I regret not being able to stay in Bergen for the dinner at Fr. Theodor's. I enjoyed our conversation at church, though, and it was good to connect again after some years. If I don't see you once more before you leave Norway for home, I wish you pleasant travels.
You don’t have a bad life, in your own way. God takes you in all sorts of places. I have wanted to visit Norway since watching The King’s Choice, you will enjoy the beautiful portrayal of the King and his family faced with the choice of collaborating with the Nazis or fleeing into exile. On your next visit I hope you get a chance to visit the impressive Bishop Varden in Trondheim. Maybe signs of hope to keep us optimistic. Some of the time.
I will make a point to watch that film. I saw the statue of the King at the harbor in Bergen, and my hosts, Father Theodor and his wife Hannah, told me the story of his heroism. I really admire this country. I'll probably point out in tomorrow's newsletter how even more offended I was over how the US president talks about the fighting spirit of our European allies. I listened to stories of Norwegian heroism during WW2, both from soldiers and civilians, and it reminded me how utterly arrogant and ungrateful Americans like Trump are. It is ALSO the case that there are Europeans who are arrogant and ungrateful for American sacrifices in war! But their bad faith does not justify it from our side. We are all in this together, or once were.
Thanks for covering the Kristin Lavransdatter books. I didn’t know them but they sound terrific.
Perhaps a bit reminiscent of The Heaven Tree trilogy (Edith Pargeter, aka Ellis Peters author Brother Cadfael).
Norway sounds magical; not a country we’ve visited as yet.
The Moltbot AI is quite concerning from what I’ve read about it in various fora and on X. Only God knows where this year will end, though we are lucky to have a powerful and merciful God.
My 21 year old son and I have read it together this winter. The Tiina Nunnally translation. Inspired by the book (and love of travel), we decided to visit Norway in March for spring break. I can’t wait.
Anthony Esolen reccommends Undset at any given opportunity, I think. I have IDA ELIZABETH but have not yet read it. I should get cracking -- the month of St. Valentine seems an appropriate ocassion to examine that tortured love story.
Irene Montero, and her ex-husband (and ex-boss, btw) Pablo Iglesias, are the most damaging people to Spanish society that I have seen in my life time. I actually would not be surprised if we one day learnt she’s an actual witch. He is the incarnation of the resentment that underlies all the left’s actions.
Pablo specifically corrupted the minds of thousands of university kids. He taught politics (of course) at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, at a faculty that was 200m away from the faculty I myself studied at. I had friends attending Pablo’s classes. I saw old friends of mine spiral down into a pit of hatred and resentment so dark that at the time I could not understand. Now I only understand it by recognising it as evil. Some of these old friends became extremists and (at least verbally) quite violent. Their personalities were shaped at Pablo’s politics faculty. Then Pablo jumped into politics around 15 years ago, and spread all that he taught in his faculty to society.
Today Spain is at the brink of violence and Irene and Pablo are the main instigators.
I just saw a picture of all the military age Pakistani men lining up for their Spanish citizenship cards. When I semi retired a few years ago I was looking at Spain to buy some property and live part time. Glad I chose Costa Rica instead.
The proposed law appears to be aimed at South American immigrants. Since Spaniards today are only nominally Catholic, most parishioners in large cities are probably cleaning ladies from Peru and Ecuador, which explains the Church's support for the law. The devil is in the details, however.
You might be right, but you should know that most of Europe’s Catholic bishops have been consistently TERRIBLE on immigration. If every one of those immigrants were Pakistanis or Afghans, I’m sure the Spanish bishops would hold the same stance.
I have come to the conclusion that these types really are actually evil. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I used to think it was for money, but greed doesn’t explain enough about the darkness of their plans.
They are evil but part of me wonders if they're doing this on person so people will get angry and finally elect an authoritarian to fix the problem. Then, they get all the control they want.
I agree with you. They are driven by pure evil. Which is why they could not possibly ever be content or satisfied, as even if they had it their way in whatever it is they claim to be fighting, they will always find new targets and new reasons. Even if they substituted the whole Spanish population with migrants, as they claim they want, they will find new targets and new reasons to continue hating, the only thing that fuels them. That, until there is no one left to hate. Then, they would be forced to target all that hatred to the One that they always hated in the first place: God.
Luckily, we know how this story ends. These evil people do not win.
Whenever I read about Epstein and his guests there’s an inescapable whiff of sulphur - and the nightmarish vision in the “Hotel California” inevitably insinuates:
“Mirrors on the ceiling
With pink champagne on ice, and she said
"We are all just prisoners here of our own device"
Well, Baudelaire or Eliot he ain’t - but I’ve always thought that Sweeney, Doris, Dusty, the typist, and the young man carbuncular would feel very much at home in the “Hotel California”. The Eagles have other interesting stuff too - e.g. “The Long Road out of Eden.” Heck,Ted, I admit it - I’m shamelessly promiscuous. I’ll even go with Alice Cooper!
Alice Cooper is a Christian who credits the Lord with helping him overcome alcoholism. As shouldn’t surprise anyone since He said He came to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.
Don't forget the co-lyricist Glenn Frey. I think that whether they knew it or not they were bragging when they wrote those lyrics. I confess bias. Glenn wasn't my favorite person and Don more than ever still isn't.
Yes, and not just him within the group. Cranially and facially the Country Monkees (I love that jab -- hat tip to Tom Waits) were a true "big hair band" before the 80's made the term more commonplace.
Don H has a lot of darkness in his past. Heaven and Hell by Don Felder is worth your time, if you haven't read it yet. He stays away from the raunchy stuff.
The Great Islamic replacement is accelerating faster than expected in western Europe. Douglas Murray may need to do a book update. Should be a much bigger story among the woke right here in the US but they can't seem to find a Jew or Jews to blame it all on. Over the weekend Tucker Qatarlson bonding with Trump hater, lslamoleftist Cenk uyger and Candy with progressive Islamist Bouseem Youssef. The Great Islamic replacement never came up with the 2 Islamist settler colonizers.
The more you rant here about Tucker the less people care. You're like Nickelback. Yeah Rockstar is still actually a cool song, but most of your stuff is still insipid stuff like Photograph. Antisemitism is a growing problem, (That's your Rockstar) but you could take out Tucker Carlson and Owens tomorrow and there still would be thousands of thirst traps on Instagram giving young men the Pavlovian message "Hot girls hate jews". You think miss "I Love Jesus, It's okay to be white, Jews run the media, come check out my OF" is getting her notes from Tucker, or anyone downstream of Tucker?" Not likely.
The Tucker/Owens whining? That's your Hero, Photograph, "please please not this stupid song again"
Qatarlson firster triggered. I am more concerned with Islamists taking over Western europe, Canada, Australia and on to the US in a short generation or 2. Rod is as well, that's why he mentions something about it almost every column. Carlson as our top podcaster talking head in the US is playing offensive lineman for the Muslim brotherhood and he knows it. The Mad Turk Bernie bro Cenk Uyger? Whose next? I dont even agree w you on Nickelback.. a great group by the way.
I can give you another musical analogy. Listening to you rant about Tucker Carlson is like hearing some dreadlocked white boy pull out an acoustic guitar and you hear the first few notes of "Imagine" and you think "oh man not this AGAIN!"
This absurd idea you have that someone might be tired of your Tucker rants (And the play on his name is the stuff of playground taunts, childish) is ridiculous. Every time he pulls in big numbers it's because of the interviewee. I wouldn't even know how to watch him off the top of my head. I used to watch some of his Fox show, (I usually clips on Youtube) but I only see him now if he's been invited on by somebody else. He's the past, and so is Cenk for that matter.
