in fact I’ve done the ones that follow in the old-fashioned way. So please enjoy them. 

LINKS:

• Trump Discovers That Some Things Are Actually Illegal (Atlantic)

• The fall of Rudy Giuliani: How ‘America’s mayor’ tied his fate to Donald Trump and got indicted (AP)

• Trump prosecutor Fani Willis faces racist abuse after indicting ex-US president (Guardian)

• 'You are in our sights': Black judge overseeing Trump 2020 indictment gets racist death threat (USA Today)

• Trump’s Indictment Has Georgia Republicans Fearing Replay of 2020 (NYT)

• Clues point to identities of ‘unindicted co-conspirators’ in alleged Ga. election office breach (WP)

• The entire capital city of Canada’s Northwest Territories has been ordered to evacuate as hundreds of wildfires scorch the region, officials say (CNN)

• Hurricane Hilary on path toward Southern California (CBS)

• Hawaii’s governor promises to prevent ‘land grabs’ after Maui wildfires (Al Jazeera)

• How a fight over immunity unraveled Hunter Biden’s plea deal (WP)

• From Marc Benioff to Mark Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s billionaires have acquired huge plots of land in Hawaii. Here’s how they’re responding to the devastating fire (Fortune)

• After Maui’s Wildfire Horror, Residents Search for a Way Forward (NYT)

• Flying taxis could soon be a booming business (Economist)

• What Happens to All the Stuff We Return (New Yorker)

• Taliban official says women lose value if their faces are visible to men in public (AP)

• Two years later, the US has abandoned both Afghanistan and accountability (The Hill)

• How the lives — and sexual freedoms — of Genghis Khan’s Mongolians helped shape a civilisation (Financial Times)

• Argentina’s angry polarization is a warning for the United States (WP)

• Consulting giant McKinsey unveils its own generative AI tool for employees (Venture Beat)

• AI Could Soon Help Us Talk to Animals, But There Is a Problem (ScienceAlert)

• AP, other news organizations develop standards for use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms (AP)

• The New York Times Has Had a Summer of AI Anxiety: “They’re Freaking Out” (Vanity Fair)

• Giuliani Insists Breaking The Law Not A Crime (The Onion)

Opening Old Boxes

Among the possessions I recently reclaimed from storage is a painted cardboard box. It’s pastel green and dates from the 1960s, when I went away to college. I guess my parents painted the box in an effort to strengthen it.

Inside were many copies of Rolling Stone containing articles of mine I’ve not read since I wrote them in the 1970s.

But there also was this (above), a piece in Life magazine about student protestors, including a picture of me being escorted out of an occupied building by the cops, under arrest.

We had been occupying the Washtenaw County Building in support of local “welfare moms,” mostly black, who in our view were being denied a decent level of benefits at the time.

It was 1968 and the campuses were erupting with similar protests, mainly over civil rights or anti-war issues. This was one of the times I mixed my nascent role as a journalist with political activity, and wouldn’t you know, it ended up criminalized and memorialized by Life magazine.

Of course, at the time, I was proud of what I’d done. I wrote about it in the Michigan Daily. The charges of trespassing on public property, to which I pled, carried no actual penalty beyond a day’s labor in a local park.

But once there, I and my fellow convicts refused to cut down the trees as we were instructed to do, as an environmental protest. Thinking back on it, we must have been one big royal pain in the ass for the authorities.

They chose to ignore the fact we didn’t serve our sentence, turning instead to more pressing matters, such as the bombing of the local CIA office, which led to the indictment of John Sinclair, and that brought John Lennon to Ann Arbor to sing in his support.

One thing led to another for me and within a few years I was editing pieces Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono produced for SunDance magazine out in San Francisco.

A few more years and I was a reporter at Rolling Stone.

At the bottom of the files in the old box was my FBI file, which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The Bureau kept track of me starting with that arrest in college and my work for an underground paper in Ann Arbor. It tracked me as I relocated to San Francisco to work at SunDance and through the years at Rolling Stone.

Much of the information in that file is blacked out in the classic way the FBI redacted files prior to releasing them under the FOIA, but there was nothing in there of any consequence as that welfare protest was my only arrest. I hope agents enjoyed reading my many articles criticizing their COINTELPRO tactics.

