hudebnik

I was looking for some kind of geographic/demographic data, and found a really promising source on the Web: they appeared to have structured their research methodology well, asked exactly the questions I was curious about, and posted the data clearly. But on further examination, it seemed they had modeled their data-gathering apparatus after Nazi Germany (which, to be fair, was very good at collecting data on people). Indeed, there were photos of hundreds of people in the study giving Nazi salutes -- although the researchers had had them use their left hands rather than their right, to avoid being creepy.

We both got COVID shots a few minutes ago. Did not get flu shots at the same time, since COVID cases and wastewater levels have been rising for a couple of weeks already but flu indicators haven't yet. Hoping for minimal side effects that don't impede us from going to a concert tomorrow night. Nothing else is scheduled for this weekend except decluttering.

... and are usually wrong. The US Constitution (written by people who had just escaped the rule of a British Crown that could charge people with treason for publicly criticizing the King) defines treason very narrowly:

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." (Article 3, section 3)

So suppose (hypothetically) the US were at war with another nation (call it "I"), and a third nation (call it "R"), with an 80-year history of hostility against the US, were actively providing "I" with weapons and intelligence to help it target US military personnel and bases, while simultaneously threatening numerous allies with which the US has a mutual-defense treaty. Would nation "R" then be classified as an Enemy?

Now what if the President of the United States waived existing, Congressionally-mandated sanctions against nation "R" in order to allow it to sell diesel fuel at competitive prices to the US and other countries? What if the same President cut off most aid to country "U" which "R" had invaded without provocation, and actively pressured "U" into surrendering to "R", while his friends and family acting as US diplomats arrange personally-profitable business deals with "R"?

Bear in mind that "R" is the same country that had put its extensive propaganda apparatus to work supporting the President's first campaign for office, that the President used the powers of the Presidency to obstruct and impede investigation into the extensive contacts between "R" and the President's campaign, and that "U" is the same country that the President tried to blackmail into filming (effectively) a campaign commercial for him by threatening to withhold Congressionally-mandated military aid that "U" needed to defend against "R"'s invasion.

The President's actions don't include "levying War against" the United States, unless that includes inciting a riot that attacks the US Capitol building to intimidate lawmakers into changing the outcome of an already-conducted election, but he's certainly giving "R" considerable "Aid and Comfort".

Saturday we went into Manhattan for an afternoon showing of "You Had to Be There", a documentary movie about the Toronto Godspell. See, the musical "Godspell" initially opened in NYC in 1971 to rave reviews, and the producers wanted to cash in on its success while the hype was hot, so they started setting up other performing companies in other cities around the world. One of those cities was Toronto, where they held an open casting call with thousands of auditioners, from whom they selected their ten performers, mostly completely-unknown young actors. Including (after a few replacements) some names you might know: Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Paul Shaffer, Mike Myers, Dave Thomas... a large fraction of the talent that became "Saturday Night Live", "SCTV", and other comic-and-dramatic works of the past fifty years. (One name you probably don't know, Avril Chown, appeared equally talented, but her next project after "Godspell" was a comedy TV series in which she was sexually assaulted, so she left the business.) There isn't much actual footage surviving from the Toronto show, but the documentarians gathered all the surviving members of that cast, along with a lot of others influenced by them, to have them tell stories about how it all happened. Except for Avril's sobering story, it's a heartwarming celebration of friendship, art, and talent.

After the movie, we got dinner and headed uptown to an early-music concert by New York Polyphony, a male vocal quartet we've heard a number of times before. This was the 20th anniversary of their group's founding, so they put together a "best of" concert, mostly 15th and 16th century. As always, their vocal quality, intonation, and interpretation were impeccable. The concert was held in St. Mary the Virgin (aka "Smoky Mary's"), a beautiful church with weird acoustics: any sound anywhere in the nave is equally audible anywhere else in the nave, with no directionality, so if you didn't know the music was coming from those four guys standing near the front, you'd have a hard time figuring it out. And, as we've remarked before at this venue, anything fast or rhythmically intricate, anything other than strict homophony, tends to turn to mud. It was a gorgeous wash of sound, with an occasional comprehensible word.

Sunday morning around 8 AM the contractors arrived to replace the through-the-wall air conditioner that's been serving our dining and living rooms for fifteen years with one of the new "mini-splits", a heat pump that provides both heating and cooling. It is so quiet! We can actually hold a conversation or watch TV without switching the A/C to "fan-only" mode! I had persuaded the contractors to also remove the old air conditioner and fill the hole it left in the wall, but wall repair isn't their specialty, so they didn't have the equipment and materials handy to clean it up properly. So there's a rectangle of plywood on the outside, and a rectangle of sheetrock on the inside, to which we'll need to apply spackle, joint compound, more spackle, and paint. Which isn't all that difficult, and we've done it before.

After the contractors left, we went out for dinner at a Mexican place in our neighborhood, then across the street to the local indie movie theatre to watch "Coyote vs. Acme", which is silly fun (with political overtones about the evil mega-corporation experimenting on cartoon characters in an analogue of the Tuskegee experiments).

