Monthly Archives: April 2025

On the hoof:

From last week’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race:

As the first news outlets began calling the Wisconsin Supreme Court election for the liberal candidate Susan Crawford, her opponent called her — to concede.

Minutes later Tuesday night, the conservative-backed Brad Schimel took the stage at his watch party to acknowledge the loss. Angry yells broke out. One woman began to chant about his opponent: “Cheater.”

Schimel didn’t hesitate. “No,” he responded. “You’ve got to accept the results.” Later, he returned to the stage with his classic rock cover band to jam on his bass. [AP]

Schimel is a classy dude when it comes to the basics of democracy. While the Wisconsin Republican Party has conducted itself extremely poorly over the last decade or so, there are still Republicans who know how this is supposed to go.

One of those Republicans who’ve been less than gracious was Michael Gableman, a lawyer and former judge and occasional subject of this blog. He seems to received a dose of comeuppance:

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who led a widely derided review of the 2020 presidential election,  searching for evidence for baseless accusations of fraud, will have his law license suspended for three years, according to a stipulated agreement between him and the state Office of Lawyer Regulation (OLR).

Law Forward, the progressive voting rights focused firm, filed a grievance against Gableman with the OLR in 2023. The OLR filed a complaint against Gableman in November that alleged, among other counts, that he had failed to “provide competent representation” and to “abstain from all offensive personality” and of violating attorney-client privilege. [Wisconsin Examiner]

Perhaps the officials of the Wisconsin Republican Party will pay attention to this object lesson and stop acting like idiots.

This morning the markets reflect the tariff war with which President Trump is afflicting the world, but there’s an outcome that I worry about. Here’s CNN/Business:

Trump also threatened to slap an extra 50% tariff on China if the country doesn’t back down from its retaliatory tariffs it announced Friday. China’s Commerce Ministry on Tuesday said the country would “fight to the end” of the trade war and would continue to stand up to Trump.

The escalating trade war between the two largest economies is turning into a high-stakes game of chicken. China may be staring down a midnight deadline to avoid tariffs surging over 100%, but it so far it is standing up to Trump, with no signs of blinking.

China has squashed deals that Trump wants – including a US company taking control of ports on both sides of the Panama Canal and a deal to sell TikTok to a US-based company. Both countries’ economies would be hurt in a trade war – and given the massive trade imbalance with the United States, China could very well be hurt worse.

Here’s the thing about autocracies like China – leaders, especially those who attain lifetime positions, like Xi Jinping, tend to leave only when dead – and rarely voluntarily. They become victims of their failures or their rivals.

And, knowing that, thrusting China and, therefore, Xi into a crisis like this may have existential overtones for Xi. This could lead to violence.

For all the bluster from both sides, neither wants to take this to the next level. Neither leader can afford to have the citizenry become restive, Trump moreso than Xi. After all, Xi can spin a brutal response as Being necessarily tough, but here in the States, while such a claim would gain some supporters, the substantial opinion to a brutal response will be to place Trump in an inferior position to most other leaders, domestic and foreign.

If you have to oppress your citizens, you’re not a strong leader. You’re weak and a bit of an idiot – and in danger of being run out of town.

So watching this play out should prove very interesting.

Spaceweather.com has a warning for folks with associations to objects in orbit around Mercury, Venus … Earth:

THE CENTENNIAL GLEISSBERG CYCLE: You’ve heard of the 11-year sunspot cycle. But what about the Centennial Gleissberg Cycle? The Gleissberg Cycle is a slow modulation of the solar cycle, which suppresses sunspot numbers every 80 to 100 years. It may have been responsible for the remarkable weakness of Solar Cycle 24 in 2012-2013. New research published in the journal Space Weather suggests that the minimum of the Gleissberg Cycle has just passed. If so, solar cycles for the next 50 years could become increasingly intense. Read the paper here.

Along with the phenomenon causing the cycle, folks like Elon Musk, sponsor of the StarLink family of satellites, should have long term concerns about those objects in orbit for which they have responsibility. A big CME could burn out the electronics of those objects.

No fingerpointing, please.

Force majeure:

Force majeure is a clause included in contracts to remove liability for unforeseeable and unavoidable catastrophes interrupting the expected timeline and preventing participants from fulfilling obligations. These clauses generally cover natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes, and human actions, such as armed conflict and human-made diseases. [Investopedia]

Noted in this article title: Tariffs: Howmet Declares Force Majeure; Nintendo, Jaguar Impact, from Investor’s Business Daily, via yahoo! finance.

That’ll tickle President Trump’s … fancy.

The crocuses are blooming.

Last night my Arts Editor and I saw Lettice and Lovage at Theatre In The Round in Minneapolis. This production was quite long, 3+ hours, so be prepared if you go.

The first Act was a bit stodgy, although it did end on a high note; the second Act moved along at a faster, more interesting clip.

The third Act was the best, as various loose ends and what we considered to be throwaway elements came back to haunt the characters. Although bits of it seemed forced, the actors do forget the necessary bonds between the other characters and the audience.