There’s also non-FBI items I saved in the old box such as a note from Jann Wenner thanking me for sharing some of the FOIA information with him after I’d left Rolling Stone in 1977.

Many other letters, clippings, files and memories pored forth out of that old cardboard box painted pastel green. I’m pretty sure my parents never imagined that that box would end up with the stuff it did. 

And neither did I.

(I first published this one a year ago.)

LINKS:

• Trump claims mystery press conference report clears him of Georgia election charges (Independent)

• Trump and co-defendants expected to be booked at Fulton County jail, sheriff says (NBC)

• 2 Trump indictments: One a scalpel, one a hammer (WP)

• Inside a Georgia Prosecutor’s Investigation of a Former President (NYT)

• No political figure has owed so much to television as former President Donald Trump. HuffPost's Paul Blumenthal takes a look at America's various "Trials of the Century," and the parallells to the O.J. Simpson case. [HuffPost]

• Hawaii wildfires are a reminder: Natural disaster risks are everywhere (The Hill)

• Elon Musk keeps getting creepier (The Verge)

• Appeals court embraces abortion-pill limits, sets up Supreme Court review (WP)

• Judge blocks Internet Archive from sharing copyrighted books (AP)

• Watch: Police Raid Small Kansas Newspaper, Seize Computers (WSJ)

• State investigators will probe police raid of Kansas newspaper office (WP)

• Kansas prosecutor says police should return computers and cellphones seized in raid on newspaper (AP)

• Publisher of raided Kansas newspaper ‘vindicated’ by prosecutor’s decision to return seized items after backlash (CNN)

• In late July, the board of the Campbell County Public Library system in Wyoming voted to terminate Terri Lesley, its longtime director. For two years Lesley stuck by her beliefs that a diverse collection of books is integral to a successful library. [HuffPost]

• The World Isn’t Ready for the Next Decade of AI — Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, talks about how AI and other technologies will take over everything—and possibly threaten the very structure of the nation-state. (Wired)

• Google's AI-Powered Search Can Now Summarize Web Pages for You (CNET)

• Google's AI model Gemini to power Bard, enterprise and cloud products - report (Seeking Alpha)

• How Blockchain Can Solve the Music Industry’s AI Problem (Variety)

• How to Prevent an AI Catastrophe (Foreign Affairs)

• Today’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence is based on neuroscience from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Imagine what A.I. could do if it incorporates the latest breakthroughs (Fortune)

• Embracing The AI Revolution (Forbes)

• Ukraine war: Ship leaves Odesa despite Russia Black Sea attack fears (BBC)

• Women in Afghanistan: From almost everywhere to almost nowhere (UN Women)

• "Our dreams were shattered": Afghan women reflect on 2 years of Taliban rule (CBS)

• Bread, Work, Freedom—Afghan Women's Two Years of Resistance (Newsweek)

• The Islamic State’s rise in Afghanistan (GZero)

• New data: Global wealth rises, inequality falls (Axios)

• Mom Asks Art Museum Docent Where The Nice Paintings Are (The Onion)

 

Slouching Towards Singularity

For months now in my daily news summaries I’ve included multiple links to articles about artificial intelligence — up to a dozen on some days. It’s an important topic but I have to admit I’m not much closer to having a firm opinion about the merits of AI than when I started studying it.

Is it good or bad? Maybe that is not even the right question to ask because it no doubt is both.

Will it cost jobs or create jobs? 

Probably in the near term, it will cost many more jobs than it will create, but I get the sense that over time it may turn out to be a lot like the dawn of a new agricultural era, with humans serving like sheepherders supervising AI-powered entities handling those hard (and soft) labor tasks we still require.

Will AI help solve our most intractable problems? Like climate change, war, poverty, health issues, violent crime, environmental decline, hate, inequality, the overall spiritual bankruptcy of our species?

The answers to those questions are simply unknown.

What we can say for certain is that ultimately AI will be what we make of it — a cliche I know but an apt one. For now, prominent researchers have recommended a pause while we collectively figure out how to proceed. That is not really happening, although there are nascent attempts at developing regulatory regimes in several parts of the globe, mainly here and in Europe.

My best guess, therefore, is that we will move forward haltingly with AI, not really knowing where we’re headed. If that sounds familiar, it’s also a pretty good summation of overall human progress to date, isn’t it? It’s apparently going to take more than the existential threat of singularity to alter that.