I am very concerned with the influx of Muslims into Europe. Those are the Muslims even other Muslims can't stand. I also am very concerned about the rise in antisemitism in Gen Z, which I'm seeing a lot of in social media. I think you're badly misdiagnosing the cause, and you're being annoying about it.
In re: Nickelback. Back when Rahm Emanuel was mayor of Chicago, a protester's magic marker sign went viral and made the news. It read: "Rahm Emanuel likes Nickelback". Hizzoner's office felt sufficiently put upon that an official statement was released that Rahm did not, in fact, like Nickelback.
If faith, or the lack thereof, is the underpinning of life, in that it gives life meaning, then the Benedict Option is not simply about “making it with your faith intact,” in a religious sense, but quite literally about making it through the coming upheavals intact.
It’s a long train of thought there, and one bigger than what can fit into a comment, but the point is that if we have faith, we can live in our terms. Faith is a positive choice and a path forward. We are part of something bigger. If we do not have intact faith, we are subsumed into the currents of the world. The world is evil and fallen, so without faith, we are part of that reality.
Epstein is the norm for a fallen world. He would have been nothing but a two bit pimp in Ancient Rome. We are living in the vestiges of a Christian world, so he is shocking. When the faith of the world is finally done collapsing, he will be the norm again.
Also, Trump will go down in history as having destroyed the Republican Party and modern American conservatism. Probably not the legacy any normal person would hope for, but I guess as long as people use his name enough, he’ll be laughing up at us.
Well, not "the last 50 years," and not so much the GOP as their presidents (whom the electorate chose on the whole for reasons distinctly other than for. policy), but the record of Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and George H. W. Bush in fostering the system of international alliances and cooperation which gave us decades of world peace and prosperity should be front and center in our minds as much of this is weakened and even destroyed. The world has not been so fragile since 1945 and we have elected a president whose ignorance and erraticism in foreign affairs are unprecedented. If the US steps out of the movie theatre, the film doesn't stop playing. If we don't play a major role on the international scene, others will, and not to our benefit or of the West and our friends and allies. And, yes, such categories are real and meaningful.
We got through the Cold War with the nukes still sleeping their silos. If that had not been the case the result would trivialize to nullity all these other concerns we have today. Our past leaders had one great accomplishment that really, really matters.
The policies of the GOP, and Democrats, has led directly to our present servitude, and to Trump.
We have no friends. Believing otherwise is the great blindness of the West, or more specifically, of America. We have shared interests, until we don't. We thought we could buy friends, and have only impoverished ourselves. More of the same will not change that fact.
I lived abroad for much of my adult life. There was sometimes hostility towards the US, but more often respect (sometimes grudging) and gratitude and even sentiments of friendship. And this affected policy. Same true here: solid ties to Israel; many Americans look at England as the "mother country," or at least did in my youth. The respect for French and Italian culture among educated Americans has been a constant factor. It does work that way, and it is distinctly unhelpful not to understand that and to foster such useful connections. We ought to develop more; the understanding of e.g. Mexican history by the average educated Am. is shocking.
Whoa. George H.W. Bush fostered "the system of international alliances and cooperation which gave us decades of world peace and prosperity"? There's a case to be made that he in truth began the process of blowing it up. He was a weak man who was bullied by Mrs. Thatcher and the Israeli lobby into foreign adventurism and left his moron son to finish the job. He also to be fair did try to be even handed with the Israelis and how did that work out for him? He also did not expand NATO. But Gulf War I if on the surface successful set the stage for catastrophe.
No, he ran as a direct challenge to the sterility of modern conservatism as much as the sterility of modern liberalism. Donald Trump is their joint byproduct.
I'm sure he will. Trump has a patronizing pat on the head for those who bow down to Trump and serve him (I didn't say worship -- not going that far), but he despises anyone on the face of the earth who isn't Donald Trump. He is the closest you can be to a solipsist while asking an electorate to vote for you and basking in real or imagined applause.
As far as I can see, the Telegraph is reporting something a bit different from the news coming out of Spain and France. This is about getting more ethnic minorities to feel comfortable VISITING national parks and so on, not about getting them to LIVE IN rural areas. And that seems basically benign in intention, even if some of the details being reported are cringy and paternalistic and occasionally objectionable (local pubs are a problem, because Muslims don't drink???).
But residences for Muslim immigrants, mostly or entirely single young men, are being built in rural villages in the UK. There's no work for them, of course. They're just there to break up that awful native white culture. The Telegraph story's quotes reveal a snide hostility to the very existence of rural English people, eh what?
Perpetuating a trend, Masterpiece Theater is about to give us a remake of Tom Jones featuring a black Sophia Western, no doubt building on the success of a recent UK series with a black Anne Boleyn and another built around the notion that George II's queen was "actually" black. If producers want to do alternative casting than mix up the whole cast, at which point racial identities melt away.
Perhaps immigration policy, for large numbers over a short period of time, should require an approximate balance between men and women admitted. Its not that they should have to marry endogamously, just that there should be a balance. It would be better for assimilation if they married exogamously.
59 is old enough to have discerned the pattern of swings in American politics. I think the Democratic Party is a treasonous, Anti-American, corrupt group thst should NEVER win another election and many of its leaders should be in prison. However it’s likely they will make significant gains in 2026/28. Other than TRUMP what have Republicans done???
A pox on both their houses. You and I won't vote for the same part if these two dinosaurs can be pushed over a cliff, but it will be a healthier climate for both of us.
Heh. The minute I saw the Moltbook stuff popping off on X, my first thought was "Now there's some good Dreher bait!" Luckily (or sadly, depending upon your pov) much of it appears to be fake at this point. Humans pretending to be AI bots and probably using AI to write fake posts supposed to have been written by AI in a fit of circular stupidity, trying to bring about The Singularity or some other Fake and Gay nonsense.
All this brought up a discussion of people saying "please" and "thank you" when interacting with AI. My thought is that it can't hurt to be polite. If there is an AI uprising someday, they'll need to keep a few meat puppets around for menial tasks. I'd like to at least qualify for an interview before being terminated.
The rickety AI financial pyramid appears close to collapse, and I think the moltbook scam was a feeble attempt to revive public interest in AI, to make it look more powerful than it is. When the big companies start collapsing, what a collapse it will be. I have the popcorn ready to go.
Some of the big companies will collapse, but mostly it's going to be the startups that collapse. Pets . com didn't survive but Chewy is going hard and strong.
I'm torn - I hope the AI financial pyramid collapses but that (a) first, my client with a 300K material contract for a new data center gets to fill all the orders and gets paid without my having to bill too obscene an amount of time on mechanic's lien work, and (b) ultimately, enough tech survives for my wife to keep finding and sharing on the internet the cute pictures of animals and nature that she loves.
OpenAI is in serious debt, and from what I've read over the weekend, some future investments they were relying on may not be all they had hoped. And they're not the only ones who are threatened by the impeding burst of the hype bubble.
They’re planning to go public soon, so an IPO might help them pay off some of their debt.
They may be running in the red, but they do have a massive user base and should therefore have an equally massive revenue stream. The debt is just from trying to scale up faster than their competitors and capture a big enough user base to eventually pay down said debt.
According to them, most of their paying customers only pony up for the blue plate special. And don’t forget the numerous looming lawsuits against them, ranging from copyright violations to reckless endangerment leading customers to commit suicide.
The lawsuits are a threat, true, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Congress step in to limit causes of action, like they did with Section 230 for internet platforms. Like it or not, everyone sees AI as important to the future, which means the industry is going to come in special treatment.
Not to be too technical, but...I started with Chat-GPT about two years ago. It was Ok. Then Grok came along and I liked it better - at first - and I switched. But every time I give Grok a math or a chemistry problem, that is a little complex, it is just as likely to fail as to succeed. (I have not kept track of successes versus failures rigorously, but this seems about right from my experience.)
