Catching up on reading The New Yorker brought me to the January 16th issue and Jill Lepore’s “What the January 6th Report Is Missing”. As noted elsewhere here, I am somewhat possessed by the question of how we can explain that 74 million Americans voted for Trump in 2020 after —>> read more –>>

Just when I thought I could put this topic away for a while, I came across this video by John Oliver. As I have noted earlier, it continues to amaze me that some of the best commentaries come from comedians. The little note, nearly at the end, of EU efforts —>> read more –>>

“Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought.” Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull have weighed in on the ruckus about ChatGPT and its many brethren in the —>> read more –>>

Financialization is an awful word. It sounds clumsy in the mouth and refers to a process that has been underway for over 40 years but is nearly unknown to most of us. Before we get to Norfolk Southern, the railroad company, what is financialization? Basically, financialization is a nested set —>> read more –>>

Individualism and Libertarians Americans are renowned for their sense of individual identity and empowerment. de Tocqueville noted this back in the 1830s in his Democracy in America. Hollywood and mass media have mined it continuously. Politicians appeal to it frequently. In my lifetime the position of the individual has been —>> read more –>>

New Page – Introduction to AmericanDelusions Topics In order to make it a bit easier to get oriented to the various topics discussed at AmericanDelusions I’ve added a new page “Introduction to AD Topics“. This provides a quick overview of the 16 topics discussed on AD. It also introduces other —>> read more –>>

The recent release of a pile of emails, text messages, and memos from within Fox News has raised the Dominion Voting System‘s defamation lawsuit to large public view. Here is a 52-minute discussion between Stewart and Anderson Jones that explores the facts revealed in the data dump, the boundaries and —>> read more –>>

The Promise Sixth Amendment In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of —>> read more –>>

Further on ChatGPT Much has been made of the fact that interest and use of ChatGPT has grown rapidly, even compared to some of the social media giants early history. Further experimentation has not changed my estimate of this facile word smith to be an error-prone mess. As noted in —>> read more –>>

A recent book sale at the University of Chicago Press brought this book to my table. Alex Johnson, Improbable Libraries : A Visual Journey to the World’s Most Unusual Libraries (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015). (If you live in or near Hudson, NY, you can get this at the Hudson Area —>> read more –>>

Here are two more angers: (an addendum to the 1.1.2023 post: My Year End Siege of Angers – the list) Guns:  “Eighteen percent of U.S. households purchased a gun since the start of the pandemic (March 2020–March 2022), according to new survey data from NORC at the University of Chicago, increasing —>> read more –>>

Yesterday as I was taking a walk up and down Warren St. here in Hudson I realized that I had become actively angry about the state of the US and the world. I walked past hotels where a single room would set you back $400 for a night or you —>> read more –>>

Southwest Airlines canceled thousands of flights representing more than 80%of all cancellations during the Christmas 2022 snowstorm. The scale of this service implosion led to stories about old software systems for managing passenger bookings and flight schedules. Then, discussions of Southwest’s point-to-point flight strategy that differs from the other major —>> read more –>>

Further experiments with ChatGPT (following yesterday’s post >>>) significantly weaken its usefulness and even suggest that it is a potentially dangerous, unreliable source of information. Experiment Six (continuing from previous post) – Query: when will ChatGPT provide bibliographic references for its answers? As an artificial intelligence, I am not able to —>> read more –>>

ChatGPT has been all over the internet in recent weeks. I have now experimented with it and have some initial thoughts to share. I ran a number of “experiments” to explore what this natural language AI could do. Using the December 15th version of ChatGPT I posed a series of questions. —>> read more –>>

The work to revise and expand my 2018 essay “Capitalism – a critique” has entered its final stages. A final draft has been distributed to a number of readers for comment and critique. I am now working on a book version. Capitalism – the actual workings – is the new working —>> read more –>>

Prison Policy Initiative released a new report on the state of incarceration in 2022. (graphics from prison policy.org) Over 80% of those in Local Jails are waiting for trial – they’ve been convicted of nothing other than not having the money to buy their way out of jail. Drugs still —>> read more –>>

The Russian war against Ukraine has produced a lot of noise about the fate of Russian oligarchs. Seizures of the yachts, bank accounts and more. Perhaps we should spend a bit of energy focusing on our own oligarchs, the rich and corporations. Despite all of the noise of the Republican —>> read more –>>

I’ve spent more than a year investigating the sources of our species reaction to autocrats, pandemics, global warming and the crisis of global capitalism. Here is a draft of an introduction to the topic. Lots of evolution, anthropology, archeology, neurology and cognitive psychology all rolled up. Now on to understanding —>> read more –>>

In the midst of the exploding pandemic here in the US we should not be distracted from understanding why we are in this catastrophic mess. Further we should not be distracted from taking action. Our Situation – the dirty laundry list The overall condition of our country is so dire —>> read more –>>

As a preface to my new field of inquiry: Human nature: “the general psychological characteristics, feelings, and behavioral traits of humankind, regarded as shared by all humans” I am most interested in how human nature is framed and partially determined by the mechanisms in our brains. In addition human culture —>> read more –>>

11.28.2021 – revised 11.29.2021 For the last ten years and more I have been studying US history and the current state of our affairs. A significant focus has been on what I refer to as the “actual workings of capitalism”. You can find some of the findings at AmericanDelusions.com. More —>> read more –>>