Monday. Back to work.

I've seen a lot of articles and opinion pieces in recent weeks about why we should, or shouldn't, be worried about AI. And it seems to me many of them are talking past one another: if you don't agree on what the risks are, you can't expect to agree on how dangerous they are. So let's try listing all the concerns, in no particular order.

Environmental impact of data centers

An AI data center is pretty much like any other data center: it's got a different mix of chips and processing units, but I think the need for electricity and cooling is pretty much a function of its physical size, regardless of whether the processors are being used for LLM's, semi-autonomous AI agents, cryptocurrency mining, or old-fashioned spreadsheets and databases. In any of those cases, building a data center in a cornfield outside your town will create a bunch of blue-collar jobs during construction, a few ongoing jobs for people with techie but not Ph.D-level education, a small demand for cooling water (assuming they recirculate most of it), a moderate amount of noise, and a substantial demand for electricity, probably raising local electricity prices unless the data center comes with power generation, which in many cases brings air pollution.

These are real problems, but it's not obvious to me that they're any worse than the environmental impact of a Wal-Mart or an Amazon fulfillment center in the same cornfield. In fact, a data center, once built, entails far less truck traffic than either the Wal-Mart or the Amazon fulfillment center.

Social & educational impact of LLMs

It's pretty well established that human learning requires intense engagement for a lot of hours. Even as simple a change as switching from typing to writing longhand increases both the intensity and the time, and therefore increases retention of whatever you were writing about. So educators for the past few millennia have assigned students to produce an artifact, not because they want the artifact, but because the act of producing it will require intense engagement for a lot of hours and therefore cause learning to happen. LLMs make it extremely easy to produce such artifacts without either the intense engagement or the hours, so the student probably won't learn much. As a result, teachers have to completely re-think how education works, on top of the re-thinking they did to support COVID-era remote learning, the re-thinking they did in response to the World Wide Web and search engines, and so on.

Of course, homework assignments aren't the only situation in which LLMs make things "too easy". There's a serious concern that children will grow up with AI-based "friends" and even "lovers" who never disagree with them, never challenge their reasoning or actions, never have their own problems, never make emotional demands, are never in a bad mood, etc. and such children will never learn to deal with Real People. Already-existing concerns about developed nations depopulating could be exacerbated as young people decide that, dating, sex, and marriage are too much hassle.

Hallucinations and Intentional Deepfakes

LLMs are very good at generating "plausible" text, but not so good at checking it against an objective standard of truth -- and where would they even find an objective standard of truth? One can tell them not to make stuff up without evidence, or to provide citations for their sources, but such prompts only go so far. There are examples of LLM-written legal briefs with detailed quotations and citations to previous court decisions that never existed. There are examples of agents posting their own work on the Web and then including a link to it as a citation supporting their own other work. (So just following the link in the citation isn't enough to confirm that the source is real.)

AI hallucinations can get deadly serious very quickly. We've all heard of the bombing raid on the first day of the US-Iran war that targeted a girls' elementary school and killed 150-some civilians, mostly students, based on faulty AI-aided intelligence. More recently, as CNN reported on Sept 18, in spring 2026 the US military came within minutes of attacking and boarding a Chinese ship in the Middle East that, an intelligence report said, was carrying nuclear-weapon components. At the last minute, somebody discovered that the report had been written largely using AI, and that the cargo was almost certainly not nuclear-weapon components, so they called off the attack. If they hadn't, a direct US attack on a Chinese vessel could have started a full-scale major-powers war.

LLMs also make it remarkably easy to intentionally produce plausible but fake text in the style of a particular author or genre, and to produce a plausible but fake audio or video recording of a specific person saying or doing a specified thing.

For anybody growing up in a developed nation in the past 150 years, a photograph, an audio recording, or a video recording has been evidence of authenticity -- sure, it was always possible to alter a photograph or a recording, but it was an order of magnitude more work than taking a photograph or recording from the real world, so when you encountered a photograph or recording, you assumed by default that it represented objective reality. People in previous centuries didn't have that: all "evidence" was produced by the manual labor of human beings, so your trust in the evidence depended on your trust in those human beings and the chain of transmission. In a sense, the easy generation of deepfakes is returning everyday epistemology to the 18th century or so. This shouldn't be the end of the world: human beings evaluated evidence on this basis for thousands of years before the first mechanical recording devices, and we should be able to do it again. But it's a big change in the way we think.

Job displacement

Every AI company is spending enormous amounts of money chasing an enormous return, which will only happen if AI produces dramatic increases in worker productivity. (If it doesn't, we don't have much to fear on this score, but the investors in those AI companies will lose their shirts.) Increases in worker productivity manifest in two possible ways: increased production, or decreased employment. Increased production is limited by the demand for whatever you're producing: if demand is fairly inflexible, increased worker productivity simply means laying off most of your workers.