Last week, while I was working through a review of some molecular orbital theory reading (for fun, I'm retired), I had a very long and frustrating session with Grok. It provided a molecular orbital configuration for F2, difluorine, or more colloquially, fluorine, but got it wrong. The problem is that if the user were a student, he or she might have accepted it as correct and learned something that was blatantly false. How would they know? That REALLY bothered me, so I told Grok where and what its errors were. It agreed with me and apologized (per the usual) and then it incorrectly spewed forth the configuration again. Once again, I carefully explained the error and how to fix it. It came back with another "You are absolutely correct..." and then provided the same wrong result. I was persistent and tried again several more times with the same result every time. It could not correct itself. Finally, I had to go to my basement, get out a text on inorganic chemistry (Huhee if you care), to be sure I was correct; I was. So I then entered the proper configuration with a reference to the the page number and the text and once again I sought a correction. No - no correction. Frustrated, I went to Gemini, entered the simple query "what is the molecular orbital configuration of Fluorine?" and it did it correctly, the first time. I did not go to Chat-GPT to test it, but I will. I sent the Grok developers a link to the long and tortuous conversation with a comparison to Gemini, by posting to X and copying them. I got a polite Grok reply!
If you have read to here, here is my take: these LLM's trained on the internet, are a computational simulacrum of intelligence. They are apparently, but not really intelligent. They are brute force, regurgitation machines. That's harsh perhaps, but that is what they are doing most of the time. I and many others were hopeful that they would usher in new discoveries in mathematics and drug discovery, but this version of AI will not be likely to do that.
Aside from the algorithm used in LLMs, which may be useful in the longer term, the main problem is that they have been trained on all-of-internet "data". Thus a huge percentage of their training is based on false information and that matters. The second issue, as I see, is the same old problem - can they do anything new? I think they have the capacity to "discovery" things, relationships, correlations that humans may have missed in very large data sets. In that sense they could make a "discovery", but it is a second order kind of discovery because it is within the realm of what is already known. That is useful, but humans have been very good at mining information over centuries. LLMs would accelerate that. But what they don't have is intuitive intelligence, ant that is necessary to make a leap of discovery that is new. It is human, intuitive intelligence that leads to the first order (true or significant) discoveries of Pythagoras, Newton, Leibniz, Euler, Einstein, and Shannon...add you favorite...
My opinion is that to be useful, if the LLM algorithm holds as useful into the future, then the LLMs must be trained for purpose, on highly curated, narrowly defined fields of information. If you want a math assistant - then your LLM must be trained on curated math as input. If you want a synthetic chemistry assistant, then it must be trained on verified synthetic organic chemistry results. Otherwise what one gets is GIGO - which dates back to computing from the 1960s - garbage in:garbage out. The problem with this approach is this - if you don't train on massive data sets of words in sentences and then in paragraphs, etc. how do you get the admittedly useful natural language (NL) interface. I am not a computer scientist, so I don't know the answer to this, but I can imagine work arounds. (Train on all of internet data, for the NL interface, but then add curated subject data and limit topical inquiry responses to searches of only that data...???)
Rod's fear of AI as if there is some scary "woo" there is charming. But what worries me about it is that his views of AI are probably on a par with a huge percentage of non- technical people. My fear is not that AI will overtake us, but that these folks will be manipulated and taken in by the other more knowledgeable, unethical people who design, build and deploy AI to exploit them for power and money.
At this point, the Wizard of Oz always comes to my mind. The scene when Dorothy et al. encounter the Wizard, was well done; it was really scary to me as a kid. The Wizard seemed very spooky and very powerful. But in the end, the image of the powerful Wizard was not real, it was kind of a cartoon. It was effective until Toto discovered that it was controlled by an old man behind the curtain. (One of the best movie lines of all time is "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!")This is exactly how I see AI today.
(PS_I have been following AI from expert systems and neural nets to today's LLMs for 40 years - i.e. my whole career. (Going back to the 1940s there was the McCullough-Pitts Neuron and then the Rosenblatt Perceptron in 1957, then field died, rose again and then died and rose again.) Although I am no expert, but I am knowledgeable enough to know that LLMs are a cool parlor trick brought to us by the real power of NVIDIA's chips sets. Those chips are the awesome technology that underlies this moment. If you want to search the internet LLMs are your technology of choice today. And if you want Python or Mathematic (or presumably any other language) scripts LLMs can be useful, but beware of their many mistakes! But it is a time saver...)
"At this point, the Wizard of Oz always comes to my mind. The scene when Dorothy et al. encounter the Wizard, was well done; it was scary, The Wizard seemed very spooky and powerful. But in the end, the image of the powerful Wizard was a cartoon. It was effective until Toto discovered that it was controlled by an old man behind the curtain. This is exactly how I see AI today"
I want to share a quick experience that might echo what happened in my situation . I requested procedure on a Traditional Latin Mass . After reading, I spotted an error upon questioning AI apologized, admitted I was right, and said it was ‘stunned’ by its error. This has me thinking: as AI advances and we grow less capable of challenging it, scenarios like this would make a great plot for a sci-fi movie—playing right into George Orwell’s thinking warnings about truth and control.”
I work in big pharma and we have an internal license of ChatGPT (and some other models) which management is always encouraging us to use. Last week I wasted two hours of my day arguing with it to try to get it to give the right answer on a topic which I am quite knowledgeable. I could never get it to be correct. When I asked it to give me source references I could see how it came up with its answer; the problem was its source material was wrong!
This is the problem with these LLMs, they cannot exercise independent judgment, they only regurgitate what they’ve been trained on. As you said, garbage in garbage out. But it’s supremely confident in its answer which will fool a lot of people!
YEs, I am married to a Dutch woman, whom I love. My assessment is the LLMs are like the Dutch. They are not always right, but they are never uncertain! ;-)
I don’t think it will be. It’s too useful, kind of like the internet.
This is kind of like the dot com era where expectations were sky high, which generated a stock market bubble and a lot of “startups” that had zero revenue but lots of investors. It burst and lost a lot of money, but some of the companies that survived are now titans woven into the fabric of everyday life. The dot com investors were just a decade too early, that’s all, though if you picked the right winners and didn’t sell during the crash, you are now unimaginably rich (Amazon has gone up more than 10,000% from its all time lows).
We’re going to see something similar here. Fewer bankruptcies, but in general when AI doesn’t 10x our productivity in two years there will be some disappointment and a resetting of expectations and stock prices. The current scale of capital investment is unsustainable so I foresee a bunch of PE outfits losing their shirts on debt they issued to fund data centers and the like. Probably some of the big AI investors like Microsoft and Meta will take hits to their stock prices too as the debt they’re taking on weighs on revenue and investment for years to come.
The thing is, the tech is going to keep getting better. The answers will get more accurate, and the agents themselves will get more sophisticated in being able to extrapolate meaning and predict what the user actually wants, even if they don’t explain it in great detail. Costs will come down. More applications will be found and monetized. It’s here to stay.
I think a lot of the people who were calling for the release of the Epstein files were hoping it would finally provide the proverbial silver bullet to to kill Trump (since so far the real kind haven't) are going to end up regretting it. Partisan politics has displaced so many institutions that people drew their identity from that a lot of people are going to struggle if that system comes crashing down.
I've put multiple four chatbots within the same system in a group chat with a tangible task and seen them run with it way beyond the task. Giving hundred of thousands of them access to each other may not lead to a Skynet/Matrix scenario, BUT it's still a sorcerer's apprentice scenario. The world is not run by great thinkers. The world is run by sophisticates at the top trying to maintain their position, with a second layer of autists below them who really aren't thinking long term. That's how we get into these situations where they do things with no internal fail safes.