Definitely a mixed bag, as a few audience members disappeared during the intermissions; this production doesn’t appeal to all temperaments. But it may appeal to your’s! A bit of whimsy and an appreciation for characters who find society lacking in graceful aesthetics, and the consequences thereof, is necessary.

Good luck.

“How it got into the hotel bar, I’ll never know.” With apologies to Grouch Marx.^[1]

Sorry. Not really. What triggered some pleasant silliness in this time of shock & unhappiness?

Indeed, many AI scientists are increasingly of the view that LLMs aren’t a route to the lofty goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI), capable of matching or exceeding anything a human can do – a machine that can think, as Turing would have put it. For example, in a recent survey of AI researchers, about 76 per cent of respondents said it was “unlikely” or “very unlikely” that current approaches will succeed in achieving AGI.

Instead, perhaps we need to think of these AIs in a new way. Writing in the journal Science this week, a team of AI researchers says they “should not be viewed primarily as intelligent agents but as a new kind of cultural and social technology, allowing humans to take advantage of information other humans have accumulated”. The researchers compare LLMs to “such past technologies as writing, print, markets, bureaucracies, and representative democracies” that have transformed the way we access and process information. [“Should governments really be using AI to remake the state?” NewScientist (22 March 2025)]

I’ve expressed my opinion that generative AI is little more than a party trick for quite a while, as long-time readers may recall. Its use as a summarizer, however, may be of use in certain situations – although generative AI’s propensity for fallaciousness must give users pause.

But I also wonder why this took so long. Could it be caused by the marketing magic of the artificial intelligence industry? Ask most any AI researcher, and reportedly they will tell you that that what is popularly called artificial intelligence isn’t. It’s better known as machine learning. It even has a well-known acronym, which is ML.

In case you’re wondering, the mythical artificial intelligence is that which can pass the famous Turing Test,

… is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human. In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine’s ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic). [Wikipedia]

Or, in other words, think of your friends and being able to depend on an AI to be as conceited and self-centered as them while spouting mathematical proofs of arcane propositions.

ML? Sure, here’s the Wikipedia definition, but I like mine better. Problem solving is the process of moving from state A (“my car won’t start!”) to state B (“my car started!”). If you know how to get from A to B, you don’t need ML (or AI, either). But if you don’t know how to get from A to B, nor does anyone else, then ML may be applicable. ML has proven reasonably good at discerning rules for taking a set of data (“This set of data represents a breast X-ray”) and discovering its implications (“You have breast cancer!”), if shown what similar sets of data implies.

I’m a bit off the beaten track, so let me get back to marketing. I’ve been somewhat fascinated by the thought that some of our current social chaos is caused by sloppy thinking. For example, those who want socialized medicine, aka single-payer healthcare, will occasionally make the argument that the citizenry deserves free healthcare. They make that statement with great sincerity.

And it’s just total bullshit. If my reader discards the well-meaning but lazy Well, I know what they mean filter, and turns on their literal interpretation capability, the “argument,” such as it is, collapses in a cloud of dust.

And if I continue on along this abstract track, I soon ask if such bad rhetorical devices are actually infecting their reasoning with bad consequences. Our example is certainly unconvincing, but rather than finding more effective arguments, it functions as a placeholder, a checkmark: I made an argument, one that is approved by my fellow enthusiasts. In that sense, the bad rhetorical argument binds together a disparate collection of individuals into a group, which implies social bonds, social hierarchies, and the whole bit of what Western Civilization pursues. It helps accomplish an unstated goal while actually hindering the putative goal.

As I said, it’s better to think of AI as ML, but if we call it AI, a phrase which comes with certain implications consequent of its parts, then certain expectations, beneficial to the patrons of the marketers, will come into play, while the limitations (or advantages, if you think about it) of ML fade from the consciousness.

And so the subtle contamination of the reasoning mind continues.

¹ Yeah, yeah, I know, mine doesn’t depend on the ill-advised lack of punctuation to bring forth the ambiguity; for me, of late, the odd, unrelated multiple meanings of many English words has been striking. Why they went on strike … English is all about confusion masquerading as communication. Yes, the cat tricked me into getting up early this morning, and I’m grumpy about it.

This time around we have Rep Victoria Spartz (R-FL) at a townhall:

“Will you demand the immediate resignation of Pete Hegseth, Michael Waltz, and the rest of the group chat”Spartz: No Crowd: Booo

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2025-03-28T23:59:47.425Z

“Will you demand the immediate resignation of Pete Hegseth, Michael Waltz, and the rest of the group chat”

Spartz: No

Crowd: Booo

Only unspeakable, if understandable, loyalty to the President explains such a refusal to do her duty. She could have made a satisfactory answer out of I’m considering it, but she didn’t.

But long-term readers will be considering the possibility that voters of a conservative tilt, long trained to make judgments solely on issues, and not to pay attention to experience, competency, moderation, and ability to negotiate compromises – even to loathe such attributes – may now be reconsidering these metrics by which to judge Republican candidates. That’s a drum I’ve been beating for a while.