LINKS:

• Fani Willis’s grand-slam indictment against Donald Trump (The Hill)

• Trump Indictment, Part IV: A Spectacle That Has Become Surreally Routine (NYT)

• McConnell says fighting Trump's influence over GOP foreign policy is 'the most important thing' he's doing now (Insider)

• State investigators will probe police raid of Kansas newspaper office (WP)

• Lessons to learn from a wildfire catastrophe (Guardian)

• Experts Scrutinize Hawaiian Electric as They Search for the Maui Wildfire Cause (NYT)

• Climate change came for Maui. The rest of us are next. (WP)

• Clarence Thomas Faces DOJ Investigation Calls as Anger Grows Over Gifts (Newsweek)

• Studios Offer Streaming Data, Writers’ Room Latitude in New Proposal to WGA (The Wrap)

• Window-washing robots are working on Manhattan skyscrapers (CNBC)

• Judge Rules in Favor of Montana Youths in a Landmark Climate Case (NYT)

• Gas station explosion kills 35, injures dozens in Russia’s Dagestan region (CNN)

• Russian central bank jacks up rates to 12% to support battered rouble (Reuters)

• Russia will struggle to cope with a sinking rouble (Economist)

• Taliban Fighters, Unsettled by Peace, Seek New Battles Abroad (NYT)

• Taliban marks two years since return to power in Afghanistan (Al Jazeera)

• Afghans dreaming of US refuge feel stuck in processing limbo (Reuters)

• Afghanistan Changed Me (Atlantic)

• The Taliban is snuffing out hope in Afghanistan. It will fail. (WP)

• How life in Afghanistan has changed two years after Taliban takeover (BBC)

• Amazon taps generative AI to enhance product reviews (TechCrunch)

• How Google is Planning to Beat OpenAI (The Information)

• 8 Ways AI Blurs the Line Between Reality and Fantasy (MUO)

• Jobs Are for Humans — Why ChatGPT hasn’t ignited the employment apocalypse that so many predicted. (Slate)

• Woman Finally Forgives Self For Eating Entire Donut All Those Years Ago

  (The Onion)

 

Line in the Sand

 Trump’s been indicted again and there’s plenty to say about that, which others will handle. But I want to focus on a different story that likely will be overlooked with the national focus on Trump.

The two stories may seem unrelated but they are in fact two sides of the same coin — the rise of autocracy in America. Freedom of the Press is an essential part of democracy and it is under assault in America on many levels in unacceptable ways. 

In the latest assault in a small town in Kansas, and I quote the Wichita Eagle, “Marion city police and the Marion County sheriff’s office did something on Friday that no government agency in America has any right to do. They shut down a newspaper.”

This case has a number of provocative details. I’ve included multiple links below about what happened and urge each reader to check into them and decide what you think.

I know what I think. This kind of abuse of government authority is a precursor to authoritarianism, which is on the rise here and around the world. It has no place in America.

The officials behind the raid must be punished and the newspaper allowed to obtain restitution. But one tragic impact of the illegal raid can never be fixed.

The elderly co-owner of the small community newspaper was overcome by stress and died soon after her home was raided. Therefore, the police and the sheriff responsible for this outrage not only have violated the Constitution, they have her blood on their hands.

RELATED LINKS:

• 98-Year-Old Co-Owner Of US Newspaper Dies Of 'Stress' After Police Raids —The Kansas Press Association described the search as "unprecedented" and "an assault on the very foundation of democracy." (NDTV)

• A five-cop Kansas police department is facing criticism after it raided the offices of the Marion County Record and the home of its publisher and owner. The co-owner of the paper collapsed and died later, with her son blaming the stress of the raid. Publisher Eric Meyer believes the raid was prompted by an unflattering story about a local business owner. [AP]

• After a police raid on a Kansas newspaper, questions mount (WP)

• Raid of Small Kansas Newspaper Raises Free Press Concerns (NYT)

• Raid on Kansas newspaper is an intolerable overreach by police (Wichita Eagle)

OTHER NEWS LINKS:

• Georgia charges Trump, former advisers in 2020 election case. The sprawling 98-page indictment listed 19 defendants and 41 criminal counts in all. All of the defendants were charged with racketeering, which is used to target members of organized crime groups and carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. (Reuters)

• Read the indictment against Trump in Georgia case (Axios)