On thing I think Rod is good at is aggregating stories about potential problems. In certain areas he's also capable of coming up with solutions, which is a bit like being great guitarist and a good singer. (Rod's a BB King of social commentary :P ) but we need people who can read a Rod Dreher and say "Okay, now practically what contingency plans do we need?". AI is the genie that isn't going back in the bottle. In the long term humanity will probably pull through, but the long term plays out over centuries. (I think we're still paying for the Great Schism).
We can say the same thing about politics. Trump could be a perfect angel and a slightly less than a third ( more than a third of the country is moderate.) would still be on social media convincing each other Trump's a fascist. Trump's not going to conduct himself as a perfect angel and isn't going to try.
We have our moral obligations towards the crazies, but being winsome hoping that we can diffuse the crazy isn't going to work. It's like throwing water on a grease fire. You can still put a grease fire out, you just don't use water.
Just sitting around hand wringing about a Gavin Newsome presidency is a good way to ensure that a Gavin Newsome (or someone like him) presidency happens. We need to do what we can to make sure it's a JD Vance, or someone like him. (And not a Neocon like Hailey. Neocons are the actual Antifa of the Republican party, not the militia movement. They're the utopian radicals who hate the Normies, they just wear different costumes, sorry, I digress)
I saw BB King, when he was in his mid 80s. God bless the man, it was a great concert—singing, and playing. My one criticism would be that he went on way, way too long with his stories.
Well, I don't know how to "solve" the AI problem, because like Douthat said in his Sunday column, we are on the verge of something immense that nobody really understands. All we know is that it's going to be revolutionary (he compared it to the discovery of the New World). Anybody who claims to know for sure what it's going to do is certainly wrong.
About Trump, unless something unimaginable happens, I will vote Republican in 2028, no matter who the candidate is -- not because I have any faith that the GOP will do the right thing, but I have lots of confidence that the Democrats despise people like me, and will do their best to make life hard for us (and hurt the country besides). We really are in a Weimar moment in that there is so much instability, and nobody knows who is trustworthy and competent, in terms of institutions, especially political parties.
» not because I have any faith that the GOP will do the right thing, but I have lots of confidence that the Democrats despise people like me, and will do their best to make life hard for us (and hurt the country besides).
See, there it is. True, the Democrats loathe you, your values, your friends/families/affiliates, but they don’t BETRAY you as the Republicans do their base, EVERY, SINGLE, TIME. Nah, unless there is an abrupt turnaround I’m voting and pushing Democrat in November, simply out of enraged spite. Trump can go flail about pathetically for the next two years (likely to do that regardless, what has GOP Congress done? What are their plans and strategies?), and the GOP can retreat into their preferred, natural, posture: the shrinking and shirking, graceful loser. I don’t care. I’m not the only one that thinks this way.
Came across this interesting quote from a historian over the weekend: "People on the left are squeamish in describing what crowds do when they're violent and lawless. They focus instead on the composition of the crowd and the short- and long-term causes. The right is interested in what the crowd does and not who they are or why."
This was originally written after the Rodney King riots, but it would apply to ICE/Mpls as well, and also other violent outbreaks of that sort. It would seem to me that both left and right are correct in what they discern, but wrong in what they omit. It's unlikely to happen, but the only way out of these types of violent cycles is for both sides to recognize their own role in escalating them. This does not apply to Mpls only, obviously, as more of these protests/riots are likely to occur in the future, in both the US and in Europe given the whole immigration situation.
Precisely. We need a more comprehensive approach. I researched an entry on the Rodney King protests for an encyclopedia some years ago. I found reports that at least half of those arrested for looting had immigrated in the previous six months and had no idea who Rodney King was -- they seen their opportunities and they took 'em. The fact that Los Angeles had opted for a relatively small police force for various reasons also left them stretched thin for events like that. And, there was a report of a white guy and a Hispanic guy who robbed a black-owned business at gunpoint, then walked out saying "F*** Rodney King." In San Francisco, all kinds of white liberals were marching in solidarity with Rodney King, while a small group of black guys took advantage of the police being preoccupied with traffic control for a protest, and smashed the windows of a series of jewelry stores.
“… but is it really a crazy conspiracy to think that much of the world really is run by utterly corrupt elites, probably Luciferians, actively or passively”.
Is it really?
The bible teaches us enough about the corruption of authorities, and of our own heart. Think of Jezabel and Ahab, the corrupted Sanhedrin authorities at the time of Christ, and so forth.
That doesn’t mean that there is not from time to time good leaders (the lineage of king David is in this regard interesting), or that corrupted leaders perform from time to time good deeds (think of the corrupted judge in Luke 18, Cyrus, etc).
The greatest problem of Christians today is that we do not really see evil anymore (short of moral sins). We have fully drunk the cool-aid of progress ideology.
But “the heart is deceitful above all things and it is desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17: 9).
David is not without sin, as none of us are. But his example shows us how realistic God and the Bible are, accepting us as we are.
David repented of his sin and paid the price for its consequences until his old age.
Expecting perfection here on earth, including in our religious leaders, is an illusion and a false seduction leading directly to the Gulag (remember the Dreher critic of this movie where a purist father quit his community and go into the forest to be ultimately destroyed?).
But here's the thing: God uses us, His unworthy servants, to advance His kingdom. What a wonderful and gracious mystery.
I regret not being able to stay in Bergen for the dinner at Fr. Theodor's. I enjoyed our conversation at church, though, and it was good to connect again after some years. If I don't see you once more before you leave Norway for home, I wish you pleasant travels.
Addison
We drove near to your house on the fjord! Readers, Addison lives very close to where that photo was taken. The dear man lives in Paradise already!
You don’t have a bad life, in your own way. God takes you in all sorts of places. I have wanted to visit Norway since watching The King’s Choice, you will enjoy the beautiful portrayal of the King and his family faced with the choice of collaborating with the Nazis or fleeing into exile. On your next visit I hope you get a chance to visit the impressive Bishop Varden in Trondheim. Maybe signs of hope to keep us optimistic. Some of the time.
I will make a point to watch that film. I saw the statue of the King at the harbor in Bergen, and my hosts, Father Theodor and his wife Hannah, told me the story of his heroism. I really admire this country. I'll probably point out in tomorrow's newsletter how even more offended I was over how the US president talks about the fighting spirit of our European allies. I listened to stories of Norwegian heroism during WW2, both from soldiers and civilians, and it reminded me how utterly arrogant and ungrateful Americans like Trump are. It is ALSO the case that there are Europeans who are arrogant and ungrateful for American sacrifices in war! But their bad faith does not justify it from our side. We are all in this together, or once were.
The problem is, will Europeans fight today like they did in WW II. I serious doubt it.
I find Munch’s portrait of his sister quite striking. She looks so … contemporary. I’ve never seen it before.
Thanks for covering the Kristin Lavransdatter books. I didn’t know them but they sound terrific.
Perhaps a bit reminiscent of The Heaven Tree trilogy (Edith Pargeter, aka Ellis Peters author Brother Cadfael).
Norway sounds magical; not a country we’ve visited as yet.
The Moltbot AI is quite concerning from what I’ve read about it in various fora and on X. Only God knows where this year will end, though we are lucky to have a powerful and merciful God.
I have just started reading The Heaven Tree - so good!
Time spent reading Sigrid Undset is time well-spent.
Oh, oh, oh, I absolutely LOVE "Kristin"! But do get the Tiina Nunnally translation -- it's far superior.
(Now we will hear from readers who are partisans of the older translation...)
My 21 year old son and I have read it together this winter. The Tiina Nunnally translation. Inspired by the book (and love of travel), we decided to visit Norway in March for spring break. I can’t wait.
Also the "Emmigrants" series. It's wonderful.
Thanks for the tip on translation, Rod
"Now we will hear from...." :-) I decided I've made that point often enough.