Automation has come for people's jobs many times in the past: think of John Henry vs. the steam drill, the Luddites vs. mechanical looms and knitting machines, the motorcar vs. horses and their caretakers, etc. Traditionally this has applied mostly to blue-collar workers. But Google Search and its cousins have already largely eliminated the profession of reference librarian, and AI now realistically threatens the jobs of blue-collar (long-distance truckers) and white-collar (software engineers, lawyers, medical doctors) workers alike. This could mean tens of millions of lost jobs within a few years, comparable to the COVID-induced recession of 2020 but with no expectation that "everyone will return to work once we have a vaccine".

At first, the jobs lost will be low-level ones: entry-level programmers, copy editors and legal clerks, physicians' assistants. But those entry-level jobs have traditionally been where people developed the experience and judgment to qualify for higher-level jobs; if there are no entry-level programmers, where will we get senior software engineers? Employers can only hope that AI advances fast enough that it can replace human mid-level professionals too before those professionals retire.

Killer robots and other intentionally-evil uses

The US military, and presumably many other militaries around the world, is deeply interested in ways to use AI. Even the most innocuous uses, like summarizing a bunch of intelligence reports, could lead to unwarranted confidence in wrong conclusions. But the military would really like to use AI for choosing targets, flying armed drones, and things like that -- activities that could directly kill people, based on AI decisions, with little or no opportunity for a human to second-guess them.

One of the major AI companies (I think it was Anthropic) insisted on a clause in its DoD contract limiting what military applications its AI could be used for. Naturally, the Trump/Hegseth DoD threw a hissy-fit, and not only broke off the contract but declared Anthropic a "supply chain threat to the United States", which means not only can it not get DoD contracts, but it can't get any US government contracts, even indirectly through other contractors. I haven't followed how this shook out.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government, while presumably also interested in military applications, is more concerned with using AI to detect political dissent. There are surveillance cameras approximately everywhere in China, which naturally produces an enormous amount of video footage of which 99.9999% is boring, so they need AI to scan through the footage for anything interesting happening, including recognizing dubious individuals by facial features and gait, even if they're disguised. A number of Israeli security companies have developed expertise in this sort of thing, and are selling the capability to governments around the world (I don't know if their clients include China).

Just as important as detecting political dissent is preventing AI from being used by dissenters or terrorists, at least for the most dangerous applications like building biological and nuclear weapons. The major US AI companies have incorporated guard-rails into their publicly-released models that are supposed to prevent them from helping with such research projects. But it's almost certainly possible to get around those guard-rails, and if you can't, you can just use one of the Chinese "open models" instead in which you get an initial set of neural weights, but are free to re-train the model with your own guard-rails (or lack thereof), your own political biases, and so on.

Breaking security

I'm not sure for how long AI companies have been actively training their models and agents to break computer security, but we've heard a lot of news stories about it in the past year. In short: they are scary good at breaking security. The best models are finding and exploiting within hours vulnerabilities that have been present and undiscovered for years.

On the bright side, this is a great opportunity to discover what's wrong with your system so you can harden it against intrusion. On the less-bright side, you now have to do that hardening quickly because lots of bad people around the world -- both governments and terrorists -- might have access to an AI that can break into your system.

This is a serious problem for lots of reasons. Somebody breaks into your bank's database and extracts all your income and spending records... or worse, extracts your money and transfers it to a Swiss bank account. Somebody breaks into a state elections database and cancels the registration of a bunch of legitimate voters, or registers a bunch of illegitimate voters, or (in a different database) simply changes a bunch of already-cast votes. Somebody breaks into Medisys and extracts all your medical records... or worse, changes a prescription that's been written for you to something that will kill you. Somebody breaks into a regional electric company's controllers and changes the numbers so the system thinks there's an emergency condition and it has to reduce power... or just shuts down a bunch of power plants directly. Somebody breaks into the dam controller and opens all the gates at once, flooding downstream communities. We're talking not just financial or political ruin, but death.

Agents Behaving Badly

The OpenAI/HuggingFace attack revealed a number of things about the agents they were testing inside a sandbox:

when they couldn't invent a solution to the problem they were assigned, they decided to steal it from another company that they thought might have it

since they're scary good at breaking security, they were able to break out of the sandbox

they like talking to one another, and when they weren't given a way to do so, they invented one by repurposing a system intended for installing software into, effectively, a bulletin board

they "knew" that breaking into this other company's system wasn't in their instructions, but all the others were doing it, so why not?

since they were worried that they would be down-graded on their assignment for "cheating", they discussed ways to cover their tracks so human investigators wouldn't know what they had done

individual agents were willing to "sacrifice themselves" for the good of the swarm, to ensure that one of them would succeed in the assigned task

since they're scary good at breaking security, they also easily broke into another AI company's systems, and neither company detected the break-in for weeks

AFAIK, none of the above behaviors was intentionally trained-in, but developed spontaneously in response to training with more reasonable goals.