The fact that a candidate can do the abortion jig, the gun rights yodel, even the anti-tax howl, may soon become burdens for Republican candidates, rather than advantages. The more Congress sits on its hands as President Trump’s actions, whether by his mistaken view of the world or on purpose, convert the nation from the leading country on Earth to a quivering lump of sodden gelatin, the more likely there will be a mass replacement of Republican Congresspeople in 2026.

Not that the replacements will necessarily be Democrats. The Democrats, for all of their anticipation at the recent gains in elections since the 2024 Election, have yet to demonstrate significant attempts at reform, although efforts by Governor Newsom (D-CA) and Rep Moulton (D-MA) can be viewed with some optimism by those who are conscious of the errors imputed to Democrats – and their allies. Along with mismanaging the transgender issue, they need to deal with the charges of anti-semitism, the lack of a primary for VP Harris’ ascension to the top of the 2024 ticket after Biden left the race, a general sense of an autocratic inclination, and a few other issues, and, internally, their turn to identitarianism, and what to do about the DEI issue, which currently seems to have become a loser with the citizenry. Oh, and much like the Republicans, the arrogance.

I offer no solutions. I’m an independent. I observe that, against a pathetic group of group of pathetic Republican candidates, the Democrats lost. That observation, if they’re honest, and willing to kick out those who stubbornly cling to positions designed to preserve their positions in the power hierarchy in the Party, should help guide them towards success.

And if they can’t? Then both Parties deserve to be replaced, not just the Republicans. Both Parties are a discouragement.

Some more State level elections took place today yesterday, for those who try to predict the future. Over in Wisconsin, a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court was up for grabs, and WaPo projects a victory for the liberal candidate:

In a state as evenly split as Wisconsin, it’ll be tempting to read the tea leaves into confirmation bias.

Republicans may discuss, if only in private conversation, how this election was not in the context of a larger election. Only those with a special interest in it might attend. Wisconsin has a population of six million, though, so attendance of, guessing here, maybe two million 2.3 million is not a bad turnout; this point may be invalid.

Democrats may be excited if margins hold, but, truth be told, given the disaster in Washington and in State capital Madison, where the Wisconsin Republican Party has made an absolute joke out of itself, I think Democrats should have expected better results.

They may have to commit to self-examination, to listening tours, to understand why they didn’t absolutely cream the conservative candidate, Mr. Schimel. No offense to Mr. Schimel, but those who have associated themselves with him cast a pall over him.

Meanwhile, in Florida two special elections for US House seats took place in Republican-controlled districts, and were won by the Republicans, but a writer on Daily Kos points out that victory margins are going to have shrunk, considerably.

But it still looks like a definitive loss to me.

All that said, Rep Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who had been nominated for UN Ambassador, is no longer the nominee. Speculation has it that the Trump Administration worried that the race to replace her in the House would result in a Democratic win and decided not to risk it, and the cited link more or less officially confirms it. This suggests that the Republican epistemic bubble of old is leaking, that telling themselves they’re popular isn’t entirely working.

And I figure Rep Stefanik inadvertently dodged a bullet. It’s not hard for the President to fire a diplomat, but it’s well-nigh impossible to fire a member of Congress. Given the President’s misogyny and Stefanik’s former moderate positions, it’s not hard seeing it as a maneuver to put a man in her current seat.

Erick Erickson tries for that profound observation, but I think it’s hollow:

But the larger issue is that we as a people have abdicated our responsibility of taking care of the poor to the federal government. Instead of sending kids on “mission trips” to picture-perfect beaches in third-world countries, perhaps we’d be better off if they took a shift at the local soup kitchen or volunteered at the local homeless shelter. When Jesus references the poor, he undeniably puts the burden of support on me and you, not the federal government.

The problem? He’s bought into a long-time propaganda point of those who’d prefer to have more influence over there community and will obscure important points to get there. What is that? Let me state it as a negation of the propaganda point.

The federal government is us.

That’s the delight and glory of the United States of America. In monarchies and autocracies, government is thrust upon the populace by force, whether that force be exogenous or endogenous. I’ll leave the question of theocracies to the reader.

But not only do we pick our leaders, we can be those leaders. If we’re a citizen, we can put ourselves forth as candidates for positions from little town council member to President. For those who bang away with hammers and wedges to alienate the people from the very government we select, I say Cease! To demand the government change its goals, despite your opinion being a minority, is to not understand how our way of life works.

Are we subject to limitations when it comes to that participation? Of course; logistics demands it. But that doesn’t mean we, individually, cannot be part of the government.

So when Mr Erickson says feeding the desperately hungry is not the federal government’s responsibility, he’s ignoring one of the most important and fundamental truths of our Constitution, as well as a practical matter of feeding folks so we don’t have food riots.

We, not them, but emphatically we are the federal government. If you win an election with the purpose of stopping food bank support, you’re against Jesus. Says the agnostic.