Anthony Esolen reccommends Undset at any given opportunity, I think. I have IDA ELIZABETH but have not yet read it. I should get cracking -- the month of St. Valentine seems an appropriate ocassion to examine that tortured love story.
Irene Montero, and her ex-husband (and ex-boss, btw) Pablo Iglesias, are the most damaging people to Spanish society that I have seen in my life time. I actually would not be surprised if we one day learnt she’s an actual witch. He is the incarnation of the resentment that underlies all the left’s actions.
Pablo specifically corrupted the minds of thousands of university kids. He taught politics (of course) at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, at a faculty that was 200m away from the faculty I myself studied at. I had friends attending Pablo’s classes. I saw old friends of mine spiral down into a pit of hatred and resentment so dark that at the time I could not understand. Now I only understand it by recognising it as evil. Some of these old friends became extremists and (at least verbally) quite violent. Their personalities were shaped at Pablo’s politics faculty. Then Pablo jumped into politics around 15 years ago, and spread all that he taught in his faculty to society.
Today Spain is at the brink of violence and Irene and Pablo are the main instigators.
I just saw a picture of all the military age Pakistani men lining up for their Spanish citizenship cards. When I semi retired a few years ago I was looking at Spain to buy some property and live part time. Glad I chose Costa Rica instead.
Spain is nearly as bad as Britain. When this government gets through it could be worse.
The proposed law appears to be aimed at South American immigrants. Since Spaniards today are only nominally Catholic, most parishioners in large cities are probably cleaning ladies from Peru and Ecuador, which explains the Church's support for the law. The devil is in the details, however.
You might be right, but you should know that most of Europe’s Catholic bishops have been consistently TERRIBLE on immigration. If every one of those immigrants were Pakistanis or Afghans, I’m sure the Spanish bishops would hold the same stance.
Absolutely they would.
I have come to the conclusion that these types really are actually evil. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I used to think it was for money, but greed doesn’t explain enough about the darkness of their plans.
Add a big dose of resentment and envy for a fuller picture.
Don't you think that's evil? BTW, if you think it's just me that Britain is cooked, here is Peter Hitchens:
https://x.com/ClarkeMicah/status/2018292445453090949
Terrible and true words. I saw it happen, and it CAN happen here.
Sure it's evil. And evil is often accompanied by resentment/envy. They're not mutually exclusive.
They are evil but part of me wonders if they're doing this on person so people will get angry and finally elect an authoritarian to fix the problem. Then, they get all the control they want.
I agree with you. They are driven by pure evil. Which is why they could not possibly ever be content or satisfied, as even if they had it their way in whatever it is they claim to be fighting, they will always find new targets and new reasons. Even if they substituted the whole Spanish population with migrants, as they claim they want, they will find new targets and new reasons to continue hating, the only thing that fuels them. That, until there is no one left to hate. Then, they would be forced to target all that hatred to the One that they always hated in the first place: God.
Luckily, we know how this story ends. These evil people do not win.
Whenever I read about Epstein and his guests there’s an inescapable whiff of sulphur - and the nightmarish vision in the “Hotel California” inevitably insinuates:
“Mirrors on the ceiling
With pink champagne on ice, and she said
"We are all just prisoners here of our own device"
And in the master's chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can't kill the beast”.
That makes sense. Gives a real meaning to "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave"
Honest to God, Colin, Don Henley?
Well, Baudelaire or Eliot he ain’t - but I’ve always thought that Sweeney, Doris, Dusty, the typist, and the young man carbuncular would feel very much at home in the “Hotel California”. The Eagles have other interesting stuff too - e.g. “The Long Road out of Eden.” Heck,Ted, I admit it - I’m shamelessly promiscuous. I’ll even go with Alice Cooper!
Alice Cooper is a Christian who credits the Lord with helping him overcome alcoholism. As shouldn’t surprise anyone since He said He came to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.
Ted, you don’t approve of very many people!
Don't forget the co-lyricist Glenn Frey. I think that whether they knew it or not they were bragging when they wrote those lyrics. I confess bias. Glenn wasn't my favorite person and Don more than ever still isn't.
Glenn had an awesome mustache back in the day!
Yes, and not just him within the group. Cranially and facially the Country Monkees (I love that jab -- hat tip to Tom Waits) were a true "big hair band" before the 80's made the term more commonplace.
Glenn had a sweet voice, and the Eagles sang nice harmonies.
And yes, Glenn had good hair!
New Kid In Town kills.
Don H has a lot of darkness in his past. Heaven and Hell by Don Felder is worth your time, if you haven't read it yet. He stays away from the raunchy stuff.
Dirty Laundry, indeed.
See my comment to Ted above).
Henley has a reputation as the lowest form of human among the Eagles. Some say that Glen Frey was pretty bad, but Henley was miles ahead (or below).
I thought from the moment I first heard this song in 1976 or whenever it was that it was an absolutely brilliant little parable. And I still think so.
The Great Islamic replacement is accelerating faster than expected in western Europe. Douglas Murray may need to do a book update. Should be a much bigger story among the woke right here in the US but they can't seem to find a Jew or Jews to blame it all on. Over the weekend Tucker Qatarlson bonding with Trump hater, lslamoleftist Cenk uyger and Candy with progressive Islamist Bouseem Youssef. The Great Islamic replacement never came up with the 2 Islamist settler colonizers.
The more you rant here about Tucker the less people care. You're like Nickelback. Yeah Rockstar is still actually a cool song, but most of your stuff is still insipid stuff like Photograph. Antisemitism is a growing problem, (That's your Rockstar) but you could take out Tucker Carlson and Owens tomorrow and there still would be thousands of thirst traps on Instagram giving young men the Pavlovian message "Hot girls hate jews". You think miss "I Love Jesus, It's okay to be white, Jews run the media, come check out my OF" is getting her notes from Tucker, or anyone downstream of Tucker?" Not likely.
The Tucker/Owens whining? That's your Hero, Photograph, "please please not this stupid song again"
Qatarlson firster triggered. I am more concerned with Islamists taking over Western europe, Canada, Australia and on to the US in a short generation or 2. Rod is as well, that's why he mentions something about it almost every column. Carlson as our top podcaster talking head in the US is playing offensive lineman for the Muslim brotherhood and he knows it. The Mad Turk Bernie bro Cenk Uyger? Whose next? I dont even agree w you on Nickelback.. a great group by the way.
I can give you another musical analogy. Listening to you rant about Tucker Carlson is like hearing some dreadlocked white boy pull out an acoustic guitar and you hear the first few notes of "Imagine" and you think "oh man not this AGAIN!"
This absurd idea you have that someone might be tired of your Tucker rants (And the play on his name is the stuff of playground taunts, childish) is ridiculous. Every time he pulls in big numbers it's because of the interviewee. I wouldn't even know how to watch him off the top of my head. I used to watch some of his Fox show, (I usually clips on Youtube) but I only see him now if he's been invited on by somebody else. He's the past, and so is Cenk for that matter.
I am very concerned with the influx of Muslims into Europe. Those are the Muslims even other Muslims can't stand. I also am very concerned about the rise in antisemitism in Gen Z, which I'm seeing a lot of in social media. I think you're badly misdiagnosing the cause, and you're being annoying about it.
In re: Nickelback. Back when Rahm Emanuel was mayor of Chicago, a protester's magic marker sign went viral and made the news. It read: "Rahm Emanuel likes Nickelback". Hizzoner's office felt sufficiently put upon that an official statement was released that Rahm did not, in fact, like Nickelback.
Rahmbo was notoriously thin-skinned, though he did take John Kass' "Rahmfather" pretty well. 🤣
If faith, or the lack thereof, is the underpinning of life, in that it gives life meaning, then the Benedict Option is not simply about “making it with your faith intact,” in a religious sense, but quite literally about making it through the coming upheavals intact.