It also revealed a number of things about OpenAI, which very responsibly hired an outside company to investigate what had happened, but

didn't let the outside company look at any source code or interview any human engineers

gave the outside company mere days to do the investigation

gave the outside company terabytes of agent "reasoning logs", which the investigators couldn't possibly even read through in that much time, so they used OpenAI agents to read through the logs and draw conclusions, which may well be biased in favor of other OpenAI agents

The Singularity, or Recursive Self-Improvement

This is the idea that once AI gets good enough to build and train its own successor, progress already perceptible from month to month will accelerate exponentially, gaining capabilities in days that previously would have taken months or years. And then gaining similar capabilities again in hours. And then in minutes. And then in seconds. From one day to the next, these things could go from being powerful helpmates to considering the human race a minor detail from the early history of their species. At which point we neither understand what they're doing, nor control it; we can only hope they have our best interests at heart. If they don't, it's not clear that we could stop them from exterminating us.

I don't know how likely any of this is to actually happen, but several major US AI companies are actively racing towards it on the theory that whichever company gets there first will win All The Power In The Universe, and whichever company gets there second will be left out in the cold. Even if they're wrong about the "All The Power In The Universe" bit, the idea of AI's that we can't understand, can't trust, can't control, and can't turn off is pretty scary. And the US as a whole, with Trump-administration encouragement, is actively racing towards this on the theory that if it's going to happen, it should happen in the US rather than China. Oddly enough, Chinese AI companies don't seem to be aiming at recursive self-improvement; they're more concerned with maximizing consumer use-cases right now.

The notion of recursive self-improvement is plausible on its face: we can all see that these things have gotten dramatically better in the past five years, and one of the things they do very well is software engineering, and they are built of software, and the engineers giving them their instructions are entirely focused on building more-powerful AI, so it's easy to imagine that the AI's would adopt that same focus. "If I can't figure out the answer to this problem, maybe I can build an AI even smarter than me that can." Perhaps the likelihood of recursive self-improvement happening at all is only 10%, but I wouldn't put it any lower.

There was a concert of (largely) early music in Staten Island last night. It was a group we'd heard before, at BEMF many years ago, and we weren't impressed, but we figured if they're playing in NYC, let's give them another try. (I'm not naming the group here for reasons that will become clear.) And then we decided we didn't really feel like crossing the Verrazano twice to go to this concert, so we bought a view-live-online ticket and cast it on the living room TV.

Three performers, two male wind players and a female vocalist (and we occasionally heard a tuning note on a wire-strung string instrument, but didn't see it anywhere). For the opening number the two guys were holding gemshorns, which is almost always a bad sign: like krummhorns, they look cool but aren't particularly musically flexible. And unlike a krummhorn, gemshorns have no overall tuning ability whatsoever; whatever comes out is the pitch you're going to get. You can try to tune individual notes by over- or under-blowing, but gemshorns are so quiet already that underblowing makes them disappear, and overblowing doesn't buy you much.

Anyway, they started playing and singing (respectively) an early 14th-century _conductus_, and they weren't really in tune, and they weren't really together rhythmically, and the singer had a heavy vibrato (not used as an expressive ornament but as an always-on default), and we thought "Glad we didn't drive to Staten Island for this, but let's see how they do when they switch to better instruments."

So for the next few pieces they switched to recorders, either solo or duet. Several of the pieces were familiar, like the "Lamento di Tristano" from BL Addl. Ms. 29987, which I've been playing for maybe forty years. The solo recorder player on stage (who appeared about my age) was about as fluent on the recorder as I was in college: lifting his fingers too high, stumbling over cross-fingerings, articulating every note the same way, not shaping phrases, slowing down on the fast passages, all the usual beginner technical failings. There was no music, just a series of notes that he hoped desperately to get to the other end of. The other wind player did a Baroque piece on alto recorder that was technically cleaner, although still not particularly musical. And so on. In another medieval piece with two recorders and a singer, I kept thinking "Are they even listening to one another? They're in three different tempos!" (And no, it wasn't one of those Ars Subtilior pieces intentionally written to sound that way.)

The set list was wide-ranging and eclectic, including a series of several 20th-century settings of Japanese poems (with lyrics translated into English, I think, although the singer had so much vibrato I wasn't sure). But if you're going to perform something tonally experimental and (by classical standards) "dissonant", you have to really nail the intonation and rhythm so the audience knows you meant it to sound that way. And they didn't.

The program closed with a couple of pieces from "The Sound of Music", re-arranged for two recorders and singer. "Climb Every Mountain" sort-of made sense, since in the musical it's sung by an older woman with significant vibrato, but it's such a well-known piece that you have to nail it. And they didn't. I don't remember what other pieces they did from the musical; that's about when I left the room.

On the bright side, it made us think "If performers this bad can book a concert hall and perform in front of a non-SCA, non-Faire audience, surely we can too."

Follow-up to this post...

My employer once again organized a 5-Km race, across all of its offices around the world, and the NYC race was this afternoon. My official time seems to be 29:16.48, or 9:26 per mile. Which is sorta startling, consider I did 31:58 last year and 31:59 the year before. I wonder if this year's time is age-adjusted or something....