• Georgia prosecutors have messages showing Trump’s team is behind voting system breach (CNN)

• 'Daring the judge': Donald Trump attacks judge in 2020 election case, despite her warnings (USA Today)

• Two Months in Georgia: How Trump Tried to Overturn the Vote (NYT)

• Hawaii churches offer prayers for the dead and the missing after devastating Maui wildfires (AP)

• Rising political threats take US into uncharted territory as 2024 election looms (AP)

• Lawyers for Hunter Biden said in a court filing that prosecutors reneged on a plea deal that would have resolved tax and firearms charges against the US president’s son as his father seeks reelection. (Reuters)

• Ironically, states’ rights are crushing the GOP’s abortion agenda (The Hill)

• Abortion Is Inflaming the GOP’s Biggest Electoral Problem — Ohio showed how abortion is weakening the Republican Party’s position in the nation’s largest metro areas. (Atlantic)

• Revealing the Smithsonian’s ‘racial brain collection’ (WP)

• Russian Ruble at Weakest Level Since Early Days of Ukraine War (WSJ)

• The Taliban are entrenched in Afghanistan after 2 years of rule. Women and girls pay the price (AP)

• The reset in the US strategy on engaging the Taliban may work (Al Jazeera)

• Afghan universities ready to readmit women but not until Taliban leader says it’s ok, official says (AP)

• Islam Does Not Ban Girls' Education. So Why Does The Taliban? (RFE)

• AI is going to eliminate way more jobs than anyone realizes (Insider)

• AI facial recognition led to 8-month pregnant woman's wrongful carjacking arrest in front of kids: lawsuit (Fox)

• "Any cybersecurity company failing to leverage AI is obsolete" (CTech)

• AI Hallucinations Could Be a Cybersecurity Risk (MUO)

• How AI is filtering millions of qualified candidates out of the workforce (EuroNews)

• Why the Great AI Backlash Came for a Tiny Startup You’ve Probably Never Heard Of (Wired)

• Amazon adds AI-generated review summaries so you don’t have to read the comments (The Verge)

• Modern romance: falling in love with AI (CNN)

• AI is setting off a great scramble for data (Economist)

• 3 ways AI is transforming music (The Conversation)

• Time To Redesign Your Career For The Age Of Artificial Intelligence (Forbes)

• How to Prevent an AI Catastrophe (Foreign Affairs)

• CEO Promotes Self To Senior CEO (The Onion)

Redwood Country

Back from a weekend at one of the old family camps (established 1914) in the coastal range under the redwoods with wood cabins, bunkbeds, a climbing wall, zip line, tie-dye sessions and a centralized dining hall. I could almost smell the Manzanita I associate with these parts of California, but not quite. Oddly, I lost my sense of smell several years ago.

But as I watched my grandchildren climb, zip, swim, play sports, clamber atop massive redwood stumps, and generally swarm the surroundings, I was remembering my own childhood in various campgrounds in Michigan six and seven decades ago.

It is so much drier out here, compared to the lakes and streams that crisscross the Upper Midwest, and the trees are so much taller and wider in girth here. But the children and their antics are the same through space and time.

There is always a sense of adventure and an ineffable air of wildness to urban and suburban kids when they get out into nature. It’s as if a set of instincts kick in, telling them to be on the lookout for predators, real or imagined, as well as edible plants, sticks that be used either for weapons or to roast marshmallows, and an eagerness to hear scary stories. 

By my current age, camp is more about observing than participating in these activities, but also spinning tales if asked. There was the time my friend and I found a dead man floating in a lagoon, for example, and occasional interactions with bears, skunks or large, coiled snakes. Also a lot of wild blueberries, blackberries and strawberries.

But I tend not to favor the scarier stories for little children, who already have overactive imaginations and who know all to well that they are, well, small. And therefore vulnerable. Anyway the main danger in the woods is always other people — hunters who get trigger-happy, campfire enthusiasts who don’t douse the flames and coals sufficiently, and other mischief-makers.

That’s why the rest of the animal kingdom, if they know what’s best for them, give the likes of us a wide berth.

These were among my thoughts as I dozed off in the shade of the redwoods, hearing an unseen small plane fly lazily overhead, and still not able to smell the Manzanitas. 

Who needs the news? Life is good.

Camp (Loma Mar)