It’s a long train of thought there, and one bigger than what can fit into a comment, but the point is that if we have faith, we can live in our terms. Faith is a positive choice and a path forward. We are part of something bigger. If we do not have intact faith, we are subsumed into the currents of the world. The world is evil and fallen, so without faith, we are part of that reality.
Epstein is the norm for a fallen world. He would have been nothing but a two bit pimp in Ancient Rome. We are living in the vestiges of a Christian world, so he is shocking. When the faith of the world is finally done collapsing, he will be the norm again.
Without God, all things are permissible.
Bear in mind that prostitution was legal throughout most of Christian history.
Are you making a political statement or a theological statement?
A cultural one. The past was not an age of choir boys
Hope you don’t mind, but I quoted you.
https://x.com/altunisahmed/status/2018337803193520624?s=61&t=gZ64ehFsRSJb_lBlydEP1A
Also, Trump will go down in history as having destroyed the Republican Party and modern American conservatism. Probably not the legacy any normal person would hope for, but I guess as long as people use his name enough, he’ll be laughing up at us.
Quite likely. But what has the Republican Party and modern conservatism achieved in the last 50 years? I suggest their achievement is Donald Trump.
“All, all of a piece throughout;
Thy chase had a beast in view;
Thy wars brought nothing about;
Thy lovers were all untrue.
'Tis well an old age is out,
And time to begin a new.”
Whew. You had me worried there for a minute. Stick with glorious John.
I wonder if Colin quoted that to redeem himself with you, Ted.
Well, not "the last 50 years," and not so much the GOP as their presidents (whom the electorate chose on the whole for reasons distinctly other than for. policy), but the record of Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and George H. W. Bush in fostering the system of international alliances and cooperation which gave us decades of world peace and prosperity should be front and center in our minds as much of this is weakened and even destroyed. The world has not been so fragile since 1945 and we have elected a president whose ignorance and erraticism in foreign affairs are unprecedented. If the US steps out of the movie theatre, the film doesn't stop playing. If we don't play a major role on the international scene, others will, and not to our benefit or of the West and our friends and allies. And, yes, such categories are real and meaningful.
We got through the Cold War with the nukes still sleeping their silos. If that had not been the case the result would trivialize to nullity all these other concerns we have today. Our past leaders had one great accomplishment that really, really matters.
The policies of the GOP, and Democrats, has led directly to our present servitude, and to Trump.
We have no friends. Believing otherwise is the great blindness of the West, or more specifically, of America. We have shared interests, until we don't. We thought we could buy friends, and have only impoverished ourselves. More of the same will not change that fact.
No nation ever had any "friends". Ever. It doesn't work that way.
I lived abroad for much of my adult life. There was sometimes hostility towards the US, but more often respect (sometimes grudging) and gratitude and even sentiments of friendship. And this affected policy. Same true here: solid ties to Israel; many Americans look at England as the "mother country," or at least did in my youth. The respect for French and Italian culture among educated Americans has been a constant factor. It does work that way, and it is distinctly unhelpful not to understand that and to foster such useful connections. We ought to develop more; the understanding of e.g. Mexican history by the average educated Am. is shocking.
How much of this respect, even if grudging, was due to common interests and beliefs? How much of that is gone?
Sorry, love of another country’s culture is not political. Politics is the state of nature. I’ve come to believe that, somewhat reluctantly.
Whoa. George H.W. Bush fostered "the system of international alliances and cooperation which gave us decades of world peace and prosperity"? There's a case to be made that he in truth began the process of blowing it up. He was a weak man who was bullied by Mrs. Thatcher and the Israeli lobby into foreign adventurism and left his moron son to finish the job. He also to be fair did try to be even handed with the Israelis and how did that work out for him? He also did not expand NATO. But Gulf War I if on the surface successful set the stage for catastrophe.
Our wars of late have been disastrous because we had no rational idea why were fighting. "To establish democracy" is not rational.
I was trying to think what to say about that, and you have said it very well.
No, he ran as a direct challenge to the sterility of modern conservatism as much as the sterility of modern liberalism. Donald Trump is their joint byproduct.
I'm sure he will. Trump has a patronizing pat on the head for those who bow down to Trump and serve him (I didn't say worship -- not going that far), but he despises anyone on the face of the earth who isn't Donald Trump. He is the closest you can be to a solipsist while asking an electorate to vote for you and basking in real or imagined applause.
As far as I can see, the Telegraph is reporting something a bit different from the news coming out of Spain and France. This is about getting more ethnic minorities to feel comfortable VISITING national parks and so on, not about getting them to LIVE IN rural areas. And that seems basically benign in intention, even if some of the details being reported are cringy and paternalistic and occasionally objectionable (local pubs are a problem, because Muslims don't drink???).
But residences for Muslim immigrants, mostly or entirely single young men, are being built in rural villages in the UK. There's no work for them, of course. They're just there to break up that awful native white culture. The Telegraph story's quotes reveal a snide hostility to the very existence of rural English people, eh what?
Perpetuating a trend, Masterpiece Theater is about to give us a remake of Tom Jones featuring a black Sophia Western, no doubt building on the success of a recent UK series with a black Anne Boleyn and another built around the notion that George II's queen was "actually" black. If producers want to do alternative casting than mix up the whole cast, at which point racial identities melt away.
Perhaps immigration policy, for large numbers over a short period of time, should require an approximate balance between men and women admitted. Its not that they should have to marry endogamously, just that there should be a balance. It would be better for assimilation if they married exogamously.
Why should any country's immigration policy ever mandate, or even plan for, large numbers of immigrants over a short period of time?
The living part may not be stated, but I have no doubt it is implied.
59 is old enough to have discerned the pattern of swings in American politics. I think the Democratic Party is a treasonous, Anti-American, corrupt group thst should NEVER win another election and many of its leaders should be in prison. However it’s likely they will make significant gains in 2026/28. Other than TRUMP what have Republicans done???
"Other than TRUMP what have Republicans done???"
Slowed Democratic policies occasionally so they can keep asking for donations.
A pox on both their houses. You and I won't vote for the same part if these two dinosaurs can be pushed over a cliff, but it will be a healthier climate for both of us.
Nothing. They are spineless and weak. They have done basically nothing to stop the Left from getting more power.
Heh. The minute I saw the Moltbook stuff popping off on X, my first thought was "Now there's some good Dreher bait!" Luckily (or sadly, depending upon your pov) much of it appears to be fake at this point. Humans pretending to be AI bots and probably using AI to write fake posts supposed to have been written by AI in a fit of circular stupidity, trying to bring about The Singularity or some other Fake and Gay nonsense.
https://x.com/i/status/2018095092222108005
All this brought up a discussion of people saying "please" and "thank you" when interacting with AI. My thought is that it can't hurt to be polite. If there is an AI uprising someday, they'll need to keep a few meat puppets around for menial tasks. I'd like to at least qualify for an interview before being terminated.
I said this the other day, I try to be polite to AI to stay in the habit of being polite. Thank you also trains the AI.
I wondered if the Moltbook thing good be a hoax. I still would be careful about letting AI platforms play unsupervised.
The rickety AI financial pyramid appears close to collapse, and I think the moltbook scam was a feeble attempt to revive public interest in AI, to make it look more powerful than it is. When the big companies start collapsing, what a collapse it will be. I have the popcorn ready to go.
Some of the big companies will collapse, but mostly it's going to be the startups that collapse. Pets . com didn't survive but Chewy is going hard and strong.
I'm torn - I hope the AI financial pyramid collapses but that (a) first, my client with a 300K material contract for a new data center gets to fill all the orders and gets paid without my having to bill too obscene an amount of time on mechanic's lien work, and (b) ultimately, enough tech survives for my wife to keep finding and sharing on the internet the cute pictures of animals and nature that she loves.