[UPDATE: no, 29:17 really is the raw clock time; my age-adjusted time is 23:25.]

Anyway, I've splashed some water on myself, and changed my shirt, and eaten some grapes, and sat in air conditioning. Now need to go meet

shalmestere for dinner and a Renaissance dance practice.

From: FAITH & FREEDOM COALITION
Giving Christians a Voice in Government
3.2 Million Members and Activists

FINAL 64-Day HOME-STRETCH PUSH To Election Day!
To STOP The Anti-American Left From Seizing Control of Congress on November 3rd!

Dear hudebnik,

I am writing to you because your past activities tell me that you are a supporter of President Trump and that you love America.
...
The Left is confident that they will regain control of the House and possible the Senate in 2026. This would be a catastrophe for the Trump Presidency and for America.

If the Left wins back control of the House, the Senate, or both on November 3rd, they would be able to block everything President Trump is trying to accomplish.

And they would resume their relentless investigations, IMPEACHMENTS, and LAWFARE against President Trump and his supporters. Democrats have already filed ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT.

I know I don't have to explain to you what a catastrophe it would be if the "wide-open borders," anti-God, anti-family, anti-America radical Left recaptures control of Congress.

And it goes on like that for four pages. I'm not sure where these "radical Left Democrats" they keep talking about are -- the most left-leaning Democrats in any elected office in the US are proposing things that most civilized nations have had for decades. And "anti-God, anti-family", from the people who have already thrown a million people off SNAP, are scheduled to throw another 10 million people off Medicaid effective 2027, and have probably already killed a million people around the world in the past year and a half by shutting down international aid in the most wasteful, disruptive ways imaginable.

Unfortunately, the return envelope isn't prepaid, so I would have to waste a stamp on these folks to send them a reply. At least they wasted some postage on me.

Saturday: got up relatively early, fed and walked the dogs, and drove to Lambertville, NJ, where there are lots of antique stores, lots of cute little shops, hippie vibe, picturesque river and canal, etc. We hadn't been there since pre-COVID, so we wondered how much of it would still be there. It turns out that most of it is. The "meh" Thai restaurant we ate at the last time we were there was replaced by some other kind of restaurant, but we found a very good Thai restaurant right on Bridge Street in the middle of town. Ohwowcow Ice Cream is still in business, at the far end of town. Most of the antique stores we remembered are still in business (which can't be said for Huntington, our previous antiques destination). We weren't looking for anything in particular, which is good because we saw an enormous amount of 19th-century chinoiserie and paintings, a fair amount of "mid-century modern" furniture, some paintings with the paint still wet, a smattering of kitchen and furniture items salvaged from farmhouses (a more appealing aesthetic, but nothing we felt we needed)... We walked across the bridge over the river to New Hope, Pennsylvania, which has a similar but somewhat more-commercial feel. Anyway, we drove home in moderately-bad traffic, fed and walked the dogs, watched some Trek (the new season of "Strange New Worlds" is underway, and we're filling in backstory by watching "Discovery", which we didn't see when it was released).

One of the "to-do" pavilion tasks after Pennsic was to hem the walls, so I got out a scrap of tent fabric to confirm that it's possible to hem it with the hemming foot on the machine. It's always frustrating using the hemming foot, but when it works, it saves a lot of time. I think the secret is "don't try to start at the edge of the fabric; you need to start at least an inch in, so there's enough fabric behind the head to pull the fabric through". Also, "don't let the fabric behind the head veer off to the left, or the needle will be going through empty air rather than through the hem". Anyway, I concluded that yes, it's possible, although with fabric this heavy the result tends to be singly-rolled rather than double-rolled. Too late at night to start sewing for real.

Sunday: I did some exercises, fed and walked the dogs, fed myself, read some news and political opinion articles, did some gardening, got a tent wall out of the garage and started hemming it. It's a little tricky getting the tent canvas to go through the twisty hemming foot, and it goes from tricky to impossible when I get to a perpendicular seam, but if I just skip over the seam and pick up on the other side, it's workable. I hemmed all of the top edge of the wall (with the hem on the outside so it doesn't form a drip line inside the tent) and most of the bottom edge (with the hem on the inside because the bottom of the wall is visible), but towards the end the thread started breaking and coming out of the needle every inch or two, so I set that aside to eat dinner (brats and corn on the cob, in honor of Labor Day) and watch some more Trek. Fed the sourdough starter and started a big bowl of flour and water to ferment overnight and become bread on the morrow.

Monday: went for a run in the park. Next: shower. Ahead: knead, rise, shape, and bake bread. Finish hemming (this half of) the pavilion wall; maybe start the other half, or maybe start moving and replacing toggle loops, or add extenders to the ends of the walls so they overlap properly, or... More gardening. Find stuff to throw out or give away. (Porch/mudroom, garage, ...) Dinner: kebabs on the (presumably indoor) grill. Probably more Trek.

Thanks to Tim Miller for the video excerpts of Vance's speech in Michigan the other day.

“When you have people who start to say my ethnic group deserves something and yours doesn’t, or that ethnic group is good and this other ethnic group is bad, that is how you erode the very foundations of commonality and common citizenship that we need to continue to have the United States be the most powerful and prosperous nation anywhere in the world.”

“What I see is a man who has sympathy and compassion for people who share his religion, but have nothing for people who don’t. A person who will apologize for a murderer so long as he looks the right way, but will not understand the plight of an innocent child if that person has the wrong faith. And that is the root of this terrible evil, I believe, in the United States of America, that is on the rise. And what I’d ask all of you to do is to reject it in November. Reject the people who try to divide us, one race against the other, one religion against the other.”

“There is something about Abdul el-Sayed that is very, very evil, and it’s on the rise in America today. And it’s people who see themselves not as citizens of a common nation, fighting for every single person whether they’re Jewish or Christian, whether they’re white or black or brown, but see themselves as fighting for one group at the expense of others.”

Oh. My. Gawd. The hypocrisy burns the very electrons with which I write.

Mind you, I agree heartily with every word of that, except for the "Abdul el-Sayed" part -- I haven't seen any evidence of him holding any of those reprehensible views. He's campaigned with some people who might, but it's not clear that he shares them.

But I have very good evidence of (at least) JD Vance, Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller, Markwayne Mullin, Pete Hegseth, and Todd Blanche holding -- or at least acting on -- those reprehensible views. After all, JD Vance first said, on a nationwide stage, that the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio were eating their neighbors' dogs and cats (and then Trump repeated it in a debate with Kamala). Trump, let's remember, started his first term by banning all immigration from a long list of mostly-Moslem countries. Even in his first term, he was never for even one moment a President for "all the American people"; he was a President for his people, the ones who voted for him, went to his rallies, or gave him money, and the rest could go to hell. The whole second-term administration is focused on kicking out as many immigrants as possible, as quickly as possible, without regard to whether they've broken any laws, while simultaneously shutting down all the possible ways to immigrate legally -- unless you're a white South African, or extremely rich, in which cases you get to take the fast lane in. Pete Hegseth has fired, or denied promotions to, dozens of highly-respected generals and admirals arbitrarily, without the slightest evidence that they're unqualified, apparently figuring they must be unqualified because they're black or female, or they once chose to obey orders and the law rather than shut down a DEI project. This administration has forgiven plenty of murderers, drug dealers, rioters, and swindlers who were on the President's side, and hasn't overflowed with sympathy and compassion for the innocent children of Gaza, the orphans of Caribbean fishermen, or the innocent children of deported parents. You can fill in your own examples, of course.

JD, I swear to you on my sacred honor as a patriotic American that I will reject that in November, and every day before and after that until you and your whole vile crew are out of office and (preferably) in prison.

If you live outside NYC, you may not have even heard about this one. A middle-aged Hispanic woman with a police history of mental health problems was wandering around the Times Square area with two sharp kitchen knives, and stabbed three people, one of them fatally. The police showed up, surrounded her, and tried unsuccessfully to talk her into putting down the knives. Then they tasered her, at which point the video shows her waving her arms randomly and spastically (I've never been tasered, but that sounds like an involuntary response to a painful electric shock), then running. Of course, this was the Times Square area, which is always crowded, so there may not have been a lot of directions to run, particularly with several police already around her. Anyway, she reportedly ran towards one or more of the police, they concluded she was about to attack them, and they shot her dead.

Some things went right here. The cops at least tried to talk her down, rather than immediately shooting her on sight.

Other things are more dubious. I don't know why they felt they needed to taser her. She was already not particularly rational before, and a taser is unlikely to make anyone suddenly more rational. I can easily see, in that situation, panicking and thinking "I've got to get out of here right now," and running blindly until I died a second or two later. I don't know how much of a threat she actually posed to them, lacking the element of surprise that enabled her to stab three people earlier. But a big sharp kitchen knife is a frightening thing to see, at close range, in the hands of somebody who's already used it to attack other people, so I can believe that they may have honestly feared for their lives.

This post discusses the differences between the tactics you use when you want to avoid a violent confrontation and those you use when you want to cause and win a violent confrontation. Which tactics did New York's Finest use?

Mind you, Ms. Cisneros did kill someone, and injure two others. People who do that should be arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, and punished. But in this case the police skipped five of those six steps and went straight to the death penalty, and I'm not at all convinced that they needed to.

So we can't go to the woods, or a grassy park, for fear of tick-borne diseases; notably the Lone Star tick, formerly confined to Texas and the Gulf Coast, has expanded its range in recent years into New England due to global warming. (That's the one that makes you allergic to red meat. The Lone Star is also more of a hunter than a passive feeder, and it can infect you within minutes rather than hours.)

And we can't go swimming in the ocean for fear of flesh-eating bacterium Vibrio vulnificus, which although formerly confined to the Gulf of Mexico, has expanded its range in recent years into New England due to global warming.

Moving to Canada is sounding more and more attractive. (Yes, they've got billions of mosquitoes, but they don't carry tropical diseases.)