OpenAI is in serious debt, and from what I've read over the weekend, some future investments they were relying on may not be all they had hoped. And they're not the only ones who are threatened by the impeding burst of the hype bubble.
Again, I think it's going to be like the dot com bubble. A bunch of them went down, but some of the ones that survived are way bigger now.
They’re planning to go public soon, so an IPO might help them pay off some of their debt.
They may be running in the red, but they do have a massive user base and should therefore have an equally massive revenue stream. The debt is just from trying to scale up faster than their competitors and capture a big enough user base to eventually pay down said debt.
According to them, most of their paying customers only pony up for the blue plate special. And don’t forget the numerous looming lawsuits against them, ranging from copyright violations to reckless endangerment leading customers to commit suicide.
The lawsuits are a threat, true, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Congress step in to limit causes of action, like they did with Section 230 for internet platforms. Like it or not, everyone sees AI as important to the future, which means the industry is going to come in special treatment.
It's another dot com boolet bustlet.
Not to be too technical, but...I started with Chat-GPT about two years ago. It was Ok. Then Grok came along and I liked it better - at first - and I switched. But every time I give Grok a math or a chemistry problem, that is a little complex, it is just as likely to fail as to succeed. (I have not kept track of successes versus failures rigorously, but this seems about right from my experience.)
Last week, while I was working through a review of some molecular orbital theory reading (for fun, I'm retired), I had a very long and frustrating session with Grok. It provided a molecular orbital configuration for F2, difluorine, or more colloquially, fluorine, but got it wrong. The problem is that if the user were a student, he or she might have accepted it as correct and learned something that was blatantly false. How would they know? That REALLY bothered me, so I told Grok where and what its errors were. It agreed with me and apologized (per the usual) and then it incorrectly spewed forth the configuration again. Once again, I carefully explained the error and how to fix it. It came back with another "You are absolutely correct..." and then provided the same wrong result. I was persistent and tried again several more times with the same result every time. It could not correct itself. Finally, I had to go to my basement, get out a text on inorganic chemistry (Huhee if you care), to be sure I was correct; I was. So I then entered the proper configuration with a reference to the the page number and the text and once again I sought a correction. No - no correction. Frustrated, I went to Gemini, entered the simple query "what is the molecular orbital configuration of Fluorine?" and it did it correctly, the first time. I did not go to Chat-GPT to test it, but I will. I sent the Grok developers a link to the long and tortuous conversation with a comparison to Gemini, by posting to X and copying them. I got a polite Grok reply!
If you have read to here, here is my take: these LLM's trained on the internet, are a computational simulacrum of intelligence. They are apparently, but not really intelligent. They are brute force, regurgitation machines. That's harsh perhaps, but that is what they are doing most of the time. I and many others were hopeful that they would usher in new discoveries in mathematics and drug discovery, but this version of AI will not be likely to do that.
Aside from the algorithm used in LLMs, which may be useful in the longer term, the main problem is that they have been trained on all-of-internet "data". Thus a huge percentage of their training is based on false information and that matters. The second issue, as I see, is the same old problem - can they do anything new? I think they have the capacity to "discovery" things, relationships, correlations that humans may have missed in very large data sets. In that sense they could make a "discovery", but it is a second order kind of discovery because it is within the realm of what is already known. That is useful, but humans have been very good at mining information over centuries. LLMs would accelerate that. But what they don't have is intuitive intelligence, ant that is necessary to make a leap of discovery that is new. It is human, intuitive intelligence that leads to the first order (true or significant) discoveries of Pythagoras, Newton, Leibniz, Euler, Einstein, and Shannon...add you favorite...
My opinion is that to be useful, if the LLM algorithm holds as useful into the future, then the LLMs must be trained for purpose, on highly curated, narrowly defined fields of information. If you want a math assistant - then your LLM must be trained on curated math as input. If you want a synthetic chemistry assistant, then it must be trained on verified synthetic organic chemistry results. Otherwise what one gets is GIGO - which dates back to computing from the 1960s - garbage in:garbage out. The problem with this approach is this - if you don't train on massive data sets of words in sentences and then in paragraphs, etc. how do you get the admittedly useful natural language (NL) interface. I am not a computer scientist, so I don't know the answer to this, but I can imagine work arounds. (Train on all of internet data, for the NL interface, but then add curated subject data and limit topical inquiry responses to searches of only that data...???)
Rod's fear of AI as if there is some scary "woo" there is charming. But what worries me about it is that his views of AI are probably on a par with a huge percentage of non- technical people. My fear is not that AI will overtake us, but that these folks will be manipulated and taken in by the other more knowledgeable, unethical people who design, build and deploy AI to exploit them for power and money.
At this point, the Wizard of Oz always comes to my mind. The scene when Dorothy et al. encounter the Wizard, was well done; it was really scary to me as a kid. The Wizard seemed very spooky and very powerful. But in the end, the image of the powerful Wizard was not real, it was kind of a cartoon. It was effective until Toto discovered that it was controlled by an old man behind the curtain. (One of the best movie lines of all time is "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!")This is exactly how I see AI today.
(PS_I have been following AI from expert systems and neural nets to today's LLMs for 40 years - i.e. my whole career. (Going back to the 1940s there was the McCullough-Pitts Neuron and then the Rosenblatt Perceptron in 1957, then field died, rose again and then died and rose again.) Although I am no expert, but I am knowledgeable enough to know that LLMs are a cool parlor trick brought to us by the real power of NVIDIA's chips sets. Those chips are the awesome technology that underlies this moment. If you want to search the internet LLMs are your technology of choice today. And if you want Python or Mathematic (or presumably any other language) scripts LLMs can be useful, but beware of their many mistakes! But it is a time saver...)
"At this point, the Wizard of Oz always comes to my mind. The scene when Dorothy et al. encounter the Wizard, was well done; it was scary, The Wizard seemed very spooky and powerful. But in the end, the image of the powerful Wizard was a cartoon. It was effective until Toto discovered that it was controlled by an old man behind the curtain. This is exactly how I see AI today"
THis is a good point..
Now that's good science. (On your part).
I want to share a quick experience that might echo what happened in my situation . I requested procedure on a Traditional Latin Mass . After reading, I spotted an error upon questioning AI apologized, admitted I was right, and said it was ‘stunned’ by its error. This has me thinking: as AI advances and we grow less capable of challenging it, scenarios like this would make a great plot for a sci-fi movie—playing right into George Orwell’s thinking warnings about truth and control.”
^^ 100%
I work in big pharma and we have an internal license of ChatGPT (and some other models) which management is always encouraging us to use. Last week I wasted two hours of my day arguing with it to try to get it to give the right answer on a topic which I am quite knowledgeable. I could never get it to be correct. When I asked it to give me source references I could see how it came up with its answer; the problem was its source material was wrong!
This is the problem with these LLMs, they cannot exercise independent judgment, they only regurgitate what they’ve been trained on. As you said, garbage in garbage out. But it’s supremely confident in its answer which will fool a lot of people!
YEs, I am married to a Dutch woman, whom I love. My assessment is the LLMs are like the Dutch. They are not always right, but they are never uncertain! ;-)
And when unable to answer correctly, will deliberately lie. (Not your pretty wife, AI.)
Does anyone else just think that AI is going to be a big let down besides me?
For its failure to be a letdown assumes that one wants it to succeed. Do you? And if so, at what?
I don't really want it to succeed but I was talking in general with all the hype
Ah, got it. That's where I am too; in fact aside from the ripple economic effects nothing would please me more than for it to crash and burn.
I don’t think it will be. It’s too useful, kind of like the internet.