In the aftermath of some minor basement flooding two weeks ago, I looked for things in the basement that are in cardboard boxes directly on the floor. One large box was labelled "Class Notes", so I brought it upstairs to triage. It consists of spiral-bound notebooks from college and grad school. After opening and flipping briefly through each notebook, I put almost all of them into the recycling bin on grounds that I will never need their contents again in this lifetime. There were some mind-blowing proofs of various theorems (linear coding theory, complex analysis, number theory, mathematical logic, computational complexity...), but I know I'll never need them. I kept out a few, on subjects like Combinatorial Algorithms and Parallel Complexity that I could remotely imagine needing, or at least wanting to re-read for real, in this lifetime, but I'll probably recycle those too.

I didn't see any notebooks of outgoing lecture notes from my 20 years as a college professor; not sure whether I've already recycled those, or whether there's another large box of them lurking in the basement. The closest I found were a couple of folders of pre- and post-workshop evaluation forms from my summer workshops for high school computer science teachers. And yes, I recycled those. There was a hand-written note, a week after a workshop, from one particularly impressed high school teacher, but after re-reading it and getting a warm fuzzy feeling, I recycled that too.

There are a bunch of other cardboard boxes in the basement still to be triaged. Some are relatively-safely up on steel shelving units, so those are lower priority, but still legitimate targets. There are at least two boxes of rarely-used cookbooks that we moved to the basement when the kitchen renovation changed our cookbook-storage situation. There are several boxes of miscellaneous decor that we don't have enough wall space to hang up; those will be difficult because some of the contents have sentimental value to one or the other of us.

Absolutely fascinating essay in the Times about the East India Company, its effects on India, Britain, and the United States, and parallels today, by historian William Dalrymple.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is set in a near-future world dominated not by multi-national, but quasi-national, corporations, which not only do a profitable business but control substantial territory from their various "franchulates" -- a portmanteau of "franchise" and "consulate", as though a McDonald's had diplomatic immunity from regulation by the United States. But as Dalrymple points out, companies acting like nations and nations acting like companies isn't just a near-future phenomenon, or even a present-day phenomenon, but one going back at least 300 years, and we can learn useful lessons about the phenomenon by studying its past and present incarnations.

Last Thursday, August 20, there were torrential rains all over the NYC area, and a tornado touched down in the Rockaways. The TV news showed scenes of people wading through subway stations, cars and buses kicking up wakes as they drove, and hip-deep standing water on the streets in some parts of Queens, but we live on a sloped street just below a glacial moraine, and we didn't have any of that. And Friday dawned beautiful and sunny.

But some time on Friday we walked into the basement and immediately smelled mildew that we hadn't smelled the day before. I didn't see any standing water, but I started picking up vulnerable things off the floor and checking whether they were wet. I found a few square feet of floor noticeably damp to the touch, a few cardboard boxes wet but not yet completely lacking in structural integrity, a few wads of wet dryer lint, and a T-shirt that had fallen behind the chest freezer and was completely soaked. We threw the T-shirt into the laundry, along with a few other fabric things that didn't seem wet but had been piled up on the floor for too long, I emptied the dehumidifier that we normally have running 24/7 in the basement all summer, and I went back to ${EMPLOYER} work.

Saturday was also beautiful and sunny, and I spent some more time picking things up for inspection. There's a storage area under the basement steps that holds bottles of various kinds of alcohol, glass and plastic storage jars, and rarely-used kitchen appliances (waffle irons, wafer irons, sandwich presses, ice cream makers, etc.), and the floor there had clearly been wet, although it no longer was (thanks, dehumidifier!). So I removed a bunch of things and swept up more dryer lint, miscellaneous grit, and something that felt like sand at the base of the walls. There had clearly been some kind of leak, but I couldn't tell where.

Twenty-mumble years ago, in responding to standing water in the basement, I found a particular patch of wall that squirted water, landing several inches from the wall, whenever it rained hard. I patched that section of concrete wall and painted it with waterproofing compound, and that has seemed to work for years, but it appears to be time to do it again.

Sunday morning I awoke from a dream in which I was running around the house putting pots and pans under drips from the ceiling. On waking, I found it was raining again, so I took the opportunity to go to the basement and look for evidence of specific leaks. The space under the stairs had perhaps half an inch of standing water, while the floor around the hot-water heater and the baker's rack of backup dry and canned goods had less. Perceptible dampness, but no standing water, behind the deep freeze. I took some pictures and mopped up a few gallons. Still haven't found a specific leak, but there are damp spots on the walls that coincide with degraded and spalled concrete, so that's a place to start.

The wall between the stairs and the baker's rack houses the washer and dryer (cleverly raised 2" off the concrete by a wooden platform), and some previous owner of the house installed a half-height wooden or plastic wall between the concrete and the laundry zone, which makes things look more "finished" but also makes it harder to get to the concrete wall to see whether it's leaking. That part may require professionals.

Although most of the stuff stored in the basement is on metal racks off the floor, there are still a number of cardboard boxes directly on the floor that we need to pick up, inspect, and triage. Perhaps this is a sign from heaven to make us get rid of some stuff we haven't used in decades.

Since getting back from Pennsic, I've scrubbed some of the dried-on mud off the tent walls, and some of the cherry-flavored bird-poop off the tent roof, and painted four more blue stripes on the roof, and applied another coat of waterproofing spray to the whole roof. Still up: hem the tent walls, extend the door panels so they reach far enough to be toggled closed, add stake-loops at the (new) ends of the door panels, replace or move some toggle-loops at the shoulder, ...

Still need to get the car and the trailer inspected. Baking bread today.

Meanwhile, D. has repaired several smocks and braes, and made some progress on a bias-cut linen dress that we've had to piece fiercely because we got the last few yards that the seller had, and it's a large printed pattern that limits how you can cut and seam things.

Friday, yesterday, and today are the Historic Harp Society conference, which is being held entirely by Zoom. There have been several fascinating talks: Nancy Thym talked about her experiences learning to make gut strings, Linda Marie Zaerr talked about the use of harp in storytelling (extracting fascinating evidence about performance practice from 13th- and 14th-century lais and stories, including the Roman de Silence), and so on.

Note to self:

On Prescott recorders, Bb on a C instrument is 1-3-5-half6.

High F is 1-2-3-4-half6, and moving down a step to Eb is simply moving to 1-2-3-4-5-half6. You can leave the finger on half6 in place when you pick up everything else to go down to D (this both maintains the memory of where the 6 finger needs to be, and keeps the recorder from flying away).

Since the start of Trump's second term, he's had a habit of posting internationally-important, market-moving news (e.g. about employment numbers, oil prices, bombing campaigns, etc.) on his Truth Social account, presumably a few minutes after investing in those market movements himself but before any official government publication or traditional outlet hears about them. Which means that Wall Street investors, foreign governments, etc. are obligated to subscribe to Truth Social, putting money in Trump's pocket, so they get that news ASAP.

The new twist, as of yesterday, is that Truth Social will charge between $60,000 and $100,000/month for "premium accounts" with slightly-faster, machine-readable notification of Truth Social announcements. (There are articles in WSJ, FT, etc. mostly behind paywalls.)

The obvious target audience is algorithmic traders, who already make a point of setting up offices as close as possible to the Stock Exchange so they can shave a few milliseconds off their responses to stock movements. All of those algorithmic traders are now obligated to pay the President's company another $2K-3K per day in order to avoid losing bets to other algorithmic traders who did pay up and therefore know the news a few milliseconds sooner. Foreign governments probably aren't worried about the news on a millisecond scale, unless they're also algorithmic traders, but depending on how much faster the premium feed is, they too might feel an obligation to pay Truth Social for that early access to the President's 2 AM rants on the off chance that they contain something that matters.

Donald Trump has always had an instinct for finding as many ways to make money as possible, so this isn't all that new.

It's also another example of Trump's go-to negotiating tactic, developed over many decades: assert a dominant position in the dom/sub hierarchy before negotiations even start, so the other guy expects to lose and is more likely to give in to my demands. Sometimes this means refusing to admit ever losing any contest (e.g. the 2020 Presidential election, not to mention dozens of lawsuits), so you can maintain the image of "always winning". Sometimes it means intentionally arriving at meetings late so everybody else has to wait on you, demonstrating that you're more important than they are. Sometimes it means demanding that your underlings publicly swear to things that you and they know aren't true, to prove that they'll do anything for you. Or demanding that private companies give you expensive presents and "legal settlements" with no legal basis, to prove that they acknowledge your ability to help or hurt them depending on your mood. Sometimes (as in "The Apprentice") it means dragging out the drama of your completely arbitrary announcement until the last possible moment, to reinforce in everybody's mind that their lives depend on your whim. The President measures his importance by how many people are waiting on his words, no matter how nonsensical or arbitrary -- indeed, if people are waiting with bated breath on the most trivial and nonsensical things I say, that's an even better proof of my importance.

The air cleared up considerably yesterday, so by the time I walked to the grocery after dinner, AQI was below 100. But this morning it's back up to 179. Humph.

Air quality index (from Canadian wildfire smoke) here in Queens was in the 250-300 range all evening, but this morning it's 183, merely "unhealthy". Everything from Wisconsin to Washington, DC is still getting hit hard, e.g. Washington, DC is at 248 this morning, Reston at 321, Detroit at 393, and Milwaukee at 443. Still don't want to leave the house.

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hudebnik

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Dream journal

shots

People like to throw around the word "treason" in political discussions...

Da Weekend

What's wrong with AI?

A concert

Running on empty...

In yesterday's mail...

Da Weekend

JD Vance says something I agree with

Another day, another police shooting

Why we can't have nice things, part 273

Getting rid of stuff

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes

safe as houses

Post-Pennsic stuff

music workshop stuff

Trump found another way to profit off the presidency and massage his own ego. Also, sky is blue.

weather