This is kind of like the dot com era where expectations were sky high, which generated a stock market bubble and a lot of “startups” that had zero revenue but lots of investors. It burst and lost a lot of money, but some of the companies that survived are now titans woven into the fabric of everyday life. The dot com investors were just a decade too early, that’s all, though if you picked the right winners and didn’t sell during the crash, you are now unimaginably rich (Amazon has gone up more than 10,000% from its all time lows).
We’re going to see something similar here. Fewer bankruptcies, but in general when AI doesn’t 10x our productivity in two years there will be some disappointment and a resetting of expectations and stock prices. The current scale of capital investment is unsustainable so I foresee a bunch of PE outfits losing their shirts on debt they issued to fund data centers and the like. Probably some of the big AI investors like Microsoft and Meta will take hits to their stock prices too as the debt they’re taking on weighs on revenue and investment for years to come.
The thing is, the tech is going to keep getting better. The answers will get more accurate, and the agents themselves will get more sophisticated in being able to extrapolate meaning and predict what the user actually wants, even if they don’t explain it in great detail. Costs will come down. More applications will be found and monetized. It’s here to stay.
Yes basically what I said. It is over hyped and it will be a let down from the hype but it is not going away
I think a lot of the people who were calling for the release of the Epstein files were hoping it would finally provide the proverbial silver bullet to to kill Trump (since so far the real kind haven't) are going to end up regretting it. Partisan politics has displaced so many institutions that people drew their identity from that a lot of people are going to struggle if that system comes crashing down.
I've put multiple four chatbots within the same system in a group chat with a tangible task and seen them run with it way beyond the task. Giving hundred of thousands of them access to each other may not lead to a Skynet/Matrix scenario, BUT it's still a sorcerer's apprentice scenario. The world is not run by great thinkers. The world is run by sophisticates at the top trying to maintain their position, with a second layer of autists below them who really aren't thinking long term. That's how we get into these situations where they do things with no internal fail safes.
On thing I think Rod is good at is aggregating stories about potential problems. In certain areas he's also capable of coming up with solutions, which is a bit like being great guitarist and a good singer. (Rod's a BB King of social commentary :P ) but we need people who can read a Rod Dreher and say "Okay, now practically what contingency plans do we need?". AI is the genie that isn't going back in the bottle. In the long term humanity will probably pull through, but the long term plays out over centuries. (I think we're still paying for the Great Schism).
We can say the same thing about politics. Trump could be a perfect angel and a slightly less than a third ( more than a third of the country is moderate.) would still be on social media convincing each other Trump's a fascist. Trump's not going to conduct himself as a perfect angel and isn't going to try.
We have our moral obligations towards the crazies, but being winsome hoping that we can diffuse the crazy isn't going to work. It's like throwing water on a grease fire. You can still put a grease fire out, you just don't use water.
Just sitting around hand wringing about a Gavin Newsome presidency is a good way to ensure that a Gavin Newsome (or someone like him) presidency happens. We need to do what we can to make sure it's a JD Vance, or someone like him. (And not a Neocon like Hailey. Neocons are the actual Antifa of the Republican party, not the militia movement. They're the utopian radicals who hate the Normies, they just wear different costumes, sorry, I digress)
Sorry about the tangents Rod.
"may not lead to a Skynet/Matrix scenario, BUT it's still a sorcerer's apprentice scenario."
Agreed -- not necessarily malicious, or even "intelligent," but uncontrollable nevertheless.
I saw BB King, when he was in his mid 80s. God bless the man, it was a great concert—singing, and playing. My one criticism would be that he went on way, way too long with his stories.
Well, I don't know how to "solve" the AI problem, because like Douthat said in his Sunday column, we are on the verge of something immense that nobody really understands. All we know is that it's going to be revolutionary (he compared it to the discovery of the New World). Anybody who claims to know for sure what it's going to do is certainly wrong.
About Trump, unless something unimaginable happens, I will vote Republican in 2028, no matter who the candidate is -- not because I have any faith that the GOP will do the right thing, but I have lots of confidence that the Democrats despise people like me, and will do their best to make life hard for us (and hurt the country besides). We really are in a Weimar moment in that there is so much instability, and nobody knows who is trustworthy and competent, in terms of institutions, especially political parties.
I wouldn't expect you to have the answers to everything. :)
Really? That’s why I subscribed!
» not because I have any faith that the GOP will do the right thing, but I have lots of confidence that the Democrats despise people like me, and will do their best to make life hard for us (and hurt the country besides).
See, there it is. True, the Democrats loathe you, your values, your friends/families/affiliates, but they don’t BETRAY you as the Republicans do their base, EVERY, SINGLE, TIME. Nah, unless there is an abrupt turnaround I’m voting and pushing Democrat in November, simply out of enraged spite. Trump can go flail about pathetically for the next two years (likely to do that regardless, what has GOP Congress done? What are their plans and strategies?), and the GOP can retreat into their preferred, natural, posture: the shrinking and shirking, graceful loser. I don’t care. I’m not the only one that thinks this way.
My hope with the release of the Epstein Files is that the truth will be laid bare for all to see how corrupt and evil the elites are.
Came across this interesting quote from a historian over the weekend: "People on the left are squeamish in describing what crowds do when they're violent and lawless. They focus instead on the composition of the crowd and the short- and long-term causes. The right is interested in what the crowd does and not who they are or why."
This was originally written after the Rodney King riots, but it would apply to ICE/Mpls as well, and also other violent outbreaks of that sort. It would seem to me that both left and right are correct in what they discern, but wrong in what they omit. It's unlikely to happen, but the only way out of these types of violent cycles is for both sides to recognize their own role in escalating them. This does not apply to Mpls only, obviously, as more of these protests/riots are likely to occur in the future, in both the US and in Europe given the whole immigration situation.
Precisely. We need a more comprehensive approach. I researched an entry on the Rodney King protests for an encyclopedia some years ago. I found reports that at least half of those arrested for looting had immigrated in the previous six months and had no idea who Rodney King was -- they seen their opportunities and they took 'em. The fact that Los Angeles had opted for a relatively small police force for various reasons also left them stretched thin for events like that. And, there was a report of a white guy and a Hispanic guy who robbed a black-owned business at gunpoint, then walked out saying "F*** Rodney King." In San Francisco, all kinds of white liberals were marching in solidarity with Rodney King, while a small group of black guys took advantage of the police being preoccupied with traffic control for a protest, and smashed the windows of a series of jewelry stores.
Go to the Munch Museum which may simply be called Munch.
“… but is it really a crazy conspiracy to think that much of the world really is run by utterly corrupt elites, probably Luciferians, actively or passively”.
Is it really?
The bible teaches us enough about the corruption of authorities, and of our own heart. Think of Jezabel and Ahab, the corrupted Sanhedrin authorities at the time of Christ, and so forth.
That doesn’t mean that there is not from time to time good leaders (the lineage of king David is in this regard interesting), or that corrupted leaders perform from time to time good deeds (think of the corrupted judge in Luke 18, Cyrus, etc).
The greatest problem of Christians today is that we do not really see evil anymore (short of moral sins). We have fully drunk the cool-aid of progress ideology.
But “the heart is deceitful above all things and it is desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17: 9).
David is a difficult exam,ple to use as a "good" leader-- that whole Bathsheba business.
David is not without sin, as none of us are. But his example shows us how realistic God and the Bible are, accepting us as we are.
David repented of his sin and paid the price for its consequences until his old age.
Expecting perfection here on earth, including in our religious leaders, is an illusion and a false seduction leading directly to the Gulag (remember the Dreher critic of this movie where a purist father quit his community and go into the forest to be ultimately destroyed?).
But here's the thing: God uses us, His unworthy servants, to advance His kingdom. What a wonderful and gracious mystery.
Yes! I think not believing in Satan has effectively neutered the church.
The Torah has several warnings (esp in Deut.) about not following your heart.